I'm sure I could come up with a less sarcastic version of that steelman but that's what it boils down to.
It doesn't speak well of their feelings about their own children, but, well, there isn't a lot speaking that well of them in general.
Healthcare providers and insurance companies are corporations too: you can get rich by treating more people.
A firm's sole responsibility is to increase profit and a maximize returns for shareholders. [0]
It's a fixed percentage. That means the more expensive treatment gets, the higher they can raise rates, and the more revenue they get from that fixed percentage.
In my opinion this added nothing to the conversation when in theory the op asked for a real answer.
Whenever they propose something, just ask yourself which lobbyist stands something to gain. That will be a sufficient explanation.
There's no two sides to deregulating every business to poison us all, its just profit over people in the most direct and obvious way. There's no complex plan, there's no 4d chess, its just a transparent power grab for ideologues that really have either no interest in the outcomes of their terrible agenda because it ends in power for them or are literally in the pockets of those who desire the end of America.
a confused, sickened and desperate population is easier to control and manipulate. end of story.
Do you think you have a better one?
I’ve looked into this a lot and there isn’t any strong argument I’ve seen that this is good for humanity, and let’s not pretend every political action is a sincere attempt to improve the world for all equally.
If you look into all the abuse heaped upon the man who discovered leaded gasoline was bad it helps give context on just how far some people will go for their own profits.
In some ways, you're kind of arguing the same thing but in reverse by claiming that the comment you're responding to isn't being made in good faith. You're certainly entitled to hold that opinion, but only because of the exact same logic that entitles the parent commenter to hold the opinion that they express in the first place (and for what it's worth, I don't think it's actually being made in bad faith; not everyone will agree about where to draw the line, but at least to me it seems like we're long past the point of giving the benefit of the doubt on policies like the one described in TFA).
If you have any other suggestion than the reason they do this is something related to money, please be my guest and volunteer. Because otherwise it is the most baffling and self destructive policy making that has ever been documented in the history of humankind.
I don't support the proliferation of PFAS in the environment, nor am I a Republican, nor do I even live in America.
Having said that, you should consider how asinine this sounds, and you should ponder whether the actual reason for this change in the law is more nuanced and less comically ridiculous than something so simplistic. I'm not saying the actual reason is a good one, but strawmanning every political opinion you disagree with is lazy and suggests an inability to use critical thinking about a world that is often quite complex.
Indeed, you sound like you're just as far down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole as 'they' are, just on the other side of the political spectrum.
That's not the same thing as literally trying to make people sick, as the original commenter said and as I was replying to initially. Being negligent is not the same thing as being malicious; intent matters. Even if I try to cover up a harm, that doesn't mean the harm itself was my intention. If you guys can't understand the nuance there then I dunno what to tell you.
Ordering the valve be opened is malicious.
If you continue to ship a product after you know it is harmful you are deliberately causing harm.
then ask yourself if the pigs had any "nuance" to what they were doing.
Fiction is fiction. I prefer non-fiction for informing what I think about other (actual) people and their decision making processes.
a non-fiction version of Animal Farm might be: "Authoritarianism is bad. Consider the case of the Russian Revolution leading to the rise and rule of Stalin. Imagine it's like the story of a farm taken over by authoritarian pigs: <insert existing Animal Farm text here>"
the word "fiction" here is doing work for your argument that it's not qualified to do.
the US Government is making the decisions they are in order to crush the population into submission. This is the simplest and most consistent explanation with many historical parallels and an approach (known as fascism) that is described by a tremendous amount of written literature, both academic and non-academic, fiction and non-fiction. The actions of politicians must be observed and the net effect of these actions forms the basis of the rationale.
The other explanation for not wanting to call a spade a spade is in the category of actually hating other people and wishing them to die a prolonged, painful death.
Now that that's out of the way, I don't think corporations are actively trying to make consumers sick so they can recoup the profits through their investments in the healthcare sector (or whatever insane conspiracy theory you guys are suggesting here).
2. The executives don’t care because proper disposal would be costly and they are heavily incentivized to increase profits as much as possible
3. Executives order chemicals to be dumped or vented into the environment
4. Company gets caught
5. Executives order a coverup
6. Company eventually pays for cleanup, but the executives are already long gone
7. Nobody goes to jail
What part of this scenario is not intentionally poisoning people?
This is the part I've been referring to from the original comment.
Also, once again, you should be careful how you use intention here. Even in the case where they knew about the harms or the risk, you can't impute intention without more evidence. Without that evidence, you should stick to negligence, since that's what it would be and indeed that is what separates a simple negligence claim from criminal negligence (intention).
If you say they intended to harm people or the environment, that's very different from saying their negligence or coverup resulted in harm to people/the environment. Intention is a subjective state of mind of the executives/board/'The company', and while it can be imputed in certain circumstances, it's a high bar. Dumping toxic waste somewhere because you think nobody will ever notice (which they did, in remote bodies of water), and then having some campers come along and jump into the water for a swim (which also happened), doesn't mean they intended to harm those campers or indeed that they intended to harm anyone. It was negligent but not obviously intentional. This really isn't hard to understand. It's also why there were never any criminal charges, not because the execs were long gone. In the US, corporations can be held criminally liable regardless of whether the original execs are still there or not.
There is not really much difference from the perspective of those harmed, is there?
It's a matter of logic and also a matter of what is most likely to be true. The language used is obviously in relation to the rather important legal dichotomy between those two things; victims of PFAS toxicity and their opinions are irrelevant. What does matter is what the executives and people making the decisions at the corporations knew, thought, and intended by doing certain things, like covering up studies that demonstrated the harms, continuing to ship products they suspected were harmful, or suing whistleblowers to keep them quiet about putative harms. The original commenter was insinuating (I've quoted it throughout this thread) that the corporations were intentionally poisoning people, as if making them sick was itself a motive for shipping these products. Whether that is true or not is to be determined from the mental state of the executives I just talked about. There is no evidence I've ever seen that any of the corporations, like Dupont or Marlboro, ever intended to poison people and give them diseases for some underlying profit motive. To suggest they had was, as I said, lazy thinking and a caricature.
That certainly doesn't mean those corporations weren't negligent. But, as has been my point this entire time, intention is everything - intention is literally the entire difference between a murder charge and a manslaughter charge. It's not trivial at all. And imputing intention to cause harm (ie., the opposite of using Occam's Razor) because you dislike a corporation or person is just sloppy thinking.
No, the said
> If companies can freely poison everyone, profits go up
Which has played out again and again in history. It's a lot cheaper to dump industrial solvents out the back door than pay for proper disposal, and if there's no legal repercussions stopping it, someone can just do it and watch profits go up.
Actually this is what he said, and what I was referring to.
An examination of the individuals in the EPA pushing this change might reveal something. Perhaps it's ideological? I don't know, I'm at a complete loss.
It used to be that environmental conservation was a part of conservative ideology, but MAGA isn't anything like what conservatism used to be in the US.
Think of the cost savings!
And that seems to be dismantling the US as a military and technological superpower - a self-inflicted Morgenthau plan, if you will. We are left to speculate why a US government would want to dismantle the US, and who would benefit.
If it doesn’t affect rich people, the government doesn’t seem to care anymore.
Then it can be seen as no longer a disparate collection of seemingly random political, social, and economic moves, but rather as a directed, intentional movement.
While I understand the argument, I also understand that the vast majority of people will always pick the cheapest option if the final product is almost the same.
Imagine another scenario. You are my neighbour. I spill some poison on the ground. Your child gets ill. Am I at fault?
If it is a feature the customers care about they will market it. But frankly customers just want a better price today.
In 2025 winner takes all ans monopolizes all
Strangling economic growth also kills, as indirectly as PFAS in drinking water.
Neither "regulate everything" nor "allow everything" is a good idea.
(no opinion about this specific one, I had no motive nor opportunity to build informed opinion on this specific one)
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/us-seek...
So, the legal reasoning might be to cut their losses litigating to defend rulings they think they'll lose due to the administrative error. I also suspect that being seen to roll back some regulations likely gives Lee Zeldin (the EPA admin) some political room to maneuver. He's historically be associated with anti-PFAS efforts (in Congress he represented a district with contamination problems and he voted for anti-PFAS legislation), but he's also part of an administration with a strong anti-regulation agenda, so he needs to walk a fine line.
https://www.awwa.org/AWWA-Articles/epa-announces-changes-to-...
> "We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the U.S. and more"
Does any of that list look like the goals of an Environmental Protection Agency?
[0] https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-launches-biggest-deregu...
Edit: Here's a start: Be more critical of the news. Content a bit; the scope of topics that are discussed more importantly.
The problem with undermining trust in the news media is that people will just replace that with blind trust with something else, and we have no way of really knowing if that something else will be worse. This is what happened with conservatives and led to the rise of Infowars.
Part of problem is that the most unproductive and unpopular and poor ideas are the most loved ones among their elites.
The only purpose they seem to serve is strengthening the far right by imposing counter productive purity tests and pushing people to vote for the far right options over more centrist ones.
Harris’s written support was turned into an ad campaign for Trump. You can agree or disagree with the policy but it isn’t a great hill to die on if you want to win elections.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/harris-gender-surgeries-ja...
I also agree that it feels like Democrats don’t stand for anything. But I think by leaving that space open they let ads like this paint what they stand for.
My issue with what you said is the claim <some issue> is not a hill to die on. They are not dying on any hills at all.
One can agree or disagree on the question of whether transgender care is medical care, but I think the sensible position for any political party (on virtually any such question) is to defer to the scientists and medical experts who spend all day working on this stuff.
AFAIK, the then-current science said that this was one of the only effective treatments for gender dysphoria, and under our Constitution inmates can't be denied medical care, even if it gives somebody the ick or would be politically inconvenient at the next election cycle.
I’m not saying I agree or disagree with this policy but the point of politicians is to advance policy one way or the other which requires agreeing/disagreeing.
I never said that. There were many far-leftists who sat out in 2024 due to Palestine, proclaiming that Kamala would've been just as bad or worse than Trump on that issue which is ludicrous. Needless to say, I'm not opposed to progressive ideals but the reality is that they're more focused on principles than getting elected.
> that also poll extremely well with the general public
If that's the case, why don't we see more candidates like Bernie/AOC/Mamdani being elected across the country? I can probably guess your next is answer is that the DNC and/or billionaires suppress their campaigns?
And you don’t have to look for second order effects to see how progressive issues poll — look at recent polls on Palestine, single-payer health care, housing affordability, and plenty of other progressive policies, by reputable non-partisan sources.
Centrism is just as much of a political perspective as being anywhere else on the spectrum and can color political perspectives just as easily — it just biased in favor of the status quo so it’s got a much easier job.
Blaming individual voters for voting ‘wrong’ is the first line of defense for people unwilling to take a hard look at the efficacy of the people that are supposed to be mobilizing and representing those voters. If your politician doesn’t represent the voters’ values enough to gain their vote, the problem is the politician. The mainstream dems have just run out of leverage to coerce people into candidates they don’t align with using the “vote blue no matter who” tactic.
Most lefists/extreme right/far-left/far-right are not the “far right” or “far left” caricatures depicted by the media, internet comments, or the mouth of the political party conventions.
> I can probably guess your next is answer is that the DNC and/or billionaires suppress their campaigns?
Of course the DNC suppresses their campaigns. Most NY Dem leaders have not even backed Mamdani even after winning the primary (not to mention that Cuomo has an entire billionaire backed Super PAC still funding him after he lost the primary badly). You being able to guess that doesn’t make the idea false. The idea being a talking point doesn’t make that truth less valid.
It’s those dang progressives and their policies that moderates push through for election appeal then turn around and partially implement and defund and finger point and blame when those policies then fail after being setup to do so.
If you can’t blame progressives then you can’t get elected in this country.
Personally I do not see how we can afford to maintain the MIC for much longer, so these issues are very important to me.
The american left by and large is simply unrepresented. Democrats have represented center right positions since clinton.
If anything, it's those centrist democrats that use purity tests as much as possible to eject the left from the party.
As a good example of that, consider the case of Al Franken vs Andrew Cuomo. Franken was pretty progressive, so when it came out that he had a picture in bad taste where he mocked squeezing boobs, gone. 24/7 news about how he's really a monster and the worst person in the world.
Meanwhile, Cuomo has multiple credible allegations of sexual harassment and who does the party STILL back even after he lost the primary? He literally got endorsements from Democrats who shed tears because of the Al Franken photo.
The same thing happened to Bernie Sanders. The centrist dems and media started circulating garbage about how he was sexist over a comment he didn't make.
And hell, just look at how first the Tea Party and then MAGA managed to yeet a lot of what used to be "moderate" Republicans out of the party alright.
> EPA Seeks to Eliminate Critical PFAS Drinking Water Protections
> The move continues to expose communities across the country to toxic forever chemicals in tap water
If this really were a "team sport", one half of the team wouldn't be set on undermining the health of the other half of the team.
i guess you reject their request to stop trying to defeat the other team. but you also object to the use of the word "team" to describe a political party?
could you explain?
Also the baseline GOP today exists in a different reality (e.g. where Trump won the 2020 election and Democrats did the COVID lockdowns)
in case someone's feeling got hurt. Throughout the history of world not USA, right ideology has also blindly supported deregulation that people will die but regulation will naturally take place( ? ) like free markert
But Charlie Kirk went to the most left places he could think of, debated people, and won some converts.
Who on the left does that? Why doesn't anyone drive out to rural football games or country music concerts, have conversations, and put them on YouTube?
And on the topic of changing minds - I think most of our decisions on what to believe are largely subconscious. Our minds process a vast number of things and then gradually push us in some direction, whether or not we want to go there. And so while I agree that debate will very rarely immediately convince anybody of anything, it becomes a part of that corpus of knowledge that your mind and subconscious are constantly processing. And, in general, I think that can only be good - particularly for those most logically sound positions.
Sanders and AOC. Look at the stops on their Fighting Oligarchy Tour. It’s just that the DNC leadership will do everything in their power to fight actual progressive.
From my observations the liberal and progressive groups seem to take on strategies where they claim the moral high ground and treat anyone not following their way of thinking as opponents and not as potential allies/converts. So even in cases where they are technically or morally "correct" in their stance, they aren't effective in bringing outsiders to their side.
I don't have much confidence that the Democrats will be able to turn things around in short order. The Democratic leadership seem stuck in their ways with no long term vision
It's easy to say "reject the news agencies", and sure that might be a good idea, but that carries the risk of "substituting bullshit with different, more dangerous bullshit". This has already been somewhat demonstrated; the conservatives spent decades undermining trust in news media and that led to the rise of assholes like Alex Jones and conspiracy theories becoming normalized by American conservatives. It's easy to say "well the left wouldn't do that", but you have no way of knowing that any better than I would.
I don't want to be cynical or hopeless, but I genuinely have no idea what I could do to help fix any of the shit going on right now.
[1] whatever that actually means, I've heard about a dozen definitions.
I mention that sounds kind of click baity? look it up. California wants to impose more stringent minimum space standards for amimals bred to slaughter (prop 12). Seems maybe good, or at least worthy of a real discussion?
But everyone had moved on by then, ironically to how much they care about animal rights (spending significant time volunteering in shelters and such).
Its just too easy to dumb people down with memes.
Trump reneging on NATO, turning military attention toward (checks notes) Venezuela, and isolating ourselves in global trade is just an absolute dream come true for China and Russia.
States can try to do some things in some cases, but the Supreme Court will get in the way and now the National Guard and Marines.
All three branches of The United States of America has been captured by a tyrannical government. Rights are being eroded for inhabitants of The United States of America, including its citizens.
You have no right to: safe medicine, safe food, safe water, vote.
The sooner the people recognize this and take action, the shorter it will be to reverse.
Americans have a duty to act, and act quickly: what's already been taken will take generations to regain.
I disagree.
The issue is there's about 1000 fires burning all with somewhat critical importance.
But further, the left and the politicians ostensibly representing the left simply are not aligned (at least in the US). It's a rock and a hard place. Generally the politicians positions are better than the right, but far less than what the left actually wants. So they rely heavily on "what are you going to do, let the other guys win?".
Meanwhile, the right has adopted nearly the opposite position. On most positions when the base says "jump" they say "how high?".
A big reason for that is money in politics. What the rightwing base wants is generally pretty compatible with monied interests. It's no skin off the nose of a rightwing politician if they want to ban books, that doesn't ultimately harm Disney's bottom dollar.
For the left, what they want in almost all ways will negatively impact monied interested. Better regulations makes rich polluters mad. Nationalized healthcare makes every business (except maybe small businesses) mad.
That's why "left" politicians tend to only support initiatives which effectively do nothing like recognizing a MLK or saying it's ok to be gay. And even then, they are happy to ditch those positions to win more rightwing base support because, shocker, that rightwing base is likely to care less about their inaction on climate change.
You are right, though, news is a big problem. And that's because mainstream media is corporate captured. That's why left policy positions no matter the channel are always framed in the absolute worst way possible. For example, whenever nationalized healthcare comes up I can guarantee you the framing will be "How will you pay for this very expensive program that will eliminate choice and cost a lot of money which might make everyone sad and probably will bankrupt everyone?"
If you look closely at the Ds they back Trumps policies, not that they come out and say so. Rather Bernie will come out and attack it. but Ds on so mnay fornts now remain silent and passive.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
The basic gist is that the left is too generous in its understanding of others' intentions, assuming good intentions from all actors long past the point where that's rational.
Look at how desperate they all were to leave DC and go on vacation, these people are not serious and they don't think there will be any consequence to them.
Edit: Also, most of the politicians in both parties get money from the same interests (oil, Israel, tech). So the leadership of Democrats basically wants the same thing as GOP, so there's only voiced resistance.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/MAHA-R...
Then it can be seen as no longer a disparate collection of seemingly random political, social, and economic moves, but rather as a directed, intentional movement.
Or, you know, they actually had really racist reasons and are using the grocery prices thing as an excuse. Who's to say?
Take a look at the administration's first term and all the involvement and ties (financial, political, etc.) there are to Russia (and Russian-related objectives like Ukraine). It sounds bonkers, but the more you dig in and see how closely tied the relationships have been, and then see how totally soft Trump has been towards Putin/Russia - including direct actions towards Ukraine like removing the long-term diplomats, stopping weapons sales and aid, and recently killing USAID (whose #1 beneficiary was Ukraine) - it all coalesces into a single coherent view.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_between_Trump_associates...
I was referring to the voters. I think a lot of the voters claimed grocery prices were the reason, but a lot of them really wanted to get rid of Mexicans. Trump used a lot of racist rhetoric during all three of his campaigns.
The fact that conservatives seem unwilling to condemn the president and ICE for detaining naturalized citizens indicates this to me.
Risk reward is dead simple. You’re already rich and powerful, you fail and become slightly less rich and powerful. You succeed and have absolute control over the most powerful country in the world
I love America, and despite my wife being a naturalized citizen we are still tentatively looking to evacuate (basically determined by if the supreme court decides that the president can overturn the Fourteen Amendment with an executive order) because we are genuinely concerned that she might still be detained because of this administrations idiotic ICE quotas and overtly racist policies.
You might argue that me leaving is no significant loss, and that's fair, but I am college and graduate educated, and I work in a technical field, and I doubt I'm the only one considering this.
https://www.epa.gov/water-research/identifying-drinking-wate...
Then it can be seen as no longer a disparate collection of seemingly random political, social, and economic moves, but rather as a directed, intentional movement.
US typically gets the cheaper and worse option (less safe). Same for American coke w/ Cane Sugar instead of actual sugar.
Americans will regularly consume chemicals that are potentially carcinogenic and banned in EU.
I have tested this in Denmark, Poland, Cyprus, Ireland and Germany.
I think you meant high fructose corn syrup instead of cane sugar (which is real sugar)
American Coke is sweetened with Corn Syrup. Maybe it's just me being a dumb American probably fooled by some green washing but isn't Cane Sugar better? What's "actual sugar" in the EU?
They just don’t believe in a society that cares for the weak and needy.
Many of this administration's policies are more like Maoism
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/california-lawmakers-propos...
The US of A are not "the World".
There are countless places around the World that make California look like a conservatism heaven.
===
To be clear, some of the Make America Healthy Again goals are quite reasonable to me. I wish they had started with those.
https://www.awwa.org/AWWA-Articles/epa-announces-changes-to-...
avalys•1h ago
jfengel•1h ago
Not how that works, sadly.
brookst•1h ago
jtms•55m ago
odie5533•41m ago