Alright, while your crude behavior doesn't exactly fill me with confidence about your receptivity for reason and evidence, let's take a look how Biden actually defines "price gouging":

"Any corporation that has not brought their prices back down, even as inflation has come down, even as the supply chains have been rebuilt, it's time to stop the price gouging"

This is either another one of his classic faux pas, or it's used as a propaganda term here, because on closer examination, this sentence reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between prices and inflation. Stay with me here, and I'll explain why, but I'm afraid it's going to require just a little of high school math.

Inflation is defined as the rate that prices rise, i.e. higher inflation = prices rise faster, lower inflation = prices rise slower. Read that last part again, because that means specifically that lower inflation does not mean prices go down. It means they go up more slowly. In order for prices to actually go down, inflation would have to be negative, which it currently isn't. Hence, Biden is either making a mathematical error here, or he is deliberately misleading people about the nature of the relationship between prices and inflation.

There you go, I hope that was clear enough. Now feel free to continue your verbal abuse, but I think it's amply clear who's the buffoon here.

Making gas more expensive to produce will drive up the price you pay at the pump. It's not that difficult to understand, is it?

Yeah, like I said, I can live with that. If it's important, I'm sure it'll come up again. If not, well, then it wasn't important.

I've already been banned from an entire server simply because my username apparently contains a secret message of bigotry and hatred, so I hope you'll excuse if I'm gonna try to keep it civil and friendly and try not to rustle too many jimmies during my time here.

Thank you. I did put some effort into it.

That's okay, I can live with that.

I honestly don't know, since I'm neither a politician nor a foreign policy expert, but it certainly seems to me that the critics were right on this one, and it was mostly a useless proxy war designed to fill the coffers of the morally ambiguous and well-connected elite at the cost of thousands of innocent human lives, so it seems that either preventing it from the getgo or not funding it all would have been the better choice. But hindsight is always 20/20.

Yes, if Putin had invaded and we had done nothing at all, some lives would have still been lost, but most likely the Ukrainian army would have folded much quicker and the death toll would have been much lower than it stands now. And let's not forget, the whole thing only started because Biden greenlit that Nordstream Two pipeline that Trump had spent his entire four years blocking for fear of precisely this incident. Literally within a week of the pipeline's approval, the first Russian boots were on Ukrainian soil, so whatever you think of the orange cheeto, it seems he was 100% on the money on this one.

I do, but if I said it outright I would just be accused of a lack of empathy and intelligence, plus a whole lot of other things far worse than that, so I won't.

So if you didn't get my broad hint, I'm not going to be upset, and if you do, like I said, perhaps take my advice to stew and simmer over it before posting a response in affect.

Hm, I was under the impression there recently was a package of $100 billion being discussed, but it appears that at least some of that money was supposed to go to Israel, not to Ukraine, and I'm not entirely sure if it ever made it through the house.

As far as what's already been spent, the BBC has reported a total of $46.6 billion as of February 21 this year, and the Council of Foreign Relationships claims a total of $76.8 billion, of which the aforementioned $46.6 billion constitute the direct military aid.

Of the bill mentioned in the first paragraph, $61 billion would supposedly go to Ukraine, so if passed, this would definitely bring the total to over $100 billion. So I regretfully admit to having slightly exaggerated my figures for dramatic effect, and humbly beg for your forgiveness, but least I only missed the mark by a single order of magnitude, and we're still somewhere in the right ballpark.

Ah yes, if only one of those country club going billionaires would decide to use their power to try and come help us…

Yeah, I think I'm just gonna let you stew and simmer on that one.

No one with any power, no one from the right families is coming to help their capital livestock.

That's an interesting sentence right there. What does that even mean, the "right" families? Are you seriously expecting the people who created the problem to now help solve it?

This exploitation machine is exactly what they wanted and spent decades lining pockets to achieve.

No, of course you aren't. But by God, let's also not ask for help from the "wrong" families…

Sending hundreds of billions of dollars to fight the war in Ukraine, for instance.

What, you thought we actually HAD hundreds of billions of dollars? They're all just printed from thin air and added to the national debt, and then inflation goes up as a result of the increased money supply.

Shutting down the Keystone XL pipeline and restricting domestic oil leases almost immediately increased the price of gas by 20 or so cents.

I thought the President doesn't control the price of goods…

See, Microsoft cares so much about you they'll even make a backup of all of your emails, completely for free, without you even having to ask. And here you are complaining…

I don't wear any watch at all. Time isn't real, it was invented by capitalists to sell more watches.

MFW using a log to smash a window is called “breaking and entering” instead of “logging in”.

It's because people somehow keep believing that voting for some politician is magically going to solve all their problems for them. It won't. Things might get better for a little while if they actually DO end up passing some law that happens to work in your favor, but in the grand scheme of things, you're better off not waiting for them to do anything and working to solve your own problems instead.

This goes for the left and the right BTW. Both have an unhealthy obsession with this sort of mindset.

Of course I have a right to tell her that, whether or not she actually does it, or whether I have the right to violently enforce my opinion on her is an entirely different matter. But we were just arguing hypotheticals in this thread anyways.

FWIW I’m not convinced that banning abortion is the solution, but neither that making it easier and safer to access solves any problems, because neither do anything to address the root cause of why women feel like they need to have any abortions at all (excluding those necessary for medical reasons of course).

But sure, I’m clearly the petulant child here that’s out of my depth, because an intelligent person would have no problem seeing such nuances instead of resorting to politically popular catch phrases.

And it’s funny, isn’t it, because women tell men all the time what they ought to do with their bodies (go to work, make money, provide for the family, share the housework, don’t drink, don’t do drugs, the list goes on), yet as a man, I’m supposedly not allowed to even have an opinion what what a woman should do with hers? I’m sorry, that just sounds like blatant sexism, but I’m sure that as long as it’s in favor of women, you’re perfectly happy accepting that.

Yeah, I’m afraid that’s just an ad hominem, not an argument.

And no, I don’t have a problem figuring out where you stand on the issue, but since you apparently can’t even defend your position without resorting to insults, this seems to be a clear case of “you can’t reason anyone out of an opinion which by reason they never acquired”.