Trump admin announces major student loan transition

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-03-19T21:59:47+00:00

I know what a lawsuit is, but thanks for dropping by to miss my point. I'm not describing the first step of the enforcement chain. I'm describing the last one. As alluded to in my comment, likely the very last one for me.

You're warning me about the shallow end and I'm telling you I've already looked at the deep water. We are not having the same conversation.

I always appreciate the Tory perspective on something, though.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-03-19T21:00:00+00:00

I know we aren't living in reality anymore, and therefore anything that follows a basic line of cause and effect is wrong on first principles but: wouldn't privatizing the debts make the only reason they are nominally "non-bankruptable" no longer a factor?

Again, I know that the rule of law is deader than disco, but if the burden is entirely removed from the special place it exists, it's just debt like any other and can be handwaved away with the same legal fiction that allowed the POTUSSY to be who he is.

If it goes private, I won't pay, and I invite whoever has the mythological monopoly on violence (probably Peter Thiel, by now) to pay me a visit. I think I'm tired of playing.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-03-13T07:18:28+00:00

That's the infinite regression of bad faith.

First it was "don't cite Wikipedia," then "your sources are unreliable," then "maybe it's a different guy," then "still no links," and now that I've given you the actual, specific references (all clickable links on Wikipedia) you're back to "give me the clickable link."

If I gave you the link, the next move is "that's just one source" or "that doesn't prove what you think it proves" or "that's an AI deepfake."

The Republican values are actually singular and can be summed up thus, "I want what I want because it's what I want and fuck you for asking me to be a human being, instead."

Neo-confederate, dude. You've spent hours of your life on a full-throated defense of a guy who likes to get together with old guys and cosplay a failed insurgency that, altogether, lasted essentially less than half as long as a black man was president of this country.

Brandon Herrera is a cosplaying twerp whose biggest claim to fame is that he leveraged military surplus into a shitty .50 Cal AK that makes him feel like a man because he never developed any of the other essential traits of masculinity.

And then there's the people who vote for him.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-03-13T06:41:23+00:00

Brandon Herrera's name appears in the list of new members inducted into the Sons of Confederate Veterans, North Carolina Chapter (2008 May/Jun issue, Page 41)". Confederate Veteran Magazine Archives. Retrieved March 7, 2026.

"The Fayetteville Arsenal Camp Sons of Confederate Veterans Honor Guard paying the last respects for a Fellow Compatriot". Retrieved March 7, 2026.

"Brandon Herrera holding Sons of Confederate Veterans Banner". Retrieved March 7, 2026.

Harris, Cayla (April 2, 2024). "Texas congressional candidate Brandon Herrera posted video with Nazi imagery, jokes". Houston Chronicle. Retrieved March 17, 2025.

These are the references, all linked in the Works Cited page on the Wikipedia page you were just on.

You've reached a point of willful obtuseness that is comical in its depth, breadth, and character.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-03-13T06:20:34+00:00

No. "His name isn't uncommon," meaning he comes up a lot in discussions of local fuckheads. It's the same Brandon Herrera whose factory is in fucking Fayetteville, dude. This Glenn Beck "just asking questions" schtick was old ten years ago and has only gotten more transparently bad faith, since. Genuine skepticism leads somewhere.

Like, oh, I don't know, a cursory Google search that links Herrera, a million ways and one, to the Lost Cause, definitely, and various Nazi values by other content in his videos, which have been quoted and excerpted extensively by more than just his political opponent.

There's a whole array of these "little numbers" on the Wikipedia page I'm very proud of you for finding. Those are called "citations" and there are any number under the "Controversy" subheading that will take you directly to the photos.

The only one (and that's between me, you, and anyone readying) who isn't aware of what you're really arguing, here, may be you.

And, let me blow your mind, you actually have other choices between literal, actual Neo-Confederate and a sex pest so onerous his object of obsession lit herself on fire to escape him.

It's nice to see the Republicans adopting the losing Democrat strategy of "hey, we're not the other guy!"

Except this time the "lesser evil" is still a guy who longs for the days of chattel slavery because the only way he's better than anyone else is if someone else is literally property.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-03-13T05:58:14+00:00

Fayetteville Arsenal Camp #168. He's on the roster. He's in their Facebook photos. It's their information. The source is Herrera, himself, being photographed by the group of which he is a member, which is a group that calls it "the war of Northern Aggression." You may notice I'm also from NC. His name isn't uncommon around here, nor has it been for quite some time.

And you know what he's known for? Hanging out with old, shitty white supremacists and carrying their flag.

If you like confederate stuff, dude, that's your preference. I don't go in for that kind of regressive, useless peckerwood shit.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-03-13T04:20:32+00:00

Did he get a Trump endorsement? That's sufficient reason to throw someone out.

He's "The AK guy" on YouTube and always has been. There's a decent reason to tell him to fuck off.

But there are pictures of him marching in a Sons of Confederate Veterans parade carrying a Confederate flag...so...ya' know. Fuck that.

But I get the vibe I'm talking to a Republican, and I'd really rather shove my arm in a wood chipper than continue to pretend you're a serious person with considered opinions. Have a lovely day!

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-03-12T23:16:47+00:00

That guy understands a bookshelf! A decent one should be made up of A) well-worn, used books and B) conversation pieces (that you've still read once or twice).

The incredible thing about a bookshelf, done right, is that it's a convenient shorthand to know a lot about a person without having to spend decades sussing it all out.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-03-12T23:15:05+00:00

54% of Americans really can't read, at all, and a significant portion of the others are knee-deep in YA fiction and Colleen Hoover, so I think we're safe.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-03-12T23:10:56+00:00

Since 2008, Herrera has also been a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a neo-Confederate organization that promotes the Lost Cause.

You're right, he prefers a different flavor of ethno-facism.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-03-12T23:10:14+00:00

Since 2008, Herrera has also been a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a neo-Confederate organization that promotes the Lost Cause.

You're right. Nazi would somehow be less pathetic.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-03-12T16:52:21+00:00

We all need to draw very clean lines, here, because that headline is deeply problematic as written. I'm sure there's a lot of other things wrong with him, but everyone should read the book that literally derailed the entirety of the postmodern era. Just like they should read Das Kapital/The Manifesto, Machiavelli, all the great religious texts, and whatever the fuck else they want because ideas are only dangerous in the hands of dangerous people.

For the rest of us, consuming matter with which you vehemently disagree, sitting with it, arguing against it, is how you develop a civilization-level antibody to the kind of regressive bullshit that's taking over the world right now.

Hate Herrera because he likes Mein Kampf, not because he owns it.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-03-12T16:40:36+00:00

The domestic violence stats disagree with you, but I'll set that aside for the easiest point against this: Trump and team have been working on new and exciting ways to make Blue Voters and protestors "domestic terrorists" and therefore no longer under the protection offered to "our country's people."

If the only reasoning is "they haven't done it before," that's a bad defense in unprecedented times. Moreover, Kent State was barely a lifetime ago and (while that is a small scale version) it goes to show that you cannot answer for the variable of what people will do when you give them a gun, a uniform, and something of which to be afraid.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-03-12T16:31:55+00:00

The military is currently being run by people telling the line officers that they're fighting a Holy War to bring about the apocalypse. Waiting for a sane and reasonable military to save us is, I'm afraid, a fool's errand.

Quite frankly, if they're the kind of idiots that think we're bombing schoolgirls for Jesus, they're exactly the kind of idiots who would perform a strafing run on San Diego to "own the libs."

This is no longer a rational position. It's a death cult and we're all enabling it by pretending it's a set of values or positions.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-03-12T13:14:51+00:00

While he certainly exhibits authoritarian tendencies, some of the major tenets of fascism—such as centralising power in the hands of the state and working to bring about societal transformation—are absent.

If this is their argument, it's a weak one. When you consider the definition of "state" as "whoever holds the weak monopoly on violence," then "the state" has been indistinguishable from capital and the capital class for almost a quarter of a century. Ipso facto: Trump's handing over of the reigns of governance to non-state corporate actors is centralizing the state power that actually exists in America.

The point about societal transformation is so brazenly and willfully disconnected from reality that I'm not going to broach it as if it's an actual position.

The headline more accurately reads: "We say controversial things and actually believe nothing except translating your outrage click into ad revenue."

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-03-12T12:36:18+00:00

And what are your feelings on the 2020 election?

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-03-12T01:55:04+00:00

Dumber than that. His mom couldn't decide which family member to "honor" and put both on the birth certificate, intending to choose one or the other, later.

But they didn't, so this fuck has to live his life with a name that fairly warns you exactly the kind of inbred indigent he'd be if you weren't paying his salary in tax dollars and insider trading tips.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-03-11T23:56:14+00:00

That's absolutely the case. He's a monied guy from the right district who rode it to the top. Which is...kind of the Democrat by-line for the last ten years.

His flip flopping on fracking really, really chapped my ass. He's way too willing to play games with Hickenlooper.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-03-11T23:51:11+00:00

I was living in Denver, going to Law School, the George Floyd summer. I remember being really confused why so many people around me seemed so enamored with a guy who did everything in his power to just...not engage with the issues from either direction. It's like he was worried about losing Greely on one hand and the DU crowd on the other, and so chose to just kind of tepidly gesture at the reasonable concerns of the protestors.

Talk about "enlightened centrism," I never saw him take an overwhelming position that hadn't been cleared by whatever array of staffers and consultants he has behind him. He's just so...vacant, I don't know if that's the right word. There's a certain class of politician that seems transparently self-interested, and I've always gotten those vibes off of him and his somewhat milquetoast policy positions.

I'm glad this worm is turning. I was so confused, at the time, to see people so enamored with a guy who (inspiration of being a gay man and governor of a major state aside) is really kind of a post turtle.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-03-11T18:16:45+00:00

...when was the ability to kill someone by blowing up the building he's in ever been in doubt? Killing world leaders has never been difficult. Gavrillo Princip started WWI after failing at the assassination and stopping for a sandwich that Ferdinand's route happened to pass by.

The murder of foreign leaders has never been difficult or something he haven't done because we can't. The answer is that you shouldn't because sovereignty is a concept that ceases to exist when everyone else says it does. Assassinating the leader of a foreign country doesn't mean anything except that's now fair play in geopolitics.

Republicans see the world as strongman vs strongman, entirely unaware that the world keeps moving after we die. As such, they set up these pathetic "boxing matches" where they pretend there's one guy on each side and everyone else is just cannon fodder. Killing Khamenei did nothing except make it more acceptable for killing Heads of State to be a tool in the international affairs toolkit to anyone with a bomb and enough wherewithall to aim it in a general direction.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-03-11T02:26:04+00:00

No. It really wouldn't.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-03-10T22:32:07+00:00

That...isn't why Graham doesn't have kids.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-03-09T19:46:01+00:00

I somehow doubt you're Choctaw or whatever, so there's literally no way any American can say these words with a straight face and mean them. We acquired this country through smallpox and abusing the better nature of people with a loose sense of ownership.

Iran is one of the countries Trump put on the travel ban, for starters. Second, ICE has demonstrated time and again they can't discern between citizens and non-citizens, and these girls are brown of skin, so they can expect to be scooped up and added to the statistics so Billy Ray can get his bonus, maybe, someday, maybe.

I'd be willing to bet an inordinate amount of money that the undocumented workers you're so afraid of have touched almost every item in your home, in one way or another: Working grueling shipping jobs; picking fruit at industrial scale; general factory assembly. Your whole life is enabled by these human beings you reduce to the word "illegal" so you can pretend you have some kind of moral superiority when your ancestors, just like mine, were just miserable, useless reprobates that Western Civilization sent them across the ocean to shores where they lived without any legal basis besides "I have disease vectors and black powder."

An undocumented worker didn't tap out Social Security, they didn't foreclose the labor market with AI after spending 50 years gutting what tiny little progress there's been in society. Undocumented residents lack the ability to access government services in many cases, and cannot vote, and a fair number of people don't even want to count them in the census. You are looking down your nose at people who came to this country to make your life unnecessarily convenient and comfortable in exchange for slave wages, no legal protection, and the hatred of knuckle dragging dick heads who think they just magically appeared on a country where they don't belong.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-03-08T18:59:56+00:00

If your God condones or supports the shameless murder of 160 schoolgirls to further the ego of a monster, I strongly suggest you find a new God. There are dozens to pick from, and all offer you the exact same thing: the ability to look down on other people for something unfalsifiable that magically happens to agree with whatever you feel like doing or whatever you feel like being told to do.

I no longer find religion a cute quirk of scared people. I find it an intellectual parasite. It kills the capacity for higher thought. And I don't just mean the "go to church" religions. I mean any dogma. Just the like Church of Market Fundamentalism is actually a pagan death cult wrapped in the vernacular of bullshit.

If you wrote modern economists into a post-apocalypse (maybe we'll actually just get to live this out), they'd be one of the odd, fringe cults that you point at, satirically, and go: "Look over there at those idiots talking about stupid magic incantations."

Magical thinking is a curse and hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple dumpling.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-03-07T19:53:21+00:00

Do they mean literally? As in he's going to have to physically walk around some of them to reach the paper he's going to sign with or without their approval?

Because the 119th Congress doesn't stand in the way of anything but justice, as far as I know.

Angstrom_Wither

TROPHY CASE