US Politics Mega-thread - Page 9696

On January 16 2018 14:07 Nebuchad wrote:
As in, if the candidate of the person that is criticized by the article is from a minority, then it says something about their opponent that they're considering someone else instead (for example, Bernie supporters being sexist for not supporting Hillary); but now that the situation is reversed and the candidate of the opponent of the person is the one who is from a minority, then it's totally fine for the person with that attitude to support the old white guy on his side despite the opponent's identity.

Seems pretty straightforward.

On January 16 2018 15:43 Aquanim wrote:

I don't think there is anything inherently inconsistent about supporting a minority candidate in one situation (partially for the reason that they are a minority candidate) and not supporting a different minority candidate in another. Arguments for or against a candidate do not have to be absolutes. Do you disagree with these statements?

People had other reasons why they believed Clinton was a better candidate than Sanders. People have other reasons to believe Cardin is a better candidate than Manning.

It's entirely possible and probable that there are examples of influential Democrats treating Clinton's gender as an absolute reason to support her over Sanders. Since neither you, GreenHorizons nor the article author saw fit to provide any examples to consider I do not have anything more meaningful to say on that front at this point. Assuming such examples exist they would still not make my argument in the first paragraph invalid, they would merely demonstrate the unreasonability of some Democrats (on which point we probably do not disagree).

On January 16 2018 16:00 Nebuchad wrote:


If you agree with the notion that it would be "unreasonable" for people to weaponize identity politics and be very disappointed in you for not voting for the minority candidate on their side while they're perfectly fine not voting for the minority candidate on your side when the situation is reversed, then you agree with 100% of Greenwald's message.

On January 16 2018 16:03 Aquanim wrote:

Maybe that's what you thought his article says.

On January 16 2018 16:06 Nebuchad wrote:


...Yeah duh of course it is. Luckily my belief here is based on Greenwald not quite making it a mystery what his article is about, so I feel fine with being a subjective viewpoint and I don't think it disqualifies me in this instance.

On January 16 2018 16:08 Aquanim wrote:

If I trusted Greenwald we wouldn't be having this conversation.

On January 16 2018 16:11 Nebuchad wrote:


1) I don't believe you, earlier you quoted the article because you thought it said something else than it did, so I'm pretty sure it's more than mistrust that caused this conversation.

2) Your mistrust shouldn't lead you to believe that your opponent's actual position, behind the lies and/or embellishments, is incoherent.

On January 16 2018 16:13 Aquanim wrote:

You've yet to demonstrate that I thought it said something other than it did. You've put forward the opinion that you think it means something different.


I don't believe his actual position is necessarily incoherent - but I do believe he will spin his summary of his position to be favourable to him.

On January 16 2018 16:19 Nebuchad wrote:


I've yet to demonstrate that? Your initial line of attack was that the article was saying minority candidates are preferable in a vacuum to old white men, and you were arguing correctly against this idea. Faced with the realization that the article isn't saying that minority candidates are preferable to old white men, but is instead attacking the people who would weaponize identity politics and make that exact argument when the minority candidates are on their political side, you now say that Greenwald is dogwhistling and that you don't trust that what he writes is the same as what he believes. Those two positions aren't consistent with each other.

On January 16 2018 16:26 Nebuchad wrote:...
That is impossible. You can't both dogwhistle something and clearly assert it at the same time.

On January 16 2018 16:26 Nebuchad wrote:...
That is impossible. You can't both dogwhistle something and clearly assert it at the same time.

On January 16 2018 15:10 mozoku wrote:

It isn't a matter of education. Even assuming someone is adequately educated and possesses enough technical knowledge to assess policy on their own (which arguably will never happen), it's impossible for a working person--or even a non-working person--to study all of the pertinent issues and come to a conclusion on them. Time is finite. Worse still, good leadership requires wisdom, a sense of fairness, and a degree of selflessness. In my experience, education isn't a reliable producer of any of those characteristics. Which is, by no means, a shot at education. Nothing else really develops those characteristics either. They just happen to be rare.

I'm willing to acknowledge that such characteristics are relatively rare in the human population (maybe 1-2%), and probably always will be. I'm of the opinion that humans and human nature has changed little in the last several thousand years, and I see no reason to believe that we'll suddenly have an population-scale abundance (i.e. most people) of quality leaders in the foreseeable future.

Given such characteristics are rare, the best way of governance is to elevate the people with such characteristics and insulate them, to an extent, from having their agency removed by the persistent specter of a 2- or 4- year election cycle decided nearly entirely by the very people unfit to rule/lead in the first place.

The American republic used to approximate this model much better than it does in the present day, and I assert (and this is by no means the first time I've made this argument here) that this is probably a strong contributor to the mess that our politics is in today. I'm not arguing for the Chinese model where the rulers have effectively no accountability outside of violent uprisings--I certainly think the US government is much better for its people than China's is for its. But I think there's somewhere in between where accountability from rulers/government can be obtained without enabling the tyranny of the (mostly ignorant and selfish) masses.

On January 16 2018 15:37 Nebuchad wrote:


It is a matter of education. It isn't in the scenario that you describe here, but that's because the scenario that you describe here is overly demanding. We don't need this perfect level of study for that sort of system to work, we need a much more basic level of understanding. We also don't need to never make mistakes. I mean, it's not like there's this system where the ruler is perfectly educated on everything and never makes policy mistakes that we could turn to instead. If we remove those unrealistic goals, then a sufficiently educated population is enough to make the system largely preferable to alternatives. At least the mistakes in this system are our own, and they've been made honestly.

On January 16 2018 13:59 Aquanim wrote:

What consistent policy on identity politics do you think the centrist Democrats should adopt instead of whatever they're doing now?

On January 16 2018 14:07 Nebuchad wrote:


What don't you understand? The criticism of the article isn't that Cardin is a white male, the criticism is the weaponization of identity politics. As in, if the candidate of the person that is criticized by the article is from a minority, then it says something about their opponent that they're considering someone else instead (for example, Bernie supporters being sexist for not supporting Hillary); but now that the situation is reversed and the candidate of the opponent of the person is the one who is from a minority, then it's totally fine for the person with that attitude to support the old white guy on his side despite the opponent's identity.

Seems pretty straightforward.

On January 16 2018 18:21 Acrofales wrote:

This would be a great point if the young trans woman in question wasn't also convicted of actual treason. Now whether or not you or I believe her act of whistleblowing was actually treasonous, the US court system found it to be, and it's not beyond belief that a large part of the US population, including the director of a Democratic think tank in Washington, believe she is treasonous scum (or in other words, a Russian stooge).

Jumping from "there is criticism on Chelsea Manning" to "there is criticism on her because she is a young transgender woman" is quite the bizarre leap.

On January 16 2018 18:21 Acrofales wrote:

This would be a great point if the young trans woman in question wasn't also convicted of actual treason. Now whether or not you or I believe her act of whistleblowing was actually treasonous, the US court system found it to be, and it's not beyond belief that a large part of the US population, including the director of a Democratic think tank in Washington, believe she is treasonous scum (or in other words, a Russian stooge).

Jumping from "there is criticism on Chelsea Manning" to "there is criticism on her because she is a young transgender woman" is quite the bizarre leap.

On January 16 2018 18:32 Nebuchad wrote:


It's genuinely weird to see people read stuff that's written by people on their left sometimes.

But yeah, for the record, you're right, that would be quite the bizarre leap. You could even go a little further and say that it would be "mindnumbingly stupid", I'd be inclined to agree.

On January 16 2018 18:49 Acrofales wrote:


Yet the article dismisses any and all policy issues and goes right to the "they support Cardin because he's an old white man (and Israel)", and completely ignore the very real reasons why anybody might not want Chelsea Manning anywhere near DC, despite her being a young transgender woman. In fact, the article goes to great lengths to avoid that issue.

If I were the Democratic Party I would be very wary of being associated with Chelsea Manning. There are better transgender heroes to champion the gender equality cause than one who a large part of the country mistrusts for reasons that have nothing to do with the one issue she is championing.

Centrist Dems Launch Smear Campaign Against Young Trans Woman, All to Keep an Old Straight White Man in Power

OVER THE WEEKEND, Chelsea Manning announced her candidacy for the U.S. Senate by posting a video outlining the broad themes of her campaign. Manning, a whistleblower who served seven years in a U.S. military brig for exposing systemic U.S. war crimes, was held under prison conditions so brutal that the U.N. formally denounced them as “inhumane.”

While her whistleblowing made her a hero around the world, Manning has also now become an icon of LGBT equality and trans rights with an act of profound bravery that at least matches, if not surpasses, her whistleblowing. She announced her transition, and demanded the dignity and treatment to which she was entitled, while she was imprisoned in the middle of a sprawling U.S. military base, in a brig at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Since her release from prison, she has become a visible and outspoken advocate for the rights of trans people. She has used her position as a Guardian columnist to stake out a wide range of positions, including drafting a proposed law to provide protections for whistleblowers. She certainly has more political experience and activism than many other Senate candidates previously supported by the Democratic establishment (Al Franken comes to mind as one example). If elected, Manning would become the first trans woman ever, and the youngest woman ever, to serve in the U.S. Senate.

Manning’s opponent in the Democratic Party primary is one of the most standard, banal, typical, privileged and mediocre politicians in the U.S. Congress: Benjamin Cardin, a 74-year-old white, straight man who is seeking his third six-year Senate term. Cardin’s decades-long career as a politician from the start has been steeped in unearned privilege: he first won elective office back in 1966, when his uncle, Maurice Cardin, gave up his seat in order to bequeath it to his nephew Benjamin. With this dynastic privilege as his base, he has spent the last 50 years climbing the political ladder in Maryland.

Cardin has remarkably few achievements for being in Congress for so many years. One of his few distinctions is that he has become one of the Senate’s most reliable and loyal supporters of AIPAC’s agenda and the Israeli government, if not the single most loyal. In 2015, he joined with Lindsey Graham in kicking off the annual AIPAC conference, causing neocon columnist Jennifer Rubin to gush about how identical they sounded.

But Cardin’s crowning achievement came last year when he authored a bill that would have made it a felony to support a boycott of Israel – a bill that was such a profound assault on basic First Amendment freedoms that the ACLU instantly denounced it and multiple Senators who had co-sponsored Cardin’s bill (such as Senator Kirsten Gillibrand) announced that they were withdrawing their support.

Despite all of this, or perhaps because of it, establishment Democrats wasted no time in mocking and denouncing Manning’s bid to become the first ever trans woman in the Senate, instead quickly lining up in support behind the straight white male who has wielded power for decades. To demean Manning, many of these establishment Democrats invoked the primary tactic they now reflexively use against anyone they view as a political adversary: they depicted her as a tool of the Kremlin, whose candidacy is really just a disguised plot engineered by Moscow.

Leading the way in spreading this obviously deranged but acceptable-in-DC conspiracy theory was Neera Tanden, the president of the largest Democratic Party think tank in Washington. Last night, Tanden spread a viral tweet that strongly implied – without even pretending to have a shred of evidence – that the Kremlin had engineered Manning’s candidacy as punishment for Cardin’s hard-line position on Russia.

This conspiracy theory mocks itself. The idea that Vladimir Putin sat in the Kremlin, steaming over Benjamin Cardin’s report on Russia, and thus developed a dastardly plot to rid himself of his daunting Maryland nemesis – “I know how to get rid of Cardin: I’ll have a trans woman who was convicted of felony leaking run against him!” – is too inane to merit any additional ridicule. But this is the climate in Washington: no conspiracy theory is too moronic, too demented, too self-evidently laughable to disqualify its advocates from being taken seriously – as long as it involves accusations that someone is a covert tool of the Kremlin. That’s why the president of the leading Democratic think tank feels free to spread this slanderous trash.