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On January 03 2020 12:02 Nebuchad wrote:
Is this to distract from impeachment or is this straight up for the elections?
Both?
I understand how a war can get people to rally behind you but I have a feeling that this specific attempt is so transparent that it wouldn't really reinforce his popularity, dunno if that's too naive of me to think.
One would hope so but a look a conservative Twitter makes it look like all the ideologues on the right have taken the bait hook, line, and sinker. There's a lot of "ooh rah" chest puffing going on about how Iran deserved it.
Hopefully that's just contained to them and not moderates. Last I saw, polling suggested the wars in the Middle East are quite unpopular, and Trump starting another will not help with that popularity. Anyone with half a brain can see that the admin's claim that this was a defensive act is BS.
On January 03 2020 12:04 LG)Sabbath wrote:Show nested quote +On January 03 2020 12:02 Nebuchad wrote:
Is this to distract from impeachment or is this straight up for the elections?
I understand how a war can get people to rally behind you but I have a feeling that this specific attempt is so transparent that it wouldn't really reinforce his popularity, dunno if that's too naive of me to think. I wouldn't expect a calculated move from Trump anyway. This is probably in response to the new email evidence that came out several hours ago.
Also this. It has been a bad last few weeks for him with more evidence coming out due to FOIAs that refute some of his side's legal arguments in the impeachment case, which makes it looks even worse for McConnell if he goes ahead with trying to block there being a trial with actual evidence and witnesses.
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United States13816 Posts
I'm surprised more people don't plug into fox new's youtube for a lead indicator for what trump will do. Tucker Carlson and fox news are taking a pretty hard line stance against a war with iran. to go far as to say (and I quote) "those people who are telling us to ignore the invasion on our southern border are the same people screaming for war against iran".
I'm not saying I endorse what fox says but I think its the best source for what the conservative world is thinking publicly.
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On January 03 2020 13:24 Sermokala wrote:
I'm surprised more people don't plug into fox new's youtube for a lead indicator for what trump will do. Tucker Carlson and fox news are taking a pretty hard line stance against a war with iran. to go far as to say (and I quote) "those people who are telling us to ignore the invasion on our southern border are the same people screaming for war against iran".
I'm not saying I endorse what fox says but I think its the best source for what the conservative world is thinking publicly.
The self-defence stance has been mentioned, they are trying to force Iran's hand and then act like it was self-defence.
This isn't exactly an anti-war move
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On January 03 2020 12:04 LG)Sabbath wrote:Show nested quote +On January 03 2020 12:02 Nebuchad wrote:
Is this to distract from impeachment or is this straight up for the elections?
I understand how a war can get people to rally behind you but I have a feeling that this specific attempt is so transparent that it wouldn't really reinforce his popularity, dunno if that's too naive of me to think. I wouldn't expect a calculated move from Trump anyway. This is probably in response to the new email evidence that came out several hours ago.
I'm probably the last person to defend saber-rattling, however the US embassy in Iraq (which I don't know any people who oppose embassies and diplomacy...) was attacked by Iranian-backed "militia". I suspect this had a lot to do with that provocation, rather than some now look over here shtick as all Trump has to do to get that effect is post more inane twitterisms or say something dumb (both about a daily occurrence). If we are to have an embassy you have to defend it, at least to give time to evacuate.
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United States13816 Posts
Its not a self-defence stance it has literally someone saying that tumps 2016 race was running against Bush's doctrine for war in the middle east and saying if theres a hot war with iran thats the end of trumps chancing of winning.
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Good on Trump, tha US has been taking to hits for some time now but thankfully even with Trump it cant last forever. And of course we have the usual lefty reaction, which at this point is so reliable it just makes me laugh more than anything.
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On January 03 2020 11:11 Gahlo wrote:Iirc, in my state(PA) 100% of the green votes and at least 75% of the Libertarian votes would have had to have gone to Hillary for her to win, and that's with ~412k more people voting than in the 2012 race. Hardly seems like a 3rd party issue.
It was one of many contributing factors, without any doubt in my mind. You can't boil the outcome of any election down to just one or two factors, there were many that affected the outcome of this one, for example, James Comey reopening the investigation into Clinton just weeks before the election.
Who knows how many people didn't vote for Clinton because of what Comey did, but I promise you her numbers did drop after that. So she loses numbers of voters to Comey, some people also decide I'm going to vote third party and she loses more to that... it adds up.
If everyone in Arizona decided, "meh, I won't vote because what good will it do..." Kyrsten Sinema wouldn't have been elected.
There have been a decent amount of recent examples of elections being won and lost by very small margins, which were very consequential elections (really what election these days isn't consequential).
This race came down to one vote, and in the recount it was a tie... then the republican won by pulling a name out of a hat... which is bullshit, but they often get away with that.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/01/04/drawing-today-decide-virginia-state-house-race-majority-party/1002910001/
It's kind of like saying, "Me throwing this plastic bottle on the ground doesn't affect pollution, it's just one bottle... In the overall scheme of things it's not enough to make an impact."
This kind of thing is what people tell themselves to feel better about doing what they feel like doing, rather than something else.
And yes, I know how the electoral college works... But even if you don't consider winning an individual state... You could not say, that the 3 million votes Clinton won the overall election by didn't have a very positive impact on the country.
In fact, that gave a lot of people hope... each one of those extra votes, that supposedly didn't count for anything.
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On January 03 2020 14:04 Introvert wrote:
Good on Trump, tha US has been taking to hits for some time now but thankfully even with Trump it cant last forever. And of course we have the usual lefty reaction, which at this point is so reliable it just makes me laugh more than anything.
I feel like you didn't actually try to say anything in this post other than "I laugh at how liberals are responding to this"
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On January 03 2020 15:23 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On January 03 2020 14:04 Introvert wrote:
Good on Trump, tha US has been taking to hits for some time now but thankfully even with Trump it cant last forever. And of course we have the usual lefty reaction, which at this point is so reliable it just makes me laugh more than anything. I feel like you didn't actually try to say anything in this post other than "I laugh at how liberals are responding to this"
That's usually what trump voters fall back on.
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On January 03 2020 15:27 ShambhalaWar wrote:Show nested quote +On January 03 2020 15:23 Mohdoo wrote:On January 03 2020 14:04 Introvert wrote:
Good on Trump, tha US has been taking to hits for some time now but thankfully even with Trump it cant last forever. And of course we have the usual lefty reaction, which at this point is so reliable it just makes me laugh more than anything. I feel like you didn't actually try to say anything in this post other than "I laugh at how liberals are responding to this" That's usually what trump voters fall back on.
I didn't vote for Trump, thanks.
No, while everyone here is advancing their latest Trump conspiracy theory, I decided to chime in with some support, as I have made similarly brief comments criticizing Trump's lack of action. I'm not sure any conservative would have a hard time explaining why they think killing high-ranking terrorists is good.
On January 03 2020 15:23 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On January 03 2020 14:04 Introvert wrote:
Good on Trump, tha US has been taking to hits for some time now but thankfully even with Trump it cant last forever. And of course we have the usual lefty reaction, which at this point is so reliable it just makes me laugh more than anything. I feel like you didn't actually try to say anything in this post other than "I laugh at how liberals are responding to this"
There were two comments, but admittedly no argument. Maybe instead of re-running the "big bad Republican" greatest hits, someone could advance a more plausible theory.
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I'm worried I'm gonna wake up to bad iran-related news.
Also re: introvert: if Trump killing the dude means less total deaths, I support it. If it means more total deaths, I am against it.
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On January 03 2020 13:24 Sermokala wrote:
I'm surprised more people don't plug into fox new's youtube for a lead indicator for what trump will do. Tucker Carlson and fox news are taking a pretty hard line stance against a war with iran. to go far as to say (and I quote) "those people who are telling us to ignore the invasion on our southern border are the same people screaming for war against iran".
I'm not saying I endorse what fox says but I think its the best source for what the conservative world is thinking publicly.
Is that Fox News or is that just Tucker? (Genuinely asking)
I'd be shocked if most people on Fox didn't applaud this, we're killing muslims it's cool it shows strength.
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On January 03 2020 16:20 Mohdoo wrote:
I'm worried I'm gonna wake up to bad iran-related news.
Also re: introvert: if Trump killing the dude means less total deaths, I support it. If it means more total deaths, I am against it.
How do you determine this without post-hoc shenanigans? To be fair the airstrike also killed the Hezbollah guy in charge who attacked the US Embassy. If I was the President I would have sent the marines in to defend the place, evacuate non-military personnel, then evac'd the marines, then told the backwards nations of the Middle East to pound sand and not waste any more $$$ or lives there, but attacking the guy who attacked you is not exactly a hard position to defend. Going after Trump on these grounds is by far and away a losing battle with the average person.
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On January 03 2020 16:20 Mohdoo wrote:
I'm worried I'm gonna wake up to bad iran-related news.
Also re: introvert: if Trump killing the dude means less total deaths, I support it. If it means more total deaths, I am against it.
I can't imagine that this would lead to less death. The "maximum pressure campaign" has brought us to these latest killings, and this is just a further continuation of it. Brings to mind Bush's "stay the course".
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On January 03 2020 16:54 Starlightsun wrote:Show nested quote +On January 03 2020 16:20 Mohdoo wrote:
I'm worried I'm gonna wake up to bad iran-related news.
Also re: introvert: if Trump killing the dude means less total deaths, I support it. If it means more total deaths, I am against it. I can't imagine that this would lead to less death. The "maximum pressure campaign" has brought us to these latest killings, and this is just a further continuation of it. Brings to mind Bush's "stay the course".
I'm not a career diplomat or high ranking military officer, so I have no idea. I'm agnostic because there's no way I have near enough to comment.
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To those who think this attack was 'just because there is an election coming', how would you have Trump react to the USA embassy being attacked by Iran militia instead?
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On January 03 2020 17:41 Laurens wrote:
To those who think this attack was 'just because there is an election coming', how would you have Trump react to the USA embassy being attacked by Iran militia instead?
Oh come on don't start this. We all know how escalation works.
We're not going with "I'm so sad that I was forced to retaliate against this rogue regime for their unspeakable actions, they really forced our hand", we're going with "Here's a pixellated american flag" this time.
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I don't want to question whether the attack was legit, probably depends on what the target was doing on foreign soil. For now it seems mostly like a warning regarding the militias.
I'm more worried about Donny's mental health in the oncoming turbulences.
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On January 03 2020 03:20 Nebuchad wrote:Show nested quote +On January 03 2020 02:46 Biff The Understudy wrote:On January 02 2020 20:42 Nebuchad wrote:On January 02 2020 18:53 Biff The Understudy wrote:On January 02 2020 02:09 Nebuchad wrote:On January 02 2020 01:24 Biff The Understudy wrote:On January 01 2020 20:50 Nebuchad wrote:On January 01 2020 19:52 Biff The Understudy wrote:
Again I think politics is about what can be done, not about some grand vision of the Left or the Right.
I don't care that Obama is a liberal or a leftist deep down. He passed reforms that are part of a much more left wing vision of society, such as a universal health care, and that's what matters. We don't elect people to embody some kind of ideological purity, we elect them to change the life of people and budge the system in a certain direction. Obama did it towards the left, so in the US context, yes, he was a left wing president. And he would have gone much further had he not been constantly blocked by the GOP.
In that regard, considering that anyway the limit of his left leaning reform were exterior constraints and nor his will, it wouldn't have made a iota of difference if he had been much much more left wing leaning as a person, as he certainly wouldn't have accomplished anything else. What mattered was that he was good enough at his job to implement his reforms with all the constraints he had to face.
I suspect that same would have gone for Clinton and I sincerely doubt that Bernie or Clinton presidency would have had a much different outcome. Both of them would have had to battle insanely hard to pass a couple of key reforms in the spirit of Obamacare, and would have been stopped wayyyy short of their vision, be it a moderately social democratic centrism or Bernie socialist grand dream. What you perceive as "what can be done" is influenced by the grand vision of the left and the right, and by the difference between liberalism and leftism. When your leftwing party runs to the center to be neoliberal and pushes the right further right so that it's now borderline fascist, what can be done is different than when you have a real leftist party on the left and a liberal party on the right. When you run as a leftist and then you staff your cabinet based 99% on what liberals want, the capacities and intentions of your cabinet will be different than that of a leftist cabinet. When you run as a leftist and then squander the good will that was given to you so much so that 1000 electoral seats turn to the opposing party, it influences what can be done by your administration outside of executive orders. It's also not just about you, as the political map that you leave behind will influence what the next representatives of the left can and cannot do. The politics that you describe there are politics of capitulation. A politician can run on 95% of the right's platform, get elected, and that would be a victory for the left because the other politician was running on 100% of the right's platform. If you remove the ideas from the equation, there is no reason why those ideas would ever win. It would be bad political strategy for your ideas to win. That's not a good outlook. I don't see what is a politics of capitulation. All I want from a politician is that he leaves the country in a better state than when he gets into office. At that point, Obama, Bernie or fucking Karl Marx in the White House would basically not achieve anything much different from each other. They would all push as hard as possible to pass left leaning reforms, and pass a fraction of them in an imperfect way. Which is great. It changes people's lives for the better. I don't believe in those grand political ideals and care not about pursuing some fantasies of political purity and childish dreams about The Revolution. And if Obama was elected in Norway and wanted to push the country right (he probably would), I would oppose him. But he did a stellar job as POTUS, and I would support anyone like him in that context. Since we are at it, i prefer someone who doesn't sell cheap dreams of revolution to get elected. If Bernie wins, he will probably end up being a good president, pushing the country a bit to the left just as Obama did by fighting like a demon, but his supporters will be super pissed off and disillusioned because The Revolution will not have delivered. And that's not a good thing. Obama is a contradictory figure in the framing that you give. He fights like a demon to get more leftwing stuff, he's doing basically the same as Bernie could, but if he was in Norway in another context, then he would push the country to the right and you'd fight against him? If he wouldn't do everything he can when the deck is on his side, why would you assume that he's doing everything he can when the deck is stacked against him? Logically, he wouldn't. That's an issue, and that's why your framing of "purity" is factually wrong. Liberalism isn't impure leftism, it's a different ideology with different goals. That's also where the capitulation comes in: we have a vision for society in the background, and we're giving up this vision because of pragmatism. But as we're giving up on our ideals being implemented, what's considered pragmatic changes, since less people are fighting on one side of the aisle and therefore the compromise position is no longer in the same place as it was when it comes to ideologies: it drifts to the right. And suddenly we don't care whether our champion is advancing liberalism or leftism, as long as we can tell ourselves they're improving the world. If we follow this logic we can even accept a quasi-conservative liberal like Biden as being good for the left, so long as the alternative candidate would have been worse. This pragmatic vision that is devoid of ideology is the kind of thought process that explains why the left keeps losing and the far right keeps strengthening, regardless of whether the nominally leftist candidate is in power or not. American society is so far on the right that in the realm of the possible right now, liberals and leftists want exactly the same thing. The end goal might not be the exact same (even though I'm not even sure about that) but both liberals and leftists basically want the US to look a little bit more like Denmark. Now we can debate whether or not we want a narrative to keep people fired up for elections about how we want to change the world radically. If you have good memory, that's what got Obama elected the first time (he was a bit the Bernie of 2008) and that costed him hugely when people realized he was only ever going to manage a universal healthcare, a cleanup of lobbyists in Washington, a comprehensive financial reform we could only dream of in the EU and a few other things instead of the socialist paradise they believed he would bring. I don't care about that. If you want to talk about great ideals and political theory that never see the light of the day, that's fine. I want poor people who get cancer to be treated instead of dying at home with no help because they don't have an insurance. See, I believe that's what matters. When it comes to Norway, what I meant is that the context, and therefore the range of possibilities is totally different. Instead of being wayyyyyy right of what american liberals want, the country is further on the left than them. Suddenly being liberal and left wing are two totally different things and the result of both in office will be different. Just as Macron would be a left wing wet dream in the US although in France he is centre right, Obama would be somewhere in the centre in Norway. Again. It's a question of context. America is this place that is simultaneously so far to the right that leftists and liberals are undistinguishable, but also where a liberal thinks running as a leftist is a good strategy to get elected since Obama is the Bernie of 2008. This America that you picture, it doesn't really make sense. If it was truly where the country was at, progressives would be running as liberals, not liberals as progressives. Basically everyone runs to the left of where they end up truly being, recent examples being Obama, Beto, Gillum, and even Trump. If you were there in 2016, I remember having arguments where people were telling me that Hillary Clinton was super progressive and that it was unfair that she was portrayed differently since her policies were competing with those of Bernie in terms of progressiveness. "The end goal might not be the exact same (even though I'm not even sure about that)" This sentence is the true issue imo. Of course the end goal is not the same. The ideal society of liberalism looks nothing like the ideal society of any leftist ideology. Liberalism wants a meritocracy, so that the people who deserve it/are the most capable get on top of society. Leftist ideologies fight against social hierarchies on a more fundamental level. This notion of top of society to get onto should be eroded. What you perceive as anti-leftist sentiment in the US is in part antiliberal sentiment. It's not only that, of course, there's also a reaction against socialism that forces people to call themselves other stuff like "progressive", I understand that. But a cliche of american politics is talking about liberal elites and how they misunderstand and are disconnected from the people. That is a leftist framing, that's populism. It might not be willing to call itself leftwing, and I have no doubt that racism and bigotry will play enough of a part that a bunch of the people who talk about liberal elites will still vote for a liberal elite like Trump over Bernie, but still this sort of framing should be accounted for. Macron would be Bill Clinton in the US. He's already happened. Look we can keep bickering, it goes nowhere. I want people to get a healthcare, affordable education and stuff like that, which are stuff both liberals and leftists are gonna try to achieve and neither are gonna fully succeed. So I don't care whatsoever if the guy who will give those to the people has a blue or a pink t-shirt. That's it. I mean I questioned some of your fundamental assumptions about the US and whether liberalism and leftism have the same political goals, glad to know that we were just bickering to you. Shrug, and see you next time you'll say the same things.
No you don't get it. I never said their end goal was the same. What I say is that their goals converge in the present situation to the point that it makes little difference who wins.
You asked me a question saying publicly I refused to answer you (which was weird), and I answered. Don't shrug and dismiss my answer because I'll say the same. You are the one who insisted on having my opinion, not the opposite.
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On January 03 2020 18:34 Biff The Understudy wrote:Show nested quote +On January 03 2020 03:20 Nebuchad wrote:On January 03 2020 02:46 Biff The Understudy wrote:On January 02 2020 20:42 Nebuchad wrote:On January 02 2020 18:53 Biff The Understudy wrote:On January 02 2020 02:09 Nebuchad wrote:On January 02 2020 01:24 Biff The Understudy wrote:On January 01 2020 20:50 Nebuchad wrote:On January 01 2020 19:52 Biff The Understudy wrote:
Again I think politics is about what can be done, not about some grand vision of the Left or the Right.
I don't care that Obama is a liberal or a leftist deep down. He passed reforms that are part of a much more left wing vision of society, such as a universal health care, and that's what matters. We don't elect people to embody some kind of ideological purity, we elect them to change the life of people and budge the system in a certain direction. Obama did it towards the left, so in the US context, yes, he was a left wing president. And he would have gone much further had he not been constantly blocked by the GOP.
In that regard, considering that anyway the limit of his left leaning reform were exterior constraints and nor his will, it wouldn't have made a iota of difference if he had been much much more left wing leaning as a person, as he certainly wouldn't have accomplished anything else. What mattered was that he was good enough at his job to implement his reforms with all the constraints he had to face.
I suspect that same would have gone for Clinton and I sincerely doubt that Bernie or Clinton presidency would have had a much different outcome. Both of them would have had to battle insanely hard to pass a couple of key reforms in the spirit of Obamacare, and would have been stopped wayyyy short of their vision, be it a moderately social democratic centrism or Bernie socialist grand dream. What you perceive as "what can be done" is influenced by the grand vision of the left and the right, and by the difference between liberalism and leftism. When your leftwing party runs to the center to be neoliberal and pushes the right further right so that it's now borderline fascist, what can be done is different than when you have a real leftist party on the left and a liberal party on the right. When you run as a leftist and then you staff your cabinet based 99% on what liberals want, the capacities and intentions of your cabinet will be different than that of a leftist cabinet. When you run as a leftist and then squander the good will that was given to you so much so that 1000 electoral seats turn to the opposing party, it influences what can be done by your administration outside of executive orders. It's also not just about you, as the political map that you leave behind will influence what the next representatives of the left can and cannot do. The politics that you describe there are politics of capitulation. A politician can run on 95% of the right's platform, get elected, and that would be a victory for the left because the other politician was running on 100% of the right's platform. If you remove the ideas from the equation, there is no reason why those ideas would ever win. It would be bad political strategy for your ideas to win. That's not a good outlook. I don't see what is a politics of capitulation. All I want from a politician is that he leaves the country in a better state than when he gets into office. At that point, Obama, Bernie or fucking Karl Marx in the White House would basically not achieve anything much different from each other. They would all push as hard as possible to pass left leaning reforms, and pass a fraction of them in an imperfect way. Which is great. It changes people's lives for the better. I don't believe in those grand political ideals and care not about pursuing some fantasies of political purity and childish dreams about The Revolution. And if Obama was elected in Norway and wanted to push the country right (he probably would), I would oppose him. But he did a stellar job as POTUS, and I would support anyone like him in that context. Since we are at it, i prefer someone who doesn't sell cheap dreams of revolution to get elected. If Bernie wins, he will probably end up being a good president, pushing the country a bit to the left just as Obama did by fighting like a demon, but his supporters will be super pissed off and disillusioned because The Revolution will not have delivered. And that's not a good thing. Obama is a contradictory figure in the framing that you give. He fights like a demon to get more leftwing stuff, he's doing basically the same as Bernie could, but if he was in Norway in another context, then he would push the country to the right and you'd fight against him? If he wouldn't do everything he can when the deck is on his side, why would you assume that he's doing everything he can when the deck is stacked against him? Logically, he wouldn't. That's an issue, and that's why your framing of "purity" is factually wrong. Liberalism isn't impure leftism, it's a different ideology with different goals. That's also where the capitulation comes in: we have a vision for society in the background, and we're giving up this vision because of pragmatism. But as we're giving up on our ideals being implemented, what's considered pragmatic changes, since less people are fighting on one side of the aisle and therefore the compromise position is no longer in the same place as it was when it comes to ideologies: it drifts to the right. And suddenly we don't care whether our champion is advancing liberalism or leftism, as long as we can tell ourselves they're improving the world. If we follow this logic we can even accept a quasi-conservative liberal like Biden as being good for the left, so long as the alternative candidate would have been worse. This pragmatic vision that is devoid of ideology is the kind of thought process that explains why the left keeps losing and the far right keeps strengthening, regardless of whether the nominally leftist candidate is in power or not. American society is so far on the right that in the realm of the possible right now, liberals and leftists want exactly the same thing. The end goal might not be the exact same (even though I'm not even sure about that) but both liberals and leftists basically want the US to look a little bit more like Denmark. Now we can debate whether or not we want a narrative to keep people fired up for elections about how we want to change the world radically. If you have good memory, that's what got Obama elected the first time (he was a bit the Bernie of 2008) and that costed him hugely when people realized he was only ever going to manage a universal healthcare, a cleanup of lobbyists in Washington, a comprehensive financial reform we could only dream of in the EU and a few other things instead of the socialist paradise they believed he would bring. I don't care about that. If you want to talk about great ideals and political theory that never see the light of the day, that's fine. I want poor people who get cancer to be treated instead of dying at home with no help because they don't have an insurance. See, I believe that's what matters. When it comes to Norway, what I meant is that the context, and therefore the range of possibilities is totally different. Instead of being wayyyyyy right of what american liberals want, the country is further on the left than them. Suddenly being liberal and left wing are two totally different things and the result of both in office will be different. Just as Macron would be a left wing wet dream in the US although in France he is centre right, Obama would be somewhere in the centre in Norway. Again. It's a question of context. America is this place that is simultaneously so far to the right that leftists and liberals are undistinguishable, but also where a liberal thinks running as a leftist is a good strategy to get elected since Obama is the Bernie of 2008. This America that you picture, it doesn't really make sense. If it was truly where the country was at, progressives would be running as liberals, not liberals as progressives. Basically everyone runs to the left of where they end up truly being, recent examples being Obama, Beto, Gillum, and even Trump. If you were there in 2016, I remember having arguments where people were telling me that Hillary Clinton was super progressive and that it was unfair that she was portrayed differently since her policies were competing with those of Bernie in terms of progressiveness. "The end goal might not be the exact same (even though I'm not even sure about that)" This sentence is the true issue imo. Of course the end goal is not the same. The ideal society of liberalism looks nothing like the ideal society of any leftist ideology. Liberalism wants a meritocracy, so that the people who deserve it/are the most capable get on top of society. Leftist ideologies fight against social hierarchies on a more fundamental level. This notion of top of society to get onto should be eroded. What you perceive as anti-leftist sentiment in the US is in part antiliberal sentiment. It's not only that, of course, there's also a reaction against socialism that forces people to call themselves other stuff like "progressive", I understand that. But a cliche of american politics is talking about liberal elites and how they misunderstand and are disconnected from the people. That is a leftist framing, that's populism. It might not be willing to call itself leftwing, and I have no doubt that racism and bigotry will play enough of a part that a bunch of the people who talk about liberal elites will still vote for a liberal elite like Trump over Bernie, but still this sort of framing should be accounted for. Macron would be Bill Clinton in the US. He's already happened. Look we can keep bickering, it goes nowhere. I want people to get a healthcare, affordable education and stuff like that, which are stuff both liberals and leftists are gonna try to achieve and neither are gonna fully succeed. So I don't care whatsoever if the guy who will give those to the people has a blue or a pink t-shirt. That's it. I mean I questioned some of your fundamental assumptions about the US and whether liberalism and leftism have the same political goals, glad to know that we were just bickering to you. Shrug, and see you next time you'll say the same things. No you don't get it. I never said their end goal was the same. What I say is that their goals converge in the present situation to the point that it makes little difference who wins. You asked me a question saying publicly I refused to answer you (which was weird), and I answered. Don't shrug and dismiss my answer because I'll say the same. You are the one who insisted on having my opinion, not the opposite.
Fair enough. Sorry to have bothered you.
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EPT
