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On February 24 2020 06:08 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:Show nested quote +On February 24 2020 06:06 Wegandi wrote:On February 24 2020 06:00 Acrofales wrote:On February 24 2020 05:57 Wegandi wrote:On February 24 2020 05:55 Simberto wrote:
If people having idiotic views and statements stops you from voting for them, how do you manage to vote for Trump? He is pretty much the unchallenged world champion at having idiotic views and statements. As bad as Trump is, Sanders is far worse. Why? One is a self-dealing moron. The other has ideas you don't like. Stupid twitter tweets and incoherent ramblings I can live with. They're not comparable. Do you not believe in climate change either? Do you not believe in promoting education, science, or civil rights either? Do you not believe in having strong diplomatic relations with other countries either? The idea that the only damage that Donald Trump is doing to our country (and the world) is limited to superficial social media posts is just plain wrong.
Your worldview boils down to if the Government doesn't do it, then its not being promoted. Kill the arts endowments, cut the FDA and make drug to market cheaper and faster, destroy the rent-seeking patents and IP system (that's a hard one since it's in the Constitution), and boost community / nuisance / tort courts with stricter property rights enforcement. Those I am in favor of, so to me your questions have false assumptions and equivalencies. I believe in science, education, and our individual rights, but for you that means Government, for me, that means No Government. We're incompatible. It's why I can dislike someone like Trump, yet still run to the polls to vote for him against Bernie. There are a lot of "independents" like me (maybe not so extreme, but you get the idea).
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On February 24 2020 06:13 Wombat_NI wrote:
The Trump presidency is an unmitigated disaster outside of some extremely specific framings.
If you’re a constitutional conservative he’s horrendous, if you’re at all on the left he’s horrendous, etc
If it wasn’t for fucking everyone else over I’d be happy to let you guys be ruled by the King you seem to desire but alas other people get involved
You don't get my argument. Of course, Trump is bad, but Bernie is like a hydrogen bomb bad to Trump's MOAB bad. Bernie will make me run to the polls to vote against him as someone who's traditionally agnostic/anti-sentiment on voting (hilariously enough I share this with GH).
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On February 24 2020 05:58 LegalLord wrote:
I very much wonder if anyone is around to give a voice to "Some Other Democrat 2020" - it seems like all the opposition around here is coming from a strictly Republican/right-wing camp.
I'm certainly in the right wing camp, but I would vote for Clinton in 2016 and this year I would vote for anyone who's not Sanders, Warren or Trump. Having to choose between Sanders/Warren and Trump would give me a headache.
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I always enjoy Republicans telling Democrats that their candidate can't win because of X.
Because there is pretty much a 100% chance X also applies to the Republican candidate.
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Canada8988 Posts
By the way as a general question, does the Jewish thing get brought up at all against Sanders/Bloomberg on the far right or in the conservative media? I don't remember even Trump making twitter innuendo on that.
It's kind of amazing how two son of East European Jewish immigrant from the 20-30 could become president of the US. They would both be the first non-israelly Jewish chief of state in history I think.
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On February 24 2020 06:30 Gorsameth wrote:
I always enjoy Republicans telling Democrats that their candidate can't win because of X.
Because there is pretty much a 100% chance X also applies to the Republican candidate.
To be fair, Republicans generally don't seem to hold their candidates to the standards Democrats do.
Thats not saying much since so many Democrats are also scumbags, but the ability for Republicans to rally around Just-About-Any-'Ol-Scumbag is pretty impressive.
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On February 24 2020 05:58 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On February 24 2020 04:19 ChristianS wrote:On February 24 2020 02:33 LegalLord wrote:
So, just had a thought: is anyone who posts here supporting any Dem candidate other than Sanders? I remember this place was split pretty strongly down the middle in 2016, but all the Hillary fans seem to have either gotten behind Sanders or at least just failed to back anyone else this time around. I find that kind of curious since he's not ideologically in sync with the standard vibe of this group. Can’t speak for others, obviously. I don’t think I was posting here yet during the 2016 DNC primary, and didn’t vote in it, but I was probably in the “I like Bernie better on policy, but Trump looks REALLY bad and Hillary seems stronger in the general” camp. There were/are theories that any Republican could just air the clip of Sanders saying “I’m a Democratic Socialist” on repeat in swing states and be virtually assured of victory, and I thought that could be a big issue. I still don’t know that that’s wrong. I’ve personally seen more than once the sequence of someone saying “I kinda like Sanders...” and someone else saying “Are you kidding? You can’t vote for a socialist!” and the first person kinda nodding like “yeah, maybe you’re right...” Anecdotal, obviously, and who knows if the nodding was just polite, but I do think the decades of mudslinging and caricaturization attached to the word “socialist” is a potential problem. But this time around I’m not putting so much stock in that, partly because I feel like everybody understands that’s not really where the battle lines are any more. Republicans’ stock in concepts like limited government or fiscal responsibility seems to be at an all-time low, and the major area where Sanders is pushing socialist policy is healthcare, which is quite obviously not anything like a well-functioning free market right now anyway. After four years of Trump, I’m not sure criticisms like “he’ll bankrupt us!” or “he’s too extreme!” or “destroying the status quo like that is dangerous!” will hold much water. The other part, though, is that I have less patience for bowing to arguments I know are bullshit just because I think other people might not recognize that they’re bullshit. We’re already in a mixed economy, and most of the areas Sanders is talking about “socializing” are already extremely regulated anyway, and nobody is seriously talking about changing that. It’s mostly just branding making Sanders “socialist” and his opponents “not socialist;” I tend to think capitalism (if that’s what we’re calling our current system) will survive a Sanders administration just fine. So you can still make tactical arguments like “maybe the socialism criticism is bullshit, but swing voters don’t know that so we should go with someone else.” But I think that sucks. Taken to its natural conclusion, you wind up saying things like “we better nominate a white male, because racists and sexists in Florida and Ohio could decide the outcome!” At some point you’re inventing shitty people in your head and doing whatever you think the shitty people would want because you can’t imagine trying to convince them not to be shitty. TL;DR: I’m still probably not very aligned with GH-type revolutionaries (I still haven’t seen anything to make me think the primary results are being intentionally manipulated, for instance), but I like Sanders a lot and even if he is weaker in the general (and I’m not sure he is), I’m willing to give it a shot. That's a couple really solid thoughts. I must admit that I did completely forget about that concept of electability as an issue (probably because of how stupid that argument turned out to be last time around). To be honest, once you get past the rhetoric, I don't think Bernie's major policy positions are all that far from standard Democratic fare. If we look: - Fight climate change. Very standard. - $15/hr minimum wage. They went with this as a policy point last time, so it can't be that out-of-the-norm. - Stop billionaire campaign contributions. It sounds like a pet issue, because just about no one else talks about it, but who is really going to come out against this in principle? The Democrats are at least nominally against this, even if in practice they take as many of these as the Republicans do. - Universal healthcare / M4A. And the corollary: tax everyone, rather than tax the rich, to pay for it. Yeah, that seems to step on some major entrenched interests. And everything else is very standard Democratic policy. From what I can tell, it's the healthcare policy explicitly, and the uncharacteristically principled opposition to the outsized influence of the wealthy implicitly, that makes him a "socialist" rather than your average Democrat. And frankly, I do get the sense that people are generally sympathetic to both of these "outlandish" principles. All that being so, there is still quite a lot of opposition to Sanders, so I very much wonder if anyone is around to give a voice to "Some Other Democrat 2020" - it seems like all the opposition around here is coming from a strictly Republican/right-wing camp.
The trouble is, there’s a lot of different and contradictory lessons you could take from 2016. One I read is that presidential platforms need to be “horizonal;” + Show Spoiler +that’s “horizonal,” as in looking to the horizon, not “horizontal.” I’m not actually sure if it’s even a word
Another plausible lesson, though, is that politics is even dumber than anyone imagined. Putting out policy documents detailing your precise plans for education or healthcare or whatever is a waste of time; nobody will decide to vote for you because of it, and quite a few people will find something to disagree with in there and decide to vote against you.
I think people knew that to some degree, but I don’t think they realized you could just say dumb shit like “let’s build a wall and make Mexico pay for it” or “let’s ban all the Muslims” and actually win. People thought that smart people would see how dumb it was and say so, and dumb people would listen to the smart people and disregard it. Turns out, you can totally do that. The dumb people think it sounds great, and smart people on your side will spend their time finding interesting and nuanced ways they can interpret that dumb thing you said as maybe not that dumb after all (smart people love a challenge like that).
I’m grossly oversimplifying, and maybe I’ll regret it when someone ITT endeavors to explain to me why I’m misrepresenting Trump or something. But my point, anyway is that I’m not convinced 2016 shouldn’t make us more credulous to the idea that Republicans will just repeat “he’s a socialist” ad nauseam and win in a landslide. You’re right, policy-wise there’s not much to justify it, but people aren’t necessarily thinking about policy. It might just be that if you ask him “are you a socialist” he says “yes,” and Americans may respond “oh, well I think socialism is bad.”
I hope not, though, and I’m betting my vote against it.
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On February 24 2020 06:37 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On February 24 2020 05:58 LegalLord wrote:On February 24 2020 04:19 ChristianS wrote:On February 24 2020 02:33 LegalLord wrote:
So, just had a thought: is anyone who posts here supporting any Dem candidate other than Sanders? I remember this place was split pretty strongly down the middle in 2016, but all the Hillary fans seem to have either gotten behind Sanders or at least just failed to back anyone else this time around. I find that kind of curious since he's not ideologically in sync with the standard vibe of this group. Can’t speak for others, obviously. I don’t think I was posting here yet during the 2016 DNC primary, and didn’t vote in it, but I was probably in the “I like Bernie better on policy, but Trump looks REALLY bad and Hillary seems stronger in the general” camp. There were/are theories that any Republican could just air the clip of Sanders saying “I’m a Democratic Socialist” on repeat in swing states and be virtually assured of victory, and I thought that could be a big issue. I still don’t know that that’s wrong. I’ve personally seen more than once the sequence of someone saying “I kinda like Sanders...” and someone else saying “Are you kidding? You can’t vote for a socialist!” and the first person kinda nodding like “yeah, maybe you’re right...” Anecdotal, obviously, and who knows if the nodding was just polite, but I do think the decades of mudslinging and caricaturization attached to the word “socialist” is a potential problem. But this time around I’m not putting so much stock in that, partly because I feel like everybody understands that’s not really where the battle lines are any more. Republicans’ stock in concepts like limited government or fiscal responsibility seems to be at an all-time low, and the major area where Sanders is pushing socialist policy is healthcare, which is quite obviously not anything like a well-functioning free market right now anyway. After four years of Trump, I’m not sure criticisms like “he’ll bankrupt us!” or “he’s too extreme!” or “destroying the status quo like that is dangerous!” will hold much water. The other part, though, is that I have less patience for bowing to arguments I know are bullshit just because I think other people might not recognize that they’re bullshit. We’re already in a mixed economy, and most of the areas Sanders is talking about “socializing” are already extremely regulated anyway, and nobody is seriously talking about changing that. It’s mostly just branding making Sanders “socialist” and his opponents “not socialist;” I tend to think capitalism (if that’s what we’re calling our current system) will survive a Sanders administration just fine. So you can still make tactical arguments like “maybe the socialism criticism is bullshit, but swing voters don’t know that so we should go with someone else.” But I think that sucks. Taken to its natural conclusion, you wind up saying things like “we better nominate a white male, because racists and sexists in Florida and Ohio could decide the outcome!” At some point you’re inventing shitty people in your head and doing whatever you think the shitty people would want because you can’t imagine trying to convince them not to be shitty. TL;DR: I’m still probably not very aligned with GH-type revolutionaries (I still haven’t seen anything to make me think the primary results are being intentionally manipulated, for instance), but I like Sanders a lot and even if he is weaker in the general (and I’m not sure he is), I’m willing to give it a shot. That's a couple really solid thoughts. I must admit that I did completely forget about that concept of electability as an issue (probably because of how stupid that argument turned out to be last time around). To be honest, once you get past the rhetoric, I don't think Bernie's major policy positions are all that far from standard Democratic fare. If we look: - Fight climate change. Very standard. - $15/hr minimum wage. They went with this as a policy point last time, so it can't be that out-of-the-norm. - Stop billionaire campaign contributions. It sounds like a pet issue, because just about no one else talks about it, but who is really going to come out against this in principle? The Democrats are at least nominally against this, even if in practice they take as many of these as the Republicans do. - Universal healthcare / M4A. And the corollary: tax everyone, rather than tax the rich, to pay for it. Yeah, that seems to step on some major entrenched interests. And everything else is very standard Democratic policy. From what I can tell, it's the healthcare policy explicitly, and the uncharacteristically principled opposition to the outsized influence of the wealthy implicitly, that makes him a "socialist" rather than your average Democrat. And frankly, I do get the sense that people are generally sympathetic to both of these "outlandish" principles. All that being so, there is still quite a lot of opposition to Sanders, so I very much wonder if anyone is around to give a voice to "Some Other Democrat 2020" - it seems like all the opposition around here is coming from a strictly Republican/right-wing camp. The trouble is, there’s a lot of different and contradictory lessons you could take from 2016. One I read is that presidential platforms need to be “horizonal;” + Show Spoiler +that’s “horizonal,” as in looking to the horizon, not “horizontal.” I’m not actually sure if it’s even a word people need to be able to get excited about the future you’re going to build together. A message like “Donald Trump must be stopped at any cost,” while understandable given the huge and easily foreseeable human cost of his presidency, doesn’t get people excited, it gets them stressed. It makes being your supporter miserable, and people won’t want to do it. By this theory, Sanders is easily the strongest candidate. Another plausible lesson, though, is that politics is even dumber than anyone imagined. Putting out policy documents detailing your precise plans for education or healthcare or whatever is a waste of time; nobody will decide to vote for you because of it, and quite a few people will find something to disagree with in there and decide to vote against you. I think people knew that to some degree, but I don’t think they realized you could just say dumb shit like “let’s build a wall and make Mexico pay for it” or “let’s ban all the Muslims” and actually win. People thought that smart people would see how dumb it was and say so, and dumb people would listen to the smart people and disregard it. Turns out, you can totally do that. The dumb people think it sounds great, and smart people on your side will spend their time finding interesting and nuanced ways they can interpret that dumb thing you said as maybe not that dumb after all (smart people love a challenge like that). I’m grossly oversimplifying, and maybe I’ll regret it when someone ITT endeavors to explain to me why I’m misrepresenting Trump or something. But my point, anyway is that I’m not convinced 2016 shouldn’t make us more credulous to the idea that Republicans will just repeat “he’s a socialist” ad nauseam and win in a landslide. You’re right, policy-wise there’s not much to justify it, but people aren’t necessarily thinking about policy. It might just be that if you ask him “are you a socialist” he says “yes,” and Americans may respond “oh, well I think socialism is bad.” I hope not, though, and I’m betting my vote against it. I think Another plausible lesson, though, is that politics is even dumber than anyone imagined is pretty accurate. Hillary stacked a callcenter full of people to respond to questions about her program when it was released and no one called because everyone was focused on the latest dumb thing Trump had said.
I would (and did) say that it was more a problem of Americans being stupid then politics being dumb but then Brexit and Boris happened in the UK and a general rise of the far right across Europe. So I guess its just people being stupid everywhere.
And yes Republicans will flood the airwaves to create a 'red scare' if Sanders is the candidate.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
On February 24 2020 06:19 Sent. wrote:Show nested quote +On February 24 2020 05:58 LegalLord wrote:
I very much wonder if anyone is around to give a voice to "Some Other Democrat 2020" - it seems like all the opposition around here is coming from a strictly Republican/right-wing camp. I'm certainly in the right wing camp, but I would vote for Clinton in 2016 and this year I would vote for anyone who's not Sanders, Warren or Trump. Having to choose between Sanders/Warren and Trump would give me a headache.
Ok, that’s definitely a valid take. Any non-Sanders/Warren/Trump candidate you’re particularly fond of, or just generally more inclined against what those ones represent rather than for someone specific?
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On February 24 2020 06:47 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On February 24 2020 06:37 ChristianS wrote:On February 24 2020 05:58 LegalLord wrote:On February 24 2020 04:19 ChristianS wrote:On February 24 2020 02:33 LegalLord wrote:
So, just had a thought: is anyone who posts here supporting any Dem candidate other than Sanders? I remember this place was split pretty strongly down the middle in 2016, but all the Hillary fans seem to have either gotten behind Sanders or at least just failed to back anyone else this time around. I find that kind of curious since he's not ideologically in sync with the standard vibe of this group. Can’t speak for others, obviously. I don’t think I was posting here yet during the 2016 DNC primary, and didn’t vote in it, but I was probably in the “I like Bernie better on policy, but Trump looks REALLY bad and Hillary seems stronger in the general” camp. There were/are theories that any Republican could just air the clip of Sanders saying “I’m a Democratic Socialist” on repeat in swing states and be virtually assured of victory, and I thought that could be a big issue. I still don’t know that that’s wrong. I’ve personally seen more than once the sequence of someone saying “I kinda like Sanders...” and someone else saying “Are you kidding? You can’t vote for a socialist!” and the first person kinda nodding like “yeah, maybe you’re right...” Anecdotal, obviously, and who knows if the nodding was just polite, but I do think the decades of mudslinging and caricaturization attached to the word “socialist” is a potential problem. But this time around I’m not putting so much stock in that, partly because I feel like everybody understands that’s not really where the battle lines are any more. Republicans’ stock in concepts like limited government or fiscal responsibility seems to be at an all-time low, and the major area where Sanders is pushing socialist policy is healthcare, which is quite obviously not anything like a well-functioning free market right now anyway. After four years of Trump, I’m not sure criticisms like “he’ll bankrupt us!” or “he’s too extreme!” or “destroying the status quo like that is dangerous!” will hold much water. The other part, though, is that I have less patience for bowing to arguments I know are bullshit just because I think other people might not recognize that they’re bullshit. We’re already in a mixed economy, and most of the areas Sanders is talking about “socializing” are already extremely regulated anyway, and nobody is seriously talking about changing that. It’s mostly just branding making Sanders “socialist” and his opponents “not socialist;” I tend to think capitalism (if that’s what we’re calling our current system) will survive a Sanders administration just fine. So you can still make tactical arguments like “maybe the socialism criticism is bullshit, but swing voters don’t know that so we should go with someone else.” But I think that sucks. Taken to its natural conclusion, you wind up saying things like “we better nominate a white male, because racists and sexists in Florida and Ohio could decide the outcome!” At some point you’re inventing shitty people in your head and doing whatever you think the shitty people would want because you can’t imagine trying to convince them not to be shitty. TL;DR: I’m still probably not very aligned with GH-type revolutionaries (I still haven’t seen anything to make me think the primary results are being intentionally manipulated, for instance), but I like Sanders a lot and even if he is weaker in the general (and I’m not sure he is), I’m willing to give it a shot. That's a couple really solid thoughts. I must admit that I did completely forget about that concept of electability as an issue (probably because of how stupid that argument turned out to be last time around). To be honest, once you get past the rhetoric, I don't think Bernie's major policy positions are all that far from standard Democratic fare. If we look: - Fight climate change. Very standard. - $15/hr minimum wage. They went with this as a policy point last time, so it can't be that out-of-the-norm. - Stop billionaire campaign contributions. It sounds like a pet issue, because just about no one else talks about it, but who is really going to come out against this in principle? The Democrats are at least nominally against this, even if in practice they take as many of these as the Republicans do. - Universal healthcare / M4A. And the corollary: tax everyone, rather than tax the rich, to pay for it. Yeah, that seems to step on some major entrenched interests. And everything else is very standard Democratic policy. From what I can tell, it's the healthcare policy explicitly, and the uncharacteristically principled opposition to the outsized influence of the wealthy implicitly, that makes him a "socialist" rather than your average Democrat. And frankly, I do get the sense that people are generally sympathetic to both of these "outlandish" principles. All that being so, there is still quite a lot of opposition to Sanders, so I very much wonder if anyone is around to give a voice to "Some Other Democrat 2020" - it seems like all the opposition around here is coming from a strictly Republican/right-wing camp. The trouble is, there’s a lot of different and contradictory lessons you could take from 2016. One I read is that presidential platforms need to be “horizonal;” + Show Spoiler +that’s “horizonal,” as in looking to the horizon, not “horizontal.” I’m not actually sure if it’s even a word people need to be able to get excited about the future you’re going to build together. A message like “Donald Trump must be stopped at any cost,” while understandable given the huge and easily foreseeable human cost of his presidency, doesn’t get people excited, it gets them stressed. It makes being your supporter miserable, and people won’t want to do it. By this theory, Sanders is easily the strongest candidate. Another plausible lesson, though, is that politics is even dumber than anyone imagined. Putting out policy documents detailing your precise plans for education or healthcare or whatever is a waste of time; nobody will decide to vote for you because of it, and quite a few people will find something to disagree with in there and decide to vote against you. I think people knew that to some degree, but I don’t think they realized you could just say dumb shit like “let’s build a wall and make Mexico pay for it” or “let’s ban all the Muslims” and actually win. People thought that smart people would see how dumb it was and say so, and dumb people would listen to the smart people and disregard it. Turns out, you can totally do that. The dumb people think it sounds great, and smart people on your side will spend their time finding interesting and nuanced ways they can interpret that dumb thing you said as maybe not that dumb after all (smart people love a challenge like that). I’m grossly oversimplifying, and maybe I’ll regret it when someone ITT endeavors to explain to me why I’m misrepresenting Trump or something. But my point, anyway is that I’m not convinced 2016 shouldn’t make us more credulous to the idea that Republicans will just repeat “he’s a socialist” ad nauseam and win in a landslide. You’re right, policy-wise there’s not much to justify it, but people aren’t necessarily thinking about policy. It might just be that if you ask him “are you a socialist” he says “yes,” and Americans may respond “oh, well I think socialism is bad.” I hope not, though, and I’m betting my vote against it. I think Show nested quote +Another plausible lesson, though, is that politics is even dumber than anyone imagined is pretty accurate. Hillary stacked a callcenter full of people to respond to questions about her program when it was released and no one called because everyone was focused on the latest dumb thing Trump had said. I would (and did) say that it was more a problem of Americans being stupid then politics being dumb but then Brexit and Boris happened in the UK and a general rise of the far right across Europe. So I guess its just people being stupid everywhere. And yes Republicans will flood the airwaves to create a 'red scare' if Sanders is the candidate.
But will people buy it? After 8 years of fear-mongering about Obama’s too-powerful-government and fiscal irresponsibility, and 4 years of making excuses Trump’s blatant enthusiasm for both autocracy and debt, is anyone going to go for it? I don’t actually know any more.
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Northern Ireland23831 Posts
On February 24 2020 06:19 Wegandi wrote:Show nested quote +On February 24 2020 06:13 Wombat_NI wrote:
The Trump presidency is an unmitigated disaster outside of some extremely specific framings.
If you’re a constitutional conservative he’s horrendous, if you’re at all on the left he’s horrendous, etc
If it wasn’t for fucking everyone else over I’d be happy to let you guys be ruled by the King you seem to desire but alas other people get involved You don't get my argument. Of course, Trump is bad, but Bernie is like a hydrogen bomb bad to Trump's MOAB bad. Bernie will make me run to the polls to vote against him as someone who's traditionally agnostic/anti-sentiment on voting (hilariously enough I share this with GH).
Bad on what?
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On February 24 2020 06:48 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On February 24 2020 06:19 Sent. wrote:On February 24 2020 05:58 LegalLord wrote:
I very much wonder if anyone is around to give a voice to "Some Other Democrat 2020" - it seems like all the opposition around here is coming from a strictly Republican/right-wing camp. I'm certainly in the right wing camp, but I would vote for Clinton in 2016 and this year I would vote for anyone who's not Sanders, Warren or Trump. Having to choose between Sanders/Warren and Trump would give me a headache. Ok, that’s definitely a valid take. Any non-Sanders/Warren/Trump candidate you’re particularly fond of, or just generally more inclined against what those ones represent rather than for someone specific?
The latter, for now at least.
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On February 24 2020 06:52 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On February 24 2020 06:47 Gorsameth wrote:On February 24 2020 06:37 ChristianS wrote:On February 24 2020 05:58 LegalLord wrote:On February 24 2020 04:19 ChristianS wrote:On February 24 2020 02:33 LegalLord wrote:
So, just had a thought: is anyone who posts here supporting any Dem candidate other than Sanders? I remember this place was split pretty strongly down the middle in 2016, but all the Hillary fans seem to have either gotten behind Sanders or at least just failed to back anyone else this time around. I find that kind of curious since he's not ideologically in sync with the standard vibe of this group. Can’t speak for others, obviously. I don’t think I was posting here yet during the 2016 DNC primary, and didn’t vote in it, but I was probably in the “I like Bernie better on policy, but Trump looks REALLY bad and Hillary seems stronger in the general” camp. There were/are theories that any Republican could just air the clip of Sanders saying “I’m a Democratic Socialist” on repeat in swing states and be virtually assured of victory, and I thought that could be a big issue. I still don’t know that that’s wrong. I’ve personally seen more than once the sequence of someone saying “I kinda like Sanders...” and someone else saying “Are you kidding? You can’t vote for a socialist!” and the first person kinda nodding like “yeah, maybe you’re right...” Anecdotal, obviously, and who knows if the nodding was just polite, but I do think the decades of mudslinging and caricaturization attached to the word “socialist” is a potential problem. But this time around I’m not putting so much stock in that, partly because I feel like everybody understands that’s not really where the battle lines are any more. Republicans’ stock in concepts like limited government or fiscal responsibility seems to be at an all-time low, and the major area where Sanders is pushing socialist policy is healthcare, which is quite obviously not anything like a well-functioning free market right now anyway. After four years of Trump, I’m not sure criticisms like “he’ll bankrupt us!” or “he’s too extreme!” or “destroying the status quo like that is dangerous!” will hold much water. The other part, though, is that I have less patience for bowing to arguments I know are bullshit just because I think other people might not recognize that they’re bullshit. We’re already in a mixed economy, and most of the areas Sanders is talking about “socializing” are already extremely regulated anyway, and nobody is seriously talking about changing that. It’s mostly just branding making Sanders “socialist” and his opponents “not socialist;” I tend to think capitalism (if that’s what we’re calling our current system) will survive a Sanders administration just fine. So you can still make tactical arguments like “maybe the socialism criticism is bullshit, but swing voters don’t know that so we should go with someone else.” But I think that sucks. Taken to its natural conclusion, you wind up saying things like “we better nominate a white male, because racists and sexists in Florida and Ohio could decide the outcome!” At some point you’re inventing shitty people in your head and doing whatever you think the shitty people would want because you can’t imagine trying to convince them not to be shitty. TL;DR: I’m still probably not very aligned with GH-type revolutionaries (I still haven’t seen anything to make me think the primary results are being intentionally manipulated, for instance), but I like Sanders a lot and even if he is weaker in the general (and I’m not sure he is), I’m willing to give it a shot. That's a couple really solid thoughts. I must admit that I did completely forget about that concept of electability as an issue (probably because of how stupid that argument turned out to be last time around). To be honest, once you get past the rhetoric, I don't think Bernie's major policy positions are all that far from standard Democratic fare. If we look: - Fight climate change. Very standard. - $15/hr minimum wage. They went with this as a policy point last time, so it can't be that out-of-the-norm. - Stop billionaire campaign contributions. It sounds like a pet issue, because just about no one else talks about it, but who is really going to come out against this in principle? The Democrats are at least nominally against this, even if in practice they take as many of these as the Republicans do. - Universal healthcare / M4A. And the corollary: tax everyone, rather than tax the rich, to pay for it. Yeah, that seems to step on some major entrenched interests. And everything else is very standard Democratic policy. From what I can tell, it's the healthcare policy explicitly, and the uncharacteristically principled opposition to the outsized influence of the wealthy implicitly, that makes him a "socialist" rather than your average Democrat. And frankly, I do get the sense that people are generally sympathetic to both of these "outlandish" principles. All that being so, there is still quite a lot of opposition to Sanders, so I very much wonder if anyone is around to give a voice to "Some Other Democrat 2020" - it seems like all the opposition around here is coming from a strictly Republican/right-wing camp. The trouble is, there’s a lot of different and contradictory lessons you could take from 2016. One I read is that presidential platforms need to be “horizonal;” + Show Spoiler +that’s “horizonal,” as in looking to the horizon, not “horizontal.” I’m not actually sure if it’s even a word people need to be able to get excited about the future you’re going to build together. A message like “Donald Trump must be stopped at any cost,” while understandable given the huge and easily foreseeable human cost of his presidency, doesn’t get people excited, it gets them stressed. It makes being your supporter miserable, and people won’t want to do it. By this theory, Sanders is easily the strongest candidate. Another plausible lesson, though, is that politics is even dumber than anyone imagined. Putting out policy documents detailing your precise plans for education or healthcare or whatever is a waste of time; nobody will decide to vote for you because of it, and quite a few people will find something to disagree with in there and decide to vote against you. I think people knew that to some degree, but I don’t think they realized you could just say dumb shit like “let’s build a wall and make Mexico pay for it” or “let’s ban all the Muslims” and actually win. People thought that smart people would see how dumb it was and say so, and dumb people would listen to the smart people and disregard it. Turns out, you can totally do that. The dumb people think it sounds great, and smart people on your side will spend their time finding interesting and nuanced ways they can interpret that dumb thing you said as maybe not that dumb after all (smart people love a challenge like that). I’m grossly oversimplifying, and maybe I’ll regret it when someone ITT endeavors to explain to me why I’m misrepresenting Trump or something. But my point, anyway is that I’m not convinced 2016 shouldn’t make us more credulous to the idea that Republicans will just repeat “he’s a socialist” ad nauseam and win in a landslide. You’re right, policy-wise there’s not much to justify it, but people aren’t necessarily thinking about policy. It might just be that if you ask him “are you a socialist” he says “yes,” and Americans may respond “oh, well I think socialism is bad.” I hope not, though, and I’m betting my vote against it. I think Another plausible lesson, though, is that politics is even dumber than anyone imagined is pretty accurate. Hillary stacked a callcenter full of people to respond to questions about her program when it was released and no one called because everyone was focused on the latest dumb thing Trump had said. I would (and did) say that it was more a problem of Americans being stupid then politics being dumb but then Brexit and Boris happened in the UK and a general rise of the far right across Europe. So I guess its just people being stupid everywhere. And yes Republicans will flood the airwaves to create a 'red scare' if Sanders is the candidate. But will people buy it? After 8 years of fear-mongering about Obama’s too-powerful-government and fiscal irresponsibility, and 4 years of making excuses Trump’s blatant enthusiasm for both autocracy and debt, is anyone going to go for it? I don’t actually know any more. Republicans will buy it hook line and sinker because that is what they have been trained to do. A bunch of independents will because fear of socialism is still deeply ingrained in American society.
If enough will to make him lose? I honestly have no clue. But none of the other candidates look to do better in any case.
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On February 24 2020 06:16 Wegandi wrote:Show nested quote +On February 24 2020 06:08 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 24 2020 06:06 Wegandi wrote:On February 24 2020 06:00 Acrofales wrote:On February 24 2020 05:57 Wegandi wrote:On February 24 2020 05:55 Simberto wrote:
If people having idiotic views and statements stops you from voting for them, how do you manage to vote for Trump? He is pretty much the unchallenged world champion at having idiotic views and statements. As bad as Trump is, Sanders is far worse. Why? One is a self-dealing moron. The other has ideas you don't like. Stupid twitter tweets and incoherent ramblings I can live with. They're not comparable. Do you not believe in climate change either? Do you not believe in promoting education, science, or civil rights either? Do you not believe in having strong diplomatic relations with other countries either? The idea that the only damage that Donald Trump is doing to our country (and the world) is limited to superficial social media posts is just plain wrong. Your worldview boils down to if the Government doesn't do it, then its not being promoted. Kill the arts endowments, cut the FDA and make drug to market cheaper and faster, destroy the rent-seeking patents and IP system (that's a hard one since it's in the Constitution), and boost community / nuisance / tort courts with stricter property rights enforcement. Those I am in favor of, so to me your questions have false assumptions and equivalencies. I believe in science, education, and our individual rights, but for you that means Government, for me, that means No Government. We're incompatible. It's why I can dislike someone like Trump, yet still run to the polls to vote for him against Bernie. There are a lot of "independents" like me (maybe not so extreme, but you get the idea).
Just the two bolded ones since i'm on a phone :
Yeah, maybe we wouldn't need government regulating drug if those companies didn't have a habit of lying to force poorly tested or plain dangerous drugs/chemicals in people/fields...
It doesn't happen. If there is money to be made, you can't blindly trust companies. It was tried before.
About IP, then I should understand that you perfectly agree with other countries copying and improving american inventions? Or should that competition just work inside your country?
(I agree with you about companies abusing the system and buying patents only to get royalties or sue, of course)
On February 24 2020 06:11 Wegandi wrote:Show nested quote +On February 24 2020 06:05 Nebuchad wrote:
Sounds similar to how the democratic establishment couldn't wait to pin Trump on racism and sexism and were sure that it would destroy him.
Trump won in part thanks to populism. Running a campaign against populism in favor of establishment economy isn't going to be that easy for him. You are right that the GOP will do that and that they can't wait, but that doesn't ensure they'll manage. Because racism and sexism in America, especially in light of the PC narrative, doesn't resonate for voters. That's not an issue that brings people to the polls. Socialism, even if you spice it up with "Democracy" does. Views saying how good Fidel Castro was and how great the Sandinista's were and eat the rich, take their shit, that does bring people to the polls in America. Comparing Democrats blinders to Bernie doesn't make much sense to me. America has changed from 1972, but I'm not so sure it changed that much.
For the (not, sadly) last time, could people stop comparing Sanders policies with Cuba or other bullshit? It's barely enough to pass for European, and we are not "socialists" in the sense depicted on the previous page... Americans should be smarter than that. Conservative media are purposely misleading to skew what should be clear.
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The democrats dont really have to win. All it takes is the republicans losing. It sounds a bit trivial maybe but i think it kinda is true specially in american politics.
Elections are won not so much by having a good platform with your party (less then 10% of the voters is "well informed" i would guess),but more so by discrediting the other candidate.This specially goes for the usa and it has been so for quiet a long time now.
Look at how trump won 2016. Going at hillary coupled with a few populistic phrases with no substance behind it like "drain the swamp" "build a wall" "make the best deals" and "make america great again"
Now trump is on the defensive from the start,he is the acting president. His strategy from the first campaign can not work so well this time. He cant attack his opponents based on the policys of the past 4 year,he cant attack opponents based on an underlying dissatisfaction with politics in general because the politics that is himself this time.
Sanders would be trumps preferred candidate to run against,against sanders he has a clear line of attack (beeing a socialist) justified or not. Still he is in a fundamentally different position then 4 years ago and will be interesting to see how his campaign adepts to it.
Did life of the average american get better in the past 4 years? If the answer is no then trump will have a lot of trouble even against someone like sanders.
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On February 24 2020 06:19 Wegandi wrote:Show nested quote +On February 24 2020 06:13 Wombat_NI wrote:
The Trump presidency is an unmitigated disaster outside of some extremely specific framings.
If you’re a constitutional conservative he’s horrendous, if you’re at all on the left he’s horrendous, etc
If it wasn’t for fucking everyone else over I’d be happy to let you guys be ruled by the King you seem to desire but alas other people get involved You don't get my argument. Of course, Trump is bad, but Bernie is like a hydrogen bomb bad to Trump's MOAB bad. Bernie will make me run to the polls to vote against him as someone who's traditionally agnostic/anti-sentiment on voting (hilariously enough I share this with GH).
Trump is ungood but Bernie is doubleplusungood, goodthink.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
On February 24 2020 06:37 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On February 24 2020 05:58 LegalLord wrote:On February 24 2020 04:19 ChristianS wrote:On February 24 2020 02:33 LegalLord wrote:
So, just had a thought: is anyone who posts here supporting any Dem candidate other than Sanders? I remember this place was split pretty strongly down the middle in 2016, but all the Hillary fans seem to have either gotten behind Sanders or at least just failed to back anyone else this time around. I find that kind of curious since he's not ideologically in sync with the standard vibe of this group. Can’t speak for others, obviously. I don’t think I was posting here yet during the 2016 DNC primary, and didn’t vote in it, but I was probably in the “I like Bernie better on policy, but Trump looks REALLY bad and Hillary seems stronger in the general” camp. There were/are theories that any Republican could just air the clip of Sanders saying “I’m a Democratic Socialist” on repeat in swing states and be virtually assured of victory, and I thought that could be a big issue. I still don’t know that that’s wrong. I’ve personally seen more than once the sequence of someone saying “I kinda like Sanders...” and someone else saying “Are you kidding? You can’t vote for a socialist!” and the first person kinda nodding like “yeah, maybe you’re right...” Anecdotal, obviously, and who knows if the nodding was just polite, but I do think the decades of mudslinging and caricaturization attached to the word “socialist” is a potential problem. But this time around I’m not putting so much stock in that, partly because I feel like everybody understands that’s not really where the battle lines are any more. Republicans’ stock in concepts like limited government or fiscal responsibility seems to be at an all-time low, and the major area where Sanders is pushing socialist policy is healthcare, which is quite obviously not anything like a well-functioning free market right now anyway. After four years of Trump, I’m not sure criticisms like “he’ll bankrupt us!” or “he’s too extreme!” or “destroying the status quo like that is dangerous!” will hold much water. The other part, though, is that I have less patience for bowing to arguments I know are bullshit just because I think other people might not recognize that they’re bullshit. We’re already in a mixed economy, and most of the areas Sanders is talking about “socializing” are already extremely regulated anyway, and nobody is seriously talking about changing that. It’s mostly just branding making Sanders “socialist” and his opponents “not socialist;” I tend to think capitalism (if that’s what we’re calling our current system) will survive a Sanders administration just fine. So you can still make tactical arguments like “maybe the socialism criticism is bullshit, but swing voters don’t know that so we should go with someone else.” But I think that sucks. Taken to its natural conclusion, you wind up saying things like “we better nominate a white male, because racists and sexists in Florida and Ohio could decide the outcome!” At some point you’re inventing shitty people in your head and doing whatever you think the shitty people would want because you can’t imagine trying to convince them not to be shitty. TL;DR: I’m still probably not very aligned with GH-type revolutionaries (I still haven’t seen anything to make me think the primary results are being intentionally manipulated, for instance), but I like Sanders a lot and even if he is weaker in the general (and I’m not sure he is), I’m willing to give it a shot. That's a couple really solid thoughts. I must admit that I did completely forget about that concept of electability as an issue (probably because of how stupid that argument turned out to be last time around). To be honest, once you get past the rhetoric, I don't think Bernie's major policy positions are all that far from standard Democratic fare. If we look: - Fight climate change. Very standard. - $15/hr minimum wage. They went with this as a policy point last time, so it can't be that out-of-the-norm. - Stop billionaire campaign contributions. It sounds like a pet issue, because just about no one else talks about it, but who is really going to come out against this in principle? The Democrats are at least nominally against this, even if in practice they take as many of these as the Republicans do. - Universal healthcare / M4A. And the corollary: tax everyone, rather than tax the rich, to pay for it. Yeah, that seems to step on some major entrenched interests. And everything else is very standard Democratic policy. From what I can tell, it's the healthcare policy explicitly, and the uncharacteristically principled opposition to the outsized influence of the wealthy implicitly, that makes him a "socialist" rather than your average Democrat. And frankly, I do get the sense that people are generally sympathetic to both of these "outlandish" principles. All that being so, there is still quite a lot of opposition to Sanders, so I very much wonder if anyone is around to give a voice to "Some Other Democrat 2020" - it seems like all the opposition around here is coming from a strictly Republican/right-wing camp. The trouble is, there’s a lot of different and contradictory lessons you could take from 2016. One I read is that presidential platforms need to be “horizonal;” + Show Spoiler +that’s “horizonal,” as in looking to the horizon, not “horizontal.” I’m not actually sure if it’s even a word people need to be able to get excited about the future you’re going to build together. A message like “Donald Trump must be stopped at any cost,” while understandable given the huge and easily foreseeable human cost of his presidency, doesn’t get people excited, it gets them stressed. It makes being your supporter miserable, and people won’t want to do it. By this theory, Sanders is easily the strongest candidate. Another plausible lesson, though, is that politics is even dumber than anyone imagined. Putting out policy documents detailing your precise plans for education or healthcare or whatever is a waste of time; nobody will decide to vote for you because of it, and quite a few people will find something to disagree with in there and decide to vote against you. I think people knew that to some degree, but I don’t think they realized you could just say dumb shit like “let’s build a wall and make Mexico pay for it” or “let’s ban all the Muslims” and actually win. People thought that smart people would see how dumb it was and say so, and dumb people would listen to the smart people and disregard it. Turns out, you can totally do that. The dumb people think it sounds great, and smart people on your side will spend their time finding interesting and nuanced ways they can interpret that dumb thing you said as maybe not that dumb after all (smart people love a challenge like that). I’m grossly oversimplifying, and maybe I’ll regret it when someone ITT endeavors to explain to me why I’m misrepresenting Trump or something. But my point, anyway is that I’m not convinced 2016 shouldn’t make us more credulous to the idea that Republicans will just repeat “he’s a socialist” ad nauseam and win in a landslide. You’re right, policy-wise there’s not much to justify it, but people aren’t necessarily thinking about policy. It might just be that if you ask him “are you a socialist” he says “yes,” and Americans may respond “oh, well I think socialism is bad.” I hope not, though, and I’m betting my vote against it.
It's pretty common fare among Democrats (and supporters from abroad) to make the argument of "the other side is just full of idiots" but I don't think it really is what happened. Certainly, it's a very easy argument to make, but also a really lazy and obtuse one. Trump did what won while Democrats ignored some very obvious signs that it was likely to happen, so maybe the "idiots" were on to something after all?
Take the two examples you gave - "build a wall" and "ban all Muslims." Obtuse and insane on their face, but they do tap into the very real anti-immigrant sentiment that exists in the country. With the Muslim part, alluding to the very real migrant crisis across the ocean in Europe that was all over the news at that exact time. Sure, it might sound stupid, but it's definitely rhetoric that alludes to very real issues that aren't popular within the standard mediaverse, but that many people are concerned about.
Some of the other arguments in favor of Trump were fairly solid. They talked about electing the right judges, and Trump has certainly been a very successful court packer. They talked about Hillary being a crook, which many "smart" people ignored until, late into the election, events managed to erase all doubt. And he talked about saving the jobs of the disappearing rural voters, which contrasted very well with Hillary boasting about putting coal miners out of business.
Perhaps the lesson isn't "the voters are idiots who don't know what's good for them" because you have to take a really narrow view of 2016 to assume that that's what happened. It's hard to know what the lessons for 2020 are, though, since we don't know who's going to be in play, or how they will do. But at the very least, one of the lessons I remember from 2012 was "almost all ads are negative, because attack ads work" - which I certainly believe is not the way that 2020 has played out. The person most able to propose a rosy vision for the future is the one doing the best in the primaries, and you know, maybe that'll mean something for the general. And maybe, after the serviceable but rather status quo presidency of Obama, another lesson may be that there's a lot of people looking for uncompromising idealists over well-polished demagogues promising more of the same (that concept certainly seemed to help Trump). And maybe "stop the socialist" will spawn a powerful McCarthy-era mania that will easily propel Trump into his second term. Who knows?
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On February 24 2020 09:01 LegalLord wrote:Perhaps the lesson isn't "the voters are idiots who don't know what's good for them" because you have to take a really narrow view of 2016 to assume that that's what happened. It's hard to know what the lessons for 2020 are, though, since we don't know who's going to be in play, or how they will do. But at the very least, one of the lessons I remember from 2012 was "almost all ads are negative, because attack ads work" - which I certainly believe is not the way that 2020 has played out. The person most able to propose a rosy vision for the future is the one doing the best in the primaries, and you know, maybe that'll mean something for the general. And maybe, after the serviceable but rather status quo presidency of Obama, another lesson may be that there's a lot of people looking for uncompromising idealists over well-polished demagogues promising more of the same (that concept certainly seemed to help Trump). And maybe "stop the socialist" will spawn a powerful McCarthy-era mania that will easily propel Trump into his second term. Who knows? Negative ads are for the general election when you have 1 opponent. Its a lot harder to do negative ads when the field is half a dozen people.
Which is also why you see a lot less use of negative adds in multi party elections in Europe.
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Buttigieg isn't satisfied with Nevada's "quality control" of the reported results
Pete Buttigieg’s campaign is claiming there are inconsistencies in the reported results in Nevada, as the former South Bend, Ind., mayor tries to claw his way to second place in Saturday's caucuses.
In a letter sent to Nevada Democratic Party Chairman William McCurdy II and obtained by POLITICO, Buttigieg’s campaign is calling for the state party to publicly release a tranche of data and recalculate some precincts, a call the state party largely rebuffed.
"We are continuing to verify and to report results," Forgey said in a statement.
"We never indicated we would release a separate breakdown of early vote and in-person attendees by precinct and will not change our reporting process now. As laid out in our recount guidance, there is a formal method for requesting a challenge of results."
www.politico.com
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Norway28558 Posts
My wife is doing a phd on populist communication in social media (it's a project inspired by cambridge analytica).
While it's an ongoing project and none of the findings so far are of such a character that what I will now post is 'publishable', one preliminary finding about populist communication, seen both with brexit, trump, PiS in poland, presumably others, is that it's a lot less fear-mongering, and far more about building enthusiasm for their project compared to what traditional media tends to portray it as. I mean yea, it is true, Trump does sometimes fear-monger about caravans of immigrants or they're gonna take your guns and stuff like that, but if you watch a trump rally, he focuses a lot on what they are going to accomplish and what they have accomplished, and they're perceived as entertaining. I've myself done some datamining of various brexit politicians' facebook posts, and I have to say, Boris Johnson comes off as jolly and enthusiastic, not scared. Farage is a bit different, much angrier and less positive, but frankly, my impression was that the remainer side was the one that was most fear-mongering.
And Sanders fits this mark, too. He portrays a vision for the future, something that can be accomplished if people band together and support him - not merely an absence of bad stuff that will happen as long as we beat the opposition. Again, these are early findings, I imagine it's another year or two until I can give a source for these statements, but the notion that the populists are particularly fear-mongering, while something I myself supported earlier, is no longer something I believe - I perceive them as the ones who are the most proficient at creating enthusiasm around a project.
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EPT
