Now that we have a new thread, in order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a complete and thorough read before posting!
NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets.
Your supporting statement should always come BEFORE you provide the source.
On April 11 2020 22:27 GreenHorizons wrote: [quote]
It can't be either of them or we're doomed according to the best available science. I don't understand why Democrats refused to recognize that but here we are.
Because as you rightly note how we come out of this will shape the country for decades and neither Trump or Biden have any intention to implement the radical climate/economic proposals required to mitigate catastrophic and irreversible warming in the shrinking ~10 year window we have.
It's similar to covid imo in that the lag between action and consequence makes it more difficult to convince people of the necessity of that action. But much trickier in that the delay is measured in years and decades rather than days and weeks.
If you don’t mind my asking: is your thinking that by you and people like you refusing to vote for either major party, neither Biden nor Trump will be president in 2021? If so, how? If not, doesn’t the bolded not make sense? Biff is saying that 2021-2024 specifically will be a critical period in shaping the US economy (including how much it focuses on reducing carbon emissions and other pollution).
If you’re saying “on either track, the trolley will destroy all living things” I can understand the apathy about which track to put it on, but I also don’t think that’s what the science says.
As of now a valid 2020 election is a probability. Depending on what one think constitutes a valid election influences where the baseline for that probability is for any particular person.
For example. Several hour lines to vote are both ubiquitous to US elections and recognized (globally) as voter suppression. Both parties don't consider that (or when combined with specific demographic targeting) is sufficient to make elections invalid. Disenfranchising people that have served their time, closed polling stations, lost or miscounted votes, etc. None of that is enough to invalidate elections in the US. Both parties have demonstrated this as recently as this cycle.
So we go back to the question of the probability there will be a valid 2020 election. I would set a different bar for what constitutes a valid election than what passes for one in the US. So before entertaining questions about 2021 I'd have to know what we mean by "me and people like me".
Because me and people like me live in places where our votes have already been stripped of their meaning by the system working as intended. That's an electoral college that means my vote is actually for electors (determined at the state level), not the president through to people who have been disenfranchised by other means like conflicts between exploitative jobs and absurd election processes, pandemic voting, voter ID, etc.
So we're the millions of people that whether we vote Biden, Columbo, Willy Wonka, or watch a Pokemon marathon instead of voting we get the same result (Biden get's the electoral votes assigned to us geographically [or doesn't for Democrats in Red states]).
If you want me to put myself in the shoes of a different kind of voter we should specify that.
I mean, neither of our votes matter, I know that. But if “the American people” or “the American left” or “swing voters” (all nebulous concepts, maybe so much so to be meaningless) are being asked to throw the switch and decide which track the trolley goes on, you probably have an opinion what they should decide, and I’m inferring it’s something like “don’t throw the switch at all, and let the trolley try to call you complicit.”
I think there will almost certainly be an election in November (and if you disagree, I’d be interested to know why). It won’t be devoid of the sorts of undemocratic abuses you’re describing, and it remains to be seen if the coronavirus will present new and creative ways to suppress the vote, but at the end of the day, I think any citizen sufficiently motivated will be allowed to vote, their votes will be tallied accurately within a reasonable margin of error. Low bar for an election, maybe.
And then I think Americans will accept the legitimacy of whoever won as being president in 2021, even if there are irregularities. And that person, either Biden or Trump, will have all the powers associated with the presidency.
Do you disagree on any particular point?
The people to the left of Bernie and the "swing voters" in swing states at the allegorical switch are largely distinct groups, though there is some overlap. Typically I'm speaking from/about/raising the perspective of the countless people on the tracks.
I think the trolly question is a moral abstraction meant to distance the people pushing the trolly over their countrymen and fellow humans around the planet of their role/responsibility by starting the question with the presumption the trolly, tracks, and people tied to them are inevitable and unquestionable.
Within this faulty framing I suggested the only ethical action imo was to derail the trolly. In that way this ties into Wombat's point about striking while the iron is hot. Covid-19 has the trolly teetering and both Biden and Trump (and their supporters) want to get it back on the tracks (Trump's tracks lined with more people). Which is the place from which I argue derailing the teetering train is not only the ethical action, but necessary and more possible than it has been in our lives while what we'll need to do and how many people will be lost increases by the second.
We've seen coronavirus already impact Wisconsin/Illinois and Republicans/Democrats are fully willing to exploit it for political gain. With that and the Mueller investigation/Ukraine impeachment I think your confidence in a valid election even by US standards just prior to Trump is misplaced. That said I'd put the odds that there isn't more significant foreign interference, election fraud, voter suppression, etc. than 2016 very low and the odds that there will be enough to argue the results are questionable for more than just some of the losing side is closer to 50/50.
That said, I think most Americans will consider the election valid regardless if for no other reason than they can't imagine an alternative.
With all respect I disagree with pretty much everything about what you're saying but to try to wrap up the specifics you asked if I disagreed with I sorta missed:
any citizen sufficiently motivated will be allowed to vote
as a matter of fact isn't true without a LOT of *'s and what you describe/what we have is a low bar for an election objectively/compared to other democracies in "1st world" countries would be my position.
Then to abandon the analogy you object to, and return to the original question: are you thinking this political movement will somehow produce a reasonable chance of neither Trump nor Biden being president in 2021? And if so, can you briefly describe a reasonable path from here to there? Because I honestly can’t picture it, and maybe a specific scenario would help people understand where you’re coming from.
Might be easier to amend the trolly analogy to a less imperfect (anything short of a treatise will be) one but let's see.
Odds aren't great it will, but revolutionary optimism springs eternal. What would it look like? Starting today it would be Biden's support plummeting when people see both his record and mental/physical condition with more scrutiny (our media is unlikely to provide). Then, desperate to replace him (before whatever becomes of the convention) Democrats across the country reject someone like Cuomo, Clinton, Buttigieg or anyone to the right of Bernie as a suitable replacement and he cleans up enough delegates in June to make it clean electorally.
Unfortunately it seems that the overwhelming number of the most politically involved Democrats have seen the worst of Biden and chose to actively support it and demand those that find it unacceptable support him anyway.
Just to be clear Bernie isn't really "derailing" imo, but hopping to an off-screen track that has far fewer people than the others with them spaced further out.
"Derailing" would fall more under refusing to move forward electorally until we committed to rebuilding the whole thing from trolly to track. I'm more just trying to encourage the people getting kicked off the trolly to the front to work to slow the trolly and untie people from the tracks (solidarity from newly unemployed middle class), encourage those kicked off to the back to not start pushing ( not tell people "Vote for Biden! It's the only moral mature choice!"), and those kicked to the sides of the trolly (affluent/comfortable onlookers under minimal/temporary financial stress) to try to tip that bih over before the billionaires send it over the edge of a rollercoaster style drop heading straight for the most marginalized people in society on both the Biden and Trump track (significantly less so, like a much bigger distance than between Biden and Trump, is the Bernie track,). The Bernie track the one being still a reasonable and viable path within the political imagination of most Americans imo.
Would you agree that the Bernie track (of all the tracks you might be persuaded to include under “acceptable”) has demonstrated the broadest appeal? And that we just recently concluded an electoral contest in which the Bernie track couldn’t find plurality support even among the “left?”
The very first contest (if you ignore everything leading up to it in media and the party) demonstrated that electoral contest was not valid imo. Several subsequent state contests demonstrated that as well. If you set aside the electoral fraud we all witnessed in Iowa and the subsequent voter suppression lines in Texas, Chicago, Wisconsin, etc.. the small fraction of the general electorate that constitutes the Democratic primary (typically a moderate group) selecting Biden doesn't allow me to draw the conclusions you have. Bernie support among the left is overwhelming, the left is only a small part of the Democratic primary (for many reasons within and beyond their control)
I mean, don’t get me wrong, a scenario in which Bernie somehow convinces Democrats to back him at the last minute sounds great to me. But Bernie just spent a year trying to convince them any way he knew how, and it didn’t work, right? What do you think will change? Coronavirus certainly didn’t seem to hurt Biden’s polling. If anything the opposite, actually.
I'm suggesting the increased scrutiny a competent and non-complacent media would provide could expose people to enough to realize how terrible of an idea it is to put Biden up against Trump and there's more than enough votes left to prevent that fate. Also that doing so by way of delayed primary voting and a delayed convention (made possible/unavoidable by covid-19) is far preferable than trying to come up with solutions after Biden is nominated or if he wins, or worse, if he loses.
But your assessment of the validity of the election isn’t the issue here. Whether you think those irregularities cost Bernie the primary (and I think it’s pretty clear they didn’t), there’s not any clear metric by which Bernie could claim legitimacy. He didn’t win the primary, he hasn’t been ahead in polls at almost any point, and at this point he himself has dropped out. You’re hoping some negative media will take Biden down, but he’s been in the public eye for decades, including as VP for eight years. If there’s an angle the media could cover him by that would sink him, why would it only happen in the next 6 months?
Do you think Bernie was wrong to drop out? Do you think he was likely to turn it around? And more importantly, do you really think there’s a real chance of convincing voters to support a guy who already dropped out?
They could ask him to draw a clock on live TV. When it shows clear signs of mental decline a responsible population would not nominate him for president.
I don't think dropping out or "suspending" his campaign matters other than Democrats can't keep blaming him for them telling voters to go to the polls but I'd like to think irrefutable evidence of Biden's infirmity would be enough for him not to get enough delegates to clinch formally and the nominee would be decided at the convention.
On April 12 2020 00:34 ChristianS wrote: [quote] If you don’t mind my asking: is your thinking that by you and people like you refusing to vote for either major party, neither Biden nor Trump will be president in 2021? If so, how? If not, doesn’t the bolded not make sense? Biff is saying that 2021-2024 specifically will be a critical period in shaping the US economy (including how much it focuses on reducing carbon emissions and other pollution).
If you’re saying “on either track, the trolley will destroy all living things” I can understand the apathy about which track to put it on, but I also don’t think that’s what the science says.
As of now a valid 2020 election is a probability. Depending on what one think constitutes a valid election influences where the baseline for that probability is for any particular person.
For example. Several hour lines to vote are both ubiquitous to US elections and recognized (globally) as voter suppression. Both parties don't consider that (or when combined with specific demographic targeting) is sufficient to make elections invalid. Disenfranchising people that have served their time, closed polling stations, lost or miscounted votes, etc. None of that is enough to invalidate elections in the US. Both parties have demonstrated this as recently as this cycle.
So we go back to the question of the probability there will be a valid 2020 election. I would set a different bar for what constitutes a valid election than what passes for one in the US. So before entertaining questions about 2021 I'd have to know what we mean by "me and people like me".
Because me and people like me live in places where our votes have already been stripped of their meaning by the system working as intended. That's an electoral college that means my vote is actually for electors (determined at the state level), not the president through to people who have been disenfranchised by other means like conflicts between exploitative jobs and absurd election processes, pandemic voting, voter ID, etc.
So we're the millions of people that whether we vote Biden, Columbo, Willy Wonka, or watch a Pokemon marathon instead of voting we get the same result (Biden get's the electoral votes assigned to us geographically [or doesn't for Democrats in Red states]).
If you want me to put myself in the shoes of a different kind of voter we should specify that.
I mean, neither of our votes matter, I know that. But if “the American people” or “the American left” or “swing voters” (all nebulous concepts, maybe so much so to be meaningless) are being asked to throw the switch and decide which track the trolley goes on, you probably have an opinion what they should decide, and I’m inferring it’s something like “don’t throw the switch at all, and let the trolley try to call you complicit.”
I think there will almost certainly be an election in November (and if you disagree, I’d be interested to know why). It won’t be devoid of the sorts of undemocratic abuses you’re describing, and it remains to be seen if the coronavirus will present new and creative ways to suppress the vote, but at the end of the day, I think any citizen sufficiently motivated will be allowed to vote, their votes will be tallied accurately within a reasonable margin of error. Low bar for an election, maybe.
And then I think Americans will accept the legitimacy of whoever won as being president in 2021, even if there are irregularities. And that person, either Biden or Trump, will have all the powers associated with the presidency.
Do you disagree on any particular point?
The people to the left of Bernie and the "swing voters" in swing states at the allegorical switch are largely distinct groups, though there is some overlap. Typically I'm speaking from/about/raising the perspective of the countless people on the tracks.
I think the trolly question is a moral abstraction meant to distance the people pushing the trolly over their countrymen and fellow humans around the planet of their role/responsibility by starting the question with the presumption the trolly, tracks, and people tied to them are inevitable and unquestionable.
Within this faulty framing I suggested the only ethical action imo was to derail the trolly. In that way this ties into Wombat's point about striking while the iron is hot. Covid-19 has the trolly teetering and both Biden and Trump (and their supporters) want to get it back on the tracks (Trump's tracks lined with more people). Which is the place from which I argue derailing the teetering train is not only the ethical action, but necessary and more possible than it has been in our lives while what we'll need to do and how many people will be lost increases by the second.
We've seen coronavirus already impact Wisconsin/Illinois and Republicans/Democrats are fully willing to exploit it for political gain. With that and the Mueller investigation/Ukraine impeachment I think your confidence in a valid election even by US standards just prior to Trump is misplaced. That said I'd put the odds that there isn't more significant foreign interference, election fraud, voter suppression, etc. than 2016 very low and the odds that there will be enough to argue the results are questionable for more than just some of the losing side is closer to 50/50.
That said, I think most Americans will consider the election valid regardless if for no other reason than they can't imagine an alternative.
With all respect I disagree with pretty much everything about what you're saying but to try to wrap up the specifics you asked if I disagreed with I sorta missed:
any citizen sufficiently motivated will be allowed to vote
as a matter of fact isn't true without a LOT of *'s and what you describe/what we have is a low bar for an election objectively/compared to other democracies in "1st world" countries would be my position.
Then to abandon the analogy you object to, and return to the original question: are you thinking this political movement will somehow produce a reasonable chance of neither Trump nor Biden being president in 2021? And if so, can you briefly describe a reasonable path from here to there? Because I honestly can’t picture it, and maybe a specific scenario would help people understand where you’re coming from.
Might be easier to amend the trolly analogy to a less imperfect (anything short of a treatise will be) one but let's see.
Odds aren't great it will, but revolutionary optimism springs eternal. What would it look like? Starting today it would be Biden's support plummeting when people see both his record and mental/physical condition with more scrutiny (our media is unlikely to provide). Then, desperate to replace him (before whatever becomes of the convention) Democrats across the country reject someone like Cuomo, Clinton, Buttigieg or anyone to the right of Bernie as a suitable replacement and he cleans up enough delegates in June to make it clean electorally.
Unfortunately it seems that the overwhelming number of the most politically involved Democrats have seen the worst of Biden and chose to actively support it and demand those that find it unacceptable support him anyway.
Just to be clear Bernie isn't really "derailing" imo, but hopping to an off-screen track that has far fewer people than the others with them spaced further out.
"Derailing" would fall more under refusing to move forward electorally until we committed to rebuilding the whole thing from trolly to track. I'm more just trying to encourage the people getting kicked off the trolly to the front to work to slow the trolly and untie people from the tracks (solidarity from newly unemployed middle class), encourage those kicked off to the back to not start pushing ( not tell people "Vote for Biden! It's the only moral mature choice!"), and those kicked to the sides of the trolly (affluent/comfortable onlookers under minimal/temporary financial stress) to try to tip that bih over before the billionaires send it over the edge of a rollercoaster style drop heading straight for the most marginalized people in society on both the Biden and Trump track (significantly less so, like a much bigger distance than between Biden and Trump, is the Bernie track,). The Bernie track the one being still a reasonable and viable path within the political imagination of most Americans imo.
Would you agree that the Bernie track (of all the tracks you might be persuaded to include under “acceptable”) has demonstrated the broadest appeal? And that we just recently concluded an electoral contest in which the Bernie track couldn’t find plurality support even among the “left?”
The very first contest (if you ignore everything leading up to it in media and the party) demonstrated that electoral contest was not valid imo. Several subsequent state contests demonstrated that as well. If you set aside the electoral fraud we all witnessed in Iowa and the subsequent voter suppression lines in Texas, Chicago, Wisconsin, etc.. the small fraction of the general electorate that constitutes the Democratic primary (typically a moderate group) selecting Biden doesn't allow me to draw the conclusions you have. Bernie support among the left is overwhelming, the left is only a small part of the Democratic primary (for many reasons within and beyond their control)
I mean, don’t get me wrong, a scenario in which Bernie somehow convinces Democrats to back him at the last minute sounds great to me. But Bernie just spent a year trying to convince them any way he knew how, and it didn’t work, right? What do you think will change? Coronavirus certainly didn’t seem to hurt Biden’s polling. If anything the opposite, actually.
I'm suggesting the increased scrutiny a competent and non-complacent media would provide could expose people to enough to realize how terrible of an idea it is to put Biden up against Trump and there's more than enough votes left to prevent that fate. Also that doing so by way of delayed primary voting and a delayed convention (made possible/unavoidable by covid-19) is far preferable than trying to come up with solutions after Biden is nominated or if he wins, or worse, if he loses.
But your assessment of the validity of the election isn’t the issue here. Whether you think those irregularities cost Bernie the primary (and I think it’s pretty clear they didn’t), there’s not any clear metric by which Bernie could claim legitimacy. He didn’t win the primary, he hasn’t been ahead in polls at almost any point, and at this point he himself has dropped out. You’re hoping some negative media will take Biden down, but he’s been in the public eye for decades, including as VP for eight years. If there’s an angle the media could cover him by that would sink him, why would it only happen in the next 6 months?
Do you think Bernie was wrong to drop out? Do you think he was likely to turn it around? And more importantly, do you really think there’s a real chance of convincing voters to support a guy who already dropped out?
They could ask him to draw a clock on live TV. When it shows clear signs of mental decline a responsible population would not nominate him for president.
I don't think dropping out or "suspending" his campaign matters other than Democrats can't keep blaming him for them telling voters to go to the polls but I'd like to think irrefutable evidence of Biden's infirmity would be enough for him not to get enough delegates to clinch formally and the nominee would be decided at the convention.
You seem awfully confident about his infirmity, so presumably you think such evidence already exists. Care to share? Maybe put the links in a spoiler with some brief context, if you’re worried the mods won’t like it.
On April 12 2020 00:19 Wombat_NI wrote: It’s possibly a good time to be radical and do the previously unthinkable stuff right after coming out of this current crisis.
By virtue of many previously materially comfortable folks being dragged into the mire, problems with various structures getting widespread exposure etc.
Not sure how it is over in your various areas of the States but there is quite a palpable ‘we’re in this together’ atmosphere, people are pissed off at NHS underfunding, even more so than usual.
Strike while the iron’s hot.
Honestly, my impression is that as a country we're more concerned about how "the economy" - and the stock market - will look when this is over than about the obvious failures in our healthcare system and disease control infrastructure that exacerbated the crisis. Too many people are much more interested in knowing when we can open the country back up for business and less interested in preventing more death. If the Fed's infinite money printing strategy is any indication, there must be one hell of a financial crisis buried under Trump's miracle economy, which is hopefully some consolation to the economy-obsessed folks.
Politically, it seems to have driven apathy rather than a big push to reform the system. Part of the reason Sanders dropped seems to be that no one is interested in the presidential campaign right now, let alone issues like universal healthcare. Don't really see any kind of unity around meaningful change in the US at the moment.
You may well be correct in this. I’m trying to be overly optimistic for reasons of my own sanity, although probably unrealistically so.
If the almighty economic god snaps back to something approaching normality vs something more catastrophic can elicit all sorts of differing responses and there are a lot of unknowns out there.
Then how people take this on board and where they apportion blame.
Which isn’t predictable and often doesn’t even make sense, but hey we’ll see.
On April 12 2020 00:55 GreenHorizons wrote: [quote]
As of now a valid 2020 election is a probability. Depending on what one think constitutes a valid election influences where the baseline for that probability is for any particular person.
For example. Several hour lines to vote are both ubiquitous to US elections and recognized (globally) as voter suppression. Both parties don't consider that (or when combined with specific demographic targeting) is sufficient to make elections invalid. Disenfranchising people that have served their time, closed polling stations, lost or miscounted votes, etc. None of that is enough to invalidate elections in the US. Both parties have demonstrated this as recently as this cycle.
So we go back to the question of the probability there will be a valid 2020 election. I would set a different bar for what constitutes a valid election than what passes for one in the US. So before entertaining questions about 2021 I'd have to know what we mean by "me and people like me".
Because me and people like me live in places where our votes have already been stripped of their meaning by the system working as intended. That's an electoral college that means my vote is actually for electors (determined at the state level), not the president through to people who have been disenfranchised by other means like conflicts between exploitative jobs and absurd election processes, pandemic voting, voter ID, etc.
So we're the millions of people that whether we vote Biden, Columbo, Willy Wonka, or watch a Pokemon marathon instead of voting we get the same result (Biden get's the electoral votes assigned to us geographically [or doesn't for Democrats in Red states]).
If you want me to put myself in the shoes of a different kind of voter we should specify that.
I mean, neither of our votes matter, I know that. But if “the American people” or “the American left” or “swing voters” (all nebulous concepts, maybe so much so to be meaningless) are being asked to throw the switch and decide which track the trolley goes on, you probably have an opinion what they should decide, and I’m inferring it’s something like “don’t throw the switch at all, and let the trolley try to call you complicit.”
I think there will almost certainly be an election in November (and if you disagree, I’d be interested to know why). It won’t be devoid of the sorts of undemocratic abuses you’re describing, and it remains to be seen if the coronavirus will present new and creative ways to suppress the vote, but at the end of the day, I think any citizen sufficiently motivated will be allowed to vote, their votes will be tallied accurately within a reasonable margin of error. Low bar for an election, maybe.
And then I think Americans will accept the legitimacy of whoever won as being president in 2021, even if there are irregularities. And that person, either Biden or Trump, will have all the powers associated with the presidency.
Do you disagree on any particular point?
The people to the left of Bernie and the "swing voters" in swing states at the allegorical switch are largely distinct groups, though there is some overlap. Typically I'm speaking from/about/raising the perspective of the countless people on the tracks.
I think the trolly question is a moral abstraction meant to distance the people pushing the trolly over their countrymen and fellow humans around the planet of their role/responsibility by starting the question with the presumption the trolly, tracks, and people tied to them are inevitable and unquestionable.
Within this faulty framing I suggested the only ethical action imo was to derail the trolly. In that way this ties into Wombat's point about striking while the iron is hot. Covid-19 has the trolly teetering and both Biden and Trump (and their supporters) want to get it back on the tracks (Trump's tracks lined with more people). Which is the place from which I argue derailing the teetering train is not only the ethical action, but necessary and more possible than it has been in our lives while what we'll need to do and how many people will be lost increases by the second.
We've seen coronavirus already impact Wisconsin/Illinois and Republicans/Democrats are fully willing to exploit it for political gain. With that and the Mueller investigation/Ukraine impeachment I think your confidence in a valid election even by US standards just prior to Trump is misplaced. That said I'd put the odds that there isn't more significant foreign interference, election fraud, voter suppression, etc. than 2016 very low and the odds that there will be enough to argue the results are questionable for more than just some of the losing side is closer to 50/50.
That said, I think most Americans will consider the election valid regardless if for no other reason than they can't imagine an alternative.
With all respect I disagree with pretty much everything about what you're saying but to try to wrap up the specifics you asked if I disagreed with I sorta missed:
any citizen sufficiently motivated will be allowed to vote
as a matter of fact isn't true without a LOT of *'s and what you describe/what we have is a low bar for an election objectively/compared to other democracies in "1st world" countries would be my position.
Then to abandon the analogy you object to, and return to the original question: are you thinking this political movement will somehow produce a reasonable chance of neither Trump nor Biden being president in 2021? And if so, can you briefly describe a reasonable path from here to there? Because I honestly can’t picture it, and maybe a specific scenario would help people understand where you’re coming from.
Might be easier to amend the trolly analogy to a less imperfect (anything short of a treatise will be) one but let's see.
Odds aren't great it will, but revolutionary optimism springs eternal. What would it look like? Starting today it would be Biden's support plummeting when people see both his record and mental/physical condition with more scrutiny (our media is unlikely to provide). Then, desperate to replace him (before whatever becomes of the convention) Democrats across the country reject someone like Cuomo, Clinton, Buttigieg or anyone to the right of Bernie as a suitable replacement and he cleans up enough delegates in June to make it clean electorally.
Unfortunately it seems that the overwhelming number of the most politically involved Democrats have seen the worst of Biden and chose to actively support it and demand those that find it unacceptable support him anyway.
Just to be clear Bernie isn't really "derailing" imo, but hopping to an off-screen track that has far fewer people than the others with them spaced further out.
"Derailing" would fall more under refusing to move forward electorally until we committed to rebuilding the whole thing from trolly to track. I'm more just trying to encourage the people getting kicked off the trolly to the front to work to slow the trolly and untie people from the tracks (solidarity from newly unemployed middle class), encourage those kicked off to the back to not start pushing ( not tell people "Vote for Biden! It's the only moral mature choice!"), and those kicked to the sides of the trolly (affluent/comfortable onlookers under minimal/temporary financial stress) to try to tip that bih over before the billionaires send it over the edge of a rollercoaster style drop heading straight for the most marginalized people in society on both the Biden and Trump track (significantly less so, like a much bigger distance than between Biden and Trump, is the Bernie track,). The Bernie track the one being still a reasonable and viable path within the political imagination of most Americans imo.
Would you agree that the Bernie track (of all the tracks you might be persuaded to include under “acceptable”) has demonstrated the broadest appeal? And that we just recently concluded an electoral contest in which the Bernie track couldn’t find plurality support even among the “left?”
The very first contest (if you ignore everything leading up to it in media and the party) demonstrated that electoral contest was not valid imo. Several subsequent state contests demonstrated that as well. If you set aside the electoral fraud we all witnessed in Iowa and the subsequent voter suppression lines in Texas, Chicago, Wisconsin, etc.. the small fraction of the general electorate that constitutes the Democratic primary (typically a moderate group) selecting Biden doesn't allow me to draw the conclusions you have. Bernie support among the left is overwhelming, the left is only a small part of the Democratic primary (for many reasons within and beyond their control)
I mean, don’t get me wrong, a scenario in which Bernie somehow convinces Democrats to back him at the last minute sounds great to me. But Bernie just spent a year trying to convince them any way he knew how, and it didn’t work, right? What do you think will change? Coronavirus certainly didn’t seem to hurt Biden’s polling. If anything the opposite, actually.
I'm suggesting the increased scrutiny a competent and non-complacent media would provide could expose people to enough to realize how terrible of an idea it is to put Biden up against Trump and there's more than enough votes left to prevent that fate. Also that doing so by way of delayed primary voting and a delayed convention (made possible/unavoidable by covid-19) is far preferable than trying to come up with solutions after Biden is nominated or if he wins, or worse, if he loses.
But your assessment of the validity of the election isn’t the issue here. Whether you think those irregularities cost Bernie the primary (and I think it’s pretty clear they didn’t), there’s not any clear metric by which Bernie could claim legitimacy. He didn’t win the primary, he hasn’t been ahead in polls at almost any point, and at this point he himself has dropped out. You’re hoping some negative media will take Biden down, but he’s been in the public eye for decades, including as VP for eight years. If there’s an angle the media could cover him by that would sink him, why would it only happen in the next 6 months?
Do you think Bernie was wrong to drop out? Do you think he was likely to turn it around? And more importantly, do you really think there’s a real chance of convincing voters to support a guy who already dropped out?
They could ask him to draw a clock on live TV. When it shows clear signs of mental decline a responsible population would not nominate him for president.
I don't think dropping out or "suspending" his campaign matters other than Democrats can't keep blaming him for them telling voters to go to the polls but I'd like to think irrefutable evidence of Biden's infirmity would be enough for him not to get enough delegates to clinch formally and the nominee would be decided at the convention.
You seem awfully confident about his infirmity, so presumably you think such evidence already exists. Care to share? Maybe put the links in a spoiler with some brief context, if you’re worried the mods won’t like it.
Outside of his better debate performances you can pretty much take your pick from his public appearances as where I've seen it. One of my favorites was seemingly forgetting Kamala Harris existed while they were both on the debate stage. Even Harris and Booker were taken back by it.
On April 12 2020 01:44 ChristianS wrote: [quote] I mean, neither of our votes matter, I know that. But if “the American people” or “the American left” or “swing voters” (all nebulous concepts, maybe so much so to be meaningless) are being asked to throw the switch and decide which track the trolley goes on, you probably have an opinion what they should decide, and I’m inferring it’s something like “don’t throw the switch at all, and let the trolley try to call you complicit.”
I think there will almost certainly be an election in November (and if you disagree, I’d be interested to know why). It won’t be devoid of the sorts of undemocratic abuses you’re describing, and it remains to be seen if the coronavirus will present new and creative ways to suppress the vote, but at the end of the day, I think any citizen sufficiently motivated will be allowed to vote, their votes will be tallied accurately within a reasonable margin of error. Low bar for an election, maybe.
And then I think Americans will accept the legitimacy of whoever won as being president in 2021, even if there are irregularities. And that person, either Biden or Trump, will have all the powers associated with the presidency.
Do you disagree on any particular point?
The people to the left of Bernie and the "swing voters" in swing states at the allegorical switch are largely distinct groups, though there is some overlap. Typically I'm speaking from/about/raising the perspective of the countless people on the tracks.
I think the trolly question is a moral abstraction meant to distance the people pushing the trolly over their countrymen and fellow humans around the planet of their role/responsibility by starting the question with the presumption the trolly, tracks, and people tied to them are inevitable and unquestionable.
Within this faulty framing I suggested the only ethical action imo was to derail the trolly. In that way this ties into Wombat's point about striking while the iron is hot. Covid-19 has the trolly teetering and both Biden and Trump (and their supporters) want to get it back on the tracks (Trump's tracks lined with more people). Which is the place from which I argue derailing the teetering train is not only the ethical action, but necessary and more possible than it has been in our lives while what we'll need to do and how many people will be lost increases by the second.
We've seen coronavirus already impact Wisconsin/Illinois and Republicans/Democrats are fully willing to exploit it for political gain. With that and the Mueller investigation/Ukraine impeachment I think your confidence in a valid election even by US standards just prior to Trump is misplaced. That said I'd put the odds that there isn't more significant foreign interference, election fraud, voter suppression, etc. than 2016 very low and the odds that there will be enough to argue the results are questionable for more than just some of the losing side is closer to 50/50.
That said, I think most Americans will consider the election valid regardless if for no other reason than they can't imagine an alternative.
With all respect I disagree with pretty much everything about what you're saying but to try to wrap up the specifics you asked if I disagreed with I sorta missed:
any citizen sufficiently motivated will be allowed to vote
as a matter of fact isn't true without a LOT of *'s and what you describe/what we have is a low bar for an election objectively/compared to other democracies in "1st world" countries would be my position.
Then to abandon the analogy you object to, and return to the original question: are you thinking this political movement will somehow produce a reasonable chance of neither Trump nor Biden being president in 2021? And if so, can you briefly describe a reasonable path from here to there? Because I honestly can’t picture it, and maybe a specific scenario would help people understand where you’re coming from.
Might be easier to amend the trolly analogy to a less imperfect (anything short of a treatise will be) one but let's see.
Odds aren't great it will, but revolutionary optimism springs eternal. What would it look like? Starting today it would be Biden's support plummeting when people see both his record and mental/physical condition with more scrutiny (our media is unlikely to provide). Then, desperate to replace him (before whatever becomes of the convention) Democrats across the country reject someone like Cuomo, Clinton, Buttigieg or anyone to the right of Bernie as a suitable replacement and he cleans up enough delegates in June to make it clean electorally.
Unfortunately it seems that the overwhelming number of the most politically involved Democrats have seen the worst of Biden and chose to actively support it and demand those that find it unacceptable support him anyway.
Just to be clear Bernie isn't really "derailing" imo, but hopping to an off-screen track that has far fewer people than the others with them spaced further out.
"Derailing" would fall more under refusing to move forward electorally until we committed to rebuilding the whole thing from trolly to track. I'm more just trying to encourage the people getting kicked off the trolly to the front to work to slow the trolly and untie people from the tracks (solidarity from newly unemployed middle class), encourage those kicked off to the back to not start pushing ( not tell people "Vote for Biden! It's the only moral mature choice!"), and those kicked to the sides of the trolly (affluent/comfortable onlookers under minimal/temporary financial stress) to try to tip that bih over before the billionaires send it over the edge of a rollercoaster style drop heading straight for the most marginalized people in society on both the Biden and Trump track (significantly less so, like a much bigger distance than between Biden and Trump, is the Bernie track,). The Bernie track the one being still a reasonable and viable path within the political imagination of most Americans imo.
Would you agree that the Bernie track (of all the tracks you might be persuaded to include under “acceptable”) has demonstrated the broadest appeal? And that we just recently concluded an electoral contest in which the Bernie track couldn’t find plurality support even among the “left?”
The very first contest (if you ignore everything leading up to it in media and the party) demonstrated that electoral contest was not valid imo. Several subsequent state contests demonstrated that as well. If you set aside the electoral fraud we all witnessed in Iowa and the subsequent voter suppression lines in Texas, Chicago, Wisconsin, etc.. the small fraction of the general electorate that constitutes the Democratic primary (typically a moderate group) selecting Biden doesn't allow me to draw the conclusions you have. Bernie support among the left is overwhelming, the left is only a small part of the Democratic primary (for many reasons within and beyond their control)
I mean, don’t get me wrong, a scenario in which Bernie somehow convinces Democrats to back him at the last minute sounds great to me. But Bernie just spent a year trying to convince them any way he knew how, and it didn’t work, right? What do you think will change? Coronavirus certainly didn’t seem to hurt Biden’s polling. If anything the opposite, actually.
I'm suggesting the increased scrutiny a competent and non-complacent media would provide could expose people to enough to realize how terrible of an idea it is to put Biden up against Trump and there's more than enough votes left to prevent that fate. Also that doing so by way of delayed primary voting and a delayed convention (made possible/unavoidable by covid-19) is far preferable than trying to come up with solutions after Biden is nominated or if he wins, or worse, if he loses.
But your assessment of the validity of the election isn’t the issue here. Whether you think those irregularities cost Bernie the primary (and I think it’s pretty clear they didn’t), there’s not any clear metric by which Bernie could claim legitimacy. He didn’t win the primary, he hasn’t been ahead in polls at almost any point, and at this point he himself has dropped out. You’re hoping some negative media will take Biden down, but he’s been in the public eye for decades, including as VP for eight years. If there’s an angle the media could cover him by that would sink him, why would it only happen in the next 6 months?
Do you think Bernie was wrong to drop out? Do you think he was likely to turn it around? And more importantly, do you really think there’s a real chance of convincing voters to support a guy who already dropped out?
They could ask him to draw a clock on live TV. When it shows clear signs of mental decline a responsible population would not nominate him for president.
I don't think dropping out or "suspending" his campaign matters other than Democrats can't keep blaming him for them telling voters to go to the polls but I'd like to think irrefutable evidence of Biden's infirmity would be enough for him not to get enough delegates to clinch formally and the nominee would be decided at the convention.
You seem awfully confident about his infirmity, so presumably you think such evidence already exists. Care to share? Maybe put the links in a spoiler with some brief context, if you’re worried the mods won’t like it.
Outside of his better debate performances you can pretty much take your pick from his public appearances as where I've seen it. One of my favorites was seemingly forgetting Kamala Harris existed while they were both on the debate stage. Even Harris and Booker were taken back by it.
He seems perfectly cogent in that clip. Technically he said “the only African-American woman that had been elected to the US Senate.” Admittedly the pluperfect is not a very clear way to say “the first African-American Senator,” but it’s definitely not proof of cognitive decline.
If I say “Joe Biden has a stutter,” is that going to be a controversial statement here? I know some people think that’s a coverup or something.
My worry isn’t necessarily if Biden does/doesn’t exhibit signs of cognitive decline, but that if he did would I have confidence that he would step aside/be forced by the party to step aside if it came to it. Will he have to draw that clock as it were?
Just as an observer I don’t feel he looks particularly sharp or vibrant even when compared to himself as a slightly younger man.
Whether it’s actual cognitive decline, fatigue or some kind of other issue I wouldn’t feel qualified to comment definitively.
He regularly just tumbles over himself, it really looks like he has forgotten what he was saying. He trails off and just goes some variant of "you know what I mean" to end it
I also think theres roughly no chance of him being removed even if gets Reagan bad, it'd probably damage the Democrats image and lower their chances of winning the next election if Biden gets removed, so we'll probably be sitting through him mostly absent from public-anything if hes as far gone as he sometimes appears.
On April 12 2020 02:18 GreenHorizons wrote: [quote]
The people to the left of Bernie and the "swing voters" in swing states at the allegorical switch are largely distinct groups, though there is some overlap. Typically I'm speaking from/about/raising the perspective of the countless people on the tracks.
I think the trolly question is a moral abstraction meant to distance the people pushing the trolly over their countrymen and fellow humans around the planet of their role/responsibility by starting the question with the presumption the trolly, tracks, and people tied to them are inevitable and unquestionable.
Within this faulty framing I suggested the only ethical action imo was to derail the trolly. In that way this ties into Wombat's point about striking while the iron is hot. Covid-19 has the trolly teetering and both Biden and Trump (and their supporters) want to get it back on the tracks (Trump's tracks lined with more people). Which is the place from which I argue derailing the teetering train is not only the ethical action, but necessary and more possible than it has been in our lives while what we'll need to do and how many people will be lost increases by the second.
We've seen coronavirus already impact Wisconsin/Illinois and Republicans/Democrats are fully willing to exploit it for political gain. With that and the Mueller investigation/Ukraine impeachment I think your confidence in a valid election even by US standards just prior to Trump is misplaced. That said I'd put the odds that there isn't more significant foreign interference, election fraud, voter suppression, etc. than 2016 very low and the odds that there will be enough to argue the results are questionable for more than just some of the losing side is closer to 50/50.
That said, I think most Americans will consider the election valid regardless if for no other reason than they can't imagine an alternative.
With all respect I disagree with pretty much everything about what you're saying but to try to wrap up the specifics you asked if I disagreed with I sorta missed: [quote] as a matter of fact isn't true without a LOT of *'s and what you describe/what we have is a low bar for an election objectively/compared to other democracies in "1st world" countries would be my position.
Then to abandon the analogy you object to, and return to the original question: are you thinking this political movement will somehow produce a reasonable chance of neither Trump nor Biden being president in 2021? And if so, can you briefly describe a reasonable path from here to there? Because I honestly can’t picture it, and maybe a specific scenario would help people understand where you’re coming from.
Might be easier to amend the trolly analogy to a less imperfect (anything short of a treatise will be) one but let's see.
Odds aren't great it will, but revolutionary optimism springs eternal. What would it look like? Starting today it would be Biden's support plummeting when people see both his record and mental/physical condition with more scrutiny (our media is unlikely to provide). Then, desperate to replace him (before whatever becomes of the convention) Democrats across the country reject someone like Cuomo, Clinton, Buttigieg or anyone to the right of Bernie as a suitable replacement and he cleans up enough delegates in June to make it clean electorally.
Unfortunately it seems that the overwhelming number of the most politically involved Democrats have seen the worst of Biden and chose to actively support it and demand those that find it unacceptable support him anyway.
Just to be clear Bernie isn't really "derailing" imo, but hopping to an off-screen track that has far fewer people than the others with them spaced further out.
"Derailing" would fall more under refusing to move forward electorally until we committed to rebuilding the whole thing from trolly to track. I'm more just trying to encourage the people getting kicked off the trolly to the front to work to slow the trolly and untie people from the tracks (solidarity from newly unemployed middle class), encourage those kicked off to the back to not start pushing ( not tell people "Vote for Biden! It's the only moral mature choice!"), and those kicked to the sides of the trolly (affluent/comfortable onlookers under minimal/temporary financial stress) to try to tip that bih over before the billionaires send it over the edge of a rollercoaster style drop heading straight for the most marginalized people in society on both the Biden and Trump track (significantly less so, like a much bigger distance than between Biden and Trump, is the Bernie track,). The Bernie track the one being still a reasonable and viable path within the political imagination of most Americans imo.
Would you agree that the Bernie track (of all the tracks you might be persuaded to include under “acceptable”) has demonstrated the broadest appeal? And that we just recently concluded an electoral contest in which the Bernie track couldn’t find plurality support even among the “left?”
The very first contest (if you ignore everything leading up to it in media and the party) demonstrated that electoral contest was not valid imo. Several subsequent state contests demonstrated that as well. If you set aside the electoral fraud we all witnessed in Iowa and the subsequent voter suppression lines in Texas, Chicago, Wisconsin, etc.. the small fraction of the general electorate that constitutes the Democratic primary (typically a moderate group) selecting Biden doesn't allow me to draw the conclusions you have. Bernie support among the left is overwhelming, the left is only a small part of the Democratic primary (for many reasons within and beyond their control)
I mean, don’t get me wrong, a scenario in which Bernie somehow convinces Democrats to back him at the last minute sounds great to me. But Bernie just spent a year trying to convince them any way he knew how, and it didn’t work, right? What do you think will change? Coronavirus certainly didn’t seem to hurt Biden’s polling. If anything the opposite, actually.
I'm suggesting the increased scrutiny a competent and non-complacent media would provide could expose people to enough to realize how terrible of an idea it is to put Biden up against Trump and there's more than enough votes left to prevent that fate. Also that doing so by way of delayed primary voting and a delayed convention (made possible/unavoidable by covid-19) is far preferable than trying to come up with solutions after Biden is nominated or if he wins, or worse, if he loses.
But your assessment of the validity of the election isn’t the issue here. Whether you think those irregularities cost Bernie the primary (and I think it’s pretty clear they didn’t), there’s not any clear metric by which Bernie could claim legitimacy. He didn’t win the primary, he hasn’t been ahead in polls at almost any point, and at this point he himself has dropped out. You’re hoping some negative media will take Biden down, but he’s been in the public eye for decades, including as VP for eight years. If there’s an angle the media could cover him by that would sink him, why would it only happen in the next 6 months?
Do you think Bernie was wrong to drop out? Do you think he was likely to turn it around? And more importantly, do you really think there’s a real chance of convincing voters to support a guy who already dropped out?
They could ask him to draw a clock on live TV. When it shows clear signs of mental decline a responsible population would not nominate him for president.
I don't think dropping out or "suspending" his campaign matters other than Democrats can't keep blaming him for them telling voters to go to the polls but I'd like to think irrefutable evidence of Biden's infirmity would be enough for him not to get enough delegates to clinch formally and the nominee would be decided at the convention.
You seem awfully confident about his infirmity, so presumably you think such evidence already exists. Care to share? Maybe put the links in a spoiler with some brief context, if you’re worried the mods won’t like it.
Outside of his better debate performances you can pretty much take your pick from his public appearances as where I've seen it. One of my favorites was seemingly forgetting Kamala Harris existed while they were both on the debate stage. Even Harris and Booker were taken back by it.
He seems perfectly cogent in that clip. Technically he said “the only African-American woman that had been elected to the US Senate.” Admittedly the pluperfect is not a very clear way to say “the first African-American Senator,” but it’s definitely not proof of cognitive decline.
If I say “Joe Biden has a stutter,” is that going to be a controversial statement here? I know some people think that’s a coverup or something.
I think it's clear that these are the established positions. People who see clear decline in his public speaking and those that see a stutter or whatever else. That's the point of the live TV clock test. We know a cognitive test is the one he skipped in his medical screening.
There are a lot of compilations that all include a handful of reasonable gaffs or whatever as well as what seem to be what even Andrea Mitchell suggested was him "losing a step".
Oh man, I forgot about that awful "poor kids are just as good as white kids" comment, I mean jesus, what a freudian slip.
THIS is what is acceptable for our highest office. He legitimately makes Trump look cogent and thats so shameful.
As a thought experiment, who DOES get the office if Biden doesn't make it to Election time? Are we switching to Bernie or is the DNC going to opt for Buttigieg or something? I get the feeling we'll see a Klobuchar or Buttigieg put up if it happens.
On April 12 2020 06:00 Zambrah wrote: As a thought experiment, who DOES get the office if Biden doesn't make it to Election time? Are we switching to Bernie or is the DNC going to opt for Buttigieg or something? I get the feeling we'll see a Klobuchar or Buttigieg put up if it happens.
Cuomo or Hillary probably. Obviously never Bernie. But it's probably going to be Biden, the rest is a bit far-fetched.
On April 12 2020 06:00 Zambrah wrote: As a thought experiment, who DOES get the office if Biden doesn't make it to Election time? Are we switching to Bernie or is the DNC going to opt for Buttigieg or something? I get the feeling we'll see a Klobuchar or Buttigieg put up if it happens.
Cuomo or Hillary probably. Obviously never Bernie.
As cynical as I am about the Democrats even they cant be stupid enough to try and put Hillary in.
Cuomo would probably be a thing they'd throw out there though, I could certainly see that.
On April 12 2020 02:35 ChristianS wrote: [quote] Then to abandon the analogy you object to, and return to the original question: are you thinking this political movement will somehow produce a reasonable chance of neither Trump nor Biden being president in 2021? And if so, can you briefly describe a reasonable path from here to there? Because I honestly can’t picture it, and maybe a specific scenario would help people understand where you’re coming from.
Might be easier to amend the trolly analogy to a less imperfect (anything short of a treatise will be) one but let's see.
Odds aren't great it will, but revolutionary optimism springs eternal. What would it look like? Starting today it would be Biden's support plummeting when people see both his record and mental/physical condition with more scrutiny (our media is unlikely to provide). Then, desperate to replace him (before whatever becomes of the convention) Democrats across the country reject someone like Cuomo, Clinton, Buttigieg or anyone to the right of Bernie as a suitable replacement and he cleans up enough delegates in June to make it clean electorally.
Unfortunately it seems that the overwhelming number of the most politically involved Democrats have seen the worst of Biden and chose to actively support it and demand those that find it unacceptable support him anyway.
Just to be clear Bernie isn't really "derailing" imo, but hopping to an off-screen track that has far fewer people than the others with them spaced further out.
"Derailing" would fall more under refusing to move forward electorally until we committed to rebuilding the whole thing from trolly to track. I'm more just trying to encourage the people getting kicked off the trolly to the front to work to slow the trolly and untie people from the tracks (solidarity from newly unemployed middle class), encourage those kicked off to the back to not start pushing ( not tell people "Vote for Biden! It's the only moral mature choice!"), and those kicked to the sides of the trolly (affluent/comfortable onlookers under minimal/temporary financial stress) to try to tip that bih over before the billionaires send it over the edge of a rollercoaster style drop heading straight for the most marginalized people in society on both the Biden and Trump track (significantly less so, like a much bigger distance than between Biden and Trump, is the Bernie track,). The Bernie track the one being still a reasonable and viable path within the political imagination of most Americans imo.
Would you agree that the Bernie track (of all the tracks you might be persuaded to include under “acceptable”) has demonstrated the broadest appeal? And that we just recently concluded an electoral contest in which the Bernie track couldn’t find plurality support even among the “left?”
The very first contest (if you ignore everything leading up to it in media and the party) demonstrated that electoral contest was not valid imo. Several subsequent state contests demonstrated that as well. If you set aside the electoral fraud we all witnessed in Iowa and the subsequent voter suppression lines in Texas, Chicago, Wisconsin, etc.. the small fraction of the general electorate that constitutes the Democratic primary (typically a moderate group) selecting Biden doesn't allow me to draw the conclusions you have. Bernie support among the left is overwhelming, the left is only a small part of the Democratic primary (for many reasons within and beyond their control)
I mean, don’t get me wrong, a scenario in which Bernie somehow convinces Democrats to back him at the last minute sounds great to me. But Bernie just spent a year trying to convince them any way he knew how, and it didn’t work, right? What do you think will change? Coronavirus certainly didn’t seem to hurt Biden’s polling. If anything the opposite, actually.
I'm suggesting the increased scrutiny a competent and non-complacent media would provide could expose people to enough to realize how terrible of an idea it is to put Biden up against Trump and there's more than enough votes left to prevent that fate. Also that doing so by way of delayed primary voting and a delayed convention (made possible/unavoidable by covid-19) is far preferable than trying to come up with solutions after Biden is nominated or if he wins, or worse, if he loses.
But your assessment of the validity of the election isn’t the issue here. Whether you think those irregularities cost Bernie the primary (and I think it’s pretty clear they didn’t), there’s not any clear metric by which Bernie could claim legitimacy. He didn’t win the primary, he hasn’t been ahead in polls at almost any point, and at this point he himself has dropped out. You’re hoping some negative media will take Biden down, but he’s been in the public eye for decades, including as VP for eight years. If there’s an angle the media could cover him by that would sink him, why would it only happen in the next 6 months?
Do you think Bernie was wrong to drop out? Do you think he was likely to turn it around? And more importantly, do you really think there’s a real chance of convincing voters to support a guy who already dropped out?
They could ask him to draw a clock on live TV. When it shows clear signs of mental decline a responsible population would not nominate him for president.
I don't think dropping out or "suspending" his campaign matters other than Democrats can't keep blaming him for them telling voters to go to the polls but I'd like to think irrefutable evidence of Biden's infirmity would be enough for him not to get enough delegates to clinch formally and the nominee would be decided at the convention.
You seem awfully confident about his infirmity, so presumably you think such evidence already exists. Care to share? Maybe put the links in a spoiler with some brief context, if you’re worried the mods won’t like it.
Outside of his better debate performances you can pretty much take your pick from his public appearances as where I've seen it. One of my favorites was seemingly forgetting Kamala Harris existed while they were both on the debate stage. Even Harris and Booker were taken back by it.
He seems perfectly cogent in that clip. Technically he said “the only African-American woman that had been elected to the US Senate.” Admittedly the pluperfect is not a very clear way to say “the first African-American Senator,” but it’s definitely not proof of cognitive decline.
If I say “Joe Biden has a stutter,” is that going to be a controversial statement here? I know some people think that’s a coverup or something.
I think it's clear that these are the established positions. People who see clear decline in his public speaking and those that see a stutter or whatever else. That's the point of the live TV clock test. We know a cognitive test is the one he skipped in his medical screening.
There are a lot of compilations that all include a handful of reasonable gaffs or whatever as well as what seem to be what even Andrea Mitchell suggested was him "losing a step".
Right, and if he successfully draws the clock everybody says “oh, nevermind, I guess he’s perfectly fine!” This seems like a straight-forward case of lose-lose for him: even if he draws it, there’s still a whole media cycle around “is Joe Biden sane” and the critics will only be emboldened.
Frankly, I think a big part of the problem here is that Joe Biden’s mental health has nothing to do with your objection to his candidacy, you just see it as an angle of attack. So maybe we should go back to talking about your real objections? Otherwise this conversation starts to not feel very good-faith.
On April 12 2020 03:01 GreenHorizons wrote: [quote]
Might be easier to amend the trolly analogy to a less imperfect (anything short of a treatise will be) one but let's see.
Odds aren't great it will, but revolutionary optimism springs eternal. What would it look like? Starting today it would be Biden's support plummeting when people see both his record and mental/physical condition with more scrutiny (our media is unlikely to provide). Then, desperate to replace him (before whatever becomes of the convention) Democrats across the country reject someone like Cuomo, Clinton, Buttigieg or anyone to the right of Bernie as a suitable replacement and he cleans up enough delegates in June to make it clean electorally.
Unfortunately it seems that the overwhelming number of the most politically involved Democrats have seen the worst of Biden and chose to actively support it and demand those that find it unacceptable support him anyway.
Just to be clear Bernie isn't really "derailing" imo, but hopping to an off-screen track that has far fewer people than the others with them spaced further out.
"Derailing" would fall more under refusing to move forward electorally until we committed to rebuilding the whole thing from trolly to track. I'm more just trying to encourage the people getting kicked off the trolly to the front to work to slow the trolly and untie people from the tracks (solidarity from newly unemployed middle class), encourage those kicked off to the back to not start pushing ( not tell people "Vote for Biden! It's the only moral mature choice!"), and those kicked to the sides of the trolly (affluent/comfortable onlookers under minimal/temporary financial stress) to try to tip that bih over before the billionaires send it over the edge of a rollercoaster style drop heading straight for the most marginalized people in society on both the Biden and Trump track (significantly less so, like a much bigger distance than between Biden and Trump, is the Bernie track,). The Bernie track the one being still a reasonable and viable path within the political imagination of most Americans imo.
Would you agree that the Bernie track (of all the tracks you might be persuaded to include under “acceptable”) has demonstrated the broadest appeal? And that we just recently concluded an electoral contest in which the Bernie track couldn’t find plurality support even among the “left?”
The very first contest (if you ignore everything leading up to it in media and the party) demonstrated that electoral contest was not valid imo. Several subsequent state contests demonstrated that as well. If you set aside the electoral fraud we all witnessed in Iowa and the subsequent voter suppression lines in Texas, Chicago, Wisconsin, etc.. the small fraction of the general electorate that constitutes the Democratic primary (typically a moderate group) selecting Biden doesn't allow me to draw the conclusions you have. Bernie support among the left is overwhelming, the left is only a small part of the Democratic primary (for many reasons within and beyond their control)
I mean, don’t get me wrong, a scenario in which Bernie somehow convinces Democrats to back him at the last minute sounds great to me. But Bernie just spent a year trying to convince them any way he knew how, and it didn’t work, right? What do you think will change? Coronavirus certainly didn’t seem to hurt Biden’s polling. If anything the opposite, actually.
I'm suggesting the increased scrutiny a competent and non-complacent media would provide could expose people to enough to realize how terrible of an idea it is to put Biden up against Trump and there's more than enough votes left to prevent that fate. Also that doing so by way of delayed primary voting and a delayed convention (made possible/unavoidable by covid-19) is far preferable than trying to come up with solutions after Biden is nominated or if he wins, or worse, if he loses.
But your assessment of the validity of the election isn’t the issue here. Whether you think those irregularities cost Bernie the primary (and I think it’s pretty clear they didn’t), there’s not any clear metric by which Bernie could claim legitimacy. He didn’t win the primary, he hasn’t been ahead in polls at almost any point, and at this point he himself has dropped out. You’re hoping some negative media will take Biden down, but he’s been in the public eye for decades, including as VP for eight years. If there’s an angle the media could cover him by that would sink him, why would it only happen in the next 6 months?
Do you think Bernie was wrong to drop out? Do you think he was likely to turn it around? And more importantly, do you really think there’s a real chance of convincing voters to support a guy who already dropped out?
They could ask him to draw a clock on live TV. When it shows clear signs of mental decline a responsible population would not nominate him for president.
I don't think dropping out or "suspending" his campaign matters other than Democrats can't keep blaming him for them telling voters to go to the polls but I'd like to think irrefutable evidence of Biden's infirmity would be enough for him not to get enough delegates to clinch formally and the nominee would be decided at the convention.
You seem awfully confident about his infirmity, so presumably you think such evidence already exists. Care to share? Maybe put the links in a spoiler with some brief context, if you’re worried the mods won’t like it.
Outside of his better debate performances you can pretty much take your pick from his public appearances as where I've seen it. One of my favorites was seemingly forgetting Kamala Harris existed while they were both on the debate stage. Even Harris and Booker were taken back by it.
He seems perfectly cogent in that clip. Technically he said “the only African-American woman that had been elected to the US Senate.” Admittedly the pluperfect is not a very clear way to say “the first African-American Senator,” but it’s definitely not proof of cognitive decline.
If I say “Joe Biden has a stutter,” is that going to be a controversial statement here? I know some people think that’s a coverup or something.
I think it's clear that these are the established positions. People who see clear decline in his public speaking and those that see a stutter or whatever else. That's the point of the live TV clock test. We know a cognitive test is the one he skipped in his medical screening.
There are a lot of compilations that all include a handful of reasonable gaffs or whatever as well as what seem to be what even Andrea Mitchell suggested was him "losing a step".
Right, and if he successfully draws the clock everybody says “oh, nevermind, I guess he’s perfectly fine!” This seems like a straight-forward case of lose-lose for him: even if he draws it, there’s still a whole media cycle around “is Joe Biden sane” and the critics will only be emboldened.
Frankly, I think a big part of the problem here is that Joe Biden’s mental health has nothing to do with your objection to his candidacy, you just see it as an angle of attack. So maybe we should go back to talking about your real objections? Otherwise this conversation starts to not feel very good-faith.
I wouldn't say it has nothing to do with my objections, but you're correct that even if I did believe his mental health was beyond reproach (I find that hard to accept) he would still be unacceptable to me.
On April 11 2020 17:23 Biff The Understudy wrote: Just read the NYT chat on the consequences of the COVID to the economy and the human cost of the crisis. It's chilling.
So, anyway, outside the 12d chess of some of our friends are doing (if Biden lose, then in 5 years, maybe our guy has better chances of winning because [insert logic]), the question one has to ask himself, and I think the only one that is truly relevant right now is: who, between Trump and Biden, and which administration, do you want to navigate the country out of the COVID crisis.
What is abundantly clear is that the reconstruction of the economy will shape the country for decades. We've got only two choices.
If the liberals win, they will have to govern with the progressives, that are a force to reckon with in both chambers. If the Republican win, it will give Trump and his goons a once in a century opportunity to remold America the way they want it to be.
I think it's going to be one of the most important elections of our lifetime. We are going to live with the consequences all our lives.
It can't be either of them or we're doomed according to the best available science. I don't understand why Democrats refused to recognize that but here we are.
Because as you rightly note how we come out of this will shape the country for decades and neither Trump or Biden have any intention to implement the radical climate/economic proposals required to mitigate catastrophic and irreversible warming in the shrinking ~10 year window we have.
It's similar to covid imo in that the lag between action and consequence makes it more difficult to convince people of the necessity of that action. But much trickier in that the delay is measured in years and decades rather than days and weeks.
I, for one, think that Bernies ban on new nuclear power would lead to a disaster in the fight against global warming - just look at what happened to Germany when they tried a similar route.
I can have sympathy for the argument about not voting to show that you are unsatisfied with the party line. (I'm thinking about doing that because I don't like the way the social democrat party in Sweden has changed ideologically.) But the problem I have with it in this case is that there has been a primary election. If the more radical left wing candidate couldn't win the primary election, why would he win in the whole country? And if the left-wing faction of the voters don't bother to vote if their guy isn't elected in the primary, why would the moderate democrats turn out for their guy if the roles are reversed for the next election? wouldn't they just use the same tactic to try to force the balance back to their position?
I guess a counter argument would be that the primary was rigged for the party's favorite candidate. But I haven't really seen much of that - admittedly I haven't been paying too close attention.
On April 12 2020 01:44 ChristianS wrote: [quote] I mean, neither of our votes matter, I know that. But if “the American people” or “the American left” or “swing voters” (all nebulous concepts, maybe so much so to be meaningless) are being asked to throw the switch and decide which track the trolley goes on, you probably have an opinion what they should decide, and I’m inferring it’s something like “don’t throw the switch at all, and let the trolley try to call you complicit.”
I think there will almost certainly be an election in November (and if you disagree, I’d be interested to know why). It won’t be devoid of the sorts of undemocratic abuses you’re describing, and it remains to be seen if the coronavirus will present new and creative ways to suppress the vote, but at the end of the day, I think any citizen sufficiently motivated will be allowed to vote, their votes will be tallied accurately within a reasonable margin of error. Low bar for an election, maybe.
And then I think Americans will accept the legitimacy of whoever won as being president in 2021, even if there are irregularities. And that person, either Biden or Trump, will have all the powers associated with the presidency.
Do you disagree on any particular point?
The people to the left of Bernie and the "swing voters" in swing states at the allegorical switch are largely distinct groups, though there is some overlap. Typically I'm speaking from/about/raising the perspective of the countless people on the tracks.
I think the trolly question is a moral abstraction meant to distance the people pushing the trolly over their countrymen and fellow humans around the planet of their role/responsibility by starting the question with the presumption the trolly, tracks, and people tied to them are inevitable and unquestionable.
Within this faulty framing I suggested the only ethical action imo was to derail the trolly. In that way this ties into Wombat's point about striking while the iron is hot. Covid-19 has the trolly teetering and both Biden and Trump (and their supporters) want to get it back on the tracks (Trump's tracks lined with more people). Which is the place from which I argue derailing the teetering train is not only the ethical action, but necessary and more possible than it has been in our lives while what we'll need to do and how many people will be lost increases by the second.
We've seen coronavirus already impact Wisconsin/Illinois and Republicans/Democrats are fully willing to exploit it for political gain. With that and the Mueller investigation/Ukraine impeachment I think your confidence in a valid election even by US standards just prior to Trump is misplaced. That said I'd put the odds that there isn't more significant foreign interference, election fraud, voter suppression, etc. than 2016 very low and the odds that there will be enough to argue the results are questionable for more than just some of the losing side is closer to 50/50.
That said, I think most Americans will consider the election valid regardless if for no other reason than they can't imagine an alternative.
With all respect I disagree with pretty much everything about what you're saying but to try to wrap up the specifics you asked if I disagreed with I sorta missed:
any citizen sufficiently motivated will be allowed to vote
as a matter of fact isn't true without a LOT of *'s and what you describe/what we have is a low bar for an election objectively/compared to other democracies in "1st world" countries would be my position.
Then to abandon the analogy you object to, and return to the original question: are you thinking this political movement will somehow produce a reasonable chance of neither Trump nor Biden being president in 2021? And if so, can you briefly describe a reasonable path from here to there? Because I honestly can’t picture it, and maybe a specific scenario would help people understand where you’re coming from.
Might be easier to amend the trolly analogy to a less imperfect (anything short of a treatise will be) one but let's see.
Odds aren't great it will, but revolutionary optimism springs eternal. What would it look like? Starting today it would be Biden's support plummeting when people see both his record and mental/physical condition with more scrutiny (our media is unlikely to provide). Then, desperate to replace him (before whatever becomes of the convention) Democrats across the country reject someone like Cuomo, Clinton, Buttigieg or anyone to the right of Bernie as a suitable replacement and he cleans up enough delegates in June to make it clean electorally.
Unfortunately it seems that the overwhelming number of the most politically involved Democrats have seen the worst of Biden and chose to actively support it and demand those that find it unacceptable support him anyway.
Just to be clear Bernie isn't really "derailing" imo, but hopping to an off-screen track that has far fewer people than the others with them spaced further out.
"Derailing" would fall more under refusing to move forward electorally until we committed to rebuilding the whole thing from trolly to track. I'm more just trying to encourage the people getting kicked off the trolly to the front to work to slow the trolly and untie people from the tracks (solidarity from newly unemployed middle class), encourage those kicked off to the back to not start pushing ( not tell people "Vote for Biden! It's the only moral mature choice!"), and those kicked to the sides of the trolly (affluent/comfortable onlookers under minimal/temporary financial stress) to try to tip that bih over before the billionaires send it over the edge of a rollercoaster style drop heading straight for the most marginalized people in society on both the Biden and Trump track (significantly less so, like a much bigger distance than between Biden and Trump, is the Bernie track,). The Bernie track the one being still a reasonable and viable path within the political imagination of most Americans imo.
Would you agree that the Bernie track (of all the tracks you might be persuaded to include under “acceptable”) has demonstrated the broadest appeal? And that we just recently concluded an electoral contest in which the Bernie track couldn’t find plurality support even among the “left?”
The very first contest (if you ignore everything leading up to it in media and the party) demonstrated that electoral contest was not valid imo. Several subsequent state contests demonstrated that as well. If you set aside the electoral fraud we all witnessed in Iowa and the subsequent voter suppression lines in Texas, Chicago, Wisconsin, etc.. the small fraction of the general electorate that constitutes the Democratic primary (typically a moderate group) selecting Biden doesn't allow me to draw the conclusions you have. Bernie support among the left is overwhelming, the left is only a small part of the Democratic primary (for many reasons within and beyond their control)
I mean, don’t get me wrong, a scenario in which Bernie somehow convinces Democrats to back him at the last minute sounds great to me. But Bernie just spent a year trying to convince them any way he knew how, and it didn’t work, right? What do you think will change? Coronavirus certainly didn’t seem to hurt Biden’s polling. If anything the opposite, actually.
I'm suggesting the increased scrutiny a competent and non-complacent media would provide could expose people to enough to realize how terrible of an idea it is to put Biden up against Trump and there's more than enough votes left to prevent that fate. Also that doing so by way of delayed primary voting and a delayed convention (made possible/unavoidable by covid-19) is far preferable than trying to come up with solutions after Biden is nominated or if he wins, or worse, if he loses.
But your assessment of the validity of the election isn’t the issue here. Whether you think those irregularities cost Bernie the primary (and I think it’s pretty clear they didn’t), there’s not any clear metric by which Bernie could claim legitimacy. He didn’t win the primary, he hasn’t been ahead in polls at almost any point, and at this point he himself has dropped out. You’re hoping some negative media will take Biden down, but he’s been in the public eye for decades, including as VP for eight years. If there’s an angle the media could cover him by that would sink him, why would it only happen in the next 6 months?
Do you think Bernie was wrong to drop out? Do you think he was likely to turn it around? And more importantly, do you really think there’s a real chance of convincing voters to support a guy who already dropped out?
They could ask him to draw a clock on live TV. When it shows clear signs of mental decline a responsible population would not nominate him for president.
I don't think dropping out or "suspending" his campaign matters other than Democrats can't keep blaming him for them telling voters to go to the polls but I'd like to think irrefutable evidence of Biden's infirmity would be enough for him not to get enough delegates to clinch formally and the nominee would be decided at the convention.
You seem awfully confident about his infirmity, so presumably you think such evidence already exists. Care to share? Maybe put the links in a spoiler with some brief context, if you’re worried the mods won’t like it.
Outside of his better debate performances you can pretty much take your pick from his public appearances as where I've seen it. One of my favorites was seemingly forgetting Kamala Harris existed while they were both on the debate stage. Even Harris and Booker were taken back by it.
On April 11 2020 17:23 Biff The Understudy wrote: Just read the NYT chat on the consequences of the COVID to the economy and the human cost of the crisis. It's chilling.
So, anyway, outside the 12d chess of some of our friends are doing (if Biden lose, then in 5 years, maybe our guy has better chances of winning because [insert logic]), the question one has to ask himself, and I think the only one that is truly relevant right now is: who, between Trump and Biden, and which administration, do you want to navigate the country out of the COVID crisis.
What is abundantly clear is that the reconstruction of the economy will shape the country for decades. We've got only two choices.
If the liberals win, they will have to govern with the progressives, that are a force to reckon with in both chambers. If the Republican win, it will give Trump and his goons a once in a century opportunity to remold America the way they want it to be.
I think it's going to be one of the most important elections of our lifetime. We are going to live with the consequences all our lives.
It can't be either of them or we're doomed according to the best available science. I don't understand why Democrats refused to recognize that but here we are.
Because as you rightly note how we come out of this will shape the country for decades and neither Trump or Biden have any intention to implement the radical climate/economic proposals required to mitigate catastrophic and irreversible warming in the shrinking ~10 year window we have.
It's similar to covid imo in that the lag between action and consequence makes it more difficult to convince people of the necessity of that action. But much trickier in that the delay is measured in years and decades rather than days and weeks.
I, for one, think that Bernies ban on new nuclear power would lead to a disaster in the fight against global warming - just look at what happened to Germany when they tried a similar route.
I can have sympathy for the argument about not voting to show that you are unsatisfied with the party line. (I'm thinking about doing that because I don't like the way the social democrat party in Sweden has changed ideologically.) But the problem I have with it in this case is that there has been a primary election. If the more radical left wing candidate couldn't win the primary election, why would he win in the whole country? And if the left-wing faction of the voters don't bother to vote if their guy isn't elected in the primary, why would the moderate democrats turn out for their guy if the roles are reversed for the next election? wouldn't they just use the same tactic to try to force the balance back to their position?
They already will use the same tactic no matter what we do. A number of liberals will side with the republicans if the candidate is too far left, they did it with Obama they'll do it next time. It's just that this is accepted as normal because the moderate democrats are political NPCs and the leftists are the only people with agency that can be blamed if they vote incorrectly.
Man Reddit is not taking this whole Bernie thing well. And now Bernie saying he's gonna get delegates so he can negotiate? lol. If you have less than 50%, see ya later. Don't need your delegates. Go lead a movement instead of being salty, Bernie. Foster talent, endorse Biden and do something right.
Bernie does well as an underdog and then terribly as a loser.
On April 12 2020 03:01 GreenHorizons wrote: [quote]
Might be easier to amend the trolly analogy to a less imperfect (anything short of a treatise will be) one but let's see.
Odds aren't great it will, but revolutionary optimism springs eternal. What would it look like? Starting today it would be Biden's support plummeting when people see both his record and mental/physical condition with more scrutiny (our media is unlikely to provide). Then, desperate to replace him (before whatever becomes of the convention) Democrats across the country reject someone like Cuomo, Clinton, Buttigieg or anyone to the right of Bernie as a suitable replacement and he cleans up enough delegates in June to make it clean electorally.
Unfortunately it seems that the overwhelming number of the most politically involved Democrats have seen the worst of Biden and chose to actively support it and demand those that find it unacceptable support him anyway.
Just to be clear Bernie isn't really "derailing" imo, but hopping to an off-screen track that has far fewer people than the others with them spaced further out.
"Derailing" would fall more under refusing to move forward electorally until we committed to rebuilding the whole thing from trolly to track. I'm more just trying to encourage the people getting kicked off the trolly to the front to work to slow the trolly and untie people from the tracks (solidarity from newly unemployed middle class), encourage those kicked off to the back to not start pushing ( not tell people "Vote for Biden! It's the only moral mature choice!"), and those kicked to the sides of the trolly (affluent/comfortable onlookers under minimal/temporary financial stress) to try to tip that bih over before the billionaires send it over the edge of a rollercoaster style drop heading straight for the most marginalized people in society on both the Biden and Trump track (significantly less so, like a much bigger distance than between Biden and Trump, is the Bernie track,). The Bernie track the one being still a reasonable and viable path within the political imagination of most Americans imo.
Would you agree that the Bernie track (of all the tracks you might be persuaded to include under “acceptable”) has demonstrated the broadest appeal? And that we just recently concluded an electoral contest in which the Bernie track couldn’t find plurality support even among the “left?”
The very first contest (if you ignore everything leading up to it in media and the party) demonstrated that electoral contest was not valid imo. Several subsequent state contests demonstrated that as well. If you set aside the electoral fraud we all witnessed in Iowa and the subsequent voter suppression lines in Texas, Chicago, Wisconsin, etc.. the small fraction of the general electorate that constitutes the Democratic primary (typically a moderate group) selecting Biden doesn't allow me to draw the conclusions you have. Bernie support among the left is overwhelming, the left is only a small part of the Democratic primary (for many reasons within and beyond their control)
I mean, don’t get me wrong, a scenario in which Bernie somehow convinces Democrats to back him at the last minute sounds great to me. But Bernie just spent a year trying to convince them any way he knew how, and it didn’t work, right? What do you think will change? Coronavirus certainly didn’t seem to hurt Biden’s polling. If anything the opposite, actually.
I'm suggesting the increased scrutiny a competent and non-complacent media would provide could expose people to enough to realize how terrible of an idea it is to put Biden up against Trump and there's more than enough votes left to prevent that fate. Also that doing so by way of delayed primary voting and a delayed convention (made possible/unavoidable by covid-19) is far preferable than trying to come up with solutions after Biden is nominated or if he wins, or worse, if he loses.
But your assessment of the validity of the election isn’t the issue here. Whether you think those irregularities cost Bernie the primary (and I think it’s pretty clear they didn’t), there’s not any clear metric by which Bernie could claim legitimacy. He didn’t win the primary, he hasn’t been ahead in polls at almost any point, and at this point he himself has dropped out. You’re hoping some negative media will take Biden down, but he’s been in the public eye for decades, including as VP for eight years. If there’s an angle the media could cover him by that would sink him, why would it only happen in the next 6 months?
Do you think Bernie was wrong to drop out? Do you think he was likely to turn it around? And more importantly, do you really think there’s a real chance of convincing voters to support a guy who already dropped out?
They could ask him to draw a clock on live TV. When it shows clear signs of mental decline a responsible population would not nominate him for president.
I don't think dropping out or "suspending" his campaign matters other than Democrats can't keep blaming him for them telling voters to go to the polls but I'd like to think irrefutable evidence of Biden's infirmity would be enough for him not to get enough delegates to clinch formally and the nominee would be decided at the convention.
You seem awfully confident about his infirmity, so presumably you think such evidence already exists. Care to share? Maybe put the links in a spoiler with some brief context, if you’re worried the mods won’t like it.
Outside of his better debate performances you can pretty much take your pick from his public appearances as where I've seen it. One of my favorites was seemingly forgetting Kamala Harris existed while they were both on the debate stage. Even Harris and Booker were taken back by it.
He seems perfectly cogent in that clip. Technically he said “the only African-American woman that had been elected to the US Senate.” Admittedly the pluperfect is not a very clear way to say “the first African-American Senator,” but it’s definitely not proof of cognitive decline.
If I say “Joe Biden has a stutter,” is that going to be a controversial statement here? I know some people think that’s a coverup or something.
I think it's clear that these are the established positions. People who see clear decline in his public speaking and those that see a stutter or whatever else. That's the point of the live TV clock test. We know a cognitive test is the one he skipped in his medical screening.
There are a lot of compilations that all include a handful of reasonable gaffs or whatever as well as what seem to be what even Andrea Mitchell suggested was him "losing a step".
Right, and if he successfully draws the clock everybody says “oh, nevermind, I guess he’s perfectly fine!” This seems like a straight-forward case of lose-lose for him: even if he draws it, there’s still a whole media cycle around “is Joe Biden sane” and the critics will only be emboldened.
Frankly, I think a big part of the problem here is that Joe Biden’s mental health has nothing to do with your objection to his candidacy, you just see it as an angle of attack. So maybe we should go back to talking about your real objections? Otherwise this conversation starts to not feel very good-faith.
I don't think it's just a GH thing. I've liked Biden a long time. He was my pick in 08, and I was pleased when he was picked for VP. I have the same concern about his declining coherency. He simply isn't the same man he was, even in 2012. I can't medically diagnose him, true. But I can observe he is make way less sense today than he was four or eight years ago. Yes, he's always been Joe 'foot in mouth' Biden. But it's not the same thing anymore, and it's very sad to see as someone who thought he could have taken on Trump four years ago. Probably I was wrong four years ago because what do I know about who could take on Trump- no-one else has figured it out yet. But still. Even four years ago Biden made more sense.
On April 12 2020 03:24 ChristianS wrote: [quote] Would you agree that the Bernie track (of all the tracks you might be persuaded to include under “acceptable”) has demonstrated the broadest appeal? And that we just recently concluded an electoral contest in which the Bernie track couldn’t find plurality support even among the “left?”
The very first contest (if you ignore everything leading up to it in media and the party) demonstrated that electoral contest was not valid imo. Several subsequent state contests demonstrated that as well. If you set aside the electoral fraud we all witnessed in Iowa and the subsequent voter suppression lines in Texas, Chicago, Wisconsin, etc.. the small fraction of the general electorate that constitutes the Democratic primary (typically a moderate group) selecting Biden doesn't allow me to draw the conclusions you have. Bernie support among the left is overwhelming, the left is only a small part of the Democratic primary (for many reasons within and beyond their control)
I mean, don’t get me wrong, a scenario in which Bernie somehow convinces Democrats to back him at the last minute sounds great to me. But Bernie just spent a year trying to convince them any way he knew how, and it didn’t work, right? What do you think will change? Coronavirus certainly didn’t seem to hurt Biden’s polling. If anything the opposite, actually.
I'm suggesting the increased scrutiny a competent and non-complacent media would provide could expose people to enough to realize how terrible of an idea it is to put Biden up against Trump and there's more than enough votes left to prevent that fate. Also that doing so by way of delayed primary voting and a delayed convention (made possible/unavoidable by covid-19) is far preferable than trying to come up with solutions after Biden is nominated or if he wins, or worse, if he loses.
But your assessment of the validity of the election isn’t the issue here. Whether you think those irregularities cost Bernie the primary (and I think it’s pretty clear they didn’t), there’s not any clear metric by which Bernie could claim legitimacy. He didn’t win the primary, he hasn’t been ahead in polls at almost any point, and at this point he himself has dropped out. You’re hoping some negative media will take Biden down, but he’s been in the public eye for decades, including as VP for eight years. If there’s an angle the media could cover him by that would sink him, why would it only happen in the next 6 months?
Do you think Bernie was wrong to drop out? Do you think he was likely to turn it around? And more importantly, do you really think there’s a real chance of convincing voters to support a guy who already dropped out?
They could ask him to draw a clock on live TV. When it shows clear signs of mental decline a responsible population would not nominate him for president.
I don't think dropping out or "suspending" his campaign matters other than Democrats can't keep blaming him for them telling voters to go to the polls but I'd like to think irrefutable evidence of Biden's infirmity would be enough for him not to get enough delegates to clinch formally and the nominee would be decided at the convention.
You seem awfully confident about his infirmity, so presumably you think such evidence already exists. Care to share? Maybe put the links in a spoiler with some brief context, if you’re worried the mods won’t like it.
Outside of his better debate performances you can pretty much take your pick from his public appearances as where I've seen it. One of my favorites was seemingly forgetting Kamala Harris existed while they were both on the debate stage. Even Harris and Booker were taken back by it.
He seems perfectly cogent in that clip. Technically he said “the only African-American woman that had been elected to the US Senate.” Admittedly the pluperfect is not a very clear way to say “the first African-American Senator,” but it’s definitely not proof of cognitive decline.
If I say “Joe Biden has a stutter,” is that going to be a controversial statement here? I know some people think that’s a coverup or something.
I think it's clear that these are the established positions. People who see clear decline in his public speaking and those that see a stutter or whatever else. That's the point of the live TV clock test. We know a cognitive test is the one he skipped in his medical screening.
There are a lot of compilations that all include a handful of reasonable gaffs or whatever as well as what seem to be what even Andrea Mitchell suggested was him "losing a step".
Right, and if he successfully draws the clock everybody says “oh, nevermind, I guess he’s perfectly fine!” This seems like a straight-forward case of lose-lose for him: even if he draws it, there’s still a whole media cycle around “is Joe Biden sane” and the critics will only be emboldened.
Frankly, I think a big part of the problem here is that Joe Biden’s mental health has nothing to do with your objection to his candidacy, you just see it as an angle of attack. So maybe we should go back to talking about your real objections? Otherwise this conversation starts to not feel very good-faith.
I don't think it's just a GH thing. I've liked Biden a long time. He was my pick in 08, and I was pleased when he was picked for VP. I have the same concern about his declining coherency. He simply isn't the same man he was, even in 2012. I can't medically diagnose him, true. But I can observe he is make way less sense today than he was four or eight years ago. Yes, he's always been Joe 'foot in mouth' Biden. But it's not the same thing anymore, and it's very sad to see as someone who thought he could have taken on Trump four years ago. Probably I was wrong four years ago because what do I know about who could take on Trump- no-one else has figured it out yet. But still. Even four years ago Biden made more sense.
That Biden had energy and despite not being a huge fan of him he could plausibly play the Everyman Joe fighting your corner, absolutely can see him trading blows with Trump, either on the debate stage or the wider media stage on a campaign.
Now, unless he has some other malaise he snaps out of I just can’t see that at all, Trump will murder him in that domain.
Biden could absolutely still win the election regardless, but I don’t think he’ll be winning it in the debate stage or the town halls.
I definitely second the impression that biden's age is showing, been feeling that since he announced his candidacy.
I'd still vote for him against Trump without a second's hesitation or ill feeling about it, though. Trump wants everything to be about himself and his gut feeling is the primary motor behind his decision making process - I'd expect Biden to have a far more delegatory nature and his mental decline to be less of a big deal in how he performs his presidential duties. To me, it's more worrisome in terms of how likely he is to win the general election - when Biden was attacked for bis apparent senility in one of the debates, it seemed to play very poorly with the crowd, but Trump and the people surrounding him aren't gonna pull any punches at all.
EPT
