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On April 12 2020 20:38 mahrgell wrote:Show nested quote +On April 12 2020 06:28 Elroi wrote:On April 11 2020 22:27 GreenHorizons wrote: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. Enlighten me. What happened in Germany?
This is not the right thread to discuss this but I will answer briefly. After the Fukushima disaster 2011, Germany decided to stop the production of nuclear energy. This has lead to rising pollution as well as about a 30% increase in price of electricity. Germany is a disaster in the fight against global warming, for example the country emits about twice as much co2 per capita as France. All this at a cost of almost 12 billion dollars per year, which is the cost of the transition away from nuclear power according to Forbes.
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On April 13 2020 02:59 mahrgell wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2020 02:35 Nyxisto wrote:On April 12 2020 20:38 mahrgell wrote:On April 12 2020 06:28 Elroi wrote:On April 11 2020 22:27 GreenHorizons wrote: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. Enlighten me. What happened in Germany? We're missing our own emission targets by a mile and keep countless of dirty as fuck coal plants open. And most of it from lignite, which is pretty much the worst polluter around. Bernie's ban on nuclear, and just as importantly, his ban on fracking would be disastrous for the US. The shale revolution and the resulting increase in the utilization of natural gas in the US is a major driver behind reduced emissions. Banning fracking and nuclear power is basically strengthening autocratic oil nations on the planet, destroying jobs, and harming your own environment. Oh yes, Germany should certainly be ashamed of its energy mix when compared to the US! 2019: Germany: 29.1% Coal, 10.5% Gas, 13.8% Nuclear, 46.1% Renewables USA: 23.5% Coal, 38.4% Gas, 19.7% Nuclear, 17.5% Renewables All bless the greatest green revolution, fracking. Only this will save the environment. You were kidding, right? I really hope so... Bonus points for the US having twice the energy consumption per capita.
No, I wasn't kidding at all. All other things being equal gas is preferable to coal and nuclear energy is preferable to both. Increasing nuclear capacity quickly is however quite difficult so the increase in natural gas usage in the US is a pretty important part of the solution. And obviously, Germany's situation could be significantly better had we invested in nuclear energy instead of trying to end it.
There is simply no upside to eliminating important alternatives to coal, and the anti-scientific opposition to nuclear energy in particular quite common everywhere is a problem.
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On April 13 2020 02:40 TheTenthDoc wrote:Show nested quote +On April 12 2020 09:44 Zambrah wrote:On April 12 2020 08:21 Liquid`Drone wrote:
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. Yeah, Trump is going to HAMMER him in any debates, Biden is almost guaranteed to trail off into nothingness multiple times and Trump will probably throw some serious barbs his way.
That being said, I still don't think thats going to help Trump win. Trump won when noone knew how he'd perform, against an unfathomably unpopular candidate, after a full 8 year Democrat presidency, and he lost the popular vote. Im pretty sure nothing will change between now and election day when it comes to who people are voting for, camps are set, most people who are engaged are going to be impossible to budge from their anti-Trump or pro-Trump vote. Having watched the Trump/Clinton debates, this seems unlikely to me. Trump was and is a very, very bad debater, and the trends in polling for him were pretty bad in the aftermath of all the 2016 debates (even the primary ones IIRC). I think the "trail off into nothingness" meter will be at least equal for both and Trump descends into nonsense very quickly even when he has a script. That said, you're right that debates are just so far from election day and the news cycle has accelerated so much that their impact on actual votes is not likely to be very high. (also, for what it's worth I thought Biden did fantastic in the 2012 debates against Paul Ryan-watching those debates is a master class in humiliating your opponent and undermining their claims of being a "policy wonk"-but Paul Ryan is a terrible debater and that will have been 8 years ago, so it's not worth much)
I don't get how you can call Trump a very bad debater in the context of presidential debates. He's great at saying what his potential supporters want to hear, and I don't think you can say the same about Clinton. In my opinion he gained more than he lost from those debates, though I admit that's arguable. Either way I don't see how Trump's a much worse debater than Clinton or Biden. I have more faith in Biden than I had in Clinton because he can at least make himself sound like he believes in what he says.
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On April 13 2020 03:15 Sent. wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2020 02:40 TheTenthDoc wrote:On April 12 2020 09:44 Zambrah wrote:On April 12 2020 08:21 Liquid`Drone wrote:
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. Yeah, Trump is going to HAMMER him in any debates, Biden is almost guaranteed to trail off into nothingness multiple times and Trump will probably throw some serious barbs his way.
That being said, I still don't think thats going to help Trump win. Trump won when noone knew how he'd perform, against an unfathomably unpopular candidate, after a full 8 year Democrat presidency, and he lost the popular vote. Im pretty sure nothing will change between now and election day when it comes to who people are voting for, camps are set, most people who are engaged are going to be impossible to budge from their anti-Trump or pro-Trump vote. Having watched the Trump/Clinton debates, this seems unlikely to me. Trump was and is a very, very bad debater, and the trends in polling for him were pretty bad in the aftermath of all the 2016 debates (even the primary ones IIRC). I think the "trail off into nothingness" meter will be at least equal for both and Trump descends into nonsense very quickly even when he has a script. That said, you're right that debates are just so far from election day and the news cycle has accelerated so much that their impact on actual votes is not likely to be very high. (also, for what it's worth I thought Biden did fantastic in the 2012 debates against Paul Ryan-watching those debates is a master class in humiliating your opponent and undermining their claims of being a "policy wonk"-but Paul Ryan is a terrible debater and that will have been 8 years ago, so it's not worth much) I don't get how you can call Trump a very bad debater in the context of presidential debates. He's great at saying what his potential supporters want to hear, and I don't think you can say the same about Clinton. In my opinion he gained more than he lost from those debates, though I admit that's arguable. Either way I don't see how Trump's a much worse debater than Clinton or Biden. I have more faith in Biden than I had in Clinton because he can at least make himself sound like he believes in what he says.
Oh, he definitely came off better to his supporters in the debates. I just have only seen results that point to very negative results among general voters. At least among non-online polls, he lost by anywhere from 11% to 40% in the first debate (with the 40% result from Fox News, oof).
Even if you think these are heavily biased, evidence pointed to Clinton gaining ~2-3 points in polling averages after the first debate which evaporated away as more news came out (it's much harder to consider this in the context of the second debate, which was very close to the Access Hollywood tape drop). While it's possible these polls were systematically biased (and they weren't by *that* much nationally), it would be odd for them to be differentially biased pre and post debate and for that differential bias to vanish over time.
Of course, it's all a matter of perception so quantifying it is tough. Maybe he did win the debates and it just took time for his performance to sink in. I haven't seen much evidence that supports that, but it could be the case. It always just nags me when people cite him as a good debater when all evidence points to him being a poor one in 2016, and his word salad has only gotten worse (just like Biden's).
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On April 13 2020 01:30 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2020 01:19 IgnE wrote:On April 12 2020 04:17 ChristianS wrote:On April 12 2020 03:36 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 12 2020 03:24 ChristianS wrote:On April 12 2020 03:01 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 12 2020 02:35 ChristianS wrote:On April 12 2020 02:18 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 12 2020 01:44 ChristianS wrote: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. Trolly version: + Show Spoiler +"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? What about Tara Reade's accusations? Yeah, that one’s a little more plausible. If we’re answering “how will the public respond once this story is widely reported?” I have no idea what the answer is, or what would happen if more women came forward. My intuition is that it would damage but not sink him, but that’s really nothing more than a guess. What if we had an Access Hollywood-style “in his own words” proof of sorts? Probably the more difficult question is “how should we respond to credible but unproven allegations against powerful figures like this?” I had a long back-and-forth with Mohdoo a few months ago that felt productive (to me, at least), but I suspect the same conversation in this context would be impossible to have. Tempers are a lot higher now than they are then.
If it's credible then he should be shouted down to suspend his campaign the same way people told Fraken to gtfo when things came out about him for a position he already held, at a lesser station, on a lesser allegation.
The flak blanketing Biden from this is ridiculous. People saying they don't care because it's 1 allegation and not the 21 pointed at Trump - as if you couldn't even just put another moderate instead if you're so deadset on being anti-Bernie. People accusing blindly that she's a Russian plant because she made a blog post a few years back about liking the country after visiting or something. More like #BelieveAllWomenWhenIt'sConvenient
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On April 13 2020 03:54 Gahlo wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2020 01:30 ChristianS wrote:On April 13 2020 01:19 IgnE wrote:On April 12 2020 04:17 ChristianS wrote:On April 12 2020 03:36 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 12 2020 03:24 ChristianS wrote:On April 12 2020 03:01 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 12 2020 02:35 ChristianS wrote:On April 12 2020 02:18 GreenHorizons wrote: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. Trolly version: + Show Spoiler +"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? What about Tara Reade's accusations? Yeah, that one’s a little more plausible. If we’re answering “how will the public respond once this story is widely reported?” I have no idea what the answer is, or what would happen if more women came forward. My intuition is that it would damage but not sink him, but that’s really nothing more than a guess. What if we had an Access Hollywood-style “in his own words” proof of sorts? Probably the more difficult question is “how should we respond to credible but unproven allegations against powerful figures like this?” I had a long back-and-forth with Mohdoo a few months ago that felt productive (to me, at least), but I suspect the same conversation in this context would be impossible to have. Tempers are a lot higher now than they are then. If it's credible then he should be shouted down to suspend his campaign the same way people told Fraken to gtfo when things came out about him for a position he already held, at a lesser station, on a lesser allegation. The flak blanketing Biden from this is ridiculous. People saying they don't care because it's 1 allegation and not the 21 pointed at Trump - as if you couldn't even just put another moderate instead if you're so deadset on being anti-Bernie. People accusing blindly that she's a Russian plant because she made a blog post a few years back about liking the country after visiting or something. More like #BelieveAllWomenWhenIt'sConvenient
This is Neb's point about agency. Democrats are helpless to prevent nominating a child caging, racist, probable rapist and/or just think that's better than social democratic policy.
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On April 13 2020 03:54 Gahlo wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2020 01:30 ChristianS wrote:On April 13 2020 01:19 IgnE wrote:On April 12 2020 04:17 ChristianS wrote:On April 12 2020 03:36 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 12 2020 03:24 ChristianS wrote:On April 12 2020 03:01 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 12 2020 02:35 ChristianS wrote:On April 12 2020 02:18 GreenHorizons wrote: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. Trolly version: + Show Spoiler +"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? What about Tara Reade's accusations? Yeah, that one’s a little more plausible. If we’re answering “how will the public respond once this story is widely reported?” I have no idea what the answer is, or what would happen if more women came forward. My intuition is that it would damage but not sink him, but that’s really nothing more than a guess. What if we had an Access Hollywood-style “in his own words” proof of sorts? Probably the more difficult question is “how should we respond to credible but unproven allegations against powerful figures like this?” I had a long back-and-forth with Mohdoo a few months ago that felt productive (to me, at least), but I suspect the same conversation in this context would be impossible to have. Tempers are a lot higher now than they are then. If it's credible then he should be shouted down to suspend his campaign the same way people told Fraken to gtfo when things came out about him for a position he already held, at a lesser station, on a lesser allegation. The flak blanketing Biden from this is ridiculous. People saying they don't care because it's 1 allegation and not the 21 pointed at Trump - as if you couldn't even just put another moderate instead if you're so deadset on being anti-Bernie. People accusing blindly that she's a Russian plant because she made a blog post a few years back about liking the country after visiting or something. More like #BelieveAllWomenWhenIt'sConvenient
But there was photographic evidence with Franken, no?
As I said to Mohdoo a few months ago, I always blink when people say without a qualifier “#BelieveWomen,” because I don’t think it takes much analysis to see that “any man accused of anything by a woman should immediately be cancelled unless the accusations can be incontrovertibly disproven” isn’t a very workable system. If the only choices are “she’s a filthy liar who should be mocked and shunned” or “he’s a filthy rapist who should be imprisoned or, at least, shunned and unemployable” a lot of lives will be ruined on either side. Of course, that conversation was in the context of Warren being called (paraphrase) “a greater enemy to women than sexists because false accusations make other women less likely to be believed,” so in that context, I didn’t get a ton of pushback on the idea that #BelieveWomen needs some qualifiers.
The trouble is that the public is desperately uncomfortable with uncertainty, but the situation is fundamentally uncertain. So they look for some way to collapse on either “she’s a liar” or “he’s the devil” and use that as the answer to every question about how to treat both of them.
The question of whether we should treat the allegations as true or not really needs to depend on for what purpose. If a girl confides her story in a friend, they should be understanding and not interrogate her for “proof.” If she’s asking for criminal charges, we should expect some proof. Our present situation is in between: she’s not calling for imprisonment, but she’s clearly interested in ending his career.
How credible is the claim? If I’m not mistaken, she says she told a friend and a family member at the time; both of them confirm. To my knowledge there’s no physical proof, either of the assault or that she told people. Iirc Christina Blasey Ford had therapist notes long predating Kavanaugh’s nomination; no such proof exists here.
As I understand it, she had come forward previously last year, and specifically did not describe anything like what she now alleges; at the time it was more the kind of “hair-sniffing”/invasion of personal space stuff that several other women also described. On the one hand, it’s not unusual for victims of sexual assault to downplay what happened to them out of shame/fear of what people will think of them; on the other hand it’s often considered a sign of invented rather than factual stories that the story changes substantially over time.
In terms of motivation, Tara Reade is apparently a big Bernie fan (and, bizarrely, a big Putin fan); that obviously doesn’t disprove her allegations, and it certainly wouldn’t be surprising that she wouldn’t support Biden if her allegations are true. But it does offer a pretty decent answer to “why would she make this up (and choose the moment she did to come forward)?” If I’m not mistaken (and someone please correct me if I am) she first revealed these new allegations on a pro-Bernie politics podcast, which would be pretty consistent with the “desperate Bernie supporter tries desperate tactic” narrative.
So where does that leave us? Obviously YMMV, but to me, the allegations rest entirely on the word of Tara Reade (and to a lesser extent, that of her friend and family member); and we can’t rule out that this allegation was invented to influence the Democratic nomination. That leaves a lot of uncertainty about what actually happened, enough so that I don’t think “cancelling”/ending the career of the accused is warranted.
If I’ve misrepresented the facts anywhere, I promise it was unintentional and I invite someone to correct me. Otherwise, I’m sure some of you disagree with me, but I’ve tried to approach the subject carefully and compassionately; I hope you guys will do the same.
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On April 13 2020 03:59 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2020 03:54 Gahlo wrote:On April 13 2020 01:30 ChristianS wrote:On April 13 2020 01:19 IgnE wrote:On April 12 2020 04:17 ChristianS wrote:On April 12 2020 03:36 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 12 2020 03:24 ChristianS wrote:On April 12 2020 03:01 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 12 2020 02:35 ChristianS wrote: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. Trolly version: + Show Spoiler +"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? What about Tara Reade's accusations? Yeah, that one’s a little more plausible. If we’re answering “how will the public respond once this story is widely reported?” I have no idea what the answer is, or what would happen if more women came forward. My intuition is that it would damage but not sink him, but that’s really nothing more than a guess. What if we had an Access Hollywood-style “in his own words” proof of sorts? Probably the more difficult question is “how should we respond to credible but unproven allegations against powerful figures like this?” I had a long back-and-forth with Mohdoo a few months ago that felt productive (to me, at least), but I suspect the same conversation in this context would be impossible to have. Tempers are a lot higher now than they are then. If it's credible then he should be shouted down to suspend his campaign the same way people told Fraken to gtfo when things came out about him for a position he already held, at a lesser station, on a lesser allegation. The flak blanketing Biden from this is ridiculous. People saying they don't care because it's 1 allegation and not the 21 pointed at Trump - as if you couldn't even just put another moderate instead if you're so deadset on being anti-Bernie. People accusing blindly that she's a Russian plant because she made a blog post a few years back about liking the country after visiting or something. More like #BelieveAllWomenWhenIt'sConvenient This is Neb's point about agency. Democrats are helpless to prevent nominating a child caging, racist, probable rapist and/or just think that's better than social democratic policy.
I even heard he was raping children in pizzerias. And that he had death squads assassinating people who worked for his campaign.
I suggest we call him Killden.
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On April 13 2020 05:40 Biff The Understudy wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2020 03:59 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 13 2020 03:54 Gahlo wrote:On April 13 2020 01:30 ChristianS wrote:On April 13 2020 01:19 IgnE wrote:On April 12 2020 04:17 ChristianS wrote:On April 12 2020 03:36 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 12 2020 03:24 ChristianS wrote:On April 12 2020 03:01 GreenHorizons wrote: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. Trolly version: + Show Spoiler +"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? What about Tara Reade's accusations? Yeah, that one’s a little more plausible. If we’re answering “how will the public respond once this story is widely reported?” I have no idea what the answer is, or what would happen if more women came forward. My intuition is that it would damage but not sink him, but that’s really nothing more than a guess. What if we had an Access Hollywood-style “in his own words” proof of sorts? Probably the more difficult question is “how should we respond to credible but unproven allegations against powerful figures like this?” I had a long back-and-forth with Mohdoo a few months ago that felt productive (to me, at least), but I suspect the same conversation in this context would be impossible to have. Tempers are a lot higher now than they are then. If it's credible then he should be shouted down to suspend his campaign the same way people told Fraken to gtfo when things came out about him for a position he already held, at a lesser station, on a lesser allegation. The flak blanketing Biden from this is ridiculous. People saying they don't care because it's 1 allegation and not the 21 pointed at Trump - as if you couldn't even just put another moderate instead if you're so deadset on being anti-Bernie. People accusing blindly that she's a Russian plant because she made a blog post a few years back about liking the country after visiting or something. More like #BelieveAllWomenWhenIt'sConvenient This is Neb's point about agency. Democrats are helpless to prevent nominating a child caging, racist, probable rapist and/or just think that's better than social democratic policy. I even heard he was raping children in pizzerias. And that he had death squads assassinating people who worked for his campaign. I suggest we call him Killden.
I think this kind of mocking and dismissive tone is unhelpful but tolerable in normal political discourse, but you should be more sensitive about alleged sexual assault. A lot of implausible and dismissable accusations have been leveled against Hillary and Biden; I don’t think this is one of them.
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On April 13 2020 05:40 Biff The Understudy wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2020 03:59 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 13 2020 03:54 Gahlo wrote:On April 13 2020 01:30 ChristianS wrote:On April 13 2020 01:19 IgnE wrote:On April 12 2020 04:17 ChristianS wrote:On April 12 2020 03:36 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 12 2020 03:24 ChristianS wrote:On April 12 2020 03:01 GreenHorizons wrote: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. Trolly version: + Show Spoiler +"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? What about Tara Reade's accusations? Yeah, that one’s a little more plausible. If we’re answering “how will the public respond once this story is widely reported?” I have no idea what the answer is, or what would happen if more women came forward. My intuition is that it would damage but not sink him, but that’s really nothing more than a guess. What if we had an Access Hollywood-style “in his own words” proof of sorts? Probably the more difficult question is “how should we respond to credible but unproven allegations against powerful figures like this?” I had a long back-and-forth with Mohdoo a few months ago that felt productive (to me, at least), but I suspect the same conversation in this context would be impossible to have. Tempers are a lot higher now than they are then. If it's credible then he should be shouted down to suspend his campaign the same way people told Fraken to gtfo when things came out about him for a position he already held, at a lesser station, on a lesser allegation. The flak blanketing Biden from this is ridiculous. People saying they don't care because it's 1 allegation and not the 21 pointed at Trump - as if you couldn't even just put another moderate instead if you're so deadset on being anti-Bernie. People accusing blindly that she's a Russian plant because she made a blog post a few years back about liking the country after visiting or something. More like #BelieveAllWomenWhenIt'sConvenient This is Neb's point about agency. Democrats are helpless to prevent nominating a child caging, racist, probable rapist and/or just think that's better than social democratic policy. I even heard he was raping children in pizzerias. And that he had death squads assassinating people who worked for his campaign. I suggest we call him Killden.
I think this is a gross way for Democrats to deal with credible accusations of rape along the lines of how Republicans treated Ford. If somehow congress did drag her out for hearings I don't think Democrats will look great trying to discredit her for Biden either.
I'd add toward ChristianS point, that if Biden didn't also have a long well documented history of inappropriately touching women and violating their personal space that argument would be more convincing.
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On April 13 2020 05:40 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2020 03:54 Gahlo wrote:On April 13 2020 01:30 ChristianS wrote:On April 13 2020 01:19 IgnE wrote:On April 12 2020 04:17 ChristianS wrote:On April 12 2020 03:36 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 12 2020 03:24 ChristianS wrote:On April 12 2020 03:01 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 12 2020 02:35 ChristianS wrote: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. Trolly version: + Show Spoiler +"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? What about Tara Reade's accusations? Yeah, that one’s a little more plausible. If we’re answering “how will the public respond once this story is widely reported?” I have no idea what the answer is, or what would happen if more women came forward. My intuition is that it would damage but not sink him, but that’s really nothing more than a guess. What if we had an Access Hollywood-style “in his own words” proof of sorts? Probably the more difficult question is “how should we respond to credible but unproven allegations against powerful figures like this?” I had a long back-and-forth with Mohdoo a few months ago that felt productive (to me, at least), but I suspect the same conversation in this context would be impossible to have. Tempers are a lot higher now than they are then. If it's credible then he should be shouted down to suspend his campaign the same way people told Fraken to gtfo when things came out about him for a position he already held, at a lesser station, on a lesser allegation. The flak blanketing Biden from this is ridiculous. People saying they don't care because it's 1 allegation and not the 21 pointed at Trump - as if you couldn't even just put another moderate instead if you're so deadset on being anti-Bernie. People accusing blindly that she's a Russian plant because she made a blog post a few years back about liking the country after visiting or something. More like #BelieveAllWomenWhenIt'sConvenient But there was photographic evidence with Franken, no?
There was a picture of him clearly not touching the person (he was hovering his hands over her vest. Tasteless, but not assaulty). It did look like he was, but only as long as it was a low res version of the picture viewed from far away. The person in the photo was also a far right troll/'journalist' later on in life. Her allegation that they had a kiss she was uncomfortable with left out that it was rehearsal for a skit - which was their job at the time (still not great, but the blame for making her do a skit she wasn't comfortable with falls on everyone involved, rather than just Franken).
There were several allegations of him groping women's asses when taking group photos, though, which were more problematic but never actually investigated.
There's a reason coming for him when she did killed Gillbrand's presidential run dead in the water (as him resigning prevented a full investigation), and it wasn't entirely misogyny.
There's far more video photographic proof of Biden engaging in weird, creepy behavior around women and girls. The only difference is that there are no Roy Moore or Kavanaugh hearings coming up, and moderates know that coming for him would leave Bernie as the alternative. There WAS a big deal made about it back in September, but after all the other moderates puttered out it seems to have been put aside as old news.
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On April 13 2020 05:40 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2020 03:54 Gahlo wrote:On April 13 2020 01:30 ChristianS wrote:On April 13 2020 01:19 IgnE wrote:On April 12 2020 04:17 ChristianS wrote:On April 12 2020 03:36 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 12 2020 03:24 ChristianS wrote:On April 12 2020 03:01 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 12 2020 02:35 ChristianS wrote: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. Trolly version: + Show Spoiler +"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? What about Tara Reade's accusations? Yeah, that one’s a little more plausible. If we’re answering “how will the public respond once this story is widely reported?” I have no idea what the answer is, or what would happen if more women came forward. My intuition is that it would damage but not sink him, but that’s really nothing more than a guess. What if we had an Access Hollywood-style “in his own words” proof of sorts? Probably the more difficult question is “how should we respond to credible but unproven allegations against powerful figures like this?” I had a long back-and-forth with Mohdoo a few months ago that felt productive (to me, at least), but I suspect the same conversation in this context would be impossible to have. Tempers are a lot higher now than they are then. If it's credible then he should be shouted down to suspend his campaign the same way people told Fraken to gtfo when things came out about him for a position he already held, at a lesser station, on a lesser allegation. The flak blanketing Biden from this is ridiculous. People saying they don't care because it's 1 allegation and not the 21 pointed at Trump - as if you couldn't even just put another moderate instead if you're so deadset on being anti-Bernie. People accusing blindly that she's a Russian plant because she made a blog post a few years back about liking the country after visiting or something. More like #BelieveAllWomenWhenIt'sConvenient But there was photographic evidence with Franken, no? As I said to Mohdoo a few months ago, I always blink when people say without a qualifier “#BelieveWomen,” because I don’t think it takes much analysis to see that “any man accused of anything by a woman should immediately be cancelled unless the accusations can be incontrovertibly disproven” isn’t a very workable system. If the only choices are “she’s a filthy liar who should be mocked and shunned” or “he’s a filthy rapist who should be imprisoned or, at least, shunned and unemployable” a lot of lives will be ruined on either side. Of course, that conversation was in the context of Warren being called (paraphrase) “a greater enemy to women than sexists because false accusations make other women less likely to be believed,” so in that context, I didn’t get a ton of pushback on the idea that #BelieveWomen needs some qualifiers. The trouble is that the public is desperately uncomfortable with uncertainty, but the situation is fundamentally uncertain. So they look for some way to collapse on either “she’s a liar” or “he’s the devil” and use that as the answer to every question about how to treat both of them. The question of whether we should treat the allegations as true or not really needs to depend on for what purpose. If a girl confides her story in a friend, they should be understanding and not interrogate her for “proof.” If she’s asking for criminal charges, we should expect some proof. Our present situation is in between: she’s not calling for imprisonment, but she’s clearly interested in ending his career. How credible is the claim? If I’m not mistaken, she says she told a friend and a family member at the time; both of them confirm. To my knowledge there’s no physical proof, either of the assault or that she told people. Iirc Christina Blasey Ford had therapist notes long predating Kavanaugh’s nomination; no such proof exists here. As I understand it, she had come forward previously last year, and specifically did not describe anything like what she now alleges; at the time it was more the kind of “hair-sniffing”/invasion of personal space stuff that several other women also described. On the one hand, it’s not unusual for victims of sexual assault to downplay what happened to them out of shame/fear of what people will think of them; on the other hand it’s often considered a sign of invented rather than factual stories that the story changes substantially over time. In terms of motivation, Tara Reade is apparently a big Bernie fan (and, bizarrely, a big Putin fan); that obviously doesn’t disprove her allegations, and it certainly wouldn’t be surprising that she wouldn’t support Biden if her allegations are true. But it does offer a pretty decent answer to “why would she make this up (and choose the moment she did to come forward)?” If I’m not mistaken (and someone please correct me if I am) she first revealed these new allegations on a pro-Bernie politics podcast, which would be pretty consistent with the “desperate Bernie supporter tries desperate tactic” narrative. So where does that leave us? Obviously YMMV, but to me, the allegations rest entirely on the word of Tara Reade (and to a lesser extent, that of her friend and family member); and we can’t rule out that this allegation was invented to influence the Democratic nomination. That leaves a lot of uncertainty about what actually happened, enough so that I don’t think “cancelling”/ending the career of the accused is warranted. If I’ve misrepresented the facts anywhere, I promise it was unintentional and I invite someone to correct me. Otherwise, I’m sure some of you disagree with me, but I’ve tried to approach the subject carefully and compassionately; I hope you guys will do the same.
That's where you're kinda losing the plot. They are refusing to even hear her out. They're just circling the wagons the same way Rs did for Kavanaugh. If we're gonna play semantics with "believe women" then I think we can agree that the interpretation of "hear women out" is the goal, which is flat out not happening here. Granted, I don't think in the majority of cases an automatic canceling is reasonable - since yeah she may be lying or misremembering - but if there's a reasonable concern that the guy we want to be president(or dislike the least as the case may be) is a rapist then a pause isn't unreasonable. Did Ford come forward with all her evidence before the hearing? Idr.
If there's no meat to it when they hear it out, that's the breaks. It fucking sucks that people don't have evidence of something horrible happening to them, which may not be the case here. Same way we don't know whether or not Bernie said a woman can't be president, there's no evidence of it, and his past behavior firmly leads otherwise. However, instead of addressing it, they just keep dodging from it.
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Northern Ireland25405 Posts
On April 13 2020 05:40 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2020 03:54 Gahlo wrote:On April 13 2020 01:30 ChristianS wrote:On April 13 2020 01:19 IgnE wrote:On April 12 2020 04:17 ChristianS wrote:On April 12 2020 03:36 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 12 2020 03:24 ChristianS wrote:On April 12 2020 03:01 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 12 2020 02:35 ChristianS wrote: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. Trolly version: + Show Spoiler +"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? What about Tara Reade's accusations? Yeah, that one’s a little more plausible. If we’re answering “how will the public respond once this story is widely reported?” I have no idea what the answer is, or what would happen if more women came forward. My intuition is that it would damage but not sink him, but that’s really nothing more than a guess. What if we had an Access Hollywood-style “in his own words” proof of sorts? Probably the more difficult question is “how should we respond to credible but unproven allegations against powerful figures like this?” I had a long back-and-forth with Mohdoo a few months ago that felt productive (to me, at least), but I suspect the same conversation in this context would be impossible to have. Tempers are a lot higher now than they are then. If it's credible then he should be shouted down to suspend his campaign the same way people told Fraken to gtfo when things came out about him for a position he already held, at a lesser station, on a lesser allegation. The flak blanketing Biden from this is ridiculous. People saying they don't care because it's 1 allegation and not the 21 pointed at Trump - as if you couldn't even just put another moderate instead if you're so deadset on being anti-Bernie. People accusing blindly that she's a Russian plant because she made a blog post a few years back about liking the country after visiting or something. More like #BelieveAllWomenWhenIt'sConvenient But there was photographic evidence with Franken, no? As I said to Mohdoo a few months ago, I always blink when people say without a qualifier “#BelieveWomen,” because I don’t think it takes much analysis to see that “any man accused of anything by a woman should immediately be cancelled unless the accusations can be incontrovertibly disproven” isn’t a very workable system. If the only choices are “she’s a filthy liar who should be mocked and shunned” or “he’s a filthy rapist who should be imprisoned or, at least, shunned and unemployable” a lot of lives will be ruined on either side. Of course, that conversation was in the context of Warren being called (paraphrase) “a greater enemy to women than sexists because false accusations make other women less likely to be believed,” so in that context, I didn’t get a ton of pushback on the idea that #BelieveWomen needs some qualifiers. The trouble is that the public is desperately uncomfortable with uncertainty, but the situation is fundamentally uncertain. So they look for some way to collapse on either “she’s a liar” or “he’s the devil” and use that as the answer to every question about how to treat both of them. The question of whether we should treat the allegations as true or not really needs to depend on for what purpose. If a girl confides her story in a friend, they should be understanding and not interrogate her for “proof.” If she’s asking for criminal charges, we should expect some proof. Our present situation is in between: she’s not calling for imprisonment, but she’s clearly interested in ending his career. How credible is the claim? If I’m not mistaken, she says she told a friend and a family member at the time; both of them confirm. To my knowledge there’s no physical proof, either of the assault or that she told people. Iirc Christina Blasey Ford had therapist notes long predating Kavanaugh’s nomination; no such proof exists here. As I understand it, she had come forward previously last year, and specifically did not describe anything like what she now alleges; at the time it was more the kind of “hair-sniffing”/invasion of personal space stuff that several other women also described. On the one hand, it’s not unusual for victims of sexual assault to downplay what happened to them out of shame/fear of what people will think of them; on the other hand it’s often considered a sign of invented rather than factual stories that the story changes substantially over time. In terms of motivation, Tara Reade is apparently a big Bernie fan (and, bizarrely, a big Putin fan); that obviously doesn’t disprove her allegations, and it certainly wouldn’t be surprising that she wouldn’t support Biden if her allegations are true. But it does offer a pretty decent answer to “why would she make this up (and choose the moment she did to come forward)?” If I’m not mistaken (and someone please correct me if I am) she first revealed these new allegations on a pro-Bernie politics podcast, which would be pretty consistent with the “desperate Bernie supporter tries desperate tactic” narrative. So where does that leave us? Obviously YMMV, but to me, the allegations rest entirely on the word of Tara Reade (and to a lesser extent, that of her friend and family member); and we can’t rule out that this allegation was invented to influence the Democratic nomination. That leaves a lot of uncertainty about what actually happened, enough so that I don’t think “cancelling”/ending the career of the accused is warranted. If I’ve misrepresented the facts anywhere, I promise it was unintentional and I invite someone to correct me. Otherwise, I’m sure some of you disagree with me, but I’ve tried to approach the subject carefully and compassionately; I hope you guys will do the same.
It’s a touchy subject, hard not to get someone’s back up unintentionally.
I imagine we’re in a better place than we were prior to #MeToo in this domain, but really the area we’ll see (or not) is in the populace at large being comfortable to come out over sexually inappropriate behaviour in workplaces and homes across all social strata.
I worry that these kind of cases and the surrounding conversation societally is possibly running counter to that specific aim.
How do you reassure the woman who worries about coming forward or guy worried about being falsely accused of something (despite it being rare) when the public discourse over cases is ‘he definitely did/did not do this thing’ off the bat and is all over the news and social media?
It might seem like a good idea caught up in such a social movement to expand into really debatable cases out of a sake of momentum gathering/maintaining it but I think it’s just created a space where the worst stereotypes around sexual assault and reporting it are now being played out on the news cycle.
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On April 13 2020 06:13 Gahlo wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2020 05:40 ChristianS wrote:On April 13 2020 03:54 Gahlo wrote:On April 13 2020 01:30 ChristianS wrote:On April 13 2020 01:19 IgnE wrote:On April 12 2020 04:17 ChristianS wrote:On April 12 2020 03:36 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 12 2020 03:24 ChristianS wrote:On April 12 2020 03:01 GreenHorizons wrote: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. Trolly version: + Show Spoiler +"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? What about Tara Reade's accusations? Yeah, that one’s a little more plausible. If we’re answering “how will the public respond once this story is widely reported?” I have no idea what the answer is, or what would happen if more women came forward. My intuition is that it would damage but not sink him, but that’s really nothing more than a guess. What if we had an Access Hollywood-style “in his own words” proof of sorts? Probably the more difficult question is “how should we respond to credible but unproven allegations against powerful figures like this?” I had a long back-and-forth with Mohdoo a few months ago that felt productive (to me, at least), but I suspect the same conversation in this context would be impossible to have. Tempers are a lot higher now than they are then. If it's credible then he should be shouted down to suspend his campaign the same way people told Fraken to gtfo when things came out about him for a position he already held, at a lesser station, on a lesser allegation. The flak blanketing Biden from this is ridiculous. People saying they don't care because it's 1 allegation and not the 21 pointed at Trump - as if you couldn't even just put another moderate instead if you're so deadset on being anti-Bernie. People accusing blindly that she's a Russian plant because she made a blog post a few years back about liking the country after visiting or something. More like #BelieveAllWomenWhenIt'sConvenient But there was photographic evidence with Franken, no? As I said to Mohdoo a few months ago, I always blink when people say without a qualifier “#BelieveWomen,” because I don’t think it takes much analysis to see that “any man accused of anything by a woman should immediately be cancelled unless the accusations can be incontrovertibly disproven” isn’t a very workable system. If the only choices are “she’s a filthy liar who should be mocked and shunned” or “he’s a filthy rapist who should be imprisoned or, at least, shunned and unemployable” a lot of lives will be ruined on either side. Of course, that conversation was in the context of Warren being called (paraphrase) “a greater enemy to women than sexists because false accusations make other women less likely to be believed,” so in that context, I didn’t get a ton of pushback on the idea that #BelieveWomen needs some qualifiers. The trouble is that the public is desperately uncomfortable with uncertainty, but the situation is fundamentally uncertain. So they look for some way to collapse on either “she’s a liar” or “he’s the devil” and use that as the answer to every question about how to treat both of them. The question of whether we should treat the allegations as true or not really needs to depend on for what purpose. If a girl confides her story in a friend, they should be understanding and not interrogate her for “proof.” If she’s asking for criminal charges, we should expect some proof. Our present situation is in between: she’s not calling for imprisonment, but she’s clearly interested in ending his career. How credible is the claim? If I’m not mistaken, she says she told a friend and a family member at the time; both of them confirm. To my knowledge there’s no physical proof, either of the assault or that she told people. Iirc Christina Blasey Ford had therapist notes long predating Kavanaugh’s nomination; no such proof exists here. As I understand it, she had come forward previously last year, and specifically did not describe anything like what she now alleges; at the time it was more the kind of “hair-sniffing”/invasion of personal space stuff that several other women also described. On the one hand, it’s not unusual for victims of sexual assault to downplay what happened to them out of shame/fear of what people will think of them; on the other hand it’s often considered a sign of invented rather than factual stories that the story changes substantially over time. In terms of motivation, Tara Reade is apparently a big Bernie fan (and, bizarrely, a big Putin fan); that obviously doesn’t disprove her allegations, and it certainly wouldn’t be surprising that she wouldn’t support Biden if her allegations are true. But it does offer a pretty decent answer to “why would she make this up (and choose the moment she did to come forward)?” If I’m not mistaken (and someone please correct me if I am) she first revealed these new allegations on a pro-Bernie politics podcast, which would be pretty consistent with the “desperate Bernie supporter tries desperate tactic” narrative. So where does that leave us? Obviously YMMV, but to me, the allegations rest entirely on the word of Tara Reade (and to a lesser extent, that of her friend and family member); and we can’t rule out that this allegation was invented to influence the Democratic nomination. That leaves a lot of uncertainty about what actually happened, enough so that I don’t think “cancelling”/ending the career of the accused is warranted. If I’ve misrepresented the facts anywhere, I promise it was unintentional and I invite someone to correct me. Otherwise, I’m sure some of you disagree with me, but I’ve tried to approach the subject carefully and compassionately; I hope you guys will do the same. That's where you're kinda losing the plot. They are refusing to even hear her out. They're just circling the wagons the same way Rs did for Kavanaugh. If we're gonna play semantics with "believe women" then I think we can agree that the interpretation of "hear women out" is the goal, which is flat out not happening here. Granted, I don't think in the majority of cases an automatic canceling is reasonable - since yeah she may be lying or misremembering - but if there's a reasonable concern that the guy we want to be president(or dislike the least as the case may be) is a rapist then a pause isn't unreasonable. Did Ford come forward with all her evidence before the hearing? Idr. If there's no meat to it when they hear it out, that's the breaks. It fucking sucks that people don't have evidence of something horrible happening to them, which may not be the case here. Same way we don't know whether or not Bernie said a woman can't be president, there's no evidence of it, and his past behavior firmly leads otherwise. However, instead of addressing it, they just keep dodging from it.
Sure, she should get to tell her story. That’s a conversation between her and whoever she wants to help her tell it on her terms. IIRC WaPo or some other newspaper helped Ford go through what evidence she might have, vetted the story as much as they could, and then published the allegations. Media outlets should do the same here. There’s quite a bit of time left to come up with evidence, if it exists, and people should absolutely look for it.
But such cases don’t usually leave a lot of evidence. If that’s true here, that leaves us with uncertainty. And I think this isn’t going to be the last time an allegation like this surfaces at a politically significant time, and we really need to have a better idea how we want to deal with it.
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On April 13 2020 06:01 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2020 05:40 Biff The Understudy wrote:On April 13 2020 03:59 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 13 2020 03:54 Gahlo wrote:On April 13 2020 01:30 ChristianS wrote:On April 13 2020 01:19 IgnE wrote:On April 12 2020 04:17 ChristianS wrote:On April 12 2020 03:36 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 12 2020 03:24 ChristianS wrote: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. Trolly version: + Show Spoiler +"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? What about Tara Reade's accusations? Yeah, that one’s a little more plausible. If we’re answering “how will the public respond once this story is widely reported?” I have no idea what the answer is, or what would happen if more women came forward. My intuition is that it would damage but not sink him, but that’s really nothing more than a guess. What if we had an Access Hollywood-style “in his own words” proof of sorts? Probably the more difficult question is “how should we respond to credible but unproven allegations against powerful figures like this?” I had a long back-and-forth with Mohdoo a few months ago that felt productive (to me, at least), but I suspect the same conversation in this context would be impossible to have. Tempers are a lot higher now than they are then. If it's credible then he should be shouted down to suspend his campaign the same way people told Fraken to gtfo when things came out about him for a position he already held, at a lesser station, on a lesser allegation. The flak blanketing Biden from this is ridiculous. People saying they don't care because it's 1 allegation and not the 21 pointed at Trump - as if you couldn't even just put another moderate instead if you're so deadset on being anti-Bernie. People accusing blindly that she's a Russian plant because she made a blog post a few years back about liking the country after visiting or something. More like #BelieveAllWomenWhenIt'sConvenient This is Neb's point about agency. Democrats are helpless to prevent nominating a child caging, racist, probable rapist and/or just think that's better than social democratic policy. I even heard he was raping children in pizzerias. And that he had death squads assassinating people who worked for his campaign. I suggest we call him Killden. I think this is a gross way for Democrats to deal with credible accusations of rape along the lines of how Republicans treated Ford. If somehow congress did drag her out for hearings I don't think Democrats will look great trying to discredit her for Biden either. I'd add toward ChristianS point, that if Biden didn't also have a long well documented history of inappropriately touching women and violating their personal space that argument would be more convincing.
It's amazing the way people argue that voting for Biden isn't selling out or a moral failing, but then react this way to a credible sexual assault allegation which makes it really really hard to believe the first point.
On April 13 2020 06:24 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2020 06:13 Gahlo wrote:On April 13 2020 05:40 ChristianS wrote:On April 13 2020 03:54 Gahlo wrote:On April 13 2020 01:30 ChristianS wrote:On April 13 2020 01:19 IgnE wrote:On April 12 2020 04:17 ChristianS wrote:On April 12 2020 03:36 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 12 2020 03:24 ChristianS wrote: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. Trolly version: + Show Spoiler +"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? What about Tara Reade's accusations? Yeah, that one’s a little more plausible. If we’re answering “how will the public respond once this story is widely reported?” I have no idea what the answer is, or what would happen if more women came forward. My intuition is that it would damage but not sink him, but that’s really nothing more than a guess. What if we had an Access Hollywood-style “in his own words” proof of sorts? Probably the more difficult question is “how should we respond to credible but unproven allegations against powerful figures like this?” I had a long back-and-forth with Mohdoo a few months ago that felt productive (to me, at least), but I suspect the same conversation in this context would be impossible to have. Tempers are a lot higher now than they are then. If it's credible then he should be shouted down to suspend his campaign the same way people told Fraken to gtfo when things came out about him for a position he already held, at a lesser station, on a lesser allegation. The flak blanketing Biden from this is ridiculous. People saying they don't care because it's 1 allegation and not the 21 pointed at Trump - as if you couldn't even just put another moderate instead if you're so deadset on being anti-Bernie. People accusing blindly that she's a Russian plant because she made a blog post a few years back about liking the country after visiting or something. More like #BelieveAllWomenWhenIt'sConvenient But there was photographic evidence with Franken, no? As I said to Mohdoo a few months ago, I always blink when people say without a qualifier “#BelieveWomen,” because I don’t think it takes much analysis to see that “any man accused of anything by a woman should immediately be cancelled unless the accusations can be incontrovertibly disproven” isn’t a very workable system. If the only choices are “she’s a filthy liar who should be mocked and shunned” or “he’s a filthy rapist who should be imprisoned or, at least, shunned and unemployable” a lot of lives will be ruined on either side. Of course, that conversation was in the context of Warren being called (paraphrase) “a greater enemy to women than sexists because false accusations make other women less likely to be believed,” so in that context, I didn’t get a ton of pushback on the idea that #BelieveWomen needs some qualifiers. The trouble is that the public is desperately uncomfortable with uncertainty, but the situation is fundamentally uncertain. So they look for some way to collapse on either “she’s a liar” or “he’s the devil” and use that as the answer to every question about how to treat both of them. The question of whether we should treat the allegations as true or not really needs to depend on for what purpose. If a girl confides her story in a friend, they should be understanding and not interrogate her for “proof.” If she’s asking for criminal charges, we should expect some proof. Our present situation is in between: she’s not calling for imprisonment, but she’s clearly interested in ending his career. How credible is the claim? If I’m not mistaken, she says she told a friend and a family member at the time; both of them confirm. To my knowledge there’s no physical proof, either of the assault or that she told people. Iirc Christina Blasey Ford had therapist notes long predating Kavanaugh’s nomination; no such proof exists here. As I understand it, she had come forward previously last year, and specifically did not describe anything like what she now alleges; at the time it was more the kind of “hair-sniffing”/invasion of personal space stuff that several other women also described. On the one hand, it’s not unusual for victims of sexual assault to downplay what happened to them out of shame/fear of what people will think of them; on the other hand it’s often considered a sign of invented rather than factual stories that the story changes substantially over time. In terms of motivation, Tara Reade is apparently a big Bernie fan (and, bizarrely, a big Putin fan); that obviously doesn’t disprove her allegations, and it certainly wouldn’t be surprising that she wouldn’t support Biden if her allegations are true. But it does offer a pretty decent answer to “why would she make this up (and choose the moment she did to come forward)?” If I’m not mistaken (and someone please correct me if I am) she first revealed these new allegations on a pro-Bernie politics podcast, which would be pretty consistent with the “desperate Bernie supporter tries desperate tactic” narrative. So where does that leave us? Obviously YMMV, but to me, the allegations rest entirely on the word of Tara Reade (and to a lesser extent, that of her friend and family member); and we can’t rule out that this allegation was invented to influence the Democratic nomination. That leaves a lot of uncertainty about what actually happened, enough so that I don’t think “cancelling”/ending the career of the accused is warranted. If I’ve misrepresented the facts anywhere, I promise it was unintentional and I invite someone to correct me. Otherwise, I’m sure some of you disagree with me, but I’ve tried to approach the subject carefully and compassionately; I hope you guys will do the same. That's where you're kinda losing the plot. They are refusing to even hear her out. They're just circling the wagons the same way Rs did for Kavanaugh. If we're gonna play semantics with "believe women" then I think we can agree that the interpretation of "hear women out" is the goal, which is flat out not happening here. Granted, I don't think in the majority of cases an automatic canceling is reasonable - since yeah she may be lying or misremembering - but if there's a reasonable concern that the guy we want to be president(or dislike the least as the case may be) is a rapist then a pause isn't unreasonable. Did Ford come forward with all her evidence before the hearing? Idr. If there's no meat to it when they hear it out, that's the breaks. It fucking sucks that people don't have evidence of something horrible happening to them, which may not be the case here. Same way we don't know whether or not Bernie said a woman can't be president, there's no evidence of it, and his past behavior firmly leads otherwise. However, instead of addressing it, they just keep dodging from it. Sure, she should get to tell her story. That’s a conversation between her and whoever she wants to help her tell it on her terms. IIRC WaPo or some other newspaper helped Ford go through what evidence she might have, vetted the story as much as they could, and then published the allegations. Media outlets should do the same here. There’s quite a bit of time left to come up with evidence, if it exists, and people should absolutely look for it. But such cases don’t usually leave a lot of evidence. If that’s true here, that leaves us with uncertainty. And I think this isn’t going to be the last time an allegation like this surfaces at a politically significant time, and we really need to have a better idea how we want to deal with it.
Isn't there some supporting evidence already out? A few people have said she relayed the story many years ago and the interns she was coordinating at the time claim she was abruptly removed from that duty. On top of that you have the initial story, that Joe Biden was funneling money towards someone involved with the Time's Up charity after/while Tara Reade went to them for help. Plus the whole video-graphed history of Joe Biden being really 'hands on' with women doesn't really help here either.
[ https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/joe-biden-accuser-says-times-up-betrayed-her-in-that-hallway-he-was-a-man-assaulting-a-woman/ has the timeline/info on the monetary donations]
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I don't think it's a great way to look at it (won't stop Republicans) but as far as their allegations go, Reade's are already more substantiated than Ford's as far as I'm aware.
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On April 13 2020 06:26 Logo wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2020 06:01 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 13 2020 05:40 Biff The Understudy wrote:On April 13 2020 03:59 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 13 2020 03:54 Gahlo wrote:On April 13 2020 01:30 ChristianS wrote:On April 13 2020 01:19 IgnE wrote:On April 12 2020 04:17 ChristianS wrote:On April 12 2020 03:36 GreenHorizons wrote: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? What about Tara Reade's accusations? Yeah, that one’s a little more plausible. If we’re answering “how will the public respond once this story is widely reported?” I have no idea what the answer is, or what would happen if more women came forward. My intuition is that it would damage but not sink him, but that’s really nothing more than a guess. What if we had an Access Hollywood-style “in his own words” proof of sorts? Probably the more difficult question is “how should we respond to credible but unproven allegations against powerful figures like this?” I had a long back-and-forth with Mohdoo a few months ago that felt productive (to me, at least), but I suspect the same conversation in this context would be impossible to have. Tempers are a lot higher now than they are then. If it's credible then he should be shouted down to suspend his campaign the same way people told Fraken to gtfo when things came out about him for a position he already held, at a lesser station, on a lesser allegation. The flak blanketing Biden from this is ridiculous. People saying they don't care because it's 1 allegation and not the 21 pointed at Trump - as if you couldn't even just put another moderate instead if you're so deadset on being anti-Bernie. People accusing blindly that she's a Russian plant because she made a blog post a few years back about liking the country after visiting or something. More like #BelieveAllWomenWhenIt'sConvenient This is Neb's point about agency. Democrats are helpless to prevent nominating a child caging, racist, probable rapist and/or just think that's better than social democratic policy. I even heard he was raping children in pizzerias. And that he had death squads assassinating people who worked for his campaign. I suggest we call him Killden. I think this is a gross way for Democrats to deal with credible accusations of rape along the lines of how Republicans treated Ford. If somehow congress did drag her out for hearings I don't think Democrats will look great trying to discredit her for Biden either. I'd add toward ChristianS point, that if Biden didn't also have a long well documented history of inappropriately touching women and violating their personal space that argument would be more convincing. It's amazing the way people argue that voting for Biden isn't selling out or a moral failing, but then react this way to a credible sexual assault allegation which makes it really really hard to believe the first point. Show nested quote +On April 13 2020 06:24 ChristianS wrote:On April 13 2020 06:13 Gahlo wrote:On April 13 2020 05:40 ChristianS wrote:On April 13 2020 03:54 Gahlo wrote:On April 13 2020 01:30 ChristianS wrote:On April 13 2020 01:19 IgnE wrote:On April 12 2020 04:17 ChristianS wrote:On April 12 2020 03:36 GreenHorizons wrote: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? What about Tara Reade's accusations? Yeah, that one’s a little more plausible. If we’re answering “how will the public respond once this story is widely reported?” I have no idea what the answer is, or what would happen if more women came forward. My intuition is that it would damage but not sink him, but that’s really nothing more than a guess. What if we had an Access Hollywood-style “in his own words” proof of sorts? Probably the more difficult question is “how should we respond to credible but unproven allegations against powerful figures like this?” I had a long back-and-forth with Mohdoo a few months ago that felt productive (to me, at least), but I suspect the same conversation in this context would be impossible to have. Tempers are a lot higher now than they are then. If it's credible then he should be shouted down to suspend his campaign the same way people told Fraken to gtfo when things came out about him for a position he already held, at a lesser station, on a lesser allegation. The flak blanketing Biden from this is ridiculous. People saying they don't care because it's 1 allegation and not the 21 pointed at Trump - as if you couldn't even just put another moderate instead if you're so deadset on being anti-Bernie. People accusing blindly that she's a Russian plant because she made a blog post a few years back about liking the country after visiting or something. More like #BelieveAllWomenWhenIt'sConvenient But there was photographic evidence with Franken, no? As I said to Mohdoo a few months ago, I always blink when people say without a qualifier “#BelieveWomen,” because I don’t think it takes much analysis to see that “any man accused of anything by a woman should immediately be cancelled unless the accusations can be incontrovertibly disproven” isn’t a very workable system. If the only choices are “she’s a filthy liar who should be mocked and shunned” or “he’s a filthy rapist who should be imprisoned or, at least, shunned and unemployable” a lot of lives will be ruined on either side. Of course, that conversation was in the context of Warren being called (paraphrase) “a greater enemy to women than sexists because false accusations make other women less likely to be believed,” so in that context, I didn’t get a ton of pushback on the idea that #BelieveWomen needs some qualifiers. The trouble is that the public is desperately uncomfortable with uncertainty, but the situation is fundamentally uncertain. So they look for some way to collapse on either “she’s a liar” or “he’s the devil” and use that as the answer to every question about how to treat both of them. The question of whether we should treat the allegations as true or not really needs to depend on for what purpose. If a girl confides her story in a friend, they should be understanding and not interrogate her for “proof.” If she’s asking for criminal charges, we should expect some proof. Our present situation is in between: she’s not calling for imprisonment, but she’s clearly interested in ending his career. How credible is the claim? If I’m not mistaken, she says she told a friend and a family member at the time; both of them confirm. To my knowledge there’s no physical proof, either of the assault or that she told people. Iirc Christina Blasey Ford had therapist notes long predating Kavanaugh’s nomination; no such proof exists here. As I understand it, she had come forward previously last year, and specifically did not describe anything like what she now alleges; at the time it was more the kind of “hair-sniffing”/invasion of personal space stuff that several other women also described. On the one hand, it’s not unusual for victims of sexual assault to downplay what happened to them out of shame/fear of what people will think of them; on the other hand it’s often considered a sign of invented rather than factual stories that the story changes substantially over time. In terms of motivation, Tara Reade is apparently a big Bernie fan (and, bizarrely, a big Putin fan); that obviously doesn’t disprove her allegations, and it certainly wouldn’t be surprising that she wouldn’t support Biden if her allegations are true. But it does offer a pretty decent answer to “why would she make this up (and choose the moment she did to come forward)?” If I’m not mistaken (and someone please correct me if I am) she first revealed these new allegations on a pro-Bernie politics podcast, which would be pretty consistent with the “desperate Bernie supporter tries desperate tactic” narrative. So where does that leave us? Obviously YMMV, but to me, the allegations rest entirely on the word of Tara Reade (and to a lesser extent, that of her friend and family member); and we can’t rule out that this allegation was invented to influence the Democratic nomination. That leaves a lot of uncertainty about what actually happened, enough so that I don’t think “cancelling”/ending the career of the accused is warranted. If I’ve misrepresented the facts anywhere, I promise it was unintentional and I invite someone to correct me. Otherwise, I’m sure some of you disagree with me, but I’ve tried to approach the subject carefully and compassionately; I hope you guys will do the same. That's where you're kinda losing the plot. They are refusing to even hear her out. They're just circling the wagons the same way Rs did for Kavanaugh. If we're gonna play semantics with "believe women" then I think we can agree that the interpretation of "hear women out" is the goal, which is flat out not happening here. Granted, I don't think in the majority of cases an automatic canceling is reasonable - since yeah she may be lying or misremembering - but if there's a reasonable concern that the guy we want to be president(or dislike the least as the case may be) is a rapist then a pause isn't unreasonable. Did Ford come forward with all her evidence before the hearing? Idr. If there's no meat to it when they hear it out, that's the breaks. It fucking sucks that people don't have evidence of something horrible happening to them, which may not be the case here. Same way we don't know whether or not Bernie said a woman can't be president, there's no evidence of it, and his past behavior firmly leads otherwise. However, instead of addressing it, they just keep dodging from it. Sure, she should get to tell her story. That’s a conversation between her and whoever she wants to help her tell it on her terms. IIRC WaPo or some other newspaper helped Ford go through what evidence she might have, vetted the story as much as they could, and then published the allegations. Media outlets should do the same here. There’s quite a bit of time left to come up with evidence, if it exists, and people should absolutely look for it. But such cases don’t usually leave a lot of evidence. If that’s true here, that leaves us with uncertainty. And I think this isn’t going to be the last time an allegation like this surfaces at a politically significant time, and we really need to have a better idea how we want to deal with it. Isn't there some supporting evidence already out? A few people have said she relayed the story many years ago and the interns she was coordinating at the time claim she was abruptly removed from that duty. On top of that you have the initial story, that Joe Biden was pouring money into the Times Up charity after Tara Reade went to them. Plus the whole video-graphed history of Joe Biden being really 'hands on' with women doesn't really help here either.
From what I had read, she confided in two people (one a friend, the other a family member); if there are others, I hadn’t heard that but would appreciate a link. I’m not aware of the “abruptly removed” part but I’d like to hear more.
I wouldn’t consider “old guy has sometimes been a bit touchy/invaded personal space” to be very strong evidence of “old guy is probably guilty of sexual assault.” I’d consider it at least as strong evidence against that the accuser previously came forward alleging the first, and later amended her claims to include the second.
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On April 13 2020 03:15 Sent. wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2020 02:40 TheTenthDoc wrote:On April 12 2020 09:44 Zambrah wrote:On April 12 2020 08:21 Liquid`Drone wrote:
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. Yeah, Trump is going to HAMMER him in any debates, Biden is almost guaranteed to trail off into nothingness multiple times and Trump will probably throw some serious barbs his way.
That being said, I still don't think thats going to help Trump win. Trump won when noone knew how he'd perform, against an unfathomably unpopular candidate, after a full 8 year Democrat presidency, and he lost the popular vote. Im pretty sure nothing will change between now and election day when it comes to who people are voting for, camps are set, most people who are engaged are going to be impossible to budge from their anti-Trump or pro-Trump vote. Having watched the Trump/Clinton debates, this seems unlikely to me. Trump was and is a very, very bad debater, and the trends in polling for him were pretty bad in the aftermath of all the 2016 debates (even the primary ones IIRC). I think the "trail off into nothingness" meter will be at least equal for both and Trump descends into nonsense very quickly even when he has a script. That said, you're right that debates are just so far from election day and the news cycle has accelerated so much that their impact on actual votes is not likely to be very high. (also, for what it's worth I thought Biden did fantastic in the 2012 debates against Paul Ryan-watching those debates is a master class in humiliating your opponent and undermining their claims of being a "policy wonk"-but Paul Ryan is a terrible debater and that will have been 8 years ago, so it's not worth much) I don't get how you can call Trump a very bad debater in the context of presidential debates. He's great at saying what his potential supporters want to hear, and I don't think you can say the same about Clinton. In my opinion he gained more than he lost from those debates, though I admit that's arguable. Either way I don't see how Trump's a much worse debater than Clinton or Biden. I have more faith in Biden than I had in Clinton because he can at least make himself sound like he believes in what he says.
'Making shit up that sounds good' isn't good debating. Ever. And that's a bad standard to use because it's been proven that Trump's supporters are willing to engage in Olympic-level mental gymnastics to justify everything Trump says or filter out everything he says and replace it with an 'ideal'.
Trump is a very good campaigner, but even then he's only a good campaigner when dealing with a largely uncaring electorate that can't be bothered to put in the legwork to learn much about the guy and are willing to ignore anything bad as 'fake news'. You put Trump in almost any other western country and he'd get annihilated. Even the Trumpiest Trump characters in other nations tend to have a better grasp on politics that are actually happening because they have a minimum standard of entry for the electorate to take you seriously.
Trump's arguments are completely illogical and based largely on lies and the correct assumption that so long as he lies long enough and loud enough people will just believe him out of exhaustion (or even worse, just not care that he lies because they've decided he's their guy so lying is good now) instead of... you know... NOT VOTING FOR A LIAR.
By the measure you're applying here Trump could out debate Noam Chomsky on leftist theory because he'd just stand there talking nonsense and everyone who was a Trump supporter would say 'man Trump owned that lefty, had him scrambling just to get a point in edgeways, Trump really is the smartest man in the world'.
Clinton obliterated him as a straight up debate performance. It just didn't matter because we're in a time in politics where nobody really listens to debates as anything other than a bit of entertainment, because the debate format itself no longer promotes deep, long-form debate on a subject that would really dig deep into the candidates' knowledge, plans and ambitions in specific areas.
It's ludicrous to dedicate three minutes of a debate to 'the economy' or 'how you will improve it'. That's a three hour conversation minimum.
On April 13 2020 06:26 Logo wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2020 06:01 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 13 2020 05:40 Biff The Understudy wrote:On April 13 2020 03:59 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 13 2020 03:54 Gahlo wrote:On April 13 2020 01:30 ChristianS wrote:On April 13 2020 01:19 IgnE wrote:On April 12 2020 04:17 ChristianS wrote:On April 12 2020 03:36 GreenHorizons wrote: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? What about Tara Reade's accusations? Yeah, that one’s a little more plausible. If we’re answering “how will the public respond once this story is widely reported?” I have no idea what the answer is, or what would happen if more women came forward. My intuition is that it would damage but not sink him, but that’s really nothing more than a guess. What if we had an Access Hollywood-style “in his own words” proof of sorts? Probably the more difficult question is “how should we respond to credible but unproven allegations against powerful figures like this?” I had a long back-and-forth with Mohdoo a few months ago that felt productive (to me, at least), but I suspect the same conversation in this context would be impossible to have. Tempers are a lot higher now than they are then. If it's credible then he should be shouted down to suspend his campaign the same way people told Fraken to gtfo when things came out about him for a position he already held, at a lesser station, on a lesser allegation. The flak blanketing Biden from this is ridiculous. People saying they don't care because it's 1 allegation and not the 21 pointed at Trump - as if you couldn't even just put another moderate instead if you're so deadset on being anti-Bernie. People accusing blindly that she's a Russian plant because she made a blog post a few years back about liking the country after visiting or something. More like #BelieveAllWomenWhenIt'sConvenient This is Neb's point about agency. Democrats are helpless to prevent nominating a child caging, racist, probable rapist and/or just think that's better than social democratic policy. I even heard he was raping children in pizzerias. And that he had death squads assassinating people who worked for his campaign. I suggest we call him Killden. I think this is a gross way for Democrats to deal with credible accusations of rape along the lines of how Republicans treated Ford. If somehow congress did drag her out for hearings I don't think Democrats will look great trying to discredit her for Biden either. I'd add toward ChristianS point, that if Biden didn't also have a long well documented history of inappropriately touching women and violating their personal space that argument would be more convincing. It's amazing the way people argue that voting for Biden isn't selling out or a moral failing, but then react this way to a credible sexual assault allegation which makes it really really hard to believe the first point. Show nested quote +On April 13 2020 06:24 ChristianS wrote:On April 13 2020 06:13 Gahlo wrote:On April 13 2020 05:40 ChristianS wrote:On April 13 2020 03:54 Gahlo wrote:On April 13 2020 01:30 ChristianS wrote:On April 13 2020 01:19 IgnE wrote:On April 12 2020 04:17 ChristianS wrote:On April 12 2020 03:36 GreenHorizons wrote: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? What about Tara Reade's accusations? Yeah, that one’s a little more plausible. If we’re answering “how will the public respond once this story is widely reported?” I have no idea what the answer is, or what would happen if more women came forward. My intuition is that it would damage but not sink him, but that’s really nothing more than a guess. What if we had an Access Hollywood-style “in his own words” proof of sorts? Probably the more difficult question is “how should we respond to credible but unproven allegations against powerful figures like this?” I had a long back-and-forth with Mohdoo a few months ago that felt productive (to me, at least), but I suspect the same conversation in this context would be impossible to have. Tempers are a lot higher now than they are then. If it's credible then he should be shouted down to suspend his campaign the same way people told Fraken to gtfo when things came out about him for a position he already held, at a lesser station, on a lesser allegation. The flak blanketing Biden from this is ridiculous. People saying they don't care because it's 1 allegation and not the 21 pointed at Trump - as if you couldn't even just put another moderate instead if you're so deadset on being anti-Bernie. People accusing blindly that she's a Russian plant because she made a blog post a few years back about liking the country after visiting or something. More like #BelieveAllWomenWhenIt'sConvenient But there was photographic evidence with Franken, no? As I said to Mohdoo a few months ago, I always blink when people say without a qualifier “#BelieveWomen,” because I don’t think it takes much analysis to see that “any man accused of anything by a woman should immediately be cancelled unless the accusations can be incontrovertibly disproven” isn’t a very workable system. If the only choices are “she’s a filthy liar who should be mocked and shunned” or “he’s a filthy rapist who should be imprisoned or, at least, shunned and unemployable” a lot of lives will be ruined on either side. Of course, that conversation was in the context of Warren being called (paraphrase) “a greater enemy to women than sexists because false accusations make other women less likely to be believed,” so in that context, I didn’t get a ton of pushback on the idea that #BelieveWomen needs some qualifiers. The trouble is that the public is desperately uncomfortable with uncertainty, but the situation is fundamentally uncertain. So they look for some way to collapse on either “she’s a liar” or “he’s the devil” and use that as the answer to every question about how to treat both of them. The question of whether we should treat the allegations as true or not really needs to depend on for what purpose. If a girl confides her story in a friend, they should be understanding and not interrogate her for “proof.” If she’s asking for criminal charges, we should expect some proof. Our present situation is in between: she’s not calling for imprisonment, but she’s clearly interested in ending his career. How credible is the claim? If I’m not mistaken, she says she told a friend and a family member at the time; both of them confirm. To my knowledge there’s no physical proof, either of the assault or that she told people. Iirc Christina Blasey Ford had therapist notes long predating Kavanaugh’s nomination; no such proof exists here. As I understand it, she had come forward previously last year, and specifically did not describe anything like what she now alleges; at the time it was more the kind of “hair-sniffing”/invasion of personal space stuff that several other women also described. On the one hand, it’s not unusual for victims of sexual assault to downplay what happened to them out of shame/fear of what people will think of them; on the other hand it’s often considered a sign of invented rather than factual stories that the story changes substantially over time. In terms of motivation, Tara Reade is apparently a big Bernie fan (and, bizarrely, a big Putin fan); that obviously doesn’t disprove her allegations, and it certainly wouldn’t be surprising that she wouldn’t support Biden if her allegations are true. But it does offer a pretty decent answer to “why would she make this up (and choose the moment she did to come forward)?” If I’m not mistaken (and someone please correct me if I am) she first revealed these new allegations on a pro-Bernie politics podcast, which would be pretty consistent with the “desperate Bernie supporter tries desperate tactic” narrative. So where does that leave us? Obviously YMMV, but to me, the allegations rest entirely on the word of Tara Reade (and to a lesser extent, that of her friend and family member); and we can’t rule out that this allegation was invented to influence the Democratic nomination. That leaves a lot of uncertainty about what actually happened, enough so that I don’t think “cancelling”/ending the career of the accused is warranted. If I’ve misrepresented the facts anywhere, I promise it was unintentional and I invite someone to correct me. Otherwise, I’m sure some of you disagree with me, but I’ve tried to approach the subject carefully and compassionately; I hope you guys will do the same. That's where you're kinda losing the plot. They are refusing to even hear her out. They're just circling the wagons the same way Rs did for Kavanaugh. If we're gonna play semantics with "believe women" then I think we can agree that the interpretation of "hear women out" is the goal, which is flat out not happening here. Granted, I don't think in the majority of cases an automatic canceling is reasonable - since yeah she may be lying or misremembering - but if there's a reasonable concern that the guy we want to be president(or dislike the least as the case may be) is a rapist then a pause isn't unreasonable. Did Ford come forward with all her evidence before the hearing? Idr. If there's no meat to it when they hear it out, that's the breaks. It fucking sucks that people don't have evidence of something horrible happening to them, which may not be the case here. Same way we don't know whether or not Bernie said a woman can't be president, there's no evidence of it, and his past behavior firmly leads otherwise. However, instead of addressing it, they just keep dodging from it. Sure, she should get to tell her story. That’s a conversation between her and whoever she wants to help her tell it on her terms. IIRC WaPo or some other newspaper helped Ford go through what evidence she might have, vetted the story as much as they could, and then published the allegations. Media outlets should do the same here. There’s quite a bit of time left to come up with evidence, if it exists, and people should absolutely look for it. But such cases don’t usually leave a lot of evidence. If that’s true here, that leaves us with uncertainty. And I think this isn’t going to be the last time an allegation like this surfaces at a politically significant time, and we really need to have a better idea how we want to deal with it. Isn't there some supporting evidence already out? A few people have said she relayed the story many years ago and the interns she was coordinating at the time claim she was abruptly removed from that duty. On top of that you have the initial story, that Joe Biden was pouring money into the Times Up charity after Tara Reade went to them. Plus the whole video-graphed history of Joe Biden being really 'hands on' with women doesn't really help here either.
Like I said a few pages back, without a full, credible investigation all this amounts to is an irreversible surrendering of the moral high ground. You can never get indignant when the Republicans do this if you're going to circle Biden and protect him from credible allegations (in fact, more credible than the ones levelled at Kavanaugh since that was purely testimony from decades prior with no recentish behaviour to call upon; Biden's accusations are a lot more recent). And this is how America slides inexorably further and further to the right; the Democrats make themselves hypocrites on yet another moral point, the Republicans can then ignore it in their candidates.
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On April 13 2020 06:36 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2020 06:26 Logo wrote:On April 13 2020 06:01 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 13 2020 05:40 Biff The Understudy wrote:On April 13 2020 03:59 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 13 2020 03:54 Gahlo wrote:On April 13 2020 01:30 ChristianS wrote:On April 13 2020 01:19 IgnE wrote:On April 12 2020 04:17 ChristianS wrote:On April 12 2020 03:36 GreenHorizons wrote:
[quote]
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)
[quote]
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? What about Tara Reade's accusations? Yeah, that one’s a little more plausible. If we’re answering “how will the public respond once this story is widely reported?” I have no idea what the answer is, or what would happen if more women came forward. My intuition is that it would damage but not sink him, but that’s really nothing more than a guess. What if we had an Access Hollywood-style “in his own words” proof of sorts? Probably the more difficult question is “how should we respond to credible but unproven allegations against powerful figures like this?” I had a long back-and-forth with Mohdoo a few months ago that felt productive (to me, at least), but I suspect the same conversation in this context would be impossible to have. Tempers are a lot higher now than they are then. If it's credible then he should be shouted down to suspend his campaign the same way people told Fraken to gtfo when things came out about him for a position he already held, at a lesser station, on a lesser allegation. The flak blanketing Biden from this is ridiculous. People saying they don't care because it's 1 allegation and not the 21 pointed at Trump - as if you couldn't even just put another moderate instead if you're so deadset on being anti-Bernie. People accusing blindly that she's a Russian plant because she made a blog post a few years back about liking the country after visiting or something. More like #BelieveAllWomenWhenIt'sConvenient This is Neb's point about agency. Democrats are helpless to prevent nominating a child caging, racist, probable rapist and/or just think that's better than social democratic policy. I even heard he was raping children in pizzerias. And that he had death squads assassinating people who worked for his campaign. I suggest we call him Killden. I think this is a gross way for Democrats to deal with credible accusations of rape along the lines of how Republicans treated Ford. If somehow congress did drag her out for hearings I don't think Democrats will look great trying to discredit her for Biden either. I'd add toward ChristianS point, that if Biden didn't also have a long well documented history of inappropriately touching women and violating their personal space that argument would be more convincing. It's amazing the way people argue that voting for Biden isn't selling out or a moral failing, but then react this way to a credible sexual assault allegation which makes it really really hard to believe the first point. On April 13 2020 06:24 ChristianS wrote:On April 13 2020 06:13 Gahlo wrote:On April 13 2020 05:40 ChristianS wrote:On April 13 2020 03:54 Gahlo wrote:On April 13 2020 01:30 ChristianS wrote:On April 13 2020 01:19 IgnE wrote:On April 12 2020 04:17 ChristianS wrote:On April 12 2020 03:36 GreenHorizons wrote:
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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)
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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? What about Tara Reade's accusations? Yeah, that one’s a little more plausible. If we’re answering “how will the public respond once this story is widely reported?” I have no idea what the answer is, or what would happen if more women came forward. My intuition is that it would damage but not sink him, but that’s really nothing more than a guess. What if we had an Access Hollywood-style “in his own words” proof of sorts? Probably the more difficult question is “how should we respond to credible but unproven allegations against powerful figures like this?” I had a long back-and-forth with Mohdoo a few months ago that felt productive (to me, at least), but I suspect the same conversation in this context would be impossible to have. Tempers are a lot higher now than they are then. If it's credible then he should be shouted down to suspend his campaign the same way people told Fraken to gtfo when things came out about him for a position he already held, at a lesser station, on a lesser allegation. The flak blanketing Biden from this is ridiculous. People saying they don't care because it's 1 allegation and not the 21 pointed at Trump - as if you couldn't even just put another moderate instead if you're so deadset on being anti-Bernie. People accusing blindly that she's a Russian plant because she made a blog post a few years back about liking the country after visiting or something. More like #BelieveAllWomenWhenIt'sConvenient But there was photographic evidence with Franken, no? As I said to Mohdoo a few months ago, I always blink when people say without a qualifier “#BelieveWomen,” because I don’t think it takes much analysis to see that “any man accused of anything by a woman should immediately be cancelled unless the accusations can be incontrovertibly disproven” isn’t a very workable system. If the only choices are “she’s a filthy liar who should be mocked and shunned” or “he’s a filthy rapist who should be imprisoned or, at least, shunned and unemployable” a lot of lives will be ruined on either side. Of course, that conversation was in the context of Warren being called (paraphrase) “a greater enemy to women than sexists because false accusations make other women less likely to be believed,” so in that context, I didn’t get a ton of pushback on the idea that #BelieveWomen needs some qualifiers. The trouble is that the public is desperately uncomfortable with uncertainty, but the situation is fundamentally uncertain. So they look for some way to collapse on either “she’s a liar” or “he’s the devil” and use that as the answer to every question about how to treat both of them. The question of whether we should treat the allegations as true or not really needs to depend on for what purpose. If a girl confides her story in a friend, they should be understanding and not interrogate her for “proof.” If she’s asking for criminal charges, we should expect some proof. Our present situation is in between: she’s not calling for imprisonment, but she’s clearly interested in ending his career. How credible is the claim? If I’m not mistaken, she says she told a friend and a family member at the time; both of them confirm. To my knowledge there’s no physical proof, either of the assault or that she told people. Iirc Christina Blasey Ford had therapist notes long predating Kavanaugh’s nomination; no such proof exists here. As I understand it, she had come forward previously last year, and specifically did not describe anything like what she now alleges; at the time it was more the kind of “hair-sniffing”/invasion of personal space stuff that several other women also described. On the one hand, it’s not unusual for victims of sexual assault to downplay what happened to them out of shame/fear of what people will think of them; on the other hand it’s often considered a sign of invented rather than factual stories that the story changes substantially over time. In terms of motivation, Tara Reade is apparently a big Bernie fan (and, bizarrely, a big Putin fan); that obviously doesn’t disprove her allegations, and it certainly wouldn’t be surprising that she wouldn’t support Biden if her allegations are true. But it does offer a pretty decent answer to “why would she make this up (and choose the moment she did to come forward)?” If I’m not mistaken (and someone please correct me if I am) she first revealed these new allegations on a pro-Bernie politics podcast, which would be pretty consistent with the “desperate Bernie supporter tries desperate tactic” narrative. So where does that leave us? Obviously YMMV, but to me, the allegations rest entirely on the word of Tara Reade (and to a lesser extent, that of her friend and family member); and we can’t rule out that this allegation was invented to influence the Democratic nomination. That leaves a lot of uncertainty about what actually happened, enough so that I don’t think “cancelling”/ending the career of the accused is warranted. If I’ve misrepresented the facts anywhere, I promise it was unintentional and I invite someone to correct me. Otherwise, I’m sure some of you disagree with me, but I’ve tried to approach the subject carefully and compassionately; I hope you guys will do the same. That's where you're kinda losing the plot. They are refusing to even hear her out. They're just circling the wagons the same way Rs did for Kavanaugh. If we're gonna play semantics with "believe women" then I think we can agree that the interpretation of "hear women out" is the goal, which is flat out not happening here. Granted, I don't think in the majority of cases an automatic canceling is reasonable - since yeah she may be lying or misremembering - but if there's a reasonable concern that the guy we want to be president(or dislike the least as the case may be) is a rapist then a pause isn't unreasonable. Did Ford come forward with all her evidence before the hearing? Idr. If there's no meat to it when they hear it out, that's the breaks. It fucking sucks that people don't have evidence of something horrible happening to them, which may not be the case here. Same way we don't know whether or not Bernie said a woman can't be president, there's no evidence of it, and his past behavior firmly leads otherwise. However, instead of addressing it, they just keep dodging from it. Sure, she should get to tell her story. That’s a conversation between her and whoever she wants to help her tell it on her terms. IIRC WaPo or some other newspaper helped Ford go through what evidence she might have, vetted the story as much as they could, and then published the allegations. Media outlets should do the same here. There’s quite a bit of time left to come up with evidence, if it exists, and people should absolutely look for it. But such cases don’t usually leave a lot of evidence. If that’s true here, that leaves us with uncertainty. And I think this isn’t going to be the last time an allegation like this surfaces at a politically significant time, and we really need to have a better idea how we want to deal with it. Isn't there some supporting evidence already out? A few people have said she relayed the story many years ago and the interns she was coordinating at the time claim she was abruptly removed from that duty. On top of that you have the initial story, that Joe Biden was pouring money into the Times Up charity after Tara Reade went to them. Plus the whole video-graphed history of Joe Biden being really 'hands on' with women doesn't really help here either. From what I had read, she confided in two people (one a friend, the other a family member); if there are others, I hadn’t heard that but would appreciate a link. I’m not aware of the “abruptly removed” part but I’d like to hear more. I wouldn’t consider “old guy has sometimes been a bit touchy/invaded personal space” to be very strong evidence of “old guy is probably guilty of sexual assault.” I’d consider it at least as strong evidence against that the accuser previously came forward alleging the first, and later amended her claims to include the second.
The New York Times story contains a reference to that information I think, sorry I can't find a Reddit copy/pase of the article contents anymore to quote here.
On the latter point, everyone believes that Kavanaugh's behavior as an entitled drunk party boy means he was capable of assaulting Dr. Ford. It's similar here of course. It's not indication it *did* happen, but it cuts the head off the argument that "Biden wouldn't do something like that". We have reason to believe he certainly would do something like that, just like Kavanaugh's behavior does the same. That's obviously a long gap between "could do" and "did do", but the point is we can't exactly use Biden's character as a defense of the accusation.
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On April 13 2020 02:37 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2020 01:30 ChristianS wrote:On April 13 2020 01:19 IgnE wrote:On April 12 2020 04:17 ChristianS wrote:On April 12 2020 03:36 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 12 2020 03:24 ChristianS wrote:On April 12 2020 03:01 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 12 2020 02:35 ChristianS wrote:On April 12 2020 02:18 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 12 2020 01:44 ChristianS wrote:
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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. Trolly version: + Show Spoiler +"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? What about Tara Reade's accusations? Yeah, that one’s a little more plausible. If we’re answering “how will the public respond once this story is widely reported?” I have no idea what the answer is, or what would happen if more women came forward. My intuition is that it would damage but not sink him, but that’s really nothing more than a guess. What if we had an Access Hollywood-style “in his own words” proof of sorts? Probably the more difficult question is “how should we respond to credible but unproven allegations against powerful figures like this?” I had a long back-and-forth with Mohdoo a few months ago that felt productive (to me, at least), but I suspect the same conversation in this context would be impossible to have. Tempers are a lot higher now than they are then. #BelieveWomen was the Democratic mantra when it was Kavanaugh.
Can anyone here make a case that the evidence against Kavanaugh was greater than the evidence against Biden is now?
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|
EPT
