US Politics Mega-thread - Page 4255

On July 11 2024 02:34 KwarK wrote:

These are the challenges that must be addressed if you’re going to put all of your eggs in the revolution basket. But I’m not doing that. I’ve blown up zero buildings but I’m not allin on that plan.

In a Wednesday morning interview, former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) repeatedly urged President Biden to make a decision about whether to stay in the presidential race, despite the president’s insistence that he should remain at the top of the Democratic ticket.

“It’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run. We’re all encouraging him to make that decision, because time is running short,” Pelosi said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “ … He is beloved, he is respected, and people want him to make that decision.”

“I love Joe Biden,” Clooney wrote in a New York Times opinion piece. “As a senator. As a vice president and as president. I consider him a friend, and I believe in him.”

But, Clooney added, the Biden he saw during the June 15 fundraiser, which also included former President Barack Obama, “was not the Joe “big F-ing deal” Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020.”

“He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate,” Clooney added, referencing Biden’s faltering and disastrous performance at the June 27 presidential debate on CNN.

That statement was a stunning assessment of Biden’s current state from someone who has interacted with the president privately — that the way the president presented himself during that debate, which the White House and Biden campaign have alternatively blamed on a cold and a tiring travel schedule, was not an aberration.

In an impassioned interview with CNN, Michael Bennet of Colorado said he believed Biden could no longer win November’s election and said his campaign needed to assess the decision of whether he steps aside in “moral” terms based on the importance of saving the country from the “American tragedy” of a second Trump presidency.

“This race is on a trajectory that is very worrisome if you care about the future of this country,” Bennet told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. “Donald Trump is on track, I think, to win this election and maybe win it by a landslide, and take with him the Senate and the House. It’s not a question about politics, it’s a moral question about the future of our country.”

“I’m sure President Biden has a different view of his prospects in this election than I do, but we should be having a discussion,” he said. “The White House in the time since that disastrous debate has done nothing to really demonstrate that they have a plan to win.

“I have not seen anything remotely approaching the kind of plan we need to see out of the White House that can demonstrate that he can actually beat Donald Trump, which is not going to be about the accomplishments that we all had, you know, three and four years ago. This is something for the president to consider.”

Bennet’s comments came after a meeting of House Democrats yesterday that failed to produce an expected groundswell of calls for Biden to stand aside but instead saw some previously sceptical members back down in the face of his resolve to continue. Rumbles of discontent among House members continue, however.

On July 11 2024 02:28 oBlade wrote:

Look, people said explain more what you're talking about, I tried to provide a panoply of different examples to sink our teeth into and it's a wall of anecdotes. I don't have a publishable mathematical proof that there are people who take their politics as religious orthodoxies.

I find more similarity between Bush, Clinton, Romney, and Obama than I do between Cenk Uygur, Andrew Cuomo, Noam Chomsky, and Bill Maher.

People who follow DEI and critical race theory believe white supremacy is real, people who follow 3rd wave feminism believe patriarchal society is real.

The fact that they purport to fight the bad thing in their framework doesn't mean they wish their beliefs, which in the religion analogy becomes the entire core of their existence, weren't true. The purpose comes from the struggle itself. That is also characteristic of religions. Islam has jihad, Christianity has constant tests, Buddhism has a struggle towards enlightenment. This is actually supposed to be endless by design. If the "belief," whatever it is, ever succeeds, it undermines its own purpose.

This would be roughly akin to saying Christians would rather Satan and Hell didn't exist, and therefore they don't really want their religious beliefs to be true. Right?

Communists still believe in communism. They don't suddenly not believe in communism just because they wish we didn't have this capitalism with its oppressive classist hierarchy.


Maybe that's the directional divide of our zeitgeist? Right wing has shifted to cult of personality while left wing has shifted to cult of good old-fashioned cult? But the right are much more critical and largely (or... noticeably) hate their representatives/party, so the result is polarizing, when someone is liked they enjoy a certain loyalty, on the left nobody is moving hearts and minds, just getting rubber stamped. This has been in like 10 years of intraparty approval stats.


To me it sounds backwards that a group of people who can be swayed or convinced of something different, are a cult, while people who would reject, cancel, or excommunicate someone at the slightest transgression against the blob, aren't.


Another fascinating psychological concept is that of "projection."


Do not confuse the fact that because it doesn't describe you, that it doesn't describe a group of people. And you don't need to put words in my mouth, I didn't and won't say all leftists. But you can't ignore the patterns time and time again. Trump is concerned about the border, racist idiot, border is secure. Few moments later - Trump and Republicans don't care about our serious border problems like Biden and Mayorkas do! Gas is too expensive - Hey, president doesn't set gas prices. Drops -> Thanks Biden! Trump proposes tariffs - Every economist agrees he will crash the economy, the cost goes right to the American consumer. 25% tariff from Biden - Foreign policy genius! And remember we have to vote for Biden this year or else the atmosphere will blow up (because he is going to stop China from using 5x as much coal as everyone else combined?). These are not strawmen just because it doesn't happen to be what you or some other random guy personally believe. There are people who lockstep followed each and every one of these. And they're serious issues. I've seen the "priests" do this time and time again, I can accept that they, at least, are purposely manipulating with propaganda. But it's the people among my friends, all over my social media, that I have to account for that fall for it. I see this again and again for years on end. How else am I to describe this behavior, what other analogue is there?

On July 11 2024 03:00 Fleetfeet wrote:


So your least socialist revolutioning is actually just considering maybe putting eggs in the socialist revolution basket when it isn't too scary, which is less than GH's small socialist revolutioning of some kind of educate -> praxis loop. Got it.

On July 11 2024 04:54 KwarK wrote:

I joined the Republican Party and will serve as a Republican election presiding judge in the upcoming election. I’ll use that trivial amount of power to ensure the responsibilities are carried out correctly, the results are certified if legitimate, eligible voters get proper same day registration etc.
I’d rate that over GH’s circular discussion group.

On July 11 2024 05:14 Fleetfeet wrote:


Sure, and you probably wouldn't talk on the internet about how you're a socialist plant in the Republican party because that would be antithetical to your goals and also stupid.

Don't get me wrong, I don't believe GH actually -IS- V from Vendetta and is secretly engaging in espionage and illicit governmental takedown. It just doesn't matter if he is or isn't. If he is, it wouldn't make sense to talk about it because of its illicit nature, and if he isn't, it wouldn't make sense to talk about it because he isn't.

On July 11 2024 05:33 KwarK wrote:

I just did talk about it. You’re allowed to join the party and there’s nothing illegal or immoral about performing my civic duties properly. They require that there be a representative member of each party ensuring the rules are followed. I volunteered to be the Republican representative and I’ll perform it by the book.

On July 11 2024 06:36 Fleetfeet wrote:


Joining the republican party as a socialist is immoral.

On July 11 2024 06:46 Acrofales wrote:

Kwark isn't a socialist though. His whole shtick with GH is idiotic, because Kwark is neither a socialist nor a revolutionary. I'm not very convinced by GH's slowrolling a revolution over generations, but at least he is unabashedly a socialist. Kwark very definitely is not (barring a recent epiphany, which I don't believe he has had).

On July 11 2024 06:53 Fleetfeet wrote:


Sure. We're engaging along a hypothetical upon which KwarK is enacting his path towards a socialist revolution. Part of the buy-in is, then, that KwarK is acting as though he is a socialist so he can demonstrate how he'd socialist better than a socialist would.

I agree that KwarK isn't a socialist, and I think we're getting there in this hypothetical, as so far it seems like KwarK's plan is to infiltrate the republican party and ensure a fair election.

On July 11 2024 09:57 BlackJack wrote:
Requiring photo ID to vote? Sounds like you’re a racist, Kwark

On July 11 2024 09:34 KwarK wrote:
Also in that role I was partially responsible for tightening up NM voter ID laws. They were explaining online voter registration rules and how anyone who registered online would have to prove their identity at the polling station before it became active. However they’d previously explained the very wide set of allowable proof of identity which included stating your full name and address as it appeared on your registration.

I stopped the training session to point out that in the case of online registrations we were validating their identity by testing their answers against our data which was also provided by them. That we weren’t validating that they were the person, only that they gave us the same answer twice.

They didn’t get it. I used the example of me registering online as a J Biden living at 1 Main St. and then explained that I would be able to show up and activate that registration and vote as J Biden if I could provide that same name and address. They said they’d get back to me.

Two weeks later on Election Day we received updated training manuals which clarified that to activate an online registration you’d need a photo ID (unless you lived on the res). Any existing registered voter (who had presumably had already shown an ID during registration) could still use the name and address method of “proving” their identity but you couldn’t use it for activating a registration anymore.

On July 11 2024 10:02 KwarK wrote:

Not to vote, just to register to vote. Any registered voter could vote simply by stating their name and address. But as your address on the electoral roll was provided by you during registration it seemed nonsensical that we would then use knowledge of that address as validation to complete that registration.