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On October 29 2024 13:34 Introvert wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2024 11:41 ChristianS wrote:On October 28 2024 11:46 Introvert wrote:
Harris had a left wing voting record in the senate and the primary. Just because she's pretending that didn't happen now doesn't make it not true. At *best* you could say she's unprincipled. And it shows in her flailing around. How can you be asked twice how you are different than Biden and not have an answer? She doesn't think she should have to work for it Not sure if this was intended as a response to me saying Harris is not some far-left radical, but it merits some discussion. Because yeah, if you go by 2020 primary positions or Senate DW-Nominate score or w/e, she looks pretty progressive, and she's Black and a woman, which supposedly progressives are supposed to be crazy about. And yet progressives never seem to claim her as one of their own, what gives? The 2020 Democratic primary was an interesting contest for a lot of reasons, but a big one is that Democratic political operatives had spent the last 4 years researching and developing every aspect of what they thought an effective presidential campaign to unseat Donald Trump should look like, and in that primary we got to see what they came up with. The answer was, in a word, "Obama." But the really interesting part is which aspects of Obama each campaign chose to replicate. Do you want a well-spoken Harvard alum who's a political outsider? Take a look at Pete Buttigieg, his only political experience is as mayor of a mid-size town in a red state! Do you want a likable Black guy with an extremely round head? Allow me to introduce Cory Booker, he's maybe got as much dad energy as any politician I've seen besides Tim Walz. But Kamala Harris had what I thought was probably the most plausible attempt to clone the Obama phenomenon. She was a clear rising star in her party, and as a California senator she was free to take progressive positions on votes as often as she liked without much backlash, which is important because I think her campaign clearly thought that to replicate Obama, you had to come from the progressive wing of the party. Surely some well-connected establishment guy is never gonna get people energized and excited about all the wonderful things their candidacy could accomplish – "Hope and Change" – the way a progressive could. She endorsed Medicare for All, etc., which seemed calibrated to make sure she was identified as one of the "progressive lane" candidates (although I'm not sure it really worked, even at the time). It turns out the political operatives were wrong anyway, people didn't want an Obama clone at all, or at least not a 2008 Obama clone. I mean, Obama was (and is!) still enormously popular with Democrats, but by then they're thinking of Obama after winning the presidency, who frankly was never all that progressive. Biden might actually have been the closest analog to that Obama, or at least used to stand next to him a lot, and that turned out to be good enough for primary voters (general election voters, too). And Kamala went to work for him as VP, which doesn't make a ton of sense if she was actually some Sanders-like dyed-in-the-wool progressive. Didn't she basically call that guy racist in the first debate? But she was always someone who tried to figure out what voters wanted, and then would try to give them what they want. When all the best minds thought that answer was an Obama clone, that was what she tried to be. Once it was clear they actually just wanted a steady hand establishment guy to calm down all the craziness + Show Spoiler +(a bit like Disney wanted from JJ Abrams around the same time) , she signed on with that project. You can call that "unprincipled" (and, I mean, I probably would) but a Harris defender might counter, what exactly is it you want politicians to do? I mean, our democratic system is supposedly so wise and just and well-designed because politicians are regularly held accountable to voters, so it incentivizes them to give voters what they want in order to stay in office. If the politicians are working hard to figure out what voters want to see and give it to them, isn't that the system working as intended? (Personally I don't buy that the system is so wise and just and well-designed; I wanted someone who endorsed progressive positions out of a sincere deeply-held belief, so I voted Sanders.) But I guess the long and short of it is, Kamala Harris was always essentially an establishment Democrat, in the sense that whatever direction the Democratic Party seemed to be moving in, she'd try to be on the leading edge of it. If the Democrats ever got enough of a mandate to implement some big, progressive reforms on the scale of Obamacare, you can bet she'd be there leading the charge. If the party decided that appealing to centrist voters with tax cuts and balanced budgets was their best path forward, she'd be there leading that charge too. She's not an ideologue, she's certainly not a socialist, GH need not worry about running into her at any meetings, and capitalists need not worry about her seizing the means of production. But in the world of Republican rhetoric, where all Democrats are Marxists until proven innocent (and even then, y'know, better safe than sorry), she's "Comrade Kamala." Which is the same playbook they run against every other Democrat, and like I said before, is almost never rooted in much truth, so changing their policy positions to counter the "Socialist!" attack is of limited value. It wasn't true before, it still won't be true after the change, and they'll keep saying it anyway. And if the attack was working before, it'll probably keep working just about as well, for reasons that apparently don't have much to do with the truth of it. I could re-interpret the historical facts that you laid out differently then you did. One reason Kamala can't do interviews very well is because she has to think about what she is "supposed" to say. She doesn't give them impression of someone who has thought through any particular issue in detail (famously she makes her staff put together large documents and then doesn't touch them). I know the thread hates him, but this is in exact contrast to someone like DeSantis. You may not like his answers or his style, but more than just about any politician today he always has an answer and he never gets caught fumbling around. He knows what he thinks and he knows what he would do. He doesn't accept false premises and he knows the material. Kamala laughs, stutters, and then doesn't answer the question (again, the "how are you different" question tripped her up TWICE in one day). Kamala has always done what she thinks she had to do to get ahead. That means for the undecided voter that at best, she's a black box. And he record from CA implies she has no problems with going along with the left side of her party. Rather than being some sort of reassurance that she will move the center because that's what it takes, her comfort with the left-wing policy proposals stereotypically associated with her home state are cause for concern.
The analogy you want might not be black box, which usually either means an algorithm that does something without us knowing or caring how exactly it got the answer or where the output came from, or the only part left after a disastrous plane crash which records key information giving us the causes ( in which case I would agree it's an apt analogy for Kamala but for different reasons than the point you were making). Kamala would instead be a mystery box or random box. But not that random. Every time she walks something back basically there's no reason not to believe she isn't being sincere and showing her true self with her first statement - whether it's banning fracking, mandatory gun buybacks, banning private healthcare, etc.
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Northern Ireland23732 Posts
On October 29 2024 22:39 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2024 13:34 Introvert wrote:On October 29 2024 11:41 ChristianS wrote:On October 28 2024 11:46 Introvert wrote:
Harris had a left wing voting record in the senate and the primary. Just because she's pretending that didn't happen now doesn't make it not true. At *best* you could say she's unprincipled. And it shows in her flailing around. How can you be asked twice how you are different than Biden and not have an answer? She doesn't think she should have to work for it Not sure if this was intended as a response to me saying Harris is not some far-left radical, but it merits some discussion. Because yeah, if you go by 2020 primary positions or Senate DW-Nominate score or w/e, she looks pretty progressive, and she's Black and a woman, which supposedly progressives are supposed to be crazy about. And yet progressives never seem to claim her as one of their own, what gives? The 2020 Democratic primary was an interesting contest for a lot of reasons, but a big one is that Democratic political operatives had spent the last 4 years researching and developing every aspect of what they thought an effective presidential campaign to unseat Donald Trump should look like, and in that primary we got to see what they came up with. The answer was, in a word, "Obama." But the really interesting part is which aspects of Obama each campaign chose to replicate. Do you want a well-spoken Harvard alum who's a political outsider? Take a look at Pete Buttigieg, his only political experience is as mayor of a mid-size town in a red state! Do you want a likable Black guy with an extremely round head? Allow me to introduce Cory Booker, he's maybe got as much dad energy as any politician I've seen besides Tim Walz. But Kamala Harris had what I thought was probably the most plausible attempt to clone the Obama phenomenon. She was a clear rising star in her party, and as a California senator she was free to take progressive positions on votes as often as she liked without much backlash, which is important because I think her campaign clearly thought that to replicate Obama, you had to come from the progressive wing of the party. Surely some well-connected establishment guy is never gonna get people energized and excited about all the wonderful things their candidacy could accomplish – "Hope and Change" – the way a progressive could. She endorsed Medicare for All, etc., which seemed calibrated to make sure she was identified as one of the "progressive lane" candidates (although I'm not sure it really worked, even at the time). It turns out the political operatives were wrong anyway, people didn't want an Obama clone at all, or at least not a 2008 Obama clone. I mean, Obama was (and is!) still enormously popular with Democrats, but by then they're thinking of Obama after winning the presidency, who frankly was never all that progressive. Biden might actually have been the closest analog to that Obama, or at least used to stand next to him a lot, and that turned out to be good enough for primary voters (general election voters, too). And Kamala went to work for him as VP, which doesn't make a ton of sense if she was actually some Sanders-like dyed-in-the-wool progressive. Didn't she basically call that guy racist in the first debate? But she was always someone who tried to figure out what voters wanted, and then would try to give them what they want. When all the best minds thought that answer was an Obama clone, that was what she tried to be. Once it was clear they actually just wanted a steady hand establishment guy to calm down all the craziness + Show Spoiler +(a bit like Disney wanted from JJ Abrams around the same time) , she signed on with that project. You can call that "unprincipled" (and, I mean, I probably would) but a Harris defender might counter, what exactly is it you want politicians to do? I mean, our democratic system is supposedly so wise and just and well-designed because politicians are regularly held accountable to voters, so it incentivizes them to give voters what they want in order to stay in office. If the politicians are working hard to figure out what voters want to see and give it to them, isn't that the system working as intended? (Personally I don't buy that the system is so wise and just and well-designed; I wanted someone who endorsed progressive positions out of a sincere deeply-held belief, so I voted Sanders.) But I guess the long and short of it is, Kamala Harris was always essentially an establishment Democrat, in the sense that whatever direction the Democratic Party seemed to be moving in, she'd try to be on the leading edge of it. If the Democrats ever got enough of a mandate to implement some big, progressive reforms on the scale of Obamacare, you can bet she'd be there leading the charge. If the party decided that appealing to centrist voters with tax cuts and balanced budgets was their best path forward, she'd be there leading that charge too. She's not an ideologue, she's certainly not a socialist, GH need not worry about running into her at any meetings, and capitalists need not worry about her seizing the means of production. But in the world of Republican rhetoric, where all Democrats are Marxists until proven innocent (and even then, y'know, better safe than sorry), she's "Comrade Kamala." Which is the same playbook they run against every other Democrat, and like I said before, is almost never rooted in much truth, so changing their policy positions to counter the "Socialist!" attack is of limited value. It wasn't true before, it still won't be true after the change, and they'll keep saying it anyway. And if the attack was working before, it'll probably keep working just about as well, for reasons that apparently don't have much to do with the truth of it. I hate to give you a short reply to a long one again but oh well. I could re-interpret the historical facts that you laid out differently then you did. One reason Kamala can't do interviews very well is because she has to think about what she is "supposed" to say. She doesn't give them impression of someone who has thought through any particular issue in detail (famously she makes her staff put together large documents and then doesn't touch them). I know the thread hates him, but this is in exact contrast to someone like DeSantis. You may not like his answers or his style, but more than just about any politician today he always has an answer and he never gets caught fumbling around. He knows what he thinks and he knows what he would do. He doesn't accept false premises and he knows the material. Kamala laughs, stutters, and then doesn't answer the question (again, the "how are you different" question tripped her up TWICE in one day). Kamala has always done what she thinks she had to do to get ahead. That means for the undecided voter that at best, she's a black box. And he record from CA implies she has no problems with going along with the left side of her party. Rather than being some sort of reassurance that she will move the center because that's what it takes, her comfort with the left-wing policy proposals stereotypically associated with her home state are cause for concern. Of course the answer of why progressives don't like her is because they have insane purity tests(she was a cop!) and she comes off as horribly insincere, not a good look to a political persuasion that values sincerity and displays of empathy. So I agree, much of what she does is because she's in many ways a soulless politician. But here's the thing, she made a bad deal with the Devil, she didn't even get that much skill in return. And she is still proposing policies that are radical. Her unwillingness to compromise on abortion, even a religious exemption, is either again a lack of serious thought or dangerously authoritarian. So no, if dems want to pretend to be moderate they maybe should pick someone who could at least plausibly pretend to be. I’m not 100% sure what we’re disagreeing on here. I mean, certainly on the DeSantis praise, and I think that part might be a symptom of liberals and conservatives having some pretty different values wrt this specifically. Like, I remember in the 2012 Republican primary Gingrich got a question at one of the debates about his honestly despicable personal history with his past wives. Gingrich got an obviously very practiced mean look on his face, a bit of fire in his voice, and started talking about how unacceptable it was for them to ask about that, the media was so obviously biased against him but he wasn’t gonna sit there and take it. To me, it looked like a transparent attempt to act peevish and mean as a deflection; to Republican voters, apparently, that was a really strong answer. I think he was even leading the primary for a bit after that? I often got the same vibe from DeSantis – he clearly thought it appeals to his base if he regularly goes on angry tirades instead of answering the question, and I suspect some of those same instances were watched somewhere by an Introvert who thought “yeah, he’s alright, he doesn’t accept false premises and knows the material.” But he could never compete with Trump for the voters who admire unprovoked peevishness, and I think there were a lot of voters like me that thought it seemed strange and unnecessarily vile. More than that, it seemed like it was insincere, manufactured vileness, which is even more off-putting (“weird,” in a word, though I know that label is old news at this point). I’m sure there are similar phenomena with Harris, things that seem obviously off-putting to you and other conservative voters but seem fine to me. Like, the whole “coconut tree” thing and “unburdened by things that have been” was something I originally saw in a GOP attack ad, which I really didn’t understand. It’s a little whimsical, I guess, but the point she’s making is pretty normal (even a bit bland) and the way she’s making it is cute, maybe even verging on likable (which, for me at least, she often struggles a little to hit). I haven’t seen the “how are you different from Biden” thing you keep mentioning but if I were a political adviser I’d say “that question is a trap, you should not be spending any time criticizing Biden or communicating to Biden fans that they might not like you. Dodge the question, stay on message, pivot and attack.” It sounds like she did that, which maybe isn’t the most honest but sounds like decent political instincts to me.
I mean De Santis went from viable Presidential candidate to well, not, the more he got national visibility.
I would somewhat agree with Introvert in a sense. I think I’ve a pretty good sense of De Santis, who he is and what he stands for. When he’s deflecting it’s away from the negatives of that reality
With Harris she feels a bit more amorphous, and when she deflects it’s to stay that way insofar as it’s possible.
That’s not even a particular criticism, I think it’s almost a necessity to hold a coalition as broad as the left and right of the Democratic base.
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On October 29 2024 21:55 Biff The Understudy wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2024 21:26 GreenHorizons wrote:On October 29 2024 21:06 Biff The Understudy wrote:On October 29 2024 18:22 Gorsameth wrote:On October 29 2024 14:11 GreenHorizons wrote:On October 29 2024 13:28 Biff The Understudy wrote:
Every time we mention socialism in this thread, i struggle to see if we are taking Denmark, Cuba, the USSR in 1925, France in 1982 or something that’s never existed.
It really makes the conversation very abstract. The word is unbelievably broad, and while I’m sure many here are very clear what they mean, it’s not always easy to follow. In the most general sense I'm talking socialism as a system to pursue conscientização or critical consciousness Critical consciousness focuses on achieving an in-depth understanding of the world, allowing for the perception and exposure of social and political contradictions. Critical consciousness also includes taking action against the oppressive elements in one's life that are illuminated by that understanding And generally aligned with Fanon, Freire, Kwame Ture, and that general flavor of revolutionary socialism. But at an even more basic level I'm just arguing in favor of socialism being a superior paradigm to pursue a "more perfect union" so to speak than capitalism and liberal democracy. As far as I can tell outside of the right-wingers, everyone agrees with that premise (socialism>capitalism going forward) at this point. The fighting is around what to do about that. Since your pointing to thinkers and not history I guess the answer to Biffs question is ' something that has never existed'. Yeah. That’s my point a little bit. And since most of us haven’t read those authors, we are talking without a clear reference over what any of that means, which dooms the conversation imo. I find though that the cultivated confusion about the word socialism is one of the reason the political debate in the US is so sterile. Republicans voluntarily entertain the confusion between « slightly more like Denmark » and « Moscow 1928 » and the progressives never explain if they want a completely new utopian system that has never existed, + Show Spoiler + or again, if we are talking increasing taxes and getting what most advanced countries already have, such as free healthcare, free education and so on.
Then everybody goes on talking with their definition in mind. Which is a major reason I've spent 7+ years trying to get you guys to read some of them. It also demonstrates how the inquiries are just bad faith sealioning. Seems like the US is getting forced into the choice of fascism or something new that hasn't existed and most US voters favor fascism over their fear of something new/reading socialists instead of hundreds of pages of oBlade type arguments. I know, but you have to realize that there are little chance anyone here is interested in another poster’s thought quite enough to read 2000 pages to understand what they are talking about. I am quite certain that you wouldn’t do it for me, and that’s really quite normal. So saying, go read my sources is not really a way to go in a discussion, because we could all do that. If I yold you: “you would understand me better if you read Spinoza and its commentary by Deleuze - and I believe you would - so your enquiries about what i say are done in bad faith” you would not take me very seriously. What I understand a bit from seven years of and and off discussion - and really, correct me if i am wrong - is that you think your ideas are deeper and worth more time and attention than any of us here. And that really limits the possibility of exchange.
Except they have read thousands of pages of utter bollocks from the oBlades over the years.
It's a matter of prioritization and they don't prioritize learning about socialism because they're addicted to capitalism and liberal democracy.
"My ideas" are but a drop in an ocean of socialist thought, they aren't an a-z blueprint for a perfect socialist revolution. If I wanted people to take away one thing it'd be that we'd be better off trying to address all of the issues we face under a socialist paradigm rather than the profit driven capitalist one we live under now that promises global ecological catastrophe and nuclear annihilation.
As such, we're all obligated to past, present, and future generations to do as much as we can to make that transition into a socialist paradigm a reality imo.
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Northern Ireland23732 Posts
We should have a USPol book club, probably using some IP meeting platform as I think it would be quite costly to do it in-person
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Wow Bush, Cheney, almost seems like Kamala is planning to bless some Middle East country with her presence...
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On October 29 2024 22:52 GreenHorizons wrote:
Except they have read thousands of pages of utter bollocks from the oBlades over the years.
It's a matter of prioritization and they don't prioritize learning about socialism because they're addicted to capitalism and liberal democracy.
"My ideas" are but a drop in an ocean of socialist thought, they aren't an a-z blueprint for a perfect socialist revolution. If I wanted people to take away one thing it'd be that we'd be better off trying to address all of the issues we face under a socialist paradigm rather than the profit driven capitalist one we live under now that promises global ecological catastrophe and nuclear annihilation.
As such, we're all obligated to past and future generations to do as much as we can to make that transition into a socialist paradigm a reality imo.
I like learning about what different normal people have to say and how they use their rhetoric to justify their beliefs. I thinks that's very insightful, especially when they come from people who inhabit the exact same space (and seemingly reality but who knows at the point), but seem to cone to very different conclusions.
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On October 29 2024 23:09 Razyda wrote:Wow Bush, Cheney, almost seems like Kamala is planning to bless some Middle East country with her presence... Or you know just people who recognise that while they disagree with Democrats on many things, everyone should be able to agree that preserving democracy in America is more important.
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Pretty sure Cheney's only interest in preserving democracy in America would be after discovering its oil reserves.
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On October 29 2024 22:52 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2024 21:55 Biff The Understudy wrote:On October 29 2024 21:26 GreenHorizons wrote:On October 29 2024 21:06 Biff The Understudy wrote:On October 29 2024 18:22 Gorsameth wrote:On October 29 2024 14:11 GreenHorizons wrote:On October 29 2024 13:28 Biff The Understudy wrote:
Every time we mention socialism in this thread, i struggle to see if we are taking Denmark, Cuba, the USSR in 1925, France in 1982 or something that’s never existed.
It really makes the conversation very abstract. The word is unbelievably broad, and while I’m sure many here are very clear what they mean, it’s not always easy to follow. In the most general sense I'm talking socialism as a system to pursue conscientização or critical consciousness Critical consciousness focuses on achieving an in-depth understanding of the world, allowing for the perception and exposure of social and political contradictions. Critical consciousness also includes taking action against the oppressive elements in one's life that are illuminated by that understanding And generally aligned with Fanon, Freire, Kwame Ture, and that general flavor of revolutionary socialism. But at an even more basic level I'm just arguing in favor of socialism being a superior paradigm to pursue a "more perfect union" so to speak than capitalism and liberal democracy. As far as I can tell outside of the right-wingers, everyone agrees with that premise (socialism>capitalism going forward) at this point. The fighting is around what to do about that. Since your pointing to thinkers and not history I guess the answer to Biffs question is ' something that has never existed'. Yeah. That’s my point a little bit. And since most of us haven’t read those authors, we are talking without a clear reference over what any of that means, which dooms the conversation imo. I find though that the cultivated confusion about the word socialism is one of the reason the political debate in the US is so sterile. Republicans voluntarily entertain the confusion between « slightly more like Denmark » and « Moscow 1928 » and the progressives never explain if they want a completely new utopian system that has never existed, + Show Spoiler + or again, if we are talking increasing taxes and getting what most advanced countries already have, such as free healthcare, free education and so on.
Then everybody goes on talking with their definition in mind. Which is a major reason I've spent 7+ years trying to get you guys to read some of them. It also demonstrates how the inquiries are just bad faith sealioning. Seems like the US is getting forced into the choice of fascism or something new that hasn't existed and most US voters favor fascism over their fear of something new/reading socialists instead of hundreds of pages of oBlade type arguments. I know, but you have to realize that there are little chance anyone here is interested in another poster’s thought quite enough to read 2000 pages to understand what they are talking about. I am quite certain that you wouldn’t do it for me, and that’s really quite normal. So saying, go read my sources is not really a way to go in a discussion, because we could all do that. If I yold you: “you would understand me better if you read Spinoza and its commentary by Deleuze - and I believe you would - so your enquiries about what i say are done in bad faith” you would not take me very seriously. What I understand a bit from seven years of and and off discussion - and really, correct me if i am wrong - is that you think your ideas are deeper and worth more time and attention than any of us here. And that really limits the possibility of exchange. Except they have read thousands of pages of utter bollocks from the oBlades over the years. It's a matter of prioritization and they don't prioritize learning about socialism because they're addicted to capitalism and liberal democracy. "My ideas" are but a drop in an ocean of socialist thought, they aren't an a-z blueprint for a perfect socialist revolution. If I wanted people to take away one thing it'd be that we'd be better off trying to address all of the issues we face under a socialist paradigm rather than the profit driven capitalist one we live under now that promises global ecological catastrophe and nuclear annihilation. As such, we're all obligated to past, present, and future generations to do as much as we can to make that transition into a socialist paradigm a reality imo.
I know GH but do you understand the problem?
Look, I can tell you that my problem with your attitude is well summarized by Jaques Rancière in his seminal book, Althusser’s Lesson and his subsequent works, in which he explains how socialists revolutions have failed abjectly because of the arrogant position in which well-read revolutionaries that knew the theory and that were dogmatically entranched in a position of intellectual superiority were naturally the ones who knew what had to be done and how to do it, and considered they had nothing to learn from the people for whom the revolution was meant to be.
Are you going to go to the library and read Rancière instead of, you too, read oBlade’s bs? No. You will keep reading oBlade. Rancière is one of the greatest french left wing philosopher of the XXth century. But you won’t take that from me or anyone here, yet you expect us to do the work you are absolutely not willing to do.
And that, for me, kills all possibility of learning from each other.
I recommend to read Althusser too by the way. “Reading the Capital” is a great work, but mainly to understand the problem Rancière had with him. Much better read that oblade, but that’s a lot of pages, I give you that.
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On October 29 2024 22:51 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2024 22:39 ChristianS wrote:On October 29 2024 13:34 Introvert wrote:On October 29 2024 11:41 ChristianS wrote:On October 28 2024 11:46 Introvert wrote:
Harris had a left wing voting record in the senate and the primary. Just because she's pretending that didn't happen now doesn't make it not true. At *best* you could say she's unprincipled. And it shows in her flailing around. How can you be asked twice how you are different than Biden and not have an answer? She doesn't think she should have to work for it Not sure if this was intended as a response to me saying Harris is not some far-left radical, but it merits some discussion. Because yeah, if you go by 2020 primary positions or Senate DW-Nominate score or w/e, she looks pretty progressive, and she's Black and a woman, which supposedly progressives are supposed to be crazy about. And yet progressives never seem to claim her as one of their own, what gives? The 2020 Democratic primary was an interesting contest for a lot of reasons, but a big one is that Democratic political operatives had spent the last 4 years researching and developing every aspect of what they thought an effective presidential campaign to unseat Donald Trump should look like, and in that primary we got to see what they came up with. The answer was, in a word, "Obama." But the really interesting part is which aspects of Obama each campaign chose to replicate. Do you want a well-spoken Harvard alum who's a political outsider? Take a look at Pete Buttigieg, his only political experience is as mayor of a mid-size town in a red state! Do you want a likable Black guy with an extremely round head? Allow me to introduce Cory Booker, he's maybe got as much dad energy as any politician I've seen besides Tim Walz. But Kamala Harris had what I thought was probably the most plausible attempt to clone the Obama phenomenon. She was a clear rising star in her party, and as a California senator she was free to take progressive positions on votes as often as she liked without much backlash, which is important because I think her campaign clearly thought that to replicate Obama, you had to come from the progressive wing of the party. Surely some well-connected establishment guy is never gonna get people energized and excited about all the wonderful things their candidacy could accomplish – "Hope and Change" – the way a progressive could. She endorsed Medicare for All, etc., which seemed calibrated to make sure she was identified as one of the "progressive lane" candidates (although I'm not sure it really worked, even at the time). It turns out the political operatives were wrong anyway, people didn't want an Obama clone at all, or at least not a 2008 Obama clone. I mean, Obama was (and is!) still enormously popular with Democrats, but by then they're thinking of Obama after winning the presidency, who frankly was never all that progressive. Biden might actually have been the closest analog to that Obama, or at least used to stand next to him a lot, and that turned out to be good enough for primary voters (general election voters, too). And Kamala went to work for him as VP, which doesn't make a ton of sense if she was actually some Sanders-like dyed-in-the-wool progressive. Didn't she basically call that guy racist in the first debate? But she was always someone who tried to figure out what voters wanted, and then would try to give them what they want. When all the best minds thought that answer was an Obama clone, that was what she tried to be. Once it was clear they actually just wanted a steady hand establishment guy to calm down all the craziness + Show Spoiler +(a bit like Disney wanted from JJ Abrams around the same time) , she signed on with that project. You can call that "unprincipled" (and, I mean, I probably would) but a Harris defender might counter, what exactly is it you want politicians to do? I mean, our democratic system is supposedly so wise and just and well-designed because politicians are regularly held accountable to voters, so it incentivizes them to give voters what they want in order to stay in office. If the politicians are working hard to figure out what voters want to see and give it to them, isn't that the system working as intended? (Personally I don't buy that the system is so wise and just and well-designed; I wanted someone who endorsed progressive positions out of a sincere deeply-held belief, so I voted Sanders.) But I guess the long and short of it is, Kamala Harris was always essentially an establishment Democrat, in the sense that whatever direction the Democratic Party seemed to be moving in, she'd try to be on the leading edge of it. If the Democrats ever got enough of a mandate to implement some big, progressive reforms on the scale of Obamacare, you can bet she'd be there leading the charge. If the party decided that appealing to centrist voters with tax cuts and balanced budgets was their best path forward, she'd be there leading that charge too. She's not an ideologue, she's certainly not a socialist, GH need not worry about running into her at any meetings, and capitalists need not worry about her seizing the means of production. But in the world of Republican rhetoric, where all Democrats are Marxists until proven innocent (and even then, y'know, better safe than sorry), she's "Comrade Kamala." Which is the same playbook they run against every other Democrat, and like I said before, is almost never rooted in much truth, so changing their policy positions to counter the "Socialist!" attack is of limited value. It wasn't true before, it still won't be true after the change, and they'll keep saying it anyway. And if the attack was working before, it'll probably keep working just about as well, for reasons that apparently don't have much to do with the truth of it. I hate to give you a short reply to a long one again but oh well. I could re-interpret the historical facts that you laid out differently then you did. One reason Kamala can't do interviews very well is because she has to think about what she is "supposed" to say. She doesn't give them impression of someone who has thought through any particular issue in detail (famously she makes her staff put together large documents and then doesn't touch them). I know the thread hates him, but this is in exact contrast to someone like DeSantis. You may not like his answers or his style, but more than just about any politician today he always has an answer and he never gets caught fumbling around. He knows what he thinks and he knows what he would do. He doesn't accept false premises and he knows the material. Kamala laughs, stutters, and then doesn't answer the question (again, the "how are you different" question tripped her up TWICE in one day). Kamala has always done what she thinks she had to do to get ahead. That means for the undecided voter that at best, she's a black box. And he record from CA implies she has no problems with going along with the left side of her party. Rather than being some sort of reassurance that she will move the center because that's what it takes, her comfort with the left-wing policy proposals stereotypically associated with her home state are cause for concern. Of course the answer of why progressives don't like her is because they have insane purity tests(she was a cop!) and she comes off as horribly insincere, not a good look to a political persuasion that values sincerity and displays of empathy. So I agree, much of what she does is because she's in many ways a soulless politician. But here's the thing, she made a bad deal with the Devil, she didn't even get that much skill in return. And she is still proposing policies that are radical. Her unwillingness to compromise on abortion, even a religious exemption, is either again a lack of serious thought or dangerously authoritarian. So no, if dems want to pretend to be moderate they maybe should pick someone who could at least plausibly pretend to be. I’m not 100% sure what we’re disagreeing on here. I mean, certainly on the DeSantis praise, and I think that part might be a symptom of liberals and conservatives having some pretty different values wrt this specifically. Like, I remember in the 2012 Republican primary Gingrich got a question at one of the debates about his honestly despicable personal history with his past wives. Gingrich got an obviously very practiced mean look on his face, a bit of fire in his voice, and started talking about how unacceptable it was for them to ask about that, the media was so obviously biased against him but he wasn’t gonna sit there and take it. To me, it looked like a transparent attempt to act peevish and mean as a deflection; to Republican voters, apparently, that was a really strong answer. I think he was even leading the primary for a bit after that? I often got the same vibe from DeSantis – he clearly thought it appeals to his base if he regularly goes on angry tirades instead of answering the question, and I suspect some of those same instances were watched somewhere by an Introvert who thought “yeah, he’s alright, he doesn’t accept false premises and knows the material.” But he could never compete with Trump for the voters who admire unprovoked peevishness, and I think there were a lot of voters like me that thought it seemed strange and unnecessarily vile. More than that, it seemed like it was insincere, manufactured vileness, which is even more off-putting (“weird,” in a word, though I know that label is old news at this point). I’m sure there are similar phenomena with Harris, things that seem obviously off-putting to you and other conservative voters but seem fine to me. Like, the whole “coconut tree” thing and “unburdened by things that have been” was something I originally saw in a GOP attack ad, which I really didn’t understand. It’s a little whimsical, I guess, but the point she’s making is pretty normal (even a bit bland) and the way she’s making it is cute, maybe even verging on likable (which, for me at least, she often struggles a little to hit). I haven’t seen the “how are you different from Biden” thing you keep mentioning but if I were a political adviser I’d say “that question is a trap, you should not be spending any time criticizing Biden or communicating to Biden fans that they might not like you. Dodge the question, stay on message, pivot and attack.” It sounds like she did that, which maybe isn’t the most honest but sounds like decent political instincts to me. I mean De Santis went from viable Presidential candidate to well, not, the more he got national visibility. I would somewhat agree with Introvert in a sense. I think I’ve a pretty good sense of De Santis, who he is and what he stands for. When he’s deflecting it’s away from the negatives of that reality With Harris she feels a bit more amorphous, and when she deflects it’s to stay that way insofar as it’s possible. That’s not even a particular criticism, I think it’s almost a necessity to hold a coalition as broad as the left and right of the Democratic base.
Interesting. I’ll admit you and Intro both might have followed the DeSantis saga more closely than I did – every time I looked at him it seemed even more certain he wasn’t gonna be president, so it was mostly a “let’s check in on the weird little guy.” US politics already offers plenty of that, and it’s usually not a productive impulse to indulge.
But I guess I never got the impression he was particularly sincere. Which is maybe better than the alternative – so many of his distinguishing characteristics amounted to “we’re going to take power and use it to punish people we despise” – but the whole thing seemed so terminally online. Like the guy would see an online discourse about gas stoves and do a photo op with a wall of gas stoves as backdrop, but the average voter doesn’t follow that discourse and a red-faced man pointing at a wall of gas stoves and essentially shouting “This is what they took from you!” is, again, bizarre and off-putting in a way that doesn’t feel sincere.
Maybe my memory is overly characterized by that weird fuckin ad they paid to make and put out into the world, then took down and claimed they didn’t make it, but we found out later they did. That seemed emblematic to me – terminally online, performatively vile in a way that seems calculated rather than sincere, but also miscalculated in that it won’t actually appeal to voters. When my conservative family members talk wistfully about the missed opportunities of having a non-Trump candidate, they look to Haley, not DeSantis.
But narrowly, I’m not sure DeSantis would be that bad a guy to know. Like, I think the peevishness is a performance, and if he was a coworker or drinking buddy I doubt he’d be particularly unpleasant. Maybe a little awkward, but not remarkably so. I bet his politics were pretty at home in the Tea Party era he came up in, somewhat less so in this Trump era but he’s willing to play ball because he’s got career prospects. So in that sense, maybe I agree that it’s easier to tell what kind of guy he is? But if I’m right, it’s not the guy he was pretending to be because he thought it would make him president.
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On October 29 2024 23:09 Razyda wrote:Wow Bush, Cheney, almost seems like Kamala is planning to bless some Middle East country with her presence...
I think the main idea is that only Trump could unite political leaders and families - from the most conservative to the most progressive - against him and his desire to repeat his reign of terror.
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Northern Ireland23732 Posts
On October 29 2024 23:44 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2024 22:51 WombaT wrote:On October 29 2024 22:39 ChristianS wrote:On October 29 2024 13:34 Introvert wrote:On October 29 2024 11:41 ChristianS wrote:On October 28 2024 11:46 Introvert wrote:
Harris had a left wing voting record in the senate and the primary. Just because she's pretending that didn't happen now doesn't make it not true. At *best* you could say she's unprincipled. And it shows in her flailing around. How can you be asked twice how you are different than Biden and not have an answer? She doesn't think she should have to work for it Not sure if this was intended as a response to me saying Harris is not some far-left radical, but it merits some discussion. Because yeah, if you go by 2020 primary positions or Senate DW-Nominate score or w/e, she looks pretty progressive, and she's Black and a woman, which supposedly progressives are supposed to be crazy about. And yet progressives never seem to claim her as one of their own, what gives? The 2020 Democratic primary was an interesting contest for a lot of reasons, but a big one is that Democratic political operatives had spent the last 4 years researching and developing every aspect of what they thought an effective presidential campaign to unseat Donald Trump should look like, and in that primary we got to see what they came up with. The answer was, in a word, "Obama." But the really interesting part is which aspects of Obama each campaign chose to replicate. Do you want a well-spoken Harvard alum who's a political outsider? Take a look at Pete Buttigieg, his only political experience is as mayor of a mid-size town in a red state! Do you want a likable Black guy with an extremely round head? Allow me to introduce Cory Booker, he's maybe got as much dad energy as any politician I've seen besides Tim Walz. But Kamala Harris had what I thought was probably the most plausible attempt to clone the Obama phenomenon. She was a clear rising star in her party, and as a California senator she was free to take progressive positions on votes as often as she liked without much backlash, which is important because I think her campaign clearly thought that to replicate Obama, you had to come from the progressive wing of the party. Surely some well-connected establishment guy is never gonna get people energized and excited about all the wonderful things their candidacy could accomplish – "Hope and Change" – the way a progressive could. She endorsed Medicare for All, etc., which seemed calibrated to make sure she was identified as one of the "progressive lane" candidates (although I'm not sure it really worked, even at the time). It turns out the political operatives were wrong anyway, people didn't want an Obama clone at all, or at least not a 2008 Obama clone. I mean, Obama was (and is!) still enormously popular with Democrats, but by then they're thinking of Obama after winning the presidency, who frankly was never all that progressive. Biden might actually have been the closest analog to that Obama, or at least used to stand next to him a lot, and that turned out to be good enough for primary voters (general election voters, too). And Kamala went to work for him as VP, which doesn't make a ton of sense if she was actually some Sanders-like dyed-in-the-wool progressive. Didn't she basically call that guy racist in the first debate? But she was always someone who tried to figure out what voters wanted, and then would try to give them what they want. When all the best minds thought that answer was an Obama clone, that was what she tried to be. Once it was clear they actually just wanted a steady hand establishment guy to calm down all the craziness + Show Spoiler +(a bit like Disney wanted from JJ Abrams around the same time) , she signed on with that project. You can call that "unprincipled" (and, I mean, I probably would) but a Harris defender might counter, what exactly is it you want politicians to do? I mean, our democratic system is supposedly so wise and just and well-designed because politicians are regularly held accountable to voters, so it incentivizes them to give voters what they want in order to stay in office. If the politicians are working hard to figure out what voters want to see and give it to them, isn't that the system working as intended? (Personally I don't buy that the system is so wise and just and well-designed; I wanted someone who endorsed progressive positions out of a sincere deeply-held belief, so I voted Sanders.) But I guess the long and short of it is, Kamala Harris was always essentially an establishment Democrat, in the sense that whatever direction the Democratic Party seemed to be moving in, she'd try to be on the leading edge of it. If the Democrats ever got enough of a mandate to implement some big, progressive reforms on the scale of Obamacare, you can bet she'd be there leading the charge. If the party decided that appealing to centrist voters with tax cuts and balanced budgets was their best path forward, she'd be there leading that charge too. She's not an ideologue, she's certainly not a socialist, GH need not worry about running into her at any meetings, and capitalists need not worry about her seizing the means of production. But in the world of Republican rhetoric, where all Democrats are Marxists until proven innocent (and even then, y'know, better safe than sorry), she's "Comrade Kamala." Which is the same playbook they run against every other Democrat, and like I said before, is almost never rooted in much truth, so changing their policy positions to counter the "Socialist!" attack is of limited value. It wasn't true before, it still won't be true after the change, and they'll keep saying it anyway. And if the attack was working before, it'll probably keep working just about as well, for reasons that apparently don't have much to do with the truth of it. I hate to give you a short reply to a long one again but oh well. I could re-interpret the historical facts that you laid out differently then you did. One reason Kamala can't do interviews very well is because she has to think about what she is "supposed" to say. She doesn't give them impression of someone who has thought through any particular issue in detail (famously she makes her staff put together large documents and then doesn't touch them). I know the thread hates him, but this is in exact contrast to someone like DeSantis. You may not like his answers or his style, but more than just about any politician today he always has an answer and he never gets caught fumbling around. He knows what he thinks and he knows what he would do. He doesn't accept false premises and he knows the material. Kamala laughs, stutters, and then doesn't answer the question (again, the "how are you different" question tripped her up TWICE in one day). Kamala has always done what she thinks she had to do to get ahead. That means for the undecided voter that at best, she's a black box. And he record from CA implies she has no problems with going along with the left side of her party. Rather than being some sort of reassurance that she will move the center because that's what it takes, her comfort with the left-wing policy proposals stereotypically associated with her home state are cause for concern. Of course the answer of why progressives don't like her is because they have insane purity tests(she was a cop!) and she comes off as horribly insincere, not a good look to a political persuasion that values sincerity and displays of empathy. So I agree, much of what she does is because she's in many ways a soulless politician. But here's the thing, she made a bad deal with the Devil, she didn't even get that much skill in return. And she is still proposing policies that are radical. Her unwillingness to compromise on abortion, even a religious exemption, is either again a lack of serious thought or dangerously authoritarian. So no, if dems want to pretend to be moderate they maybe should pick someone who could at least plausibly pretend to be. I’m not 100% sure what we’re disagreeing on here. I mean, certainly on the DeSantis praise, and I think that part might be a symptom of liberals and conservatives having some pretty different values wrt this specifically. Like, I remember in the 2012 Republican primary Gingrich got a question at one of the debates about his honestly despicable personal history with his past wives. Gingrich got an obviously very practiced mean look on his face, a bit of fire in his voice, and started talking about how unacceptable it was for them to ask about that, the media was so obviously biased against him but he wasn’t gonna sit there and take it. To me, it looked like a transparent attempt to act peevish and mean as a deflection; to Republican voters, apparently, that was a really strong answer. I think he was even leading the primary for a bit after that? I often got the same vibe from DeSantis – he clearly thought it appeals to his base if he regularly goes on angry tirades instead of answering the question, and I suspect some of those same instances were watched somewhere by an Introvert who thought “yeah, he’s alright, he doesn’t accept false premises and knows the material.” But he could never compete with Trump for the voters who admire unprovoked peevishness, and I think there were a lot of voters like me that thought it seemed strange and unnecessarily vile. More than that, it seemed like it was insincere, manufactured vileness, which is even more off-putting (“weird,” in a word, though I know that label is old news at this point). I’m sure there are similar phenomena with Harris, things that seem obviously off-putting to you and other conservative voters but seem fine to me. Like, the whole “coconut tree” thing and “unburdened by things that have been” was something I originally saw in a GOP attack ad, which I really didn’t understand. It’s a little whimsical, I guess, but the point she’s making is pretty normal (even a bit bland) and the way she’s making it is cute, maybe even verging on likable (which, for me at least, she often struggles a little to hit). I haven’t seen the “how are you different from Biden” thing you keep mentioning but if I were a political adviser I’d say “that question is a trap, you should not be spending any time criticizing Biden or communicating to Biden fans that they might not like you. Dodge the question, stay on message, pivot and attack.” It sounds like she did that, which maybe isn’t the most honest but sounds like decent political instincts to me. I mean De Santis went from viable Presidential candidate to well, not, the more he got national visibility. I would somewhat agree with Introvert in a sense. I think I’ve a pretty good sense of De Santis, who he is and what he stands for. When he’s deflecting it’s away from the negatives of that reality With Harris she feels a bit more amorphous, and when she deflects it’s to stay that way insofar as it’s possible. That’s not even a particular criticism, I think it’s almost a necessity to hold a coalition as broad as the left and right of the Democratic base. Interesting. I’ll admit you and Intro both might have followed the DeSantis saga more closely than I did – every time I looked at him it seemed even more certain he wasn’t gonna be president, so it was mostly a “let’s check in on the weird little guy.” US politics already offers plenty of that, and it’s usually not a productive impulse to indulge. But I guess I never got the impression he was particularly sincere. Which is maybe better than the alternative – so many of his distinguishing characteristics amounted to “we’re going to take power and use it to punish people we despise” – but the whole thing seemed so terminally online. Like the guy would see an online discourse about gas stoves and do a photo op with a wall of gas stoves as backdrop, but the average voter doesn’t follow that discourse and a red-faced man pointing at a wall of gas stoves and essentially shouting “This is what they took from you!” is, again, bizarre and off-putting in a way that doesn’t feel sincere. Maybe my memory is overly characterized by that weird fuckin ad they paid to make and put out into the world, then took down and claimed they didn’t make it, but we found out later they did. That seemed emblematic to me – terminally online, performatively vile in a way that seems calculated rather than sincere, but also miscalculated in that it won’t actually appeal to voters. When my conservative family members talk wistfully about the missed opportunities of having a non-Trump candidate, they look to Haley, not DeSantis. But narrowly, I’m not sure DeSantis would be that bad a guy to know. Like, I think the peevishness is a performance, and if he was a coworker or drinking buddy I doubt he’d be particularly unpleasant. Maybe a little awkward, but not remarkably so. I bet his politics were pretty at home in the Tea Party era he came up in, somewhat less so in this Trump era but he’s willing to play ball because he’s got career prospects. So in that sense, maybe I agree that it’s easier to tell what kind of guy he is? But if I’m right, it’s not the guy he was pretending to be because he thought it would make him president.
I can’t say I was laser focused, I was paying attention at one point for quite a specific reason.
A history podcast I listen to demarcates various leaders into history into your charismatic leader of men types, and your ‘bean counters’, those with a real talent for nitty gritty administration
Quite early in this cycle when things were more in flux, I do recall a certain fear that what happens if someone who’s pretty damn competent can ride the MAGA wave, and De Santis seemed the obvious candidate there.
However it became quite clear, whatever the special sauce needed to capture those hearts and minds is, De Santis doesn’t have it. Or at least not if Trump’s in the mix.
Perhaps this rather worrisome hypothetical is something of a chimera. MAGAism is a rather emotionally driven, rather haphazard phenomenon and once you start to bolt on pragmatic competency it just dissipates.
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On October 29 2024 22:52 GreenHorizons wrote:
"My ideas" are but a drop in an ocean of socialist thought, they aren't an a-z blueprint for a perfect socialist revolution. If I wanted people to take away one thing it'd be that we'd be better off trying to address all of the issues we face under a socialist paradigm rather than the profit driven capitalist one we live under now that promises global ecological catastrophe and nuclear annihilation.
As such, we're all obligated to past, present, and future generations to do as much as we can to make that transition into a socialist paradigm a reality imo.
Is there a practical blueprint for this transition? Do you have one you can link me to or that you can copy paste?
Most of what I've read in terms of socialist or communist ideas (and I even worked myself through Kolakowski's behemoth) , given that the transition succeeds, falls short because of either - in the form of centralized socialism - the same problems that predicted the fall of the Soviet Union or - in the form of decentralized socialism - because of issues like motivation or long term equality as seen with the Israeli Kibbutzim or Mondragon.
So far, I didn't come across a theory that could be able to tackle these obstacles.
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On October 29 2024 23:58 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2024 23:44 ChristianS wrote:On October 29 2024 22:51 WombaT wrote:On October 29 2024 22:39 ChristianS wrote:On October 29 2024 13:34 Introvert wrote:On October 29 2024 11:41 ChristianS wrote:On October 28 2024 11:46 Introvert wrote:
Harris had a left wing voting record in the senate and the primary. Just because she's pretending that didn't happen now doesn't make it not true. At *best* you could say she's unprincipled. And it shows in her flailing around. How can you be asked twice how you are different than Biden and not have an answer? She doesn't think she should have to work for it Not sure if this was intended as a response to me saying Harris is not some far-left radical, but it merits some discussion. Because yeah, if you go by 2020 primary positions or Senate DW-Nominate score or w/e, she looks pretty progressive, and she's Black and a woman, which supposedly progressives are supposed to be crazy about. And yet progressives never seem to claim her as one of their own, what gives? The 2020 Democratic primary was an interesting contest for a lot of reasons, but a big one is that Democratic political operatives had spent the last 4 years researching and developing every aspect of what they thought an effective presidential campaign to unseat Donald Trump should look like, and in that primary we got to see what they came up with. The answer was, in a word, "Obama." But the really interesting part is which aspects of Obama each campaign chose to replicate. Do you want a well-spoken Harvard alum who's a political outsider? Take a look at Pete Buttigieg, his only political experience is as mayor of a mid-size town in a red state! Do you want a likable Black guy with an extremely round head? Allow me to introduce Cory Booker, he's maybe got as much dad energy as any politician I've seen besides Tim Walz. But Kamala Harris had what I thought was probably the most plausible attempt to clone the Obama phenomenon. She was a clear rising star in her party, and as a California senator she was free to take progressive positions on votes as often as she liked without much backlash, which is important because I think her campaign clearly thought that to replicate Obama, you had to come from the progressive wing of the party. Surely some well-connected establishment guy is never gonna get people energized and excited about all the wonderful things their candidacy could accomplish – "Hope and Change" – the way a progressive could. She endorsed Medicare for All, etc., which seemed calibrated to make sure she was identified as one of the "progressive lane" candidates (although I'm not sure it really worked, even at the time). It turns out the political operatives were wrong anyway, people didn't want an Obama clone at all, or at least not a 2008 Obama clone. I mean, Obama was (and is!) still enormously popular with Democrats, but by then they're thinking of Obama after winning the presidency, who frankly was never all that progressive. Biden might actually have been the closest analog to that Obama, or at least used to stand next to him a lot, and that turned out to be good enough for primary voters (general election voters, too). And Kamala went to work for him as VP, which doesn't make a ton of sense if she was actually some Sanders-like dyed-in-the-wool progressive. Didn't she basically call that guy racist in the first debate? But she was always someone who tried to figure out what voters wanted, and then would try to give them what they want. When all the best minds thought that answer was an Obama clone, that was what she tried to be. Once it was clear they actually just wanted a steady hand establishment guy to calm down all the craziness + Show Spoiler +(a bit like Disney wanted from JJ Abrams around the same time) , she signed on with that project. You can call that "unprincipled" (and, I mean, I probably would) but a Harris defender might counter, what exactly is it you want politicians to do? I mean, our democratic system is supposedly so wise and just and well-designed because politicians are regularly held accountable to voters, so it incentivizes them to give voters what they want in order to stay in office. If the politicians are working hard to figure out what voters want to see and give it to them, isn't that the system working as intended? (Personally I don't buy that the system is so wise and just and well-designed; I wanted someone who endorsed progressive positions out of a sincere deeply-held belief, so I voted Sanders.) But I guess the long and short of it is, Kamala Harris was always essentially an establishment Democrat, in the sense that whatever direction the Democratic Party seemed to be moving in, she'd try to be on the leading edge of it. If the Democrats ever got enough of a mandate to implement some big, progressive reforms on the scale of Obamacare, you can bet she'd be there leading the charge. If the party decided that appealing to centrist voters with tax cuts and balanced budgets was their best path forward, she'd be there leading that charge too. She's not an ideologue, she's certainly not a socialist, GH need not worry about running into her at any meetings, and capitalists need not worry about her seizing the means of production. But in the world of Republican rhetoric, where all Democrats are Marxists until proven innocent (and even then, y'know, better safe than sorry), she's "Comrade Kamala." Which is the same playbook they run against every other Democrat, and like I said before, is almost never rooted in much truth, so changing their policy positions to counter the "Socialist!" attack is of limited value. It wasn't true before, it still won't be true after the change, and they'll keep saying it anyway. And if the attack was working before, it'll probably keep working just about as well, for reasons that apparently don't have much to do with the truth of it. I hate to give you a short reply to a long one again but oh well. I could re-interpret the historical facts that you laid out differently then you did. One reason Kamala can't do interviews very well is because she has to think about what she is "supposed" to say. She doesn't give them impression of someone who has thought through any particular issue in detail (famously she makes her staff put together large documents and then doesn't touch them). I know the thread hates him, but this is in exact contrast to someone like DeSantis. You may not like his answers or his style, but more than just about any politician today he always has an answer and he never gets caught fumbling around. He knows what he thinks and he knows what he would do. He doesn't accept false premises and he knows the material. Kamala laughs, stutters, and then doesn't answer the question (again, the "how are you different" question tripped her up TWICE in one day). Kamala has always done what she thinks she had to do to get ahead. That means for the undecided voter that at best, she's a black box. And he record from CA implies she has no problems with going along with the left side of her party. Rather than being some sort of reassurance that she will move the center because that's what it takes, her comfort with the left-wing policy proposals stereotypically associated with her home state are cause for concern. Of course the answer of why progressives don't like her is because they have insane purity tests(she was a cop!) and she comes off as horribly insincere, not a good look to a political persuasion that values sincerity and displays of empathy. So I agree, much of what she does is because she's in many ways a soulless politician. But here's the thing, she made a bad deal with the Devil, she didn't even get that much skill in return. And she is still proposing policies that are radical. Her unwillingness to compromise on abortion, even a religious exemption, is either again a lack of serious thought or dangerously authoritarian. So no, if dems want to pretend to be moderate they maybe should pick someone who could at least plausibly pretend to be. I’m not 100% sure what we’re disagreeing on here. I mean, certainly on the DeSantis praise, and I think that part might be a symptom of liberals and conservatives having some pretty different values wrt this specifically. Like, I remember in the 2012 Republican primary Gingrich got a question at one of the debates about his honestly despicable personal history with his past wives. Gingrich got an obviously very practiced mean look on his face, a bit of fire in his voice, and started talking about how unacceptable it was for them to ask about that, the media was so obviously biased against him but he wasn’t gonna sit there and take it. To me, it looked like a transparent attempt to act peevish and mean as a deflection; to Republican voters, apparently, that was a really strong answer. I think he was even leading the primary for a bit after that? I often got the same vibe from DeSantis – he clearly thought it appeals to his base if he regularly goes on angry tirades instead of answering the question, and I suspect some of those same instances were watched somewhere by an Introvert who thought “yeah, he’s alright, he doesn’t accept false premises and knows the material.” But he could never compete with Trump for the voters who admire unprovoked peevishness, and I think there were a lot of voters like me that thought it seemed strange and unnecessarily vile. More than that, it seemed like it was insincere, manufactured vileness, which is even more off-putting (“weird,” in a word, though I know that label is old news at this point). I’m sure there are similar phenomena with Harris, things that seem obviously off-putting to you and other conservative voters but seem fine to me. Like, the whole “coconut tree” thing and “unburdened by things that have been” was something I originally saw in a GOP attack ad, which I really didn’t understand. It’s a little whimsical, I guess, but the point she’s making is pretty normal (even a bit bland) and the way she’s making it is cute, maybe even verging on likable (which, for me at least, she often struggles a little to hit). I haven’t seen the “how are you different from Biden” thing you keep mentioning but if I were a political adviser I’d say “that question is a trap, you should not be spending any time criticizing Biden or communicating to Biden fans that they might not like you. Dodge the question, stay on message, pivot and attack.” It sounds like she did that, which maybe isn’t the most honest but sounds like decent political instincts to me. I mean De Santis went from viable Presidential candidate to well, not, the more he got national visibility. I would somewhat agree with Introvert in a sense. I think I’ve a pretty good sense of De Santis, who he is and what he stands for. When he’s deflecting it’s away from the negatives of that reality With Harris she feels a bit more amorphous, and when she deflects it’s to stay that way insofar as it’s possible. That’s not even a particular criticism, I think it’s almost a necessity to hold a coalition as broad as the left and right of the Democratic base. Interesting. I’ll admit you and Intro both might have followed the DeSantis saga more closely than I did – every time I looked at him it seemed even more certain he wasn’t gonna be president, so it was mostly a “let’s check in on the weird little guy.” US politics already offers plenty of that, and it’s usually not a productive impulse to indulge. But I guess I never got the impression he was particularly sincere. Which is maybe better than the alternative – so many of his distinguishing characteristics amounted to “we’re going to take power and use it to punish people we despise” – but the whole thing seemed so terminally online. Like the guy would see an online discourse about gas stoves and do a photo op with a wall of gas stoves as backdrop, but the average voter doesn’t follow that discourse and a red-faced man pointing at a wall of gas stoves and essentially shouting “This is what they took from you!” is, again, bizarre and off-putting in a way that doesn’t feel sincere. Maybe my memory is overly characterized by that weird fuckin ad they paid to make and put out into the world, then took down and claimed they didn’t make it, but we found out later they did. That seemed emblematic to me – terminally online, performatively vile in a way that seems calculated rather than sincere, but also miscalculated in that it won’t actually appeal to voters. When my conservative family members talk wistfully about the missed opportunities of having a non-Trump candidate, they look to Haley, not DeSantis. But narrowly, I’m not sure DeSantis would be that bad a guy to know. Like, I think the peevishness is a performance, and if he was a coworker or drinking buddy I doubt he’d be particularly unpleasant. Maybe a little awkward, but not remarkably so. I bet his politics were pretty at home in the Tea Party era he came up in, somewhat less so in this Trump era but he’s willing to play ball because he’s got career prospects. So in that sense, maybe I agree that it’s easier to tell what kind of guy he is? But if I’m right, it’s not the guy he was pretending to be because he thought it would make him president. I can’t say I was laser focused, I was paying attention at one point for quite a specific reason. A history podcast I listen to demarcates various leaders into history into your charismatic leader of men types, and your ‘bean counters’, those with a real talent for nitty gritty administration Quite early in this cycle when things were more in flux, I do recall a certain fear that what happens if someone who’s pretty damn competent can ride the MAGA wave, and De Santis seemed the obvious candidate there. However it became quite clear, whatever the special sauce needed to capture those hearts and minds is, De Santis doesn’t have it. Or at least not if Trump’s in the mix. Perhaps this rather worrisome hypothetical is something of a chimera. MAGAism is a rather emotionally driven, rather haphazard phenomenon and once you start to bolt on pragmatic competency it just dissipates.
Yeah, I remember the fears that Republican operatives would manage to create a lab-grown MAGA whisperer who wasn’t a fucking idiot like Trump, and how dangerous that could be. Maybe they’ll still manage it, but I don’t think it’s DeSantis and I don’t think it’s Vance. I suspect that both Democratic and Republican political operatives just aren’t that smart and everybody has been giving them way too much credit for a long time.
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Northern Ireland23732 Posts
On October 30 2024 01:16 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2024 23:58 WombaT wrote:On October 29 2024 23:44 ChristianS wrote:On October 29 2024 22:51 WombaT wrote:On October 29 2024 22:39 ChristianS wrote:On October 29 2024 13:34 Introvert wrote:On October 29 2024 11:41 ChristianS wrote:On October 28 2024 11:46 Introvert wrote:
Harris had a left wing voting record in the senate and the primary. Just because she's pretending that didn't happen now doesn't make it not true. At *best* you could say she's unprincipled. And it shows in her flailing around. How can you be asked twice how you are different than Biden and not have an answer? She doesn't think she should have to work for it Not sure if this was intended as a response to me saying Harris is not some far-left radical, but it merits some discussion. Because yeah, if you go by 2020 primary positions or Senate DW-Nominate score or w/e, she looks pretty progressive, and she's Black and a woman, which supposedly progressives are supposed to be crazy about. And yet progressives never seem to claim her as one of their own, what gives? The 2020 Democratic primary was an interesting contest for a lot of reasons, but a big one is that Democratic political operatives had spent the last 4 years researching and developing every aspect of what they thought an effective presidential campaign to unseat Donald Trump should look like, and in that primary we got to see what they came up with. The answer was, in a word, "Obama." But the really interesting part is which aspects of Obama each campaign chose to replicate. Do you want a well-spoken Harvard alum who's a political outsider? Take a look at Pete Buttigieg, his only political experience is as mayor of a mid-size town in a red state! Do you want a likable Black guy with an extremely round head? Allow me to introduce Cory Booker, he's maybe got as much dad energy as any politician I've seen besides Tim Walz. But Kamala Harris had what I thought was probably the most plausible attempt to clone the Obama phenomenon. She was a clear rising star in her party, and as a California senator she was free to take progressive positions on votes as often as she liked without much backlash, which is important because I think her campaign clearly thought that to replicate Obama, you had to come from the progressive wing of the party. Surely some well-connected establishment guy is never gonna get people energized and excited about all the wonderful things their candidacy could accomplish – "Hope and Change" – the way a progressive could. She endorsed Medicare for All, etc., which seemed calibrated to make sure she was identified as one of the "progressive lane" candidates (although I'm not sure it really worked, even at the time). It turns out the political operatives were wrong anyway, people didn't want an Obama clone at all, or at least not a 2008 Obama clone. I mean, Obama was (and is!) still enormously popular with Democrats, but by then they're thinking of Obama after winning the presidency, who frankly was never all that progressive. Biden might actually have been the closest analog to that Obama, or at least used to stand next to him a lot, and that turned out to be good enough for primary voters (general election voters, too). And Kamala went to work for him as VP, which doesn't make a ton of sense if she was actually some Sanders-like dyed-in-the-wool progressive. Didn't she basically call that guy racist in the first debate? But she was always someone who tried to figure out what voters wanted, and then would try to give them what they want. When all the best minds thought that answer was an Obama clone, that was what she tried to be. Once it was clear they actually just wanted a steady hand establishment guy to calm down all the craziness + Show Spoiler +(a bit like Disney wanted from JJ Abrams around the same time) , she signed on with that project. You can call that "unprincipled" (and, I mean, I probably would) but a Harris defender might counter, what exactly is it you want politicians to do? I mean, our democratic system is supposedly so wise and just and well-designed because politicians are regularly held accountable to voters, so it incentivizes them to give voters what they want in order to stay in office. If the politicians are working hard to figure out what voters want to see and give it to them, isn't that the system working as intended? (Personally I don't buy that the system is so wise and just and well-designed; I wanted someone who endorsed progressive positions out of a sincere deeply-held belief, so I voted Sanders.) But I guess the long and short of it is, Kamala Harris was always essentially an establishment Democrat, in the sense that whatever direction the Democratic Party seemed to be moving in, she'd try to be on the leading edge of it. If the Democrats ever got enough of a mandate to implement some big, progressive reforms on the scale of Obamacare, you can bet she'd be there leading the charge. If the party decided that appealing to centrist voters with tax cuts and balanced budgets was their best path forward, she'd be there leading that charge too. She's not an ideologue, she's certainly not a socialist, GH need not worry about running into her at any meetings, and capitalists need not worry about her seizing the means of production. But in the world of Republican rhetoric, where all Democrats are Marxists until proven innocent (and even then, y'know, better safe than sorry), she's "Comrade Kamala." Which is the same playbook they run against every other Democrat, and like I said before, is almost never rooted in much truth, so changing their policy positions to counter the "Socialist!" attack is of limited value. It wasn't true before, it still won't be true after the change, and they'll keep saying it anyway. And if the attack was working before, it'll probably keep working just about as well, for reasons that apparently don't have much to do with the truth of it. I hate to give you a short reply to a long one again but oh well. I could re-interpret the historical facts that you laid out differently then you did. One reason Kamala can't do interviews very well is because she has to think about what she is "supposed" to say. She doesn't give them impression of someone who has thought through any particular issue in detail (famously she makes her staff put together large documents and then doesn't touch them). I know the thread hates him, but this is in exact contrast to someone like DeSantis. You may not like his answers or his style, but more than just about any politician today he always has an answer and he never gets caught fumbling around. He knows what he thinks and he knows what he would do. He doesn't accept false premises and he knows the material. Kamala laughs, stutters, and then doesn't answer the question (again, the "how are you different" question tripped her up TWICE in one day). Kamala has always done what she thinks she had to do to get ahead. That means for the undecided voter that at best, she's a black box. And he record from CA implies she has no problems with going along with the left side of her party. Rather than being some sort of reassurance that she will move the center because that's what it takes, her comfort with the left-wing policy proposals stereotypically associated with her home state are cause for concern. Of course the answer of why progressives don't like her is because they have insane purity tests(she was a cop!) and she comes off as horribly insincere, not a good look to a political persuasion that values sincerity and displays of empathy. So I agree, much of what she does is because she's in many ways a soulless politician. But here's the thing, she made a bad deal with the Devil, she didn't even get that much skill in return. And she is still proposing policies that are radical. Her unwillingness to compromise on abortion, even a religious exemption, is either again a lack of serious thought or dangerously authoritarian. So no, if dems want to pretend to be moderate they maybe should pick someone who could at least plausibly pretend to be. I’m not 100% sure what we’re disagreeing on here. I mean, certainly on the DeSantis praise, and I think that part might be a symptom of liberals and conservatives having some pretty different values wrt this specifically. Like, I remember in the 2012 Republican primary Gingrich got a question at one of the debates about his honestly despicable personal history with his past wives. Gingrich got an obviously very practiced mean look on his face, a bit of fire in his voice, and started talking about how unacceptable it was for them to ask about that, the media was so obviously biased against him but he wasn’t gonna sit there and take it. To me, it looked like a transparent attempt to act peevish and mean as a deflection; to Republican voters, apparently, that was a really strong answer. I think he was even leading the primary for a bit after that? I often got the same vibe from DeSantis – he clearly thought it appeals to his base if he regularly goes on angry tirades instead of answering the question, and I suspect some of those same instances were watched somewhere by an Introvert who thought “yeah, he’s alright, he doesn’t accept false premises and knows the material.” But he could never compete with Trump for the voters who admire unprovoked peevishness, and I think there were a lot of voters like me that thought it seemed strange and unnecessarily vile. More than that, it seemed like it was insincere, manufactured vileness, which is even more off-putting (“weird,” in a word, though I know that label is old news at this point). I’m sure there are similar phenomena with Harris, things that seem obviously off-putting to you and other conservative voters but seem fine to me. Like, the whole “coconut tree” thing and “unburdened by things that have been” was something I originally saw in a GOP attack ad, which I really didn’t understand. It’s a little whimsical, I guess, but the point she’s making is pretty normal (even a bit bland) and the way she’s making it is cute, maybe even verging on likable (which, for me at least, she often struggles a little to hit). I haven’t seen the “how are you different from Biden” thing you keep mentioning but if I were a political adviser I’d say “that question is a trap, you should not be spending any time criticizing Biden or communicating to Biden fans that they might not like you. Dodge the question, stay on message, pivot and attack.” It sounds like she did that, which maybe isn’t the most honest but sounds like decent political instincts to me. I mean De Santis went from viable Presidential candidate to well, not, the more he got national visibility. I would somewhat agree with Introvert in a sense. I think I’ve a pretty good sense of De Santis, who he is and what he stands for. When he’s deflecting it’s away from the negatives of that reality With Harris she feels a bit more amorphous, and when she deflects it’s to stay that way insofar as it’s possible. That’s not even a particular criticism, I think it’s almost a necessity to hold a coalition as broad as the left and right of the Democratic base. Interesting. I’ll admit you and Intro both might have followed the DeSantis saga more closely than I did – every time I looked at him it seemed even more certain he wasn’t gonna be president, so it was mostly a “let’s check in on the weird little guy.” US politics already offers plenty of that, and it’s usually not a productive impulse to indulge. But I guess I never got the impression he was particularly sincere. Which is maybe better than the alternative – so many of his distinguishing characteristics amounted to “we’re going to take power and use it to punish people we despise” – but the whole thing seemed so terminally online. Like the guy would see an online discourse about gas stoves and do a photo op with a wall of gas stoves as backdrop, but the average voter doesn’t follow that discourse and a red-faced man pointing at a wall of gas stoves and essentially shouting “This is what they took from you!” is, again, bizarre and off-putting in a way that doesn’t feel sincere. Maybe my memory is overly characterized by that weird fuckin ad they paid to make and put out into the world, then took down and claimed they didn’t make it, but we found out later they did. That seemed emblematic to me – terminally online, performatively vile in a way that seems calculated rather than sincere, but also miscalculated in that it won’t actually appeal to voters. When my conservative family members talk wistfully about the missed opportunities of having a non-Trump candidate, they look to Haley, not DeSantis. But narrowly, I’m not sure DeSantis would be that bad a guy to know. Like, I think the peevishness is a performance, and if he was a coworker or drinking buddy I doubt he’d be particularly unpleasant. Maybe a little awkward, but not remarkably so. I bet his politics were pretty at home in the Tea Party era he came up in, somewhat less so in this Trump era but he’s willing to play ball because he’s got career prospects. So in that sense, maybe I agree that it’s easier to tell what kind of guy he is? But if I’m right, it’s not the guy he was pretending to be because he thought it would make him president. I can’t say I was laser focused, I was paying attention at one point for quite a specific reason. A history podcast I listen to demarcates various leaders into history into your charismatic leader of men types, and your ‘bean counters’, those with a real talent for nitty gritty administration Quite early in this cycle when things were more in flux, I do recall a certain fear that what happens if someone who’s pretty damn competent can ride the MAGA wave, and De Santis seemed the obvious candidate there. However it became quite clear, whatever the special sauce needed to capture those hearts and minds is, De Santis doesn’t have it. Or at least not if Trump’s in the mix. Perhaps this rather worrisome hypothetical is something of a chimera. MAGAism is a rather emotionally driven, rather haphazard phenomenon and once you start to bolt on pragmatic competency it just dissipates. Yeah, I remember the fears that Republican operatives would manage to create a lab-grown MAGA whisperer who wasn’t a fucking idiot like Trump, and how dangerous that could be. Maybe they’ll still manage it, but I don’t think it’s DeSantis and I don’t think it’s Vance. I suspect that both Democratic and Republican political operatives just aren’t that smart and everybody has been giving them way too much credit for a long time.
I think many, excluding someone like MTG are a lot smarter than they have to present, and perhaps the tastes of the electorate or something if a problem
I’m pretty confident if I could grab a few beers out and have a chat with representatives from both sides of the aisle, completely off the record, I’d have a rather different impression than parsing public pronouncements
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On October 29 2024 23:33 Biff The Understudy wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2024 22:52 GreenHorizons wrote:On October 29 2024 21:55 Biff The Understudy wrote:On October 29 2024 21:26 GreenHorizons wrote:On October 29 2024 21:06 Biff The Understudy wrote:On October 29 2024 18:22 Gorsameth wrote:On October 29 2024 14:11 GreenHorizons wrote:On October 29 2024 13:28 Biff The Understudy wrote:
Every time we mention socialism in this thread, i struggle to see if we are taking Denmark, Cuba, the USSR in 1925, France in 1982 or something that’s never existed.
It really makes the conversation very abstract. The word is unbelievably broad, and while I’m sure many here are very clear what they mean, it’s not always easy to follow. In the most general sense I'm talking socialism as a system to pursue conscientização or critical consciousness Critical consciousness focuses on achieving an in-depth understanding of the world, allowing for the perception and exposure of social and political contradictions. Critical consciousness also includes taking action against the oppressive elements in one's life that are illuminated by that understanding And generally aligned with Fanon, Freire, Kwame Ture, and that general flavor of revolutionary socialism. But at an even more basic level I'm just arguing in favor of socialism being a superior paradigm to pursue a "more perfect union" so to speak than capitalism and liberal democracy. As far as I can tell outside of the right-wingers, everyone agrees with that premise (socialism>capitalism going forward) at this point. The fighting is around what to do about that. Since your pointing to thinkers and not history I guess the answer to Biffs question is ' something that has never existed'. Yeah. That’s my point a little bit. And since most of us haven’t read those authors, we are talking without a clear reference over what any of that means, which dooms the conversation imo. I find though that the cultivated confusion about the word socialism is one of the reason the political debate in the US is so sterile. Republicans voluntarily entertain the confusion between « slightly more like Denmark » and « Moscow 1928 » and the progressives never explain if they want a completely new utopian system that has never existed, + Show Spoiler + or again, if we are talking increasing taxes and getting what most advanced countries already have, such as free healthcare, free education and so on.
Then everybody goes on talking with their definition in mind. Which is a major reason I've spent 7+ years trying to get you guys to read some of them. It also demonstrates how the inquiries are just bad faith sealioning. Seems like the US is getting forced into the choice of fascism or something new that hasn't existed and most US voters favor fascism over their fear of something new/reading socialists instead of hundreds of pages of oBlade type arguments. I know, but you have to realize that there are little chance anyone here is interested in another poster’s thought quite enough to read 2000 pages to understand what they are talking about. I am quite certain that you wouldn’t do it for me, and that’s really quite normal. So saying, go read my sources is not really a way to go in a discussion, because we could all do that. If I yold you: “you would understand me better if you read Spinoza and its commentary by Deleuze - and I believe you would - so your enquiries about what i say are done in bad faith” you would not take me very seriously. What I understand a bit from seven years of and and off discussion - and really, correct me if i am wrong - is that you think your ideas are deeper and worth more time and attention than any of us here. And that really limits the possibility of exchange. Except they have read thousands of pages of utter bollocks from the oBlades over the years. It's a matter of prioritization and they don't prioritize learning about socialism because they're addicted to capitalism and liberal democracy. "My ideas" are but a drop in an ocean of socialist thought, they aren't an a-z blueprint for a perfect socialist revolution. If I wanted people to take away one thing it'd be that we'd be better off trying to address all of the issues we face under a socialist paradigm rather than the profit driven capitalist one we live under now that promises global ecological catastrophe and nuclear annihilation. As such, we're all obligated to past, present, and future generations to do as much as we can to make that transition into a socialist paradigm a reality imo. I know GH but do you understand the problem? Look, I can tell you that my problem with your attitude is well summarized by Jaques Rancière in his seminal book, Althusser’s Lesson and his subsequent works, in which he explains how socialists revolutions have failed abjectly because of the arrogant position in which well-read revolutionaries that knew the theory and that were dogmatically entranched in a position of intellectual superiority were naturally the ones who knew what had to be done and how to do it, and considered they had nothing to learn from the people for whom the revolution was meant to be. Are you going to go to the library and read Rancière instead of, you too, read oBlade’s bs? No. You will keep reading oBlade. Rancière is one of the greatest french left wing philosopher of the XXth century. But you won’t take that from me or anyone here, yet you expect us to do the work you are absolutely not willing to do. And that, for me, kills all possibility of learning from each other. I recommend to read Althusser too by the way. “Reading the Capital” is a great work, but mainly to understand the problem Rancière had with him. Much better read that oblade, but that’s a lot of pages, I give you that.
I don't really read oBlade or the responses and want a successful socialist revolution, so I'll probably read this "Althusser's Lesson" soon (long before you see me reply to oBlade) and recommend others do to.
What immediately jumps out to me though is how such an analysis conflicts with my understandings of the Freirean concepts of empowering the masses through critical consciousness.
Based on a cursory examination it seems people have discussed Freire and Rancière in relation to each other and there are some interesting points raised.
I would find that conversation infinitely more interesting than the next red herring, but I imagine you can see the problem with that?
EDIT: You know if Rancière wrote about the Black Panther Party specifically?
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On October 29 2024 23:44 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2024 23:09 Razyda wrote:Wow Bush, Cheney, almost seems like Kamala is planning to bless some Middle East country with her presence... I think the main idea is that only Trump could unite political leaders and families - from the most conservative to the most progressive - against him and his desire to repeat his reign of terror.
I think issue with this idea is that it may be presented as "warmongers unite against Trump and support Kamala"
Disclaimer - I have nothing against Bush daughter, know nothing about her, it is only that Bush Cheney surname combo gives somewhat weird vibes.
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Northern Ireland23732 Posts
On October 30 2024 01:41 Razyda wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2024 23:44 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On October 29 2024 23:09 Razyda wrote:Wow Bush, Cheney, almost seems like Kamala is planning to bless some Middle East country with her presence... I think the main idea is that only Trump could unite political leaders and families - from the most conservative to the most progressive - against him and his desire to repeat his reign of terror. I think issue with this idea is that it may be presented as "warmongers unite against Trump and support Kamala" Disclaimer - I have nothing against Bush daughter, know nothing about her, it is only that Bush Cheney surname combo gives somewhat weird vibes.
It may be, but it’s pretty easily circumvented with a ‘I don’t agree with x Republican defector on many issues, but I think it’s illustrative that Trump is so egregious that they’re endorsing me’
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On October 30 2024 01:41 Razyda wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2024 23:44 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On October 29 2024 23:09 Razyda wrote:Wow Bush, Cheney, almost seems like Kamala is planning to bless some Middle East country with her presence... I think the main idea is that only Trump could unite political leaders and families - from the most conservative to the most progressive - against him and his desire to repeat his reign of terror. I think issue with this idea is that it may be presented as "warmongers unite against Trump and support Kamala" Disclaimer - I have nothing against Bush daughter, know nothing about her, it is only that Bush Cheney surname combo gives somewhat weird vibes.
I personally wouldn't call Bernie Sanders a warmonger, yet he's backing Harris too. In the same way that people all across the political spectrum are backing Harris, so are people with a very diverse set of opinions about wars (what to do about Russia-Ukraine, what to do about Israel-Palestine, etc.).
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EPT
