The Virginia Society for the Preservation and Appreciation of High-Quality Posts

[Fuzzy Bear Loves Christian Missionaries]

When only one solution is required.

Send in The Fuzz.

Awww, c'mon, that's QUALITY!

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

Bernie is entirely within his rights to go negative, but these phone bank scripts are absurdly terrible strategy.

Calling a Biden supporter and telling them "nobody is excited" about their candidate is incredibly dismissive of the affection that person likely has for Biden.

Calling a Pete supporter and telling them that Black and young people don't support him can easily make one feel as though their support is considered less important, and of course opens the door for an incredibly awkward confrontation if the phone banker calls a Black or young person supporting Buttigieg.

Calling a Warren supporter and telling them "she is the candidate of the elite" is essentially calling that voter an elitist. You can imagine a parent who works paycheck to paycheck and struggling to pay their healthcare premium being incredibly taken aback by that, and of course insulted. The line about her supporters being people who will vote Democratic no matter what is particularly gross - again dismissive of the importance of someone's support.

I plan to vote for Sanders, and I would imagine much of his base will enjoy these talking points. But it will not grow his support, and these scripts demonstrate a stunning lack of self-awareness among his campaign and an underlying problem of his team not understanding a lot of the resistance to his candidacy.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Thus far I have been fairly clear in my support for Andrew Yang, though my endorsement of him in this primary has been somewhat passive and I've tried not to evangelize much for him on here. This is partly because I don't want to come across as a die-hard Yanger who won't shut up about his preferred candidate, but also because it's a whole lot easier to cynically criticize other candidates from the sidelines instead of putting forth ideas and arguments of my own. To rectify this, I'd like to make a brief argument for Yang's candidacy and explain why I genuinely think he is the best man for the job. Any constructive responses are much appreciated.

The War on Normal People

I finished reading Yang's book over the break, and while it has not fully convinced me that UBI is the right course of action for America, I am now convinced that AI, robots, and automation will result in the mass layoffs and economic displacement that Yang is predicting. I am eating crow here. Remember, I am a libertarian who has in the past rolled his eyes at this argument, comparing it to the narrow-mindedness of Malthus and those who predicted "peak oil." Until this point, I have been very much inclined to let the market run its course, assuming that new jobs will be created to replace the ones being lost.

So what convinced me? Why is AI different from any other technological innovations in the past, none of which resulted in mass unemployment? It helps to think of it this way: AI is not most comparable to crop rotation, or to the assembly line, or to any other technological advancements that affected one industry at a time. AI is comparable to slave labor, in that it creates a massive "workforce" (robots and software programs) that will perform manual/repetitive labor for no wages and at very little cost to the owner. Furthermore, AI cannot waste the owner's time and money by sleeping, eating, using the bathroom, getting distracted, having children, or getting injured-- all things that happen to human beings. Computer programs never ask for time off, or for higher wages, or for basic rights and freedoms. They diligently do their work when told to, and they do it forever.

AI is inherently superior to human beings when it comes to repetitive, manual tasks that require very little creative thought. This is why it is affecting call center workers, factory workers, truck drivers, checkout cashiers, and salespeople the most. It will also affect legal clerks, human resources departments, administrative staff, diagnostic wards, radiologists, and certain types of journalist-- because while all of those jobs require a good degree of expertise, they are all inherently repetitive, which means a computer could be easily trained to do them. For a second, don't think of AI as a technological innovation. Think of it as a sudden injection of slave labor into an otherwise market-based economy. And now imagine that those slaves (being computer programs) are infinitely more efficient than their human counterparts.

In a slave economy (such as the American South in the early 1800s), wages are no longer competitive because the baseline wage is zero. Wealth becomes collected by those who own the slaves, while those who are neither slaves nor slave-owners find that their labor is borderline useless. They have no economic opportunity due to their lack of marketable skills, and as a result, generations of people find themselves unemployed, uneducated, and poor. This happened in the South-- it's a big reason for why the region is still so backwards today-- and it will happen in the era of AI too, because robots, computers, and machines will suddenly start to perform a vast majority of the economy's labor for a very, very low cost.

Identifying the Problem

The argument I just laid out is not Yang's; it occurred to me as I read his book. But by pointing to job loss as the root cause of our problems, Yang has touched on something that should be apparent to all of us. Wages have been stagnant for decades and four million jobs were lost in the Rust Belt just since 2000. Americans increasingly have very little in savings, and the "jobs" being created are ~90% gig economy jobs with no benefits, no job security, and no scheduling stability. It is difficult for the average person to understand the multinational forces at work here, so they've started to turn to two things-- socialism in the case of Bernie Sanders, and right-wing ethno-nationalism in the case of Donald Trump. This division has demonized entrepreneurs and immigrants, and more importantly, it has caused two halves of the country to hate one another for a perceived indifference to their problems.

Yang's argument that Trump is the symptom, not the disease, is in my mind 100% correct. Trump did not emerge in a vacuum, and defeating him in 2020 will not solve all the problems that got him elected in the first place. The country will remain just as divided as before and polarization will continue to accelerate, perhaps this time driven by the left. I hate Donald Trump and I want to see him lose, but even when I imagine the day after he leaves office, I am not optimistic. People still voted this man into power and they did that for a reason-- automation has torn apart their communities, Amazon has shuttered their local businesses, and in that vacuum they have turned to opioids, Fox News, and deranged cultist mentalities.

Due to a preponderance of evidence in its favor, I am forced to conclude that the automation boom is primarily responsible for Trump's election. It is the main reason for job loss in the swing states that cost Hillary Clinton the election, and without such a massive regional economic slump, I do not think that she would have lost. There are parts of this country that have never recovered from the Great Recession. This is because employers at the time, trying to cut costs, found ways to automate away jobs that have not returned since. Because of the Obama administration's inability to bring back these jobs-- and because Clinton was personally tied to policies like NAFTA-- she was unable to portray herself as a credible actor for economic change in the way that Trump was.

Because I find this causal mechanism believable (as anyone should), I am attracted to Yang on the basis that he is the only candidate who has identified the problem at hand. He understands the issue of automation better than any other candidate in the race, and because I believe that the economic disruption from automation is the biggest issue confronting us today, that makes him my candidate of choice. Correctly identifying the problem does not equate to fixing it, but none of the other candidates have taken even that basic first step. They are in a frenzy over Trump, impeachment, and a multitude of social issues that are of very little consequence. Meanwhile, Yang is concerned about those who have lost their jobs (who are now using drugs, committing suicide, going on disability pay, getting divorced, and dying early) as well as those who are about to lose their jobs (the Safeway clerk, the customer support worker, the truck driver, the radiologist). I don't have a ton of faith in Yang's ability to solve these problems given the dysfunctional nature of our politics, but he is going to try, and that is a step in the right direction.

Yang Himself

I have my reservations about Yang as a candidate, as I'm sure many of you also do. I cannot imagine him ordering troops into battle. His willingness to meme-ify himself, though endearing, worries me-- I'm afraid that people will not take him seriously and will therefore not take the issues he raises seriously either. He is going to have to reform his Silicon Valley/Tech Bro persona before I consider him ready for the gravitas of the office he seeks.

But he is visibly humble. He is funny. He has a Bill Clinton-esque ability to talk to 'regular people' in a way that never comes across as condescending. He is clearly intelligent and passionate about the issues he is championing. He has made his campaign about policies and issues, not a vanity project for himself. He has shown nothing but respect and kindness for his fellow candidates and has never engaged in personal attacks. His campaign is an attempt to unify the country-- not to pit himself against another candidate, or even to pit his party against the other party. He, more than any other candidate, has shown real empathy towards Trump supporters and has attempted to win them to his side.

That last point is important, and it is the number one reason why I support Andrew Yang. I constantly see posters on Atlas saying that Trump voters "Won't vote for a Democrat anyway, so why bother with them" (even though some of these people voted for Barack Obama-- twice). The argument here is that Democrats need to shore up their base to win in 2020 rather than reach across the aisle. And to some degree I get that-- I may be a libertarian, but I was raised as a Democrat, and I share the frustration of Democrats over the behavior of the GOP this past decade. It's indefensible. It's borderline criminal. Every Republican congressman and senator should be ashamed at what they've enabled. So I 100% understand the instinct to say "f**k you" when someone says "We need to be more understanding," "We need to reach out to Trump voters," or "Both sides do it." I get it.

But in addition to automation, I'm also concerned about the social fabric of America. Specifically polarization. The Roman Empire didn't fall just because a bunch of barbarians were at its gates-- it fell because the East and the West didn't share a language, a culture, a geographic region, an economic structure, a leader, or a common interest, and they spent their time fighting between each other instead of facing external threats. Rome killed itself through internal divisions. And when I see people in my own country calling for California to secede, or saying that Trump supporters are all inbred racists, or siding with Russia over their fellow countrymen, or calling America "unexceptional," or showing open disdain for the Constitution, I feel like I'm watching a train crash in slow motion. I would very much like to see this country knit itself back together before it's too late-- before it becomes a bloated bureaucratic dysfunctional wreck, or worse, before it blows apart.

Andrew Yang is not tribal in any sense. He rejects the politics of race and resentment. He rejects identity politics even when it seems to operate in his favor. He ignores the Republican-Democrat dichotomy and acknowledges that both sides are to blame for ignoring the effect that automation has had on the Midwest. His slogan-- "Not left, not right, but forward"-- is an open dismissal of polarization and almost a rejection of partisanship itself. Whenever he is afforded the opportunity for a personal attack, he neatly sidesteps it to remain focused on the issues he has raised. His explanation for America's current inequality involves no villainous immigrants, corporate fat cats, welfare leeches, or wealth hoarders; there is no villain in the narrative he paints, only rational actors whose goals have become misaligned. Warren and Sanders have spent this campaign on a crusade of class warfare, Trump has spent his presidency railing against minorities, and Biden has offered waffling platitudes and no real vision. I have lost my patience for them; ironically, compared to Yang's forward-thinking vision, they seem like sideshows and distractions. They are focused on the daily battles of tabloid politics. Andrew Yang is focused on the future.

Quick Word on UBI

I am still unconvinced on UBI as I am worried it will be inflationary. I am open to arguments for it, but even Yang seems a tad evasive when confronted with this problem. However, due to our dysfunctional congress, I am relatively certain that UBI will not pass in the way that Yang has proposed. What makes it through congress will probably look like one of three things (in decreasing order of likelihood):

1) A drastic tax cut for the lower classes; maybe even an elimination of the income tax for lower brackets of earners.
2) A negative income tax for lower earners.
3) A program to give truck drivers, retail workers, factory workers, and other people displaced by automation stock options in companies using AI and robots as part of their severance.

I support all three of these ideas and would be happy to see any of them implemented in the next four years. I think it is criminal that our government taxes people who are earning less than $25,000 a year. It is pointless and cruel and it needs to stop. If Yang can get this done, I will consider his presidency a step in the right direction. More importantly, I trust the man's judgement. I believe that if he became convinced that one of these ideas was better than UBI, he would not worry about being a "flip-flopper" and would change his policy proposals accordingly. Such are the benefits of not being an establishment politician.

If by some miracle UBI makes it through congress, it will have gone through unprecendented levels of economic scrutiny by various bureaus and committees. They will most likely have watered it down, but it will still amount to a large-scale wealth transfer away from major tech companies, primarily Amazon, Google, and Facebook. This is a good thing. Internet companies are inherently monopolistic because users want to be able to find everything they want on one platform, and don't want to have to use other sites once they've familiarized themselves with one. These companies are going to be bigger and wealthier than anything we've seen in human history, and it makes sense to tax them heavily. I'm a libertarian, not an anarcho-capitalist. Amazon needs to start paying taxes; otherwise it's going to continue siphoning money out of local businesses and retail stores. And Americans need money. When 40% of Americans can barely afford a sudden $400 expense, that should set off the alarm bells. Societies with extreme inequality gravitate towards dysfunction, extremist politics, and finally revolution. We've done the first two already. I hope to God we can avoid the third.

-------------------------

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them.

[President Johnson]

https://twitter.com/_grendan/status/1222559519697403904

In reality, a Romney administration would be equally if not a greater horror show than the current one. Biden's heart is not in this fight and he should yield the field to someone who still gives a damn about this country.

How would a Romney administration be at all equal to the horror show that is Trump? Because he is conservative? Sure, Romney's policies would be harmful and not ideal in many ways, however he is competent and at least cares about the country.

Romney never fed into the divide in this country and encouraged it for his benefit
Romney never insinuated that "second amendment people should do something" about his political opponent
He wouldn't:
-- be soliciting political help from foreign countries
-- call white supremacists "great people" thus emboldening them
-- cause massive distrust in the free press by calling them "the enemy of the people"
-- push Russian govt-created conspiracy theories every single day
-- discredit our intelligence agencies in front of the world and siding with a dictator
-- reveal classified information to foreign ambassadors
-- threaten nuclear war on Twitter
-- engage in a harmful trade war that hurts our farmers
-- lie over 15,000 times and get away with it, shifting the Overton window of what is acceptable behavior in mainstream politics
-- fail to fill vital cabinet positions and ambassadorships
-- support a pedophile in a Senate race
-- call anyone who fails to support him "human scum"
-- be building a useless and divisive border wall
-- falsely allege that a caravan of scary foreigners is heading this way every time an election comes around
-- undermine America's faith in the electoral process by making false claims about illegal voting in key states that he lost
-- Separate children from their parents and lock them in cages
-- hide his tax returns
-- fire an FBI director for investigating him
-- mock a woman at a rally that is accusing his Supreme Court appointee of sexual assault
-- help Saudi Arabia cover up the murder of an American, or at least ignore it
-- kick Transgender people out of the military
--  encourage violence at his rallies
-- praise a congressional candidate for physically attacking a journalist

. . . should I go on?

[Meclazine for Israel]

And it was from his Dad as well.

I was talking to my dad about this and he said you never were gonna get a fair impeachment trial when so much of the country still supports Trump . He said Nixon only went cause his approvals were in the 20s and dropping by the day .

Then he said it might not be the brave decision to do , or honorable but then he said it’s true in real life too when he said most people in general will not choose to uphold their principles over their careers and he said so of course the vast majority of politicians will be like that cause that’s how people are in general .

He said that’s unfortunate but that’s the way how the world works and he said the only way to get more honorable politicians is for polarization to reduce back to where it was till the early 90s. He said as long as you have almost 90% of voters who vote the same way in every federal election no matter what then nothing will change .

He basically said we the people deserve most of the blame for our politics today not the politicians and he said until we recognize that , things will only get worse

I pretty much agree 100%

[Meclazine for Israel]

This guy cracks me up. Comedy gold, this kid.

Image Source: Imgur

He's watching this thread.

[Antonio the Sixth]

This is not a high-quality post. Please stop spamming.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

This was a dumb move that plays into Trump/R's hands re: rural areas being ignored.

The average voter does not know who the Senate Minority Leader is, lmao.

After Trump goes on about how Dems abandoned the Iron Range at a local campaign rally, many will.

I'm not for rural areas being ignored, but I doubt that Trump knows, much less cares, about DFL politics.

Au contraire.

The Iron Range is full of historically Democratic union voters who are culturally conservative energy industry workers and miners who have been loyal, liberal Democrats for most of my life (and that includes during the McGovern debacle in 1972).  Trump is well aware that this move is another shift toward latte liberal suburban environmentalism at the expense of union workers in "dirty" industries that were the guts of the Democratic Party that I knew for most of my life, and was a party that I could generally support, even after registering Republican (for local political considerations) and even as the Democratic Party pushed its pro-life elected officials out of the party, one office at a time.

Today's Woke Dipstick Democrats are working hard to ensure that the 2020 Democratic Party nominee gets a lower portion of union voters than did George McGovern (whom the AFL-CIO did not endorse).  The latte liberals are now all Democrats, and the country is more socially liberal now than it was in 1972, and that's not ALL for the worse, but the Democratic Party has traded people who work at union  jobs for a living in exchange for socially liberal soccer moms and Woke Imbeciles.  That does make for a different Democratic Party, does it not?  I strongly suggest that this trade in constituencies has changed the Democratic Party by making it more elitist and less responsive to the people who actually do the work of our society.  If that's how they intend to rebuild the middle class, I suppose I'll learn to live with disappointment.

I agree with the general spirit of this, but only MN political insiders and Atlas neckbeards know or care about who leads the DFL, is my point.  If Democrats are going after urban and suburban voters at the expense of rural, this is partly because that's where more of the voters are.  Rural communities are sadly in decline and neither party has much to offer them.  The Republicans take their votes for granted much in the same way centrist Democrats take African Americans for granted.

A few months ago I transcribed a bipartisan political conference for creating job opportunities in rural Iowa, and even there the solution they proposed wasn't to bring back dangerous mining jobs which the economy will no longer support, but to invest in STEM (particularly tech) fields and businesses.  Blue-collar union jobs are going to be harder to create and sustain in the age of automation, as are most jobs, and rural communities are being affected the most.  With fewer union jobs being available, Democrats are at an inherent disadvantage.  De-wokeifying the party probably wouldn't help them regain the ground they've lost in these areas.

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

This made me laugh out loud even if I obviously disagree. It’s the short quips/jokes like this that are high quality and worth being appreciated.

This will not be the hill I get banned on.

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

History will look very favorably indeed on Mitt Romney as a man of faith, courage, conviction,  ability, compassion, honesty, integrity.  

History will view Donald Trump, on the other hand, as an unstable, petulant, immature, vindictive, small minded, dishonest, petty man who was impeached for attempting to sell out America to the Russians and to the Chinese, as the President who took the word of the Russian dictator, Putin, over that of the intelligence community of the United States.  

Trump will always, permanently, have impeachment on his record.  Nothing can reverse that.  

[F. Joe Haydn]

Isn't this similar to the reasoning of Republicans in 2016, that the conservative anti-Trump vote would rally around and prevent his nomination? I see it as doubtful that enough of the moderate candidates will get out of the race in time to have any chance of stopping Sanders. If the "moderate lane" has not consolidated by Super Tuesday, it may be too late for them.

He's alive! There is hope for Concert of Europe part 3 after all!

[Bleach Blonde Bad Built Butch Bodies for Biden]

The way the question is framed here is not entirely fair, in that China and India still have quite a ways to go in terms of providing broad-based access to wealth for their people (I'm making a few assumptions here). This is a phenomenon that was observed back in the fifties, but ironically as a point against capitalism--why were the Second and Third Worlds growing substantially faster than Europe or the United States!? As we can see now, this was largely the product of economies making up for lost time. If we were hanging out at the gym, we'd call them "beginner gains" (I think that's how the phrase goes)--the initial burst of muscular growth after one hits weights for the first few times. India, China, the US, and Europe have different starting points.

That said, there are reasons for socialism to cause lower economic growth, though they are not presented here in your premise. If we're talking about development over centuries, there are good reasons for countries that provide for rule of law and protection of private property to surge ahead of those where investment environments are uncertain. While internal trade barriers and expropriative monarchs were a threat to this in the eighteenth century, the major threat in the twentieth century has come from expropriative populists. This is a long-standing argument, but one that doesn't seem particularly relevant to the dilemma you describe.

As for Europe in particular--we're not really discussing socialism per se, but rather larger welfare states or social market economies. So why is growth slower there? If I had to guess it's just perhaps an environment less favorable to innovation or radical (economic) change. We should also remember that the population of several European countries is declining, so this may account for it in a way that political economy cannot.

We should also keep in mind, however, that growth isn't everything. Some of these societies may provide all around better economic security and even access to highly-prized consumer goods even in the face of relative stagnation compared to the outside world.

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

Good luck winning with this racist POS.

https://twitter.com/Trisha_Tahmasbi/status/1227014773021323270

Everything he says in the speech is objective true and was believed by 90% of people (including Bernie Sanders and most Black people) until about 4 years ago.

The 95% statistic is clearly wrong, and if you adjust for demographic socio-economic factors crimes by latino-americas is not higher than by the general population and it is only moderately higher amongst black Americans.

As much as I am opposed to stop-and-frisk, the statistic isn't wrong at all. Bloomberg was just stating a fact. In 2015, 94% of murder victims in NYC were minorities, 94.2% of murder suspects were minorities, and 93% of those arrested for murder were minorities.

I don't think this will have a non-negligible impact on his campaign. This is just an old clip of Bloomberg using an accurate statistic to justify stop-and-frisk. I think Bloomberg's past support of stop-and-frisk is already common knowledge. Yes, stop-and-frisk was a really bad policy that had a negligible effect on crime, but it was a policy Bloomberg inherited from Giuliani, Bloomberg reduced the # of stops by 95% during his last two years in office, and Bloomberg has apologized for it and has released a lot of criminal justice policies. How is this more racist than Bernie assuming that "most drug dealers are black' a little while ago when that is not even close to being true? At least Bloomberg's "most murder victims and suspects in urban areas are young minority males" claim is absolutely true. Don't get me wrong, neither Sanders nor Bloomberg are anywhere even close to being racist. I just wanted to point out the double standard.

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

We’ve got billionaires Bloomberg and Steyer rising in the polls, mostly to the detriment of Joe Biden.. what does this say about the Democratic Party during the era of Trump? Will Democrats essentially embrace Citizens United just to oust Trump?

Needless to say, I’m not a fan.

I've thought a lot about this too. The more I watch how these primary results are playing out, the more I realize the Dem party now is nothing more than an amalgamation of people who dislike Trump and his raucous politics, rather than one with any consistent principles or ideological conviction. The Republican party has become the party distrustful of major institutions in public life (the media, the tech giants, international bodies, and lately the top law enforcement agencies). Meanwhile, the Democrats have become apologists and/or defenders in many ways for these major institutions, and most Dem voters still have trust in these institutions. If this road continues, the Dems will effectively become the 'establishment' party while the R's will always run populists who rail against the powerful, despite the contradiction of how some policies benefit the poor/the powerful. This is why Bernie is having such a hard time getting to clear frontrunner status despite almost everything lining up favorably for him at the moment, he is running in a party that does not have the same populist fervor as the Republican party (and why the comparisons to the way Trump won in 2016 are not quite accurate).

A lot of the same stuff is true for the Republican party too, just in case anybody wants to respond to say 'but the cult of Trump', yeah, I know. I railed against that all throughout 2015/2016.

[Fuzzy Bear Loves Christian Missionaries]

MB is easily the FF of the Month!

Pull funding from rural Virginia until they comply. Richmond and NoVa literally pay for everything and they represent the interests of the majority of Virginians.

Don't let a bunch of cornfields hold back progress.

hmm I wonder what the reason for this is....?

Rural areas are the past. The suburbs are the future. States like Pennsylvania in the 2018 governor's race show just how irrelevant Dem losses are in flyover country as long as we make gains in the suburbs.

It's not just part of America that needs help...it's all of it. And gains in cities and suburbs are great (it helps Democrats win after all) but ignoring a part of the country just cause they didn't vote for you is a pretty bad attitude.

The highlighting of the last part is mine.  This is a post the vast majority of Atlas needs to read and take to heart.

[Continential]

Alot of other websites got cut too since then, the hedgehog R political report got cut out.. Alot of people moved on to better things. But, the only forum that had been active is this one.

The other forums couldnt hold up after the Great Recession happened. 

The Best OC Post

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

Possible contender for post of the year:

At this point I'm more disappointed in the left. It has allowed a large section to be taken over by this notion that there is but this one savior who can deliver us from evil. A notion that has been constantly reinforced by his aggressive us vs them intra-party campaign to separate and isolate his supporters from the rest of the Democratic party.

This separation has not only limited his ability to get beyond a core subset of the party in terms of support (people tend to not vote for you if they think you've been calling them 'the evil establishment' for yeas on end) but has isolated the left in terms of necessary critique. Mass movements can very easily be hijacked by bad actors who seek to exploit the movement for their own ends. To abuse the trust they gain from taking leadership roles in such movements for personal gain and enforcing of loyalty above the ideas, message, and people of the movement.

Suddenly its time to hug it out with racists and sexists because they're suddenly on board with Sanders. Stories of abuse, online yes, but also in person, in real world spaces, never happened because if it did happen it makes the movement look bad. And when such denials can not be made, it was some bad apples. And so what if there seems to be a lot of bad apples, this isn't a systematic problem that needs to be addressed. Because if we try to fight back against the abusers, the corporate dems win!

And even non-behavior critiques of the Sanders campaign, focused on the candidate, campaign, and platform specifically are brushed aside as well. Excuses are made to insure that he is always right, and everyone else is always wrong. The responses to even mild critique of his class only style leftism  are kind of predictable and rely on us having very short memories.  Similarly, his wanting to be handed the nomination if he doesn't win a majority, just a plurality, relies on us not remembering his position last election when he wanted to be handed the nomination despite having lost the vote and delegate race. Question the specifics of his strategy to get things done? Oh, you're trying to prevent the only real chance we got despite his strategy either being wishful thinking or relying on institutionalist senators just ignoring the rules to push his agenda. Aka, wishful thinking of a different sort.

So there is a lot to be critical of, but the left has overwhelmingly decided that any critique, even the most reasonable critique that might, you know, help Sanders get elected or actually get things done, are ignored. And if you press, suddenly you're a traitor to The Movement.

But guess what, if folks be going all in like this, maybe it isn't us who see issues and want to talk about them who have been betrayed here. The growing left has been hijacked. And for what? To get some guy elected? Is that all? That he'll magically pull off all the wishes the good leftist girls and boys have wanted for years?

Politics doesn't work like that. Politics, especially Democratic and leftist politics, relies on building coalitions. Bringing people together. Just saying you're bringing people together is not the same thing as actually doing it. Especially if your entire campaign relies on cutting a bit line right down the middle of the party. With everyone on this side is a good person who totally can do no wrong, and everyone over there is a traitor and no better than a Republican. Including those people who have been fighting the right for decades, because they just didn't want to sign up with the Sanders team for some reason.

I could go on, but I've grown tired of screaming into the wind pointlessly. The left will not survive Sanders at this rate. When he's no longer a candidate, what there is now will fall apart. Those who've been in the fight from before his rise will still be around, but all the folks he supposedly brought to the movement will fade away. Because he made this fight about electing him exclusively, not about doing the right thing. And if there's not that focus, well... there's no movement. Whoops.

[America Needs R'hllor]

So much for the Democrats being a Big Tent party.

Don't care how often I have to repeat myself on this. Yes, any candidate who is not only adamantly anti-choice, but a lead Point person in legislating against gay rights for years, votes against Obamacare, refuses to endorse Obama for re-election, is at best Centrist on most other economic issues, AND represents a safely Democratic District to boot, yeah, they're going to fly like a lead balloon and deservedly so.

Additionally, if Lapinski was representing a district in West Virginia, Idaho, or maybe even non Gary or Indianapolis Indiana, relatively few Democrats here would seriously give him much beef.

On a further note, how many Republicans can you point to who are as similarly left-of-center on as many issues that Lipinski is right-of-center on and representing a safely Republican District who is it getting primaried? Please, go on and show me the pro-choice, longtime Pro gay-marriage, pro-obamacare, and generally moderate to right of Center on most other issues Republican who refused to endorse Mitt Romney due to being to extremist, who is also representing an r + 8 District without getting primaried.

I'll wait.

[lfromnj]

yeah, the PRC and USA are pretty much the exact same when it comes to censorship <biggest rolleyes in the world>


The only question left now is:are you lying or are you stupid?  Maybe some combination of the two?

Lol, be as snarky as you want from your isolated little corner of the world. The point of this thread is evidently just to further the perception of ignorant Americans who know nothing of the rest of the world that China and many other places across the world really are some terrifying totalitarian regimes where people are getting run over by tanks for playing some silly game.

I'd make many real criticisms of the Chinese government just as I would of the United States. But rather than sitting and complaining about things beyond my scope of knowledge or experience on the internet, I have actually helped people get access to uncensored information.

And, none of that's illegal by the way. Western media would have you think people are getting cops at their house for posting Winnie the Pooh gifs on WeChat. That's simply not the case, and there are just as many ignorant people in China with similar views about life in the West. VPNs are legal. Educated Chinese people are on average pretty well informed about Western culture and viewpoints. The same for educated Westerners and Chinese discourse is not the case whatsoever.

Ok. Let's have a talk about what I, as an "ignorant American," know of the Chinese government. I mean, you're right. I have never lived in China and my experiences with the CCP's rule are limited. All I can really rely on are my friends from China, or my other friends who've actually been there and experienced the CCP firsthand.

My girlfriend was born in China and spent the first 15 years of her life there. Her school taught revisionist history and fired teachers who went off-script from the CCP's narrative of Chinese history. Her parents are not party members, so they are occasionally forced to go to Marxist reading sessions to ensure that they are not subversives. When her grandparents were growing up during the Cultural Revolution, they were forced to kill their own teacher. We use WeChat to talk to one another, but I have found my account deactivated whenever I send her something that even vaguely criticizes or makes fun of the CCP. I have to be careful about what I send her because I don't want her to be harassed by government officials when she goes home to visit her parents.

My roommate in my Junior year of college was a Chinese exchange student; he became one of my closest friends and we still keep in contact. Though I liked him a lot, he was completely brainwashed by the CCP and followed the party line lockstep. He genuinely believed that nobody but Xi Jinping could possibly do the job of leading China, and that nobody else wanted the job anyway. He routinely used tired arguments of cultural relativism to explain away the differences between our systems, even as he showed genuine fear when we discussed things that the CCP would rather we didn't talk about. This included Tiananmen Square, the crimes of Mao, and Deng Xiaoping's reforms-- he insisted on calling China's system "Communism with Chinese aspects" despite all evidence to the contrary, because it was what he'd been told from birth. His mixture of blind loyalty and subconscious paranoia is pretty much par for the course for those living in a surveillance state. He, like other victims of authoritarian regimes around the world, is in serious need of psychological help.

My other roommate during Junior year went to Hong Kong during the protests last summer. He saw protesters getting beaten, gassed, and arrested for trying to preserve a semblance of democracy in their city. The Hong Kong police are not officially part of the CCP, but they do its bidding, and they engaged in absolutely brutal tactics to quell the protesters. The extradition law was 100% the product of mainland meddling in Hong Kong, and sadly the strong response to it will probably only end up postponing the inevitable.

So no, I don't know everything about the CCP... but I've heard enough to make a judgement. The Communist Party of China is an evil organization that has subjugated and attempted to brainwash a great nation-- a nation that deserves far, far better than the leaders they have right now. The CCP has tried to keep the populace placated through vague platitudes, historical scrubbing, and GDP growth (the product, of course, of pro-market reforms). However, it will not last forever. The Party has built itself up as a benevolent power that genuinely wants the best for the Chinese people. It has expertly used the humiliations suffered by China in the past as a springboard to create national unity and a sense of collective sacrifice. In doing so, it has assumed paternalistic responsibility over its citizens, claiming credit for their higher standard of living and powerhouse economy. But the good times will have to end someday (they may even be ending now), and when that happens, the veil will be lifted. In a democracy, there are built-in mechanisms to cope with social upheaval and dissatisfaction with the government. In a country like China, the only available mechanism is revolution. I sincerely hope I live to see that day come. The Communist Party must be destroyed if China is to flourish.

Stop playing apologist for a regime that is currently engaged in a literal genocide and start engaging with reality. You might like it.

[scutosaurus]

You're not being asked to die in a muddy trench. You're not being asked to work 14-hour shifts in an overcrowded hospital filled with sick people. You're not under house arrest. You're being asked to stay home for a while and collect TrumpBucks. You can even go outside to walk the dog or go for a run. If you can't get on board with that, I'm sorry, you are selfish.

Maybe instead of moaning about if you can go to a sporting event, you should be using this time to call friends and loved ones you haven't talked to in a while, learning a new skill, developing that business idea you always wanted to try, go explore a National Park you haven't been to (they're free now), or anything that will make you come out of this crisis a better version of yourself.

Bro, I can’t speak to what should actually be legally punishable during this ... but as the son of a hospital executive and the boyfriend of an ICU nurse, I can assure you that you just simply don’t get it.  And that’s so depressing.  They need your help, and they’re relying on you; make a sacrifice.

The best outcome possible is for someone like you to be able to mock all of this as “going too far” in a year or so.  This could be catastrophic on our healthcare industry.  My girlfriend is already constantly afraid at work because she’s not even fully protected.  The CDC is now telling them to use masks that were deemed not safe enough a week ago.  You don’t have to realize just how bad this could get, but it’s your moral responsibility to help.  We WILL move on; but we won’t truly move forward if we can’t seriously slow this, and the experts (people who actually know what they’re talking about) are telling us this is what needs to be done.  This is all of our times to step up, and it’s SUCH an easy ing challenge being proposed to you.

If your area isn’t as bad as others, that’s even more incentive for you to take these pleas seriously and prevent it from ever getting to a New York- or Washington-level situation.  There’s no going back for them.  Let’s try to make them the exceptions, not the foreshadowing.

How long will I social distance?  As long as it takes.  Period.

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

No "consensus" can be reached with nazis, we fought a whole war over it. In the end of the day, racism is against the terms of service. You're free to disagree, but the mod team is acting in accordance to them. That doesn't make you smarter or your scope wider, btw. It's shocking, but many of us don't believe that listening to takes like "some races have a higher IQ" or "not being transphobic is insane" would help anyone intellectually or warrants deabte in a decent community.

[Badger]

yeah, the PRC and USA are pretty much the exact same when it comes to censorship <biggest rolleyes in the world>


The only question left now is:are you lying or are you stupid?  Maybe some combination of the two?

Lol, be as snarky as you want from your isolated little corner of the world. The point of this thread is evidently just to further the perception of ignorant Americans who know nothing of the rest of the world that China and many other places across the world really are some terrifying totalitarian regimes where people are getting run over by tanks for playing some silly game.

I'd make many real criticisms of the Chinese government just as I would of the United States. But rather than sitting and complaining about things beyond my scope of knowledge or experience on the internet, I have actually helped people get access to uncensored information.

And, none of that's illegal by the way. Western media would have you think people are getting cops at their house for posting Winnie the Pooh gifs on WeChat. That's simply not the case, and there are just as many ignorant people in China with similar views about life in the West. VPNs are legal. Educated Chinese people are on average pretty well informed about Western culture and viewpoints. The same for educated Westerners and Chinese discourse is not the case whatsoever.

Ok. Let's have a talk about what I, as an "ignorant American," know of the Chinese government. I mean, you're right. I have never lived in China and my experiences with the CCP's rule are limited. All I can really rely on are my friends from China, or my other friends who've actually been there and experienced the CCP firsthand.

My girlfriend was born in China and spent the first 15 years of her life there. Her school taught revisionist history and fired teachers who went off-script from the CCP's narrative of Chinese history. Her parents are not party members, so they are occasionally forced to go to Marxist reading sessions to ensure that they are not subversives. When her grandparents were growing up during the Cultural Revolution, they were forced to kill their own teacher. We use WeChat to talk to one another, but I have found my account deactivated whenever I send her something that even vaguely criticizes or makes fun of the CCP. I have to be careful about what I send her because I don't want her to be harassed by government officials when she goes home to visit her parents.

My roommate in my Junior year of college was a Chinese exchange student; he became one of my closest friends and we still keep in contact. Though I liked him a lot, he was completely brainwashed by the CCP and followed the party line lockstep. He genuinely believed that nobody but Xi Jinping could possibly do the job of leading China, and that nobody else wanted the job anyway. He routinely used tired arguments of cultural relativism to explain away the differences between our systems, even as he showed genuine fear when we discussed things that the CCP would rather we didn't talk about. This included Tiananmen Square, the crimes of Mao, and Deng Xiaoping's reforms-- he insisted on calling China's system "Communism with Chinese aspects" despite all evidence to the contrary, because it was what he'd been told from birth. His mixture of blind loyalty and subconscious paranoia is pretty much par for the course for those living in a surveillance state. He, like other victims of authoritarian regimes around the world, is in serious need of psychological help.

My other roommate during Junior year went to Hong Kong during the protests last summer. He saw protesters getting beaten, gassed, and arrested for trying to preserve a semblance of democracy in their city. The Hong Kong police are not officially part of the CCP, but they do its bidding, and they engaged in absolutely brutal tactics to quell the protesters. The extradition law was 100% the product of mainland meddling in Hong Kong, and sadly the strong response to it will probably only end up postponing the inevitable.

So no, I don't know everything about the CCP... but I've heard enough to make a judgement. The Communist Party of China is an evil organization that has subjugated and attempted to brainwash a great nation-- a nation that deserves far, far better than the leaders they have right now. The CCP has tried to keep the populace placated through vague platitudes, historical scrubbing, and GDP growth (the product, of course, of pro-market reforms). However, it will not last forever. The Party has built itself up as a benevolent power that genuinely wants the best for the Chinese people. It has expertly used the humiliations suffered by China in the past as a springboard to create national unity and a sense of collective sacrifice. In doing so, it has assumed paternalistic responsibility over its citizens, claiming credit for their higher standard of living and powerhouse economy. But the good times will have to end someday (they may even be ending now), and when that happens, the veil will be lifted. In a democracy, there are built-in mechanisms to cope with social upheaval and dissatisfaction with the government. In a country like China, the only available mechanism is revolution. I sincerely hope I live to see that day come. The Communist Party must be destroyed if China is to flourish.

Stop playing apologist for a regime that is currently engaged in a literal genocide and start engaging with reality. You might like it.

cc: Sulfer mine burn thread

[YE]

A few thoughts, in no particular order:

1. We all want this to be over and life to return to normal, or as near to normal as it can get.

2. There are some mildly encouraging signs in some of the recent data.  Although we all are looking for hope, don't draw immediate conclusions from them!  Being optimistic is fine, but temper it with realism.  Don't assume that just because things may look a little better for a couple of days, it will all be over by the end of April!  That's wishful thinking leading you into conclusions based on what you hope will happen.

3. Life is NOT going to go back to completely normal until there is an effective vaccine.  That isn't going to happen for quite a few months yet.

4. Don't assume that we're going to get a peak (in May, June, or whenever), and then it's going to die out and everything will be over.  Some of you seem to be expecting this.  Sorry, but that's wishful thinking again.

5. This does not mean that a tight lockdown will need to extend for that entire time.  What we are doing now is designed to slow growth and buy time to put less strain on the medical system, and create more resources such as PPE and tests (both for the virus and for the presence of antibodies).

6. (corollary to 4&5) This is not an all or nothing situation!  As the lockdowns buy time and the peaks pass in various locations, restrictions can be eased.  But there may well need to continue being SOME restrictions for a longer time.

7. This is not happening at a uniform rate all over the country.  NYC will probably hit its peak soon.  Seattle may well be past it.  But there are other parts of the country that have yet to be broadly affected, so their peaks will be much later.

8. The earlier preventive action is taken, the better!  So for those areas that don't think they're badly affected -- you WILL be affected.  Taking action early will save a lot of lives in your area.  Would you rather be in the situation NYC is in, or the situation the SF Bay Area is in?

9. (corollary to 7&8 ) This means that not all places will be able to end restrictions at the same time.  It's going to depend on local conditions.

10. There is a good chance that there will be multiple waves of this, just like there is with the flu.  Even if things go back to relatively normal in a few months, there are probably going to be future waves -- and if they happen before a vaccine is available, we may need to go back into restrictions for a time.

[Pouring Rain and Blairing Music]

The major difference (as a pro-Sanders person, and someone who has seen frustration with said style) that the party has seem to be stylistic in nature. You have your MacArthur-types, who have legitimate policy differences, but even then Sanders's more abrasive, hostile style overshadows them.

It really says a lot that there's about 15% of people who would be open to his politics, but never came back to the roost. They support Medicare for All. They gladly backed him in 2016. But when his voters bled off, they flocked to Buttigieg, Warren, or even Biden himself. There was relatively little effort to win them over. There was no outreach, no olive branch, no nothing. Only screeching, tantrums, and ****-fits when an activist group endorsed Warren or someone who wasn't 100% on board.

Take the whole "Mayo Pete" thing, for example. Even in my #NeverPete days, I always thought it was funny that the people who said Bernie Bro is a racist term constantly mocked Buttigieg's supporters as a bunch of white people. As the most vocal opponent of the term, you'd think that the rest of my comrades would have some self-awareness, but apparently not! Making fun of his appearance, gloating about him dropping out, or mocking his supporter base is not outreach. It's not a good way to reach out to Buttigieg supporters. It's lunacy.

His supporters are a completely different topic that I've already opined on. I could do a massive dissection of the entire "Bernie Bro" trope, but this thread really isn't the place or time to do it. The short version is that while there are some on both sides, the Bernie people are louder and more numerous on social media. The other main difference is that Bernie has elevated Trump supporters by proxy into his campaign.

In my eyes, Briahna Joy Gray (who I've never really had any sort of attachment to) is no different from a Trump supporter and should never have been hired. And never mind that - she's essentially endorsed the Reade accusations! Getting into Twitter fights on a weekly basis isn't smart political operation, let alone endorsing the worst, loudest elements of the Bernie movement.

I would certainly hope Nina Turner didn't vote for Stein either, but definitely thought she should have done more to help Hillary. David Sirota is too, but he doesn't need to associate with the "dirtbag left" and Bernie's shock troops. I can only really think of one comparable equivalent the establishment has to them. The rest of these people aren't known or have little influence on the party itself.

Essentially, while Warren is looking to build up big, structural change from within, Bernie has advocated for a more hostile revolution. And as much as I'd love to see some of the toxic elements of the party purged, the fact is that Democratic voters don't want that. They like the Democratic Party. They like the Democratic establishment. They like Hillary Clinton. They want someone who's a part of the team, and Bernie didn't make enough gestures to ingrain himself as a part of it.

[Del Tachi]

You cannot begin to understand the current political divide by looking to any point in living memory of anyone alive today.

We have an immense cultural divide that defines the two parties. We have a partisan press that caters to each side, with the positive feedback loop and confirmation bias that tailored search engines and recommended lists on various social media sites tend to create. This means that both worlds live in their own universe with their own priorities and their own truth.

Furthermore, they view the success of the other side as a fundamental destruction, an existential threat to the continuance of their culture, their political and social norms and their political wish list. To put it bluntly, it is a figurative fight to the death with the highest stakes attached to victory or defeat, possible.

The closest parallel that can be informative is the post Civil War period. This is often wrongly taught today emphasizing too much that there was a "lack of disagreement" between the two parties. This is fundamentally false, appropriating modern understandings of policy (especially economic) onto a past period. The Republicans, the party of Yankee whites and the Democrats, the part of White Southerners, Irish and other immigrants. The Democrats viewed the success of their opponents as an existential threat to either Southern culture or Irish political and religious rights, or both. Republicans viewed the success of the Democrats as an economic threat risking complete devastation to their wealth and power achieved in the Industrial Revolution and also a demographic threat in the form of displacement by immigrant groups (some things never change).

They each had their own newspapers, they each had their own "truth" and unity was maintained as much in opposition to the other side as in favor of any particular agenda, ideology or philosophical underpinnings.

Not surprisingly corruption during this period was rampant and it was tolerated and waved off, because while a Republican might be a crook, at least he will keep the tariffs high and put the Irish in their place, likewise a Democrat might be a crook but at least he will protect the immigrants and put the... (you can fill in the rest in your minds).

 It also worth mentioning that corruption itself takes on a partisan meaning. You see this every time one party raises hell about some behavior only to do it themselves. Also to the fervent diehards, the opposition party's agenda is itself the product of corruption. You saw this with conservatives viewing the green agenda as a slush fund for rich liberals in California and likewise Democrats seeing Republican policies as "corrupting the system" to benefit the rich. Once you play this out, the word corruption loses its objective meaning and becomes solely anything that the other side is doing, which by extension means that simply by opposing them and defeating them you have in your eyes, "drained the swamp". In Trump's eyes and many of his supporter's eyes, he "drained the swamp" when he defeated Hillary Clinton. His grifting since is either ignored, deemed irrelevant or even more blatantly embraced on the grounds of, well they had their turn at it, now it is ours (NC GOP on redistricting right there).

That is literally where we are at. "He might be a crook, but at least he is 'our' crook". The good news is, sooner or later this paradigm breaks.