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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
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Hence why I'm waiting for HRC related merch, not Trump merch.
I don't want anyone associated with Sanders. Because for some reason, people who either endorse him or are endorsed by him don't have a very good track record this year.
I'd pick Dean. The guy knows his shit. He knows how to win. Abandoning his strategy was DWS' biggest mistake (and she made plenty to choose from).
edited 4th Dec '16 7:57:15 AM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprisedYanks can get pretty touchy about their flags. I'm not saying wearing an upside down flag pin or shirt would lead to violence but I can see a lot of people giving you shit.
Shame Dean dropped out, he could've done a pretty good job of bridging the gap between the progressive/centrist divide.
Is using "Julian Assange is a Hillary butt plug" an acceptable signature quote?How about a US flag with the union (the blue field with stars) on the right instead of on the left? You can get such patches at an Army-Navy store. Soldiers wear it on their right shoulder (and a normal US flag on their left shoulder) because it resembles a flying flag being carried forward into battle.
Which, I think, aptly symbolizes what we want: to move forward, instead of regressing backwards to the bad old days, like the GOP does.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank.I do not get the level of hate people in here have for Sanders. I don't generally agree with far-left policies but I believe the guy is sincere in wanting to do good. I believe he's a voice the Dems need to acknowledge if they want to survive the next four years. I do believe some people who voted for Trump (and deny the racisim angle) or who stayed home would have voted for Sanders in the general if he was an option (and I believe these are not people who are likely to have voted in the primaries).
@speedy: Washington Post leans liberal and was one of the leading anti-Trump voices in the media. The comment section you're seeing is Brietbart types looking to tear their articles down.
edited 4th Dec '16 8:29:08 AM by Elle
Ellison seems to have a remarkable consensus...he's got Sanders, Chuck Schumer, Warren and others backing him. He seems to be the guy bridging the progressive-centrist divide, he has a history in union rights and stuff and he's got the whole identity politics things down too.
HE also predicted
Trump winning the GOP nomination before it happened. So he's got Cassandra Truth down.
Best part Ellison is young. The Democrat party is kind of looking pretty old. Sanders, Biden, Pelosi and others are in their 70s. As are others.
Obama said he'd be involved in party stuff in his post-presidency and he really has no choice. He's still young and the only way the Democrats can bounce back is if it becomes "The Party of Obama".
I like Bernie a lot, what I dislike are the trail of opportunists that followed him and his Bernie supporters. I also have issues with the rancor of his campaign, where he kept attacking the Democrat Party establishment, calling the Planned Parenthood part of the establishment and so on. I am all with bringing the New Deal back, but he fails to understand that this isn't the same America that existed in 1932 when FDR was on the campaign trail, he neglects that the Deal coexisted with segregation and he forgot that the Democrats party of the working class was not a terribly simple thing even back then.
Now I do excuse that...I mean we cut slack for all candidates for exaggerating and dolling up their platforms to get elected. I think Bernie has a right to do that as much as anyone. if we can forgive Biden for lying to Paul Ryan in the 2012 VP debate, we can pardon this.
Ultimately Sanders had nothing to do with why the election swung to Trump...Jill Stein was more responsible.
edited 4th Dec '16 8:39:34 AM by JulianLapostat
There's not a lot anyone can do about the state-level stuff thanks to gerrymandering. The Republicans in 2010, the year of census redistricting, doctored the districts so much that the only way the Democrats can come back is if they win the popular vote in most states by a huge margin.
You know they have to be twice as good, campaign thrice as hard to get the stuff the Republicans have declared as their feudal domain.
The 2018 midterms were a long-shot even if HRC won. If they lose that, then 2020 and the next census redistricting begins leaving an avenue open for more gerrymandering. Of course things might not work in that direction when shove comes to push...the demographics in 2020 might not be as advantageous for that kind of stunt as it was in 2010. The Republicans do have a shrinking demographic, their candidate was incredibly unpopular and is in essence unrepresentative.
Demographics are not destiny but they aren't stuff you can warp reality around endlessly.
edited 4th Dec '16 8:46:43 AM by JulianLapostat
Its about the fact that most colleges are huge echo chambers of increasingly radical leftwing thought, which has seeped into much of media
Mccarthyist Self-Demonstrating much. Most colleges are not grounds of radical leftwing thought. Economists are Keynesians or these days, Pikettists, but neither are radical left-wing economic programs. Some economists from conservative schools are Friedman-buffs.
Marx is still around but he's more influential in social sciences and history (and even there historians are more nuanced about him), than anywhere else and that's the area of humanities that has the least media and policy influence. Ron Chernow had a degree in journalism and not history and it was his biography of Hamilton and not the labour of Nancy Isenberg/Sean Willentz and others who know the real guy, that inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical.
As for wider media...most of the movies these days are not radical. Superhero movies and so on. The only recent major movie with a genuine left-wing view of history was Steven Spielberg's Lincoln and even then that's for telling the truth that the civil war was about slavery. If you mean the increased presence of talented African-Americans and other POC on screen, and diversity to women...well if you think that is "radical leftwing" than you sir are lost.
And listen it's a hard brutal fact that there aren't genuine conservative intellectuals, artists and philosophers of real merit anymore.
This reminds me of the time a right-winger ran out of the class I was in because I dared to point out that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan hadn't accomplished much. Apparently this made me a Communist who was disrespecting American and Canadian veterans (to which I can only say, please, I haven't been a Communist since the 9th grade).
According to these people, the ability to recognize reality for what it is becomes evidence of radical left-wing bias.
@Elle
Sanders himself is not the problem. The fanboys who turned him into St. Bernie and were prepared to accept Trump rather than their messiah? They were.
Sanders was the latest candidate to attract the attention of the Progressive Unicorn Brigade, and that candidate ultimately ends up mattering far less than the fact that s/he brought those people out to play again.
Speaking of the Unicorn Brigade, TYT praises Trump for the Carrier deal
. Apparently he's just so much stronger than Obama. Gag me with a spoon.
edited 4th Dec '16 9:53:11 AM by AmbarSonofDeshar
If there's any truth to it, it's that yes a lot of the understandings about social structures and the organization society like privilege, racism, and general prejudice are taught in many universities and a lot of this information doesn't filter down to much of the population, thusly creating a severe cases of Values Dissonance when you put two people of certain parts of America in the same room.
However that speaks more to a lack of general knowledge of the average person about their own society, and them being unaccustomed to regularly navigating complex questions. Since a lot of that stuff is just making an honest assessment about who has power in society, and how that power is kept. If anything this election has mostly proved those understandings to be correct.
edited 4th Dec '16 9:53:47 AM by Draghinazzo
Which it self demonstrates Anti-Intellectualism. Anyone who knows anything about intellectual history knows that it's not like intellectual ideas get along. There have even been instances of intellectual-on-intellectual violence.
It doesn't help that the only respected voice that supported the Iraq War was Christopher Hitchens and he discredited himself when he did that, burning all his bridges and becoming a caricature.
And you know even Clint Eastwood is against the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. I should amend my point about their being no serious great conservative artists. Eastwood is the only one left.
However that speaks more to a lack of general knowledge of the average person about their own society, and them being unaccustomed to regularly navigating complex questions. Since a lot of that stuff is just making an honest assessment about who has power in society, and how that power is kept. If anything this election has mostly proved those understandings to be correct.
The reason that stuff doesn't filter down is that the media censors and pays no attention to it. In the 60s and 70s you had Dick Cavett show and others where Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, Gore Vidal, James Baldwin and others would come and share thoughts and ideas. You have the famous debates between Vidal and William Buckley . Since the rise of right-wing media and news, none of these voices get serious airtime and attention.
Like Noam Chomsky is a great linguistic theorist and one of the most respected political commentators around the world. He shows up on BBC but not on CNN, leave alone Fox News. Gore Vidal showed up a few times on CNN I think...but that's it.
And look it's not the job of university folk to go out and advertise themselves. Some of them are doing that now, merely to get their voices a forum and not cause misrepresentations but they shouldn't have to do that. Society has an obligation to listen to the brightest minds in their universities...listen and learn from their scientists, historians, artists, social scientists and others.
edited 4th Dec '16 10:00:59 AM by JulianLapostat
I don't think conservatives are the enemy.
If so, I would have to call many people I know very well enemies in some way.
I get that the Republican as they are are not going to help the US, but I don't feel like we're dealing with Black-and-White Morality here.
Sorry if I am out of line here, I just wanted to get my feelings out.
"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." -Thomas Edison@Ambar: I considered the annoyance at Bernie's fans but I didn't find it sufficient to explain that some people here appear more interested in attacking Sanders himself. I suspect the so-called "Progressive unicorn brigade" is an irrelevant minority and not the part of his base we should be concerned with.
Also, re:
: That's pretty nonsensical. Any amount of thinking of a person as an enemy is a crack in the barrier to thinking of them as a person. If you can fight the ignorance and wrong ideas though...
edited 4th Dec '16 10:07:44 AM by Elle
The insistence of those people that Sanders is better in every way unfortunately necessitates demonstrating that he is not.
EDIT: There is nothing nonsensical about treating the hard right as the enemy. The minute they want to send people like you to prison, or leave you to rot without healthcare they are the enemy.
edited 4th Dec '16 10:11:08 AM by AmbarSonofDeshar

So, who do you guys want for DNC chair?
Although I'm extremely lukewarm on Keith Ellison, if people like Tom Perez and Howard Dean can control things or have enormous influence behind the scenes away from the spotlight, then I'm all of him being in "charge".
It'll shut the far-left idiots up, so they think they're running things, and we avoid a civil war.
In an ideal world, I'd chose Perez in a heartbeat
New Survey coming this weekend!