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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
I knew Sanders voted on Mass Incarceration but didn't know about sociopaths...I guess TNC didn't know that either.
But yeah, Sanders did get a lot of passes. He and the Sanders contingent also didn't take into account how nice the Democrats and the DNC were to them. Giving them 9 Debates instead of 6, Hillary and Co. going easy on him because they didn't want to alienate and upset the voting contingent too much.
And in the end, their niceness doesn't get repaid by the folks who don't understand the sweet deal they are getting from Hillary and the great boost in popularity Sanders got from the Democrats. Instead the minute the emails came, all they did was attack and use that as fuel, and they didn't read that stuff either.
If you seriously think this is even a fraction of his support, maybe you should talk to actual Sanders supporters (but right now these horrible racists are probably too busy trying to elect a black muslim for DNC chair).
He actually never
said that.
What difference does it make if his support was half-hearted or if he said the same thing in another context? End result is he has the same blood on his hands that she does.
Besides Hillary was First Lady at the time and she had to support Bill and everything, she arguably had more pressures to support or actively propagandize something that Bill was getting behind, while Sanders was the Independent The Last DJ. He had more room to speak out strongly against it than she did at the time and he didn't.
Bernie Sanders never released more than a year of his tax returns AND kept asking for delays on filings for the FEC which they granted him. He stayed in the race until the deadline was finally up...when he was no longer running, therefore he didn't have to disclose them.
Imagine if HRC had did that.
SMFH.
New Survey coming this weekend!@Julian: First off, you said nothing about starting a network in the original post, although that isn't in itself a bad idea since it clearly works as a method to get people to pay attention and keep the message out there. Fox has clearly done something right if their message is so omnipresent, and it's a tactic worth considering. I would like to note that I also said nothing about "starting a network" and simply said that people who want to affect the world have a responsibility to communicate, but you decided to interpret that as "start a network". I was, in fact, referring to going onto the news and talkshows and all that. Don't put words in my mouth I didn't say, please.
What it looked like you were saying was that 'intellectuals" (however you are defining that term) had no responsibility to communicate. Sorry, but it doesn't work that way. Most people do, in fact, go looking for information, but don't actually the time to go looking for every bit. People who want to run the world or affect policy have the responsibility to reach out in as many ways as they can. The media has a responsibility too, but that doesn't change what the people with the message have to do. Sitting back and letting people come to them is not, in fact, very effective at all.
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Unfortunately the media never really got that across. It's more or less the same thing that plagued Clinton all-throughout the general election; no real nuance or effort to followup on stories, which played to the strengths of a very shallow candidate like Trump. Sanders actually made a point of criticizing the news media for its lack of substance on election reporting, and look where that's gotten us.
edited 4th Dec '16 11:34:10 AM by CaptainCapsase
The context is different in that's it's much more ambiguous what Sanders is referring to; first he complained about jailing people rather than building schools, but then goes "but of course there are people who need to be locked up." in a fairly typical politician's non-answer. Clinton explicitly referenced gangs and kids which makes the intended meaning much clearer.
Once again, not that he should get a pass for supporting the bill in the first place, but at the very least, what he said is no worse than what Clinton said.
edited 4th Dec '16 11:39:37 AM by CaptainCapsase
Look I don't want to bash Bernie at all..,I do agree that we need to stop inter-left squabbles, we need to mount a Popular Front, and I think Keith Ellison as DNC chair is good (He has consensus which is a nice sign). But we also need to agree on a few things...Hillary won the Popular Vote, she was a brilliant candidate, she won the popular vote against a Mccarthyist media Smear Campaign and she was against a candidate who had the luck of Gladstone Gander and Adolf Hitler. Her platform and policies were not discredited because she won the Pop Vote by a whopping 2.5 million margin. Identity politics and that alone got her that far, so this constituency cannot be sidelined, cannot be dismissed in favor of the Great White Working Class Vote. In practical terms you could see the next election where the Dems win the White Working Class vote but California goes Green Party because the Democrats decide to do nothing against Trump's assault on minorities and women.
Trump won on a fluke, that is becoming more and more clear when we see the low-voter turnout in the Rust Belt, the voter-suppression laws and the Comey Email thing that came out before the election. The stars aligned a particular way for him...metaphorically speaking since I do believe that the universe is an endless void in which the earth is insignificant. But basically this was a triumph of luck, of spectacle, of emotion over hard work and reason. Sometimes that happens but there's not a lot to learn against it.
I disagree that Trump was a fluke; that it was so close should give us hope that it will just be a flash in the pan, at least in the United States, but he's definitely part of a larger trend.
I also disagree with the notion that appealing to the rust belt necessitates abandoning social policy issues; it's less about getting Trump voters and more about getting low-turnout members of that particular bloc (low turnout in 2016 at least) such as union members and students out to vote.
edited 4th Dec '16 11:41:28 AM by CaptainCapsase
No, that is in fact exactly what he said.
Note that I don not assume that he would abandon social justice completely in favor of economic populism. Many of his statements and actions indicate otherwise, but others are not so generous and given history and the demographic that Sanders and others wish to pursue it is not an unfounded concern.
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I've never known the Green Party to be particularly heavy on social justice. Seems more likely to me that these people would have stayed home come the election, which I've always been curious if that would have been the case (more so then with Clinton) if Sanders had gotten the nomination.
edited 4th Dec '16 11:43:03 AM by Mio
From the context, it's clear that he's contrasting a tiny group of 'irredeemable' people from the large group of people who shouldn't be imprisoned. He isn't even talking about black people. So please, stop the smears.
It's ambiguous who he's talking about (and it's a complete non-answer rather than a statement of support), which is better than what can be said of Clinton, but he voted for the bill despite his reservations, which is deeply disappointing.
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That's a bit of a quote mine; his argument wasn't that we need to drop identity politics as its defined here, but that we need to also include appeals on more universal economic grounds at the same time, which is a major place where the democrats failed to get the message across in 2016. I don't think those are mutually exclusive.
Some here seem to think that it is, and if we are trying to give some universal messages alongside the micro-targeted messages, we are abandoning minorities to the wolves.
edited 4th Dec '16 11:47:09 AM by CaptainCapsase
IF he is no worse than HRC, why not vote for HRC, as most people did anyway. As TNC said when candidates take labels and reputations, they have to be judged on it.
Sanders said he was a socialist independent radical...yet he says reparations (to take one issue) are impractical, somehow more impractical than getting Americans to vote for a self-described socialist, more impractical than getting Americans to vote for a non-Christian, and more impractical than getting Americans to vote for a Jewish man. He's supposed to be the guy who says, "Anything is possible".
And as for Sanders supporting mass-incarceration...remember Hillary was First Lady at the time, socially and optically, she had to back and hype up Bill's crazy schemes. Sanders didn't have to do that. He hemmed-and-hawed and signed off on it.
I was talking about this particular issue. So yeah, someone who was a single issue voter on this ought to have flipped a coin during the primaries. Beyond that, reparations would be far more impractical that simple welfare expansions, since there's nothing in it for the 87.7% of Americans who are not black.
edited 4th Dec '16 11:56:17 AM by CaptainCapsase
He said that a politician's stances (i.e. caring about the needs of working class people) are more important than their personal identity. He never said that minority-specific needs are unimportant (which most people interpret the phrase 'identity politics' as), or even that diversity in itself doesn't matter ("We need 50 women in the Senate. We need more African Americans").
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Spinning his words is, however.
edited 4th Dec '16 11:53:53 AM by Perian
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I'm saying that "go beyond identity politics" is a direct quote from him and whether it is fair or not people have latched on to it as a rejection of social justice, or at least that it should be dempahsized.
I recognize his views are generally more nuanced then that, but you can't necessarily rely on all of his supporters feeling the same way or others not feeling it's a slippery slope.
edited 4th Dec '16 12:11:06 PM by Mio
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That bill was bundled with the Violence Against Women act, which more or less twisted the arms of democrats (and Sanders) into supporting it. Had he voted against it you would be holding that against him. In that sense, I think both Sanders and Clinton can and should be forgiven for their support for the bills, along with other democrats in congress at the time.
edited 4th Dec '16 12:00:59 PM by CaptainCapsase

That's mostly what I was talking about earlier when I said that even if you care about facts, finding out just what the facts are isn't easy since most of the time you're relying on second-hand information, often about very complex subjects that aren't easy to understand.