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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Sure ya can. Alt-pizza is like regular pizza but with broccoli on it. Alt-orphans are maliciously self-made. Alt-kittens breathe lava. All of this right here? Alt-language, yo.
This has been your regularly scheduled Alt Facts.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.Many of Sanders' ideas have very solid ideological foundations. The problem is that he failed to communicate a reasonable plan to implement them, making them "cool story, bro" as well as political distractions. I initially liked him but got turned off when I heard his exact stump speech for the three-hundredth time without any details. I also found his insistence that delivering economic equality would also drive social equality to be a bit unconvincing.
Again...
- Single-payer healthcare: This is indeed the place we should be going, but Obamacare barely squeaked through Congress on reconciliation; there is literally zero chance of passing single-payer any time soon. Clinton was being realistic in proposing a "public option" for health insurance, which could have evolved into single-payer over time.
- Higher minimum wage: Frankly, we should go beyond $15/hour and index the minimum wage to a national living wage. That said, it is a widely held position among progressives that this should be done in some form, so we're not having any kind of argument about it.
- Free college tuition: There are serious problems with this proposal, not the least of which being tuition inflation as demand exceeds supply and schools try to gouge the government. We also, critically, need to dismantle the college sports system so that educational institutions are not mechanisms to funnel money into football programs. Furthermore, I did not see a plan in Sanders' platform to address the critical problems with our elementary and high school systems, particularly in poor areas. It does little good for Joe and Jane Urban to get free college if they can't pass an entrance exam.
- Reinstate Glass-Steagall: This stump position had dubious real value, as was pointed out by many pundits. Dodd-Frank is (or was, if Congress succeeds in tearing it down) an excellent tool to rein in the excesses of the finance system, as seen in how vocally they oppose it. We need more measures, of course. A financial transaction tax is a really good idea.
- Break up the big banks: This crowd-pleaser is another idea that has dubious actual economic value. There are many problems with large financial institutions, but a sledgehammer approach that smacks of populist revenge fic isn't necessarily the best way to solve them.
There are others, and I've written this same post before.
As for the infighting over tactics and who blamed who for what, that's natural in a divided body politic, but we should remember first of all that we are progressives who oppose the Republicans' desire to destroy the ideas of factual knowledge, social justice, and equality. Yes, the DNC did oppose Sanders' campaign. Yes, Clinton's campaign was mismanaged in some critical ways. Yes, Sanders did tacitly support "Bernie Bros" who were making racist attacks against Clinton's demographics. Yes, we need to get our collective shit together as Democrats and figure out how to win local elections so that there's a solid base to govern from. So let's solve problems, not fight over who's responsible.
edited 11th Mar '17 8:03:22 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Texas has been court-ordered to redraw it's Political Districts due to Racial Gerrymandering
. It can still go to the Supreme Court to appeal the decision, however.
Excellent post but this
This just isn't the case. A number of nations, particularly Sweden have tried this and all have pretty much objective failures, if not catastrophic depending on your perspective.
Every single time it's been implemented it always generates less revenue. ALWAYS. Mainly To prevent capital flight from destroying their economy, governments built in a number of exceptions and loopholes to the law, making it random bureacracy that has no force. A good example of this is UK's transition tax, where I believe only 30% of whatever is covered under the financial translation tax is actually taxed and there are low rates for it anyway (i'll need to dig the source on this, I just remember reading bout it)
And keep in mind this was back in the 80s, when virtual trading wasn't a thing yet. The moment a FTT is passed in America on Wall Street, all trading would go towards either London, or East Asia, practically over night.
edited 11th Mar '17 8:07:43 AM by TacticalFox88
New Survey coming this weekend!And almost all Sanders followers supported Keith Ellison instead of Sam Ronan, so this ties in with the above point I tried to make.
But no-one says that they should right now, this is what I mean with the strawmanning.
@Fighteer: These are all fair criticisms (although I don't agree with all of them), and I'm not saying that people shouldn't point out flaws in his plans when they see them. But most posts I've seen about Sanders resort in people acting (either deliberately or indeliberately) like the worst people they can find on the net are somehow representative of what his 'movement' is about. Case in point: this comment of yours
And obviously, I think the Republican Party is far worse than the Democratic Party, and I'd rather see, for example, Joe Manchin, in the White House than Donald Trump. But this doesn't mean that I think people should accept whatever awful things the former does either. I'd much prefer that the US move to the direction that my country has been in for years (even politicians on the right here would say you're nuts, for example, when you attack the concept of public healthcare), and I feel that there are several elements in the Democratic Party who want to prevent this (see e.g. the DNC chair election, of which several Democrats afterwards said that they didn't vote for Ellison because this would move the party 'too far to the left'), and I think these people should be called out for this as well - and that this is definitely not the same as helping Trump.
edited 11th Mar '17 8:47:12 AM by Perian
Former Trump aide Flynn says lobbying may have helped Turkey
@Perian
I find it interesting that you keep making assertions about how most of us feel about Sanders, yet provide no links to back yourself up. No one has claimed that Sanders is himself representative of the insane Internet left, simply that the insane Internet left exists and that their love of Sanders (or their fictionalized, idealized version of him) often blots out their reason.
And don't try to pretend the hard left is just a few guys on the Internet. They're the morons who helped put Reagan in power when they insisted on having Ted Kennedy primary Carter, despite the fact that Kennedy couldn't even properly articulate why he was running. Every few elections these people show up, pick their messiah, and then storm out of the electoral process should said messiah not get in. They exist and they're a long running problem.
He's referencing the fact that you don't seem to do anything else. You only seem to show up when someone says something less than flattering about Sanders. Which I mean, you're allowed to do certainly, but it makes it harder to take your comments seriously.
Of course, but in your entire post history I can't think of a point at which you've ever allowed that a criticism of Sanders would be warranted. So with that in mind, here's my question to you—what would you consider to be a legitimate criticism of Sanders?
edited 11th Mar '17 10:53:01 AM by AmbarSonofDeshar
You never finished that paragraph but yeah pretty much this. I think Sanders is a cool guy myself, but his damn fan club drives me up a wall.
i'm tired, my friendGoing back a bit and responding to some posts from yesterday...
By using an unsecure phone, Trump has basically bugged himself. Anything that the phone's microphone can hear, camera can see, or antennas can pick up can (and very likely are) being recorded and transmitting to foreign intelligence agencies.
That phone is a fucking security nightmare.
The only thing I'd add to Fighteer's post is that Bernie also embraced the "outsider" narrative despite the fact that he's been in Congress for 30 years. I dislike that sort of thing from anyone, because painting yourself as an outsider who will come in and fix everything that those damn insiders have broken makes it extremely difficult to govern effectively if you do manage to get into office, because your supporters expect you to burn down the system and start fresh, and burning down the system is a terrible way to govern, so you either have to betray your base (by working with all those evilbadwrong "insiders") or be really ineffective at your job (by refusing to work with all those evilbadwrong insiders).
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.![]()
I went back and finished the paragraph. Thanks for catching that.
It's their hypocrisy that always gets to me. Railing about Clinton's "superpredators" comment and trying to make it all about race, while ignoring or rationalizing away Sanders' equally problematic "socoipaths" comment. They were talking about the same people, guys, and both comments are pretty tonedeaf in retrospect.
Or after Sanders said Clinton won "the Confederacy", a horrid gaffe that upset a lot of African-Americans. Would the Sanders fans even admit it was a gaffe? Nope. For the most part they started lecturing African-Americans and their allies about how there was nothing racist or tonedeaf about it.
The "Sanders can do no wrong" narrative is really, really irritating.
edited 11th Mar '17 10:58:26 AM by AmbarSonofDeshar
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Yup, that's pretty much my view of the situation too.
Please post a link to that.
1 2 We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. -KVI mean, there is some overlap between Sanders' base and the Greens; some of them, according to their own words, only got involved with the Dems because of Sanders. They aren't a majority by any means of course.
Sanders himself isn't nearly pie in the sky to overlap with Stein and co, and I'm pretty sure he wouldn't put up with anti-vaxx or anarchist BS.
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.Let's not start pretending the Sanders is "cool" because his fanbase is full of morons and literal nutcases and isolate him from any responsibility.
He got his fame through largely suburban white college kids who used social media to propel him into the spotlight, and unlike Obama, he didn't have the self-awareness enough to control his ego, nor the intelligence and policy background to make his fantasy ideas remotely work.
New Survey coming this weekend!I don't feel it's very polite to single out particular users. I'm just pointing out that whenever Sanders is mentioned, people set up strawmen like that his campaign has been fuelled by sexism, that he wants to throw minorities under the bus etc. This is exactly what happened a couple of pages ago. And don't act like 'guilt by association' isn't a thing. Otherwise, what's the point in continuously complaining about a tiny group? Most people who voted for Sanders deeply care about minorities and voted for Clinton in the general election. You like Clinton - I think you would be annoyed as well if these people
were continuously brought up in any discussion relating to her.
Except that I did just this in the post you were referencing:
See e.g.., the hyperbole in the above post 'suburban white college kids', ignoring that he's also extremely well liked by minorities, 'fantasy ideas' etc.
EDIT: Also, if Warren, or Ellison, or any other progressive politician, was repeatedly attacked in this forum, I would make the exact same post. I've seen people defend Clinton and Obama as vigorously as I did with Sanders. So these 'Sanders fan club' comments are rather patronizing.
edited 11th Mar '17 12:05:17 PM by Perian
@Ifwanderer I would recommend just looking at Ambar'e post for starters who has frequently called them the hard left, insane left and the alt left.
Yeah, no, I've been over this already. Bernie was popular with the young in general not just young white guys.
Young minorities voted for Bernie more than they did for Hillary.
So hearing people accuse him of being the white guy's candidate is pretty insulting and doesn't match the data
edited 11th Mar '17 12:57:15 PM by MadSkillz

(5X) Alt-center is a thing now? You can't just add alt- prefix to anything to make it a worse version of something and I'm pretty sure alt-left don't exist yet (and hopefully never actually become a thing). Seriously, politics make words lost all meanings.
Only an experienced editor who has a name possesses the ability to truly understand my work - What 90% of writers I'm in charge of said.