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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Is that the case in the US? Most TCM practitioners here don't claim that their offerings can replace Western medicine anymore, but position them as passive immune/metabolism boosters, if not symptomatic treatments for chronic conditions (which may or may not be psychosomatic).
It's not a tiny group. It's a well-established, deeply obnoxious part of the American far-left that has cost progressives past elections, and continues to do so. These people helped elect Reagan, they helped elect Bush II, and now they've helped elect Trump. The only time they weren't an outright hindrance to the party was when they rallied around Obama, and they turned on him the moment he was elected and they discovered that the simple act of putting a black man in office didn't magically undo decades of systemic racism.
Clinton lost this election because too many Democratic voters in a couple of key states stayed home. And one of the reasons they did so is because of month after month of the Unicorn Brigaders insisting that there was no difference between Clinton and Trump, that she was at best "the lesser of two evils", and that Trump's neofascist stance wasn't enough reason to get out and vote like you had never voted before. The meme about Clinton being corrupt, murderous, a warhawk, etc, was started on the right in the 90s, and regurgitated by the alt-right in the present day, but it was picked up and reproduced by members of the American left.
There is a genuine problem with messianic politics on the American left. It is not Sanders' fault, but he was the beneficiary of it this time around.
Yes it does. Because young people don't vote. The people who did most of the voting for him, were white men. For that matter, the people who were, and remain, the most obnoxious about him online were white men (and some white women—looking at you, Susan Sarandon).
It's hysterical to me when someone insists that Sanders energized the young and brought them into politics because he didn't. Vast swathes of his millennial fanbase couldn't be arsed to actually go vote for him, and that, more than anything else, is why he lost the primaries.
Don't know about anti-vaxxers but when someone with a chronic pain condition asked his campaign about one of his plans to restrict opioids, they were told to look into yoga.
edited 11th Mar '17 1:22:51 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar
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No, but then not all of that was voter suppression. Hell, some of it was even people who switched sides because Trump said he would bring back their jobs (and they did not care who he stepped on for that to happen).
In that sense Bernie might have done better, though that would assume that these people's desire for favorable jobs and social policies out-weighed any xenophobia they might have felt, which is far from a guarantee to say the least.
edited 11th Mar '17 1:37:19 PM by Mio
When fully half of the eligible voters aren't voting, in a country of millions of people, I don't think you can blame it entirely on voter suppression. (I have no doubts that voter suppression was happening, what with reports of democratic voters outright being removed from voter rolls prior to the main election.)
This country has a long and historical problem with voter apathy, and one hell of a hard time getting people under thirty into the voting booths. This isn't something we should forget here in this thread.
It should be noted he did better in states where the primaries were held through caucuses rather than just straight voting. Caucuses are time consuming, so there's that barrier to participation, and some of them ended up coming down to coin flips. This never did sound like a victory for democracy to me, but I held that more against the systems in the states that used them than against Bernie.
edited 11th Mar '17 1:51:47 PM by AceofSpades
@Ambar: It's true that the rhetoric that Clinton and Trump were basically the same helped to elect Trump. The strategic failures of the Clinton campaign also helped to elect Trump. The media's obsession with the Clinton e-mail story helped to elect Trump. The Dem's strategy to elevate people like Trump and Carson as 'pied piper' candidates so that other Republicans had to move to the right helped to elect Trump. The treatment of Sanders by the DNC helped to elect Trump. The condescending attitude of some people whenever any genuine criticism of Clinton was offered helped to elect Trump. The Dem's failure to address rampant income inequality helped to elect Trump. Considering the tiny margin of votes with which Trump won, all these statements are true.
But what do you mean with 'not tiny'? Certainly the 'regressive left' is a tiny group among Sanders supporters, considering the statistics I just talked about, and Stein barely got any votes in the election either. Or do you mean that they just have a very large influence in US political discourse? Because I find it hard to believe that the electorate's dislike of Clinton was caused by some idiots on the internet, as opposed to Fox News, for instance, which a very large segment of the US population gets their information from.
And again, we wouldn't have this discussion if these people were called 'SteinBros' (or just plainly 'idiots') instead of BernieBros: you really can't deny that trying to discredit Sanders by associating his campaign with racism and sexism by invoking these people hasn't been done multiple times in the media (and already several times on this page in this thread).
So? His support in the primaries, in which most voters generally loved both candidates, isn't indicative of his support among all American people. Among all Americans, he has the lowest favorability with white men and the highest with African Americans. That's how dumb the narrative that 'Sanders is only liked by white males' is.
It's been 6 months? Feels like the Trump era's been going on for 20 years...
When foreigners ask if it’s safe to visit the United States
The concept was novel. Rather than stay in hotels, troupes of regular Americans without rank or government status would bunk in the homes of foreign hosts. The same hospitality would be offered here in return.
There have been diplomatic gaffes and glitches. And 9/11, too.
But never before has the Friendship Force had to cope with a challenge like the one posed by President Donald Trump, his bleak take on immigration and his America First policy.
The Friendship Force is in 66 countries now, with 15,000 members. “Many are asking for a position statement on the things that are going on in this administration,” said Jeremi Snook, the president and CEO of the organization, which is still based here. “I don’t want to say that they’re panicking. But I will say there is certainly a state of anxiety.”
Heretofore, Snook said, security questions have been raised by American travelers (and others) headed for more troubled corners of the world.
Now, the world has seen an Indian immigrant killed in Kansas. Mosques have been put to the torch here and there. “They’re asking: ‘I just saw this thing on the news. Am I safe coming to the U.S.?’ ” Snook said.
“I find myself scrambling to go to try to find those three or four other news sources that they can go to, to try to get an understanding about what’s really going on here. So they can make an informed decision,” he said.
“You find yourself defending the safety of your country and having to question it — because of the things that you’re seeing, too,” Snook said. “You have to ask, where are we right now? Have we overturned a stone and realized that there’s a really ugly side to the U.S. that maybe I didn’t see before? It’s really kind of hard for Americans to process, let alone people outside the United States.”
Snook told of an encounter with a Friendship Force board member from Switzerland who pointed to Trump’s slogan of America First, a phrase that has its roots in the isolationist aversion to joining Britain’s lonely battle against Nazism in World War II.
before Snook signed off, he told of a recent trip Down Under. He had climbed to the back of a van headed for the airport in Brisbane, Australia, without saying a word that would betray an American accent.
Others followed. The topic of foreign political doings rose up. American ones.
“They were very informed,” Snook said. “One person said, ‘Oh, you’re talking about the United States.’
“Another person said, ‘Oh, you mean the Divided States of America.’ And they all started laughing,” Snook said. “It was really sobering to hear this.” Chastened, he kept his mouth shut the rest of the way.
But it raises the possibility of a new frontier for the Friendship Force for its fifth decade: a domestic version, in which red America takes a chance and visits the homes of blue America, and vice versa.
Lord knows we need it.
edited 11th Mar '17 2:36:24 PM by CenturyEye
Look with century eyes... With our backs to the arch And the wreck of our kind We will stare straight ahead For the rest of our lives@Aceof Spades: I was really more referring to how Sander's message would have resonated better with the rust-belt voters who went Trump, and like I said, I'm still not sure if they would have gone with Sanders over Trump though or if that would have made a difference if they did.
And you could have ended it right there. This narrative was pushed by the hard-left and they have yet to take any sort of responsibility for it. Just like they took no responsibility for Reagan, despite their insistence on getting Ted Kennedy to primary Jimmy Carter having effectively crippled Carter's chances. Just like they took no responsibility for W Bush, insisting to this day that voting for Nader or staying home were "the only real choices". Just like they took no responsibility for abandoning Obama and helping the Republicans win the 2010 midterms.
The Unicorn Brigade have done lasting damage to the Democratic Party and the American body politic. Until they own up to it, they will not have earned a voice in any sort of deliberations.
Now there's some profound victim blaming. Sanders and his fanboys were not victims of the DNC. The DNC and the Democratic Party as a whole are victims of the Unicorn Brigade search for a messiah. You can't complain about the DNC trying to do what they could to prevent a recurrence of the idiocy of Kennedy primarying Carter, or attempting to stop a hostile takeover by a faction of non-Democrats who explicitly stated their opposition to all the party stands for.
If Sanders wanted to be President he could have joined the Democratic Party decades ago. Instead he continues to play at being an outsider (despite being a thirty year member of the Establishment) so that he can enjoy the adulation of people who prize purity over accomplishment. He's free to do that, but he doesn't get to complain when he fails to become leader of the Democratic Party ten seconds after joining it, and if his fans wanted someone other than Clinton to be the candidate they should have actually turned out to support another Democrat (or actually gotten of their rear ends to vote for him as so many did not).
I just have no words for this. The man couldn't win the support of his own party's base outside the caucuses (you know, the things that restrict turnout) yet he totally would have won the nation. It's a ludicrous argument built on nothing save wishful thinking.
You know, I don't even know what you mean by this term. In my experience it's a made up term thrown around by people like the New Atheist crowd in order to try and discredit anybody who gets in the way of their rampant Islamaphobia. Because apparently True Progressives (TM) hate Islam and those of us who won't get in back of their efforts to smear 1.6 billion people are standing in the way of progress. Or something.
What place if any it has in this conversation I do not know.
Are you hallucinating? Nobody on this page has tried to discredit Sanders. Nobody in this discussion has tried to discredit Sanders. We don't need to discredit Sanders; in case you didn't notice he lost and conceded.
Now his diehard fanboys? The Unicorn Brigaders who are running around calling themselves "Justice Democrats" and boasting about how they'll primary every single member of the Democratic Party who didn't get behind The Messiah? The ones bragging about how they're going to splinter the Democratic Party into multiple factions because they didn't get what they wanted? The ones who rip on the likes of Obama and Clinton while trying to pretend that Gabbard, a genuinely regressive conartist was one of the few to throw in her lot with Sanders? The ones sitting around waiting for Trump to bring the revolution somehow? That diverse collection of disparate crazies? Those people we're happy to discredit.
edited 11th Mar '17 3:34:09 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar
@Perian: If the young people who supported him chose not to vote in either the primaries or the actual election, then their "support" is basically worth nothing. If you don't turn out to vote for the guy you like, then you're doing nothing for them. If what turned out to vote for him was white men, then their support is what counts, since taking the actual action of voting is what matters in these things.
He's doing these town hall things in "Trump country", I guess as a stab at the fifty state strategy? Or least that's why I would be doing such a thing. He's basically just going along with the Democrats at the moment, which is significant parts of what he was doing before. He may be registered as Independent, but he's caucused with the Dems for most of his career because they're the group he agrees with most.
I just hope that having chosen a DNC chair that the Dems finally get something going. Individuals seem to be doing things, but they really need to organize with each other more. Ellison's idea about a fifty state strategy is incredibly important right now.
Carter was a horrid candidate. I'm sorry that a branch of the Democrat Party wanted a better president that's the one they got. If Ted had beat Carter, we'd have been happier for it and honestly Carter was going to lose to Reagan either way. Carter's approval ratings were in the gutter.
See this is the type of behavior that makes me wish the Democratic Party breaks in two some days. When you have one branch of the party calling the other side the unicorn brigade and the hard left/alt-left and saying they don't deserve a voice, it makes it hard to actually want to work with them.
Did the DNC try to help Hillary so she could beat Sanders? Yes or no?
Why can't you? Hillary lost to Trump. They failed.
Also where's the evidence that it was non-Democrats trying to take over the Democratic Party?
I don't think Bernie knew he was going to run for president decades ago.
He kinda is. He's an Independent and he's to the left of most Democrats. Establishment might as well be codeword for neoliberal.
And I haven't seen him complain. He jumped to support Hillary after he lost.
We did. There just weren't enough of us.
Seriously, Bernie won more of the youth vote than Trump and Hillary combined.
Gonna repeat this again. Bernie won more of the youth vote than Hillary and Trump combined. That is significant.
The main thing hurting Bernie is that he was too left for some older folks and that he didn't have the bame recognition that Hillary and Trump did.
Claiming 'Hillary lost to Trump' as an argument in favour of Sanders rings awfully hollow to me. Because Sanders lost to Hillary. So we're judging purely by end results, surely the most natural conclusion is that Trump would've won by even more.
As does 'we totally did turn out to support him, there just wasn't enough of us to make a difference'. Cause, like, which is it? Was there enough support for him that he could've beaten Trump, or not enough for him to be able to beat Hillary?
edited 11th Mar '17 4:55:10 PM by Gilphon
I will say on a sort of high level snooty European level, the fact that Sanders is considered a hard-leftie and a revolutionary in America is a really, really sad indictment of US politics in general.
Still not embarrassing enough to stan billionaires or tech companies.

The justice department attorneys who did not immediately resign when told to by the whitehouse have now been fired.
Bharara included, who seemed to have delayed his resignation as there was some confusion about the request
. He was one who Trump had explicitly asked to stay on after his election.
I'm not so sure on the antivaxers. Sanders is pretty damn chummy with the Chinese medicine crowd (themselves largely antivaxxers since chinese medicine denies the existence of germ theory).
edited 11th Mar '17 1:11:39 PM by carbon-mantis