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Barrel Cactaur posted:Pretending the president has any substantial power over the purse is laughable(and notably a classic piece of propaganda). That money was set aside for policing and other local government poo poo from the start. It's not news. Even if the states don't spend it it just goes back to the balance sheet for Congress to reallocate. The president literally can't take the cop money for more vaccines. I swear schools need to bring back civics so this can get hammered into people. Weird because when McConnell wanted the COVID relief decoupled from the Ukraine war funding, he called up President Biden and asked him to remove it Why would McConnell do that when the president has no substantial power over the purse? Someone needs to send McConnell to civics class to learn how government works because he seems to have fallen for a classic piece of propaganda that pretends the president has power over legislation 
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May 14, 2022 13:37
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Cranappleberry posted:Also who says that leftists are not doing things to help even if they aren't voting or aren't voting for democrats? Making a difference directly in people's lives through local activism or just local charity... works. Does it? I'm not seeing much results. It works on helping people, sure, but is there any political return?
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May 14, 2022 13:40
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DarkCrawler posted:Does it? I'm not seeing much results. It works on helping people, sure, but is there any political return? the point is not political return but to help people. Individuals make far more a difference for themselves and in other people's lives by doing this compared to lending their time, effort, money to a system that could care less about their wishes.
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May 14, 2022 14:02
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The main takeaway imo is that this pathetic administration, in the face of multiple, substantive problems, is so paralyzed that all they can do is fund a war against Russia and try to turn the clock back to early nineties tough on crime horseshit. Doesn't seem like they're doing anything to actually govern or win elections. Just feels like they're monetizing the decay.
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May 14, 2022 14:44
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VitalSigns posted:Weird because when McConnell wanted the COVID relief decoupled from the Ukraine war funding, he called up President Biden and asked him to remove it 
cat botherer fucked around with this message at 15:08 on May 14, 2022 |
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May 14, 2022 15:02
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Pretty interesting NYT article about John Fetterman that includes a couple dozen interviews with local PA voters entitled: "How ‘Just a Dude’ in Shorts Became a Senate Front-Runner" came out today. I just love that they listed: quote:who wore a sweatshirt to the White House Easter Egg Roll as one of the primary reasons some voters are "skeptical" of him. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/14/us/politics/fetterman-pennsylvania-democratic-primary.html
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May 14, 2022 15:12
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cat botherer posted:I love how we get to have these "actually the president only has precisely the formal powers outlined in the constitution" every week or so. The president has a huge control over the purse because he has control over over both how laws are actually enforced, and which legislation gets passed. Power dynamics are real. The govt isn't some sort of beep-boop computer, it's people. The whole concept of neoliberalism and American education from kindergarten to PHDs is about obfuscating power dynamics and hammering into people from cradle to grave that procedure and decorum are what really matter, and you just need to obey the rules and respect your superiors hard enough to make everything better- or at least to advance your own career, because what else could be more important?
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May 14, 2022 15:15
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Trump endorsed a guy for Governor in PA who bussed people to the Jan 6th event and who is by far the most extreme of the other candidates running on the GOP side https://twitter.com/samstein/status/1525454550500528129?s=21&t=XUD2Dt7FGNHV80TWyIY90Q
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May 14, 2022 15:32
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Pretty interesting NYT article about John Fetterman that includes a couple dozen interviews with local PA voters entitled: "How ‘Just a Dude’ in Shorts Became a Senate Front-Runner" came out today. Dear god! Someone let him know not to wear a tan suit or we're gonna have real problems E Cross posted but found this op-ed that touches on a lot of what we've discussed the last few pages. Starts with Goldwater and moves thru Reagan, Gingrich, Palin, Trump, etc. https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/13/opinions/gop-extremists-kathy-barnette-trump-zelizer/index.html quote:it should come as no shock that in 2022, we are seeing a crop of candidates who will start to cast the former president (Trump) as tame. They will eventually blame him for being too comfortable with the status quo and uninterested in shaking up the political “establishment.” BiggerBoat fucked around with this message at 15:52 on May 14, 2022 |
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May 14, 2022 15:37
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:I still don't know what you are arguing or think I'm arguing, though? You're just being kind of snarky because you were linked to something that proved you wrong and falling back on "you're a sheeple and loyalist, unlike independent and sober-minded me" instead of explaining why. These are a lot of words distorting what I've already said three or four times now, and to attempt to turn it into some sort of "argument." I'm not "upset" (you have a bad habit of distorting my posts into exaggerated emotionalism) nor am I arguing anything other than the GOP is good at propagating enduring tropes, as opposed to Dems coming up with weaksauce stuff like Great Maga King or talking about the good ole GOP boys from the good ole days. They aren't the sole cause of Biden's approvals being in the shitter, but they definitely & effectively work as communications strategy. The tropes build on & feed into the ideas that Biden is responsible for this, that Dems won't do anything to improve people's lives, and that everyone in power is incredibly incompetent. The tropes are the natural consequence of what happens when a party rules from weakness, not strength. I guarantee that the next batch of tropes will be about the infant-formula shortage, and that they too will be designed to exploit voters' sentiments about the party in power, regardless of that party's power or powerlessness.
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May 14, 2022 16:09
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Willa Rogers posted:These are a lot of words distorting what I've already said three or four times now, and to attempt to turn it into some sort of "argument." You know they are bad faith tropes though, so why are you giving it any credibility? Just because someone out there does it doesn't mean you have to. Did you buy into birth certificate hysteria, or tan suit hysteria because conservatives made talking points about them? Why would an informed person give two shits unless you're just using the tropes you know are bad faith as if they are legitimate criticism?
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May 14, 2022 16:15
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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:You know they are bad faith tropes though, so why are you giving it any credibility? Just because someone out there does it doesn't mean you have to. Did you buy into birth certificate hysteria, or tan suit hysteria because conservatives made talking points about them? Maybe because we live in the real world and these tropes have an impact?
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May 14, 2022 16:19
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Why should we care about or discuss conservative propaganda and how the US public reacts to that propaganda as we approach the Most Important Election of Our Lives ? It's a puzzle, to be sure.
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May 14, 2022 16:19
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Nucleic Acids posted:Maybe because we live in the real world and these tropes have an impact? But, according to polling data, they aren't. Or, at least to a lesser degree than previous Presidents who had no stickers.
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May 14, 2022 16:19
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:But, according to polling data, they aren't. Or, at least to a lesser degree than previous Presidents who had no stickers. If we’re talking about polling data and American politics things aren’t looking so great for Brandon right now.
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May 14, 2022 16:22
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Nucleic Acids posted:Maybe because we live in the real world and these tropes have an impact? Voters are not blaming Biden for high gas prices unless they're a republican generally. Harold Fjord posted:Why should we care about or discuss conservative propaganda and how the US public reacts to that propaganda as we approach the Most Important Election of Our Lives ? Discussion of it is important. It is also important to treat it like the bad faith propaganda that it is and not as if it were true or accurate. Nucleic Acids posted:If we’re talking about polling data and American politics things aren’t looking so great for Brandon right now. Polling has been mostly decent in reality
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May 14, 2022 16:27
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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:Voters are not blaming Biden for high gas prices unless they're a republican generally. The seems to belie the fact that we know most citizens barely pay attention at all
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May 14, 2022 16:29
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Nucleic Acids posted:If we’re talking about polling data and American politics things aren’t looking so great for Brandon right now. Yeah, nobody disagrees with that. It just seems like a weird thing to focus on because so much is going wrong and backed up by polling, that this is the one area where most people in polling seem to agree with Biden. So, why would someone think the one area that looks better for Biden is actually the source of his problems? I think the average American is pretty checked out of politics, not especially intelligent about public policy issues, and makes a lot of decisions based on tribalism. But, I still have faith that they are able to see that gas prices are high on their own without a sticker. And they seem to be able to based on polling data. I just don't get the focus on messaging and stickers when there are so many more obvious and direct causes and the blame polling is the one area where Biden isn't worse off than other Presidents with high gas prices. Leon Trotsky 2012 fucked around with this message at 16:33 on May 14, 2022 |
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May 14, 2022 16:30
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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:You know they are bad faith tropes though, so why are you giving it any credibility? Just because someone out there does it doesn't mean you have to. Did you buy into birth certificate hysteria, or tan suit hysteria because conservatives made talking points about them? I'm "giving it credibility" because I'm not pretending something doesn't exist if I don't acknowledge it. I'm not "buying into it" or otherwise making a judgment other than what I perceive to be an effective political strategy. This isn't tan-suit or birth-certificate territory, and it's an observation based on my background in comm studies & my intermittent involvement in politics for the last 50 years. As I've said, I'm a political atheist, and don't approach political arguments as someone who has faith in a political party (as I once did), nor do I feel compelled to dismiss things that don't fall within some imaginary & constructed schema of acceptable discourse.
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May 14, 2022 16:32
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Harold Fjord posted:The seems to belie the fact that we know most citizens barely pay attention at all so they don't pay attention to the propaganda either then? what are you even arguing.
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May 14, 2022 16:33
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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:so they don't pay attention to the propaganda either then? They don't have to pay attention to see a propaganda message posted in a place that they regularly visit. They have to pay attention to not be fooled by it.
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May 14, 2022 16:35
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:But, according to polling data, they aren't. Or, at least to a lesser degree than previous Presidents who had no stickers. lol, again with the stickers, as if that's the only trope being used against Brandon & the Dems. eta: You referred to stickers 17 times, most of which were after I stated multiple times that it wasn't just the stickers. You are good at this obfuscation through repetition, I'll give you that. Willa Rogers fucked around with this message at 16:39 on May 14, 2022 |
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May 14, 2022 16:35
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A lot of this seems to tie to a contradiction between the Democratic partys stated goals of persuading reasonable Republican centrists to support them but in-thread Dem boosters idea that Republicans are fundamentally ungettable. Not sure how this is resolvable.
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May 14, 2022 16:38
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Willa Rogers posted:lol, again with the stickers, as if that's the only trope being used against Brandon & the Dems. The polling data is what it is. So, the entire messaging scheme about blaming Biden and his policies personally for it is not working as well as it did for Obama and Bush. People can be mad at the objective situation and Biden's inability to do anything/lack of action while still recognizing that he didn't cause it. And that is what the polling data shows. I just don't get the insistence that people can't be mad about a situation if they know he didn't cause it or that it is especially effective in convincing people to blame him for causing it when most people seem to agree with Biden on the sources.
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May 14, 2022 16:38
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Other polls:quote:
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May 14, 2022 16:44
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Cranappleberry posted:Also who says that leftists are not doing things to help even if they aren't voting or aren't voting for democrats? Making a difference directly in people's lives through local activism or just local charity... works. As someone that has been working for a nonprofit for the last year, it works a lot better when the federal government is also part of the process. The issue with the "we can make people's lives better through charity, gently caress the government" is that it's basically a re-packaged right-wing talking point - cuts to public programs are often justified by saying private entities can do it better, and that is almost always incorrect. Getting a census of people that need help is a huge endeavor for local orgs, whereas the government already has all sorts of data it can use to identify areas that need help. This isn't to say that nonprofits don't play an important role here, especially on a more granular level, but letting visibility decide where funds are allocated is basically inherently self-defeating. If you have the capacity to really get the word out, rest assured there is someone doing worse who lacks that much. Here are a few easy examples: - Animal shelters tend to get a ton of donations and volunteers due to the number of people that have pets. I just spoke last week to someone tabling for a local one that has hundreds of pets a month coming up from southern states - is there a similar mass of people that would do the same for victims of domestic abuse? - Organizations run by and for non-English speakers have a huge disadvantage in nearly any type of fundraising, and almost universally have poor access to services. This problem is exacerbated in situations where there isn't a critical mass of speakers, as translation efforts are often not going to be made. Even well-intentioned neighbors can only do so much if there is a fundamental communication barrier, so it is important for there to be a central resource for translation on a wide enough level to make having that translator make sense. There are an embarrassing number of situations where Google Translate fuckups propagate or get to print before they are caught. - For issues where there are two or more sides that could be argued, you end up with the same issues on the micro level as you do on the macro level. Obviously there isn't any charity that is pro-spousal abuse or pro-hunger, but there are plenty of organizations that are anti-abortion, anti-immigrant, or anti-LGBTQ, and your ability to make a local impact can be immediately stymied by that. Similarly, for all the complaints about "money in politics" as a national issue, it is by far much worse on a local level - NIMBYs and developers can leverage capitalism to ruin almost any project you can imagine, and for every success story you are bound to have plenty of failures. Virtually every city has had at least one neighborhood completely destroyed for the sake of infrastructure since the beginning of the highway system, and the constant creep of gentrification and the associated unaffordable housing will never be solved by anything less than government action - nothing is going to cause developers to build denser, affordable housing other than government requirements, and even that has to fight AGAINST the locals to happen. Donations and volunteers are also not a consistent way to run anything, you either need an endowment or to chase down grants year after year in order to keep programs going. It is possible to mobilize people to handle dramatic crises, like disaster relief or the first burst of the pandemic, but it is ultimately unsustainable on any longer timescale because people have to work to eat, and the places where resources are centered are not the places where most help is needed, as a rule. There's a reason why unions have dues and why making it illegal for them to be mandatory is seen as a death knell - you can't count on enough people to pay in to a better society if there is no penalty to being a free rider. Willa Rogers posted:Other polls: Why would you just paste an excerpt without a link? It serves no purpose but to obfuscate and make it hard for the reader to determine any additional relevant information (ie crosstabs) BougieBitch fucked around with this message at 16:55 on May 14, 2022 |
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May 14, 2022 16:51
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Willa Rogers posted:Other polls: That proves the point. If the worst polls you can find all have him below 50% and as low as 30% blame for causing it (over 90% of which are Republicans), but disapproval of his handling of it is 30+ points higher, then that indicates that most people are mad at the situation/his handling of it who don't blame him personally. The amount of people that blamed Obama (2012) and Bush's (2004) policies for causing high gas prices were 54% and 62% respectively.
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May 14, 2022 16:51
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This was my original post in response to CGIR:Willa Rogers posted:Bolding this bc the whole broken-clock trope is about a clock that's "truthful" twice a day. I said that I thought MTG's trope was effective and that the Dems needed effective tropes as well. I pointed out from the jump that tropes are shorthand to get ideas across, and that the Dems haven't been as successful as creating tropes as Republicans. I also asked, a couple times, for examples of effective Dem messaging in that vein, and I'm still very much interested in answers to that, as opposed to emotive distortions of what I've said.
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May 14, 2022 16:52
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about the truth as much as you want, but the counterargument is the effectiveness of this sort of signaling, from the I DID THIS stickers of Biden at gas pumps to Let's Go Brandon becoming shorthand for not only gently caress Joe Biden but the ability of news media to distort reality through obfuscation.
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I see we moved from the motte of "does giving the idiot person who was going to poo poo on dems anyway ammunition matter"(no) to the bailey of "does messaging work", which of course it does.
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May 14, 2022 17:01
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Jaxyon posted:I see we moved from the motte of "does giving the idiot person who was going to poo poo on dems anyway ammunition matter"(no) to the bailey of "does messaging work", which of course it does. I think this also an apt description of current democratic party messaging https://twitter.com/jbarro/status/1525507969751949312
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May 14, 2022 17:08
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I personally am very appreciate of you all going at this conversation hard this weekend, because I wasn't really paying attention and was in danger of blaming Biden for the economic woes and paying too much attention to the dipshit bumper stickers I regularly see in my neighborhood. Whew.
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May 14, 2022 17:08
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So that'd be a no, I take it, about whether there are examples of effective Dem messaging? Because it seems as if interpretive distortions come into play every time I circle back to my original question.
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May 14, 2022 17:14
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Here's a really weird bit from the Quinnipiac poll about gas prices (https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3841): "Do you think public figures in the US who express admiration for Vladimir Putin are being unpatriotic, or not?" 54% Yes, 33% No, 13% Don't Know. D split 73/22/5, R split 50/35/15, I split 49/38/12 We can dissect the specifics I guess (probably the D no represents people who object to "unpatriotic" as jingoistic, the R no is people who took it to be anti-Trump), but it seems fairly striking. Notably, this poll was taken before the Russian withdrawal on the Kiev front, which led to the graphic images of war crimes from Bucha (among others). My suspicion is that the April 9 Ipsos poll has that part baked in, and that is the reason why the blame moved from Biden to Putin
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May 14, 2022 17:17
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Willa Rogers posted:So that'd be a no, I take it, about whether there are examples of effective Dem messaging? Because it seems as if interpretive distortions come into play every time I circle back to my original question. I would have to agree that the last good president we had at messaging was Obama, but we're at the point where any message sent without obvious intent and actions will be seen for what it is. Unless they actually do something the message won't even matter. But right wing talking points are still bad faith tropes that shouldn't be used as the starting point of an argument.
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May 14, 2022 17:18
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Professor Beetus posted:I personally am very appreciate of you all going at this conversation hard this weekend, because I wasn't really paying attention and was in danger of blaming Biden for the economic woes and paying too much attention to the dipshit bumper stickers I regularly see in my neighborhood. Whew. When even mods can't come to a good faith understanding of what's being posted something deeper is wrong. It seems like any time anyone wants to talk about the group of voters the Democratic Party itself focuses it's efforts on, it's interpreted to mean the poster supports Republicans, agrees with their talking points, etc. Heck Yes! Loam! posted:But right wing talking points are still bad faith tropes that shouldn't be used as the starting point of an argument. This is what they call a thought terminating cliche. All valid criticism will be seized by the right wing as a talking point, especially when it is hypocritical of them to do so, and become conveniently verboten. Harold Fjord fucked around with this message at 17:24 on May 14, 2022 |
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May 14, 2022 17:18
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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:I would have to agree that the last good president we had at messaging was Obama, but we're at the point where any message sent without obvious intent and actions will be seen for what it is. Unless they actually do something the message won't even matter. If my aim were to ensure that Democrats & Biden remain in office, and grow their numbers in Congress, I would certainly feel compelled to examine what the opposition is doing and attempt to co-opt the arguments behind their messaging, rather than pretending it doesn't exist, or by convincing myself that I'm perpetuating the messaging deficit by pointing it out.
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May 14, 2022 17:22
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Harold Fjord posted:When even mods can't come to a good faith understanding of what's being posted something deeper is wrong Nah, I get it, it's just disappointing that the conversation is so annoyingly vitriolic and emblematic of CE in general. I'd like to see more productive conversation about what messaging or tactics the Dems could and should be using to deal with bad faith attacks from the right wing. My personal view is that they shouldn't give the dumb rear end "dems are socialist homo nazis that want to gently caress your kids and raise all the prices of everything for some reason" any thought and instead focus on the many things they've done to make life easier for working class folks, but they would actually have to do those things first.
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May 14, 2022 17:25
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Harold Fjord posted:When even mods can't come to a good faith understanding of what's being posted something deeper is wrong. I don't think anyone was saying that about the gas prices. Maybe they were about MTG's thing. I just think it is weird that there is a focus on one specific kind of messaging that doesn't seem to be working (convincing people Biden's policies caused high gas prices) when all specific data we have says the opposite and there are lots of really obvious and more direct reasons for people to be mad at him. If 30+% more people disapprove of Biden's handling of gas prices than blame his policies for it, far fewer people blame his policies personally than previous Presidents, and the vast majority of people who do think that are partisan Republicans who would say that anyway, then it seems pretty clear that the messaging "incredibly effective" compared to previous times. People are not tuned in and dumb, but they realize that gas prices are high, not changing anytime soon, and mad about it without being convinced that Biden himself did it. If there was no data on it, then I could see arguing it, but you are arguing against all data and obvious reasons for people to be satisfied and attributing it to a messaging campaign that seems to objectively not be winning the message of what caused the prices. To put it simply, if every previous President had the disapprove % and blame % roughly align, but Biden has a much higher disapprove % than blame %, then on what basis are you arguing this is a historically successful messaging campaign to blame him? It seems that definitionally most people don't blame him personally, but are still unhappy with his performance. You can be mad that he isn't doing anything or the objective situation without thinking he personally caused it and that is what the data shows. Leon Trotsky 2012 fucked around with this message at 17:37 on May 14, 2022 |
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May 14, 2022 17:33
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BougieBitch posted:Why would you just paste an excerpt without a link? It serves no purpose but to obfuscate and make it hard for the reader to determine any additional relevant information (ie crosstabs) I am so sorry! I mean to include the links. Here you go! Quinnipac Yougov Again, my deepest apologies for not including them in my post.
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May 14, 2022 17:33
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Willa Rogers posted:I am so sorry! I mean to include the links. Here you go! The poll I sourced was more recent than these, indicating that the public has turned around on who they think is most responsible.
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May 14, 2022 18:09
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