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Uglycat posted:I have learned and fully believe that there was a vast right wing conspiracy to ensure there were a lot of us and that we'd be obnoxious when they (the right wing fascist conspirators) needed us to be. It’s still chugging along too, doing the same thing.
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Jun 30, 2023 06:39
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Ghost Leviathan posted:The point is to make the statement to the left 'We don't need you, we can win without you' and have a mandate with no obligation to even do the bare minimum to improve things for the majority. The villainisation of Bernie and his supporters was a very clear opening to strangle the nascent leftist resurgence in its crib. Do you have any evidence for this? It's a pretty wild claim. It seems like this is prescribing evil motives that could easily be explained by lovely polling or hubris, or even just liking talking to friendlier crowds, rather than some sort of statement towards the left.
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Jun 30, 2023 06:41
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Ghost Leviathan posted:The point is to make the statement to the left 'We don't need you, we can win without you' and have a mandate with no obligation to even do the bare minimum to improve things for the majority. The villainisation of Bernie and his supporters was a very clear opening to strangle the nascent leftist resurgence in its crib. She spent those 36 years pushing a very specific brand of politics around her personal fulfilment and advancement, not just becoming President for any reason but for the reasons she wanted to, through her ideology and beliefs. That she failed with all this behind her and fell into the trap the right had spent those 36 years straight openly preparing in front of her is testament to some of the flaws in her strategy and ideology, to say the least. This really feels like what I mean by "imaginary version of Hillary someone made up to be mad at." That was another sort of interesting bit of polling from the 2016 general season I recall. It asked supporters of both major candidates why they supported them, and also asked voters who said they'd never support a candidate why that was the case. Trump critics painted a rather specific picture of who he was, why his policies would be bad, and the kind of harm his victory would do, while Trump supporters gave an impressively inconsistent variety of virtues for both him and his expected policies. For Clinton it was exactly the opposite: supporters gave a consistent picture of what she was like and what policies she'd enact (whether accurate or not), while her critics just assigned whatever villainous traits were necessary for the specific speaker to never back her no matter their opinion of Trump. In that poll the last category was presumably mostly conservatives fattened for 25 years on talk radio bits about Hillary. And no group is immune to rose-colored glasses for their favorites or assuming their enemies are fractally wrong on every possible level. But boy, you really don't have to find a conservative forum to encounter some amorphous caricature of "the libs" (whether voters or candidates) who are exactly as bad as the speaker needs, in precisely the right way, to make merely enabling them just as bad as allowing a fascist victory.
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Jun 30, 2023 07:32
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Uglycat posted:She wasn't a weak candidate. Hillary Clinton lost the electoral college to Donald Trump. She absolutely was a weak candidate. Hillary Clinton couldn't defeat the candidate that two other democratic runners have managed to. I don't care about the circumstances around someone. If your electorate is primed to think one way about someone and they can't win two big elections then they're a weak candidate. Nelson Mandingo fucked around with this message at 12:12 on Jun 30, 2023 |
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Jun 30, 2023 12:07
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Killer robot posted:This really feels like what I mean by "imaginary version of Hillary someone made up to be mad at." That was another sort of interesting bit of polling from the 2016 general season I recall. It asked supporters of both major candidates why they supported them, and also asked voters who said they'd never support a candidate why that was the case. Trump critics painted a rather specific picture of who he was, why his policies would be bad, and the kind of harm his victory would do, while Trump supporters gave an impressively inconsistent variety of virtues for both him and his expected policies. For Clinton it was exactly the opposite: supporters gave a consistent picture of what she was like and what policies she'd enact (whether accurate or not), while her critics just assigned whatever villainous traits were necessary for the specific speaker to never back her no matter their opinion of Trump. In that poll the last category was presumably mostly conservatives fattened for 25 years on talk radio bits about Hillary. And no group is immune to rose-colored glasses for their favorites or assuming their enemies are fractally wrong on every possible level. But boy, you really don't have to find a conservative forum to encounter some amorphous caricature of "the libs" (whether voters or candidates) who are exactly as bad as the speaker needs, in precisely the right way, to make merely enabling them just as bad as allowing a fascist victory. Setting aside that most of this is just insults to the intelligence of people who disagree with you, didn't enabling her do exactly that?
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Jun 30, 2023 13:04
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The Pentagon now says that the Chinese spy balloons did not collect or transmit any intelligence information while over the US. There are also recent reports the equipment was off the shelf commercially available american parts but the Pentagon will not confirm that. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66062562
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Jun 30, 2023 13:23
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Uglycat posted:She wasn't a weak candidate. Yes she was, because of the vast right wing conspiracy. The point was to hobble her reputation and it worked, so it made her a weak candidate. Whether she had the intrinsic skills to be a good candidate in an alternate universe where those smears didn't take place, which you seem to be focused on, is a really stupid question. Uglycat posted:And i still suspect putin of killing Seth Rich so the fascists could put a body on Hillary before the election. Two points here 1. In an alternate universe where nothing happens to Seth Rich, Hillary still loses. There are not tens of thousands of people who decided to vote for Trump, or not vote for Hillary, because of Seth Rich. 2. Think about what it means for a foreign state to kill a US citizen on US soil. If Putin was willing to take that extraordinary risk just to create a minor conspiracy theory about Clinton, he must have been doing it all the time, right? So which other bodies are we going to pin on the Russians? And if they're willing to kill an American in America to influence the media narrative, why didn't they spend way more money on the more direct interference? Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 13:39 on Jun 30, 2023 |
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Jun 30, 2023 13:31
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It seems so obvious in retrospect that HRC was a weak candidate. For some reason, back in 2016, I forgot that one of the big reasons I went for Obama instead of Hillary was because I thought Hillary had too much baggage. I grew up in the south during the 80s and 90s and I was fully immersed in how much conservatives down there genuinely hated the Clintons (i.e., not just as political opponents, but as symbols of various things they really did not like). I guess I forgot about that after being in a blue state as long as I had been. I think the US media would have done to Bernie Sanders what the British media did to Corbyn, but that ship has long sailed. Biden really should have just run in 2016. I know his life wasn't in the right place at that stage in time, but... I think he would have won out and spared us a fair amount of grief.
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Jun 30, 2023 13:37
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Gumball Gumption posted:The Pentagon now says that the Chinese spy balloons did not collect or transmit any intelligence information while over the US. There are also recent reports the equipment was off the shelf commercially available american parts but the Pentagon will not confirm that. quote:He said the efforts the US took to mitigate any intelligence gathering "contributed" to the balloon's failure to gather sensitive information.
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Jun 30, 2023 13:40
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I'd be careful about letting the word contributed lead you to conclude lots of things the article isn't saying as well
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Jun 30, 2023 13:44
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Uglycat posted:She wasn't a weak candidate. She got her rear end kicked by comparative neophyte Barack Obama in a party primary. She was an unelectable oaf.
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Jun 30, 2023 13:57
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socialsecurity posted:From your own article It's a basic summary of the article.
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Jun 30, 2023 13:58
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Hilary Clinton was a very formidable candidate who was weakened by decades of right wing smears. Saying Barack Obama was a political neophyte is hilarious: he was a very ruthless political operator that shot out of Chicago, inherited the vast Kennedy political structure, and had actual charisma.
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Jun 30, 2023 14:02
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I will admit that this is not an issue I am particularly knowledgeable about. So, I'm not sure if this is similar to the "Apples contain cyanide and shampoo contains cancer-causing chemicals" claims where the amounts are so tiny that it doesn't really matter. Even the Department of Transportation isn't sure if/how dangerous this is and they are requiring a study before Florida is actually allowed to use it. But, even if it turns out to be low-risk, this is still a wild decision from someone who is actively running for President and spent the last two years carefully crafting the entire state's legislative agenda around his presidential campaign. https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/1674734523903361027 quote:Florida governor and presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis signed a bill Thursday that would allow for roads across Florida to be made with "radioactive" mining waste that has been linked to cancer. Nucleic Acids posted:She got her rear end kicked by comparative neophyte Barack Obama in a party primary. She was an unelectable oaf. To be fair, Obama also had the backing of Harry Reid and Ted Kennedy. They really lobbied hard to get people to support him (which was seen as insane because you were openly going against the person who was most assuredly going to be the next President), Obama was far and away a better public speaker than her, Obama had the major wedge issue of being anti-Iraq war when it was the #1 priority of primary voters, and Obama's appeal to black voters and liberal activists broke the traditional "black/Hispanic voters + older center-left white voters" combo that usually decides who gets the nomination in the Democratic primary. Even with all of that, Obama only won by about 2%. I agree that Hillary was a weak candidate in general because she was incredibly polarizing. 2016 had the lowest turnout of any modern election outside of 1996 because everyone assumed she had it in the bag and She and Trump were both very polarizing and unpopular. That ended up allowing Trump to squeak out an EC win despite solidly losing the popular vote.
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Jun 30, 2023 14:13
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DeadlyMuffin posted:Do you have any evidence for this? It's a pretty wild claim. It seems like this is prescribing evil motives that could easily be explained by lovely polling or hubris, or even just liking talking to friendlier crowds, rather than some sort of statement towards the left. There's a lot of conspiratorial thinking on the left as regards the process of politics and government, where people assume that vast Machiavellian conspiracies like Rotating Villain Theory are primary movers where it's all just institutional inertia, cross-pressuring, and the ebb and flow of politics. Remember it's Veep not West Wing.
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Jun 30, 2023 14:21
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Phosphogypsum doesnt sound good
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Jun 30, 2023 14:25
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zoux posted:There's a lot of conspiratorial thinking on the left as regards the process of politics and government, where people assume that vast Machiavellian conspiracies like Rotating Villain Theory are primary movers where it's all just institutional inertia, cross-pressuring, and the ebb and flow of politics. Remember it's Veep not West Wing. Kinda like how I wish the Democrats were as left wing and counter-culture as the right pretends they are, I wish the Democrats were as coordinated and unified as the left pretends they are.
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Jun 30, 2023 14:30
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"Hilly Clinton is a weak candidate" and "it wasn't really her fault" can both be true things. ("Hillary is a scurrilous backstabber determined to take out the left" is a great example the kind of belief that made her a weak candidate, as is the even more implausible right wing mirror meme "Hillary is a ball-busting Communist.") It's funny, you can argue that she was only ever so close to being President because she married Bill Clinton, but you can also argue that she only lost because she had been married to Bill Clinton. It put her in the national spotlight at a time, in the early '90s, when a lot of people really weren't ready for a woman that assertive in a prominent (and unelected) position, and then ended up tarring her with a lot of scandal and a lot of misdirected right wing rage. It made her the focus of intense and relentless attacks in the way that, say, a woman Senator would not have been - just for lack of being as famous, if anything. Who knows what Hillary Rodham on her own might have accomplished on her own; she is not lacking in talent or intellect or ambition. To whatever extent she bought into cynical, amoral political pragmatism, you need a little bit of that to end up on the top of the pyramid. (I mean, you need a pretty specific sequence of events to unfold in your life to end up a major party nominee for President, so it's pretty unlikely that should could have taken an alternate path to the same place, but she had the potential.) There is a piece from Ezra Klein that has stuck with me over the last seven years. People may consider it to be "cringe" or hagiography but it's an interesting perspective from somebody who knows Clinton personally. Ezra Klein on Vox posted:Other politicians find themselves under continuous assault, but their poll numbers strengthen amid campaigns. Barack Obama’s approval rating rose in the year of his reelection. So too did George W. Bush’s. And Bill Clinton’s. All three sustained attacks. All three endured opponents lobbing a mix of true and false accusations. But all three seemed boosted by running for the job — if anything, people preferred watching them campaign to watching them govern. e: Stupid second hand anecdote I know but my stepfather, who was from near where she grew up, said that he had attended a party as a teenager where she was in attendance, and that she was absolutely magnetic. Everybody loved her. I think we underestimate how engaging and likable "elite" retail politicians can be compared to the average person. Even somebody like Mitch McConnell could probably dominate a room of normies while holding court on any subject. Mellow Seas fucked around with this message at 14:41 on Jun 30, 2023 |
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Jun 30, 2023 14:36
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so when we getting the next electoralism containment thread? If everyone else is getting to tote out their tired arguments again and again then 'don't vote for rapists' (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jun 30, 2023 14:41
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Mellow Seas posted:"Hilly Clinton is a weak candidate" and "it wasn't really her fault" can both be true things. ("Hillary is a scurrilous backstabber determined to take out the left" is a great example the kind of belief that made her a weak candidate, as is the even more implausible right wing mirror meme "Hillary is a ball-busting Communist.") Ezra Klein has produced plenty of gaseous, obsequious and fawning coverage of the ruling class in his work, but this is among some of his best belly-crawling.
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Jun 30, 2023 14:41
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socialsecurity posted:Kinda like how I wish the Democrats were as left wing and counter-culture as the right pretends they are, I wish the Democrats were as coordinated and unified as the left pretends they are. It's just a misapprehension of the way things work. I've seen a lot of takes about how the good decisions in Moore and Allen were cover for the bad decision in the affirmative action case, to keep the public satiated and confused about SCOTUS eliminating highly popular and successful programs to reduce racial higher education gaps. But race-based admissions criteria are actually wildly unpopular so SCOTUS wouldn't need to conspire about which cases to advance and cynically rule on to avoid public outrage on the Harvard/UNC cases. But it's taken as gospel among a lot of lefty posters on the internet that SCOTUS doesn't actually have any jurisprudence, they make nothing but political calls so if there's a ruling that you like, it's only because a far worse ruling is coming down the pike. Most Americans would say this is a good ruling - depending on how you word the question of course - and certainly not enough think it's bad that we have a stich in time to save nine situation (which itself is again more likely conspiratorial thinking rather than historical fact)
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Jun 30, 2023 14:41
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:I will admit that this is not an issue I am particularly knowledgeable about. So, I'm not sure if this is similar to the "Apples contain cyanide and shampoo contains cancer-causing chemicals" claims where the amounts are so tiny that it doesn't really matter. “Ron deSanctimonious” is too much of a mouthful. Wonder if “Radioactive Ron” could catch on.
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Jun 30, 2023 14:42
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:I will admit that this is not an issue I am particularly knowledgeable about. So, I'm not sure if this is similar to the "Apples contain cyanide and shampoo contains cancer-causing chemicals" claims where the amounts are so tiny that it doesn't really matter. I tried googling around a bit, but I'm having a hard time finding the actual activity of the phosphogypsum itself. Obviously it contains uranium and thorium, but apparently the EPA considers it as a radiation hazard specifically because those decays lead to the release of radon, which is a heavier-than-air-gas that is also radioactive itself. However, the main risk from radon is that if it accumulates in places like buildings, that 'atmosphere', for lack of a better word, is going to be an increased cancer risk, since people breathe it in. Radon is nasty stuff when inhaled, since its decay chain is alpha and beta emitting, which are worse (comparatively speaking) if it happens near one's lungs or guts or what have you. And it decays into toxic elements, chemically speaking, which also isn't good health-wise if that poo poo is in one's system. Having radon released into the open air from road pavement isn't as bad, maybe, but building roads out of radioactive waste is still super-dumb and totally on brand for Florida (sorry Florida). Driving around on uranium roads wouldn't be believable in Fallout, let alone real life 
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Jun 30, 2023 14:42
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selec posted:Ezra Klein has produced plenty of gaseous, obsequious and fawning coverage of the ruling class in his work, but this is among some of his best belly-crawling. Yes, I knew that many people would react that way, which I why I said Mellow Seas posted:People may consider it to be "cringe" or hagiography but it's an interesting perspective from somebody who knows Clinton personally. Personally I could've guessed your opinion of the piece without you sharing it but thank you for sharing anyway.  Ezra Klein is a great writer, I'm sorry. Most of what he writes is not "gaseous, obsequious and fawning coverage of the ruling class," it's wonkish poo poo about policy and political science. Have you read a lot of his work at WaPo, Vox or the Times independently, or have you read him in the context of people linking to his stories saying "look what LIB Ezra Klein said about [x]"? World Famous W posted:so when we getting the next electoralism containment thread?
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Jun 30, 2023 14:46
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Pretty sure Ron doesn’t care if our roads are radioactive or not because he absolutely despises all Floridians, even his voters
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Jun 30, 2023 14:49
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EPA approved it for road construction in 2020. https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-approves-use-phosphogypsum-road-construction No idea if that makes it a good or bad idea, just more context.
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Jun 30, 2023 14:49
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It was unapproved in 2021. This seems to be more about politics than radiation but are we so hard up for road materials that we need to use uranium mine tailings and old smoke detectors?
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Jun 30, 2023 14:52
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I have faith that the EPA will be fully edified by qualified scientists, during the public comment period, as to what amount of Radon in roadways is acceptable, and whether or not it's zero. And I expect them to not approve the use of this material if there is any danger posed whatsoever. I don't know if I would be so confident in an EPA run by a right wing hack like Scott Pruitt but thankfully that is not the current situation. Hell, even if there is a theoretically acceptable level of radon exposure from this type of aggregate, the EPA probably wouldn't approve it just for political/optics reasons. zoux posted:It was unapproved in 2021. This seems to be more about politics than radiation but are we so hard up for road materials that we need to use uranium mine tailings and old smoke detectors? (...oh wait, right, the right wing has been fervently against the idea of reducing the amount of lung cancer since the 1980s...)
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Jun 30, 2023 14:52
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Gumball Gumption posted:EPA approved it for road construction in 2020. That was under the Trump EPA, which had very few limits. Biden's EPA pulled most of Trump's rule-making after taking office and I would guess that this was one of them because the Department of Transportation says they have to perform a study before they will approve it for Florida. Edit: Beaten, but my hunch was confirmed. zoux posted:It was unapproved in 2021. This seems to be more about politics than radiation but are we so hard up for road materials that we need to use uranium mine tailings and old smoke detectors?
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Jun 30, 2023 14:53
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zoux posted:There's a lot of conspiratorial thinking on the left as regards the process of politics and government, where people assume that vast Machiavellian conspiracies like Rotating Villain Theory are primary movers where it's all just institutional inertia, cross-pressuring, and the ebb and flow of politics. Remember it's Veep not West Wing. Many people on the left have repeatedly told you that the former are simply convenient ways to describe the net effect of the latter. this is not a mutually exclusive situation this is just you not liking other people's words
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Jun 30, 2023 14:54
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zoux posted:It was unapproved in 2021. This seems to be more about politics than radiation but are we so hard up for road materials that we need to use uranium mine tailings and old smoke detectors? Seems like lobbying from an industry that has a lot of waste on their hands and trying to turn it into money.
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Jun 30, 2023 14:54
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It doesn't seem bad for road construction in the "low risk, and life is full of risk" sense, it just seems like it's a giant political handout to one specific group in Florida. What critical lack of available building material for roads is being solved by letting an extractive industry put it's waste in roads instead of storing it safely (read: expensively)?
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Jun 30, 2023 14:55
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Mellow Seas posted:Personally I could've guessed your opinion of the piece without you sharing it but thank you for sharing anyway. weve all been posting together for years at this point, most of us are dug into our beliefs and politics, so no poo poo we can safely assume how constant posters will respond
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Jun 30, 2023 14:57
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zoux posted:It was unapproved in 2021. This seems to be more about politics than radiation but are we so hard up for road materials that we need to use uranium mine tailings and old smoke detectors? Thanks for this post, I honestly hadn't heard about any of this. But I'm, once again, reminded what a piece of poo poo Andrew Wheeler is.
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Jun 30, 2023 14:57
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Harold Fjord posted:Many people on the left have repeatedly told you that the former are simply convenient ways to describe the net effect of the latter. this is not a mutually exclusive situation this is just you not liking other people's words Had someone told me that even once I'd've said they are simply stupid ways and wrong ways to describe the net effect of the latter and skew one's perceptions of How Things Work in favor of magical thinking. Gumball Gumption posted:Seems like lobbying from an industry that has a lot of waste on their hands and trying to turn it into money. Maybe they can make pennies out of it zoux fucked around with this message at 15:01 on Jun 30, 2023 |
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Jun 30, 2023 14:59
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You can think that but not seeing the magic eye image doesn't make you smarter than everyone who sees it "Heh, lots of stupid people calling this a boat"
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Jun 30, 2023 15:01
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I would be interested to know the cost relative to regular bituminous material. The asphalt cost for a mile of road - a local road, with a 30 foot cross section, one lane each direction - is nearly a million dollars. (Which, granted, is a small percentage of the cost of the building that road, but still a significant expense.) If the material was safe, and if it was substantially cheaper, then there would be an argument for using it. But I would be really surprised if it was safe, and I would be really surprised if the company selling the waste didn't make out like bandits. I do wonder if, like birdfood bathtub suggests, this is less about selling the actual material and more about "hey we are having trouble storing this stuff, think we could just spread it over every god drat square inch of the state maybe?"
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Jun 30, 2023 15:02
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bird food bathtub posted:It doesn't seem bad for road construction in the "low risk, and life is full of risk" sense, it just seems like it's a giant political handout to one specific group in Florida. What critical lack of available building material for roads is being solved by letting an extractive industry put it's waste in roads instead of storing it safely (read: expensively)? I wonder about effects on workers digging this stuff up specifically. The long-term nature might mean it's not actually harmful, but perhaps some emissions gets stuck and the person digging it up to fix some pipe will get a lungful of Radon? .... Sure sounds like the sort of thing you would use a study to evaluate!
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Jun 30, 2023 15:02
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wow, it's a schooner
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Jun 30, 2023 15:03
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Harold Fjord posted:You can think that but not seeing the magic eye image doesn't make you smarter than everyone who sees it It does if you're looking at a blank wall.
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Jun 30, 2023 15:04
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