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Talmonis posted:The same way we've always won. With grindingly slow progress, tiny victories over generations that add up to a whole goddamn lot when taken from an overall view. Occasionally by using the army on Southerners. So, having defeated the racists in that particular run of battles, you decided it would be a good idea to adopt the tactics they used against you? You know racism is bad dude, so why are you trying to imply that racists using a tactic is any kind of validation for using it yourself? Especially when it's been a losing strategy for them for years. You've literally swapped roles within certain circles so that racists are the ones "being prosecuted" and you're the authority telling them how it is and attacking them when they step out of line. The older I get the more convinced I am that the progressive side of the culture war has formed its own orthodoxy such that real progressives get shunted to the side while conservative culture warriors on either side duke it out. Someone upthread mentioned that it's likely our position will be the conservative position of the future, but I think that poo poo already happened. Maybe the old conservatives held out just too long and we didn't get a proper hand-off, or maybe society split so far apart that 2 different parallel societies formed their own conservative movements. Either way it sure feels like we're stuck fighting 2 different conservative movements and it really sucks.
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Jan 11, 2017 02:47
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POC feminists aren't a great example because that whole problem has a very long and valid history. It's probably bubbling up now because while it's pretty bad timing for the march, it's the perfect timing to make a fuss. Kinda like air traffic controllers striking during the holidays.
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Jan 11, 2017 08:49
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Frosted Flake posted:Intersectionality doesn't even seem to be the "Left" in practice because unlike Syndicalism or Socialism it is completely unable to unite people in coalition either practically or even in theory. A mass movement based on every category of person, or every individual pushing their own tiny agenda is not going to work. That's a very good point. We need to build a coalition from the singular centrally shared struggle that manifests in different ways, rather than trying to tie together seemingly random individual problems.
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Jan 11, 2017 14:46
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I feel like those probations were out of order and exactly perfect for this thread at the same time. When the poster used "regular" I assumed they meant "white" too (though it actually became clear after a couple posts what they actually meant)... but why is that probatable? Once they've stepped away from "regular" you've loving won the argument regardless of what they originally meant. You then explain to them that "regular" is too easy to misinterpret so they should avoid using language like that in the future and just describe what they mean like "non-activist women" or "women who aren't plugged into the wider debate" or whatever because clarity is important in charged topics like this. But no, they stepped out of line for a bit and had to be punished for it. Beautiful. Also microaggression as a term used outside of academic papers needs to gently caress off and die already. It's the most bullshit term in actual conversation and it does not help get people onside or explain the real reason why what they did is a problem. Just say using "regular" to describe white people makes it sound like everyone else is abnormal and it makes people feel bad to read it. If they say so what then you explain the problem with microaggressions without using the actual word. When they say they didn't mean it, pretend you believe them because to do otherwise is loving useless and has no path forward, then explain to them that they need to be more careful with their word use because the poo poo I said earlier. Having a term like microaggression used against you in a debate feels horrible. It feels like an attack on your level of education and an appeal to authority at the same time. Just use regular person words, and by regular person I mean someone who isn't plugged so tight into academia or activism to know all the secret correct people words. The other person wants to feel like they're arguing with an actual person with a personally held position, not like they're arguing against an entire academic consensus. Though Jargon is a real pet peeve of mine in general so I don't know how important it is, I just know I hate it. You got this power like yesterday Koala so I hope you get the broader context of what people are trying to say here.
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Jan 12, 2017 01:27
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Ya'll realise I posted that in the context of a debate right? I don't give a poo poo about the probations themselves, I'm pointing them out because I think they support my argument. And again you do that weird personal attack thing where you ascribe motivation and then attack it. I don't care about microaggression being used against me, I hate to see it used in an argument period because I think it's terrible and I've seen it and similar terms gently caress up arguments over and over. But whatever, like I said keep using it if you're not convinced, I'm only addressing it for a second time because of how you replied to it. Just look at all those personal attacks I got from that post. One poster couldn't even decide which personal attack to jump on so they double-posted em. Again, I don't care about the attacks themselves, I care about highlighting them in the context of the debate. And look at how loving mild my position is compared to breadth of positions that can come into the topic of culture war. Why are you attacking me personally for my arguments? Do you think this is a winning strategy? I'm coming back because the personal attacks didn't land. If they did land I'd either be raging or quitting the debate. Either way you'd never reach me.
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Jan 12, 2017 02:15
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Chelb posted:What a real hero Fine, let me rephrase it so the meaning is more clear: When you use these kinds of personal attacks in an argument, someone is only coming back to argue in good faith if the personal attacks didn't land. If they did land they'd either be raging or quitting the debate. Either way you'd never reach them.
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Jan 12, 2017 02:25
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Koalas March posted:Do you really not see the problem with telling a black woman who is talking about combating racism that her mind is "race addled"? That is definitely a problem. quote:Do you not see the problem with using the term "regular women" in any context? Nope, I even directly addressed why it is a problem in my post. My disagreement was purely to do with how it was handled. quote:Do you not see the problem with telling a black woman, who educated and shares their experiences with microaggressions on this very site that you hate them, they're dumb and figments of people's imaginations and oh boy if you accuse someone of a microaggression it might hurt their fragile feelings? I never said that microaggressions were dumb, I said the term was dumb. Describing the phenomenon of microaggression is something I agree with completely, I just think using the term itself is counterproductive. I also softened this by explaining my dislike of jargon in debate with everyday people. If you think my objections to any position you've so far expressed is anything more than arguing about the best way to advance that position and convince people of it, then that's a miscommunication.
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Jan 12, 2017 02:35
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Chelb posted:It'd be pretty cool if you could answer my original point - that dismissing the use of academic terminology or consensus in an argument is pretty much denying legitimacy to someone because they don't make you feel intelligent enough. I had lots of things to reply to.  I just fundamentally and completely disagree with your point. In an argument it is your responsibility to argue with that other person in mind. If they disagree with you because they feel you're attacking their intelligence then it's your loss. Also possibly their loss depending on what you're arguing about. But it's always at least your loss, so it's your responsibility to avoid making them feel like you're attacking their intelligence if you want to convince them.
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Jan 12, 2017 02:42
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Cease to Hope posted:what if nobody's interested in reaching you Since I'm using me as a stand in for others then your reply is kinda the problem. If you're not trying to reach people why are you even talking? I'm becoming less and less convinced I am going to get through to people, but what possibility remains is the only reason I'm still talking.
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Jan 12, 2017 02:45
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stone cold posted:You are a tone policing collaborator. Like you are the human embodiment of MLK's portrait of a white moderate. I have never criticised BLM. I have never criticised a protest in my entire life. I've never criticised speaking out or debating any topic that addresses power imbalance ever. We're talking about an existing debate. In the context of a debate I'm entirely behind, I'm criticising the debating method being used. I don't think that your particular style of debate is ever going to achieve the goals you seem to be aiming for, so I'm pointing that out. Condemn the gently caress out of systems and practices you disagree with and absolutely attack arguments you disagree with, but don't attack the person you're arguing with, and do use language that is more likely to reach your opponent. MLK was criticising moderates that said don't push. I'm not saying don't push so it doesn't apply.
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Jan 12, 2017 02:59
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Chelb posted:Framing debates as a singular contest with the goal of minimizing losses is a pretty sure-fire way to lead to nothing of worth being accomplished. This gets tricky because I completely agree with you, but I also completely don't. I agree that it's a two-way street, but at the same time you only control yourself so it's kinda useless to care about the other person's responsibilities. Like say I saw two people arguing and one said microaggression and the other one got all upset and the argument exploded. If I got to pull aside each person before time was reversed to just before that point I'd tell the person who said microaggression to not use microaggression and to instead describe the concept directly because their opponent might get pissy otherwise, and I'd tell the other person to not worry if the person uses a word they don't understand and just ask them to explain it and that it doesn't mean they're dumb if they don't know it. Then I'd hope that at least one of them got it because it would hopefully only take one side changing their approach to fix the problem. If that makes sense. About the framing debates as singular contexts I get what you mean. I'll think about that point some more.
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Jan 12, 2017 03:31
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Chelb posted:I guess I'm just plain baffled at the idea that the people that need to be reached in any haste are those who'd handwave away terms like "microaggressions" as liberal elitism. There are many individuals out there willing to educate and engage themselves on a topic they're unfamiliar with, and they'll always be better listeners and allies than those that insist a conversation take place on their intellectual level. Persuasion is give and take, and plenty of minorities out there have been forced to give more than enough; they deserve to be met halfway. It's the same phenomenon as Americans being all for universal health care so long as you use words that don't trigger their "= socialism = bad" response.
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Jan 12, 2017 03:36
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Tesseraction posted:Uh. This comes across as suggesting the second person is unreasonable and stupid. All time travels stories are broken if you look at them too closely. 
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Jan 12, 2017 03:43
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The Kingfish posted:Tone policing is good. You should be civil, even with people whom you disagree with. This. Tone policing is bad when used to shut down debate. It is not bad when used to shape debate.
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Jan 12, 2017 03:44
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stone cold posted:Like, here's a thought. The framing of this bullshit culture war is SJW's vs deplorables, right? Maybe, when one side is a bunch of racist, white nationalist, bigoted cowards, who want to wipe out the other side, maybe that opinion isn't valid. I think you're being too absolutist here, though to be fair that might be the OP's fault. The culture war sides are fairly big coalitions with all sorts of people in them and a bunch of people in the middle that could go either way or nowhere. I'm not saying everyone on the other side is reachable, I'm saying some are reachable and a whole lot in the middle are definitely reachable, and we owe it to ourselves to try to reach them. Or not, whatever, don't do something you don't think will work. But don't sabotage other people's efforts. Because that's what you're doing when you just straight up attack people for minor things. Like yeah attack someone like Sessions that rear end in a top hat isn't reachable, but someone who puts a foot out of line can potentially be reached. But when you attack the other side, not the other side's arguments or its worst offenders, but the other side itself you just reinforce their coalition and make it harder for other people to talk them out of it. The people you could peel from the other side move closer to the core of hate-filled individuals that has roped them into the coalition and people in the middle will often see you being a bully (and then fall into that both sides are the same bullshit that is so infuriating). Nobody is saying their views are valid. Just that their are approaches to getting some of them out from under those views.
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Jan 12, 2017 03:55
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stone cold posted:Also, show me exactly where calling out bigotry undermines other people's efforts, ever. Calling out bigotry is not a problem.
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Jan 12, 2017 04:10
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Problem is tone policing is super loving huge amongst the white middle class. You see it as being something used to shut down POC and women (because it is, but also) because you don't see first hand how it's used within middle class white society all the time. Which is your loss because it deprives you of a very strong weapon that every powerful white person holds over the largest (depending on how you define middle class) demographic in the west.. But I'll drop the argument here. Think about it though.
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Jan 12, 2017 04:35
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Would you say you bootstrapped your way into understanding and everybody else just needs to do the same?
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Jan 12, 2017 04:50
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stone cold posted:Okay, I think the notion that Haider posits that white guilt is more insidious that white supremacy is specious. His willfully dense approach to analyzing white privilege is as misguided as it is patronizing. White guilt is automatically more insidious than white supremacy if you posit that it's a serious problem because it's the more subtle and overlooked of the two. How is his approach to analysing white privilege misguided and patronising? Multiple people have already indicated they thought the article was good (and I agree) so they obviously didn't see what you saw, so you're going to have to give more details. He never stated that the white working class don't have race issues as far as I can see. Point it out if I'm wrong cause I missed it. As far as I can tell he didn't say racism amongst working class people was an illusion or some poo poo black people made up, he just talks about its origins. He said it was created by and for the bourgeoisie and that it serves only them, but he didn't say it was only perpetrated by them or that the white working class were free of all guilt. I don't see how this silences objections of the POC working class. I'm don't doubt they'll have objections to working with their artificially created enemies but no less do I doubt that white working class people will have objections to working with their artificially created enemies. And of course he offers no solutions to the working class beyond "ally against white supremacy and private property," he's pushing socialism so his answer was always going to be for workers to ally against their true oppressors. Part of his point is that social justice as practised by white liberal elites is a total loving sham used to deflect from their oppressive role so I think you and he totally agree on that point. I think what his main thesis hints towards is that white privilege is the other side of the oppression coin. White supremacy was used as justification for elites to oppress poor POC, and now white privilege is being used as justification for elites to oppress poor whites. White privilege is only really an important weapon* when used against poor white people as that's the only advantage they get. Actual elites who gain the most benefit from that privilege have much more visible and powerful advantages that could already be used against them before the concept of white privilege, and they can combat it by simply uplifting "good" minorities into the oppressor class. If you view the language of privilege as having supplanted the language of socialism then I'd say it's a net negative in terms of empowering the disadvantaged against their oppressors since it divides the oppressed classes where socialism does not (though socialism evidently doesn't contain enough to prevent division by itself). *The concept of privilege can also be used as encouragement for POC and I believe studies have shown it's more effective at helping POC students than the language of disadvantage. So it has good uses there. But I'm talking specifically about when it is used as a weapon against white people, rather than as a framing to help non-white people.
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Jan 12, 2017 10:38
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Rexicon1 posted:YES. YOU. CAN. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NW3RLnXmTY Reverend Wade Watts went above and beyond what I'd expect of like 99.9999999999% of the population to be able to do, but he showed it was possible to turn even members of the KKK. Again, I don't expect any of us could turn KKK but surely we should at least try the softer targets.
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Jan 12, 2017 11:46
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Rexicon1 posted:They are going to do this anyway. These people are getting the word out that the sky is green and that black people are made of concentrated void energy and must be destroyed. Fighting on terms of messaging in a traditional sense isn't going to work. Why are we so tied to fighting on their terms. Why do we always have to let them pick the battlefields. Right wing media DOMINATES the path of discussion because we are so goddamn worried about the minutiae of the message and the focus. It doesn't need to be focused , just shotgun the messages of "giant corporations need to be taxed more, healthcare is a right, labor rights must be upheld, cops shouldn't be allowed to loving shoot black people". Do what they do for their venomous horrible poo poo, but do it in service of positive. When you get someone to listen to you more attentively with these promises of a better world, THEN you give them the research and the proof and the logic and the reasoning. Then you get them back into reality. Tune them in with a message that means something to them. I like all this stuff here much more than the stuff about attacking people. I think the left is going to have to realise that winning the media narrative is probably not going to happen (though don't stop trying) and it's going to have to be a ground game. I think the rural poverty thread has some good ideas in regards to joining social organisations and working with churches and doing charity work and stuff like that. You need to get people away from the TV and into a social environment where they're more open. I haven't thought it through but there's got to be a way to leverage some of the large black pro athlete contingent becoming more political. Sure the worst can throw insults on the internet and yell on TV when athletes get political but get em with these people in person talking about this stuff civilly and most won't be able to do that. As hateful as people can get from afar or in passing, most of them can't do that in a (dry) social setting. Maybe if celebrities turned away from fundraising with the rich and into more community outreach they'd be a more valuable asset too. Tesseraction is right that it's not enough to have one conversation, so you gotta make it something regular. A lot of churches and church-based charities are especially good because (avoiding the obviously terrible ones) they have a lot of conservative but generally good people and you have a ready-made time to interact with them regularly.
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Jan 12, 2017 13:16
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blackguy32 posted:In your first example, you can easily fish for a reason to discount anyone's opinion. People often point out to how Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement wore suits, etc. And how kids these days don't as if it diminishes the message at all. It's just a cheap way to discount opinions and stifle messages. Tone isn't about the message, tone is about how the message is being stated, and the goalposts can easily change at a moment's notice for what is the right tone. This has to be a two-way street though. Why should someone deal with a call-out in good faith if the call-out...er is not giving them the same benefit of good faith? Why should people not get defensive when they're called out by someone being overly defensive? I mean, I try to do that because it's useful in a debate, but it's entirely unfair if only one side is required to be the bigger person and extend an unreciprocated assumption of good faith. EDIT: A big problem with callouts is that they often completely flip the burden of proof from what it actually should be. Like if you think a bigass effortpost has problems then you should have to break it down and loving show where the problems are and why it is a problem because you are the one making a claim. IF that's what callouts were I would loving love them. But more often then not it's the person quoting the post and adding a single sentence just proclaiming it to be a problem. When that happens to me I now have to figure out why the poster has a problem with it, hope I'm right, and then defend myself from the claim that didn't even deign to offer any proof for itself and is often not based on the content of the post but the other person's assumption of what I was thinking when I wrote the post. It's dumb. Futuresight fucked around with this message at 03:06 on Jan 13, 2017 |
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Jan 13, 2017 02:55
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Mixodorian posted:Relative to this exchange by you and kingfish, I guess my thinking is tone matter if you're settled on affecting change through peaceful means exclusively. However, if you're really ready to do what needs to be done despite the cost, it becomes totally useless and a waste of time considering it. I think this is a very important point. I think a disconnect we're having here is when tone matters. It matters in the context of trying to talk to people, of trying to convince people to join your side, and in guiding the conversation. It does not mean that everything has to be a conversation, just that if you're going to engage in a conversation you should do it in the most effective way. Like, I am straight up not against riots. I don't promote them if I'm not going to be a part of them because that's chickenhawk levels of bullshit, but I'm not against them. I wouldn't be against armed organisations of black people patrolling neighbourhoods (again) in an implied ultimatum to police if that's what people felt necessary. Etc. I don't think polite protest, let alone polite conversation, is enough to get things done. I believe the implied threat of violence is always, and actual violence is sometimes, important for forcing significant change in society and as great as the peaceful protests during the civil rights era were, they benefited hugely by being compared to the alternative of violence. But as much as I'm okay with violence against the state as needed, I would disagree entirely with injecting violence into a peaceful protest. And I'm completely against (when I remember, I'm human) using personal attacks in the realm of conversation. You need to use the right tactics against the right people at the right time. You can't just rage incoherently at every opportunity and expect to be effective. If you don't think conversation with the other side will work or it's not for you, then don't do it. Do your own thing. But let people who do genuinely believe conversation can work to actually do their thing. Like, I'm not saying you have to go out of your way to talk white people onside, just try not to make it harder for the people who are going out of their way to do it. If you don't want to put the effort into educating someone then don't talk to them at all maybe? This ain't Liar Liar rules, you don't have to blurt out what you're thinking or feeling regardless of how helpful or not it may be. Setting poo poo on fire just to see it burn is for rioting; it doesn't do much of anything in constructive conversation. And if you fail to hold back, so what? If you lose your temper and lash out then that's just being human. If you just own up that it was a brief loss of composure then nobody on your side is going to care. Everybody here knows the bullshit people are facing out there and how it wears you down. It's only when you defend your outburst as a good thing that it becomes a problem people want to talk you away from. Jack Gladney posted:The goal of activism isn't to educate white people. It is to secure and enforce the rights of nonwhite people. White people carry a moral obligation to educate themselves. If you signed up for some kind of lecture series or training about race in America, I'm sure the professor would treat your curiosity with encouragement and generosity, so long as you did the reading first. Outside of that context, it's silly to assume someone else will become your teacher if you make no effort on your own to learn and grow first. If every white person fulfilled their moral obligations the only replies to the op would be like "wtf is a culture war?" Every strategy is going to have to take into account that most won't do this.
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Jan 13, 2017 05:51
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Jack Gladney posted:What is the role of the listener in these exchanges. Are there boundaries of appropriateness for one that makes an error or asks a question of another? Where do our norms and expectations of the white listener come from? The expectations on the white listener are just as heavy as the speaker. The problem is that it's much harder to get them to fulfil those expectations if you haven't even gotten them to agree to the basic premise of the argument yet. It's hard to impress on them the importance of educating themselves and listening until after they've internalised the education. When someone first becomes "woke" they tend to go in a reading spree because they've only just gained the incentive to do it. A person you're trying to bring onside hasn't hit that point yet so you have to go above and beyond what morally should be expected of you because you have to make up the difference. From a justice perspective it's complete bullshit, I hear you on that for sure, but from a practical perspective that's often how it has to be. Oh and "you"/"them" and "speaker"/"listener" refers to "person on the progress side" and "person not on the progress side". I'm taking the assumption that anyone who could be convinced of my position here is someone who agrees with the cause of social progress, if not currently my ideas for the tactics.
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Jan 13, 2017 06:08
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blackguy32 posted:I have hinted in my posts that there seems to be no expectation, because the person you are educating can easily waste your time for 30 minutes only to gaslight you at the end. But since you are fighting for equality, your expectation is to just accept it and move on over and over and over again. Yep, I've had people in real life agree with me one day and then the next day they've completely changed their mind. One especially memorable incident was over legalisation of marijuana where I got an old lady to agree that marijuana shouldn't be illegal and that our drug policies in generally are hosed up. Then the next week they came back with the idea that even though marijuana shouldn't be illegal on its own merits, it is currently illegal, thus it should remain illegal because anyone who smokes it is a criminal so they shouldn't be given a break by changing the law. Like. What? It's loving infuriating engaging in conversation with these people sometimes but if you wanna do it you gotta learn to get over that poo poo.
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Jan 13, 2017 06:23
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How are you not right now telling me that I'm doing activism wrong?
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Jan 13, 2017 06:51
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Only what I've just looked up in response to your question.
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Jan 13, 2017 07:23
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It's been somewhat misused from the start but I think we've all been through enough rounds of "no, let me explain to you what neoliberal means" recently that we just collectively went with the spirit of its use.
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Jan 13, 2017 14:22
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Tesseraction posted:Basically that you don't effect change by reasoning with single people, you do it via societal and political pressure. Telling someone to go gently caress themselves doesn't have much of an effect on that. People who think that are ignoring local politics. Real changes that affect people's lives get made through arguing with individuals all the time. The big societal changes might be sexier, but a lot gets done at a smaller scale. But Democrats don't even turn out in force for mid-terms so yeah, not surprising that an even smaller scale is overlooked.
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Jan 13, 2017 17:00
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Rangpur posted:Is real easy to misinterpret when tempers run high. The number of successful protests that didn't create animosity between the general public and the protestors is, I would imagine, pretty close to zero. Moreover, we have the added wrinkle that thanks to advances in communication, the craziest rant that goes viral on social media becomes the face of the movement, e.g., people who believe that BLM's message of 'the police need to stop killing us' is a call for white genocide because their great aunt retweeted the footage Fox News got of the guy chaning 'kill the pigs.' To put it another way, I agree that the perception that opposition to Trump consists of insufferable college students trying to out-woke each other is harmful to left-leaning policy goals. But I don't agree that perception accurately reflects reality. I had decided to bow out of posting in this thread because it seemed a lost cause but I can't resist replying to a reasonable post. I think that here is an important swivel point for the argument. I totally agree that pissing people off for a purpose, or in the process of getting things done is just gonna happen. It's not vitally important to avoid pissing people off, but it is important to only piss people off when you're doing it for a purpose. Pissing people off has a cost, so you need to make sure you're getting something of worth out of doing it. So yeah, just want to clarify that there's no argument against protesting. The "kill the pigs" thing is an interesting point because you're right that it happened like once from a small group and BLM shut that poo poo down as soon as they could and it still went viral. But if they didn't shut it down and it continued on and on I really think we'd be seeing a very different and very much worse reaction.
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Jan 14, 2017 06:28
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OwlFancier posted:I would suggest that the desire to boil everything down to economic class is no longer sufficient, there manifestly are other, valid classes to which people may belong. We definitely want a pan identity and a singular goal if we can though. Being groups of people that are doing their own thing but help each other out from time to time cause we're roughly fighting the same group of people is kinda weak. The alliance between communism and anarchism brought about "no war but class war" because it unites them against their shared enemy. Now we need something like "no war but <identity type> war" where <identity type> basically covers the fight along all types of power differentials, rather than just the economic power differential. Which then covers like... the entire left vs the right. So then we have things like the race front, the class front, the gender front, the sexuality front, etc but only one war. That might actually drive out centrists though because a lot of them are not at all about helping all oppressed classes. Whether that's a good thing or not depends if the left can succeed without them I guess.
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Jan 15, 2017 07:49
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Just to clarify my "maybe this drives out the centrists" part I don't mean the left Democrats should do that right now. They should be prying as much power and leadership away from the centrists and put in as much actual leftist policy as they can, but actually pushing the entire centrist faction out of the party would be premature given the whole losing horribly across the board thing.
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Jan 15, 2017 09:21
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khwarezm posted:Will I link this article again? Here are some choice quotes to show how he could have done better but didn't: Thanks for this it was interesting to read. The real big problem with this is that idpol is far better for the Republicans than for the Democrats because they serve a single identity. Identity politics unites their entire base all across the board. Whereas Democrats then have to appeal to various minorities in order to get them on board during the primary, and then they have to appeal to a large chunk of the identity the republicans hold a monopoly on in the general. And every bit of progress in one demographic is essentially wasted on another. Not entirely because it builds up an impression of being a real progressive when you're consistent about advancing the entire coalition, but it's a much smaller effect than if you could just dump everything into one demographic. Which really weakens to Democrats vs Republicans. Actually that article made me think; would a candidate largely ignoring minorities but having well funded and supported advocates work? Like if they just gave Danny Glover a bunch of money and allowed him and a team of black activists to essentially drive the whole black outreach program, give them power to add to the platform, and guarantee them access over Bernie for X time a week, and promised cabinet positions, would that have potentially worked? Would you accept a candidate that essentially said "I'm a senator from Vermont so I don't know as much about this subject as I'd like, which is why I've assembled a team who will tell me what I should be doing in this area and given them power to dictate policy"? He could throw in something about how his main objectives will help everyone and the team is there to make sure it doesn't miss the black community, and to address other important concerns that economics doesn't. Or would it have to come directly from the candidate? Because it would be a lot easier to appeal to and serve a coalition if you ran and governed as a coalition instead of one person trying to be everything to every part of the coalition. But I don't know if people would take to that.
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Jan 16, 2017 05:16
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OwlFancier posted:If you're left wing you should not be voting for the man who lives in a literal golden tower and whose platform is unfocused yet spiteful nationalism. I'd say both of these I bolded would be inaccurate. Accelerationists that are willing to vote Bernie are more of a weird kind of independent. Which is why we should be trying to get their votes.  But yes, also fighting back against the idea that voting Trump is a good idea itself. Even though I understand the frustration. Unless people really get stuck into primarying establishment types and forcing them to be answerable to the left we're just going to see the same holding pattern bullshit we're seeing. I know some people think it's good enough but it sure as poo poo is not. The position The Saurus has will only continue to grow unless the Democrats can make real change at the top. I mean Jesus gently caress there's someone in another thread (I think the election thread or donald trump piss party) defending Cory Booker because we have to stick together 4 years before the next election. That idea has to loving die. Forced unity under threat of Republicans can only hold for so long and will cause the fractures to become bigger all the while. Defend Cory if you think he's an actual good egg, but don't pull out unity. You can't force unity you have to earn it by convincing your coalition that you are actually allies or at least aligned enough ideologically to work together, and "none of us want Trump now do we" is not an ideology. EDIT: Also note that primarying does not need to mean you win the primary. Just trying to do it by itself should help raise their fear levels.
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Jan 16, 2017 09:43
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