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Tom Perez B/K/M? This poll is closed. |
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77 | 25.50% |
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160 | 52.98% |
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65 | 21.52% |
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Nevvy Z posted:It's like you want to the HFC of the left. Heck Yes! Loam! posted:So you don't want people to vote for Ossof? I literally don't understand how you could possibly be upset by the idea that they want R's that didn't vote for trump to vote for a D candidate. That's how you win R+ Districts.... This indicates the Democrats haven't learned much. And they appear to be abandoning a fifty-state strategy, without which they won't win the House, and will seriously harm their chances of defeating Trump in 2020.
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Apr 20, 2017 19:10
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I mean, how the GOP interacts with its constituency is miles better than what the Democrats do. They're starting to reverse course on that I think after all the antagonistic town halls, but this is going to be to their detriment. Ghoulish policy goals aside, the Democrats would do well to copy parts of the GOP playbook for putting together a winning coalition and creating an enthusiastic base. So far what they're doing instead is "this is the candidate we want you to vote for, now go vote for them" which hasn't worked in the past and isn't going to start working just because Trump is President. They'll pick up seats off the back of his unpopularity, but they're not going to crush it like they should.
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Apr 20, 2017 19:18
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JeffersonClay posted:I'm pretty sure the difference is that the Labor electorate that chose Corbyn is tiny compared to the Democrat electorate that chose Clinton.
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Apr 20, 2017 20:22
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Smart leftists remember you have to shoot the rich before you can eat them.
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Apr 20, 2017 23:55
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Ytlaya posted:Also, there's no such thing as a stance being not ideological. Many more centrist Democrats seem to view their own ideas as "evidence supported/pragmatic/scientific/whatever", when in reality they're just as ideological as anyone else. The minute someone tries to define their own views as non-ideological or unbiased they also create a huge blind spot due to falsely attributing objectivity to what is essentially still an ideological position.
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Apr 21, 2017 00:13
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GlyphGryph posted:Thats not really accurate for the pols in the Democratic party that consider themselves centrists though. They tend to have strong beliefa about the way the world SHOULD work. I guess another way to put it is that the defining quality of a centrist is that they're not out to change anyone's mind. If raising minimum wage will get them some more votes they're for it, but if it'll put them at a disadvantage and force them to argue the point because it's the right thing to do, then the best you'll get out of them is "now's not the time".
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Apr 21, 2017 00:23
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Majorian posted:I've said it before and I'll say it again: the left would be wise to co-opt Obama. Turn him into the left-wing version of Reagan. I don't disagree, but Obama would have to go along with it, and so far he's put himself in opposition (cf Tom Perez).
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Apr 22, 2017 04:41
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Majorian posted:It's difficult to say, but I try not to read too much ideology into Obama backing Perez like he did. While it was a cynical move that I don't particularly like, I think the idea was to have somebody who he could exert more control over than Ellison. We'll see what happens, but you are definitely correct that he is of sound mind and body - and that means he's not going to want to be on the wrong side of history. Like I said it's a nice idea, but honestly I think the best leftists can hope for is power-sharing with the Obama coalition and shutting out the Clintons for good. The idea that Obama is going to truly ally himself with leftist Democrats is fantasy, but he probably won't burn the house down before cooperating with them like the Clintons will, either. Kilroy fucked around with this message at 10:38 on Apr 22, 2017 |
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Apr 22, 2017 10:35
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SSNeoman posted:We're not even done with special elections. Settle down.
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Apr 22, 2017 23:33
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WhiskeyJuvenile posted:Legalizing drugs without dismantling capitalism let's the pharmaceutical companies that created the opiate crisis push their shot even harder I'm skeptical. I'm pretty sure whatever you're trying to say here is vastly stupid. But I've never heard a defense of the drug war along the lines of "because capitalism still exists", so if you're up for it, 
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Apr 23, 2017 03:49
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WhiskeyJuvenile posted:Opiate epidemic was caused by legal opiates Moreover, we've also had "epidemics" of restricted drugs such as crack. Almost as if people are going to do drugs and prohibition is just an excuse to put the ones you don't like in jail. JeffersonClay posted:I guess it's not surprising that terrible opinions are comorbid with reading comprehension deficits.
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Apr 23, 2017 05:08
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FuriousxGeorge posted:And yet, somehow, some way... Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders persuaded me to vote for them. Weird. I mean I'm sympathetic to those afflicted with the disease of libertarianism since I'm a recovering libertarian myself (clean for 10 years) but if you were on board with Sanders then switched to Johnson, you don't have any coherent politics to speak of. Not sure what you're doing in this thread.
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Apr 23, 2017 05:12
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Alienwarehouse posted:Again, false. Bernie voters wanted change. With Hillary, there was no change. Honestly if this is a concept that you can't wrap your head around then you should probably stay the hell away from the polls on election day. Go worship whatever trickster god you pray to, instead.
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Apr 23, 2017 05:21
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FuriousxGeorge posted:Why is it so difficult for you guys to comprehend that it's not Sanders people switching to not voting or third party? It's people who don't vote and independent people who switched to Sanders. Get this, he's an appealing politician people like! He comes off as competent, honest, and caring. I'm not sure how to appeal to such voters considering they switched from one candidate to another candidate with zero intersection on policy. Pretty much whatever you liked about Sanders, by switching to Gary Johnson you were saying "oh okay I don't care so much about those things anymore, and actually never did". And again, yes this is purely on matters of policy, and while I know that isn't everything, it kind of does need to count for something, doesn't it? Isn't it called politics for a reason? You seem to want candidates to try to appeal to voters who are not, even in principle, interested in policy. Sure a lot of voters do not educate themselves on policy that much, will respond to policy proposals very different just by switching around the phrasing a bit, and are otherwise easily manipulable. That doesn't seem to apply here though, where we're talking about people who will switch seamlessly from supporting one set of policy goals, to pretty much the exact opposite, without so much as a moment of introspection or a second thought. Where the question "what will this candidate loving do?" apparently isn't such an important thing to them. I mean yeah, sure, Democrats need to appeal to more people to win elections, but I think there are probably some easier pick-ups than this group. YMMV.
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Apr 23, 2017 09:21
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FuriousxGeorge posted:Personally I think private prisons are a major distraction from the actual problems with our criminal justice system. I'd rather a candidate who supports private prisons than one that refuses to say marijuana should be legal. Ideally we could have someone who supported legalization and opposed private prisons. If one can imagine such a person. Can you name a few things where you think introducing a profit motive is a bad idea? Other than the military (presumably). Try to think about the question both in terms of sub-standard quality of service for a captured market, and the corrupting influence it can have on government (and which will work tirelessly to undermine efforts to address the quality of service issue). I happen to think there are many such areas, however libertarians tend to think there are few or none. I'm curious how you think the problems America faces right now with for-profit prisons can be solved within a libertarian framework, and whether you think it can be done in such a way where the benefits of your approach are manifest just as quickly as with blanket legalization of marijuana (which I agree has almost pure upside).
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Apr 23, 2017 09:41
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FuriousxGeorge posted:There isn't zero intersection on policy, though there isn't a ton either. Sanders and Johnson are both stronger on ending the Drug War. They both supported gay marriage before Clinton. They are both less hawkish. They both represented independent voters who generally feel that the two party system is a major source of our inability to address serious issues. On qualification outside of policy, they both came off as honest and experienced rather than as fringe characters which is a danger for outsider candidates. Sanders with a long career in the Senate and Johnson as a Governor. Ideology isn't all voters look at. As for the two-party system, that's not going to be solved by voting for any Presidential candidate, at all. It's just completely the wrong venue for it and people who show up to the polls every four years to vote for a third-party candidate in protest of the two-party system, are idiots. Well meaning idiots, perhaps, and with a legitimate gripe, but they are not doing anything meaningful to bring about the change they want to see. They are not wielding the power of their vote in what could be called an effective manner, at all. And, yeah sure Bernie Sanders and Gary Johnson have some intersection on policy in all the usual areas where you'd expect a libertarian and a leftist to agree. But you admit yourself, it's not a lot, and the stuff they disagree on, I think a lot of it they'd disagree on it by kind of an awful lot, you know? So we're still at my original point where you want to appeal to people who have just weird ideas about policy (at best) or no ideas about policy. It either people who are just single-issue voters wrt full legalization, or gay marriage, or both, and who do not give a gently caress about anything else - like they do not care if you want to strengthen unions or gut them utterly, they do not care if you want to strengthen secondary education and improve access or just privatize the whole loving thing, whether you want stricter environmental standards and research or you're a climate change denier. And so on. I'm not sure how to appeal to people who have no strong opinions on this stuff, and what's more I'm not sure I'd like it if the Democratic party started to move in the direction it'd have to move to pick up these voters. De-emphasize climate change in favor of legal weed? No, thanks. Finally I'll point out that, while far from perfect, the Democratic platform is better for libertarians on the issues where leftists and libertarians agree, so even if you are a single-issue voter on one of those things, it still seems like the Dems are the better choice 
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Apr 23, 2017 09:58
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KomradeX posted:It doesn't has to be Libertarians, but this is an exact loving problem we see with the "gently caress you, we don't need you to win" Democrats who continually fail and then blame the people they told they didn't need for them failing. It's pure narcissism That's the real worry with KS-04 and the upcoming election in Montana. It shows that the DNC still hasn't learned this lesson and they're still up for leaving entire states to twist in the wind if they don't think there are enough easy votes there. They're still only interested in optimizing for the very next election, not in building a movement which can hand them the next 10 elections. Kilroy fucked around with this message at 23:36 on Apr 23, 2017 |
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Apr 23, 2017 23:30
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Feldegast42 posted:God this whole conversation is really depressing. We can't even convince leftists to take a firm stand against money in politics anymore, even if its obvious that no good (electoral or otherwise) is going to come out of it. 2018 is going to be a bloodbath and I'm not sure that its going to be against the GOP. 
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Apr 26, 2017 16:41
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axeil posted:Where it irritates me is that the group of people getting upset about this will just find something else tomorrow that proves the Democrats Are The Real Bad Guys. There's no pleasing them unless you meet 100% of their ridiculous criteria and then the minute you slip up even a little they'll abandon you en masse and stab you in the back. Every single criticism the left has made is countered with exactly this same "purity test" argument. Including the one where we complain that the guy who just got finished loving with the DNC chair election, is now accepting fat checks from Wall Street. If you're going to accuse us of being hard-liners for complaining about that, then might as well break out the guillotines and go full Jacobin after all - if you'll accept nothing less than full acquiescence from the left then it's a joke to consider you allies.
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Apr 26, 2017 17:03
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SSNeoman posted:Explain to me how it's hypocritical for Obama to accept 400k from Wall Street while also making a point about the corrupting effects of money in politics.  If you can't wrap your mind around this I seriously suggest you seek help. You might have dementia or brain damage. SSNeoman posted:Especially since this is past his presidency.
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Apr 26, 2017 17:07
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Ytlaya posted:And this really cuts to the core of it, doesn't it? I won't deny that there's a really tiny minority of dumb leftists, but I think you need to take some time and ask yourself why they bother you so much. There are plenty of different stupid people of every possibly ideology, so why is it that ignorant leftists bother you so much? So if you say e.g. "I'm going to vote for the most left wing candidate on the ballot regardless of party" they are right there to either browbeat you into compliance or, failing that, announce that you shall have no further influence on the direction and the politics of the party. They're basically petit bourgeois fuckheads in a political sense, and ought to share the fate of the actual petit bourgeois, which I leave as an exercise for the reader.
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Apr 26, 2017 22:42
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Nevvy Z posted:Wishing death on people because they disagree with you online. Truly The Enlightened Left. I know that in some circles it's more fashionable to cause suffering and death merely indirectly and with as much plausible deniability as you can. I gotta stay true to myself, though
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Apr 26, 2017 22:58
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Nevvy Z posted:If you can't tell the difference between my post and Kilroys that's on you dumdum. But yeah, there is a difference. You're calling directly for the death of someone who earnestly advocated against abandoning entire states to the fascists. I'm calling for Something Bad To Happen to people who aren't so much concerned about the rise of fascism just as long as they don't acquire enough power to start doing actual political purges. (FYI, with idiots like you leading the opposition, they will acquire this power.)
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Apr 26, 2017 23:13
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Centrists ironically call for the death of opponents like this, but leftists unironically call for the death of opponents like this.
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Apr 26, 2017 23:18
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Nevvy Z posted:Ironic calls for death and serious calls for death. Equivalent according to the person doing it seriously. But as usual, it's okay when your side fucks up or acts like hypocritical assholes, because I guess you're doing it For The Good Of The Realm or whatever. But if leftists start getting a bit agitated that the only opposition party in sight is too busy rearranging their deck chairs and making sure only the right sort of people can sit in them, to mount an effective defense against NSDAP v2.0: Now With Nuclear Weapons - well when that happens better focus on shutting them out above all else. Wouldn't want a Democratic party that actually does poo poo. Like, this speech is quid pro quo for installing Tom Perez as DNC chair and making sure that the Democratic party is still friendly to Wall Street. That's literally what it is. And you're defending it. I don't wish you death, but I do wish you and people like you would cease to have any influence on Democratic party politics - any politics for that matter. And, as we slide closer to the abyss, I'm getting a lot less concerned about the path we take to that goal. The fascists must be stopped, and you're getting in the loving way.
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Apr 26, 2017 23:33
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Nevvy Z posted:
I mean if I said they should kill themselves IRL instead of heavily implying that others should do it for them, we'd still be here arguing over why it's different when you do it, wouldn't we? Nevvy Z posted:Anything at all to support that? I think you are the first person to claim it as an actual qpq and not just a vague appearance of corruption.
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Apr 26, 2017 23:44
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It's incredible to me that we hold middle management grunts managing relationships with contractors to a higher standard than a former POTUS who is actively involved in party politics. If you were working for a company managing third-party outsourcing and were found to be receiving checks from one of those contractors you'd be fired and possibly sued. And, you can rest assured that no one would jump to defend you on grounds of "so what if he took a bunch of money from our contractors, if he wants to fleece them for six-figures I'm not going to stop him - hell I'm jealous  " And even if it were somehow actually above board you'd still avoid it because even the appearance of impropriety could cost you your job.Picture some dude working at Boeing or something where he's got to decide between two contractors and one of those contractors is cutting him six figure checks and try to figure out how long he's going to have that job once his company finds out about it. And bear in mind that it won't even matter if he chooses the other company. Like, even if you think Obama is just fleecing these Wall St rubes or whatever the poo poo, in the private sector he'd be out on his rear end immediately. I mean at the level of national politics I can kind of understand throwing up your hands and going "all these fuckers do it, what's one more". What I can't understand is actively going to bat for You're defending literal corruption, all because you think this corrupt politician is on your side (he isn't) and because you have a burden of proof that is actually higher than what you'd find in a court of law.
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Apr 27, 2017 01:19
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LeoMarr posted:So will the democrats vote yes on tax cuts? Seems like a quagmire if they were to vote no. Everyone hates taxes, so tax cuts are a great public opinion spinner. It seems likely that this tax reform may create a masive influx of consumer spending, i mean im buying a loving house the day after these cuts come. How many people would upgrade their standard of livinging with 15% more $$
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Apr 27, 2017 06:59
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Ytlaya posted:So I think the key point isn't so much that a president/politician receiving money in this matter is necessarily corrupt, but that if it was there would be no way for us to do anything about it. If there actually was an unspoken understanding that behaving in a way beneficial (or at least not harmful) to an industry would yield rewards later (and there effectively is for the reasons I mentioned before), there would be no way to stop it if we allow this sort of thing.
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Apr 28, 2017 06:57
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I always figured that if America became a one-party state it would be in the aftermath of some terrible war or other calamity with breakdown of rule of law and suspension of civil rights and poo poo. Turns out it's happening right now because one of the parties has decided that cashing checks is cooler than winning elections. This thread title is so loving accurate.
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Apr 28, 2017 07:01
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Condiv posted:cross-postin from c-spam:
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Apr 28, 2017 15:02
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You're a craven idiot, JeffersonClay.
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Apr 28, 2017 15:23
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JeffersonClay posted:It seems like any exchange of services for money creates the possibility of untraceable corruption. what's the difference between a paid speech and a book contract, or a consulting gig? Consulting gigs for politicians are actually very often bullshit as well, but they're more a steady trickle of illicit income as opposed to a one-time massive grant like this speech was. So they don't make the headlines as much. So that's the difference. What else you got?
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Apr 28, 2017 19:03
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Maybe that's what Obama was saving that political capital for? Actual capital?
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Apr 28, 2017 19:07
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JeffersonClay posted:Any corporation could just buy a bunch of the books. They could offer advances on books that they never expect to recoup. Consulting gigs can easily pay out much more than 400k. You've articulated no significant difference here. WampaLord posted:Expand on this thought, please.
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Apr 28, 2017 19:35
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Hey, have you guys complaining about this speech also considered every other hypothetical instance of corruption permitted by the laws of physics?
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Apr 28, 2017 19:37
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I mean, even if he wasn't paid for this speech the banks could just bombard his fingernails with alpha radiation until enough of the keratin in them transmutes into gold. If you haven't got a problem with that then I don't see why you're up in arms about the $400K 
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Apr 28, 2017 19:55
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JeffersonClay posted:These arguments may not make any sense right now, but mark my words, they will some day! Stop posting. Go outside. Find a cliff. Jump off that cliff.
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Apr 28, 2017 19:59
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JeffersonClay posted:Is it abnormal for ex-presidents to fund their charities with the profits from their speaking gigs? Carter does this, and clearly the Clintons did too.
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Apr 28, 2017 20:02
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Hey didn't that politician who just suffered a catastrophic loss do this same thing? What's the problem?
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Apr 28, 2017 20:03
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