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regardless of what happened here (which is at the least a bunch of cronies getting an important contract for which they were clearly unqualified), mayo pete claiming victory is insanely dodgy and *at best* an attempt at misdirection with insufficient information. the thing here is that, if the samders campaign's released numbers reflect reality, obfuscation and chaos are very convenient for the establishment types who commissioned the app and for the other establishment people who made the app - there's plausible deniability, sure, but the sheer level of convenience combined with the utter opportunism of the candidate lends itself well to conspiratorial thinking. even in the best case here (an incompentent outfit gets an important contract through their connections) it's super shady, and it looks pretty much exactly how an actual rigging attempt might look
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Feb 4, 2020 14:00
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the thing is, even if this is honest incompetence it's still completely outrageous and should under no circumstances be defended. it's a major scandal under any conceivable circumstance because it casts the entire integrity of the process into question
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Feb 4, 2020 14:07
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feedmyleg posted:Giving him a nickname like Cheaty Pete just makes you sound as small and petty as Trump with his nicknames. attempting to spin no result as a win is more than enough to warrant the nickname. it's absolutely loathsome behaviour
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Feb 4, 2020 14:10
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mr whistler posted:Politics ain't beanbag. If a politician trying to generate some momentum on incomplete results sends you into hysterics, I shudder to think what might happen to your health when exposed to real politics. lol this faux-cynical bullshit attitude is why complete liars like trump and johnson are winning all the elections note that none of the other front-runners were skeevy enough to declare victory off the back of a complete logistical disaster. this is not an unrealistic bar, even for this contest. when he plays dirty, he really needs to be called out - and his declaration of victory was playing dirty.
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Feb 4, 2020 14:17
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DreamingofRoses posted:Didn’t Bernie give what was basically an “I won” speech too? he said he was 'feeling good' about the results and then his campaign put out partial results which put him moderately ahead - this is within the bounds of what is reasonable. had buttigieg said something like 'it looks like we've done very well' that would be one thing, but outright claiming victory is some dodgy poo poo because it primes everyone to expect something which may not be (and indeed, probably is not according to what evidence we do have available) true. there's a line between legitimate spin and disinformation - of course the campaign is going to try to claim the results as encouraging, and a results in the mid-to-high twenties in a very competitive field can be reasonably spun as doing well even if they somehow ended up third - but saying that you're first when there's nothing real to support that statement is crossing that line, because at that point you're not pushing an interpretation of the facts, you're pushing your own facts - which means that everyone else suddenly has to decide what to do about it, either call it ouy viciously or make up alternative facts using the confusion of a major procedural breakdown (which, again, is a big scandal even under the best reasonably imaginable circumstances) to try to push a distortion of the facts is really dodgy behaviour and absolutely needs to be called out in an aggressive way
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Feb 4, 2020 14:37
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tempers are flaring over a scandal which, had it happened in a presidential election in latin america in favour of a socialist incumbent, would likely have been used to legitimise a coup this is probably this thread at its most hardened
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Feb 4, 2020 15:08
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so did they give any numbers yet i crave numbers
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Feb 5, 2020 03:02
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oh so a technical tie and a win on popular vote, that's not great but ok i guess biden's hosed though
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Feb 5, 2020 03:04
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bloomberg has infinite money at his disposal, were i him i would simply outright bribe every delegate to make me the nominee
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Feb 5, 2020 03:06
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itsameta4 posted:I thought alpha particles can barely penetrate your skin anyway. yeah they're thicc
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Feb 5, 2020 03:08
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Gatts posted:Does Jeff Bezos make a vanity run or does he accept he's powerful enough as he is and buys all of the govt? i think that running for president is a retirement thing, probably. they want to cash in one more time and sit in the big chair before they die. this, i suspect, is because they suddenly realise that they've not really gotten much fulfilment from their stuff and decide that this last morsel is going to make everything ok
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Feb 5, 2020 03:11
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CelestialScribe posted:Yes, it is. If you don't see how it doesn't become that then you're beyond saving. dude you should probably like read a book or something
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Feb 5, 2020 03:12
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bloomberg actually flexing his economic muscles rather than just spending his passive income would be great, an experiment in just how powerful brute cash injections are in modern politics my hunch is that it'd be enough for a fair chunk of voters, but not enough to actually get elected
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Feb 5, 2020 03:15
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Seph posted:Do we still have electricity and tap water in this hypothetical anarchist framework or is it caveman style for everyone? anarchism just means the abolition of present power structures. probably you'd end up with a fair amount of de-facto states at a municipal level with a fair amount of division of labour anarchists ran catalonia for a couple of years until they got physically deposed, and anarchist types were running northern syria until rather recently without any particular issues. anarchism is a venerable and flexible doctrine, but if one reads it as a protestant i can understand the reaction
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Feb 5, 2020 03:21
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nelson posted:Just bribe the electors in the general election. holy shi GreyjoyBastard posted:he's worth 60 billion, he could give them each ten million bucks and have 6b left over i'd take the money, no lie
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Feb 5, 2020 03:24
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perot was a much stronger candidate than bloomberg is, but i'm pretty sure you can transform dollars into votes more effectively and more efficiently today than you could in the nineties
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Feb 5, 2020 03:27
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mutata posted:Bernie isn't out there preaching action months after a heart attack so we can sit here and cry about unknown and far-fetched hypotheticals. all that dosh tho
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Feb 5, 2020 03:28
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Majorian posted:Bush Sr. wasn't as roundly hated as Trump is though. trump's at about 40+ approval rating, same as HW was in 1992 iirc
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Feb 5, 2020 03:34
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there's a lot of space for bloomberg to take in a sanders-trump contest - for one he'd be able to mount a credible pro-business pro-trade challenge, and he could campaign on neoliberal rationality - it's a fading doctrine but it's still very powerful and how a lot of people think the world just functions he'd have to spend serious money though, and ib the end i don't think he's willing to actually sacrifice anything for this
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Feb 5, 2020 03:39
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comrades, our movement has eaten poo poo in the entire western world since mitterand. odds are we are going to keep losing for a while longer - to be a socialist is to tolerate defeat. an ambiguous result in the iowa caucus really shouldn't even register
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Feb 5, 2020 20:24
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i do not understand how these delegates function do they have literally any role other than picking convention delegates?
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Feb 6, 2020 02:53
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tbh i think you have to expect some drainage in a system as clunky as the iowa caucus apparently is - some people may go to the wrong group, some may actually change their minds on the spot, some are miscounted etc, so some irregularities (like fewer second round votes than first) are to be expected of course, given how ridiculous this whole process has been there's no real reason to have faith in it so...
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Feb 6, 2020 02:58
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OJ MIST 2 THE DICK posted:they pick the county delegates that pick the CD delegates that pick the convention delegates* and at none of these steps is anything else than the delegates to the next step voted on?
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Feb 6, 2020 03:00
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any system relying on people standing in the right spot is going to have some failures - the british parliament votes this way, and so MPs are basically professional standers-in-spots, and they occasionally cock up and pick the wrong lobby
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Feb 6, 2020 03:02
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OJ MIST 2 THE DICK posted:you used to be able to swap candidates, but that got locked in a while ago yeah, but like, they're not actually delegates to the iowa democratic state convention where issues are discussed and voted upon or something
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Feb 6, 2020 03:03
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make caucus day a bank holiday, it might actually be interesting
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Feb 6, 2020 03:05
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OJ MIST 2 THE DICK posted:they're delegates to the county conventions where they vote more on issues and poo poo ok so the delegate number does actually matter somewhat. that's oddly reassuring that they do have a function of some kind
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Feb 6, 2020 03:06
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Waltzing Along posted:Why is the DNC so against Bernie? Is it just a $$$ thing? Their corporate sponsors don't like his policy and so they have to follow suit? bernie sanders is a no-poo poo social democrat and has a departure from neoliberalism as his core policy platform. this is fairly radically different to what the DNC believes, which is clintonite financialisation and privatisation combined with means testing and incentive structures etc - basically they represent a fundamentally different coalition of institutional interests (tech firms, urban businesses, real estate, the fabled professional managerial class) than bernie (organised labour, the precariat, going basically all-in on the latter) and this means that they have pretty fundamentally different views on what should be done etc. in addition, a lot of people's careers are at stake. if you look at jeremy corbyn's tenure as leader in british labour, you see a lot of the same mechanisms - a party which has been totally beholden to one coalition of interests is simply not interested in changing, and since people have invested so much in the party as-is it's hard to accept the need for change - easier to just see this left-wing tendency as an insurgency to be quashed so you can go back to doing what you were doing. this happens everywhere from time to time. if sanders wins and reforms the party, in twenty-thirty years the situation's going to have changed in unpredictable ways and new interests are going to emerge - when the old precariat is no longer precarious, where are they going to go? basically all successful parties are able to shape the electorate of the future in some direction by building institutions and setting up incentives (e.g. the liberalisation of housing markets in the eighties leading to the generational divide in present british politics and cementing thatcherism's position), but there's no way to control these things perfectly and eventually some social or technological change is going to make your position untenable - the communist party of the soviet union based its power on mass-employing heavy industries, which suddenly turned obsolete due to the reduced cost of transportation (well, simplifying somewhat but you get the picture). the big strength of a market system is that it can render such groups obsolete by channeling their economic viability into political viability. unfortunately, this also leads to stuff like abandoned cities and the rise of the permanent underclass and precariat. sanders' proposal involves a big shift in the philosophy of government and necessitates a much more active state if he's going to do the stuff he wants to do, and that's fundamentally contrary to the interests of the DNC.
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Feb 6, 2020 17:42
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the really twisted thing about american politics is that you've got dominant factions in both parties who are explicitly in favour of financial capital and ground rent concerns (i.e. agribusiness and various mineral concerns), but who've been divided mostly on cultural issues and to an extent on foreign policy. sanders is the first real threat to these positions in at least my lifetime and, along with corbyn, melenchon and to an extent wagenknecht, a representative of the post-2008 left resurgence. with corbyn's defeat, the sidelining of wagenknecht and whatever the hell is going on in france, sanders represents the most likely solid leftward step in the western world. a single major victory signals the viability of the whole tendency, and then it's game on for the western left
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Feb 6, 2020 17:52
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Gripweed posted:Yeah people were just flat out ignoring the fact that everybody in the UK hated Corbyn. And that his overly complicated solution to the most pressing political issue wasn't very persuasive compared to his opponents single sentence solution. The situations aren't comparable at all. this is a poor summary of the corbyn situation, which does map onto sanders in important ways but which notably diverges in other ways one important divergence is that the british press is miles worse than the american media - the conversation is driven by newspapers, and every newspaper is willing to push agendas quite openly. most of them are rabidly right-wing, but some are liberal-centrist, which normally provides some measure of balance - but all of them tried very hard to undermine corbyn. another salient difference is the role of the candidate in the party. in the UK, corbyn became vulnerable to attacks by way of attacking misconduct within the party structure for which he was responsible but which was largely out of his control - as leader of the opposition, you have to put yourself out there in ways which sanders hasn't had to, and sanders himself cannot be smeared with other people's behaviour in the same way - this makes him less vulnerable to undermining from within by tom watson types. corbyn only really became unpopular with the double whammy of brexit and labour antisemitism, the latter of which was an entirely fabricated scandal attacking him through the party structure and the former being a point where he actually lost the internal debate. the party simply couldn't come together on anything, and so the official line kept morphing on the issue. this leaves you vulnerable to press spin. it is telling that corbyn's personal numbers went up by quite a bit during the election. unfortunately it was too little too late, and the big issue of the election was also one where labour's core message (government can be used to make society better) wasn't really relevant labour's final stance on brexit wasn't actually complicated at all, that's another fabrication - it was 'get actual deal, put deal to referendum against remain' and in principle was perfectly reasonable, though of course the hardline remainers had completely poisoned the idea of a second referendum by that point. all the dithering was also murder on corbyn's great strength, his credibility - people stopped seeing him as an old stalwart and started seeing just another politician. the lesson for sanders, then, becomes: remain somewhat separate from the party, maintain an openly antagonistic relationship while hollowing it out and getting your own people in. never engage on issues where you don't have room to stake out your own position. he's been remarkably canny about the latter so far, avoiding warren's misogyny attack and not getting bogged down too much in the procedural nonsense in iowa. unless trump can set the agenda with some issue which is hugely divisive for sanders voters (foreign policy seems like a good contender here) sanders is in a strong position. it really cannot be emphasised enough how devastating brexit was for corbynism. a real pity.
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Feb 7, 2020 14:51
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Katt posted:Hard disagree on Labours final Brexit position. The second referendum promise was just smoke and mirrors. Labours position was to cancel Brexit and ignore the original referendum. no it wasn't. corbyn was signalling hard that he was going for a soft brexit-type deal (so norway plus or something) and then putting that up for a second referendum. this is perfectly reasonable and provision for it should've been made in the first referendum. brexit being entirely ephemeral was a big problem - during the first referendum everyone was talking about soft brexit, and then it hardened a lot in the follow-up. labour would've shattered had they gone for a hard brexit, because a huge majority of their young members were against it. second ref being tainted by the insane remoaner maniacs doesn't make it an unreasonable proposition per se
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Feb 7, 2020 15:04
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anyway the point is that barring any comparably divisive issue, i think the corbynite strategy of 'hey government can be used to improve people's lives' is a sound one so long as one can control the conversation somewhat, which sanders is in a good position to do as he doesn't have to answer for the actions of a big and very hostile institution
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Feb 7, 2020 15:09
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Berke Negri posted:lol to put it this way: when labour party people tried to gently caress corbyn, that was credibly spun as corbyn's fault for mismanaging his party. when they try to gently caress sanders, he can point out that he's not even a member of their stupid party. the DNC being incompetent isn't something that can be pinned on sanders because he's still manifestly an outsider to that institution, which corbyn wasn't by the end
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Feb 7, 2020 15:15
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Katt posted:With how close the first referendum was. There is no way that you in good faith can argue that giving the voters a choice between a Labour deal and remain would not 100% end up with remain winning. there was no other reasonable way to intepret the referendum result. like, maybe they could've just campaigned on soft brexit? but they still didn't have a specific deal in place and would've been open to the same criticisms
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Feb 7, 2020 15:22
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Berke Negri posted:this isn't how things are going to play out either way, in terms of party dynamics not being comparable but also if there was the idea sanders could just say well, i wasn't even one of them really! not flying cause thats a fantasy yeah a presidential candidate isn't a party figure like the Leader is - my whole point is that the political structure is different in a way that means sanders loses a lot of corbyn's problems
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Feb 7, 2020 15:25
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Katt posted:They should have campaigned on getting Brexit done their way. Yeah they might still have lost but campaigning on a promise to ignore a referendum is completely unacceptable. Referendums mean nothing if you can just make people vote again until they vote the right way. i still absolutely disagree with this assessment of what they were doing - one might as well go the full farage and say that anything short ofo no-deal isn't real brexit. do note that i have a burning hatred for the EU and what it represents, and i want it gone. tory brexiteers were never going to accept any labour brexit as brexit anyway u brexit ukip it posted:I think Sanders' problems as President may be more along the lines of Dem senators telling him to gently caress off. A good performance in the downballot races will help here to show them which way the wind is blowing and to get with the program but I fully expect this to happen. yeah sanders is going to be stuck with a legislative and judicial branch entirely uninterested in being constructive, but that's a good problem to have because it means he's actually won. i'm taking narrowly about his chance of being elected, which i think are good
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Feb 7, 2020 15:31
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Cowcaster posted:the democrat legislature spiking the ball if bernie gets elected and voting in lockstep with the republicans would hopefully reveal to the soft brained centrists exactly who and what they've been propping up this entire time but they'd probably be enthusiastic about it the democratic party has been a Liberal party for at least several decades, and Liberals in europe usually align with the right (with some exceptions) so yeah i'd expect this to happen. what sanders might do in retaliation is to just torch the party and try to set up his own, but this is all getting very much ahead of ourselves
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Feb 7, 2020 15:35
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cargo cult posted:trump isn't losing with this economy, im not sure why people are so all-in on sander's and his heavily economic message in a year like this there's a lot of economic insecurity in the country, enough that the abstract economic performance has been decoupled from people's lives. sanders' entire strategy revolves around getting these people - the uber drivers, the three-job service workers etc - to turn out in sufficient numbers that he can win. whether this is credible is unclear, but UK 2017 GE demonstrates that the basic message of 'government can do things for you' is no longer inherently a losing one
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Feb 7, 2020 18:54
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this difference in sanders' approach is also going to see a somewhat different voter coalition than traditional democrats - he's aiming to do well in post-industrial places where trump did uncharacteristically well and in places with a lot of poverty. i don't know a lot about iowa but i do know that it's heavily agricultural and that seems to imply a less favourable landscape for sanders since his arguments are not aimed that hard at these voters. for him to win out, people are going to have to place patriotism below their personal concerns, and for that to happen those concerns have to be pretty serious.
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Feb 7, 2020 19:02
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MSDOS KAPITAL posted:Nitpick, but it probably never was a losing one. No one has articulated it for over thirty years. And that's if you grant that Carter, Mondale, and Dukakis did make that case, which maybe they sorta did but it was half-hearted at best. no, but foot and kinnock were making it, as was jospin and all the rest of the european social democrats who got turfed out by emboldened neoliberal conservatives - public sector inefficiency was dogma well into the last decade and still has a lot of purchase among certain types.
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Feb 7, 2020 19:10
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