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fool of sound posted:Hey, the general election thread will be going up soonish, but in the meantime, the rules on talking about the general are in abeyance. Electorialism is also going to be inevitable. However, focus your arguments on candidates, not posters. Do not accuse posters of being Trump lovers in disguise for voting Green or whatever. Do not accuse posters of wanting minorities to be slaughtered because of their choice of candidate. Do not accuse posters of being pro-rape or anti-science or whatever else. Criticize candidates and campaigns. Post "Biden is a senile creep who supports X policies that harm the poor", post "The Greens pander to idiot anti-vaxxers, here's the proof", post "I think that in the long run it is better to vote Dem/not vote Dem and this is why", ect. Put arguments on trial, not posters. The Iowa caucuses are on February 3rd! That's next loving Monday! This primary we've been obsessively following for months and months is finally getting started! New thread! Thread-specific rules, some of which are probably redundant now that the main D&D rules have been updated, but I don't feel like going through them right now:
--- The 2020 Democratic Primaries are an utter clowncar poo poo show. A number of candidates are running, and most of them are jokes. Most have dropped out: SKULL.GIF posted:We've come such a long way... quote:Summary of the candidates Somebody fucked around with this message at 23:54 on Apr 14, 2020 |
# ¿ Jan 31, 2020 05:08 |
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# ¿ May 22, 2024 13:56 |
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Bushido Brown posted:Can you correct Warren's bit? She's not Harvard-educated. (Just was a Harvard Prof.) I tweaked it! Vox Nihili posted:The crazy thing is that she's actually a pretty intelligent person. She's been getting poisonous advice for months now. I think Warren just isn't good at being a public figure. I think she fears the media, and therefore makes an active effort to jump headfirst into centrist talking points and media narratives without stopping to consider that they could look bad to the voters. For someone who makes a big deal about having detailed plans, the details of her plans often seem like nothing more than a route to a cheap slogan she thinks the media will like. For example, her public option plan actively rewarding companies that currently provide lovely healthcare pay less, because she wanted to be able to say that not a single company would pay more for the public option than they currently do for private healthcare.
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# ¿ Feb 1, 2020 00:13 |
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Bloomberg didn't just buy himself some decent poll numbers - he also slipped the DNC several hundred thousand bucks. I wonder if that has anything to do with why they're willing to change the rules for him after telling a bunch of upstart outsiders to get hosed. https://mobile.twitter.com/ryangrim/status/1223337638691856385
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# ¿ Feb 1, 2020 00:25 |
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Wicked Them Beats posted:I just read the politico article and it sounds like the DNC people pushing this are actually looking for a rules reversion in 2024 and think a Bernie nomination would be enough to get the DNC to restore the superdelegates to full power. It looks to me like it's talking about two separate groups with different positions. There's a small group who want the rule change right now, and then there's a larger group who want the rule change but realize that doing it now would be an incredibly dumb idea so they want to push it off for the next cycle. I wouldn't read too much into the contents of the story itself. There was plenty of opposition to reducing superdelegates' power in the first place, so it shouldn't be at all surprising that some superdelegates still want to return to the old rules they supported. The real question is why the political media is suddenly choosing now of all times to run stories on it.
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# ¿ Feb 1, 2020 01:32 |
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MSDOS KAPITAL posted:Y'all are reading this like it's just Sanders saying "Vietnam was a really bad war" and maybe that's all people are going to take from it. Like I really loving hope so, anyway. But that's not what he said: he was calling out our actions there and the actions of our soldiers, and woo boy is that another kettle of fish. Saying America was morally wrong? Bad. Comparing America to Nazi Germany? Uh pretty loving bad, actually. Comparing US soldiers to loving Hitler? I mean I don't disagree, to be absolutely clear - look at Gallagher. But it's pretty loving bad. I think one of the single most important lessons of 2016 was that many of the political taboos that have been around so long weren't actually things the voters gave a poo poo about. The media gave a poo poo about them, and the political class gave a poo poo about them, but for the most part voters barely cared even when the media and the political class were putting those violations on full blast. Trump violated decorum with poo poo like calling for the imprisonment of his political opponents. Sanders weathered the "socialism" smears without a problem. Trump openly smeared poo poo on the troops, veterans, and "war heroes" repeatedly. "Raising taxes" appears not to be the politically-deadly phrase it was long thought to be. Russia was incredibly unpopular among the GOP, but when Trump embraced Putin, it didn't drag his popularity down - it dragged Russia's popularity up. All sorts of "politically radioactive" stuff was thrown around in the last couple of cycles, and the only one that actually had any noticeable impact on an election was Roy Moore's pedophilia scandal - and even then, he still came pretty close to winning. Yes, the media and the talking heads are virtually unanimous in insisting that America can do no wrong. But after seeing the media's track record in 2016, I'm not necessarily worried right away when a candidate crosses the media's bounds of acceptable discourse, since there's no telling whether they're actually in tune with what the voters think.
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# ¿ Feb 1, 2020 19:07 |
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Bushido Brown posted:Again, do you work/volunteer for the Buttigieg campaign? Serious question. Let's not do this.
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# ¿ Feb 2, 2020 04:16 |
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Bushido Brown posted:Not do what, exactly? Accuse people of being paid shills because they hold a particular opinion.
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# ¿ Feb 2, 2020 04:23 |
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Bushido Brown posted:Good thing that's not what I am doing, then. Look at their post history. There's a fair amount of cryptic description that went on, and this is the third or fourth time I've asked the same question. The repeated silence in response has been deafening. There's lots of things that are up for debate in Debate & Discussion, but this isn't one of them. Stop trying to insinuate that other posters are paid shills, period. You aren't going to get anywhere trying to negotiate that with me.
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# ¿ Feb 2, 2020 04:28 |
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Harrow posted:Completely hypothetical question: would there ever be a reason for a campaign to want to spike a poll that shows them unrealistically ahead? Let's say Pete's internal polling is fairly consistent and a poll shows up that's a clear outlier with him way ahead. His campaign knows he'd vastly underperform that poll which would look bad. Would they want to bury that poll or would the good press in the moment be worth the risk? At this point, absolutely not. The good press in the moment would be incredibly valuable right now, because polling well helps convince voters that the candidate is viable, which will have a positive impact on the actual voting. It's the same reason Iowa and NH are make-or-break moments - performing well helps convince voters that a candidate is capable of performing well, which increases their confidence that the candidate is worth picking.
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# ¿ Feb 2, 2020 05:31 |
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Ms Adequate posted:If I were Yang I would tell my supporters "Back Bernie - he's by far the closest to what I want to do" and go angling for either a Cabinet position with Bern, or perhaps something like heading up a Special Commission to investigate and maybe trial run a UBI proposal. I don't think Yang really has all that much in common with Sanders. He's much closer to Warren, in that he's a pro-capitalism centrist who happens to lean left of the establishment on one or two pet issues, and is trying to take advantage of that to hijack the Bernie wave for himself.
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# ¿ Feb 3, 2020 06:34 |
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Mandrel posted:here in Alabama that’s most people I know in my personal life including family I think extremely online leftists aren't the only people who've lost faith in electoralism after decades of bipartisan billionaire domination. The particular way in which it manifests differs from group to group and from place to place, but I think there's a surprising number of people out there who feel that their vote won't matter no matter what they do, and have buried that under a layer of rationalization to distance themselves from that uncomfortable feeling. And of course, there's plenty of entities out there willing to encourage that thinking in order to suppress or manipulate voters. For example, the New Democrats worked hard to convince Dem lefties that the conservatives will win no matter what, so it's better for the Dems to adopt conservatism themselves so that they can exercise some influence over minor policy details.
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# ¿ Feb 3, 2020 17:53 |
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Please send your energy to Bernie in the form of campaign donations and volunteering offers, not emptyquoted gifs (at least not in this thread, anyway).
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# ¿ Feb 3, 2020 18:13 |
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On the off-chance that there's any Iowa goons heading for the caucuses later, please make sure to double-check your caucus location before you go! https://twitter.com/iowademocrats/status/1224385208411136002 https://twitter.com/iowademocrats/status/1224407154104336384 Main Paineframe fucked around with this message at 20:08 on Feb 3, 2020 |
# ¿ Feb 3, 2020 20:05 |
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Herewaard posted:disinfo@iowademocrats.org is the worst official email address ever conceived Only the best from the DNC's elite troll fighters. https://twitter.com/RaniaKhalek/status/1224382500082012160
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# ¿ Feb 3, 2020 20:19 |
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Some real presidential material here. I particularly like the part where he stops to talk to the reporters and the person guiding him starts pulling on his arm to get him to keep moving.
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# ¿ Feb 3, 2020 21:45 |
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This is utterly beautiful.
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# ¿ Feb 4, 2020 00:59 |
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mutata posted:I would like that. It would be nice. I'm gonna have to put this thread down for a while though. I can't really handle the ups and downs with only 2% reporting or whatever. empty whippet box posted:I'm at work and cannot read all posts can someone please give me a general update quick so I can look at it when I have a moment? thank you. nothing of consequence is going to happen for a while yet probably, if you're feeling pressured then just go to sleep and see how it turned out in the morning
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# ¿ Feb 4, 2020 04:01 |
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This guy finally finished his story. https://mobile.twitter.com/shawnsebastian/status/1224542984655572993 https://mobile.twitter.com/shawnsebastian/status/1224549120779653120
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# ¿ Feb 4, 2020 05:37 |
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Nonsense posted:Iowa as First In The Nation is very threatened after tonight. They will probably have to give up the caucus to stay first. They can't be first if they drop the caucus because NH insists on having the first regular primary. PepsiOverCoke posted:I have the app on my phone literally right now. You have to send in photo confirmation of what you put on the app. For some reason, people weren't coming into this with a huge amount of trust in Dem party leadership or the integrity of the election infrastructure, and a fuckup of this magnitude has exceeded all expectations in that regard.
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# ¿ Feb 4, 2020 07:20 |
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mr whistler posted:I actually like Bernie but goddamn why does everything that is even possibly slightly negatively bad for him a massive illuminati conspiracy on here. Conspiracy theories spring up when an entity has utterly destroyed people's trust in it, usually for good reason. Once people have seen enough ratfucky coverups whose evidence was suppressed, they start to find "well we don't have any actual evidence for this theory" to be a lot less meaningful. Honestly, it doesn't really matter if the paper trail clears up the Iowa results in the end, because in the grand scheme of things, Iowa is responsible for a tiny amount of delegates. The significance of Iowa is the media impact of the first race in the nation clearly demonstrating which candidates can draw meaningful amounts of support and which ones can't, causing people to abandon the losers and flock to the winners. That's why Pete went ahead and declared victory - even if it's later shown to be wrong, he'll still have spent the post-Iowa media cycle perceived as a winner, and that's a much more valuable prize than the actual Iowa delegates themselves are.
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# ¿ Feb 4, 2020 16:03 |
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Also, I'm gonna say two things from the mod perspective:
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# ¿ Feb 4, 2020 16:10 |
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PepsiOverCoke posted:What does it mean to TV/IV in a thread? It's the kind of low-content posting you see when people are liveposting and live-reacting about currently ongoing events; mostly people just posting their raw thoughts rather than trying to have a discussion.
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# ¿ Feb 4, 2020 16:28 |
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Democrazy posted:Insofar as the idea that the Iowa caucuses have been rigged, this is not an idea which has actually been supported by Sanders himself. If Sanders has evidence and has dispatched lawyers to air complaints with the Dem party, then there's no reason for him to air the claims now. It's valuable negotiating leverage, and he can still publicly complain later if the Dems fail to offer a sufficient solution. Pakled posted:They did have a backup plan involving calling the results in over phone but that failed too and I haven't heard what exactly the issue was on that one. I'm guessing that they underinvested in the infrastructure and staffing for that option, since they expected that most results would go through the app and only a few precincts would need to use the backup option.
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# ¿ Feb 4, 2020 18:11 |
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Concerned Citizen posted:https://twitter.com/tylerpager/status/1224744245942202369 What the gently caress does "the majority of results" mean? How are they still not going to have complete results by 4pm, and why the gently caress are they going to bother with incomplete results? We already have incomplete results from the candidates themselves!
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# ¿ Feb 4, 2020 18:23 |
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I'm sure releasing partial results to a desperate media before adjourning for the night, leaving reporters with only that info for the entire day, will do plenty to restore campaigns' trust in the system.
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# ¿ Feb 4, 2020 18:43 |
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It's just a rumor, but if it's good enough for CNN it's good enough for me! https://mobile.twitter.com/studentactivism/status/1224748446743175168 https://mobile.twitter.com/studentactivism/status/1224751110889639936 (It's probably false tho)
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# ¿ Feb 4, 2020 18:49 |
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DarkHorse posted:Or maybe those districts were just quicker and easier to count. Sure, but they're not trickling out results one-by-one as they finish counting each precinct. They dumped this all at once, and are refusing to provide a timeline for when the rest will come out, as well as refusing to provide an explanation for the delays and the partial release. For some reason, they made a conscious choice to stop and release at this point, and there's no telling how long these will be the only numbers we have. And for some reason there's not a whole lot of trust or benefit of the doubt going around!
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# ¿ Feb 4, 2020 23:53 |
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MOD DECREE Let's not talk about who you'll vote for in the general if your favored candidate doesn't win. That just leads to the discussion turning into a clusterfuck, which is why it has been banned by the thread rules for a very long time. I don't particularly care to go digging back through the posts and find who contributed most to starting that talk, but I'm ending that subject here.
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# ¿ Feb 5, 2020 19:10 |
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I don't think it really matters who anyone in this thread caucused for, unless you're planning to hurl a bunch of insults if the answer was "not Bernie". They can say it if they want to, but if you just can't read their posts without knowing their candidate preference, then you should probably just put them on ignore rather than endlessly hounding them to demand an answer over and over again.
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# ¿ Feb 5, 2020 19:57 |
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Kraftwerk posted:I’ve been demoralized by Iowa. I thought we had it in the bag. NH favors Sanders way more than Pete does, and has way less room for party fuckery and centrist collusion. Bernie has a very comfortable lead in NH, Pete has like zero chance in SC, and if I recall right, Bernie was polling pretty well in NV as well. Iowa was Pete's best shot, as well as the early state most likely to be hostile to Bernie. Biden eating poo poo in Iowa is extremely good news for Bernie, because Biden failing to show he's electable among white people will shake up his black support and very much put the south back in play. And I don't think anyone is better positioned to benefit from that than Sanders is.
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# ¿ Feb 5, 2020 20:20 |
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sexpig by night posted:https://twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/1225168116994445312 You'd think that after seeing how the situation thus far was being taken, they would have made their fake results at least a little more plausible.
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# ¿ Feb 5, 2020 22:39 |
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Debate time! Go here, I'll reopen this thread a bit after the debate https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3913846
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# ¿ Feb 8, 2020 02:01 |
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debate's over Pete
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# ¿ Feb 8, 2020 04:45 |
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Slo-Tek posted:So, mandatory service is pretty much a tax, right? So the idea is 'lets tax children and poors, but more...like _way more_"? It's not even thought through to the point of considering the economic aspects. The thing is that most of the people who go on about "national service" are people who were privileged enough to climb the meritocracy and get into top schools, but not privileged enough to just skip the admissions process altogether with a million-dollar donation. Mix that with even the slightest bit of ambition, and it usually leads to a particular mindset in which they lose the ability to tell the difference between "what will look good on your Ivy League application or political resume" and "what develops and improves you as a person". They spent so much of their lives learning how to turn that couple hundred hours of extracurricular community service into a Harvard admission essay, they seem to manage to actually forget it how much of it was fake bullshit they dropped the second it was no longer needed for their ambitions. On top of that, while their "service" may ultimately amount to spending a few months slumming it with the poors in order to impress the meritocracy with their personal development, it's still often the only time in their entire lives that they've interacted with people outside their upper-class bubble without the aid of a secretary or assistant to manage the encounters for them. As a result, it often does become a bit of a formative experience for them, because it's the first time they've ever met anyone who doesn't think like them. It often doesn't have enough of an impact to really change their thinking in a meaningful way, but they come out of it with a "wow, the world really is deep and diverse" impression that perfectly slots into the liberal elite fake-wokeness they're destined to inherit. That's why Buttigieg isn't the only candidate pushing a national service idea, either. Yang is big on it as well, to the point of saying that new high school graduates would only become eligible for his UBI after finishing a national service session. I think the Hickenlooper campaign was big on national service, too. I wouldn't be surprised if there were others I'm forgetting, too. That particular flavor of elite liberal centrism is practically obsessed with the virtues of "service".
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# ¿ Feb 8, 2020 20:11 |
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Chef Boyardeez Nuts posted:I actually like national service as an inoculation against the bigotry that comes from being sheltered. I was a weirdo racist at 18 because I grew up in Bumfuck, Hickistan. It wasn't real and didn't survive through week 1 of basic training, but I was still developing. Another couple of years and that toxic poo poo would have metastasized like it did in friends I left behind. I think the disconnect here is that the bigotry isn't merely a result of being "sheltered" - it's the result of a complex class and race hierarchy built to divide the workers of America by intentionally segregating groups from each other throughout our entire lives. Taking people out of their segregated neighborhoods and segregated schools for a few weeks of poorly-paid labor before they're sent off to their segregated colleges and then to their segregated workplaces is a relatively weak excuse for a solution. It doesn't actually seem to be effective, either, given that Pete did plenty of "national service" but clearly hasn't been cured of bigotry himself. What the national service narrative actually does is simply blame bigotry on individual people while completely ignoring the massive structural factors that are built in - which perfectly suits the purposes of elite liberals like Pete, who imagine themselves to be woke even as they blame police shootings of black teens on "gangsters".
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# ¿ Feb 8, 2020 20:36 |
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Doctor posted:I honestly just can not comprehend how anyone could look at the walking talking political platitude spewing Pete Buttigieg, a man who looks like he was grown in a vat to inhabit that corporate suit, and think yeah this seems good and cool and exciting. Seriously is it just because he’s gay? There's plenty of vat people out there who appreciate the representation...and want him to set a precedent so that they or their children can follow that exact same path to political prominence themselves. There's establishment figures who've already had multiple internships with legislators before even graduating high school. They're not even old enough to drink yet, and it's already clear that they're not only aiming for political prominence, but spending all their free time on structuring their life around pursuing that power. When people like that look at openly ambitious politicians who are willing to do anything for the sake of personal advancement, they don't see rats or snakes, they see role models. That aside, there's also a whole bunch of low-info voters who've been deceived by the media coverage, since the media loves Pete and Warren. The hardcore Pete fanboys may be almost as unwinnable as the KHive, but they're a minority compared to the soft supporters who don't really know anything about him but heard on CNN that he's the next Obama. SimonCat posted:You really don't know what you're talking about. Having a cigar in the middle of Bagram Air Base at night isn't going to draw sniper fire. On the other hand, convoys are shot at and blown up on a regular basis in Afghanistan. During the time Pete spent in Afghanistan, the number of US fatalities per month was in the single digits for the entire year, except for one month in which the number of fatalities spiked up to a whopping 13. There were about 30-40 US fatalities during Pete's seven months in Afghanistan (I don't feel like looking up the exact dates he arrived and left), and there were about 32,000 US troops in Afghanistan around the midpoint of his stay there. That's a fatality rate of about 1 per 10,000, or 10 per 100,000. By comparison, ordinary car crashes in the US kill over 35,000 and injure over 2 million. Put that against the entire US population to get per capita numbers, and car crashes end up with a fatality rate of 11 per 100,000. Now, you could just compare those numbers blindly to come out with the impression that the streets of Afghanistan weren't any more dangerous than the highways of America. But that doesn't tell the full story, because this isn't a 1:1 comparison. After all, the Afghanistan number wasn't just road fatalities, it was all fatalities. So American road vehicles alone cause more fatalities per capita thanall causes of troop death in Afghanistan in 2014 put together. That doesn't necessarily mean that Afghanistan was always that safe, of course. But Buttigieg didn't just choose the safest possible job to deploy into, he also chose the cushiest time. The US withdrawal from Afghanistan was well under way, with troop counts dropping sharply. Most routine military activities had already been handed over to the local military, and Obama was openly hinting at a final US withdrawal (aside from the permanent colonial presence) by the end of 2014. In fact, Obama officially declared an end to the US combat mission there in Dec 2014, just three months after Buttigieg left. Of course, that "end" of the US war in Afghanistan didn't last long. But when Pete first boarded that plane to Kabul, he had good reason to think that the final US withdrawal was imminent, and that US soldiers would not be nearly as active there as they had been in previous years.
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# ¿ Feb 10, 2020 17:14 |
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The post-Iowa Buttigieg appearances appear to be Extremely Normal. https://mobile.twitter.com/EmmaVigeland/status/1226897760043053063 https://mobile.twitter.com/EmmaVigeland/status/1226898530142425089 https://mobile.twitter.com/EmmaVigeland/status/1226899169132019712 https://mobile.twitter.com/DJJudd/status/1226910706223767555 https://mobile.twitter.com/ninaturner/status/1226816358580674560 That's the smell of fear, I think. Pete's scared, and Bernie is the one he's scared of.
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# ¿ Feb 10, 2020 17:59 |
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Preggo My Eggo! posted:This discussion about establishment grifters makes me curious -- is the government (plus democratic establishment) more bloated with bureaucracy now than it will be after Sanders takes office? Meaning that the socialist candidate will ironically have the impact of reducing the size of government? The actual career bureaucracy probably isn't too bloated, because everything except the DoD has been subject to heavy budget cuts and severe staffing constraints for quite a number of years now. As for the political appointees, there's no shortage of do-nothing embassy positions to send them to. The Dem establishment is pretty much pure grift, though. team overhead smash posted:So what's the basis for this Bernie dark money stuff? I assume there's some basis for it even if it's actually cool and being distorted, but googling just gets me a bunch of stuff attacking Bernie over it. Some of the unions backing him have PACs. Also, Bernie's narrative is too popular to fight back against, so the only option Pete really has is to cast Sanders as inauthentic and hypocritical, regardless of whether it's true.
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# ¿ Feb 10, 2020 18:44 |
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goethe.cx posted:idk pete genuinely seems like a really smart and talented guy. he just uses those abilities for evil Yeah, but Pete's campaign claims he's "proficient in" eight languages, which is very over the top, especially considering that he's never had any real opportunity to use those languages in day-to-day life or a professional capacity. https://mobile.twitter.com/Vinncent/status/1226881463754350597 How fluent is he actually? We don't know. He claims he learned Norwegian solely so that he could read Norwegian novels, but he's probably not really fluent in the spoken stuff. And more often than not, neither are the people he's talking to. After all, his multilingual abilities are largely just a method of social and class signaling, rather than a direct appeal to Americans. https://mobile.twitter.com/Rozb7aleeb/status/1224827208209969153 How useful is it as a marker of personal or presidential ability? It's interesting that despite being a supposed Norwegian speaker who's positioning himself as the great rural Midwest-knower, he's never once mentioned the fact that most Americans who speak Norwegian live in the Midwest (which is where most Norwegian immigrants tended to end up). There's still tens of thousands of people who still use Norwegian as their primary language in Wisconsin, North Dakota, and Minnesota, so you'd think presidential candidate Pete would talk about them instead of his nerdy "learned Norwegian so he could read Norwegian books" tale. I'm guessing he has no idea whatsoever. But his ignorance doesn't just extend to the relatively obscure Norwegian-American community. Even though Pete himself claims to know Spanish, he apparently couldn't be bothered to lend his linguistic skills to producing campaign materials for the second most widely spoken language in the US. https://mobile.twitter.com/nidhiprakash/status/1223034609832808448
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# ¿ Feb 11, 2020 00:11 |
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# ¿ May 22, 2024 13:56 |
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LookingGodIntheEye posted:When you think about it, it's kind of surprising that DnD doesn't have a book recommendation megathread, or a book club. There's no reason D&D can't have one if someone's willing to run it.
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# ¿ Feb 11, 2020 07:32 |