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[SalmonGod]

Good to know that if anybody associated with the left behaves in an aggressive manner anywhere ever, that it constrains our ability on this unrelated forum to critique how moderate association provides the extreme right structural support to enact violence through state apparatus.

[Reelya]

Good to know that if anybody associated with the left behaves in an aggressive manner anywhere ever, that it constrains our ability on this unrelated forum to critique how moderate association provides the extreme right structural support to enact violence through state apparatus.

If you remember the point was that people were saying there's no reason to try and win over the moderates. How does pushing the moderates away actually help with this problem? Surely, you'd want to have policies that are palatable to the moderates* that can then shift them to your camp, or is that unthinkable?

*And crafting those policies would rely on you *shudder* listening to moderates, what they say, what language they use, then tailoring your message to that. All unthinkable wrongthink, I know. They should be forced to learn and adhere to the latest postmodern jargon or GTFO for being ignorant.

I know this seems radical, but the way to win more people over is to listen to them and work out what they want. And Democrats as a party need to get outside their own echo-chamber (which has its own special jargon) in order for that to ever work.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

-snip0

Is it any wonder why I left?

Only returned for a moment to satisfy a small itch to see the response to the oddities going on in Arizona and other states, and then saw this reaffirm my mindset.  Still, given the degree, I feel the need to leave a few things to chew on.

On the fuckery for Arizona in particular, such strange little things like Maricopa county in the Arizona elections having Sinema leading in it by 50,000...despite the Governor having won said county by 200,000.  Sure, there's always the possibility of a difference of opinion between the two posts, but 250,000 people doing so in a county that previously went 200,000 for McCain during 2016?  Among other things like soon after the election night when there were 99% reporting, her opponent had been in the lead by near a full point for a few days after?  Oh, and don't forget this little nugget in your thoughts.  Edit: Double checked the numbers.  Seems I misread the count.  It's even larger.  Very strange, huh?

Though I decided to pack in a couple more things I had been looking in on.  Such as the complaining just a bit up-thread of Trump asking forces on the border to consider rock throwing a shootable offense.  Oh wait, that policy has been around since before 2013 and has been upheld by court decision.

Finally, may as well put in this last thing of someone going to the migrant caravan and finding out some interesting things about it.  Oh, and also some of them are crossing the border right now.  Remember the assurances they were weeks away?  They seem a bit...off.

[SalmonGod]

Good to know that if anybody associated with the left behaves in an aggressive manner anywhere ever, that it constrains our ability on this unrelated forum to critique how moderate association provides the extreme right structural support to enact violence through state apparatus.

If you remember the point was that people were saying there's no reason to try and win over the moderates. How does pushing the moderates away actually help with this problem? Surely, you'd want to have policies that are palatable to the moderates* that can then shift them to your camp, or is that unthinkable?

*And crafting those policies would rely on you *shudder* listening to moderates, what they say, what language they use, then tailoring your message to that. All unthinkable wrongthink, I know. They should be forced to learn and adhere to the latest postmodern jargon or GTFO for being ignorant.

I know this seems radical, but the way to win more people over is to listen to them and work out what they want. And Democrats as a party need to get outside their own echo-chamber (which has its own special jargon) in order for that to ever work.

My point was that yours is non-sequitur.  Your behavior is the same as what you're accusing us of. 

Moderate alliance with extreme-right in the political sphere does amount to providing structural support to their ability to enact violence through state apparatus, which is the ultimate goal of fascist ideologies.  That is repeatedly the historical consequence of these things, and plainly observable in the present.  To point it out is a fair criticism that isn't necessarily rooted in any hysteria or orthodoxy.

You make the implication that left-leaning participants in this forum don't listen to moderates by drawing an unfair connection between the above and other unrelated cases of other left-associated people behaving shrill in unrelated contexts.  It's loaded rhetoric.

Well you know what?... Reelya's never going to gain sympathy for his side of politics if he goes around calling everyone on the left blind hysterical nazi-accusers.  But maybe it's too radical unthinkable wrongthink to consider that maybe not all left-leaning people are simply obsessed with throwing around the word nazi in wreckless fits of self-righteous false vindication when they talk about the presence of fascism in politics.

[Trekkin]

Though I decided to pack in a couple more things I had been looking in on.  Such as the complaining just a bit up-thread of Trump asking forces on the border to consider rock throwing a shootable offense.  Oh wait, that policy has been around since before 2013 and has been upheld by court decision.

If you read the article, the suit didn't actually uphold the policy per se. It just said that the officer in question wouldn't be subject to a Bivens claim because he's got qualified immunity regarding following the policy, given the extraordinary circumstances. It also notes that the policy has been significantly amended since then to take circumstances into account. If Trump preserved those changes, he didn't tweet about it.

Regarding the election, there's no actual evidence of fraud, variably relevant little nuggets or no. There's evidence that an unusually large number of ballots were cast in an election with unusually high turnout, sure, and there is some procedural variability that should be addressed (and is, via lawsuit) but nothing "very strange." If you wanted to make a credible case that the shifts were themselves suspicious, you could try to find elections in states under similar circumstances and see how different this one's was.

As for the caravan: large groups of people tend to occupy large areas of space, so it's understandable that some people might be at the border while the vast majority(EDIT: 93%, by my math) remain in Mexico at present. I'm not sure what "interesting things" you mean; by all means, state them.

[RedKing]

I'm not sure what "interesting things" you mean; by all means, state them.

Wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more squire!

@ZTG: You're going to have to do better than linking some bullshit YouTube vid by a known conservative shit-stirrer with a history of producing false documentaries (see "Stockholm Syndrome").

In December 2016, Horowitz's 10-minute film Stockholm Syndrome, which explores the "cultural and religious clashes between liberal Swedes and the recent influx of refugee immigrants", was released on FoxNews.com and YouTube.[19][20] Filmed in September 2016 in Sweden[21] it features what Horowitz described as "no-go zones". Horowitz said police told him that "when we're pursuing a suspect, and they cross that threshold, and there's about 30 or 40 of them in Sweden, they will not pursue".[21] The film includes audio footage that he says is of himself being "punched, kicked and choked" by Arabic-speaking men that he was trying to film in Husby, Stockholm.[22][23][24] Horowitz's commentary on the relationship between immigration and crime in Sweden appears to have influenced President Donald Trump's false claims on the same subject.[2]

Many of Horowitz's statements about Sweden in the film and in subsequent interviews were described as false by fact-checkers, news organizations and criminologists as well as Swedish authorities.[2] Two policemen who were featured in Horowitz's film said that Horowitz edited answers and questions to misrepresent them.[25] Two cameramen involved in the project later concurred, after reviewing the raw film, that the footage had been unethically edited to misrepresent the subjects.[26][27] Horowitz denies it, but refused to show the raw material.[28]

[Gentlefish]

Finally, may as well put in this last thing of someone going to the migrant caravan and finding out some interesting things about it.  Oh, and also some of them are crossing the border right now.  Remember the assurances they were weeks away?  They seem a bit...off.

Can you find another source corroborating Fox News's claims of "interesting things"? This is the same "mainstream" news source that's aired racist ads, accused ISIS of training monkeys for warfare, and has help up the recent Acosta snafu as legitimate.

[misko27]

On the fuckery for Arizona in particular, such strange little things like Maricopa county in the Arizona elections having Sinema leading in it by 50,000...despite the Governor having won said county by 200,000.  Sure, there's always the possibility of a difference of opinion between the two posts, but 250,000 people doing so in a county that previously went 200,000 for McCain during 2016?  Among other things like soon after the election night when there were 99% reporting, her opponent had been in the lead by near a full point for a few days after?  Oh, and don't forget this little nugget in your thoughts.  Edit: Double checked the numbers.  Seems I misread the count.  It's even larger.  Very strange, huh?

You seem to imply that strange results are in-and-of-themselves a sign of fraud. If that were true, we might as well say we should abolish democracy entirely, have the entire thing run by machines calculating what it is likely you want based on your demography. Because let us be most clear: you have no evidence. You have, at most, a feeling. A suspicion. A sense things should be otherwise. And instead of trying to explain why the evidence points the way it does, you've simply said the evidence is wrong, because it does not seem to work as you claim it should. Behold the root of all conspiracy: instead of revising the theory to fit the facts, you revise the facts to fit the theory.

[WealthyRadish]

the problem is the ideological purity bullshit that's taken over. For example, the "two genders" vs "gender spectrum" debate. The liberals have made it clear that anyone who believes there are two genders (a pretty standard belief mind you, since the dawn of history) is now "rebranded" as some sort of Nazi-sympathizer. That's the attitude. That's the sort of thing that is driving the rise of alt-right media on youtube and similar. The issue is that when balanced sources are willing to discuss both sides of the issue they get labeled as "alt-right". Even Laci Green is called "alt-right" now, because she debated people outside the "sjw though bubble". I wouldn't even consider the people she was debating with as being that far to the right. Many of them are skeptics about social justice movements, but their politics tends to be pretty left-leaning, e.g. socialists, anarchists, atheists, etc. By calling Philip DeFranco* or The Amazing Atheist "alt-right" you're basically conceding an entire swathe of middle-ground to the "right" as their territory.

I think that this is a key point that this argument hinges on. When I hear conservatives talk about the "extremism" of Democrats, it's usually the gender and LGBT politics that they're referring to, along with the broader tendency to attribute social ills to discrimination and various "-isms". More specifically, I suspect that what makes "moderate conservatives" most repulsed by the Democratic orthodoxy is a perceived tendency that Democrats loudly beat the racism, sexism, and homophobia drums too readily over situations that conservatives don't believe they apply to.

If we imagine the three central dimensions of the Democratic party platform to be social justice, economic equality, and environmentalism, the aggregate party ideology in practice has up to now been essentially right-wing on the latter two and fairly aggressive with respect to the first. I think some here would readily give them the benefit of the doubt that they haven't been able to act with a free hand, but I doubt any of us would readily apply the label of "extreme" to the national Democratic platform in any sense. What I find most damning about this arrangement they've settled on is that the social justice dimension is the least of these aspects that can be directly improved by policy (largely only making progress in the courts and to the extent that society at large can be influenced by the Democrat-affiliated media) which meant that a widespread swathe of reactionaries were created in opposition to hypotheticals and strawmen without there even having been much concrete progress to react against.

For instance, how many times have we had the "I don't want to learn 40 new pronouns" conversation even on this forum full of socialists and anarchists? This is a frivolous concern and hardly worth considering since virtually nobody wants that, but strawmen non-issues like that have come to be one the principal ways that the official orthodoxies attack each other, and it bleeds into discussion everywhere. Conservatives continually get accused of being racist, sexist, and homophobic (for the record, I think this has some merit) but clearly don't agree with that assessment, while simultaneously "liberals" get painted by conservatives as being a bunch of pompous fools chasing flawed premises to ridiculous conclusions (and also for the record, I also don't think this is an unreasonable conclusion from that perspective). Both have at least a kernel of truth, but there's nothing of substance being said or gained.

I should add that maybe it sounds like I'm implying that the Democrats really are "too extreme" on social issues at least regarding strategy, but I'm not sure that's the best conclusion. If Democrats pivoted from social issues to an economic or environmental focus, I'm not convinced they'd fare better. We can already see how successful industrial interests have been in discrediting climate change (the phrase itself even now feels like a political by-word), and while I think there is dormant popular support for some form of socialism that could be awakened, it's clear the Dems are hardly going to be the ones to kick that beehive.

[Kagus]

Some people are Left, some people are Right, but everybody is Wrong.

[Reelya]

Trying to get my head about the hatred of Moderates actually, since this all started when I said that winning the moderate vote is the key to either side winning an election. People got really upset about that, so now I'm a nazi apologist apparently. for saying that you need to win over swinging voters. Go figure. For saying that you need to make your platform attractive to middle America, that's exactly the same as saying that you can't call out Nazi extremists. Huh?

But perhaps I misunderstood. The hate of moderates didn't make a whole lot of sense in an inter-party framework (since those are in fact the people your party as a whole is trying to win over), but it might make sense as an internal struggle within the democrats. Often there's more intense vitriol between people who are similar, since they tend to be fighting over the same thing/party.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/30/democrats-midterms-divisions-progressives-centrists

For nearly two hours, Democrats from the progressive and moderate wings sharply defended competing visions for the future of their party as it clambers back from the political wilderness.

“They have wrecked the party,” said Jeff Weaver, a senior political adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders and his 2016 presidential campaign manager, jabbing a finger in the direction of the moderate panelists. “They have destroyed the coalition that undergirded the Democratic party for decades and we can’t let them have it back.”

He clashed with Jonathan Cowan, president and co-founder of the centrist thinktank Third Way, who said the left’s revolutionary policy aspirations “might look good on a bumper sticker” but are removed from political reality. If Democrats ran on a populist platform in 2020, he warned, Donald Trump would be re-elected.

As tensions flared, the moderator interjected playfully: “I have to keep reminding myself, you guys all belong to the same party.

So ... is this what the frothing vitriol from even mentioning moderates is actually about? Internal power struggle? Some of these people are basically saying exactly what I said, but they're not alt-right provocateurs, they're not even Republicans, they're people in the Democratic party.

[Loud Whispers]

So ... is this what the frothing vitriol from even mentioning moderates is actually about? Internal power struggle? Some of these people are basically saying exactly what I said, but they're not alt-right provocateurs, they're not even Republicans, they're people in the Democratic party.

Granted they're also not wrong. If you look at it from the point of the neocon democrats, the socialist democrats stand a fair chance of turning away enough centrists that the Republicans will get the next election. The socialist democrats stand a fair chance of winning because the neocon democrats are the ones who fucked up the party, and if there's ever a time to convince Americans socialism is tenable, it is with something scarier and orange behind them

[Maximum Spin]

It was a blue wave, by the way.

Just because Nate Silver said it doesn't make it true, and you certainly won't convince the median voter by saying so. Actually, articles like that will probably make voter exhaustion worse.

[Egan_BW]

Just because Nate Silver said it doesn't make it true

that doesnt seem right

[Maximum Spin]

Just because Nate Silver said it doesn't make it true

that doesnt seem right

I know, but replicated scientific studies have proven it!