Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Frumple]

Warren literally flipped parties in response to that sort of economic horseshit, so no, it couldn't be that. Sanders occasionally beats the nativist drum, so I could see him tripping over somethin', but if he has on that front I've missed it.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The problem appears to be that the Democrats are so far right as an organization that voters who want actual progress are left out. The conservatives around here (Texas) are already rightly celebrating Trump's second term.

If Bernie wins the nom he'll be the one to fulfill the Prophecy of Blue Texas, remember this post.

So I'm leaning Sanders myself.

But, I do hear valid (valid-sounding) points about how are we going to actually pay for his massive, sweeping reforms. Is there any hard response to that? What if he ends up with things half-implemented by the end of his term? Obama couldn't get even the most basic healthcare reform to stick. I guess my question is what makes us think he can actually deliver?

How You Gonna Pay For It: Sanders has released a few graphs on payment for each of the big proposals, and some like M4A are cheaper than the current system anyway. However, the true hard response is "the same way we pay for random military bullshit right after cutting the taxes of the people who hoard everyone's money". The US government is a sovereign entity and, glorious Modern Monetary Theory or no, doesn't have any financial limitations in reality. The very idea is a Republican talking point which is forgotten the second it's about something that Republicans want.

How Obama Failed:
* First, as SG described, his failure was intentional. The ruling class owned him body and soul from day one. This is how you go from being a community organizer in Chicago to drone striking schools and weddings by the dozens. The biggest thing that determines a candidate's behavior is the makeup of their base. Sanders' base and donations are from working people. That is what will determine his behavior as President.

* Secondly, that "basic" reform was from the Heritage Foundation. It was never meant to be effective. A comprehensive removal of the insurance agencies is more likely to succeed and endure, not less. Even in Orry hellhole Britian, they're only just now getting around to disposing of the NHS because assaulting it took decades of ratfucking and shifting rhetoric. If enacted, M4A will endure until the collapse of the US or our ascension to gay space communism. I'd bet my life on it. Hell, they couldn't even get rid of some of Obamacare's actually popular policies like pre-existing condition immunity. People don't want stupid tax scheme bullshit, they want to be secure in their health.

* Thirdly, Obama labored under the delusion that all centrists labor under, that they can bring the right and left together. We should all know by now that means destroying the left and giving the right whatever they want, which is exactly what Obama did. There was really no other outcome, see point one, but Obama also pretty clearly didn't even try on things he had total autonomy on like Standing Rock or maintaining Gitmo. Sanders understands that politics is constructed. Sometimes by corporate lobbyists and sometimes by millions marching in the streets. We need the latter, and the same body that gets Sanders elected will endure to make it possible. Even successfully elect another centrist and you will simply signal to the right that they're allowed to go further now, and condemn the old center as communism. This happened due to both Clinton and Obama. Next will be ecofascism for the right, while the Democrats are allowed to run on rebranded Trumpian fortress state racism.

Well, I suppose we have had many more seats won across the board for the Dems. Do you think that might translate to an easier implementation for his policies? Or rather, will it translate to them being actually possible?

I mean it's not like I expect him to promise these things and then 100% implement all of them or it's not worth electing him. Don't get me wrong there.

I do want him to make something happen, though. In a relatively-immediate practical sense.

Any policy that is outside the right is impossible under the current system of US politics. Take just something tepid like M4A which even some capitalist countries have. If Sanders tries to get elected, they'll pull every trick in the book to make sure he doesn't. We are here. When he wins the nom, plenty of ruling class centrists will try to tell Democrats they should vote for Trump instead. When he wins the election handily, every centrist Democrat will side with the Republicans now that they've "returned to sanity" and insist on a NeverBernie policy. When he overcomes the Congress and signs it into law, 40 years of center-left to far-right judges will toss it out as unconstitutional immediately. And if he packs the courts, they'll just impeach him and wheel out the medical dream machine Nancy Pelosi is entombed in and make her hold the chair until the Republicans can elect President Tom Cotton a few years later. President Cotton will then repeal all requirement that hospitals treat anyone who can't pay preemptively.

And don't think you'll get away with trying to get around it with a centrist. You saw what happened with Obama. Health simply isn't for you, peasant. Try opening a rideshare app if you want your children to live so badly.

Now, I'm sure you're wondering why this bleak truth is an argument for Sanders. Well, what I've described is the reality of having a system where the ruling class enacts political operations while the working class remains passive and just votes for people who sound good. That is our system and that is what Sanders and co. intend to shatter. If you want to avoid all of that, there's only one way short of actually overthrowing the government. Scare the shit out of them. And don't think they can't be scared. Occupy Wall Street was about as spontaneous and disorganized as these things come, and it only took a couple of days for the intelligence apparatus to reach "kill all their leaders and tell the news what to say about it" levels of panic. If even just the truly committed Sanders supporters march, that's millions more than any ruling class motherfucker feels safe near. They'll cough up healthcare if the alternative is made sufficiently clear to them. Imagine what happens to a union march when it's personally attended by the President of the United States, explicitly supporting the strikers, and you understand what a Bernie presidency means for the American left.

All the power the ruling class has is an illusion. All of it. Illusions can be deadly, but only by the redirection of something real. This isn't an illusion. This is real. Bernie is real. That's why.

I haven't really been following Sanders all that much. I've found that a bunch of the people in the running for the Dem slot have been presenting lofty goals with absolutely no backing plan. I mean, if the choices next year are the dude who complains about not having due process but then tantrums out of the room when offered it or someone with a lofty goal and no plan, my vote won't be going to the former. But still, plans are nice.

Last I heard about Sanders was the heart attack in October. I don't really see how electing the guy who very well could be the first in a while to die in office would be a good idea.

As described above, clever plans are useless when the entire system is arrayed specifically to prevent what you are doing from being possible. Consider Warren's idea of a M4A "plan". Introduce public option slowly (ever so slowly) over year one and two, don't do anything to the insurance companies (i wonder if they'll think to do anything those two years), then on year three (hey what about that midterm) introduce open Medicare but don't get rid of the insurance companies (how nice of her) so people who want to keep their insurance plan will (folks, we love our insurance, don't we).

This will never fucking happen. Ever. I'd bet all my money on cold fusion being invented in the next four years before I'd bet it on Warren's so-clever plan. Not just for the obvious foolishness of publicizing how she'll lose the insurance companies some but not all of their money, but because of the political realities that I listed and the fact that keeping the insurance companies means they'll just drop a cool ten billion funding every anti-healthcare movement they can find and ridding themselves of whatever Warren does by any means necessary. Oh hey, it's President Tom Cotton again! Hello sir!

Also, that's if she even actually tries to carry out the clever plan. Which given her dinners with insurance companies, doubtful. So then you'll just get a shitty unusable copy of Obamacare for a couple years and still be drafted by President Cotton to invade Mexico and make them free.

Bernie's approach to M4A is one which addresses our reality. Introduce it all on week one and start swinging right out the gate until there's nothing left in the way. We need it, and much more, to survive the coming decades. Everyone powerful would prefer you die quietly for your country like a good American instead. But they are thousands, and we are millions. Which side will you take?

If Biden can make it through a single day without making a gaffe, I would be surprised. (Trump cant seem to go longer than 20 minutes...)

I honestly do not know if I believe Biden will even make it to election day, win or lose the nomination. He's degenerating noticeably with every passing debate and his campaign basically keeps him in a box whenever it's not a critical event.

Personally, I think Warren and Sanders should not be butting heads; They should make a gentleman's agreement that whichever comes out ahead in the primary, the other will be their VP.  The votes would be immense, as it would effectively combine their constituencies, and be totally legal.  The only real difference in their platforms is the degree of intensity they think is appropriate.

Not so. Sanders and Warren occupy completely different class positions, and their bases and the policies those bases would prefer prove it. Sanders' campaign is supported by the general bulk of working people, and desires Medicare For All. Warren's campaign is supported by white suburban professionals who vote D instead of R, and for that reason is obsessive about the idea of "if you like your plan, you can keep it" because they're the only group of people in the entire country who actually have insurance plans you could make yourself think are useful. For that one detail, the lives of millions are thrown away even in a successful Warren plan, waiting whole years of time as to not upset the insurance executives too much.

Such people can be supporters of a people's movement, but they cannot be the center of it as Warren would make them. Not only are they an extreme minority of the country, but their living conditions are too good to truly empathize with the horrid conditions people are living in. I'm not wealthy enough to be one of these people, but I can see them from where I am. Trust me when I say you do not want their answers of what you should be allowed to have put into law. We need better than "I'll buy the homeless person a sandwich, but I'll never give them money. You know how it is."


Anyway, there's my effortpost for the year. B12, I know we haven't been on the best terms recently, but god damnit do the right thing. We're running out of chances to lose. And by we I mean the entire human species and possibly life in general, depending on the composition of this lonely universe.

Win or lose, the struggle will carry on until there's no one left to carry it. Of that, I am certain. But this one is starting to look a lot like the difference between a happy victory and a bittersweet one. Don't let our home burn. It's all we've got.

[Dunamisdeos]

Metal that was one of the best posts I've seen in Ameripol, and you've personally sold me on Sanders over Warren.

[Egan_BW]

Optimism helps.

[wierd]

So, Karlan shredded the GOP today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDgflZKpD8M


Law profs in general roast the shit out of him. (For full context.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNqvtBLVF8M

[SalmonGod]

Ispil - Can you tell me when you think Democracy was in a particularly good state?  While it's been getting worse as long as I've been alive, I can't look back through U.S. history and see any point where it functioned in a healthy manner.

• We went from the founding, when there was slavery and the law was written deliberately to care only about the interests of white male land owners. 
• From there to the Gilded Age, when the rich hired mercenaries to murder labor activists in cooperation with law enforcement and sometimes even military.  Doors to factories were locked from the outside to prevent workers from leaving as they worked 16 hour days for starvation wages, and this was legal.
• Then to WW2 and the Cold War, when propaganda arose as a science, the CIA conducted experiments on its own populace in search of the secret to mind control, and there was a massive witch hunt that imprisoned or even put to death anybody suspected of anti-capitalist beliefs. 
• Then from there to the Reagan/Bush/Clinton era, and the problems you described.

That's a severely condensed summary that really does not do justice to how troubled American supposed democracy has always been.

And even though slavery ended, the 60's civil rights movement happened, and women won their right to vote, minorities and women have still never equal representation.  Racial minorities are still massively systemically disenfranchised, and treaties with Native Americans are still regularly broken and their land invaded with impunity the same is it always has been.  What do you think their opinion is of democracy in the USA?

I believe in Democracy, too, as an ideal.  I lean hard towards direct democracy instead of representative, but everyone's equal participation and value in collective decision making is a wonderful idea.  The difference between you and me is I don't see how we have ever had anything like that.  It's never existed here.  So whatever happens (and I do not share your views regarding the Sanders movement being more harmful to democracy than anything else already happening), we are not losing any democracy in the process, because we never really had it.  We're just fighting to survive the same as we always have.  And if you look at any point in history where the common person achieved greater rights, a higher quality of life, or a step closer towards actual democracy (such as a new demographic gaining the right to vote), it only ever happened when there was a movement that treated that struggle as an actual fight, not a process.

I believe in Sanders, because he demonstrates clearly that he understands this.  He has a genuine history of participation in grassroots activism, and he continues it to this day.  Who was the only politician to be outspoken on Standing Rock in the first few months of conflict, and participated in demonstrations supportive of them?  Sanders.  And at his rallies, he consistently tells the audience that it's about them, not him.  That if he gets the presidency, he's only there to help the movement from that position, and it's the movement that has the real power, not him.  And that's a truth I've never seen any other politician say.

[Folly]

I believe in Democracy, too, as an ideal.  I lean hard towards direct democracy instead of representative, but everyone's equal participation and value in collective decision making is a wonderful idea.

If I may ask, what specifically do you consider 'wonderful' about the idea of Democracy?
Do you honestly believe that the general public are sufficiently educated and informed to make sound decisions about affairs of state, or even knowledgeable enough to choose the most qualified representative who can make such decisions for them? Or is your thinking more along the lines of people not necessarily getting what is best for them, but always getting what they deserve as product of their own willful ignorance?

My personal view of Democracy is that it is far better than many of the systems which were proliferant before, but still far from ideal. I feel that the notion of Democracy being the ultimate and perfect form of government is preventing us from exploring other options which may ultimately serve the people better than what we have now.

[SalmonGod]

I believe in Democracy, too, as an ideal.  I lean hard towards direct democracy instead of representative, but everyone's equal participation and value in collective decision making is a wonderful idea.

If I may ask, what specifically do you consider 'wonderful' about the idea of Democracy?
Do you honestly believe that the general public are sufficiently educated and informed to make sound decisions about affairs of state, or even knowledgeable enough to choose the most qualified representative who can make such decisions for them? Or is your thinking more along the lines of people not necessarily getting what is best for them, but always getting what they deserve as product of their own willful ignorance?

My personal view of Democracy is that it is far better than many of the systems which were proliferant before, but still far from ideal. I feel that the notion of Democracy being the ultimate and perfect form of government is preventing us from exploring other options which may ultimately serve the people better than what we have now.

Ethics

That whether they're right or wrong, an external force violently imposing what they believe to be best for a people is wrong if those people don't agree.  That's in the best case scenario of that external force genuinely having that people's interests in mind, which is completely unrealistic.

I don't care so much whether it's the ultimate in terms of outcomes.  I care about the ethical problems with society being imposed by occupying force.  I am anti-authoritarian first and foremost.

[Folly]

Ethics
That whether they're right or wrong, an external force violently imposing what they believe to be best for a people is wrong if those people don't agree.

So if a child wants to play with a gun, but a parent takes it away and decrees that the child is not allowed to play with guns, in your view that is unethical?

[SalmonGod]

Ethics
That whether they're right or wrong, an external force violently imposing what they believe to be best for a people is wrong if those people don't agree.

So if a child wants to play with a gun, but a parent takes it away and decrees that the child is not allowed to play with guns, in your view that is unethical?

Is that seriously meant to be a question in good faith?

I'm talking in terms of communities.  Not that nobody ever has the right to impose on anyone ever.  Not that individual people should only care about themselves and do whatever they want, and no one has the right to ask otherwise.

Reality is messy.  Ideals and values are not goals in and of themselves.  They're directions to move in, while navigating the mess.  Give me any political ideology.  Any.  It can be stretched to absurdity, and discarded in exactly the same fashion if one wants.  It's not a useful way to judge these things.  If everything were approached that way, every idea would be worthless and the universe a pointless mush of inescapable stupidity, where no such thing as a worthwhile idea or value exists at all.  Absolutism is always bad, because that's what it turns into.

The relationship between a parent and their child is vastly different from the relationship between the rich and the poor, or the state and its people, or a dominant culture and a minority.  If you want a rule of thumb, decisions should only involve people who are stakeholders in the outcome of those decisions, and the amount of influence someone has in the decision-making process should be relative to how directly and severely they are effected by it.  Yes, you can take this idea off into the realm of extreme absurdity too, if you wish.  It's a rule of thumb.

[Folly]

Reality is messy.  Ideals and values are not goals in and of themselves.  They're directions to move in, while navigating the mess.  Give me any political ideology.  Any.  It can be stretched to absurdity, and discarded in exactly the same fashion if one wants.  It's not a useful way to judge these things.  If everything were approached that way, every idea would be worthless and the universe a pointless mush of inescapable stupidity, where no such thing as a worthwhile idea or value exists at all.  Absolutism is always bad, because that's what it turns into.

That whether they're right or wrong, an external force violently imposing what they believe to be best for a people is wrong if those people don't agree...I care about the ethical problems with society being imposed by occupying force.  I am anti-authoritarian first and foremost.

You were the one who began speaking in absolute and extremist terms. I glad to hear that you recognize reality is far more nuanced than all that.


I do believe that parallels exist between the parent-child example and state-community. There are many situations where the lives and livelihood of people are directly affected in ways that most people do not fully comprehend, and one of the primary purposes of government is to become informed on the intricate details of these situations and make decisions in the best interest of the people, regardless of whether or not the uninformed masses agree with those decisions. There are also situations which come down to ethical judgements, and for lack of a better resolution method, the majority consensus of the masses tends to be the most fair method of resolution in these cases.

The main problem I perceive with current forms of democracy is that we simply trust the same elected officials to make both types of decisions. And while elections generally do a good job with the latter case, they are extremely unreliable with the former.

[SalmonGod]

You were the one who began speaking in absolute and extremist terms. I glad to hear that you recognize reality is far more nuanced than all that.

I stated a principle of value.  How that principle is pursued is nuanced.  The principle itself is not.

I do believe that parallels exist between the parent-child example and state-community. There are many situations where the lives and livelihood of people are directly affected in ways that most people do not fully comprehend, and one of the primary purposes of government is to become informed on the intricate details of these situations and make decisions in the best interest of the people, regardless of whether or not the uninformed masses agree with those decisions.

Agreed.  But this is where the media, education, and the processes by which experts are appointed and managed is paramount.  Those are points of values and incentives.  Anyone can and should be able to engage in that stuff to some extent.  One of the reasons I'm anti-capitalist is because of the poisoning of incentive and the unjustifiably unequalizing effect it has on those institutions and processes, trending towards authoritarianism.  Imposing on communities for reasons that have no systemic relation to the interests of those communities.

There are also situations which come down to ethical judgements, and for lack of a better resolution method, the majority consensus of the masses tends to be the most fair method of resolution in these cases.

In other words, democracy.  But my caveat would be that these situations are typically amplified by people who are not stakeholders in those decisions demanding influence anyway.  Failure to respect the ideal that one person's rights end where another's begins, which necessarily involves staying uninvolved when other people's rights are in question, but not your own.

The main problem I perceive with current forms of democracy is that we simply trust the same elected officials to make both types of decisions. And while elections generally do a good job with the latter case, they are extremely unreliable with the former.

I think it's poisoning by capitalism, and that there's too much vast blanket approach to what institutions have jurisdiction over.

[dragdeler]

-

[nenjin]

Reality is messy.

This is exactly what Obama has said, in response to criticisms of his presidency.

[dragdeler]

-