Fair enough. I wonder why the child separation policy seems to have provoked the “Abolish ICE” movement at all then.
Given the alternatives currently on offer, it’s unlikely that anybody who genuinely espouses a significant number of liberal principles is going to be “walking away” from the liberal/Democratic establishment any time soon. Non-liberals were never advocates for the Democratic party or liberal principles in the first place.
As for your three examples, Harris, who describes himself as a “liberal”, supported Clinton in the 2016 election; Rubin has always been a bog-standard shallow libertarian with a sprinkling of SJW positions on social issues such as gay rights; Rogan is another libertarian whose primary “liberal issue” is cannabis legalization.
:dubious: Well, you see, Democrats and liberals in general support this concept we call “freedom of speech”. Sometimes we use that freedom of speech to criticize people who otherwise agree with us.
I realize this may seem like a bizarre notion to Republicans/conservatives too timid to break ideological ranks on any issue more substantive than the question of which of them can get his tongue farthest up Donald Trump’s ass, but it works for us.
Of course, if some fragile snowflake pseudo-liberal does decide that he thinks other Democrats are being too mean to him and he needs to take his marbles and go home, well, we earnestly hope that the door doesn’t hit him on his way out. #FlounceAway
I’m pretty sure it means not giving a wet shit what other countries’ political spectrums look like.
Nigerians don’t factor in the opinions of the Japanese when voting, the Poles don’t ask themselves how they compare to Chile, and nobody in the US gives a rat’s ass what you want to claim the “International Standards” are.
He does that on a daily basis.
In the first place, I don’t see why you’re trying to equate this oddly specific political attitude with the (alleged) phenomenon of “abandoning liberalism”. Whatever so-called “abandoning liberalism” is supposed to mean, I’m pretty sure it isn’t merely “not giving a wet shit what other countries’ political spectrums look like”.
In the second place, your other assertion is flat-out wrong: voters in one country do frequently care what voters in other countries think about issues similar to the ones confronting them. Even your cherry-picking of particularly distant and disparate pairs of countries, which have a lot less in common with each other than the US does with “international” politics overall, doesn’t fully support your erroneous claim.
For one thing, given that Nigerians constitute an unusually large immigrant population in Japan and are affected by a lot of racial tensions and criminal associations there, it does matter to Nigerian voters to some extent what Japanese voters think. For another, Poland and Chile actually have significant bilateral cooperation, with collaborative policies on technology, worker exchange programs, and foreign investment, all based in large part on asking themselves how their countries compare to each other.
I saw Colbert’s piece on this and, frankly, I don’t really understand the purpose of the campaign. Democrats will think that it’s stupid. Reasonable Republicans will think that it’s stupid. The crazy/idiot Republicans might see it and think, “Oh good! I guess I don’t need to come out to vote this election, since the Democrats are leaving their party.”
All it does is to help keep the hard right from coming out to vote which, by anyone’s measure, is a good thing. The only people who wouldn’t want that are Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, because Trump relies on those people and Putin wants to handicap the US government by filling it with crazies and idiots.
So…meh. I put it under the heading of, “Oh no! Don’t throw me in that there b’rer patch!”
I can think of an at least conceivable reason for it. They’ve already figured out how to rig the November election and they want something they can point to as the reason for Democratic losses. I’m not saying that that’s happening, but it could explain this fake movement.
I think it’s akin to the staged recantations of dissidents in the Soviet Union. It’s reassuring to consumers of ideological propaganda to see people publicly rejecting and disavowing positions that might challenge the propaganda.
The conservative establishment wants the crazy/idiot Republicans politically engaged enough to vote but not so politically engaged that they risk actually encountering or believing any views that contradict the Party’s message. Better to keep pounding them with the message that the opposition is crumbling in disarray, even if it does result in a few of them becoming complacent.
If they’ve stayed strong through 18 months of Trump, I don’t think there’s really any need to doubt that they’re in for the long haul, no matter how many turds they need to smoke. You may as well advertise fish to dolphins.
As such, I’ll stick with the argument that whoever is running the add is stupid and all they’re going to get from it is the complacency.
Because ICE does run the facilities used to hold most detainees, including those detained at the border. That includes the child separation facilities that provoked much of the recent outrage.
You don’t think that had more to do with Hillary was Hillary and not Obama who got record turnout with blacks?
You may want to rethink the quoted sentence, it is bordering on silly.
I don’t think it’s entirely to do with Hillary not being Obama. Democratic presidential candidates always get ~90% of the African-American vote.
But African-American turnout was historically high for Obama.
Why are the astroturfers doing this, as has been asked? Maybe just to buck up the morale of the culture warriors, who must be having trouble reconciling what Trump has actually said and done with the qualities they attribute to him. They have to be at least a little worried about the family separations and the tariff-driven job losses they see, and may be wondering if the evil Libruls might actually be right about a few things despite being baby-killers and gun-grabbers. Some reassurance that they’re actually in the right, that the Bad People are realizing it, and that they’re actually winning could go a long way.
If a fake “grassroots” movement is actually driven by Russian bots, does that make it cosmoturf?
That is absolutely what such a phenomenon ought to be called. Well played.
Odd that white people, especially men, simultaneously argue:
- That the Democratic party is the party of minorities, and…
- Minorities are fleeing the Democratic party in droves
I like it. Cosmoturf!
ETA: Russian for robot is . Can we do something with that?
That should have said that the Russian word is .
Um, davidm, thanks for trying, but…
(Or can everybody else actually see your cyrillic?)
According to Google Translate, it’s робот. Which, if I’m not mistaken, just transliterates straight back to “robot”.