You think being a staffer means jack shit?
Years ago? Again, you think it’s relevant?
This is the problem, you don’t understand what actually matters. And then gripe that others aren’t focusing on the same irrelevancy.
I think this is evolving into a single-poster pitting, so if one of you would be so kind as to create such a thread, it might be helpful for any future one-off screw up to get chewed out here.
Please and thank you.
To be fair, rarely does a poster show up in this thread and so thoroughly demonstrate why they got called out in this thread. But can we QED that shit and move on?
Fair enough.
It means approximately 25% more than tagging along with your buddy when he gets a dinner invite.
She worked for The Hill until she was fired in 2024. I know counting is hard, but you only have to count to 1.
No, the problem is that I disagree with you when you say “don’t look behind the curtain, nothing to see there” and you get really fucking butthurt about it.
Who’s She? She this she that. Say her name.
This wasn’t you?
Fair enough, I see how you can interpret it that way. I did also expand on my thoughts more in a post I took more than 5 seconds to write and where I didn’t mirror someone’s phrasing for effect:
Okay, that clears things up a bit - but doesn’t that also suggest that tarring Trump by association with people like Fuentes would be good strategy? If Kamala lost by not sufficiently repudiating “defund the police”, why not hit Trump for not sufficiently repudiating “your body, my choice?”
Harris’ press statement wasn’t performatively racist?
AFAICT Harris always gave very nuanced answers when asked if she supported defunding the police, clearly stating that she didn’t favor abolishing police entirely but suggesting that some reallocation of funds from militarized police forces to social services might produce better results. She didn’t attack or “repudiate” either people calling for police reform or people concerned about crime, she acknowledged that they both had legitimate concerns.
Do you think she should have taken the position that racism in policing isn’t a problem in America, and everyone who is shot by police had it coming? Or what?
More to the point, since you raised the comparison, do you think “defund the police” and “black people should kill white people” are equivalently offensive statements, and it’s appropriate that they should be repudiated in equally strong terms?
It could suggest that. You can put a check in the “pros” column.
How many checks do you want to put in the “cons” column for the fact that we have been hammering the Trump and Fuentes had dinner once drum for literal year, to no effect?
There are many reasons why the strategy might not be as effective against Republicans. Maybe it’s because Trump isn’t afraid to say “I’ve never liked the guy, I barely know the guy, I don’t agree with him on anything” before rambling on to something else. Maybe it’s a different reason. But I don’t think you can deny that it hasn’t worked.
Kamala lost for a lot of reasons, probably the largest of which is inflation.
I mean, you can, but given the relative magnitude of the two phrases combined with the fact that Fuentes himself was publically against Trump by the time he said it, I doubt you’ll get much traction:
Well, I don’t know why we’re speaking in hypotheticals. As the article that iiandyiiii linked shows, that’s precisely what has happened. This was linked to Trump, but it didn’t really stick.
No wonder we’re fucked.
What the fuck are you talking about?
That part is pretty good!
This part is the problem. You can acknowledge legitimate concerns (like Clinton did) while pointing out that abolishing law enforcement is batshit crazy, and that while our law enforcement agencies are in serious need of deep reform, they also perform crucial and necessary services for society.
Definitely “or what”, of those two options.
No, of course not.
Well, i assumed you were using hyperbole, because i never saw an ad for any Democrat that said those things.
WRT performative racism, here’s from the Wikipedia article you linked:
Prior to his appearance, Clinton’s campaign staff had conducted an intense debate about how far he should go in distancing himself from Jesse Jackson, who was unpopular with moderate voters. When Souljah was invited to speak at the conference, Clinton’s advisors saw their chance. In an essay for The New York Review of Books, Joan Didion, who covered Clinton’s campaign, wrote, “a number of reporters had apparently been told in advance by Clinton aides that Governor Clinton would use his Rainbow speech to demonstrate his ‘independence’ from Jesse Jackson, and the very quotable intemperance of Sister Souljah provided the most logical possible focus for such a demonstration.” Later in the essay, Didion argued that the Sister Souljah incident had been favorably viewed by the media as “a Clinton call for ‘an end to division’ that had at once served to distance him from Jackson and to demonstrate that he was ‘the guy in charge,’ capable of dominating, or ‘standing up to,’ a kind of black anger that many white voters prefer to see as the basis for this country’s racial division.”[7]
It was a calculated attempt to distance himself from Jesse Jackson, who as the article notes was “unpopular with moderate voters”. If you want to argue that there were non-racist reasons for Jackson’s unpopularity among “moderates”, go ahead, but don’t expect me to take you seriously.
Also, I referred to “people advocating police reform”, a large portion of the electorate and particularly of the Democratic base. You talked about people proposing to literally abolish the police, an extremist fringe position. The attempt to equate the two is right-wing propaganda, and I don’t see how Harris would have benefited from buying into that.
I suppose she could have found some obscure rapper calling for police abolition and made a major speech denouncing him. But when you go down that road, you run the risk of spending your whole campaign rebutting Trump’s lies about you, and he can lie a lot faster than you can explain the truth. I think there’s a lot to be said for just saying “that’s a lie” and moving on.
Sorry, everyone.
< Babale then spends the rest of the post angrily insisting they’re right >
Dunno if it’s a “motivator” but it’s definitely a huge part of their agenda.
And you angrily insisting that they don’t doesn’t magically make it so, you dumb motherfucker.
But let’s check the cites you’ve provided to support your position ohhh…
Apart from none of that being remotely true. Plenty of examples upthread of you relying on GOP rhetoric rather than things actually happening.
But keep angrily asserting!
“I’m not carrying their water, I’m just repeating their rhetoric and pretending they’re saying it in good faith.” Good talk.
Whats going to defeat us are the assertions that things can’t get that bad and that they will be stopped by the courts or the Constitution or Steiner’s Panzer units. Because we’ve already seen that isn’t true.
Do you think platforming a speaker at the RNC whose views they well know is a “secret”?
Yeah, there’s a reason you’re seeing the top of my head right now.
Uh-huh. Republicans spent over $200m on anti-trans ads and are passing more and more punitive laws against trans people. Most trans people I know do see an attempted genocide happening. But we get it. You’re fine with that.
And Republicans don’t want everyone to be Christian. They just want Christians to rule over everything, Constitution be damned.
And saying that it’s ridiculous to say “Republicans want to gas migrants!” when legal migrants are getting grabbed off the street and shipped to a prison camp in El Salvador in inhumane conditions and with no due process is exactly the sort of deflection from reality that is counterproductive. Really, the only valid argument is that the GOP don’t want to pay for the gas.
A big problem for Kamala was that Biden campaigned and was elected as a moderate, but then governed further to the left, and she was expected to continue that trend. And the influence of ideologically committed staffers on a president verging on dementia is a plausible reason for that.
A strong leader could have convinced voters that they would stick to their guns and avoid being influenced by leftist campaign groups and staffers, but Kamala was not seen as a strong leader. Given the circumstances of her nomination, she was seen as a continuation of the unpopular Biden government.
Another issue is shown by this chart that Matt Yglesias likes posting:
It’s not that voters saw Kamala as super far left, it’s that the average voter sees themselves as being right of centre. There’s a lot of jokes about wanting to select a new electorate, but in reality, this is the one politicians need to appeal to.
Someone made a comment on this a few days ago that I thought had a lot of truth to it: these people aren’t conservative. They don’t go to church. They don’t listen to advice from older people. They don’t like their society and want to preserve it - they are radicals who want a revolution. Like minorities on the left, they blame all their problems on society holding them back and favouring other people. They are people who should have been left-wingers, but as straight cis Christian white males, they see no place for them on the modern left.
That is something that can and should change.
It did change. They wanted a fascist party, so they converted the republicans into a fascist party.
What they don’t ever want to be is part of a progressive future-oriented inclusive party.
But how could you possibly know that?
I mean other than actually listening to what they’re more than happy to tell you.
Why do you think delusional straight cis Christian white males should be left wingers? They live in a country that was specifically built for them. A country that favored them by law, then when those laws were changed, by customary practice.
The fact that they blame their problems on everyone else doesn’t make them like minorities, because minorities were actually prevented from succeeding by laws and racism, and these white guys aren’t.
Because it would be better than them being Nazi-curious? Or do you think they were born bad?