2017 Democratic Thread

[Reddy]

The VA Gov campaign underscores how bernie should be the candidate in 2020 despite age. He's the only democrat-aligned politician capable of effectively playing offense.

 

Because he's also authentic when he's being an ass?

[bmags]

Yes.

[GoSox05]

Which is fine, allowed, and deserved.

 

Wait, she deserved it?

[StrangeSox]

The VA Gov campaign underscores how bernie should be the candidate in 2020 despite age. He's the only democrat-aligned politician capable of effectively playing offense.

 

You mean tacking to the right and saying "ban sanctuary cities!" because your Republican opponent has gone Full Trump on the racism is bad?!

[Reddy]

Wait, she deserved it?

After 30 years of paying her dues to, and building the party? Yes.

[StrangeSox]

It's Her Turn (again, in 2020)

[StrangeSox]

Everyone should be angry that they turned over so much control to Clinton's campaign team because Clinton's campaign team was extremely bad.

[Balta1701]

Everyone should be angry that they turned over so much control to Clinton's campaign team because Clinton's campaign team was extremely bad.

And at DWS for allowing that to happen, and at Obama for allowing DWS to be head of the DNC.

[bmags]

You mean tacking to the right and saying "ban sanctuary cities!" because your Republican opponent has gone Full Trump on the racism is bad?!

 

Yes! Allowing sanctuary cities to be used against you when ... there are no sanctuary cities in Virginia and it's unclear that the opponent even knows what sanctuary cities are.

[bmags]

And at DWS for allowing that to happen, and at Obama for allowing DWS to be head of the DNC.

 

Also Obama strangling DNC for OFA. He should have combined them.

[StrangeSox]

Yes! Allowing sanctuary cities to be used against you when ... there are no sanctuary cities in Virginia and it's unclear that the opponent even knows what sanctuary cities are.

 

"Sanctuary Cities" means MS-13 brown people. It's just the same Willie Horton s*** Republicans have been pulling for decades. They're doing it because it works really, really well with an unfortunately large portion of the country.

[Reddy]

Everyone should be angry that they turned over so much control to Clinton's campaign team because Clinton's campaign team was extremely bad.

I actually agree with all of this.

[Reddy]

Also Obama strangling DNC for OFA. He should have combined them.

And this. Obama deserves a ton of blame for where we are right now.

[StrangeSox]

This article touches on the deeply rooted problem that's been exacerbated by social media

 

America is facing an epistemic crisis

What if Mueller proves his case and it doesn’t matter?

 

Over at the Gothamist, Jake Offenhartz has an astounding and richly symbolic story about the latest bit of “fake news” burped up by the alt-right.

 

At Columbia University on Monday, alt-right self-promoter Mike Cernovich gave a speech to College Republicans. Other students showed up to protest. And then some alt-right members in attendance, posing as protesters, unfurled this banner:

 

The banner has a NAMBLA (North American Man/Boy Love Association) logo on it, making it look like the protesters are defending pedophilia. Ha ha.

 

Cernovich grabbed the image off Twitter, stripped it of context, and sent it bouncing around the right-o-sphere. When Offenhartz reported the copyright violation, Twitter removed the photo from Cernovich’s account. That led the alt-right to cry censorship, which led to more publicity for the photo, which led, in the end, to thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of conservatives believing that students of Columbia University were openly marching in favor of pedophilia.

 

Basically, the alt-right tricked itself into believing even more stupid, wrong things. Burn, I guess?

 

Crazy conservative fairy tales have become numbingly common

The sheer absurdity of the tale is familiar these days, reminiscent of “Pizzagate,” the bonkers story about Democrats running a child prostitution ring out of a DC pizza joint. Even after it went viral on Reddit and some jacked-up angry white guy showed up at Comet Pizza with a gun, it still had the scent of parody. It is quite simply impossible for most people to imagine believing all the things that would be required to also believe that DC Democrats are into organized child trafficking.

 

It is similarly difficult for most people to imagine believing that Hillary Clinton has had multiple people killed, that Obama is a secret Muslim who wasn’t born in the US, that Trump had millions of votes stolen, that Barack Obama wiretapped Trump’s White House, that Seth Rich (the mid-level Democratic staffer who was tragically murdered) was assassinated for stealing DNC emails and giving them to WikiLeaks, or that Antifa, the fringe anti-fascist movement, will begin going door-to-door, killing white people, starting on November 4.

 

And yet millions of Americans fervently believe these things. Different polls find different things, and it’s always difficult to distinguish what people really believe from what they say on surveys. But if 30 percent of America’s 200 million registered voters are Republicans, and 40 percent of those don’t believe Obama was born in the US, well, that’s 24 million people, among them the most active participants in Republican politics.

 

The US is experiencing a deep epistemic breach, a split not just in what we value or want, but in who we trust, how we come to know things, and what we believe we know — what we believe exists, is true, has happened and is happening.

 

The primary source of this breach, to make a long story short, is the US conservative movement’s rejection of the mainstream institutions devoted to gathering and disseminating knowledge (journalism, science, the academy) — the ones society has appointed as referees in matters of factual dispute.

 

In their place, the right has created its own parallel set of institutions, most notably its own media ecosystem.

 

But the right’s institutions are not of the same kind as the ones they seek to displace. Mainstream scientists and journalists see themselves as beholden to values and standards that transcend party or faction. They try to separate truth from tribal interests and have developed various guild rules and procedures to help do that. They see themselves as neutral arbiters, even if they do not always uphold that ideal in practice.

 

The pretense for the conservative revolution was that mainstream institutions had failed in their role as neutral arbiters — that they had been taken over by the left, become agents of the left in referee’s clothing, as it were.

 

But the right did not want better neutral arbiters. The institutions it built scarcely made any pretense of transcending faction; they are of and for the right. There is nominal separation of conservative media from conservative politicians, think tanks, and lobbyists, but in practice, they are all part of the conservative movement. They are prosecuting its interests; that is the ur-goal.

 

Indeed, the far right rejects the very idea of neutral, binding arbiters; there is only Us and Them, only a zero-sum contest for resources. That mindset leads to what I call “tribal epistemology” — the systematic conflation of what is true with what is good for the tribe.

 

There’s always been a conspiratorial and xenophobic fringe on the right, but it was (fitfully) held in place by gatekeepers through the early decades of America’s post-war prosperity. The explosion of right-wing media in the 1990s and 2000s swept those gatekeepers away, giving the loudest voice, the most exposure, and the most power to the most extreme elements on the right. The right-wing media ecosystem became a bubble from which fewer and fewer inhabitants ever ventured.

 

As the massive post-election study of online media from Harvard (which got far too little attention) showed, media is not symmetrical any more than broader polarization is. “Prominent media on the left are well distributed across the center, center-left, and left,” the researchers found. “On the right, prominent media are highly partisan.”

 

In short, they conclude, “conservative media is more partisan and more insular than the left.”

 

That insular partisan far-right media is also full of nonsense like Pizzagate that leaves the base continuously pumped up — outraged, infuriated, terrified, and misled. At this point, as the stories above show, the conservative base will believe anything. And they are pissed about all of it.

 

As Brian Beutler wrote in a scathing piece recently, the mainstream media has never learned to deal with the right-wing bubble — it has not learned how not to take bad-faith lies seriously. And now we will all reap the consequences.

 

The incentives facing GOP politicians are not good

For Mueller’s findings to have any effect, they will have to break some part of the basic dynamic on the right. Here’s how it works:

 

Pundits and yellers in right-wing media compete to freak out the base and reinforce its allegiance to Donald Trump. The base leans on politicians. And most elected GOP officials are in seats safe enough that they fear a primary challenge from the base more than a Democratic challenger. The only way to stave off a primary is to pay obeisance.

 

That’s why Jeff Flake and Bob Corker are leaving the Senate. They no longer have any control over what their constituents believe or want, and their constituents believe and want increasingly ugly things. Sen. John McCain is saying all the right things now, but back when he faced his own Tea Party challenger, he sprinted right as fast as he could.

 

GOP politicians cannot (or feel that they cannot) cross the base. And the base is currently being lied to about the Mueller investigation at a furious pace. The entire right-wing machine has kicked into high gear, led by the president himself, furiously throwing out chaff about Comey, Mueller, Obama, Hillary, the dossier, the uranium, the emails, and whatever else.

 

This reaction to Mueller in right-wing media was predictable enough. Similar things have happened so many times before, and been studied, analyzed, and documented. But to this day, no one knows how to stop or counter it. Mainstream institutions seem as unable as ever to resist its warping effects. It’s all playing out like some morbid script that we can only watch, stupefied

 

Say he pardons everyone. People will argue on cable TV about whether he should have. One side will say up, the other will say down. Trump may have done this, but what about when Obama did that? What about Hillary’s emails? Whatabout this, whatabout that, whatabout whatabout whatabout?

 

There is no longer any settling such arguments. The only way to settle any argument is for both sides to be committed, at least to some degree, to shared standards of evidence and accuracy, and to place a measure of shared trust in institutions meant to vouchsafe evidence and accuracy. Without that basic agreement, without common arbiters, there can be no end to dispute.

 

If one side rejects the epistemic authority of society’s core institutions and practices, there’s just nothing left to be done. Truth cannot speak for itself, like the voice of God from above. It can only speak through human institutions and practices.

 

The subject of climate change offers a crystalline example here. If climate science does its thing, checks and rechecks its work, and then the Republican Party simply refuses to accept it ... what then?

 

That’s what US elites are truly afraid to confront: What if facts and persuasion just don’t matter anymore?

 

As long as conservatives can do something — steal an election, gerrymander crazy districts to maximize GOP advantage, use the filibuster as a routine tool of opposition, launch congressional investigations as political attacks, hold the debt ceiling hostage, repress voting among minorities, withhold a confirmation vote on a Supreme Court nominee, defend a known fraud and sexual predator who has likely colluded with a foreign government to gain the presidency — they will do it, knowing they’ll be backed by a relentlessly on-message media apparatus.

 

And if that’s true, if the very preconditions of science and journalism as commonly understood have been eroded, then all that’s left is a raw contest of power.

 

Donald Trump has the power to hold on to the presidency, as long as elected Republicans, cowed by the conservative base, support him. That is true almost regardless of what he’s done or what’s proven by Mueller. As long as he has that power, he will exercise it. That’s what recent history seems to show.

 

Democrats do not currently have the numbers to stop him. They can’t do it without some help from Republicans. And Republicans seem incapable, not only of acting on what Mueller knows, but of even coming to know it.

 

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe US institutions have more life in them than I think. But at this point, it’s just very difficult to imagine anything that could bridge the epistemic gulf between America’s tribes. We are split in two, living in different worlds, with different stories and facts shaping our lives. We no longer learn or know things together, as a country, so we can no longer act together, as a country.

 

So we may just have to live with a president indicted for collusion with a foreign power.

Edited November 2, 2017 by StrangeSox

[Quin]

The VA Gov campaign underscores how bernie should be the candidate in 2020 despite age. He's the only democrat-aligned politician capable of effectively playing offense.

 

Biden, Franken, Harris.

[Dick Allen]

DNC related: http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/35832...ire-over-job-ad

 

DNC Job ad: "I personally would prefer that you not forward to cisgender straight white males, since they're already in the majority,"

Low level unpaid volunteer. Coffee boy wrote the ad.

[StrangeSox]

It was a joke about the attempted Papadopolous deflection from the Trump camp.

[StrangeSox]

The Ricketts family decided to shut down DNAinfo and Gothamist because their editorial staff unionized last week.

[Reddy]

It is a woman with the title of "Data Services Manger"

And she should be fired, since discrimination in hiring is illegal.

 

Both parties are just kicking so much ass lately...

[Quin]

The Ricketts family decided to shut down DNAinfo and Gothamist because their editorial staff unionized last week.

 

Boycott Cubs games!

 

But yeah, dirtbag move by dirtbag family.

[StrangeSox]

DNAinfo was always such a weird name to me because it screams "fake bulls***" but it was actually a decent site, especially for localized news.

[bmags]

I loved DNAinfo, they were always first with the weirdest s*** like restaurants burning down and when weird building evacuations would happen.

[StrangeSox]

Supposedly, DNAinfo never really did turn a profit for Ricketts. So even if the closure decision was anti-union spite, it may be that local news just isn't profitable enough. I'm not sure how you fix that problem as a society because it's still a valuable thing and not everything should be covered on a more national scale.

[bmags]

Supposedly, DNAinfo never really did turn a profit for Ricketts. So even if the closure decision was anti-union spite, it may be that local news just isn't profitable enough. I'm not sure how you fix that problem as a society because it's still a valuable thing and not everything should be covered on a more national scale.

 

Yeah, I'd have more sympathy for that had he not purchased it in May. And also, just find another buyer then.

[StrangeSox]

He bought the -ist sites in May but I thought he actually founded DNAinfo?

 

Either way yeah buying up all these sites and then shuttering them a few months later "coincidentally" right after they unionize is so blatant. I'm sure the NLRB will be all over this!