2020 Democratic Primary

[Arilynn]

The strongest argument for Trump against Biden is that Biden is a bloodthirsty chicken hawk, who loves war, while he himself dodged the draft because he had asthma, while being a high school football star. At the same time, Trump is trying to pull out of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, while negotiating with North Korea more seriously than presidents in the past have even attempted. Trump is taking a lot of flak for this. I think he's just calling a spade a spade and admitting defeat in wars where we have no victory condition. If the Taliban were easier to negotiate with, I think we would have been starting to get out of Afghanistan last week.

Biden, on the other hand... he voted for the war in Iraq, even though recently publicized documents show that he and everybody else in congress knew the reasoning behind that vote was bullshit. Biden also refuses to call the assassination of Soleimani an assassination, which signals to me he would do the same thing Trump did. Biden calls himself a zionist, calls BDS anti-semitic, and supports brutal IDF incursions in Gaza, and record setting aid packages to Israel. Biden personally tried to intervene to stop Ecuador from granting Snowden asylum.

The list goes on, but you get the picture. Trump might rattle his sabre, but he actually acts in the best interests of peace advocates. Biden does not.

The picture I get is one in which you have a very slanted view of Biden v. Trump.

Israel
Biden has repeatedly stated he supports a two-state solution. He opposes Jewish settlements and criticized Netanyah’s policies regard settlements and outposts as working against a two-state solution and dangerous: “the steady and systematic expansion of settlements, the legalization of outposts, land seizures – they are moving us and, more importantly, they are moving Israel in the wrong direction...They are moving toward a one state reality, and that reality is dangerous.” He calls the BDS movement “wrong”.

Trump’s “peace” plan upends the long-standing US insistence that the two sides must negotiate with each other, advancing their own ideas, with the US being only a broker to such talks and refusing to takes one side’s historical claims over another. Instead, Trump’s plan gives precedence to “the State of Israel’s valid legal and historical claims” to the “ancestral homeland of the Jewish people,” while ignoring Palestinian legal and historical claims to the contested territories. Indeed, Palestinian leaders and experts were not consulted. It paved the way for Israel’s annexation of most of the West Bank as well as, in Netanyah’s words, “all the settlements in Judaea and Samaria. Trump calls the BDS movement antisemitic.

Trump finalized a plan to give Israel $38 billion over the next 10 years, which more than any other president and more than the agreed upon memo of understanding, even though Israel initially said it would reject anything more than the MOU terms. In contrast, Trump has cut aid to Palestinians, including funding for a hospital network that provides care Palestinians can’t get elsewhere such as neonatal intensive care and dialysis for children.

....


Being a stubborn optimistic, I had more, which addressed each of your points to me. Unfortunately, it disappeared, and I can’t get it back. It probably doesn’t matter, however, as you seem as immune to facts as Trump.

 

[bubblesort]

I truly don't understand how you can label me a Trump voter when I have never voted for Trump in my life? I've never even voted Republican. You call me "privileged" which is a laugh and a half on the whole story of my life. Have you ever read " The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson? Are those who are not willing to blindly follow the community... privileged? Put away your label machine. All of this categorization is not bringing you to some universal truth.

Bringing up Trump around people like this seems to illicit some kind of psychotic break. I think it's because they know, deep down, that the chances are, Trump will win this election, and they can't do anything about it, because they can't actually hold a civil political conversation with people who disagree with them. They don't actually debate Trump's policies, and they don't actually compare him to other candidates. They turn on their favorite 24 hour news channel, and that channel tells them how to feel about the news, and they fall in line, and they feel the way the talking head on the TV tells them to feel. They don't seem to mind that this situation isolates them, because it makes it so they can only discuss politics within the fandom of their favorite TV channel. I do actually understand where they are coming from. Not everybody has the time or energy or curiosity to stay as informed about current events and basic civics as you and me.

To be clear, I'm not talking about everybody here, just a vocal minority who seem to like to hurl insults and talk about who is allied with who, and who they trust and don't trust. You know, people who just want to hurt your feelings on internet forums. Those people are just jerks.

I don't put people on ignore, but I'm at a point where I think I generally won't respond to those people, unless they start being civil or something. I don't think they will be, but you know... always give people a chance.

 

[Jolene Benoir]

Trolling the forum. Not a surprise from someone who was banned for trolling the forum once before. Trump and his policies have been discussed here ad nauseum. Only someone completely oblivious or trolling would make such a statement.

The rest is just pure trash, as well.

 

[Shiloh Lyric]

I'm loving the display of privilege in this thread. Please...keep it up, young privileged white males, tell me more about our Trump Derangement.

 

[bubblesort]

The picture I get is one in which you have a very slanted view of Biden v. Trump.

Israel
Biden has repeatedly stated he supports a two-state solution. He opposes Jewish settlements and criticized Netanyah’s policies regard settlements and outposts as working against a two-state solution and dangerous: “the steady and systematic expansion of settlements, the legalization of outposts, land seizures – they are moving us and, more importantly, they are moving Israel in the wrong direction...They are moving toward a one state reality, and that reality is dangerous.” He calls the BDS movement “wrong”.

Trump’s “peace” plan upends the long-standing US insistence that the two sides must negotiate with each other, advancing their own ideas, with the US being only a broker to such talks and refusing to takes one side’s historical claims over another. Instead, Trump’s plan gives precedence to “the State of Israel’s valid legal and historical claims” to the “ancestral homeland of the Jewish people,” while ignoring Palestinian legal and historical claims to the contested territories. Indeed, Palestinian leaders and experts were not consulted. It paved the way for Israel’s annexation of most of the West Bank as well as, in Netanyah’s words, “all the settlements in Judaea and Samaria. Trump calls the BDS movement antisemitic.

Trump finalized a plan to give Israel $38 billion over the next 10 years, which more than any other president and more than the agreed upon memo of understanding, even though Israel initially said it would reject anything more than the MOU terms. In contrast, Trump has cut aid to Palestinians, including funding for a hospital network that provides care Palestinians can’t get elsewhere such as neonatal intensive care and dialysis for children.

....


Being a stubborn optimistic, I had more, which addressed each of your points to me. Unfortunately, it disappeared, and I can’t get it back. It probably doesn’t matter, however, as you seem as immune to facts as Trump.

Thank you for the thoughtful response!

You are right, that Biden seems to be taking a slightly harder line towards Israel in the current election cycle, and that's nice, but I just don't believe him. This is the same guy who defended Israel's attack on the Gaza flotilla back in 2010.

The $38 billion is a more complex story. Obama negotiated to give Netenyahu $38 billion back in 2016, before he left office, while Biden was VP. Trump signed that aid package into law in 2018. So it's a bipartisan fuck off to the Palestinians, and anybody who cares about human rights. The fact that they both had input in that deal tells you something about them. They generally want the same things.

On one hand, I see Trump helping Netenyahu and his hard liners, and that's terrible. On the other, I see Biden saying he won't, but I know he probably will... so I kinda see the subject of Israel as a wash between the two.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Why are you people cringing? I asked the question because there are issues with the efficacy of retraining, and the data shows that we training people is not as easy especially when it comes to older crowds. Yes, we should be trying to retrain people, but there is a number of issues around retraining when it comes to older people. Can we just face the facts?

I completely agree -- when a mine closes, or at least when that was happening here in the UK, it has a devastating effect on the whole community, and there's no one single solution, not retraining, not offering tax breaks and incentives to companies to set up there, not offering grants to set up your own business, not offering people help with relocation...

Each town or village is a different case, and requires a battery of different forms of help, tailored to the particular community's needs, though I think it also has to include a serious look at how large a community is sustainable there, now the pit has closed.

The only reason, after all, there is a town or village of any size there in the first place is that there was a coal mine, and they needed miners. When the pit has closed, the reason for needing that many people living in the area goes with it, and to my mind it's irresponsible to try to pretend all those jobs can be replaced, at least not with anything at all comparable in either necessary skills or in payment.

So yes, I completely agree that retraining isn't a panacea, and neither is anything else.

All I'm saying is that retraining has to be part of the solution, though obviously it can't be the whole solution.

Personally, I wish national politicians would stay out this kind of thing -- it needs people who know the area and understand its needs, so primarily the local community and local government at various levels, with assistance from national agencies (but not politicians with simple, one size fits all, solutions, whatever their party).

 

[Brenda Archer]

Bringing up Trump around people like this seems to illicit some kind of psychotic break. I think it's because they know, deep down, that the chances are, Trump will win this election, and they can't do anything about it, because they can't actually hold a civil political conversation with people who disagree with them. They don't actually debate Trump's policies, and they don't actually compare him to other candidates. They turn on their favorite 24 hour news channel, and that channel tells them how to feel about the news, and they fall in line, and they feel the way the talking head on the TV tells them to feel. They don't seem to mind that this situation isolates them, because it makes it so they can only discuss politics within the fandom of their favorite TV channel. I do actually understand where they are coming from. Not everybody has the time or energy or curiosity to stay as informed about current events and basic civics as you and me.

To be clear, I'm not talking about everybody here, just a vocal minority who seem to like to hurl insults and talk about who is allied with who, and who they trust and don't trust. You know, people who just want to hurt your feelings on internet forums. Those people are just jerks.

I don't put people on ignore, but I'm at a point where I think I generally won't respond to those people, unless they start being civil or something. I don't think they will be, but you know... always give people a chance.

Psychotic, emotional wimmin!

It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with a judiciary getting packed with Christofascist extremism.

If you’re so rational and superior, why are you in bed with Dominionist evangelicals?

You’re a Trump voter who wants to deny it. If you can’t understand why Christofascism is simply unacceptable, you are not now and will never be a genuine Sanders voter.

 

[Cristalle]

Arsonists becoming the firefighters... Yeah, prepare for 4 more years of Trump, or Ivanka in 2024.

 

[Salome]

Trolling the forum. Not a surprise from someone who was banned for trolling the forum once before.

We saw this same behavior during GG. The whacko element would come in and plop down links to nutter websites and ranting hour long videos about conspiracy nonsense and half-truths. If we blew them off, we were sheep who couldn’t handle the truth. If we watched and meticulously addressed every single point and highlighted the falsehoods and/or nuanced realities, we were attacked or ignored and all new hour long videos of all the same lies and half-truths were posted. Because conspiracy nutters don’t give a fuck about reality or nuance. They’re all in. That’s why they treat conspiracy grifters and one dude with a blog like legit sources while going on about how you can’t trust anyone else outside that circle. Except, of course, for the articles that lend any credibility to their nutter ideas.

And because one or two of the “regulars” were off their rockers on the subject, it brought out the trolls to dance in the fuckery and encouraged bothsidesism in others who generally knew better, even when it became painfully clear that GG was largely a movement finger fucking around with toxic white nationalism and misogyny.

Any adult knows that every politician who has been in office more than a week is going to evolve and change position over time. In this case both candidates have deeply shitty issues in their past. They’re career politicians and they’re 80. But this is a primary and a primary is about choosing someone to lead a PARTY. You can whine about how you think people shouldn’t be loyal to a party all you like, but it’s the dumbest take to have during a fucking primary. And it’s unfathomably stupid to expect people to vote without consideration for what is best for the party they support — the only party that advances change for them at both the local and national level — the only party with any real chance at leadership that gives even a fraction of a shit about the serious issues facing the world right now.

Sanders believed his own hype, surrounded himself with trolls and sycophants, and made shitty political choices. So he’s losing the primary he doesn’t belong in in the first place. Again.

Because voters are rejecting him. Again.

And rather than address the very real mistakes and miscalculations he’s made, he and his campaign are engaging in disgusting and divisive rhetoric to poison the well. Again.

You can post lengthy conspiracy nonsense about how people are sheep or shouldn’t be loyal to a party they belong to, yadda yadda, but if you cannot look at the very real and very simple reasons he got his ass handed to him and recognize his responsibility for it, it‘s not other people who are denying reality.

And, on the off chance Sanders turns it all around, in addition to the multiple responsibilities I think he’s utterly unprepared for, he’s going to have to live with the aftermath of having made it painfully clear he abandoned outreach to POC voters and deliberately chose a strategy to undercut their voting power so he could soak up the white vote.

 

[Clara D.]

I HAZ A PSYCHOTIC LURVE FOR TEH TRUMPZ!

Yes. We know.

 

[Brian]

So why is it that the major figureheads and loudest speakers for DSA, The Intercept, et al. are always discovered to be well above the poorer classes from which their messaging unmistakably insinuates they belong?

Her defense is that her father owns only franchises, yet she is to inherit at least 3M.
The Kamala is a cop narrative was nefarious enough before knowing this about its origins.



Trust fund elite.
Every. fucking. time.

 

[Salome]

Trust fund elite.
Every. fucking. time.

I have said it before. I’ll say it again. Women and POC have been putting in decades of hard work and laying networks of roots within the Democratic Party. It’s not a coincidence that just as that hard work has begun to yield fruitful, diverse candidates that suddenly a segment of the left has developed an old white man savior fetish.

 

[Salome]

UPDATE: No, Joe Biden did NOT vow to veto Bernie's M4All bill

Here's the full transcript (verbatim) of Joe Biden's exchange with Lawrence O'Donnell about whether he'd veto some version of Medicare for All if it were to actually pass the House and Senate: O'Donnell: "Let's flash forward: You're President, Bernie Sanders is still active in the Senate, he...

acasignups.net

 

[Salome]

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Just a mention that that is a small thread:

Thread by @vexedinthecity: Write this down: Black "progressivism" is not the same as white progressivism and, if you listen to black academics and intellectuals over b…

Thread by @vexedinthecity: Write this down: Black "progressivism" is not the same as white progressivism and, if you listen to black academicctuals over black politicians and businesspeople, you'll never have a fully accurate understanding of the motivat…

threadreaderapp.com

 

[Salome]

I’m sure 84% of black voters in Mississippi are just more of “the establishment” against Bernie.

 

[Clara D.]

Black Democrats Have Plenty Of Reasons To Be #NeverBernie

I don’t hate Bernie Sanders, I simply do not like his ways. I also don’t like deification and mythologization of politicians. Many people…

medium.com

 

[Spirits Rising]

So have they gotten to the grasping at straws portion yet?

I know they're well past the projection phase.

 

[Zaida Gearbox]

You can get the kind of certifications mentioned, and other "learn to code" courses, at evening community college, for a fair price. The problem with "learn to code" is it mostly doesn't work. It did in the early 90's, but it doesn't anymore. You pretty much have to be autistic to be a programmer anymore, and this is intentional. When soccer moms entered the field in the 90's, programmer culture resisted by making everything a contest of minutiae. You now not only have to be detail oriented and have great memory and logic, traits that not everyone has, you also have to have the patience of God and the tolerance for Sheldon Cooper personalities. And you'll have to pass a whiteboard test that the interviewer can pass only because he got the question and answer from a "stump the normies" book.

Worse, the twenty-something codemonkey interviewer has to like you. And you'll have to already have experience for your very first job. Participation in an open source project counts, of course, but how many people will have had that experience prior to their first job interview? Or been able to contribute meaningfully to such a project without experience? Or had the desire to do so uncompensated while trying to train themselves out of unemployment? Or been able to get along with the personalities involved? Or had their submissions accepted by the personalities involved?

Basically, the field is hostile to ordinary people. I know two people who have done this training. One doesn't have the personality for it and never got a job. The other does have the personality for it and went through a couple positions and "wasn't a good fit" and is no longer in the field.

I don't know where you live, but community college where I am it's not all that reasonable. I looked into getting a paralegal certificate, and it was going to cost almost as much as my bachelor's degree cost at a private college 25 years ago! A certificate - not a degree - at a community college!!!! I have a co-worker who payed over 10k to get certified as a medical coder/biller. 10k - for a job that probably only pays about $12 per hour to start!!!! That is not fucking reasonable!!!

 

[Salome]