Bernie Has A Mean Followers Problem

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

NP. I had to unumute and do a page search for the slur. But, you know, puzzles are fun I guess lol.

Sorry, I would have screencapped but am on phone at the moment.

 

[Salome]

 

[Cristalle]

While obviously Sanders can't be held responsible for the behaviour of his more obnoxious supporters, I am sure that his supporters here, at least, will agree he could fairly be held responsible for failing to dissociate himself from vile attacks like that and for failing to tell Chapo Trap House he can do without supporters like them.

Can we (the royal we, not you Innula, but people in general) calm down a bit here? Chapo doesn't even have that big of an audience. I didn't even know who they were until the last week or so. Their YouTube channel has somewhere around 60k subscribers. I looked up their numbers and their Patreon account amounts to having a whopping 32,000 people willing to pay to support them. That's somewhere around 1.066666666666667e-4 percent of the population. Screaming about a fringe group only increases their visibility. They have the pearl-clutching folks and their allies in the liberal media apparatus to thank for the growth in their subscriber base.

Further: their whole shtick is to be vulgar. Is it ideal? No. Not my cup of tea, normally.

That said: no politician, woman or otherwise, should be immune to criticism. While I don't agree with sexist attacks on Warren, there seems to be no way to critique a woman without it being called sexism. Should people call her a snake? No. Okay, so how do you express displeasure if you don't believe she represented her conversation with Bernie correctly? It seems the only answer is that you can't, as if politicians don't lie because they're women.

Maybe it's because I don't use Twitter very often why I'm disconnected from all the perceived hatred and meanness from alleged bros.

 

[Brenda Archer]

In KHive Twitter there was a popular account from a woman named Jennifer (@stillleftyjenny) who, over the last two years has shared her journey with fertility attempts and finally ended up with twin boys who we referred to as “the Lefty boys.” Most of us watched them go from ICU to home and it was a lovely break from just politics.

Recently her account was doxxed by a bunch of Berners. She’s since removed all her social media accounts for safety reasons and sends updates through surrogates about the boys‘ progress. I cannot count the number of women (especially black women) who get regularly mass reported and doxxed by Bernie stans. It’s just what happens whenever you post something negative about him these days.

This does not happen from Biden, Warren, or other supporters, despite the fact that they have all been roundly criticized in the same circles. Yes, of course, insults fly and viral posts get swarmed. But the doxxing and really harmful shit is an overwhelmingly Bernie camp problem.

The refusal to accept this and address it — the disgusting dismissal of calling it “people being mean to you online” is why victims and those who have watched the attacks are done with this “bad people on all sides” bullshit.

There aren’t other candidates with rabid fan bases doxxing babies, ffs.

How are people who are not so much on Twitter supposed to even know this happened? I believe it, because almost all prominent women on Twitter are at risk for this. But you can’t say every Sanders voter has somehow endorsed something they may not even know about. I’m somewhat on Twitter, and this is the first I heard about it.

 

[Brenda Archer]

Can we (the royal we, not you Innula, but people in general) calm down a bit here? Chapo doesn't even have that big of an audience. I didn't even know who they were until the last week or so. Their YouTube channel has somewhere around 60k subscribers. I looked up their numbers and their Patreon account amounts to having a whopping 32,000 people willing to pay to support them. That's somewhere around 1.066666666666667e-4 percent of the population. Screaming about a fringe group only increases their visibility. They have you all to thank for the growth in their subscriber base.

Further: their whole shtick is to be vulgar. Is it ideal? No. Not my cup of tea, normally.

That said: no politician, woman or otherwise, should be immune to criticism. While I don't agree with sexist attacks on Warren, there seems to be no way to critique a woman without it being called sexism. Should people call her a snake? No. Okay, so how do you express displeasure if you don't believe she represented her conversation with Bernie correctly? It seems the only answer is that you can't, as if politicians don't lie because they're women.

Maybe it's because I don't use Twitter very often why I'm disconnected from all the perceived hatred and meanness from alleged bros.

There’s a tendency for Twitter people to think their arguments are decisive for the whole world, while most of us have never heard of them, much less participated. I run into this problem constantly on disability Twitter. They can’t speak for the people who didn’t see the argument.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Can we (the royal we, not you Innula, but people in general) calm down a bit here? Chapo doesn't even have that big of an audience. I didn't even know who they were until the last week or so. Their YouTube channel has somewhere around 60k subscribers. I looked up their numbers and their Patreon account amounts to having a whopping 32,000 people willing to pay to support them. That's somewhere around 1.066666666666667e-4 percent of the population. Screaming about a fringe group only increases their visibility. They have the pearl-clutching folks and their allies in the liberal media apparatus to thank for the growth in their subscriber base.

Further: their whole shtick is to be vulgar. Is it ideal? No. Not my cup of tea, normally.

That said: no politician, woman or otherwise, should be immune to criticism. While I don't agree with sexist attacks on Warren, there seems to be no way to critique a woman without it being called sexism. Should people call her a snake? No. Okay, so how do you express displeasure if you don't believe she represented her conversation with Bernie correctly? It seems the only answer is that you can't, as if politicians don't lie because they're women.

Maybe it's because I don't use Twitter very often why I'm disconnected from all the perceived hatred and meanness from alleged bros.

Whatever the size of Chapo's audience, now a large number of people who'd probably never heard of them now have, and find this particular clip particularly offensive for a number of reasons -- I'll explore some of the reasons I dislike it so much if you want, but for the time being please just accept that they are very serious reasons, or at least ones that are very serious to me, and not simply the sort of thing only "pearl-clutching folks" (or politically correct liberal metropolitan elites, come to that) worry about.

Here's an opportunity for Sanders to react to an issue that concerns many of the people he seeks to reassure, particularly since he presumably hopes to attract at least some people who had, until now, supported Warren and are bitterly disappointed she's out of the race?

Self-interest, as well as common decency, should impell him to take a stand, to my mind, and I don't think it's unfair to judge him by his reaction, or lack of it.

As to booing and hissing and expressing displeasure that you don't believe someone?

Please -- maybe it's different in the US, but the only time I ever boo and hiss like that is at the pantomime, for heaven's sake.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

A 'Bernie Bro' who once joined in online attacks rethinks his behavior - The Washington Post

A 'Bernie Bro' who once joined in online attacks rethinks his behavior The question itself was new for McDowell, whose tweets defending Sanders used to be impulsive and unthinking. But as Sanders pick...

www.evernote.com

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-doubt-of-a-bernie-bro-a-hard-charging-sanders-supporter-questions-whether-his-tactics-help-or-hurt/2020/03/07/0e89cbea-57e6-11ea-8585-993ff9ec93f9_story.html

Revealing and not-unsympathetic account of one young Sanders supporter out campaigning with friends.

The criticism of Sanders’s online attack squad has been harsh. As she ended her campaign Thursday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) decried the “organized nastiness” of some of his supporters, saying he did not do enough to rein them in.
Sanders has disavowed the most abusive voices while defending the majority of his backers.

“We have over 10.6 million people on Twitter, and 99.9 percent of them are decent human beings,” Sanders said at a recent debate. “And if there are a few people who make ugly remarks, who attack trade union leaders, I disown those people. They are not part of our movement.”

McDowell applauded Sanders’s statement, but he also worried the criticism was overblown. He was just playing politics in the way he knew how.
His generation had grown up absorbing the news through “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report,” which intimately intertwined politics and absurdity. And political punditry on 24-hour news channels can seem as aggressive as any battle royal.

The gaming of American politics didn’t seem much different from sports or the games he played online. And if that was the way politics was being played, should it not come with the trash-talking, irreverent hyperbole that comes with any other fan base on the Internet?
“I’ve seen people be just as vicious if you have a fight between Star Wars versus Star Trek,” McDowell said.

 

[Salome]

“I’ve seen people be just as vicious if you have a fight between Star Wars versus Star Trek,” McDowell said.

This is a really odd statement for a young kid to make. SW vs ST debates are tedious, but not really regularly vicious. I haven’t seen a passionate round of that since usenet days (and, even then Apple vs PC was the real third rail battle).

These days I’d have expected a young voter to say Marvel vs DC or something.

 

[Salome]

A really excellent point aimed at the people blowing off toxic harassment in the Berniesphere:

 

[Aeon Jiminy]

There is surely a relationship between Sanders supporters reactions and expression on social media and their suppression of representation on all other forms of media and debate. Yang, T-censored-d, M-censored-n, were part of that broader coalition with common goals and you can't even say some of their names without summoning the wrath of hell upon yourself.

So please, half a truth is also half a lie.

 

[Salome]

Mangy is a linguistics expert who also has a great deal of knowledge about speech impediments and therapies. She’s been pushing back against this insidious “Biden has dementia” Sanders/Trump/Russia disinformation campaign and getting swarmed by Bernie “progressives” who have been just delightful:

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Mangy is a linguistics expert who also has a great deal of knowledge about speech impediments and therapies. She’s been pushing back against this insidious “Biden has dementia” Sanders/Trump/Russia disinformation campaign and getting swarmed by Bernie “progressives” who have been just delightful:

Thanks.

I took a look at her twitter, and found this really useful and informative piece that she retweeted:

The Disinformation Campaign Being Launched Against Biden | Washington Monthly

There is no data to support the allegation that he is in cognitive decline.

washingtonmonthly.com

 

[Pamela]

This from the above linked article:

A stutter does not get worse as a person ages, but trying to keep it at bay can take immense physical and mental energy. Biden talks all day to audiences both small and large. In addition to periodically stuttering or blocking on certain sounds, he appears to intentionally not stutter by switching to an alternative word—a technique called “circumlocution”—which can yield mangled syntax. I’ve been following practically everything he’s said for months now, and sometimes what is quickly characterized as a memory lapse is indeed a stutter. As Eric Jackson, the speech pathologist, pointed out to me, during a town hall in August Biden briefly blocked on Obama, before quickly subbing in my boss. The headlines after the event? “Biden Forgets Obama’s Name.” Other times when Biden fudges a detail or loses his train of thought, it seems unrelated to stuttering, like he’s just making a mistake. The kind of mistake other candidates make too, though less frequently than he does.

 

[Beebo Brink]

Thank you. That is a lot more reassuring than I expected. And it makes sense of what I'm seeing when Biden speaks.

 

[Pamela]

His speech after Pete’s endorsement was amazing, totally extemporaneous and heartflet, and I don’t remember any gaffs.

 

[Aribeth Zelin]

I'm seriously torn on not bothering to vote in our primary at all, because early voting starts this week and well, Covid-19 worries and all, or going and voting either for Warren because she is still on the ballot for Florida. I get Our Revolution emails still, and I'll say while I don't have a problem with Bernie himself, you are judged by who you associate with, and too many of the people he has surrounding him, are in the same basic class as Ted Cruz - wouldn't even buy a used car from them.

*I wouldn't buy a used or even new car, since I don't know how to drive, but if I did....

 

[Cristalle]

I'm seriously torn on not bothering to vote in our primary at all, because early voting starts this week and well, Covid-19 worries and all, or going and voting either for Warren because she is still on the ballot for Florida. I get Our Revolution emails still, and I'll say while I don't have a problem with Bernie himself, you are judged by who you associate with, and too many of the people he has surrounding him, are in the same basic class as Ted Cruz - wouldn't even buy a used car from them.

*I wouldn't buy a used or even new car, since I don't know how to drive, but if I did....

You're seriously going to pass on good policies because of people on the Internet?

 

[Jolene Benoir]

You're seriously going to pass on good policies because of people on the Internet?

That is rich when you make excuses for the people who voted Stein, Bernie or abstained in 2016.

As I recall you saying on more than one occasion, "nobody is owed our vote.".

I think it would be a mistake for Aribeth in that she might later regret not having made her voice heard, but your hypocrisy couldn't go unchecked.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

I'm seriously torn on not bothering to vote in our primary at all, because early voting starts this week and well, Covid-19 worries and all, or going and voting either for Warren because she is still on the ballot for Florida. I get Our Revolution emails still, and I'll say while I don't have a problem with Bernie himself, you are judged by who you associate with, and too many of the people he has surrounding him, are in the same basic class as Ted Cruz - wouldn't even buy a used car from them.

*I wouldn't buy a used or even new car, since I don't know how to drive, but if I did....

Whatever you do, please show up for the general. America's allies really would like to have our friend back.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Mangy is a linguistics expert who also has a great deal of knowledge about speech impediments and therapies. She’s been pushing back against this insidious “Biden has dementia” Sanders/Trump/Russia disinformation campaign and getting swarmed by Bernie “progressives” who have been just delightful:

Making good use of this today elsewhere. ty