All purpose news and politics thread part v: The quickening

[numberthirty]

That's conjecture on your part -- it remains to be seen whether enough young voters will show up for Biden or Sanders to make any difference in the elections.

With that in mind, if said young voters show up in the primaries and propel him to the top of the ticket then he's the nominee regardless, so there's no point in arguing about it. Enough with the fearmongering -- just support your candidate and stop trying to demonize other candidates just because you prefer someone different. There is too much at stake to continually bash and attempt to drag down the Democrats statistical best chance at winning the next election.

Half the reason many of these people don't show up is because of this defeatist narrative that somehow a "moderate" candidate is just as bad at Trump.

There's one really glaring problem with that approach...

If you wait until the nomination process concluding pointing out that you have an actual issue by sticking it in your face?

It's almost always way too late to actually be able to address the issue so that it won't kneecap you going into the General.

[PwrdOn]

Why am I not surprised you're handwaving away the likely path this is gonna follow and what it means? I mean, I'm fairly sure imprisoning people in 'reeducation camps' isn't going to end tensions, and if you're defending *that* practice as way towards addressing 'deeply rooted structural issues', I don't think we have much to say to one another.

Ugh, typical moderate nonsense. You get on your soapbox about this issue that you took completely out of context and don't understand at all, and have absolutely no idea how to fix aside from "stop doing the bad stuff and everything will be fine," and then when I try to point out that this kind of simplistic take is probably not helping, you take this to mean that I'm in favor of what's going on.

[aja_christopher]

There's one really glaring problem with that approach....

The only "glaring problem" here is your continued failure to address your chosen candidates' lack of political and legislative success on the national stage.

That's the issue you seem to want to "ignore" and "not address" even as you constantly try to lecture others on how to win elections.

Moderates have won plenty of national elections without your advice -- with that in mind, fix your own house before you try to tell others how to fix theirs.

-----
"Sanders runs into resistance as he looks beyond Warren dispute"

"When the head of New Hampshire’s leading foundation for women arrived at a local Women’s March to find she would be sharing the stage with Sen. Bernie Sanders, she backed out.

At the same event, a prominent former state senator turned her back when he spoke.

After a week-long flare-up with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sanders sought to bolster his support among women on Saturday. But for a number of New Hampshire activists, he only made it worse.

“In the context of the last week's events, it was especially ironic it was Sen. Sanders speaking,” said former state Sen. Iris Estabrook, who has endorsed Sen. Amy Klobuchar.

She was at the event with a sign reading, “When women vote, women win.”

“That was the spirit of this thing, and it was unfortunate that the senator — and whoever gave him the platform — didn't respect the original purpose of the gathering,” she said. “I was disturbed enough that when the senator spoke I took a break from the rally and went elsewhere.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/0...-voters-100826

[Theleviathan]

Young voters delivered the only election victories that the Democrats have had in this millennium, and seeing that Biden's campaign message of "I was Obama's sidekick" doesn't seem to be working with that constituency, his outlook appears grim.

Again, this is not true. Black voters delivered those elections and they had a range of ages. The decline in turnout also ranged across all black age groups:

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blog...n_america.html

HRC's loss had little to do with young voters and everything to with black turnout and all the negative baggage she came with.

At some point, can you guys just be supporters of Bernie without living in a god damn imaginary kingdom? Rejoice in his virtues, share what you like, but for the love of all that's good in the world....stop pulling things out of your collective butts and calling it fact.

[Tendrin]

Ugh, typical moderate nonsense. You get on your soapbox about this issue that you took completely out of context and don't understand at all, and have absolutely no idea how to fix aside from "stop doing the bad stuff and everything will be fine," and then when I try to point out that this kind of simplistic take is probably not helping, you take this to mean that I'm in favor of what's going on.

'Moderate nonsense' is refusing to take a side with a shoulder shrug towards obvious injustice. I may not know how to solve /all/ the problems, but I can at least safely say that nothing good has ever come from mass imprisonment under the guise of 'deradicalization camps'. My 'simplistic take' of 'concentration camps are bad actually' was pointing out that this is an escalating situation that we ought to be watching more closely. Hand wobbling and shrugging it off as an inevitable consequence of India's issues doesn't make it any less true, no matter how wise such puerile cynicism lets you feel.

[Tendrin]

Speaking of concentration camps:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...documents.html

In 2014, little more than a year after becoming president, he spent four days in the region, and on the last day of the trip, two Uighur militants staged a suicide bombing outside a train station in Urumqi that injured nearly 80 people, one fatally.
Weeks earlier, militants with knives had gone on a rampage at another railway station, in southwest China, killing 31 people and injuring more than 140. And less than a month after Mr. Xi’s visit, assailants tossed explosives into a vegetable market in Urumqi, wounding 94 people and killing at least 39.
Against this backdrop of bloodshed, Mr. Xi delivered a series of secret speeches setting the hard-line course that culminated in the security offensive now underway in Xinjiang. While state media have alluded to these speeches, none were made public.
The text of four of them, though, were among the leaked documents — and they provide a rare, unfiltered look at the origins of the crackdown and the beliefs of the man who set it in motion.
“The methods that our comrades have at hand are too primitive,” Mr. Xi said in one talk, after inspecting a counterterrorism police squad in Urumqi. “None of these weapons is any answer for their big machete blades, ax heads and cold steel weapons.”
“We must be as harsh as them,” he added, “and show absolutely no mercy.”

As a result, we now have millions of people in concentration camps in China, with escalating horror stories from them, as always happens. We can rest assured that whatever we /think/ is going on, the reality of it will be worse -- and the fact that no international pressure has been (or probably can be easily applied to a state with the economic clout of China) simply means that these methods will be exported to other authoritarian leaning nations, as we're now seeing with a general suggesting that the area that was undergoing the longest internet blackout globally should have mass internment.

(I should add that India's supreme court recently declared that the blackout should end and that restrictions are easing as of the 15th of January.)

[Farealmer]

The number of otherwise reasonable people that vote conservative because they are in business and currently making lots of money is getting on my nerves.

[Tendrin]

The number of otherwise reasonable people that vote conservative because they are in business and currently making lots of money is getting on my nerves.

I'm gonna guess that if you pushed on them much at all, you'd find that each and every one is a bit more reactionary than you knew.

[PwrdOn]

I'm gonna guess that if you pushed on them much at all, you'd find that each and every one is a bit more reactionary than you knew.

Which is why it's so important that we placate their sensibilities with centrist platitudes if we want to win in 2020.

[aja_christopher]

Which is why it's so important that we placate their sensibilities with centrist platitudes if we want to win in 2020.

You still have yet to provide any real evidence regarding how your chosen candidates will actually win the elections that moderates have won in the past and continue to win in the present, such as Obama and Clinton's presidential victories, or the gamechanging "moderate" victories in the 2018 midterms.

All you do is attack and demean the Democratic candidates that you disagree with, which doesn't make you much different from Republicans in that respect.

Even if progressives do eventually rise to relevance, they still are going to have to work with moderates to actually get things done.

[numberthirty]

Which is why it's so important that we placate their sensibilities with centrist platitudes if we want to win in 2020.

That's honestly going to be one of the most interesting parts of how the fall breaks down.

While Democrats will obviously be able to make an "Are You Better Off Than You Were Four Years Ago?..." case to some of the voters that put Trump's win together in 2016, it would seem that some parts of minority/working class white communities are going to be doing a little bit better financially than they were when he took office.

If it's not plant workers whose jobs went away or farmers, will they vote "D" if they did just a bit better under Trump?

[Tendrin]

Which is why it's so important that we placate their sensibilities with centrist platitudes if we want to win in 2020.

I mean, if that's what it takes. The only way real change is going to come is if leftists continue to build on a real left flank in seats where they can get elected and work to broaden their appeal from there and pull the presidency left through congress. The presidency is not the beginning, rather, it's the end. For far too long American, left-leaning politics has relied on a top-down focus on the presidency while conservatives filled state houses, judiciaries, school boards and more. We are only just at the very beginning of reversing that trend, and some of it will involve electing 'moderates' to office to ensure that there's a majority to get anything done. That /is/ how the GOP did it. They didn't arrive at this moment by accident, even if the guy enacting their agenda isn't who a lot of the people behind this movement wanted it to be.

The last thing we want to do is to repeat the mistakes of Ernst Thalmann and his Social Democratic party opponents.

[lam]

These debates have been very interesting to pore through. Even the older stuff; still significant to this point, for the most part. That's why I love this page - it offers just a little bit of everything.

[SquirrelMan]

The smears are out there.

The Bernie Sanders campaign said Joe Biden lauded a Paul Ryan proposal to cut Social Security. That’s False

"The 2018 speech is very clearly Biden saying the opposite of what the Sanders campaign is claiming. He’s saying that Paul Ryan is going to cut taxes so that he can complain about the deficit and demand a need to cut Social Security."

[Tendrin]

The smears are out there.

The Bernie Sanders campaign said Joe Biden lauded a Paul Ryan proposal to cut Social Security. That’s False

I am shocked that Saint Bernard's campaign might do that.