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US Politics: Make Thread Titles Great Again


Varysblackfyre321

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15 minutes ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

Don't wander off on a tangent.

 

14 minutes ago, lokisnow said:

take this tangent to its own thread!

Let's not get sidetracked by a cotangent, this is getting derivative.

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Just saw the new poll from UMass Amherst for the NH primary.  Biden 28, Sanders 20, Harris 14, and Warren 9.  Continual good news for Harris - and actually a fairly disappointing number for Sanders.

ETA:  Looking at the crosstabs (see page 3), those numbers do not include independents,  (ETA II:  nevermind, they do) which make up a large percentage of registered voters in NH (around 43%), and probably will be more inclined to vote in the Dem primary rather than the non-competitive GOP primary.  Sanders does do slightly better there - with 21 compared to Biden's 24 and Harris' 12.

ETA III:  Looking at the topline results are even more encouraging for Harris.  When asked who else they'd might be willing to support in the primary, Harris actually wins at 28, with Biden at 26, Booker at 24, Warren at 22, Sanders at 21, and Beto at 20.  That clearly suggests the race is unsurprisingly fluid right now, but it's nice to be in the lead, however marginal.  When likely Dem primary voters are asked who they will NOT be willing to support, it's Warren 26, Sanders 21, Booker 14, Biden 13, Beto 12, and Harris 11.  That's bad news for Warren.

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11 hours ago, Rippounet said:

White supremacists certainly do have a thing about presenting themselves as victims for some reason. 

They're slowly adapting to fit the current political environment.

11 hours ago, Rippounet said:

This Metzgar woman is quite a piece of work if you ask me. That article is just a slightly more politically correct version of the age-old racist habit of blaming minorities for their problems. What's new is that it blames progressivism rather than the members of minorities themselves. Subtle. Almost.

I think it's more that she is proselytizing: the article blames the current state of affairs on the decline of religion.

11 hours ago, Rippounet said:

And that's basically the only thing the two articles have in common.

It's more than that. Both articles describe the identity politics of the left as a form of religion. From the Atlantic article:

Quote

Racial politics today have become a kind of religion in which whites grapple with the original sin of privilege, converts tar questioners of the orthodoxy as “problematic” blasphemers, and everyone looks forward to a judgment day when America “comes to terms” with race.

 

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23 minutes ago, TheKitttenGuard said:

White Supremecy always had a victimology aspect to it. All actions are a defense to a always coming menance. It has never been a new thing.

You are literally arguing with a Nazi. Unless you plan to punch it in the face, I'd advise you to desist.

Fascism taught me that violence solves everything. I am a prodigious learner.

 

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8 minutes ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

@DMC I’m not sure if you noticed but it appears the mods kinda fused our two US politics threads together. And this thread kinda has granted me credit for making it. I’m going to make sure my OP gives you credit for the thread’s title. 

I did notice, and don't worry about it.  Merging the threads was obviously the right decision, and yours started before mine.  Ended up weird, yeah, but who cares?  Me starting the competing thread was just a joke anyway.  Thanks though.

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3 hours ago, aceluby said:

Why is the Klobuchar thing even a story?  We have heinous scandals happening on a daily basis in the WH, woman treats assistant poorly after making a lunch order mistake doesn't deserve any kind of attention.

Meh, I have mixed feelings about this statement. Yeah I totally understand that you know this isn’t really big deal. Like the abuse being reported isn’t from what I gather the criminal. Please correct me if I’m wrong here. Klocbucar being a dick as a boss, really won’t be the reason I won’t vote for her as a nominee. Still, I guess it shows the type of person she is. So it has that value. 

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1 hour ago, TheKitttenGuard said:

White Supremecy always had a victimology aspect to it. All actions are a defense to a always coming menance. It has never been a new thing.

This is true. One simply need to look at films such of “Birth of nation” the southern racists were the victims of those evil savage blacks. Or read an old southern textbook discussing slavery and the civil war. They’re the aggrieved party even though the confederacy mostly fought in the name of being legally able to own blacks. 

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18 minutes ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

This is true. One simply need to look at films such of “Birth of nation” the southern racists were the victims of those evil savage blacks. Or read an old southern textbook discussing slavery and the civil war. They’re the aggrieved party even though the confederacy mostly fought in the name of being legally able to own blacks. 

Or turn on the news. :/

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6 hours ago, Altherion said:

It's more than that. Both articles describe the identity politics of the left as a form of religion. From the Atlantic article:

Others have addressed victimhood, so I'll focus on something else. You have often ascribed identity politics to the left. And for a long time I didn't particularly react to that because it kinda made sense. Except, after doing a bit of historical digging and thinking about it, it really doesn't.

Present-day identity politics are focused on the individual: an individual's skin-color, backgorund, culture, feelings... etc. Funny thing is, as conservatives love to remind us, the left isn't overly concerned about the individual, that's more of a right-wing concern. So it's only logical that the present-day iteration of identity politics could not be a leftist creation.

I don't have time for the references, I can always provide them a bit later, so I'll paint history with a broad brush.
In the 1960s the left passed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. These were laws designed to address racial discrimination in American society. Combined with affirmative action, this "social experiment" (to use your words) was designed to tackle racial inequalities and redress the sins of the past (slavery and segregation).
But the right was furious. Right-wing Southerners especially embarked in a crusade against the federal government. And to do that they decided to use the weapon they preferred: focus on the individual. They had lost the battle on race, so they decided to shift the onus on a slightly different field. Slowly the debate was moved from race to ethnicity, from communities to families, and from racial politics (dealing with macroeconomics) to identity politics (dealing with microaggressions).
Now I'm painting with a broad brush and historical causality is never *that* simple, but as it turns out, the fact that Republicans deliberately started focusing on individuals to sidestep the issue of race as a macroeconomic factor is pretty well documented.
There's the way affirmative action was painted as discriminating against white individuals instead of looking at its effect on racial inequalities through society. In other words, instead of looking at macroeconomic effects (as leftists do) people started focusing on individuals (as right-wingers do).
There's the way the "black family" was described as so dysfunctional that it was beyond any kind of help. Bonus points for blaming African-American males for that of course, the stereotype lives on strong to this day. Of course this avoids discussing the effects of *poverty* on family structures and shifts the blame to the family itself.
There's the use of successful members of minorities as symbols of *individual success*, the point being to completely drown the overall facts about racial inequalities. Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, Herman Cain... etc. We even know who the Republican strategist behind this is.
There's the insidious idea that American society ought to be "colorblind" anyway and that one's ethnicity or culture is an *individual* affair.

Now the left and leftists aren't blameless. There *were* potential benefits to focusing on individuals to be gained, so some leftists eagerly embraced the identity politics of the right and developed it, thus falling into the trap that had been laid out. Because of course, identity politics focused on the individual was something designed by the right to kill racial politics. And in the end, it achieved just that.

Of course, this was always part of a greater picture. By the 1990s, Clinton embraced much of the right-wing agenda: toughness on crime, toughness on welfare, toughness on terrorism... The Democrats of the 1990s would probably have horrified leftists of the past. Point is, by the 1990s, the intellectual war against the federal government and actual leftist policies had been won by the right. A big decade later, no one was shocked when Colin Powell supported Barack Obama, because Democrats and Republicans were no longer defined by a mere left-right divide.

So to sum up: the left won the battle on race (which is why "racist" is such an insult today) but lost the war on everything else.

And the kicker: the reason I started reading about this is that in my socialist eurocommie country identity politics are almost non-existent. They have only been recently introduced... yeah, you guessed it... by the right.

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16 hours ago, aceluby said:

Why is the Klobuchar thing even a story?  We have heinous scandals happening on a daily basis in the WH, woman treats assistant poorly after making a lunch order mistake doesn't deserve any kind of attention.

I think if I'm going to raise hell about how somebody like Jeff Bozo treats his employees, then I think how Klobuchar treats her staff is fair game, if true.

I'm fundamentally a pro union/labor Democrat, and if she has a bad habit of treating her employees like shit, then I might take issue with that. Also, I've worked for bad bosses and I've worked for good ones. The bad ones, who are often mercurial and belittle their underlings for trivial bullshit, tend not be very good managers or effective leaders and are morale killers. Not a good management style for somebody that wants to be president.

Not that it would cause me to support Trump or anything over her. To paraphrase Churchill, if Satan ran against Trump, I'd probably feel obligated to find a few kind words to say about Satan.

And maybe, I'd still put my support behind her, if considering everything else, I still thought she was the best candidate overall. There are things about her I like. And there are likely bigger issues with respect to her candidacy. Still, the issue of how she treats her staff, while perhaps a rather small issue in the grand scheme of things, is not without relevancy, and I want to know about them.

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13 hours ago, Altherion said:

I think it's more that she is proselytizing: the article blames the current state of affairs on the decline of religion.

For somebody that bothered to start an entire thread, essentially claiming that everything produced from the social sciences is essentially bullshit, your objection here would be what?
It would seem to me, that your real objection here isn’t so much that identity politics is a “religion”, but more of the nature that you’d prefer your own brand of religion to be adopted. In fact, I would submit that you yourself have seemingly adopted with much approval, what I believe are some left wing excesses, about the nature of what we can know and whether it’s possible to objectively evaluate claims to truth. It seems to me that you put a great faith in your own lived experiences to make statements about how the world operates. And facts, data, general rules of inference, general known historical facts, and logic outside of those experiences be damned.
 

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I find the focus on the comb story in terms of Klobuchar to be rather odd. I guess it has gotten traction because it makes such a good "visual" in people's minds. But there is no indication in the story of what her having "berated" the aide actually means. There would be a big difference between one sharp sentence and yelling and screaming for five minutes. And as I heard someone on TV say this morning, using a comb as a utensil could be seen as showing a creative solution to a problem. It could have been a brand new comb, or she could have cleaned it herself before using it that way. 

I am much more concerned by these two paragraphs that come shortly after the comb incident in the New York Times story:

Quote

 

The senator feared sabotage from her own team: In an email, she once raised the prospect of an in-house mole. She and her top confidantes could complicate the future job opportunities of some staff members who sought to leave, former aides said, sometimes speaking to their would-be employers to register her displeasure. And Ms. Klobuchar frequently suggested that her aides were preventing her from greater standing in Washington and beyond, former staff members said.

“We are becoming a joke,” she wrote in one email about the contents of her Twitter feed, “and it is making me a joke.”

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/us/politics/amy-klobuchar-staff.html

The above, to my mind, comes closer to making her look paranoid, vindictive, and having a tendency to blame others, which seem very relevant traits to me in evaluating a candidate, and much more important than being upset over a missing fork.

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21 minutes ago, Ormond said:

I find the focus on the comb story in terms of Klobuchar to be rather odd. I guess it has gotten traction because it makes such a good "visual" in people's minds. But there is no indication in the story of what her having "berated" the aide actually means. There would be a big difference between one sharp sentence and yelling and screaming for five minutes.

I do tend to like her, so I'd hope she wouldn't be the type to go all Captain Queeg over some missing strawberries.

Quote

The above, to my mind, comes closer to making her look paranoid, vindictive, and having a tendency to blame others, which seem very relevant traits to me in evaluating a candidate, and much more important than being upset over a missing fork.

"A very disloyal officer", while rolling balls in hand.

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