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US Politics: To Open or Not To Open, That's the Question


Tywin Manderly

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Just now, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

You’re the professor.  What’s wrong with assigning Plato and Aristotle for reading in a class on political philosophy?

Nothing at all.  Indeed I'd say it's essential to assign the Republic.  Luckily, though, I've never been assigned a political theory class.  Guess I was close with political sociology this semester, but it was justifiable to simply start with Marx and Weber there.  Mwahaha!  (Also, I'm not a professor.  In fact by the end of the week I'll be just another unemployed dreg of society.)

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6 hours ago, Darth Richard II said:

Uh, we’re are you getting this information from?

About Jessie Ventura? It's been on the news, my man. https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/494875-jesse-ventura-says-hes-testing-the-waters-for-green-party-bid-for-president

Or if you mean more support that Reade told people at the time? https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/28/politics/tara-reade-neighbor/index.html

I guess it could be how I mentioned Clinton as Biden's VP? But that was just a response to what I saw up-thread. Two news stories broke about Biden yesterday: Clinton endorsed him, and he's super close to choosing a VP--and Clinton is a woman. People putting that together is speculation, but it's fair speculation. I hope he isn't that stupid, but we'll see. 

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6 hours ago, Consigliere said:

Looks like Simon is just parroting talking points/conspiracy theories from left wing cesspools. 

What's the conspiracy theory I'm promoting? Are Reade's allegations now being called conspiracy theories? You should read up on rape culture, pal. 

If you're talking about Jessie Ventura? Well, he's floated the idea, it's in the news? Or is it the Clinton VP thing--which I saw on a post above mine...

I don't even know what left wing conspiracy sites are, unless you mean like Slate or Salon or NYT?

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37 minutes ago, Ran said:

We're past this moment in the election politics, but Princeton Economics has a new paper suggesting that the share of wealth held by the top 0.1% is about half what estimates in the past have suggested, and that a wealth tax would consequently bring about half of what some of the estimates from from Warren and Sanders suggested. Saez and Zucman, and Piketty, are referenced.

A 5 minute search tells me that Zidar tought at the University of Chicago (!) and was an analyst for Bain Capital.
But I'm sure you can trust an economist working for an investment firm when he attacks Saez, Zucman, and Piketty's work, uh? :rolleyes:

For a long time I genuinely believed economic debates/controversies were mostly in good faith.
Now that I know about stuff like the Reinhart-Rogoff fumble, you'll forgive me if I look down on whatever criticism is leveled at Saez, Zucman, and Piketty.
I'm sure some of it is legitimate, but I think it's reasonable to assume a significant proportion of the papers trying to attack their work is directly or indirectly financed by the people who feel threatened by that work (i.e. the 0,1%).
Though of course, you also have some "true believers" in voodoo economics (the ideology is seductive: freedom, yeah!).

And I might be wrong about Zidar or Zwick, who knows? Obviously I didn't spend much time looking at their bio. But I no longer give right-wing stuff the benefit of the doubt. If a paper's ultimate purpose seems to be to protect the interests of the 0,1%, most of the time, it is.

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28 minutes ago, DMC said:

Nothing at all.  Indeed I'd say it's essential to assign the Republic.  Luckily, though, I've never been assigned a political theory class.  Guess I was close with political sociology this semester, but it was justifiable to simply start with Marx and Weber there.  Mwahaha!  (Also, I'm not a professor.  In fact by the end of the week I'll be just another unemployed dreg of society.)

I’m sorry to here that.  

For the record, my wife (who calls me a communist) has a great deal of respect for Marx and Hegel’s very cogent criticisms of capitalism.  She simply thinks their solutions are worse than the problems they identify.

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Quote

The implications of governors’ decisions to reopen come hell or high water is even more stark when you consider that once virus-related restrictions are lifted and an employer reopens, employees who don’t return for health concerns would not only lose their jobs, they’d lose their right to unemployment benefits currently being provided. In Georgia, that would have a significant impact on the service industry employees who are now being forced back to work. Iowa and Texas are following suit. “If you’re an employer and you offer to bring your employee back to work and they decide not to, that’s a voluntary quit,” Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, said last week. “Therefore, they would not be eligible for the unemployment money.

Workers in States Quick to Reopen Would Lose Unemployment Benefits Even if They’re Too Fearful to Return Yet

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/04/meat-processing-workers-states-reopen-lose-unemployment-benefits-georgia-texas-iowa.html

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2 hours ago, DMC said:

Well, this is like saying the Pauls are consistent.  Yes, kinda?  But what kind of consistency are we talking about here?  Isn't it even worse than the regular GOP much of the time?

Look, I'm not going to spend too much time defending Amash, but he voted to impeach while Rand Paul tried to use the Senate trial to expose a whistleblower. I'd never say Rand Paul is consistent at anything except smug selfishness.

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6 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I’m sorry to here that.  

For the record, my wife (who calls me a communist) has a great deal of respect for Marx and Hegel’s very cogent criticisms of capitalism.  She simply thinks their solutions are worse than the problems they identify.

I think that's a fair criticism to Marx and Hegel who lived in very different times. The interesting thing is how relevant their critiques remain of capital. I think that's why it's important to try and understand what people mean by socialism (and potentially renaming it) as we tried to do in the "What is Socialism?" thread last summer. What Marx promoted as a solution, for example, is too idealistic. But we've seen other countries take some of his ideas and put them to great use. I tend to think that putting control of all labor entirely in employees' hands is counterproductive, but I think they should have a voice at the table.

Also interesting, I hadn't ever consciously considered Hegel to be anti-capitalist, though clearly he is when you think about his writing. I suppose the Young Hegelians saw this as precisely the issue with his writings--the lack of clarity on material conditions.

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6 hours ago, TrueMetis said:

Didn't he use to run a conspiracy theory show?

I think he probably still does. But that being said he did a couple things I agree with and the only thing Tim Pawlenty ever did I agreed with was get voted out of office. He also stoked tons of anti native sentiment in the state over gambling during a time I lived in a rural area near a very poor reservation (not my own very poor reservation, different band, same tribe). The Pawlenty years yielded a bumper crop of racial slurs for me. Jesse Ventura shut off the freeway on ramp meters after a study showing they didn’t improve the flow of traffic at all. I’m not saying I like Ventura, but he was not a scary bigot and I believe he was trying to do a good job. I do not believe those things about Tim Pawlenty. The democrat who unseated Pawlenty, Mark Dayton, was awesome (though the worst public speaker I have ever seen).

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6 minutes ago, Simon Steele said:

Also interesting, I hadn't ever consciously considered Hegel to be anti-capitalist, though clearly he is when you think about his writing. I suppose the Young Hegelians saw this as precisely the issue with his writings--the lack of clarity on material conditions.

Agree, I don't think Hegel should be conflated with Marx, at all.  It makes no sense in a variety of ways.  I also agree that Marx is entirely applicable these days.  Especially these days.

10 minutes ago, DanteGabriel said:

Look, I'm not going to spend too much time defending Amash, but he voted to impeach while Rand Paul tried to use the Senate trial to expose a whistleblower. I'd never say Rand Paul is consistent at anything except smug selfishness.

Amash was able to because of his constituency, Paul was not.  That's pretty much how I look at it.  Maybe it's dismissive, but electoral motives usually end up accurate.

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1 minute ago, Fury Resurrected said:

I think he probably still does. But that being said he did a couple things I agree with and the only thing Tim Pawlenty ever did I agreed with was get voted out of office. He also stoked tons of anti native sentiment in the state over gambling during a time I lived in a rural area near a very poor reservation (not my own very poor reservation, different band, same tribe). The Pawlenty years yielded a bumper crop of racial slurs for me. Jesse Ventura shut off the freeway on ramp meters after a study showing they didn’t improve the flow of traffic at all. I’m not saying I like Ventura, but he was not a scary bigot and I believe he was trying to do a good job. I do not believe those things about Tim Pawlenty. The democrat who unseated Pawlenty, Mark Dayton, was awesome (though the worst public speaker I have ever seen).

I honestly know very little about Ventura outside of Predator and when I watched wrestling as a kid. To clarify, are you saying Ventura stoked anti-native sentiment (or Pawlenty)? 

Ventura, I'm certain, has plenty of skeletons in his closet based on the fact that he is a conspiracy radio show host.

I suppose the point I am making is that in this election where two men who have been accused of sexual assault are running for President, the other options are no better. While I do not know what the Dem Party can do about this, I think if they don't do something, they lose what credibility they still had. ]

With Blasey-Ford, my co-workers and I wrote letters to Cory Gardner about how important it was he take partisanship out of this decision. Not that Kavanaugh was a hundred percent guilty, but with such horrible accusations from a credible witness, he should not vote a man into one of the highest judicial positions in the U.S.

Gardner responded over a month later, with the same form letter to each of us, saying some generic shit about why he voted for Kavanaugh. We all have these letters hanging on our bulletin boards in our offices as a reminder that this November, Gardner cannot win his Senate seat back. We've used this to inform our own local activism against him. And, we thought, the Democratic party was the party who supported this.

By not even engaging with the Biden issue, but instead, letting the media gaslight Reade as the solution, is a true blow to the ethics the Dem Party claimed to have. The excuses I hear--well, we've settled down since Me Too started and we're more refined in our judgments--are the same excuses the right use with Trump. It creates true nihilism in our political system.  

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Wait, did you people think Kirstin Gillibrand gave half a fuck about metoo when she forced Franken out? 

Have you really been living with that misinterpretation of events this whole time? Well, the Democratic party never cared. Especially after it was clear that Republicans were immune (sorry Roy Moore, pedophilia is the line). I'm sorry if you actually believed anyone on any political stage saying they cared, but you got taken for a ride.

Does that help with this loss of 'credibility' that never existed if you were paying attention?

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There are at least 20 fucking people in the briefing room that Trump is holding his press conference in, with people practically standing on top of one another, and I've only seen one wearing a mask. FFS

Upshot of the briefing - Dr. Fauci announced preliminary results for the as-yet largest controlled study of remdesivir, with preliminary results showing modest, but not quite statistically significant, improvements in mortality rate and length of hospitalization. They're announcing early to give people in the placebo group the opportunity to begin taking remdesivir.

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After all the infighting of the last couple of threads (and more) can we all find some common ground in saying that picking Clinton for his running mate would be a fucking terrible idea and that he'd have to show substantially worse political judgement than he's shown so far to do something so ill advised?

He'd deserve to have the nomination revoked due to incompetence if he did that so I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and treat any suggestion that he's considering it as bullshit disinformation.

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3 minutes ago, karaddin said:

After all the infighting of the last couple of threads (and more) can we all find some common ground in saying that picking Clinton for his running mate would be a fucking terrible idea and that he'd have to show substantially worse political judgement than he's shown so far to do something so ill advised?

He'd deserve to have the nomination revoked due to incompetence if he did that so I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and treat any suggestion that he's considering it as bullshit disinformation.

I am so sick and bloody tired of this endless ‘Biden is going to pick Clinton’ shit. This is what, the 5th, the 10th, the 20th, the 50th time this has been brought up? So all the Clinton haters can play whack-a-mole again? (This is not directed at you, I’m too lazy to go back to Simon’s post). 
 

 

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6 minutes ago, karaddin said:

After all the infighting of the last couple of threads (and more) can we all find some common ground in saying that picking Clinton for his running mate would be a fucking terrible idea and that he'd have to show substantially worse political judgement than he's shown so far to do something so ill advised?

He'd deserve to have the nomination revoked due to incompetence if he did that so I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and treat any suggestion that he's considering it as bullshit disinformation.

It's hard to believe that Biden and the DNC would be so clueless and out of touch as to nominate Clinton. I'd like to see the sourcing for that claim, beyond "Hillary Clinton has been hanging around a lot."

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9 minutes ago, karaddin said:

can we all find some common ground in saying that picking Clinton for his running mate would be a fucking terrible idea

Yes.  I don't understand why this is even being entertained.  It's not going to happen.  It's a ridiculous premise.  I've been busy grading, but if this has all of a sudden something legitimized because she endorsed him, it's really stupid.

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1 minute ago, DanteGabriel said:

It's hard to believe that Biden and the DNC would be so clueless and out of touch as to nominate Clinton. I'd like to see the sourcing for that claim, beyond "Hillary Clinton has been hanging around a lot."

I know I said it last night but I really really wish both Bernie and her had stepped back from the public stage pretty much entirely. Or at least done something to try draw a line under that conflict and smooth some of the divisions. I know Clinton did this a lot more than Bernie, but she was also the one that won the nomination and lost the election so there's more "get out of the way" pressure.

It's just so clear the divisions really got wedged apart in 2016 and absolutely no progress has been made on changing that, and imo a lot of the bitterness and cynicism from Sanders supporters - particular with respect to lack of trust in the DNC - is still as much as reaction to 2016 as it is to anything that happened this time. The other half is just due to how jarring the high of "he's winning" turned into "... And it's over already with most states still to vote, wtf?". There was definitely a media narrative being driven in the few days between SC and SupTue, but I don't think the party itself did anything problematic in there. And I'm still shocked it worked, but I think I over value the media narrative and under value the consolidation of the moderate vote.

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4 minutes ago, karaddin said:

It's just so clear the divisions really got wedged apart in 2016 and absolutely no progress has been made on changing that, and imo a lot of the bitterness and cynicism from Sanders supporters - particular with respect to lack of trust in the DNC - is still as much as reaction to 2016 as it is to anything that happened this time.

Let's say the Dems nominated someone awesome instead of Joe Fucking Biden.  Would I care if she "mended the fences" between Sanders 2016 and today?  Would you?  I don't get this standard.  Why should any candidate have to account for what happened in the previous cycle?  It seems ludicrous on its face.  This reflects a sense of entitlement on behalf of certain constituents that is simply not relevant to any two-party system.

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