By David Futrelle
Big day. Big big day. Lots of shit going on. Discuss.
Also: VOTE!!!!!!!!!!!!!1!
I mean, if you’re in the US. If you’re not in the US, I guess don’t vote, unless maybe you’re a citizen abroad but I don’t know how the mechanics of that work exactly.
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Really, it’s a mystery heaped upon enigma.
From my cultural perspective, Warren is the only one out of the top four who looks like a normal, serious political leader candidate. Maybe she lacks charisma, but so do the others. Over here, politicians run more on competence anyway.
All the men are weirdly old and less convincing than Warren on substance. Biden doesn’t even appear sharp or energetic for his age. He doesn’t only lack charisma, but his senility is eerily reminiscent of Trump.
Sanders’ stage demenour is alien and off putting to me. I don’t see charisma in him, any more than Warren. Politically, he has a target audience, and so does Biden, but Warren could theoretically cover those both from between.
Bloomberg is creepy rich, and generally gives the air of a rightwinger pretending to be centrist. That alone makes him eerily reminiscent of Trump, not to mention the smell of corruption and sleaze.
Apparently, I was ninja’ed ny Bloomberg. Cool.
@Hambeast
You are one of the few cool Boomers that is self-aware enough that, whilst you may not have personally contributed to these problems, the rest of your peers have been hellbent on wrecking the planet. Kudos.
Ugh, I remember that trash right after Obama won and his whole plead to let the country “heal”. And then right after that the Tea Party happened, the Voting Rights Act was gutted, he became the most filibustered president in history and republicans embraced fascism.
You know what happened in Iceland aftet the 2008 crisis? They jailed their bankers and criminals, and haven’t had a problem with those fuckers since.
You know what happened after the Odebrecht scandal hit our shores and we realized every last one of our living presidents, and some candidates, had received bribes?
We jailed them all (minus Alan García who blew his brains out last year, as he was getting arrested), and guess what? The Far Right in Peru is all but destroyed and the country is progressing and growing. There is absolutely no downside whatsoever to jailing criminal politicians and mafia members.
As a matter of fact, jailing the aforementioned substantially increases the quality of your representatives and makes sure to cut out the middlemen and plutocrats out of the decision-making process. For the first time in years we are finally seeing the light and the powerful are losing influence, left, right and center.
Who would’ve thought Rule of Law was so important, right? Perhaps that’s why politicians in the US are entirely against enforcing it.
Really good analysis, if anyone is interested
https://twitter.com/AlexandraErin/status/1235215800967016452?s=19
@Diego Duarte
I would love to see Trump in jail, but even if he loses in 2020 he’s unlikely to end up behind bars. It is best to punish the corrupt, but if America did that we would be in a very different country today. Probably much better in many ways.
I said my piece on Wonkette, a home of the online Warren supporters, outlining the stakes going forward. It was not met well.
This is really a mask-off moment for me. Being Canadian, I have no direct influence on events transpiring south of the border, but what I’m seeing is a lot of people I thought were interested in progressive policy actually gleeful that the viable progressive candidate is losing.
I’m used to progressives losing in Canada. Our Overton Window is a little more balanced than that down south, but the manufactured consensus of the natural governing parties leave little room for viable progressive challenge. Here the US has a golden opportunity and they’re throwing it away.
For what? “Electability” against Trump? Has he damaged progressive psyches so much that they can’t even stand on their own principles?
I think that’s the big disappointment. Candidates and voters are who they are. Setting them aside, those that I thought understood the magnitude, the gravity of the challenges ahead: climate change, economic upheaval, mass migration as a result of both, they’ve demonstrated they’re more invested in settling scores than actually advocating for the changes necessary for basic human survival.
@ moggie
bernie is just an overwhelmingly better candidate for the part of the electorate warren thought she could compete with him for.
it’s not her competence per se, although it, along with how she chooses to emphasize it, is closely related to why she isn’t appealing to more voters. she’s not a leftist but a liberal technocrat. a lot of people who use none of those terms are very aware of the difference on an instinctive level, and to them any technocrat is part of what is wrong with the world and not someone who can help change things for the better. it also doesn’t help that she is bad at addressing the public. her public speaking skills are geared toward a different kind of context and audience. from a certain type of voter’s perspective she often comes off as quite condescending and sometimes insincere, which are the two worst possible things to come off as for winning that type of voter’s trust.
can’t say how much her poor presentation interacts with her being a woman. definitely she is judged more harshly than a man would be. but when you compare her to bernie or aoc, politicians who don’t have the same problem, the difference should be obvious.
@Katamount
Must we go down this route again? We’ve had this same conversation before.
@Katamount
Pitching in to help because some people are fucking ridiculous. I definitely understand Warren voters, because she also has a rich history of fighting against establishment politics and doing so effectively, but Biden? Get the fuck out of here with that grade “A” fucking nonsense!
Not to mention being hypocritical enough to demand the most subservient loyalty of anti-establishment people, whilst at the same time bashing them at every turn and blaming them if they lose.
@Diego Duerte
It makes perfect sense to me.
See, conservativism isn’t really about preserving the status quo so much as reverting it back to an earlier and supposedly better one. Centrism, on the other hand, actively embraces the status quo and allows changes to it only grudgingly if at all.
They might talk about slow and incremental change, but that’s smoke and mirrors- what they really mean is that they’re so terrified that change will disrupt their current easy life or immediately cause the end of the world that they’d rather try in vain to keep everything frozen in time, even when doing so will eventually cause them to lose even more than they might have otherwise.
IMO, the chief reason that they’re the main opposition to the right and not the left is at least in part because most people who oppose the right aren’t willing to give up all of their nice things to do so. While it’s understandable if rather selfish, that by definition means they shouldn’t be complaining when their refusal to sacrifice anything beyond trivialities comes back to haunt them.
But unfortunately the probability of changing their views through orthodox means is slim at best- while I would prefer it to be otherwise, the most successful countermeasure now would likely involve considerable discord if not outright bloodshed. At the worst? This planet has supported life long before humans showed up in situations that are incomprehensibly extreme by our standards, and it will continue to do so long after we go extinct.
@Naglfar
Nope, I’ve said my piece. I’ll leave it at that.
@Anonymous
I agree with your analysis, however I do have a particular gripe with this:
Why is it that this sort of galaxy-brained, philosophical thoughts come most from first world citizens, whereas all of us in the so-called third world are more desperate to survive?
Could it be because we are getting saddled with a problem we did not cause and have almost no control over? Could it be because us, in the Global South, will be (already are in some cases) the first ones having to reckon with the consequences of your decisions? Could it be, because you are already aware that the wealth of your nations will insulate you from these changes, while the rest suffers?
Misanthropic thoughts such as these, more often than not, hide xenophobic, classist and/or racist undertones; because of the disproportionate effects these reckless policies have on developing nations. So I’ll ask you not to trivialize the matter. There are several thousand million of us which do not want to die and fuck off the face of the Earth, just because of a few reckless, selfish idiots.
@Katamount
Wow, the Biden thread. I thought differently of Wonkette’s audience but holy hell. The amount of Biden fans is staggering, how in the world could they possibly be cheering that guy as a candidate, whilst shitting on the two progressives left?
Someone stop the planet. I want to get off.
Katamount,
Please fucking stop. Warren is the only who made holding the Trump administration accountable part of her campaign. Even Bernie doesn’t show much of an appetite for it as his focus is healthcare.
If you have a problem with people boosting Biden on Wonkette take it up with them, but don’t come here snarling about Warren supporters, none of whom here on this site have been arguing that Trump shouldn’t be held accountable.
It’s seriously pissing me off that you keep doing this. And leaving a snarky comment in one thread, running away and doing the same thing in another thread is shitty troll behavior.
@Diego Duerte
I cannot (and do not particularly want to) speak for everyone who has shared similar sentiments to my own. But in my case it’s more like bitter resignation on my part in the hopes that taking a longer view will be less psychologically damaging than throwing up my hands and saying “we’re already dead and we just don’t know it yet”.
I had no part in making the decisions that made the global South what it is, and as much as I would wish them to be changed my status as just one random voter out of millions in a party which couldn’t give a fuck about the global South (as opposed to the one that openly hates its continued existence) in a country that’s basically a plutocracy anyhow, my hands are tied.
What else can I do, wish that I was born to some ultra-rich family with superhuman charisma and the people skills I have never possessed? Or maybe just give up completely and spend most of my existence either pretending roughly half of the world doesn’t matter or lock myself into a state of constant mourning over how past generations have doomed us with no way out? I already went through the “hope and change” song and dance before when I bought into Obama’s hype and now I know it just brings more bitter disappointment, so it’s now either the philosophical approach or despair. Which of those would you prefer?
@WWTH
Seconding all of this. I don’t even read Wonkette, so I and other commenters here shouldn’t have to hear people vent about other people I don’t know just because I like the same candidate as the other people.
@Anonymous
My apologies, I do admit that I’m a bit pissed given the current results, which seem to indicate that, even if Biden somehow manages to pull a miracle, we will continue to live in a status quo.
As for my very, specific and particular petition, I simply don’t want people to trivialize the matter. I get that you’re in no position to change the course of your country by yourself, but making light of it still rubs me, and others, the wrong way. And rightfully so because, as I already mentioned, we’re essentially getting saddled with these decisions.
It’s easy to say “well, we’re gonna go exctinct anyway” and another one entirely to bear witness as civilization starts collapsing around you. Shit doesn’t collapse overnight, it collapses in increments and every last stretch makes it all more drawn out and painful.
@Anonymous : remember that wiping definitely all life on Earth is an actual possibility, because the Earth can become like Venus and be 400°C with sulfuric acid rain. It’s even the most probable outcome currently, but mostly because of general apathy.
The problem with nihilist / resigned take like that is that often, they are physically wrong. As in, they misinterpret natural event and believe they will neatly fit into a specific worldview, and reality isn’t polite enough to change to fit philosophy.
As for me, I do think a lot of people overestimate the importance of who exactly will be president. It’s not enough to elect, say, Warren or Bernie Sander ; it’s also not the end of the world to elect Biden if you follow up by making sure left wing people go into the Senate and Lower Court. If you want the system to change, the focus need to be on the big picture, because the system was written to need a lot of people to push the government in a given direction.
I take a sort of Pascal’s wager view. If we don’t do something then we’re definitely stuffed. If we do do something then we might still be stuffed; but then again we might get everything back on track. So might as well try.
Personally I think if we can keep things going until the Greta generation take over we’ve probably got this.
This chap puts it better.
@Diego Duerte
Even from my comparatively comfortable position in the first world, I see the signs that things are already faltering- and when that happens all I can do is go to ground and hope that I outlast the worst of it so I can help rebuild from the ashes of our current society. Which I don’t actually expect, mind you- I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a coward and have no survival skills to speak of.
@Ohlmann
I don’t think it’s going to be that bad- humans will likely go extinct before the earth reaches that point (which ironically will ultimately undo the damage eventually since there won’t be anything left to cause it). Life managed to survive the Permian Extinction that wiped out roughly 90-96% of all existing species at the time, and I believe it can do so again.
You do have a point about the Senate and courts though, although I shudder to imagine how Trump would react to being in 2012-2016 Obama’s place. It might even be better to focus on the local levels where the corrupt federal systems will have the least control; again, ironic that the same “state’s rights” horseshit that got us into this mess in no small part might actually get us out of it too.
@Anonymous
Humans aren’t the only thing which can cause damage—plenty of natural disasters could take a toll post-extinction. So I wouldn’t say damage would be undone, but things would change.
The thing about courts is that Biden would be unlikely to make many good court appointments even if we had a Democrat Senate to let him do it. Anyone he picks would be too center to have a good effect.
@WWTH
You’re right, you’re right. I’ll stop.
@anonymous : if mankind release too much greenhouses gases, the result will actually increase instead of returning to the mean, hence the Venus scenario, which *is* unsurvivable by anything. It actually have started to have some positive feedback, so if humans all dies immediatly, there’s a real risk that the planet will be fucked anyway.
That’s exactly the kind of belief I think of when I say people don’t look reality but try to make it fit their belief. Sure, you can believe all you want that the humans are too insignificant to permanently scare the planet. You can believe that the Permian catastrophe has to be worse than what is currently happening no matter what. But it’s not like it change the fact the current events are unprecedented and have a high likelihood to effectively destroy the biosphere.
Similarly, there’s a lot more reason to think that most of mankind damage will continue after our demise than reasons to think it will suddenly stop. Plastic don’t spontaneously disappear, the carbon don’t automatically go back into the ground, and radioactive waste don’t stop being radioactive because nobody is here to check it out.
@Nagalfar
They would, yes. But short of the moon crashing into the earth it’s highly unlikely to destroy life entirely.
Also, @Ohlmann
The current IPCC consensus is that a Venus-like greenhouse effect isn’t going to happen even with human “help”. So you have that.
https://web.archive.org/web/20181109070930/http://www.ipcc.ch/meetings/session31/inf3.pdf
@Anonymous
Well, eventually the sun will destroy the earth and that will be the end of life regardless. So there’s that. It’s not the same as Venus, but eventually all life will be destroyed.
@ ohlmann
ipcc is consistently biased toward overly conservative, “non-alarmist” views. it’s basically written into their rules.