According to Politico, I’m a “Sarah Silverman Democrat“, or a Bernie Sanders supporter who was able to cheerfully switch to supporting Hillary Clinton…or, as I prefer to think of it, someone who is aspirational but pragmatic at the same time.
But I’ll take the title. The alternative to voting for Clinton, obviously, is simply ridiculous.
There’s nothing “aspirational” about supporting yet another rich, privieged, crochety old white man whose “revolution” was composed of privileged white mysogynists, who was funded mainly by Republican and foreign money, who was supported by Karl Rove’s superPAC, whose message found absolutely no purchase among women, colored people and sexual minorities, who chums up to the Pope and the NRA, who dismisses Pland Parenthood and the Human Rights Campaign as “the Establishment” (more “establishment” than the Catholic Church I guess) and who regards a woman’s right to bodily self-determination as a “distraction”.
Try “asspirational”.
This is one of the downsides of having a leader elected directly. There is little margin for error.
I’ve noticed that the US (and the UK) seem to favor winner takes alle contests on all levels.
In Denmark we have a ridiculously complex voting system, but the upside is that not all seats in parliament are decided on a head to head contest, but are awarded on the basis of the general vote.
in general you vote for a person or a party. If you vote for the part, the vote is counted according to how the party has configured the list of people on the partys list.
Within each district, the party – or person – with the most votes get the mandate, and it is assigned according to the rules chosen by the party before the election. Either the number 1 on the list gets the mandate, or the person on the partys list with the most personal votes get its.
Districts are placed in circuits, and within these extra ,mandates are assigned based on the total number of votes given to each party. The rules for this are complex, but the upshot is that if a party is “cheated” on the aggregate vote count, it gets a chance to pick up a seat in the circuit.
Above this are grand circuits, that work like circuits, by assigning extra mandates. So if a party has got a small but not insignificant vote count across the country, they will most probably pick up a seat in in the grand circuits.
The upshot is, that after the election, the parties represented by the 175 members of parliament are represented roughly in line with the share of the votes the parties got nationally.
That means that as long as a party is above the 2% minimum limit nationally it will get in parliament, even though it wins no single contest in a local district. Furthermore votes are not wasted, if you live in a conservative district, your votes still counts nationally, and gerrymandering is less of an issue.
I am not saying it is perfect, and I appreciate that it is based on the fact that our system of government is based in Parliamentarism.
The strength in this case would be that if there is a splitting as we see, then 5 percent of the vote could go to the llibertarian party, 3 percent to the green, and both Sanders and Clinton could be elected for parliament. Who would get to be Prime Minister would be based on both party politics, and on the need to make sure no majority is against the cabinet.
In Denmark the cabinet leader is found by all parties pointing to a leader of negotiations after an election, this leader will then negotiate with alle parties as to who they will support, and what they would demand in return. When the leader is satisfied that a stable majority has been found, he or she will announce the new prime minister (usually the leader), who then has to present a cabinet
whoah. did not know that. OMG. Really? Rove’s superPAC funded Bern? Inconceivable (used not sarcastically). yuk
I knew Bern was grumpy like your favorite grandad complaining about how the kids are driving the car. But those tidbits paint him completely different to me. ~garsh~
There is reason to prefer Democrats as an opposition party. Heinous
policies they opposed under Bush they supported under Obama. Under Clinton
we could be looking at bipartisan Bush foreign policy.
Under Trump there would be fiercer opposition than under Bush. From both
parties.
And both parties would be forced to reform.
Re #1, it’s good to know that there are people as disconnected from reality among the Clinton loving crowd as the Bernie or Bust people.
There’s a lot of similarity between toxic Bernie supporters and Bernie bashers. When I went to volunteer training for the Bernie campaign, they emphasized that you had to let people join the campaign, you couldn’t force them. So they emphasized showing that our job was to make people aware that Bernie was running and had support, but to let people read the literature and watch Bernie for themselves. They hammered that it didn’t do any good to try and argue someone into supporting him. That didn’t stop people who wanted to harass and bully from doing so.
The Clinton campaign gets that they need to win over Bernie supporters as shown by the convention. Speaker after speaker has emphasized the (large) parts of Bernie’s platform shared by Hillary while praising the volunteers and voters who worked for him. That doesn’t stop people who prioritize bashing Bernie over winning the election from doing so.
Penalfire@4.
Thank you for your monumentally stupid, unsupported and uninformed opinion.
Citation needed.
Whenever somebody says the rethugs and the democrats are the same, I see one of two possibilities.
1) The person is so far out on the right or left their binoculars have no depth of field for the middle.
2) The person doesn’t pay attention to the fact that the president doesn’t dictate policy, but must work through Congress implement policy. And Congress doesn’t have to go along with the President. Americans seem to like stalemated government, and usually doesn’t give either party a clear and solid majority in both the House and Senate to support the President.
Bernie Sanders inspired at least 40% of self described democrats with his message and his practices. What the establishment and their sycophants fail to realize is that a significant percent of the rest of his support are people who hadlost interest in the political process and have little to no respect for either the democrats or their more evil cousins, republicans. Every Sanders supporter walking away from the democratic party right now is a lost opportunity that the Clinton machine should feel ashamed of. It’s their behavior and their treatment of Bernie Sanders that is driving them away. They certainly aren’t doing anything to inspire them to stay.
I’m saying this as a lifetime liberal, progressive who has supported mostly democratic candidates for years, but, even though I will probably vote for Clinton in November, am mostly doing so as a vote against trump. I will no longer support anyone just because they’re a democrat. It’s no longer an indication that their policies and personal beliefs are anywhere near mine.
According to the OP, I would be classified as a Sarah Silverman democrat. This past primary season I actively campaigned for Bernie Sanders and am now supporting Hillary Clinton. Although disappointed that Bernie didn’t become the democratic nominee, I am pleased that he and the supporters of the political revolution were able to positively and significantly influence the democratic party platform. Hopefully, the momentum of the revolution will continue and their aspirations of more progressive values realized.
This ^^^^
From what I see, Sanders has been treated well by the Democrats, having a major impact on their platform, and his inspiring new folks to start doing political work was called out by President Obama in his speech last night.
What did you really expect? That Sanders would somehow end up with the Presidential nomination?
I see the hard core Bernie supporters that are willing to burn everything to the ground as never really being on board in the first place. I think they fell in love with the idea of Bernie more so than what he actually stands for and find it difficult to face the reality that their guy got beat convincingly by Clinton, the delusion is pretty strong among them with supporters I know still holding out at the end thinking that the super delegates were going to flip and vote him in. This is mind you after he just endorsed Clinton the night before. I saw the writing on the wall after the New York primary, the numbers we so ridiculous for Bernie to get enough of the remaining votes given Clinton’s strong unwavering support among democratic primary voters. At least we had Michigan to get our hopes up and make it interesting for a few weeks, it was really the only outlier, but what an outlier it was. I’m pretty sure once we get to the election the numbers of holdouts will be of similar magnitude to other elections. There should really be less when you think about it. The level of adoption of Bernie’s platform into the Democratic platform was really quite striking.
As for the OP, I think “grown-ups” has a nice ring to it.
@ Stacy DeathSatan, 1
Ah, so it was all a conspiracy of rich “outsiders?” I knew there was something familiar about your trolling, and you’re better at hiding it than some, but you just can’t resist those Anti-Semitic dog whistles, can you.
What is it about Jewish people that’s so upsetting to bigots? That’s always puzzled me. Why not, say, left handed people, or people whose second toe is longer than their big toe? It would make just as much sense.
Oh boy, another person asserting that I must be a white misogynist dude for supporting Bernie in the primaries.
And yes, as a bisexual trans person, I do have problems with the HRC – they’ve been very trans-exclusionary in the past, they have a habit of supporting republicans over more LGBT friendly democrats in the name of ~cross party cooperation~, and they reek of “feel-good do-nothing” capitalist activism.
I don’t see anyone in the thread saying that. But the primaries are over now. Bernie didn’t win. He doesn’t get to be the nominee.
If anyone has actually, after being corrected, characterized you as a white dude based on your support of Bernie, that was shitty of them.
That said, equating the observation that a substantial subset of Bernie supports (I hereby dub them the “Let-It-Berners”) are white, male, demonstrably driven by a sense of entitlement arising from the privilege accompanying those categories, and prone to dribbling racist and sexist dogwhistles, with misgendering you specifically, is intellectually dishonest.
Uh, yes, I know. I am soundly in the “Vote Hillary if only to keep out Trump” camp, and have been since the second she started winning in the primaries.
I was referring to this part from @1
Devoid of any qualifiers – “mostly”, or “primarily” – that does read like the average Applehead “UGH ALL THESE WHITE MISOGYNIST BERNIE BROS ON PHARYNGULA” screed.
And yes, I do think those qualifiers are needed. If @1 actually meant to indicate that there was a lot of white male Bernie Bros rather than painting with an absurdly large brush like people like Applehead routinely do, they should fucking do it explicitly.
I’m so fucking tired of being implicitly misgendered here, and I’m no longer giving allowances for sloppy wording seeing as there are numerous drive by posters who do actually state that anyone who supported Bernie is a white male.
Okay, after a breather, I’m sorry for being so aggressive. I’m just used to people on this blog asserting that yes, indeed, only white males supported Bernie.
I admit that it could have just been poor wording on @1’s part, but I’m kind of loathe to assume the best out of random drive by Bernie-bashing posts by this point, seeing as there seems to be one about once a thread on the topic.
You are interpolating the “only.”
Indeed. Like I said, not giving the benefit of the doubt to random drive by anti-Bernie posts anymore. If they want it to not be read that way, they can use a qualifier.
I suppose it could be a dialectical difference, but I’ve never heard an unqualified “composed of x” that doesn’t imply “composed almost entirely of x” or “comprised solely by x.”
Either way, if @1 wants to clarify I’ll gladly mea culpa, but until then, experience tells me that reading it charitably is misguided.
vivec wrote @24:
ummm minor correction to the valid point you are trying to make and though it may sound like I’m objecting … {I fail at disclaimers}
Seth Meyers gave a good example of what you asked for.
A store with a sign “We Sell Lottery Tickets” is never taken to imply “We Sell ONLY Lottery Tickets”.
I agree with you, that that is not quite the same as seeing the implied “composed solely by” in “Supporters of A are [____] X”
but given that I can point this out means there might be some confusion.
argh maybe I’m inspiring such confusion by expressing it. mea culpa
@25
I guess what I mean is like, when its used insultingly, I’m used to something like “Raiders fans are a bunch of convicts” implying that being a Raiders fan probably makes you a convict.
Sure, it doesn’t explicitly say that every Raiders fan is a convict, but that seems to be the point of using that statement insultingly.
Meanwhile, objecting to blanket statements about “white people” or “men” with “BUT IT’S NOT ALL…”, or complaining that the statements don’t include qualifiers like “some,” is an irritating cliche at this point. I feel like a similar principle applies here: if there’s actually an observable general pattern, general statements are reasonable.
And I think that’s a silly quibble and a serious break I have with a lot of mainstream SJ discourse.
Qualifiers exist for a reason, and I don’t think that it’s wrong to expect people to use them when they are implying a qualifier. If you don’t mean all of a group, say that you don’t mean all of said group.
UK, same argument. Do you vote for a principle you want, or for a party that will get to be government? Well, we voted for the latter for years and years- just like Americans did- voting for Kinnock and Blair (Clinton the male etc. for you lot), and look what happened. When they got in, they thought they’d got in because they were vote winners, changing the world, that all that old social justice shite was just so last year, and they were so clever that they were the only ones to notice it. And went on to dig their personal gold in the public domain.
It’s worse here, and I suspect there too. They used to say, put up a monkey with a red rosette in Salford, and they (the electorate, the idiots) will elect him. So they did that, with the clever touch that they used the ordinary radicalism, idealism and community solidarity of these supporters to split the movement. They deliberately kept ethnic minorities separate- because they were useful in getting your candidates chosen, you could wheel out a block vote to trump your opponents’ choice. And when it came to Thatcherism, they (the smooth professional politicos) never spent time pointing out that oppression doesn’t respect ethnicity- break solidarity and you’ve broken the resistance of the old population and the new (sorry, better point out that most non- white commmunities in UK developed in my lifetime). And solidarity was broken. Now we’ve got employed hating unemployed, and white (unemployed or not) hating black or muslim (unemployed or not; and vice versa) because they can’t see that the problem is employment, housing, and rights, not white, muslim or black. How we get from here to anywhere good I can’t tell.
@Vivec, you’re not wrong. Putting aside the discussion over the validity of “not all” style objections, this is about erasure. It’s a similar problem to how movement atheists are all portrayed as straight, white cis males. There’s a big difference between talking about under representation and micro aggressive lines about Sanders supporters just being a bunch of white bros.
*Cross posted with the Moments of Political Madness thread.*
Interesting article from Reuters about the Progressive wing of the Democrats.
There is an active group within the party trying to make it more progressive. Now, what are those of you, who want a more progressive Democratic party, going to do in 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022, etc.? Sit back and moan about lack of choices, or get involved? The latter is the only way things will change.
As the DNC speakers have pointed out, change is hard, and won’t be done overnight. Your help might make the difference.
Per the OP:
Did I miss the “cheerful” bit attributed to PZ by the title?
Could someone point me to where PZ said he was “cheerful” about supporting Clinton?
I know I’m not.
I’m resigned – that’s one hell of a long way from “cheerful”.
If I’d wanted to cheer for Clinton, I would have tried to get a seat at the Convention.
Aspirations? One of my old favourites. Rather fitting too, in this dry season. For some reason, I always associated it with Dune, and here we are with Harkonnens versus Atreides.
I just want to point out that whats listed here in this bizarre, embarassing rant has not been demonstrated, or substantiated, with anything more than highly dubious anecdotal evidence.
To make a counter-anecodatal argument, I would say many if not most of the people I’ve seen asserting that Bernie supporters are more prone to be sexists or whatever are very gullible, and/or fundamentally bad-faith actors who are unaware of the role confirmation bias has played in shaping their views of Bernie supporters.
And really ? Its an act of white privilege to oppose the fabulously privileged white establishment politician who’s actions have left thousands of corpses all over the world, and who ascendance to the white house will leave many thousands more ?
In all honesty there is a very good chance I’ll vote for Clinton in November but I strenuously object to the idea that she gets a blank check on everything until 2021 just because she’s not as nuts as Trump. Right now if she has a divided party that’s her fault. Her handling of Wasserman Schultz was insulting and corrupt. Those are not the actions of someone looking to unite the party, they are the actions of someone wanting to encourage other people to do the same thing for her.
I don’t get the people that still want Bernie but I get the people cheering uncritically for Hillary even less. Eight years ago it was “Hope and Change” and we were betrayed by a “transparent” administration that was more viciously against whistleblowers than any in history, a “pro immigrant” administration that also broke records for deporting people, and aggressive drone warfare that sometimes hits the mark but often seems to have questionable results at best. This year the slogan they want me to get behind seems to be “We’ll say a few nice things but mainly: Hope for No Change” which is pretty ridiculous.
Wars in 7 countries, merciless prosecution of whistleblowers (unprecedented
under Obama), Presidential kill list (although that is unfair to Bush; that
was likely an Obama innovation), illegal surveillance, etc.
Plenty of things.
The neocons were lining up even before Trump. They are seizing Hillary as a
comeback opportunity.
Trump is not a respected member of the establishment. Democrats did resist
Bush, but tepidly, with deference.
Republicans are not falling in line behind Trump the way they did under
Bush. Plenty of them are openly declaring mutiny even if he wins the
presidency.
Republicans are already forced to reform. They are examining themselves.
We’ll see if anything happens. But there are endless op-eds about it.
Democrats would realize they cannot win with a warmongering mascot for Wall
Street. The lesser of two evils would not be good enough anymore.
While they didn’t learn anything from the loss in 2000, the loss here would
send a stronger message. No Nader to blame either.
All allegations, not ONE CITATION. Dismissed the rest of your evidenceless screed.
For starters:
Democrats supporting Obama policies opposed under Bush:
http://www.salon.com/2012/02/08/repulsive_progressive_hypocrisy/
https://theintercept.com/2015/08/06/obama-summarizes-record/
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jul/25/democratic-establishment-nsa
Neocons for Hillary:
https://theintercept.com/2016/07/25/robert-kagan-and-other-neocons-back-hillary-clinton/
http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/06/23/exclusive-prominent-gop-neoconservative-to-fundraise-for-hillary-clinton/
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/03/trump-clinton-neoconservatives-220151
Evidence that neocons were preparing to ally with Hillary *before* Trump:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/opinion/sunday/are-neocons-getting-ready-to-ally-with-hillary-clinton.html?_r=1
Republicans Examining Themselves Due to Trump:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trumps-america-1455290458
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/17/opinion/sunday/a-cure-for-trumpism.html
Deference to Bush and Bush Officials (Trump is less likely to be shielded by the gentleman’s agreement between Democrats and Republicans not to prosecute for high-level crime):
http://www.salon.com/2011/12/31/progressives_and_the_ron_paul_fallacies/
Open mutiny among Republicans against Trump if Trump wins:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/02/28/former-cia-director-military-may-refuse-to-follow-trumps-orders-if-he-becomes-president/
Whether or not it has been demonstrated or substantiated, it is the gist of the sentiment, which is being complained about, embodied in the use of phrases like “Bernie Bros” and the longhand statements that the person actually being addressed was objecting to.
Is it too much to ask that you dipshits read things before quoting them?
There’s an 80% chance I will be voting for Clinton. The 20% remaining depends on Johnson getting any traction and Clinton having a 99+% chance of winning my state. I am doing this only to openly reject Trump and the quasi fascist Trumpianism. The sort of nationalist xenophobic authoritarian popularism Trump has dug up is absurdly dangerous. It and those that support it must be defeated. In short I’m voting for Clinton to defeat the alt right and assholes like Vox Day.
And for no other reason.
It’s one thing to do this it’s quite another to do it “cheerfully.” Voting for Clinton cheerfully is the wrong moral stance.
Personally, I’m literally going to have to be drunk to do it. Clinton is such a terrible person.