Il Douché and His Discontents: The 2016 Primary Voting Thread, Part 4

fundamentally changing national political power structures

lol are u guys for real. it's all-or-nothing with you isn't it?

ok Shakey is an Occupy-denier aqs well

anything so they get to handwave

kind of amazing Bernie was a successful 2-term mayor of Burlington while completely ignoring infrastructure, resources, coordination, funding, and goals

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Wednesday, March 16, 2016 4:28 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lmao have u been to burlington dude

there are 42,000 people in burlington

i have been to burlington. pretty awesome place. if my city had air that fresh i would love it.

a busy lefty like Big HOOS will save us bcz he stays off these idiotic threads?

Occupy was a promising but ultimately disappointing exercise

xp

I will happily review a list of Occupy's accomplishments if anyone has one

"on cnn after rubio drops out begala basically accuses rubio of being the john edwards of 2016 and the panel reacted like he farted in church. is it really that bad of a comparison? seems apt to me."

Unless there is a Rubio sex scandal I'm not aware of I'd say that comparison is kinda strange.

brought inequality into the national discussion

xp

I don't know if BLM would have been as organized and successful as it has been without Occupy reigniting people's interest in wide-scale grassroots activism.

nearly made Wall Street scumfucks shit their pants for a year

yes Occupy helped built up some of that left infrastructure

I will happily review a list of Occupy's accomplishments if anyone has one

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, March 16, 2016 4:39 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is just off the top of my head but a recent presidential primary has been driven to a substantial degree by young, engaged voters fired up about the issue of income inequality, the wall street bailout, and policies that revolve around taxing wall street to redress economic-justice issues. others may be able to add to this list though.

basically what y'all said

helped Greater NYC significantly post-Sandy when FEMA was paralyzed

I haven't read about any connections between BLM and Occupy, would be interested to see more on that. I think BLM benefits from v clear goals and v specific incidents to rally around, which Occupy lacked.

2008 Bailout yo

v clear goals ... which Occupy lacked

sudden wave of nostalgia

flopson we have another hawaii correspondent but she only posts in the wwe thread

not reallly sure the wall street scumfucks really shit their pants over anything

It seems kinda weird to count a failed primary challenge as a success for Occupy. To me, anyway. I know issues have to be raised in a national dialogue before they can be addressed in a concrete way, but it's really the latter that matters most, and frankly income inequality is not being addressed legislatively and I'm not convinced that all this increased dialogue is going to amount to much without, y'know, winning elections. Which goes back to my point about the necessity of infrastructures etc. to achieve down-ballot election victories, mount successful primary challenges, get bills introduced and passed. The actual mechanics of politics.

xp

not reallly sure the wall street scumfucks really shit their pants over anything

I saw the fear in those pricks' eyes at their windows as we were marching.

like if you guys think Occupy, and by extension Bernie's candidacy, is going to push Hillary's legislative priorities to the left to address income inequality... man, idk. I wouldn't bet on it. It's possible.

xp

not reallly sure the wall street scumfucks really shit their pants over anything

there's a prostitution joke lurking here but it feels really dickish to make it

her rhetoric will probably tack that way in the general, but I wouldn't be super-confident that that will be backed up by action

xxp

Again, I do agree it's all going nowhere and things will only change, and for the worse, when the Extinction Event comes full-bore.

was deblasio a product of occupy?

oh nothing is going to push Hillary to the left. she already voted for the Iraq War, The Patriot Act, and the bailout, she's pretty much a lost cause.

but the lost causes are the vital ones, as Mr Smith said to Claude Rains xxp

the perception that he was an extreme lefty, maybe. xp

oh nothing is going to push Hillary to the left.

so... a real success for Occupy and Bernie then

I feel bad having to handhold you guys through these conclusions here I mean come on

you are defining success by how it affects Hillary's campaign

my overarching point is that at some point the left has to move past the goal of getting people talking about stuff and get their hands dirty getting people to actually vote for stuff.

lol that is the exact thing HRC told BLM when she met them.

uh the system is broken and the kleptocracy has drones

oh nothing is going to push Hillary to the left. she already voted for the Iraq War, The Patriot Act, and the bailout, she's pretty much a lost cause.

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Wednesday, March 16, 2016 4:50 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

iirc her voting record in the senate was to left of most democrats

lol that is the exact thing HRC told BLM when she met them.

BLM has a great candidate for mayor in Baltimore and most likely played a key role in removing two DA's who failed to appropriately prosecute cases, among other things. afaik Bernie doesn't have any allies slated to win anything, and Occupy never focused on legislative or electoral goals.

"was deblasio a product of occupy?"

does anyone like him?

iirc her voting record in the senate was to left of most democrats

― marcos, Wednesday, March 16, 2016 4:58 PM (40 seconds ago)

i'm getting a little tired of the is-hillary-a-progressive-or-not arguments -- at this point people should probably have their minds made up -- but being the 11th most liberal senator is not really that impressive if you're representing new york

yeah sure but nobody here is actually mounting the "move hillary to the left" argument, right? so why linger on it?

i think the party/country spending six to nine months arguing around terms of income inequality, wealth inequality, "the 1%", big-money influence on electoral politics, and the pros and cons of redistributive measures is a good thing. sorry. i don't need to wait to see the end-result legislation getting signed to say "this is a positive development," just as i don't need to see President Trump in office building his wall to look at his campaign of vitriol, violence and bigotry to say "this is a negative development."

i for one look forward to the conventional-wisdom "safe" positions of cowardly middle-of-the-road positions running for minor office becoming "well you gotta say you're for taxing wall street, i mean come on" instead of that being taken as basically the position of a dead-in-the-water fringe communist student radical. america's parents at america's dinner tables can talk about something other than dinky tax credits for "the middle class." this is not a failure.

yeah OWS very clearly brought economic inequality into the mainstream conversation in a meaningful way. that's an accomplishment in itself. i'm very pro-BLM but you could make the same arguments about how it hasn't gotten anything "done". you're cherry-picking

iirc her voting record in the senate was to left of most democrats

― marcos, Wednesday, March 16, 2016 4:58 PM (40 seconds ago)

i'm getting a little tired of the is-hillary-a-progressive-or-not arguments -- at this point people should probably have their minds made up -- but being the 11th most liberal senator is not really that impressive if you're representing new york

― k3vin k., Wednesday, March 16, 2016 5:03 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

im not saying it is particularly impressive, i just think the hyperbole around her is kind of absurd

like some bernie dude i know literally adds a #hilaryiscorporatepersonhood hashtag to every FB post he makes on politics

(i admit though than bringing up every FB post made by idiot friends to support arguments isn't great)

yeah OWS very clearly brought economic inequality into the mainstream conversation in a meaningful way. that's an accomplishment in itself. i'm very pro-BLM but you could make the same arguments about how it hasn't gotten anything "done". you're cherry-picking

my point is that BLM is mobilized around v specific goals, and it's showing signs of success already. Electoral gains, actions from the justice dept., convictions, etc. OWS and Bernie have not, because they were/are shitty at organizing and achieving goals.

i think the party/country spending six to nine months arguing around terms of income inequality, wealth inequality, "the 1%", big-money influence on electoral politics, and the pros and cons of redistributive measures is a good thing. sorry.

i do, too. and if her opponent was anyone other than trump, the chances of those topics dominating the conversation would be higher. but trump obviously has a way of bending all media coverage to whatever he wants to talk about, so most of those topics (except for "big-money influence on electoral politics", which he sometimes brings up as a way to deflect criticism that he donated to causes deemed heretical to conservatives) don't seem likely to gain much traction

re "liberal senator" scoreboards: statistics, damned lies, etc

had some long post about BLM being associated with a threat of violence/riots (which OWS and Bernie never have been) being tied to political effectiveness but my thoughts about it are a bit muddled... there's something there though, I think. Maybe about how it has framed the political calculus of BLM's goals as political accommodation vs. urban destruction, with institutions and voters siding for the former.

yeah what an awesome liberal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_Protection_Act_of_2005

if her opponent was anyone other than trump, the chances of those topics dominating the conversation would be higher.

i was counting backwards! the conversation has been going on!

i dunno i'm very much in the camp of, my entire life as far back as i was aware of politics, the discourse has been totally dominated by reagan/clinton attitudes about the role of government and the role of corporations. everyone here is used to it by now maybe, but: i think it is kind of blindingly huge news that a cranky old socialist, talking about jacking up taxes on the rich to pay for enormous new entitlements, has held possibly the most 'inevitable' candidate in years and years down to 57.8% of the democratic primary vote so far (a number which might plausibly go down further). (this particular silver chart is kinda helpful to put that in perspective. the next one down is sitting president ford staving off reagan in 1976 and look where the party went after that.) so far, counting primaries and not caucuses, nearly six million people have walked into a voting booth and chosen the income-redistributing big-government socialist. history books may well record that as the most important political development of 2015-2016 depending what ultimately happens with trumpism.

and again: how many of those are first-time voters? how different will the range of allowable choices look to you throughout the rest of adulthood when the first vote you cast is Socialist 4 Prez?