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

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?

if ows posed no threat of violence you certainly wouldn't have known it from watching tv

obv there are certain factors that make blm a whole lot scarier to some people

agree w djp that there is a lot more occupy-->blm continuity than the These Are The White Leftists; These Are The Black Leftists categories allow for; i also think that bernie really did respond well to blm's criticisms, and black people not switching from hillary by the millions in six months is not some kind of damning referendum on his hopeless whiteness. certainly blm activists are not hostile to economic-justice ideas; its not as if their success comes at the expense of socialism. i think what we've seen over the past few years is a flourishing of leftist activism + a slow and heavily resisted reintroduction of leftist ideas into the Serious sphere, and which bernie's surprisingly good run is an example of this trend, not a culmination of it, regardless of how everybody's facebook friends are acting.

the next one down is sitting president ford staving off reagan in 1976 and look where the party went after that.

i've thought cautiously of this parallel too.

Whether it's Trump or Hills, this is the fist time we can say Reagan's dead.

Then we all diem

um i wrote that paragraph about three different ways and decided to use them all i guess

hopefully bernie will bring everyone to tears at the convention, then lie for years about having last-second improvised it

have we discussed Trumps anti-Hilary ad where she goes "arf! arf! arf! arf!" like she's in the freakin' dog police

i said "this is going to be really unpleasant" and then we all comforted ourselves with some good ol intra-left bickering

heh

dog police?

Dog police https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0359hSerDeE

for Morbz: http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnzogby/2016/03/16/rest-in-peace-to-the-republican-party/#16bfb2bf6fe3

Wait, there's a serious call for Paul Ryan to run for ... president? As a third party? As what? How would that work? I mean, it'd be good, right, because he would split the vote? And also because it would be extra funny, because http://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/daily/intel/2012/10/11/11-paul-ryan-time-p90x.w245.h368.jpg

Wait, there's a serious call for Paul Ryan to run for ... president? As a third party? As what? How would that work? I mean, it'd be good, right, because he would split the vote? And also because it would be extra funny, because 🗻

Here come the RyanBros

paul ryan is a douche but he's not fucking stupid, he's not going to do that

paul ryan wouldn't waste his presidential bid this year. he is too ambitious. he is going to try to run in 2024 or something like that.

it is kinda funny that the muppet-faced doofus Ryan is actually the soothing potential candidate everybody wants now

but yea, not gonna happen

they're going to go with trump. good for them, they deserve it

maybe they'll change the rules to where in a contested convention, whomever can win a round robin 1-on-1 basketball tourney is the nominee

or maybe they will arrange for trump to be killed and then, at the convention, newt gingrich will come onstage and do one of these

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ7RvRPCSWM

what do people think will happen to trump when he loses the general? is he going to go back to his previously annoying ways or is he going to linger around stenching up the US with political forays?

he is going to die because he is 70 years old, doesn't exercise, and subsists on a diet of grease, sugar, and bile

will return to Castle Greyskull