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

he does do a good job wif the nicks

morbz fan here.

awwww :)

btw i am really really sorry Sanders is boring some of you with the wholesale theft of everything by the richies who own our government!

I voted for the dude. not my fault the rest of my state didn't follow suit.

no matter who wins the democratic nomination, if the democrats win the presidency, citizens united is sure to be gutted by SCOTUS anyway, no? that's in the case Obama can't ever nominate his last judge.

I remember this being good on the anti anti-science stuff

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/08/the-new-scientism/

If it's actually bad then I apologise

Sanders in Wash Sq Park next Wednesday night

doing sk8board tricks

poppin wheelies, eatin vegan food, gettin arm tats

cool new york jokes dudes

yeah sorry i regretted that instantly

it's okay i would blame the last 2 years of New Yorker covers.

Trump is fucked

Maybe i'll go see sanders. I wonder if the pigeon guy will be there. What does he do when the park gets massively crowded?

Some nerdy beardo explaining convention rules to lawrence o'donnell brian williams and rachel maddow, all of whom are acting intrigued, like they are improbably just learning about this now. maybe thats true of brian williams

Some nerdy beardo

Sage Francis?

Chris matthews has the same odd blonde old man hair trump has. What is this about? Is it dyed?

Ben Ginsberg. They should do an hour on this stuff. The rules are what the delegates decide they are after the delegates vote on the rules base upon the rules committee's official rules, barring a minority statement on alternate rules based upon 25% of the rules committee delegates agreeing to create one, based upon the rules, and the Louisiana delegate meeting where Trump's invitations got lost in the mail. Plus hookers slipping mickeys to delegates in Cleveland hotels to prevent signing off on the nominees (that discussion was implied in my living room).

xpost

https://twitter.com/speechboy71/status/717175557096673280

i like the picture of sanders there, he looks like a total dumbass. go back to the retirement home, you kooky old piece of shit. amiright, daily news?

xpost

https://twitter.com/tcote/status/717382056481800193

if they want people to take the article seriously, they should pick better photos.

this just reminds me that /all/ of our choices for president are essentially terrible, although naturally by no means /equally/ terrible

good night everybody!

Wow what an irritating twat this Michael Cohen is - his tweets reveal that he too has no idea what he's talking about. Who is he?

yeah i don't give a shit about michael cohen but the bernie interview /was/ pretty embarrassing and cohen's takeaways from it were mostly pretty valid

anyway back to the humor section:

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/716222480738869248

i mean i don't think you can successfully explain away bernie's answers in that interview by reference to how irritating/lame michael cohen is

I'm a bernie supporter but I think his insistence on the moral culpability of the corporations and banks is misguided. The issue is coporations and private banks are existentially required to maximize profit by any legal means necessary. It's bleak but it's what they do, otherwise we wouldn't call them corporations. Politicians who don't reign them in, or are compromised by their lobbyist money or whatever, are far more culpable, because they are supposed to work in the public interest.

Basically you can't expect capital to work for the interests of labor-- that's why labor needed to get organized to improve their circumstances. That's why so many people in history have wanted to abolish capitalism.

cool shit twitter account speechboy71, one to watch in 2016

do you mean moral culpability of individual actors? or the institutions?

cool shit twitter account speechboy71, one to watch in 2016

― hunangarage, Wednesday, April 6, 2016 1:16 AM (42 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

man, every other post on ILX is such garbage these days

much like... a twitter feed, i suppose

As a rhetorical tactic the talk if jailing bankers is I guess effective, but that kind of thing wouldn't strike at the root of the global forces that are dispossessing and angering the working class. And I am skeptical that there is a lot that could be done on the trade agreement front without causing unexpected consequences.

is "moral culpability" really the center of sanders's attack on "big banks"? if it was, wouldn't he be aiming primarily and punishing the individuals responsible? (which is part of his "plan," such as it is, but not the one he insists upon most vocally)

i feel like sanders does diagnose the problems as structural ones to the extent that someone making a serious run for national political office in the USA can

a problem is that the diagnosis isn't very sophisticated

do you mean moral culpability of individual actors? or the institutions?

― wizzz! (amateurist),

Both. Capitalism is amoral. It's hard to reign in. It wreaks havoc. I don't know if things would be so different if it was only good people leading these profit maximizing organizations, who need to maintain their edge however they can or else become unprofitable and die.

right, of course -- i just can't imagine that line of argument getting a politician anywhere

it's just too dispassionate

rein, treezy!

(btw just to return to an earlier theme, i think many of michael cohen's critiques of sanders and his campaign are whiny and silly. i happen to think his pointing out how dumb sanders sounded in the NYDN interview was completely valid.)

Sanders sometimes offers a structural critique but then also sometimes sesms to point to "greed" as a problem, which seems sort of like it misses the point.

Lol sorry k3v

Both. Capitalism is amoral. It's hard to reign in. It wreaks havoc. I don't know if things would be so different if it was only good people leading these profit maximizing organizations, who need to maintain their edge however they can or else become unprofitable and die.

but don't both clinton and bernie's plans at least propose to resolve the structural problems that enable banks to engage in bad behaviors? doesn't that acknowledge that the problems aren't primarily about individual bad actors but about the about of leeway that we allow the financial sector?

xposts!

i mean they are basically making arguments for structural reforms but draping them in the language of moral culpability, which is basically a technique to win elections

The politician <---> lobbyist profession makes diagnosing capitalism/govt as two separate problems silly. (in our time and place.)

yeah i don't give a shit about michael cohen but the bernie interview /was/ pretty embarrassing and cohen's takeaways from it were mostly pretty valid

It was pretty disappointing to me, too, as a non-citizen who had felt excited enough by him to volunteer a bit. I think I still prefer him to the other options but that says as much about how I feel about the other options.

Also, I haven't seen much about this: has anyone talked or written about whether/how the welfare state Sanders is proposing would be affordable without drastic reductions in US military spending (or, if not, how much he'd be willing to cut the military)? This seems like the most obvious difference between the US and most other First World countries. I'm no economist but Canada is just managing to maintain a single-payer health care system that covers less than what he's suggesting while spending about 27% as much on the military relative to GDP (by Wikipedia numbers). Even our leftist parties don't talk about free tuition.

Even our leftist parties don't talk about free tuition.

(Actually, I think the Green Party does, tbf.)

That's one of the things I have with Bernie. He's very vague about his plans, like he goes from 1 to 5 and skips 2, 3, 4. Like, "well, we just need a revolution among the people!" and that's great and everything, but has he seen what things are like here lately? I like the spirit of what he talks about, but his moments of magical thinking make me cringe whenever I hear them.

OK, looking at World Bank numbers, Canadian health care spending relative to GDP is about 64% of the US's so maybe there's a case that health care expenditures could fall more generally under single-payer? Is that the expectation?

i'm fine with voting for virtue moving in the right direction that will never happen

bcz the Clintons have shit in their veins

the expectation is yes, that spending falls under single payer. but you know, if anyone can fuck that up, it's the US

daria-g:

all these "trump campaign losing momentum, in disarray" stories are just preparation for the "trump campaign amazing comeback, genius"

The Story Has To Change. Just as Clintonian inevitability was a story, which needed to change to Unexpected Surge of Populist Challenger. Which needed to change to WTF? A Socialist Has No Chance, which needed to change to OMG Can He Really Have a Chance? Which needed to change to Clinton Fights Sanders Insurgency, which needed to change to Sanders Closing The Gap, which needed to change to Clinton Roaring Back, which needed to change to ZOMG Sanders Scores Major Upset, which will change to But Clinton Still Leads in Delegates, and so on.