END TO END BERNERS: The Official Bernie Sanders 2020 Crew thread

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAB2sf31mss

the reason why you can speculate on the intellectual/class/rhetorical traits of ilxors/columnists/twitter users is bc those mediums all have specific ways of functioning that prioritise some things over others and attract different sorts of ppl. massive national newspapers and tv stations are v obviously shaped by lots of forces that are inimical to wealth redistribution and grassroots politics, which is not to say those are the only relevant forces or that they're inescapable but accepting any media or set of institutions as a natural or permanent feature of the landscape is foolish

Not the same as using a monolithic term like The Media

we could go back to "the Fourth Estate"

écrasez l'infâme!

no most journalists do not lean "the system worked" are you guys morons do you actually read any newspapers??

the general public does not read papers, you condescending motherfucker.

adios

fp'd you for that, but you're gone from this thread, so I guess you'll never read this

what a bizarre discussion. what's happened to these threads?

two things can be true at once: (1) the mainstream political media can be, on balance, a force for good in democracy, and (2) it can to a degree be subject to the same reactionary forces that shape any powerful national institution. I know mordy and shakey have read some marx so this doesn't need to be a controversial statement

where you getting those scales from

lifted from the eyes of babes iirc

On the plus side, I can drop the “Democratic” from my tweets about why Socialism is good. 😉

— Briahna Joy Gray (@briebriejoy) April 8, 2020

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/us/politics/biden-sanders-democratic-voters.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur

this has some pretty incredible quotes, particularly for the "media doesn't matter!" crowd - my fave is the 69-year old saying she can 'wait four more years' on M4A and a Green New Deal because of Trump.

You have Medicare and you're gonna be dead before we need respirators to move through the wastelands, of course you can wait.

In retrospect it was bad to act like Trump is an unprecedentedly bad President, he’s actually pretty normally bad.

def now

He's the third or fourth worst Republican President of my lifetime!

most Presidents intentionally let a pandemic rage on because testing hurts his re-electability

here comes the Trump reclamation campaign, and his first term isn't even finished

and they make fun of libs for "reclaiming" Dubya

"Third or fourth worst Republican" isn't a reclamation, given that they should all be hung upside with their throats slit.

He's inarguably done less damage to humanity than Reagan or W, so it's really just about how you feel about Desert Storm/the Highway of Death vs. HW.

guessing for most people who'd weigh in, dead people in the Middle East count less of course

death to america

Yeah don’t worry I’m not rehabilitating Trump just putting all the other presidents on his level.

Yeah Iraq still easily trumps any trump thing so far

Cant tell if you guys are psyching yrselves up to vote for him or not

Which of them

Exactly

No one itt is voting for trump. No one on this board, even.

If the Greens want my vote they're going to have to openly accept Russian assistance.

Which ILXor is this?

We could have had President Elizabeth Warren. Then we could have had all the same policies and values but without the needlessly self-defeating ideological label.

Social Security, Medicare & every public goods program ever has been called "socialism" - by people OPPOSED to them.

— Mark Gubrud (@mgubrud) April 8, 2020

No one itt is voting for trump. No one on this board, even.

Roger Adultery might still be lurking ILM

What if Biden promises to take yr guns away

Strong zinger from Rapey Mo, but you need to update the xls buddy.

we aren't owed good journalism

so we're calling people Rapey Mo now?

For about fourteen years

are all tv chefs totally obnoxious twats?

coincidence that he decided today was the day to be all JUST ASKING QUESTIONS about sexual assault

self righteousness is a helluva drug

(posted with extreme self awareness!)

milo that is some deep xls

that's what it's called??

The Rachael Ray detail really makes it stick, unfortunately.

Bernie was too nice.

He’s going to get absolutely eviscerated, metaphorically. pic.twitter.com/1gMwAyUFe7

— Ryan, Perdido en TX (@RyanLostinTX) April 9, 2020

Look mate, get with the program, the only people who have a problem with Biden as they nominee are BernieBros™️ and incels. Oh and by the way it’ll be their fault too if Biden loses because his inability to speak in complete sentences somehow goes against him.

Bernie couldn’t go after his senility because he’s even older. That he’s showing no apparent decline wouldn’t matter.

Anyway, cross your fingers that the CIA will rent out the heart attack gun before the election.

I think "not showing apparent decline" kinda matters. Reckon it could've been done by not linking it to old age.

I'm really surprised at how hard-hit I've been by the Bernie thing. I like Bernie OK, but I'm not really a huge Bernie supporter, never have been. I don't put much stock in elections, at least not the way they're done here in America. I do find it very personally painful the way a lot of people, including people who identify as left and socialists, treat me when I say that I can't in good conscience vote for Biden.

I understand feeling hurt and betrayed because I feel that way too. What I am hurt by is this constant insistence on fear, guilt, and shame. I don't like it. I don't think it's good or right or healthy, and I am _really_ hurt by people blaming me for being unable to vote for someone "nominated" by a process that wasn't fair, free or open, a candidate who was decided on before the people who designed this fantastic process even asked me. I believe in voting as an act of radical intersectional solidarity, but I am just not in solidarity with the people who made Biden the Democratic candidate. I don't trust them to speak for me. I don't _want_ Joe Biden to speak for me!

And whenever I point that out the response is always Trump, Trump, Trump, personally blaming me for not being able to go along with this, for pointing out that the "lesser evil" is still evil and there are things other than evil in this world. I'm OK with compromise, I'm even OK with "Realpolitik" to an extent. This surpasses that extent. I will not vote for a candidate I do not trust who was nominated through a process that makes a mockery of the principles of democracy, _particularly_ not if the election I am expected to vote for him in is _another_ election where my vote doesn't count, a _completely different_ mockery of the principles of democracy.

The Republican Party and those who vote for it want me dead, whether they will admit to it or not. I don't talk to people who voted for Trump if I can avoid it, I moved across the country to a state that wasn't run by Republicans when Trump got elected. And yes, I was lucky, or "privileged" as certain people like to put it, but I'm also alive, which honestly, if I hadn't gotten the hell out of the Midwest, I'm not sure I'd be right now.

It rips me up, tears me apart, that I can't help all of the people who are suffering because of not just Trump, but so many _institutions_ that are weapons of destruction against minorities, racial minorities, religious minorities, queer people, and the accusation, which I've heard, that I am heartless or indifferent to the suffering people have gone through under Trump- it really upsets me. What about all of the _other_ causes of oppression? I'm just supposed to ignore those, ignore all of the other gross injustices, and boil everything down to one goddamn hateful asshole?

I don't believe that. I believe in treating everybody I can with kindness and respect, whether they vote for Biden or not. I recognize that people are afraid of Trump winning again, that people feel hurt and betrayed, but this sort of transference where my queer ass is the _real_ problem, where people who believed in Bernie, people I like and trust and care about, people who have behaved with decency and fairness and kindness, are supposed to just knuckle under and vote blindly for his antithesis because he has a "D" next to his name without even being offered a fucking olive branch... it upsets me.

...clarification: "lucky" isn't the same as "privileged" and i was both

Marvelous post, Kate.

thanks alfred!

Speaking for myself, I don't vote for candidates to speak for me -- I vote for the candidates who have the closest alignment with my political aims. If the candidate meets, say, one or two of ten of those aims, that's enough for me in 2020, especially as a queer Latino Floridian. I suspect thousands of voters in the South also voted in the primaries using similar metrics.