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

if Biden can't make a positive case for how he's going to improve the lives of people being fucked by that economy

A whole bunch of people have already voted for him despite this lack of a positive case for how he's going to improve their lives. (Note, I was not one of them.)

It's possible that people don't vote because the candidate made a positive case. Perhaps a whole bunch of people just point at the guy whose name they've heard, or the guy who they think seems appropriately relatable.

Sometimes we fall into the error of thinking that people make their voting decisions the same way we would, if we were in their shoes. It's also possible that we construct post-hoc rationalizations for our voting decisions, that insert a whole I AM RATIONAL MAAAAAN veneer on the same fucking gut/tribal decision all the other schmucks are making.

He's going to need people to vote for him who are not Democratic primary voters

A whole bunch of people have already voted for him despite this lack of a positive case for how he's going to improve their lives.

Not that many actually? And primarily people who would 'vote blue no matter who' regardless.

It's also possible that we construct post-hoc rationalizations

... or we could just be looking at historical elections and the forces that shaped them.

thx M, I knew that was gonna be yr sillyass reply. never change

if I was jaymc i'd dig up yr post, but nah

the credulity w/r/t media motivation around these parts by otherwise intelligent posters is just confounding

For some reason it's conventional wisdom that employees of by News Corp, w/o explicit instructions, adapt to that culture for purposes of preserving a profitable political order; but those of Disney, TimeWarner, Comcast, National Amusements? Never!

i wrote about politics for newspapers at one point in my life. if anything my editors and fellow journalists leaned left and they fiercely guarded their independence from the money side of the business. moreover major media orgs regularly report unfavorably about corporations and other major potential sponsors (not to mention the state). ilx opinions on the media are v shallow imho

He's going to need people to vote for him who are not Democratic primary voters

this is what should scare you, yes.

ilx opinions on the media are v shallow imho

handling ilx is a skill some posters have and others don't it's weird to blame ilx- an amorphous collection of many different ppl with many different beliefs and ideologies - over the poster

i am not blaming ilx for losing the democratic nomination or really for being anything other than what it is

you are making generalisations and inferring from them

"i wrote about politics for newspapers at one point in my life."

All is revealed.

that's a different complaint - if you differ from the opinions i was responding to above feel free to elaborate xp

if anything my editors and fellow journalists leaned left

most thought The System Worked, I bet

after all Obama "leaned left" lol

I sometimes think defenders of the media coverage during this political season actually believe the critique has something to do with some kind of secret cabal or reflects the politics of individual reporters

it's natural that when power (in this case to disseminate information and shape opinions) is concentrated in the hands of so few entities, that market will condition employers—not out of any nefarious intent but just as a means of self-preservation—to behaviors that most behoove those entities

no most journalists do not lean "the system worked" are you guys morons do you actually read any newspapers?? almost every story is "What went wrong"

you are making generalisations and inferring from them

In order to conflate people this is somewhat necessary?!

if anything our media bias is towards sensationalism and bad news since that sells papers / earns clicks - titillation and despair

w Mordy on this one tbh

the bias is systemic and organic to unregulated capitalism

The journalists I know (quite a few) are terrified about losing jobs and are quite aware of institutional biases and privileges, waging daily battles they have 50/50 odds of winning. And these aren't even explicitly political journalists

being reductive about the media = weird
being reductive about ilx = wise

i.e not covering the Beltway or even state politics scrim

ogmor your complaint is weird i was responding to like 4+ ppl itt saying the same thing i'm sorry i overgeneralized about ilx

Journalists totally reinforce each other's lane, spoon-fed opinions all the time, and you see it time and again in their tweets about politics or something like covid.

Are the journalists now genuinely trying to convince us that line is "flattening" pic.twitter.com/a3Tl4Lvy0j

— Sam ✌️ (@samisam147) April 8, 2020

wtf nobody fucking said journalists are claiming "the system worked"

the argument is that the parameters of the "what went wrong" story are constrained....which is...obvious?

I think ppl don't have much awareness of the power the basic structure and form of media has in shaping thinking at an epistemic/framing/dialectical level, that form isn't neutral just because it can be adopted by a variety of ppl who disagree on a lot of things

^^^^^

Decades of research and thousands of dreary academic journal articles back that up, yeah.

plenty of academic research about no matter who you are you are inclined to think the media is biased against you (even the same media for two people with diametrically different positions cf this beirut study)

Not the same as using a monolithic term like The Media, though

xpost

it is remarkable how the far left and the far right are consistently both aligned in that conclusion

xps

and when you talk about "the media" in aggregate you're inevitably picking and choosing who you mean - oh these guys were nicer to my candidate i don't mean them - and ignoring even coverage within supposedly "hostile" outfits that undermine the narrative, etc. "the very nature of our thinking is structured by the media" okay sure but most ppl now get their news online and pick the sources that already appeal to their interests. you can get any news story spun the way you prefer. making broad claims about the medium is the message requires much more than assertion esp in a campaign analysis than many (tho not all!) will/have given here.

We need a new tune with more of a schadenfreude feel to replace the now no longer relevant Kool & The Gang tune at top of 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.