Joe Biden, Senator from Citibank (oops, DELAWARE), to Run for President

why is it more gauche to post to the trump thread than the biden thread?

trump is the unwanted trip and biden is the accidental patio chat in hour 4

milo your constant trolling is making me not like ilx anymore, it's not your point of view it's the way you present it

I've never trolled ILX.

Like... I posted an image taken directly from Joe Biden's campaign website (something I consider pretty terrible, but I did not comment on it). I did not tag tombot or point it out to him or really remember that he exists in any way - and yet he responded multiple times, angrily.

I guess I shouldn't have said that, I know you have a coherent and valid point of view, I just wish you wouldn't be so confrontational

I don't want a thread of piety towards Joe Biden; no politician deserves, especially him. But I left the thread in April because for once the constant revivals just cracked me; it looked like every DO YOU SEE Twitter thread on earth.

*no politician deserves IT.

not really seeing where Milo was confrontational here. He posted something abt Joe Biden in the Joe Biden thread and was subsequently eviscerated. Lockdown doing numbers on ppl

This thread, and the Democratic primary thread before, is the one I have to step away from the most. Too much going in circles with the same bitter arguments.

don't even trip. we've got him this time

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/20/ukraine-joe-biden-petro-poroshenko-recordings-investigation

I hadn't joined ILX in 2004, so I've no idea if the Kerry threads were this tedious.

So Biden talked to Ukraine officials about needing to fire Shokin, and tied that to delivering aid? So he did the thing he was tasked with doing years ago that everyone already knew he did? Oh my.

I truly don't take tombot's aggression personally - pretty sure the meanest thing I've ever said to him before was that he was comfortably upper-middle class and the stakes are different for him - so it really does seem to me that he's just shotgunning for other political reasons.

i remember when hillary was ahead. i don't know tombot beyond his posts here but i'm still pissed off. fuck donald trump

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election/donald-trump-lose-election-joe-biden-2020-economy-coronavirus-a9525131.html

I genuinely believe our country is capable of better things, even without your chosen ideologue at the top of the ticket. I think incrementalism is the- not a, the- way to get there. I believe foreign policy is a serious business, not something we can recuse ourselves from as a nation because something bad might happen to people if we practiced it.

Your posts, for years, are a series of exercises in belittling everyone who might disagree with your simplistic moral view of politics. You’re a terrible poster and you drive other people out. You’re predictable and tiresome. And unlike Morbius, you don’t have the credentials of “really nice guy IRL” to slide. You just suck.

Even xyz is actually funny sometimes, with his dumb tweets about melts

"Voter turnout could also swing the election one way or another, according to the report.

The model is said to have correctly predicted the popular vote in every election since 1948, other than 1968 and 1976.

However, researchers admit it has “inherent limitations”, excluding non-economic factors such as a candidate’s agenda or likeability."

another high quality article from the good folks at The Independent!

interesting, so, according to the report, you're saying "voter turnout" could make a difference? interesting - i need to check out that report!

honestly i think almost all ilxors are good people and trying their best, it's just variations on how we deal with all of this nonsense in the world

You’re a terrible poster and you drive other people out.

I would reiterate that I posted a screenshot and you responded multiple times angrily and personally, in a "discombobulated rage."

by "almost all", i'm leaving room for any jeffrey dahmer lurkers out there

milo, maybe you’ve killfiled all the other posters politely telling you to shut the fuck up, but for the record, I’m not exactly special

Agreed.

I think the difference between milo and tombot is that they each have a different idea of what it means to 'take politics seriously'.

tombot is oriented toward finding and getting the best available results, regardless of what he might imagine to be better, but he concludes are not available until circumstances that are beyond his control have changed.

milo is oriented toward identifying the position he thinks is the most moral among all those he can imagine or describe, without reference to results, and he believes that if everyone just came around to his position then the world would be a better place. It is his job to maintain his position resolutely, hoping through his persistence to guide the world toward his positions, and if he were to compromise or adjust his position then the rest of the world may not be able to find what's best for them.

As far as I have extracted lessons from five decades of watching politics play out, tmobot's way works somewhat well almost all the time, while milo's way only works when a significant mass of people are prepared to sacrifice everything, right up to their lives, to bring about their desired change. I don't see milo grasping this.

Actually my orientation is that I don't know exactly what will work but that what we've had going on is self-evidently not working.

I have watched the country and the world become a worse place for more people year after year. In large part because of the leadership and/or the inaction of Democrats like Joe Biden. Mass incarceration, forever war, drone strikes, rising inequality and stagnant wages, household wealth for black Americans wiped out in 2008 with no recovery, no real effort to rein in police abuse, aggressively punching left whenever given the chance. You can't even give them credit for the one big social issue win - same-sex marriage, given their direct opposition to it. It should not be controversial to point out when Joe Biden fuckin' sucks. It should not be necessary to point out, when saying that, that Republicans are worse. We all know that - it's dumb and offensive when conservatives demand that you also bring up the Great Leap Forward if you mention the Holocaust, right?

It should also be okay to be wryly amused at the relatively minor expressions of how much Joe Biden sucks. Victim blaming the Palestinians isn't in the top 10 worst things Joe Biden will say this year, but it still deserves an eye roll and a sigh.

We did this incrementalism schtick already - our resident proponents of "if you don't accept incrementalism you're a worthless child" ignore the possibility that incrementalism isn't happening. Incrementalism might be fine - if we had become over the last four decades an incrementally more free society (we haven't, rather the opposite given the surveillance state - Joe Biden claims to have secretly authored the PATRIOT Act), a more noble and moral society in international conduct (we haven't - cf. Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Honduras, drone strokes around the world), an incrementally more equitable society (we haven't - capital has more of the kitty than ever, the people less of it), an incrementally more just society (our two options for most powerful human being on Earth have both been credibly accused of sexual assault).

Sean McElwee made the point recently that a lot of progressives mistakenly conflate the role of politicians and the role of activists/movements. Politicians must operate within the boundaries of public opinion. It's the role of activists/movements to push those boundaries, to get the public to accept a previously unpopular idea or position. Only then can a politician pick it up and have the broad support to turn it into working legislation. We like politicians who are unshakeable moral leaders, but it's sometimes at odds with the work of governance.

(I'm sure you think Sean McElwee fuckin' sucks, too, but he seems like someone who's thought a lot about how to get progressive candidates into office and how to get progressive policies passed in Congress.)

really don't see milo as having done anything particularly terrible here. I agree that foreign policy is a serious business, but even in a Biden administration I can't help but think that the US will never be anything more than an unfortunate reality in the eyes of the rest of the world, maybe helpful sometimes if you appease the right people, but completely untrustworthy, convinced beyond reason of its goodness, and likely to reverse anything decent the second another Republican gets in. Bernie gave me some hope that someone with decent instincts about what America should and shouldn't be doing in the world might be in charge, but Biden? Better than Trump, sure, but I can't believe that he'll be able to fix much of what Trump destroyed, or change any of the uglier Obama policies.

tombot is oriented toward finding and getting the best available results, regardless of what he might imagine to be better, but he concludes are not available until circumstances that are beyond his control have changed.

milo is oriented toward identifying the position he thinks is the most moral among all those he can imagine or describe, without reference to results, and he believes that if everyone just came around to his position then the world would be a better place. It is his job to maintain his position resolutely, hoping through his persistence to guide the world toward his positions, and if he were to compromise or adjust his position then the rest of the world may not be able to find what's best for them.

I wonder which one of these is more appropriate for "the act of posting to a message board" as opposed to pretending your vote means anything in an election where boomers with melted Fox/MSNBC brains are ultimately going to decide which creep leads us to the apocalypse

I'm still not 100% convinced Biden is going to be better than Trump unless he's going to means test who gets a nicer cell after they're arrested by ICE

Literally all it takes is reading replies on a site I don’t even use, and entering basic search terms. Your cherry picking bullshit is weak

― El Tomboto, Wednesday, May 20, 2020 6:25 PM (two hours ago)

I only use this website

milo otm tbh

Milo, your reiteration of your own conclusions doesn’t change anything about what Aimless said.

JoeStork, I personally think Biden can do a huge amount to reverse what Trump’s done on the foreign policy front: restore confidence in NATO commitments, put Russia on the back foot, maybe even treat our fellow Americans (north AND south) like neighbors. He might even save the Iran deal.

When LBJ pushed through the CRA and VRA, public opinion of MLK and the Civil Rights Movement was like 80-20 horribly negative and it directly cost the Democrats A lot of elections for decades.

Whether moral or merely political (somehow), the abdication or leadership by liberals over the past 50 years has been a fundamental problem. When Democrats have taken the lead it has been in service of the project of deregulating capital. And yet, the only winning Democrats of most of our lives ran campaigns centered on changing the status quo rather than maintaining it.

Whiney: fuck off and die

silby: use better websites

Somehow “America is ALREADY Great” didn’t resonate quite enough with a mass of people living in terror of getting sick or laid off.

I’d be impressed how much more intelligent and worthwhile your posting has become if it hadn’t required so much genuine vitriol on my part to encourage it.

Tombot, you’re a bully and not even very good at being one. You get madder than your targets.

You’re a schmuck and nobody likes you

The heart breaks, but nevertheless you remain an attempted bully. There's always been someone or a different clique 'posting wrong' to get you riled up about ILX going to the dogs, yet it's always you who's mad and yelling and trying to insult people.

yet you remain, bravely committed to drag everything and everyone down to your level in the name of moral superiority about American politics

Perhaps the problem is that American politics is so deeply amoral

Whose heart breaks? Not yours, you haven’t gaf in years. You’re Leftist Texas Fred

Oh boy Whiney sprinkling deep insights

Tomboto - if Biden does all that, or tries to, will anyone pay attention at this point? If Biden wants to re-start the Iran deal, why should Iran trust that we won't just elect another Trump? Why should the Kurds ever accept our allyship? Why should NATO countries treat us like a leader again?

These are great questions! Do you think electing Trump again will help? How about another GOP-controlled Senate? Does that help? Let me know what you think helps.

they won't trust us for a long time, but you can't possibly think that's a reason not to support Biden

It remains the case that if Joe Biden loses it won’t be because of our posts about how he’s bad

I don't want either of those things, thanks, very good questions. I was really hopeful about Sanders for a brief moment because it felt like someone with decent instincts about what America should and shouldn't be doing in the world might be directing foreign policy. I think that might have helped, because it would have a been a relatively drastic shift in how America presented itself to the world. Feel free to call me a naive moron for thinking that. But if you're going to lecture milo about how foreign policy is serious business and he's refusing to engage with reality in order to keep the moral high ground, maybe it's worth taking into account that this country has zero credibility as a world leader at this point, and not just because of Trump.

I wonder if positions will start to become more entrenched soon