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

For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Treeship.

in reality though, empathy shouldn't be used as a synonym for virtue. i want a president who acts on principle and actually cares about the well-being of others, especially those who are most vulnerable in this time of pandemic and depression. whether he *really feels their pain* and can demonstrate it is secondary to what he will be willing to do for them. we're not looking for a guidance counselor here.

I'd be ok with a good guidance counselor tbh

America, show me on the doll where Trump touched you

hell, even a school nurse

define "actually"

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/fc/PetShopBoysActually.jpg

What you guys want is an avatar, not a politician

Good politics requires empathy, but it also requires compromise and decisions that might result in some people losing out. The fact that a politician's empathy can't always be maximally extended doesn't mean that she lacks it.

What you guys want is an avatar, not a politician

actually what I want is a nice michelada

xp We can, of course, argue about the nature of those compromises and where lines should be drawn and what constitutes "the greater good."

i want a nice michelada that understands people but can also kick some ass when needed

i think those arguments are what politics should be about. what are our priorities, where are we willing to compromise, what are our bedrock principles we will never violate? that stuff seems to matter more than like, to what degree can my representative feel empathic identification with so and so group. because that is--at best a starting point--people have different ideas about what policies will be good for people!

i don't think obama lacked the capacity for empathy at all. i don't think he wanted to bomb people because he didn't care about them. i think he made a bad calculation--he thought that this was the way to preserve the american empire and weaken extremist groups, and that this serves the greater global good. (i think he also believed his primary responsibility was to be a good steward of the empire, putting americans first).

empathy doesn't enter into it. it was his positions.

xp

OTM. I get tired by the automatic assumption of malevolence.

I dream of someone looking to shrink/ramp down rather than expand american empire but I am fully aware this will never ever happen

OTM. I get tired by the automatic assumption of malevolence.

― jaymc, Friday, August 7, 2020

another example how cynicism is really sentimentality with a smirk.

sure is

and it's the "coin of the realm" on twitter. (i noticed marxists use a lot of haughty quotation marks in their writing, thinking of adopting it)

we do be like that

Defending Obama's decision to drone bomb innocent people as "not malevolent" is a laughable contortion.

the point is that what was going on in his head is 1.) not something we can know and 2.) not the most relevant thing here. what matters MORE is 1.) that it happened and 2.) what the ostensible defense was, because that's the thing you can actually resist.

it's not that it's totally irrelevant to dive into the psychology of individual politicians, it's just that they'll never be a consensus here so it's frustrating to see "empathy" as the focus.

and related to section 2, part 2, it can also be worthwhile to look into whether the ostensible defense is plausible or if they had a different reason. (in american politics, there almost always is a special interest consideration in play). but doing this you're still in the world of politics, you know

I dream of someone looking to shrink/ramp down rather than expand american empire but I am fully aware this will never ever happen

We have that now. How's it working out?

nice try

donnie and co would fuckin love to expand american empire, he and his people are just too inept and lack a cheney style competent ghoul

i mean, he wants to redefine it though, ditching the commitment to international stability/security that has traditionally justified it in the post-war era. and it's hard to envision a situation where the american empire could be as big and influential as it is while saying, "listen, we're in it for ourselves only!" the US does rely on some buy-in from others

unperson has a point in that Trump is not interested in expansionism. He wants to personally be involved abroad when it benefits him personally, but I suspect he’d be totally happy drawing all of our troops everywhere if his party consented.

He’s definitely not remotely interested in the beneficent pretexts that justify this empire.

Like he does nothing but complain about the intn’l costs of membership in organizations that enable US presence abroad.

I honestly think that Trump has done enough damage to American “prestige” abroad and to international relations that there’s no going back to the status ante quo.

Remember when he tried to buy Greenland? good times.

Trump is as much of an imperial expansionist as anyone at the upper echelon of power, he's just more afraid of looking like a loser if he can't win in a week.

Alfred is ultimately right: the VP pick is nearly meaningless.

I dunno what are the odds that a VP is going to end up taking the wheel sometime in the next 4 years if Biden wins?

Meaningless to the outcome of the election.

trump's isolationism:

sponsored one successful and one failed coup in South America.

huge sanctions on Iran which directly caused the largest anti-regime protests (maybe since the revolution?), had Qasem Solemaini assassinated in Iraq.

huge sanctions on Lebanon due to the presence of Hezbollah in the government which contributed to largest protests in the country since the civil war.

US bombing of Syrian government and Russian targets in Syria.

Probably in the sense that no one is really thinking beyond Nov 2nd right now, but I would def sleep better with a strong VP sitting next to gramps long term.

xp

Obama seemed to project genuine empathy while ordering the drone bombing of Americans. Politicians, especially good ones, aren't jus' folks.

'Seemed to be' vs 'actually is,' which was tables request.

No one talking about the VP for the last week has suggested electoral implications AFAICT, it has entirely been about who can step in when the senile old man steps on a rake and brains himself into a coma.

Meaningless to the outcome of the election.

Veep choice usually doesn't help, but it can hurt.

Alfred, Darin, PBKR, and President Keyes are all simultaneously correct: the VP choice is unlikely to decisively change the electoral calculus (unless it's a choice that loses key votes - it's unlikely to gain many).

At the same time, being the backup for the Oldest! President! Ever! is clearly the fastest path to the US having a woman as president.

Veep choice usually doesn't help, but it can hurt.

― Muswell Hillbilly Elegy (President Keyes),

https://thumbs.gfycat.com/PlaintiveBowedAegeancat-small.gif

To assert that Joe Biden has brains enough to leak should he step on a rake is the height of arrogance.

Rebecca Traister captures the frustrating gendered dynamics in the media's coverage of the veepstakes: https://www.thecut.com/2020/08/how-did-biden-pick-his-vice-president.html

I was happily in general agreement with all her points until she wrote:

Biden may have intended this to be about an imagined expansion of possibility for women but wound up creating a pre-narrowed field, from which he, the benevolent corrector of representational deficiency (who had just aggressively run against six women), would eventually pluck some lucky contestant.

Wtf? Does she not think the third woman veep nominee in US electoral history represents an expansion over merely two? Does she think any of those six women she cites did not run aggressively against one another?

Does she really think a presidential candidate ought not be the one who picks their running mate? Should that candidate be expected to choose from a list that had not been narrowed in any way beforehand?

This is just rhetorical nonsense that's supposed to harness pre-existing feelings of grievance, rather than identify ay actual grievances.

"My sources told me that the Biden campaign, yielding to serious pressure from progressive groups, asked Summers to take himself out of contention for a job in the administration. Summers made it sound like a purely voluntary decision." https://t.co/PmuPhzvHV4

— David Dayen (@ddayen) August 7, 2020

I once got in a testy back and forth with Summers about defense spending. Guy is a total douchebag.

(test - keep getting poxy fuled)

Monday: Biden tweets to advertise $30 T-shirts with a printout of a tweet that an entire team of PR professionals wrote for him, saying that you won't need to worry about his tweets when he's president.

https://i.imgur.com/FCbgSiF.jpg

(https://store.joebiden.com/dont-worry-about-my-tweets-black-t-shirt)

Thursday: Joe Biden is allowed to speak in his own words in front of a camera for a few minutes. Soon, a team of PR professionals are writing a series of tweets explaining that you should pay attention to his tweets, not to his actual thoughts or statements.

https://i.imgur.com/EMllqGr.jpg

not sure what the point of dunking him is now tbh

You should be prepared for four years of dunking on, objecting to and protesting him.