Bernie/Biden task force presents suggestions

[Agema]

He also, I think, got Eacaraxe's meaning wrong. He didn't call people like him stupid. He said ignorant, and if Eac wants to correct me he absolutely can, but ignorant is the right word here. It's not a question of intelligence, it's a question of being ill-informed.

This is on a level with saying "It's not racist to say Muslims are violent, squalid savages, because Islam is a religion not a race": which is to say, totally missing what the real problem is. Whether you want to use stupid, ignorant, irrational or any other term doesn't really matter. At the point you are insultingly dismissing someone making reasonable points just because you have a different opinion, you need to take a good, long walk and sort yourself the fuck out before you step back into the debate.

This debate, which has rolled over about a dozen threads over quite a few months, represents two groups of people who want similar policies but have different ideas about how to get them. In simple terms, it's about strategies of non-cooperation against compromise, which to a large extent equates to "all or nothing" against "partial progress", or "high risk high gain" against "low risk low gain".

 

[Buyetyen]

I'm not saying you have to appeal to the barons or the oligarchs. I saying you don't have to co-op authoritarian strategy when appealing to the masses. The vote matters and the masses outnumber the rich and the wealthy by a large margin. That's what broke Obama through when he first stood on the convention stage in 2004 and got him the nomination and presidency in 2008. That's what Biden is doing now, at least within the party.

"Other"ing the problems, many of which are exacerbated by but by no means caused by wealth inequality, and simplifying the situation down to crude talking points only serves to embrace the kind of authoritarianism and blunt policy that exacerbates the issues rather than solving them. It dumbs down the electorate by not trusting them with the nuance that many of the biggest problems of our lives (Global Warming, Racial Disparities, Housing, Internet regulation, global trade, the Rise of China as an expansionist Han Surpemest Ethnostate, rising Authoritarianism, failing democracies, etc.) are going to need to actually address those issues. Authoritarian language and approaches to politics only serve to further legitimize authoritarian politics, and this is a time we need to take a stand against that more than ever.

Still not sure how you think going after the robber barons and holding them accountable is authoritarian. What, for it to be democracy we just have to let them get away with it? They're tax cheats, frauds, scammers, con artists. How is it authoritarian to point out that they keep breaking the law and getting away with it? Wanting justice is not inherently authoritarian.

FOSTA/SESTA is what happens when you start down this path, a poorly-worded law that no one who tackles those issues on a day-to-day basis would have recommended. Progressive die hards Sanders and Warren voted for it. Senator Ron Wyden, arguably the most thoughtful senator when it comes to the ramifications of internet policy, particularly in the technology sphere, was one of two votes against it (the other being Senator Paul, who will vote against anything he interprets as limiting freedom[tm]). A bill to help victims of trafficking puts more people at risk because "it sounds good" and no one talked to people in the know about the actual balance of interests because no one except two senators wanted to be against a law that said it was fighting child trafficking.

Behold the power of low expectations. We expect conservatives to fuck everything up, so we're unsurprised when they do. Any policy progressives support that has unintended consequences, like every other policy ever passed, is a failure of progressivism is general. Progressives are not allowed to make mistakes. We are held to a much different standard.

So if we can't identify the criminal robber barons as a problem because that automatically becomes authoritarianism, how exactly do we address these injustices if we're prohibited from naming them?

 

[Eacaraxe]

See, I get what you're saying. You still have not explained to me how 4 more years of this shit is the better alternative. Because I really do not see it. Why am I supposed to prefer this? In what way will this make the people I care about safer?

Respectfully, cynicism is the laziest excuse for inaction. It lets you morally absolve yourself for doing nothing.

We had eight years of Obama, I don't see how anything needs to be "explained" at this point. In those eight years nothing was done by Democrats or Republicans except sweep shit under the rug, engage in apologia, deny basic fact about US foreign and domestic policy, and normalize the most libidinous urges of the Bush administration to the point Democratic and liberal policy elites and pundits are expressing open nostalgia for the most morally bankrupt presidency since Warren G. Harding.

Under Obama the US government engineered another a coup d'etat in Guatemala. Nothing was done to reverse policies on rendition, detention, and torture; in fact, they were hidden. Drone strikes went up, the range of acceptable targets widened, and the number of civilian casualties hidden by changing the definition of unlawful combatant (again). The US was caught running CIA black sites and running guns out of consular grounds, making our diplomatic missions party to international conflict and therefore legitimate military targets. The US promoted civil conflict in an entire region, intervened, and did absolutely nothing to nation-build in its wake which led to the rise of one state where human trafficking has become decriminalized legal (Libya) and another still in the grip of civil war eight years later (Syria); in the former, we armed, trained, funded, and equipped the party responsible for 9/11 (al-Qaeda, being that ANF is an al-Qaeda front and splinter organization).

And that was Obama's first term. I didn't even start on the second term which included Snowden, the other half of Timber Sycamore where the Pentagon was funding and arming FSA to fight the groups our intelligence community was funding and arming, the continuation of economic sanctions on Venezuela which led to the country's collapse, increased arms trade to Saudi Arabia for munitions we knew would be used against civilian and refugee populations, and sleepwalking through the Sudanese genocide enabled in Obama's first term. That's the shit I can name off the top of my head.

That's just the foreign policy side. About what you're in denial is the US is already a fascist regime and has been for decades, we just like to pretend it wasn't; on the domestic side, you think the surveillance state, mass incarceration and our broken CJ system, and eight years' of deploying the Guard, militarized police, and private military against mass protest happened in a vacuum? You think I'm talking about Trump? under whose presidency did Occupy, Standing Rock, and Ferguson happen? The only -- only -- thing Trump did, was continue the trajectory.

I'm sorry you're upset because you're being forced to see it in a way you likely never have before Trump, but this is the true face of the US. This is why your allegations of fascism ring incredibly hollow, and why I'm unsympathetic; I apologize, but that's how it is. To me, you're just saying fascism with a smile is preferable to open, honest fascism.

Frankly, you need to make the case to me as to why allowing half the country to return to blissful slumber about it is an improvement. Because as I keep saying, past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior; as that's what occurred for eight years under Obama, the safest bet is that's what will happen under Obama's VP.

 

[Buyetyen]

I'm sorry you're upset because you're being forced to see it in a way you likely never have before Trump, but this is the true face of the US.

Oh, spare me. I've been criticizing my country for this shit for years. I just refuse to give into despair and quit like a pouting child.

I apologize, but

No, you don't. You're still fucking talking.

Frankly, you need to make the case to me as to why allowing half the country to return to blissful slumber about it is an improvement. Because as I keep saying, past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior; as that's what occurred for eight years under Obama, the safest bet is that's what will happen under Obama's VP.

If you've chosen to give up, there's nothing I can say that will make you get over your own personal grievances and at least try to do the right thing. I'm not that persuasive, probably never will be. Wallow in cynicism, failure and hopelessness all you want. Admit defeat. But don't get in the way of those of us who haven't had the fight completely beaten out of us. The lives of too many people I care about are pretty fucking dependent on Trump not getting re-elected. Shit on me all you want, I've faced far more venomous attacks for much less. At the end of the day, I still have reasons to give a shit and you're looking for reasons not to. Those two paths don't really intersect.

 

[Eacaraxe]

Pt. 2,

With regards to the GND, I'd say that a 2 trillion investment in clean energy, green infrastructure etc-- the highest ever proposed by an enormous margin-- is intended to appeal to the progressives and left-wingers. It reflects quite a lot of what was asked for in the GND resolution.

It's "a chicken in every pot". It's simply not enough and not on a fast enough timetable, even if Biden and Democrats get everything they want out of that plank, the best-case scenario is still mitigated climate catastrophe. And he's not, because that plank is before conservative Democrats get hold of it, and Republicans get sloppy seconds. Biden's giving away the store before he can open shop, and neither he, his advisors, nor Democratic leadership have proven themselves anything but bad-faith actors, repeatedly.

Similarly, with healthcare, the universally-available public option, cap on premiums & deductibles, & automatic premium/deductible-free option for those uncovered are also designed to appeal to the progressives and left-wingers.

No it isn't. Progressives and left-wingers want private insurance, for-profit health care, and the power of the insurance lobby, gone. That proposal is designed to shield and empower the root cause for the problems with health care in the US. For what it's designed is to shut out progressive voices and manipulate progressive voters, by having the appearance of a compromise but in reality doing anything but.

But what's relevant is that the progressive wing has accomplished a major shift in platform.

No, they've accomplished the appearance of a major shift in platform. Because this theatrics.

I imagine those who rely on it might object to that-- and might appreciate the difference between defunding it immediately now, or funding it a while longer, even if its future isn't assured.

The zero-sum approach inevitably ends up being callous in this regard. The principled stance that it doesn't matter if social security ends now or later is immaterial (and almost insulting) to the people who need it now.

Literally all that needs to happen to make social security fiscally solvent indefinitely is to increase FICA income cap. To a million per year, if I remember GAO's math on it off hand. That this has been completely memory-holed by Democrats, and replaced wholly by discussion of cuts and defunding even internally, should tell you how far right the Overton window really has been pushed.

You're defending Biden on social security, but he's pushing voodoo economics, and you should be asking why he's pushing voodoo economics as a Democrat instead of grouching at me for calling that out.

Yeah, cool, but we were comparing Biden's record. What in his record matches or exceeds Trump's on the same issue?

Exactly what part of "Biden co-authored FISA", "Biden co-authored the crime bill", "Biden was a key supporter of the Homeland Security Act", and "Biden was a key supporter of Iraq and Afghanistan" do you not understand?

Ok. So you believe UK Labour's loss is not due to any long-standing issues with northern working-class communities, and that even suggesting such is "propping up right flanks"?

The "far left" is neoliberal now, apparently?

You're "wishing" as well, of course: wishing for a complete and immediate course-correction to give everything you want in a single electoral cycle. I daresay you'll be waiting a while longer for that hand to be filled.

No, I expect a candidate who isn't a proven bad-faith actor whose political history isn't being a direct contributor to the wholesale destruction of the country, whose campaign isn't engaged in theatrics while aligning itself with the parties responsible for the country's wholesale destruction, that isn't the candidate for a party that lost legitimacy four years ago led by least competent motherfuckers on the planet, whose bid isn't founded exclusively in fixing nothing except returning Americans to a general state of denial as to how bad things really are.

Put that on the table, and we can have a conservation about a foreign, arcane concept called "negotiation" and how it works. because for Democrats, that seems to only be a concept they understand when it comes to punching left. Or to put it another way, if Democrats were a tenth as stubborn with Republicans and blue dogs as they are their own left flank, the US would be celebrating the tenth anniversary of universal health care this year and thankful we had it when corona came to call.

But fine, I can accept that you only meant the Democrat-leaning ones, fine, whatever. Happy to let that drop.

That's fine, I should have been clearer to begin with. But that's what I mean when I say "Trump-deranged voters".

 

[Tireseas]

Still not sure how you think going after the robber barons and holding them accountable is authoritarian. What, for it to be democracy we just have to let them get away with it? They're tax cheats, frauds, scammers, con artists. How is it authoritarian to point out that they keep breaking the law and getting away with it? Wanting justice is not inherently authoritarian.

The punitive desire behind it very much is, and is a hallmark of the American approach to pretty much any sense of wrong. The same desire to "go after" the wealthy contains, at its root, the same desire that results in draconian police practices and cruel sentences. It is fundamentally retributive; it is not meant to fix the problems, only to act as a false catharsis while embracing an ugly mentality that pervades Americans up and down the income, social, and racial hierarchy.

Don't get me wrong: both a progressive tax and a wealth tax are not prohibited under a reframing towards a common purpose. Everyone applies their own strength to the problems at hand because the problems require everyone's contribution to insure they succeed (even if they are compelled to by tax law). This reframing addresses the injustices of the system with both a collective purpose to strive towards and removing the unhealthy framing that treats "the other" as worthy of contempt or punishment. Why you do something is often as important as how you do something, because the first informs the latter.

Behold the power of low expectations. We expect conservatives to fuck everything up, so we're unsurprised when they do. Any policy progressives support that has unintended consequences, like every other policy ever passed, is a failure of progressivism is general. Progressives are not allowed to make mistakes. We are held to a much different standard.

No, my point was that a blunt approach that prioritizes talking points over substance can end up with bad policies by good minded and well-meaning people. It was a complete failure of a deliberative body (progressives, conservatives, and moderates) to examine the costs of a bill that had wide reaching consequences that no one wanted to discuss or examine. It is a warning about the dangers of sloganeering and selling voters on abstract policies without examining the downstream negative consequences.

So if we can't identify the criminal robber barons as a problem because that automatically becomes authoritarianism, how exactly do we address these injustices if we're prohibited from naming them?

Is the injustice the barons themselves, or the tax, income, and financial systems that allowed their wealth to so outstrip all others? Do you want to fix a broken system or do you want to punish?

The progressive wishes to mend, to fix, and to improve; the authoritarian wishes to punish, to break, to crush. If you wish to be a progressive, you need to let go of the desire to punish because it is holding you back and blinding you to the problems and the potential solutions. If your aim is to rebalance the wealth in this country to a more equitable state, the wealthy should and will be asked to contribute more because they have more, then let that be the framing; but your aim is simply to bring the wealthy down, then you are merely replacing one authoritarianism with another.

The why is so incredibly important because that is what we will have to live with.

 

[Buyetyen]

The punitive desire behind it very much is, and is a hallmark of the American approach to pretty much any sense of wrong. The same desire to "go after" the wealthy contains, at its root, the same desire that results in draconian police practices and cruel sentences. It is fundamentally retributive; it is not meant to fix the problems, only to act as a false catharsis while embracing an ugly mentality that pervades Americans up and down the income, social, and racial hierarchy.

Don't get me wrong: both a progressive tax and a wealth tax are not prohibited under a reframing towards a common purpose. Everyone applies their own strength to the problems at hand because the problems require everyone's contribution to insure they succeed (even if they are compelled to by tax law). This reframing addresses the injustices of the system with both a collective purpose to strive towards and removing the unhealthy framing that treats "the other" as worthy of contempt or punishment. Why you do something is often as important as how you do something, because the first informs the latter.

And if you're not willing to show your teeth when the opposition gets vicious (and they will), you're going to lose. Instead of, "They go low, we go high," the slogan should be, "This far, no further."

Is the injustice the barons themselves, or the tax, income, and financial systems that allowed their wealth to so outstrip all others? Do you want to fix a broken system or do you want to punish?

Why is it mutually exclusive? This system is of the elites' construction and they are actively undermining democracy to perpetuate it. In what way are they not culpable? Why is it so unthinkable to have some goddamn accountability?

The progressive wishes to mend, to fix, and to improve; the authoritarian wishes to punish, to break, to crush. If you wish to be a progressive, you need to let go of the desire to punish because it is holding you back and blinding you to the problems and the potential solutions. If your aim is to rebalance the wealth in this country to a more equitable state, the wealthy should and will be asked to contribute more because they have more, then let that be the framing; but your aim is simply to bring the wealthy down, then you are merely replacing one authoritarianism with another.

The problem I have is with the word, "asked." We've been "asking" the wealthy to pay their fair share for years, and all they ever do in response is lobby for more tax cuts. They're utterly clueless to how we live and assume that our calls for equality come from a place of laziness and jealousy. What gives you the arrogance to assume that you can reason with people that divorced from reality? How can you claim to enforce equality when you refuse to apply the laws and enforcement mechanisms you already have in place to do something about powerful people abusing their status because you're terrified of looking like an authoritarian?

If you're of the opinion that the banksters who crashed our economy in 2008 never seeing the inside of court room was the right way to handle that, you've already lost because you showed them that they can walk all over you. I believe in peace, too. I just recognize that when someone takes a swing at you, you're entitled to fight back. I take issue with anger at injustice being portrayed as more of a problem than the injustice. Angry gets shit done.

 

[Silvanus]

It's "a chicken in every pot". It's simply not enough and not on a fast enough timetable, even if Biden and Democrats get everything they want out of that plank, the best-case scenario is still mitigated climate catastrophe. And he's not, because that plank is before conservative Democrats get hold of it, and Republicans get sloppy seconds. Biden's giving away the store before he can open shop, and neither he, his advisors, nor Democratic leadership have proven themselves anything but bad-faith actors, repeatedly.

Not only is 2 trillion not enough, it's not even worth having? Might as well have nothing? If climate scientists had taken this approach over the past two decades, we'd already be under water.

I don't understand bringing up timeframes when you're willing to let the problem grow faster for four years on the off-chance that afterwards someone might introduce a faster solution. The timeframe narrows further and faster if Trump wins. It's pure brinkmanship.

No it isn't. Progressives and left-wingers want private insurance, for-profit health care, and the power of the insurance lobby, gone. That proposal is designed to shield and empower the root cause for the problems with health care in the US. For what it's designed is to shut out progressive voices and manipulate progressive voters, by having the appearance of a compromise but in reality doing anything but.

A public option, competing with the private insurance companies, and a premium-free and deductible-free option are... designed purely to shield private insurance companies. You don't think reducing their market share and their profitability is going to weaken their grip?

No, they've accomplished the appearance of a major shift in platform. Because this theatrics.

I don't think you have a better understanding of this than the people who've spent decades in office fighting for it.

Unless Sanders and AOC are secretly shills themselves, now.

Literally all that needs to happen to make social security fiscally solvent indefinitely is to increase FICA income cap. To a million per year, if I remember GAO's math on it off hand. That this has been completely memory-holed by Democrats, and replaced wholly by discussion of cuts and defunding even internally, should tell you how far right the Overton window really has been pushed.

You're defending Biden on social security, but he's pushing voodoo economics, and you should be asking why he's pushing voodoo economics as a Democrat instead of grouching at me for calling that out.

Again, I'm not defending Biden, and have quite explicitly derided his record on social security. This is a strategic discussion, a fact I feel has to be reiterated.

These discussions are not going to occur by a sooner, larger defunding of the programme. This issue is not addressed better by your approach. If anything, it gives less time for any addressing to be done, and makes the eventual job ever larger and less likely.

Exactly what part of "Biden co-authored FISA", "Biden co-authored the crime bill", "Biden was a key supporter of the Homeland Security Act", and "Biden was a key supporter of Iraq and Afghanistan" do you not understand?

Uhrm, none of it? You imagine that FISA in 1978 is more egregious than the surveillance state in its current incarnation with Trump? The crime bill (also supported by Bernie Sanders, & including the popular assault weapons ban) is more egregious than the repressive use of law over the last 4 years?

The "far left" is neoliberal now, apparently?

I don't even know what part this is responding to, because it doesn't bear any relevance.

No, I expect a candidate who isn't a proven bad-faith actor whose political history isn't being a direct contributor to the wholesale destruction of the country, whose campaign isn't engaged in theatrics while aligning itself with the parties responsible for the country's wholesale destruction, that isn't the candidate for a party that lost legitimacy four years ago led by least competent motherfuckers on the planet, whose bid isn't founded exclusively in fixing nothing except returning Americans to a general state of denial as to how bad things really are.

Put that on the table, and we can have a conservation about a foreign, arcane concept called "negotiation" and how it works. because for Democrats, that seems to only be a concept they understand when it comes to punching left. Or to put it another way, if Democrats were a tenth as stubborn with Republicans and blue dogs as they are their own left flank, the US would be celebrating the tenth anniversary of universal health care this year and thankful we had it when corona came to call.

As someone said not too long ago, "shit in one hand..."

 

[Eacaraxe]

Oh, spare me. I've been criticizing my country for this shit for years. I just refuse to give into despair and quit like a pouting child.

You fundamentally misunderstand my position. I'm not giving up anything; in fact, I'm more radicalized and mobilized than I have been in a decade. I'm making the conscious decision to no longer be complicit in Democratic malfeasance and incompetence, and enable their inexcusable behavior. Democratic misconduct is why Trump is in office, and Democratic misconduct is why the country is in such dire straits that Trump was in a position to run and win to begin with. Voting for Democrats is rewarding failure, and enabling the decades-long chain of catastrophically poor decision-making in the party that began during the Reagan administration.

The Democratic ideal has been proven to be all the policies that led to Trump, and Trump's policies, minus his caustic behavior. House Democrats have been a rubber stamp for his agenda for two years, just as House Democrats were a rubber stamp for Bush's agenda fourteen years ago. All the torn paper and theatrical golf-clapping in the world won't change the legislation that flew through the House on angel wings for the past two years. Impeachment was expensive and costly kabuki theater to shield Biden's presidential bid, and while it was the one time Democrats lived up to campaign promises they never should have made to begin with in 2018, it was destined to failure and happened despite Pelosi's and conservative Democrats' wishes for it.

I'm not voting for that, period. If you're unhappy with that, oh fucking well. This is what accountability looks like, because there are no refunds on a ballot and the idea of holding someone accountable after an official takes office is the biggest joke in American politics. It's personal to you and I get that. It's personal to me too, because of my friends and family that didn't come home from Iraq in one piece or at all, the kids they had to shoot over there, and the willy pete they dropped on civilian noncombatants supposedly in my name as an American citizen.

Is the injustice the barons themselves, or the tax, income, and financial systems that allowed their wealth to so outstrip all others? Do you want to fix a broken system or do you want to punish?

Exactly who do you think lobbies for this shit?

 

[Buyetyen]

It's personal to you and I get that.

No you don't. If you did, you wouldn't have gotten shitty with me about it and been so presumptuous. I'm voting my conscience. If you're unhappy with that, oh fucking well. Everybody's got dead people. And during this pandemic, you are hardly the only person who has had to watch loved ones needlessly die in agony because of a failure of leadership. My roommate's a navy brat and he's voting anyway. There are still living people to save. Wanting to avenge the unjustly dead is commendable, but not at the expense of those of us still on the mortal coil.

Fuck, if nothing else I'd expect that you wouldn't want that stumblefuck buffoon presiding over another year of letting a pandemic rampage across the country, if for no other reason than cynical self-preservation. Obama and Biden fucked a lot of things up, but they took that threat seriously. Because let's be real, the pandemic is out of control there's going to be another wave, and it is going to persist well into the winter and probably spring of 2021. Would you rather have the guy who helped the president build a pandemic response department? Or the guy who still insists that if we just stop testing, we won't have cases anymore? That I even have to phrase that as a question is obscene.

 

[Tireseas]

And if you're not willing to show your teeth when the opposition gets vicious (and they will), you're going to lose. Instead of, "They go low, we go high," the slogan should be, "This far, no further."

Then do not pretend to be more moral or just than those you fight. You are merely playing the game of power for power sake and not some greater goal. You are as malicious as those you fight and you will have to live with that

Why is it mutually exclusive? This system is of the elites' construction and they are actively undermining democracy to perpetuate it. In what way are they not culpable? Why is it so unthinkable to have some goddamn accountability?

Because there is a difference between healing and harming. If you want recriminations, then go and do that, but it is a vicious cycle that never ends until someone decides to stop. Nations and movements born in violence and recrimination inevitably institutionalize it, as has the US and many other nations, with those with power, whether it be by wealth or politics or arms escaping the worst of it. You have the opportunity to break or continue the cycle through your actions and motivations.

The problem I have is with the word, "asked." We've been "asking" the wealthy to pay their fair share for years, and all they ever do in response is lobby for more tax cuts. They're utterly clueless to how we live and assume that our calls for equality come from a place of laziness and jealousy. What gives you the arrogance to assume that you can reason with people that divorced from reality? How can you claim to enforce equality when you refuse to apply the laws and enforcement mechanisms you already have in place to do something about powerful people abusing their status because you're terrified of looking like an authoritarian?

Hold a majority in power and you can resist lobbying. This does not require bowing to the devil on our shoulder and embracing authoritarian politics. Hold a majority at every level, fight them at every election, but do not give in to the temptation that often replaces one with merely the same.

I get the frustration. I get the anger. I get the sense of injustice you feel, but if you act on those feelings, if you are driven by those feelings, you will not advance the policies you want because it becomes all encompassing. Anger is small and isolating. It eats at you and no one will wish to work with you

If you're of the opinion that the banksters who crashed our economy in 2008 never seeing the inside of court room was the right way to handle that, you've already lost because you showed them that they can walk all over you. I believe in peace, too. I just recognize that when someone takes a swing at you, you're entitled to fight back. I take issue with anger at injustice being portrayed as more of a problem than the injustice. Angry gets shit done.

Anger accomplishes little and what it does is often regretted later. Three-strike laws, mandatory sentences, executions, and scars that last generations are far more often the products of anger than good reforms. The 1968 civil rights act was not born out of anger, but of perseverance. The new deal reforms were not born out of anger, but out of a sense of duty to one another. The fight for marriage equality was born of love.

We have a hard rule in law that bars "ex post facto" laws because it is inherently unjust to hold someone accountable for actions that were not legally wrong (even if morally wrong) at the time they acted. It exists because it would criminalize and punish people without any sense of fair notice to dissuade, effectively allowing one or more people to become criminals merely at the whims of those in power. It is as much a protection against those who do a moral wrong as much as preventing a majority from criminalizing a whole class of people merely for the crime of existing.

If you wish to address a wrong, you do it through the means that insures justice. You can still tax income and wealth without the anger, the recrimination, or the malice. You can still regulate industry and labor without it. You can still work towards a better future without it. Anger serves nothing except malice and hate, and primes your mind to look for the strongman rather than for justice.

 

[Eacaraxe]

Not only is 2 trillion not enough, it's not even worth having? Might as well have nothing? If climate scientists had taken this approach, we'd already be under water.

I don't understand bringing up timeframes when you're willing to let the problem grow faster for four years on the off-chance that afterwards someone might introduce a faster one. The timeframe narrows further and faster if Trump wins. It's pure brinkmanship.

The end result of Biden's plan would be nothing except a bunch of pork to energy companies, while no substantive advances are made and climate change proceeds apace regardless. Because Democrats always cave to their own right flank, let alone the Republican party, and Biden's plank by merit of its own weakness is pre-signaling that intent.

A public option, competing with the private insurance companies, and a premium-free and deductible-free option are... designed purely to shield private insurance companies. You don't think reducing their market share and their profitability is going to weaken their grip?

Yes, I do, because I can tell you exactly how Biden's plan would be enacted. It would be a public option in name only, it would be structured the same as TRICARE except as government-subsidized health care as administered by private insurance companies through contract. Which is the worst of all worlds, because not only would it increase market share, it retains private insurance corporations' overhead, certainly wouldn't include profitability caps or restrictions, and private insurers would soak the government through GSM status. The cost wouldn't be born by the individual consumer but rather the tax base, it would be inherently unsustainable, and we'd end up in the same situation we are now with SSA. That's if BIden were to somehow get everything he wanted, which he wouldn't because it wouldn't even survive the blue dogs.

Which is why you don't give away the store before it's even open.

Private insurance has to go, period.

I don't think you have a better understanding of this than the people who've spent decades in office fighting for it.

Fighting for it and losing, regardless of what Democratic platforms say or don't say.

Again, I'm not defending Biden, and have quite explicitly derided his record on social security. This is a strategic discussion, a fact I feel has to be reiterated.

Yes it is, and I'm pointing out how Democratic rhetoric and strategy, and nominated candidates, are at complete odds with reality.

You imagine that FISA in 1978 is more egregious than the surveillance state in its current incarnation with Trump?

Keep ignoring the thirty-eight years between then and when Trump took office, and Biden's vocal support between then and now. Including the proposed expansion in the crime bill, '98 expansion, and PATRIOT Act. Biden's on the record about this.

The crime bill (also supported by Bernie Sanders, & including the popular assault weapons ban) is more egregious than the repressive use of law over the last 4 years?

The assault weapons ban that did jack shit, you mean. Because the overwhelming percentage of firearm homicides are committed by weapons the AWB didn't cover in the first place, and the firearm homicide rate went down during the '90s because the violent crime rate altogether went down. All because the economy improved, not because of a nominal ban on polymer tacticool shit that has fuck-all to do with how firearms operate.

And fuck Bernie. This is a "but Bernie!"-free zone. But since you brought it up, why did Biden hold domestic violence victims hostage by nesting VAWA inside the crime bill?

I don't even know what part this is responding to, because it doesn't bear any relevance.

Of course not. We wouldn't want to talk about the effects of austerity and the impact it might have had for the working classes, would we.

 

[Buyetyen]

Then do not pretend to be more moral or just than those you fight. You are merely playing the game of power for power sake and not some greater goal. You are as malicious as those you fight and you will have to live with that

I do not accept that idea that it is immoral or authoritarian to expect the Rule of Law to be upheld. Treating accountability like a Faustian bargain only enables the bad faith actors in our society to get away with fucking everything up. If you're too scared to hold people responsible for the consequences of their actions, then you don't get to claim you believe in justice.

Because there is a difference between healing and harming. If you want recriminations, then go and do that, but it is a vicious cycle that never ends until someone decides to stop. Nations and movements born in violence and recrimination inevitably institutionalize it, as has the US and many other nations, with those with power, whether it be by wealth or politics or arms escaping the worst of it. You have the opportunity to break or continue the cycle through your actions and motivations.

So why are accountability and reform mutually exclusive? Why can't you do both? Why do we have to let evil people get away with it? I'm not asking you to publicly execute the banksters, I'm asking that the law apply to them the same as it does to me. Because right now it doesn't. And the fact that my anger over that injustice bothers you more than the fact that the injustice is allowed to continue begs some questions.

Hold a majority in power and you can resist lobbying. This does not require bowing to the devil on our shoulder and embracing authoritarian politics. Hold a majority at every level, fight them at every election, but do not give in to the temptation that often replaces one with merely the same.

How is Rule of Law authoritarian? Why is asking for equality under the law authoritarian? Why is holding powerful people to account for their misdeeds authoritarian? You keep saying over and over and over that it just is. And when I ask you why, you give me these feel-good platitudes. No, I need you to explain to me why telling financial oligarchs that they're not getting a free ride anymore is the wrong thing to do.

I get the frustration. I get the anger. I get the sense of injustice you feel, but if you act on those feelings, if you are driven by those feelings, you will not advance the policies you want because it becomes all encompassing. Anger is small and isolating. It eats at you and no one will wish to work with you

I don't think you do. If you understood, you wouldn't be so condescending.

Anger accomplishes little and what it does is often regretted later. Three-strike laws, mandatory sentences, executions, and scars that last generations are far more often the products of anger than good reforms. The 1968 civil rights act was not born out of anger, but of perseverance. The new deal reforms were not born out of anger, but out of a sense of duty to one another. The fight for marriage equality was born of love.

If you think there was no righteous anger motivating the abolitionists or early feminists or the civil rights movement, you haven't studied history. In fact, the image of the civil rights movement as sterile and only that one soaring MLK speech is a deliberate falsehood crafted by white moderates to appropriate the legacy of the civil rights heroes without ever actually agreeing with what they had to do and why or admit their own culpability in the system these leaders were trying to change.

But please, do go on telling me about how Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali and John Lewis never felt righteous anger, were never motivated by it.

We have a hard rule in law that bars "ex post facto" laws because it is inherently unjust to hold someone accountable for actions that were not legally wrong (even if morally wrong) at the time they acted.

You think that's what I want? No! I want them to be held accountable for the existing laws they've already broken. What the hell gave you the idea I wanted ex post facto? How is that authoritarian and not just the Rule of Law?

If you wish to address a wrong, you do it through the means that insures justice. You can still tax income and wealth without the anger, the recrimination, or the malice. You can still regulate industry and labor without it. You can still work towards a better future without it. Anger serves nothing except malice and hate, and primes your mind to look for the strongman rather than for justice.

Anger is a very shallow emotion. It's capacity for constructive and destructive behavior is heavily dependent on what is informing it. To you, anger is an emotion that only does one thing. In reality it is far more complicated than that. And the people who repress their anger and refuse to let it fuel genuine drive for positive change are cowards who want reform with none of the work. Progress is not guaranteed, it has to be fought for. And if you can't work up the anger to be righteously furious when a bunch of cops murder an unarmed black man and get away with it, then the people who need help the most against this injustice will know better than to count on you when it matters.

 

[Eacaraxe]

And during this pandemic, you are hardly the only person who has had to watch loved ones needlessly die in agony because of a failure of leadership.

No I'm most certainly not, but I'm not talking about the pandemic. I'm talking about people who have been deliberately sent to fight, suffer, kill, and die for natural resources to further enrich a handful of economic elites at the cost of everyone else. That was a premeditated, conscious, choice by US elected officials, sold to the American populace on lies.

That is a far cry from a Presidential administration failing to act adequately to mitigate the harm of a global pandemic. And no, Democrats are absolutely not off the hook from that.

There are still living people to save. Wanting to avenge the unjustly dead is commendable, but not at the expense of those of us still on the mortal coil.

And you're not saving them electing people who put them in a position to die.

Obama and Biden fucked a lot of things up, but they took that threat seriously.

No, they didn't. The Obama administration consistently requested cuts to HHS, CDC, NIH, and SNS throughout his presidency, while strategic PPE and medical equipment strategic reserves went unrefreshed despite severe logistic strain throughout his years in office.

CDC preparedness funds take hit in proposed 2014 budget

www.cidrap.umn.edu

Obama Also Pushed For CDC Cuts In Years Before Ebola Outbreak

Obama Also Pushed For CDC Cuts In Years Before Ebola Outbreak

www.huffpost.com

Fact check: Did the Obama administration deplete the federal stockpile of N95 masks?

During the presidency of Barack Obama, the national stockpile was seriously taxed as the administration addressed multiple crises over eight years.

www.usatoday.com

Not even PolitiFact can polish that turd.

Pandemic money fell for years. Trump’s budgets didn’t help

President Donald Trump’s critics have charged that he undermined efforts that could have helped the nation respond faste

www.politifact.com

Obama's "pandemic response team" was political theater, it was already the CDC's job and all Obama did was play bureaucratic musical chairs to cover his ass after fucking up the H1N1 response. His admin didn't write "the playbook", it already existed care of (if I remember right) the DoD and HHS and the Obama administration couldn't even be arsed to follow what already existed.

The sooner you realize that for eight years Obama did nothing while going to great effort to make it appear as if he did, the sooner you'll figure out why people like me are pissed and want nothing to do with Democrats.

 

[crimson5pheonix]

This is on a level with saying "It's not racist to say Muslims are violent, squalid savages, because Islam is a religion not a race": which is to say, totally missing what the real problem is. Whether you want to use stupid, ignorant, irrational or any other term doesn't really matter. At the point you are insultingly dismissing someone making reasonable points just because you have a different opinion, you need to take a good, long walk and sort yourself the fuck out before you step back into the debate.

This debate, which has rolled over about a dozen threads over quite a few months, represents two groups of people who want similar policies but have different ideas about how to get them. In simple terms, it's about strategies of non-cooperation against compromise, which to a large extent equates to "all or nothing" against "partial progress", or "high risk high gain" against "low risk low gain".

When the "reasonable point" is "I just want things to be normal again" and the only response can be "things are normal, what are you talking about?", then that's the word that's going to be used. The point here that several of us are trying to make in defense of our strategy is that it's just easier now to see all the abuses of our government domestic and foreign, so trying to say one of the most conservative members of congress will be a step to normalcy only makes sense if you think not hearing about these problems means these problems don't exist.

 

[Buyetyen]

And you're not saving them electing people who put them in a position to die.

And sitting out the election somehow will? Look, I get it. You've made the choice to withhold your votes as a form of protest. You've been pretty clear about that. My contention is that such actions typically come off as self-righteous and in this particular election cycle it feels like putting pride before reality. Obviously I can't stop you, you're committed to this decision and the only thing could change it is a bullet. If that. Just don't expect to be praised for inaction. Why? Because over half the electorate is already doing it. Are your reasons better than most of theirs? Probably. Does it have the same effect in the end? Pretty much.

 

[Eacaraxe]

And sitting out the election somehow will?

Who said anything about sitting out? I'm writing in DSA candidates this year.

My contention is that such actions typically come off as self-righteous and in this particular election cycle it feels like putting pride before reality.

And? I can't control what you or others think, and I frankly couldn't give a damn. I'm not standing for being gaslit after the last four years, period.

 

[Buyetyen]

Who said anything about sitting out? I'm writing in DSA candidates this year.

Well, that might help make a dent in the local races at least. I trust we can agree that if we can't get progressive president, we need to be seeding the down ticket state and local offices with progressive candidates. Trying to get it from the top down without doing that first has been the main strategy for the last 20 years, and I think it's safe to say at this point it's not working out like we had hoped.

As long as you're doing something, I can respect that. I have only contempt for the people who just give up.

 

[Agema]

When the "reasonable point" is "I just want things to be normal again" and the only response can be "things are normal, what are you talking about?", then that's the word that's going to be used. The point here that several of us are trying to make in defense of our strategy is that it's just easier now to see all the abuses of our government domestic and foreign, so trying to say one of the most conservative members of congress will be a step to normalcy only makes sense if you think not hearing about these problems means these problems don't exist.

This is an argument between the left and the left. None of you want it to be "normal".

It's just some of the left thinks that if left can't win, centre is preferable to right. Not making things worse is as much an improvement over making things worse as making things better is an improvement over not making things worse.

 

[crimson5pheonix]

This is an argument between the left and the left. None of you want it to be "normal".

It's just some of the left thinks that if left can't win, centre is preferable to right. Not making things worse is as much an improvement over making things worse as making things better is an improvement over not making things worse.

That's actually the common theme among most of the left (except accelerationists), the problem is that there's debate on whether Biden will stop making things worse. Some of us point out Trump isn't special, he's just a continuation, and there's no reason to believe Biden won't be a continuation of Trump. And we bring up history from the last few election cycles, as well as further history in general, to show how Trump isn't all that unique and the veneer of improvement under Dem presidents is a facade of PR divorced from the reality of their policies in how it actually effects the people in the world.