His “class trumps race” arguments have repeatedly been proven to be nonsense. People are still racist and misogynistic after they get rich. They’re still both of those things after they jettison god-belief, too. How naive I was to assume otherwise. It seems that for some of these people, Bernie was merely a merkin for their misogyny.
The insurrectionists booked airline flights to DC, chartered jets, or arrived in $70k pickup trucks, toting $5k worth of tactical gear. And Bernie tries to pin it on “poverty.” If they had enough accessible cash to take days off work, travel from Snakefuck, Oklahoma to D.C. then I wish I had their problems.
He voted against the debt ceiling deal.
He complained about Trump getting banned from Twitter after inciting an insurrection.
He’s a Putin op. Is there any good faith explanation for Bernie’s life long commitment to the USSR and Putin and his refusal to sanction Russia while benefiting personally from RU disinformation? Including voting against the Magnitsky Act? No, there isn’t.
We could’ve had comprehensive immigration reform in the 2000’s, but Bernie sided with the racists like Lou Dobbs & the minutemen militia.
Anyone who supported Bernie in the past, just admit you were had, that you made a mistake, and will in the future listen to marginalized folks when they tell you why (and show you how) someone is trash.
Did everything I could in 2016. Tried talking people out of voting green, tried to get Berniebros on board, saying a Clinton loss would be apocalyptic; it’s no time for a protest vote. Now women have lost their rights, as predicted. Democracy itself is teetering. Fuck all of you who said we were overreacting. The juvenile Bernie die-hards acted on their impulse to vandalize civilization just because their guy didn’t make it.
drewsays
HIs position, as always, is to point out the horrors of the Democratic party, then hypocritically corral everyone into voting for them.
Tethyssays
Really? I am still angry at him for shitting on Hillary Clinton because he lost to her, and getting the orange asswipe elected.
Old white man chose to be a bro and made me regret casting my primary ballot for him. It’s nice that he put out this blurb supporting Harris, but I hope he feels guilty every day for his role in helping the fascists get their greedy grimy hands on my government in the first place.
lotharloosays
Get over Hillary fucking Clinton. She was a terrible candidate and a shit campaigner. She lost to her own hubris. She was a privileged asshole and she has only herself to blame.
I think Kamala will lose which is unfortunate because she is running a much better campaign but unfortunately was thrown into a disadvantaged situation because the dumbass democratic party decided it was better to put a corpse as a candidate and they thought nobody will notice.
And I think you misspoke, you really meant to say you hope Kamala loses. You want to teach the Democratic Party a lesson, but you won’t be the one getting the strap across the arse. Marginalized people will. All because of your perfection tantrum. Well, maybe you’ll be among the last against the wall when your retribution is re-elected.
Tethyssays
It sounds as if the only person who needs to get over Hillary Clinton is lotharloo.
She was in fact the most qualified candidate for POTUS in my lifetime. More qualified than Obama, or Reagan, either Bush, rotten Orange or Jill Stein.
I’m getting more confident daily that Harris is going to win, and we can turn the page. By contrast, the GOP has managed to pretty much destroy its own party by becoming a toxic bro-cult. They’re eating the Puerto Ricans! Or dogs. Maybe geese.
Meanwhile US women are 51% of the voters, and we are so very done with bro-don assaulting women and women’s civil rights.
lotharloosays
@Robert Westbrook:
Yeah, as a brown middle-eastern immigrant I am fucking oozing with privilege. Fucking clown. Still can’t accept the reality that you candidate sucked and if she was slightly more competent and more serious, she could have won? I thought so, better blame everything else.
lotharloosays
@Tethys:
I am absolutely over Hillary. I don’t suddenly and randomly bring her up at all. I don’t derail threats by talking about 8 years ago. Maybe if you read the actual thread you will get a clue.
Also about the qualification, I disagree. There are no courses or degrees for POTUS so deciding whether someone is “most qualified” is very subjective but I am very bored to talk about Hillary.
I hope you are right that Trump can’t win but I think he is the favorite right now. There are a lot of good signs for Kamala but the zombie horde will be marching to elect their cult leader and I don’t think the polls are able to capture that, meaning, I am expecting him to do much better. In every election, Trump has out-performed the polls much more than the Democratic nominee by 2-3-4 points. Even if does better than Kamala by 1% this time, it is over.
Tethyssays
Rude jerk @12
I don’t derail threats by talking about 8 years ago. Maybe if you read the actual thread you will get a clue.
I obviously read the thread, and haven’t derailed the thread by noting Bernie’s contribution to the CURRENT
state of affairs of having to defeat a rapist for the THIRD time, instead of just once in 2018.
That would be you, with your irrational hatred of Hillary Clinton. Great back-peddling on the subject of being qualified though!
I actually suspect that Harris is going to win by far more than the current +4 odds, as the polling is significantly underestimating multiple US demographics.
Exit polling in supposedly red states shows that women’s reproductive rights and democracy are the top issues for the record breaking numbers of early voters, so that’s a good sign that they chose Harris/Walz.
KGsays
HIs position, as always, is to point out the horrors of the Democratic party, then hypocritically corral everyone into voting for them. – drew@6
Your position is to point out the horrors of the Democratic Party, while hypocritically ignoring the far worse horrors of the Republican Party, and dishonestly pretending there is at this point any third option. You are, in short, either a fascist or a fool, and it’s really not of much importance or interest which.
KGsays
Robert Westbrook @5,
I’d be interested in any actual evidence that Sanders is “a Putin op”. His record on sanctions against Russai is rather more equivocal than you imply.
jack lecousays
Tethys @10: ….most qualified candidate for POTUS…
I think it’d be more accurate to say she would have been one of the most qualified presidents. And I wouldn’t disagree with that. But the issue is precisely that before you can do that job, you have to run a campaign and perform the job of candidate, and there’s plenty of evidence that she was rather less qualified there.
Obviously, just a handful of votes in a couple of states would have changed the 2016 outcome. Hundreds of external factors in the race might have been individually larger than that tiny margin. Had Comey not pulled a Comey, maybe it’d be different. Had Russians not hacked the DNC, maybe it’d be different. If the US electorate were a quarter point less sexist asshole, maybe it’d be different. If the GOP hadn’t run a 3-decades long character assassination campaign against Clinton, maybe it’d be different. If there were a couple hundred thousand fewer credulous morons voting for Trump, maybe it’d be different.
Heck, had the weather been slightly better in a couple counties in Ohio, maybe it would have been different.
But none of that stuff actually absolves Clinton. When you’re leading a campaign, you can’t blame the weather if you lose. If you didn’t account for it, that’s still on you. All of those external speed bumps were the campaign’s — the candidate’s — job to tackle and overcome. And the bottom line is that she didn’t. Instead, she ran a singularly insipid and uninspired campaign. Arguably didn’t even do that much in, say, Wisconsin…
(And while I certainly wouldn’t say that running a campaign has much to do with being a good president in general, there is some overlap. Clinton was such a notoriously bad campaigner, it’s gotta say something. Like, at least part of her repeated failures were due to her staffing decisions. She chose to highly place various long-time cronies and hangers-on in her campaigns, cronies who were invariably as incompetent as they were overpaid. And she employed them again and again, even when they failed. My understanding is that to the extent there were any new faces in the 2016 campaign at all, it was mainly due to inheriting pieces of Obama’s machine, rather than any real attempt on Clinton’s part to reform the team that had so fubar-ed her 2008 effort. Stuff like that is not a good look for an executive, and does actually reflect on her leadership qualities.)
I think it’d be more accurate to say she would have been one of the most qualified presidents.
It would be more accurate if she had won. Of course it logically follows that the best qualified candidate would also be a best qualified President. Sadly, merit and qualifications were trumped by the excrescence, and billions in dark money contributions from wealthy foreign autocrats.
Sexism won, struck down Roe vs Wade, and now we are here in 2024 with that scumbag reenacting a Nazi rally.
As we have discussed before, voter turnout is the key to winning electoral elections. Orange “ won” with just 29% of the vote, in one of the most dismal years for voter turnout.
Comer and Bernie were a great help in depressing voter turnout.
whheydtsays
I am cautiously optimistic that Harris will win next week.
In the mean time… What’s this with using the first names of women and the surnames of men? If you’re going to call Trump Trump, have the courtesy to call Harris Harris.
Tethyssays
That should be Comey, obviously. Hail typnos!
John Moralessays
whheydt, did you read te post title? The comment preceding yours?
(‘Bernie’ is not a surname)
Tethyssays
Sorry KG, my comment 18 should have been directed to Jack Lecou. Dang tiny screens and my crappy eyesight.
jack lecousays
Tethys @18: Of course it logically follows that the best qualified candidate would also be a best qualified President.
Maybe I’m misreading you, but no, I don’t think that follows at all. Even at the best of times, an election isn’t really a meritocratic hiring process. It’s a popularity contest.
All things considered, that’s probably a worthwhile price to pay for democracy, but let’s not pretend it’s something it’s not.
In actual fact, I think one could make a convincing case that even wanting to be president — nevermind having the qualities it takes to successfully navigate the US electoral system ca. 2000CE — is already a pretty big discount in qualification from the sort of person who’d actually make the best president. But c’est la vie.
lasiussays
I disagree with Bernie that a Trump win would change climate change policy in my country called Europe.
jack lecousays
Tethys @18: Comer and Bernie were a great help in depressing voter turnout.
That’s false when it comes to Bernie. Unless you want to say that having different ideas and running against someone in a primary is automatically tantamount to killing their chances in the general. And the numbers just don’t support it either way. It’s true that there was a vocal minority in the Sanders camp that ended up going over to Trump (or sitting it out), but their visibility exceeded their actual impact. Sanders endorsed her, and in the end more Sanders voters returned to the roost for Clinton in ’16 than Clinton voters did for Obama in ’08. (Anyway, it wouldn’t actually be Sanders’ fault if he clicked with a segment of the electorate Clinton didn’t. There’s no situation where Candidate B is somehow entitled to Candidate A’s voters — they always still have to earn them.)
Now, Comer I’d grant you. He’s an asshole. But see above — there are plenty of assholes in the world. That’s just life. The blame for a losing campaign nevertheless has to start with the things the campaign could actually have changed. If Clinton had run the best campaign in 50 years, and still lost, OK, maybe now it’s on Comer. But she objectively didn’t run that campaign. E.g., she lost Wisconsin by 20,000 votes because she simply didn’t even bother to put it on the itinerary.
jack lecousays
(Edit to my 25: s/Comer/Comey. Comer is a different asshole.)
Hemidactylussays
When it looked early on like a potential Hillary v Jeb showdown (Clinton v Bush 2.0) I was in my jaded cynic phase leaning into rational ignorance of the political arena. We had seen that movie before and for me voting seemed passe’. When Trump entered the picture that viewpoint changed. I wasn’t thrilled with Hillary and liked Bernie ok. The revelation of the Russian hack soured me on the DNC more than I was already. But I still voted for Hillary and was one of the few people who got her nuance contrasting the basket of deplorables versus Trump supporters we should emphasize with. Funny how that latter part dropped from the conservative narrative and she morphed into a basher of the deplorables.
I like Kamala. Her campaign seems to have embraced the first name whheydt@19 and Hillary also before that. Bernie has first name props too, so deal with it and stop dragging people who use Kamala or Hillary unless you want to alienate them. Just what we need now with tight margins…alienated voters who got dragged for non-issues.
I’m kinda pessimistic about this election. The huge support Kamala got when she took over for Uncle Joe (aka the Senator from MBNA) that gave her an apparent popularity spike seems to have waned some. Not sure how the swing states will fall. I hope Kamala wins. Otherwise…I can’t even with that.
As for what I saw of PZ’s Bernie video, I wish we would end all military support for Israel. Too bad that will never happen even under Kamala.
imbacksays
OK people, 2016 was by my calculation eight years ago. Moving on, his leading point is that Gaza is a tragic issue, and that Trump would be far worse than Harris on that issue. Gaza is a current issue and important to a lot of Americans, and I agree with Sanders here.
StevoRsays
@8. lotharloo : HRC was the choice of most Americans for POTUS in 2016. Even after decades of vile, absurd Repug slurs and hate and even despite the worst Assange and Comey did. That election revealed a hell of a lot of misogyny and was bloody awful. But she did get the most votes. She was the most popular as wellas the most qualified and clearly the best candidate seen rationally.
Problem is in the USA with the disgraceful Electoral College system blatantly favouring the reichwing she didn’t win by quite enough. All history now but I think it disproves your point. What baffles me is why you keep raising it & attacking her personally nearly a decade later. How is it relevant here and now?
You know the reichwing ran a far worse & less popular candidate than HRC in 2015 and he won that – and yet they’re running Trump again despite him being a known rapist, traitor and convicted felon..but they’ve united around him anyhow.
Right now is the time for Democratic and leftwing progressive people to unite to stop Trump. That is what matters most now and what I really think we must focus on achieving.
I love Bernie Sanders and agree with him 100%.
But do people really think a secular Jew, which is a euphemism for atheist, can win in the USA in 2024?
Or someone who uses the word socialist to describe himself? Frankly, I really think people on the left should stop using the word socialist because the right wing has destroyed the meaning of that term. We should call ourselves FDRists or even Eisenhowerists. It would be appropriate for either though FDR deserves more of the credit.
And if we do bring FDRism back, we can do it better next time and remove the racism and misogyny make it apply to women and minorities.
StevoRsays
I am terrified by this election. The implications it has for the future are beyond gargantuan. For Climate, for Democracy, for the future of the USA and for the rest of our shared pale blue dot
That it can seemingly be so horribly close is just appalling and says nothing good about the state of American culture, politics and society..Murdoch has rotted far too many minds for far too long and the Overton window been pushed so over-stretchingly far that outright sympathising with and backing from nazis isn’t the automatic disqualifying race-ending factor it should be.
I cannot wait for it to be over. I hope and will do anything I can do to help the result being a badly needed landslide against Trump. A landslide big enough to overcome the EC and deter any Trump cultists violence and phsyical warfare to inflict him as POTUS upon the world again. I do not really know who will win but I know who needs to win for us to have any chance of saving the world as we know it..
I wish more people took this election as the matter of life and death that it truly is. So very much depends on the outcome now and so we cannot risk fucking around and messing this up.
We have one more week to go. Let’s use this time as well and productively as possible and sdo everything possible to make sure Kamala Harris wins.. Because there’s only one alternative and a Trump return cannot be allowed to happen. After the election will be the time to push for major badly needed reforms and more. Now is NOT the time for anything that hurts the Democratic party or Kamala’s chances. Get her & a Democratic Congress elected first.
crimsonsagesays
Ya know I try and get over him but sucdem grandpa always brings me back. While people on the left are very vocal about not voting over Gaza I highly doubt that a significant number will actually abstain come election day. Most leftists who are abstaining are probably doing so in states in whic it doesnt matter anyway so a strategic vote has very little risk. If they are really concerned about Gaza affecting their election they need to worry more about Arab Americans who I think are rightly angry at Bidens policies.
I know anecdotally my bubble is basically all leftists and I dont think any of them aren’t voting for Coconut mommy unless they live in solid blue states, but that’s all anecdotal. I an cautiously optimistic that kamala will win she seems to be improving her margins over Brandon basically every where except Arab Americans, and Trumps base has only contracted, cus if ya know they deding. Also Trump just feels rizless, he’s outa juice and has the stink of loser on him. I hope kamala wins, as much as I dispise biden over Gaza he gas been the best president for labor in my lifetime and if kamala is even half as good that would be a massive boon to the left.
Also it’s weird to see bluanon comments here.
John Moralessays
StevoR, your terror is of your own making.
Obs, “We” are Australians, the election is in the USA. On the other side of the world.
You do get us doing “everything possible to make sure Kamala Harris wins” would be election interference by a foreign entity, no?
(A bit hypocritical to condemn Russia for doing it and then to advocate for others to do it as well)
Oh please! They call even the most milquetoast centrist economic policies “Communism.” There’s no point in finding a new word, we just need to stop being cowards about it and worrying about offending the rich and their bootlicking lackeys (i.e. the middle class).
crimsonsagesays
@30 mark McKee
The republicans will call you a communist no matter what you call yourself, hell they sexistly are calling kamala a communist and I don’t know how much I would even consider her a progressive; or she would for that matter.
If you are a socialist you should say what you ate and stand by your deeds, running from your opponents smears just makes you look week. If you aren’t a socialist, which I don’t think you are, then the lesson remains it doesn’t matter what you call yourself you will be tarred as a commie.
crimsonsagesays
What you “are” not “ate,” but ate is also funny. “I am a communist that ate trail mix and organized my workplace!”
John Moralessays
Bubble aside,
“I dont think any of them aren’t voting for Coconut mommy unless they live in solid blue states”
↓
‘I think all of them are voting for Coconut mommy unless they live in solid blue states’
(Not sure that was the intended meaning)
John Moralessays
[I mean, I can read it both ways. Like that hag/youngy optical illusion, or the Necker cube]
crimsonsagesays
Yeah that’s what I meant. I think people make a lot of noise about not voting, but when push comes to shove they do. We see it every election cycle where self identified leftists scream about not voting dem, but then end up doing it anyway.
It doesn’t help that on the flip conservative dems use this to prop up the zombie lie that “leftists don’t vote” ergo we can and should ignore them, despite the fact the data basically says the opposite every time.
John Moralessays
Appreciate that, crimsonsage. Ta.
billseymoursays
IIRC, high voter turnout used to be good for Democrats. If that holds true in this election, maybe we have a chance.
I drove by the early voting place nearest where I live today, the seventh day of no-excuse early voting in Missouri, just to check out how busy it was. The line outside the building was about three blocks long. My one remaining hope is that the polls aren’t counting all the folks who are voting this time.
VolcanoMansays
I get StevoR’s terror and helplessness. I’m also terrified of a Trump win, and am Canadian so I also can’t do a thing about it. Americans have to stop pretending that their politics are solely their purview. Trump would be a disaster for more than just your nation (he’s has a massive impact on global politics already, as he threw gasoline on a revanchist, right-wing authoritarian political movement, leading to similar movements finding success in many other countries, my own included). Some of the damage he’s done is irreversible – it has to run its course. But he can do so, SO much worse in a second term. And yet only Americans have the opportunity to keep him from winning, and getting a second shot at destroying everything good about his country (and there are an impressive number of good things about America), and moving the world even further away from actual solutions to the global problems we all face.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand the apathy. I want it all to end, the election BS, and I don’t even live in America. Can’t you guys just have normal elections? Set aside 12 weeks for a campaign, and just…choose between a bunch of boring candidates, none of whom will actually do very much, besides keeping the ship afloat, perpetuating neo-colonial capitalistic cultural hegemony with a mild partisan spin, communicated in inspirational messaging adverts and punchy, rehearsed interview responses. Why does every election have to be the most important election you’ll ever vote in? This messaging is getting old (even as it remains depressingly true). The Trump cult needs to die, and so do the billionaires who are propping it up (I can’t believe some people still think it’s salt-of-the-earth American working class people who are responsible for Trump’s success). And I know that many Americans are over it so hard that they don’t even care what happens on November 5th – most of these people won’t even bother voting (even if they live in a state where their vote might matter). And that’s by design, by the way – the power brokers realized they don’t have to put in the effort to manufacture consent most of the time…apathy is a more than acceptable outcome. So I disagree with Timothy Leary…I think it’s fine to turn off and tune out (preserving your sanity should be pretty high on your priority list)…but for goodness’ sake, don’t drop out. Instead, drop IN to your designated voting location and do the rest of the world (not to mention yourself) a solid, yeah?
And finally, note that I cannot stand that regardless of what happens next week, Israel is going to keep genociding brown people in Gaza, the West Bank and any other place they think they can get away with. Or that no major political party (in my country or yours) has an actual, actionable plan to ban the extraction, trade and combustion of fossil fuels in a time frame that actually could make a difference in the adverse outcomes of climate change set to happen in my lifetime (let’s call that another 4 decades), let alone that of future generations. And yet despite all of that, I am calling on Americans to please preserve a functional world order (even a shitty one) so that diplomacy can actually have a shot at solving the big problems we all face. The option here is not between good people and bad people, or good policies and bad policies. We don’t actually face a world in which one election can end all suffering. But one election can certainly lead to more…or less suffering, depending on who wins.
StevoRsays
@ 32. crimsonsage : “Also it’s weird to see bluanon comments here.”
Blueanon? Really? What exactly do you by that and whose comments specifically are you referring to here?
That has more than just a whiff of false erquivalence to my nostrils.
Obvs allusion to Quanon but if you compare, well, who doing what to that movement..
“Left-wing users posted conspiracy theories of a “false flag” operation,[314] dubbed “BlueAnon”, in reference to QAnon.[308][330][331][332]”
Akira MacKenziesays
“BlueAnon” is generally a term used for Democrat/liberal conspiracy theories about Trump. (e.g. The attempts on Trump’s life was staged. Trump had classified documents buried with Ivana. Putin is blackmailing him with a “pee tape.” etc..)
crimsonsagesays
@43 StevoR
I am referring specifically to #5 Robert Westbrook and the idea that Bernie is a Russian plant at the behest of the USSR and Putin, as well as, to a lesser extent, the idea that all Bernie and his supporters are/were sexist/racist dudebros that lost Hillary the election. Perhaps Russia derangement syndrome would be the better epithet to describe that? I have always heard bluanon to describe the more conspiracy minded democrats. Like I may not agree with people here 100% of the time politically but I can usually respect that everyone is a reasonable and intelligent person of good will.
Sorry, PZ, but if you magically showed up at my apartment today I’d probably run out and find a spray bottle because of this post. “Bad PZ, bringing up voting for Sanders in 2024, bad!”
rietpluimsays
Friendly reminder that Clinton did not loose the 2016 presidential election. She won the election, by 2,868,686 votes to be precise, but Trump became president nonetheless because of the US’ archaic election process.
beholdersays
@32 crimsonsage
Also it’s weird to see bluanon comments here.
On FTB? You can find them pretty regularly on the Infinite Thread…
This time, though, it was probably a few sleeper agents from the Clinton campaign who read “I’d rather be voting for Bernie“, and it activated old, disused circuits in their brains that haven’t processed any new events since mid-2016. They were compelled to regurgitate how Yas Queen would, in fact, Slay, that she is the best candidate that can and will ever exist, and that Bernie makes their skin crawl.
beholdersays
@48 rietpluim
Friendly reminder that Clinton lost the 2016 election. Get over it.
jack lecousays
rietpluim@48: Friendly reminder that Clinton did not loose[sic] the 2016 presidential election. She won the election, by 2,868,686 votes to be precise, but Trump became president nonetheless because of the US’ archaic election process.
That’s a bizarre statement. It’s like saying “Team X actually won the Superbowl because they scored more goals with kicks. Team Y were only appointed champions because of the archaic rules of American football.”
I mean, I hate the anti-democratic electoral college system as much as the next guy. More, probably. With the fury of 10,000 suns. I want it gone. But the fact is that for now — and in 2016 — it is the rules the game is played by. That’s what a US presidential election is.
Both candidates know that perfectly well when they enter the contest. It’s why neither side campaigns in, for instance, California (solid D) or Idaho (solid R). If one side also decides to ignore oh, say, Wisconsin or Michigan and thereby blows their electoral chances, nobody gets to turn around and say “but they won the popular vote!”.
jack lecousays
crimsonsage @39:
Yeah that’s what I meant. I think people make a lot of noise about not voting, but when push comes to shove they do. We see it every election cycle where self identified leftists scream about not voting dem, but then end up doing it anyway.
It doesn’t help that on the flip conservative dems use this to prop up the zombie lie that “leftists don’t vote” ergo we can and should ignore them, despite the fact the data basically says the opposite every time.
That’s exactly right.
Though I would say the tragedy is a little deeper than that. I agree that we leftists invariably hold our nose and vote in the end, but that doesn’t mean the inevitable establishment Dem “pivot to the center” isn’t without a turnout cost. I think what happens (to varying degrees) is that while leftist activists might hold their nose and do their duty at the polling booth, what they might be less likely to do is also push a more apathetic friend or relative out to the polls. It’s a lot harder to wax enthusiastic to your friends about a candidate who is selling out to banks. Or, say, seems to be complicit in a genocide.
Hard to pin down down how big that effect is, but IMO it’s not insignificant.
Why would you want to vote for Sanders? Even if he’s not wrong, senile or evil, he’s still just a cantankerous old man, not someone who can actually lead; and certainly not someone who can lead in the face of determined fascist opposition. Nor has he shown himself to be much of a coalition-builder or deal-maker in Congress. Wherever his heart is, he’s just never been effective as a politician; and trust me, if he’d been the Democrats’ nominee this year, Trump would win easily, without any doubt at any time, just he would have beat Sanders in 2016.
crimsonsagesays
@49 Beholder
I meant here on pharyngula specifically, most posters here seem to be pretty reasonable.
jack lecousays
Raging Bee @53:
Well, one reason to vote for Sanders (or someone like him, but maybe a bit younger) is the fact that socialists have a much better record against fascists than centrist liberals do.
FWIW, I’m somewhat sanguine about Harris, even if she hasn’t run exactly the campaign I might have wanted her to. I certainly hope she wins — I dropped my own ballot off a couple days ago.
But I also hope that once she’s in office she makes some additional breaks from the neoliberal norms that have been poisoning the Democratic party for the last 40+ years. This is what Biden has done, in some of his most successful moments: e.g., student debt, support for unions, an FTC and a Justice Dept that actually think holding corporations to account might be part of their job. (In Bidens case, some of this may be because he is simply from an era predating those neoliberal norms. Harris could actually be the first post-neoliberal President. Or not.)
As to Bernie’s chances in 2016, obviously it’s all speculation, but I think that’s a lot less clear cut than you think. Successful wheeling and dealing in Congress is a lot less important in a presidential race — might even be a hindrance. And on the other hand, Sanders wouldn’t have had Clinton’s baggage, and might have defined a campaign with very different contours. (Like it or not, and true or not, Clinton’;s image was defined well before the campaign started: a corrupt political insider, a sellout with no principled views of her own.)
Sure, he might have been successfully tarred as a commie socialist in the general election, but very possibly only to the segment that inevitably believes the same thing about Obama, Clinton, Biden and Harris as well, regardless of the facts or their actual positions. And then, Sanders has a lot of genuinely principled (appearing) policy positions (universal healthcare, opposition to war, etc.) that might have allowed him to actually define some kind of alternative vision to oppose and undercut Trump’s 2016 image as a fresh outsider with populist ideas (Clinton, as an objectively stale insider, was left utterly flatfooted there).
In the end, most Democrats (and Republicans) would have come home to their party regardless of the candidate, so it’s largely a question at the margins. I think it’s very likely Sanders would have lost some support with, e.g., African-Americans relative to Clinton. He might not have picked up NC. But there’s plausible reason to believe Sanders could have picked up a few points with non-college whites, a segment where Clinton fell off from Obama quite badly, and that ultimately hurt her in the Midwest and Southwest. IIRC, Sanders wouldn’t even have had to beat Obama’s 2012 numbers with that segment to turn things around and carry the EC.
Our organization listened to Bernie for years before he ran for president. He isn’t perfect. But, his ideals (not ideology) outshine almost all of the alleged superstars of politics today; Raskin and AOC, Jasmine C. and a few others excepted. We supported his run and were only disappointed when he gave up campaigning. The corporate democratic machine did all they could to dishonestly assassinate his character. Thus, we condemn the duopoly and both major corporate run parties. The electoral college is a farce. Ranked choice voting seems to be a great idea that the moneyed corporate powers will never allow.
We are not strictly socialists. We support honest privately owned businesses. We will never support crapitallism. We are secular and cannot respect the superstition that is religion.
Everyone in our organization has voted already. We voted against tRUMP. However, we can’t respect Harris. She is (and has signaled she will continue to be) a co-sponsor of the genocide in the middle-east, among other drastic flaws. Based on limited info, we like and respect Tim Walz.
Fact check time:
@5 Robert Westbrook wrote complaining about Bernie
‘Sigh. Bernie was blind to racism in his own supporters, too out of touch, and persistently tone-deaf to the concerns of POC.’ ‘It seems that for some of these people, Bernie was merely a merkin for their misogyny.’
The reality is that for decades he has fought against ALL forms of bigotry. Just as he said in the video, Bernie, many times, decried bigotry, sexism and racism. And, the assertion by @5 is clearly wrong. As Bernie supporters, we have always engaged in the fight against all forms of bigotry.
And just to be very clear when I said, “We voted against tRUMP.” I am also staying that we did vote for harris/walz.
Jemolksays
Oh, good. This has dredged up the people who inexplicably hate Sanders for… well, for the same sort of nonsense the Republicans used against Hillary Clinton for 30 years, quite frankly. Smears, lies, and distractions. Let’s be real about this — Clinton would most likely have made a pretty average president, all things considered. Obviously lightyears ahead of Trump, but then again, a potted plant is lightyears ahead of Trump.
However, she was an absolutely terrible campaigner. Not only did she never try to take control of the narrative, she never even contradicted the smears against her. She was beyond complacent, took advice from out of touch idiots, and lost as a result. Not by much, to be sure, and she could easily have still won, but she never should have been so close in the first place that Comey’s comments could cause her to lose. She made more than enough unforced errors to make up the difference and then some, even accounting for the sabotage and poor luck.
As for Sanders — he’s a good guy who genuinely believes in using his position to help people, and has never been shy about voicing his positions. It’s speculation, of course, but I believe his willingness to take control of the narrative could very easily have carried him to the presidency, if he had just won the primary, and I think he would have made an excellent president, too. He’s not as far left as I would like, but then, very few people are, and you’re not likely to see any anarcho-communists running for office anywhere. Not really our style.
jack lecousays
I think the thing I’m more troubled by how many people here are, 8 years on, still trying to blame the 2016 outcome on Bernie Sanders of all people, and/or basically anyone and anything except the very public failures of Hillary Clinton and her campaign.
That’s very worrying when some of us saw Biden, and now Harris, making some of the same mistakes. I do think Harris is a better candidate than either of them, her support for Palestinian genocide notwithstanding.
But if — Chthulhu-forbid! — she does lose, and if we ever have another election again after that, we need to be able to examine those mistakes, learn from them, and force the Party and future candidates to do better. Or at the very least, not allow them to keep sticking their heads in the sand and scapegoating the very-much-not-in-power leftist faction for their repeated failures.
StevoRsays
@33. John Morales :
StevoR, your terror is of your own making.
Obs, “We” are Australians, the election is in the USA. On the other side of the world.
In the same world, the same pale blue dot with the one global atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere which we all have to share.
I look at the climate graphs and trends and right now, they are screaming at us – metaphorically speaking of course.
There are a lot of .other implications if the USA falls to Trump and fascism too gioven their massive cultural influnece and our political tuies and the importing of American culture war issues to us frex the weaponisation of false late term abortion myths that recently caused one regressive Mp locally to try a bill denyiong wormn’s right’s in SA.
Sadly the election in the States does affect us all – globally.
Yes, StevoR, all that. Still, you don’t get to vote in the USA.
So… “We have one more week to go. Let’s use this time as well and productively as possible and sdo everything possible to make sure Kamala Harris wins.”
Basically, what you are is a foreign national posting social media comments endorsing one candidate, demonising the other, and providing various hyperbolic and inflammatory scenarios.
Also, be aware that doing “everything possible” includes doing illegal, immoral and cruel things, as well as lying and cheating misleading and compromising and whatnot. Or assassinations.
You exclude nothing.
—
Again: There is no “we” — there is the electorate which gets to vote, and there is you.
The election is for eligible USA voters, not for you.
Hemidactylussays
John Morales @63
StevoR obviously feels invested in the outcome of the coming US election as the implications are global and not limited to us. Trump is a demon, no demonization needed, and amply supplies his own hyperbolic and inflammatory scenarios. No need to just add water.
No reasonable person is thinking StevoR wants “illegal, immoral and cruel things” done nor assassination (jeebus!). That’s all ridiculous word-chopping on your part. What compels you to do this to people? You’re more gnat than gadfly when you do it. There’s nothing aporic in it. Nothing constructive. Just unwarranted tedium on your part.
John Moralessays
There are a lot of .other implications if the USA falls to Trump and fascism
Yeah, well. Indeed there are. Biggest kid in the schoolyard.
Still: not up to us how the USA votes.
Basically, if Trump is voted in, it will be the will of the people.
(Attributed to Thomas Jefferson: “the government you elect is the government you deserve”)
—
To quote Jack @51: “I mean, I hate the anti-democratic electoral college system as much as the next guy. More, probably. With the fury of 10,000 suns. I want it gone. But the fact is that for now — and in 2016 — it is the rules the game is played by. That’s what a US presidential election is.”
Right?
Can’t condemn Trump for failing to respect the election result and then not respect the result oneself.
John Moralessays
Ah, been a while since you attempted this, Hemidactylus.
“Trump is a demon”, quoth you.
What, supernatural in nature?
An extremely competent performer?
(heh)
No reasonable person is thinking StevoR wants “illegal, immoral and cruel things” done nor assassination (jeebus!).
(sigh)
Whatever makes you imagine I thought that at least one “reasonable person is thinking StevoR wants “illegal, immoral and cruel things” done”?
I quoted what he wrote.
Whatever I (or a reasonable person) thinks StevoR probably meant, I quoted what he wrote.
Again: doing “everything possible” excludes nothing that is not physically impossible to achieve.
(Words mean things)
That’s all ridiculous word-chopping on your part.
Nope.
You ostensibly think that’s all ridiculous word-chopping on my part, which is not the same thing.
(You’re chopping meaning; much as with the ‘sanewashing’ some claim is applied to what Trump says)
What compels you to do this to people?
Probably the very same thing that compelled you to do this to me. :)
You’re more gnat than gadfly when you do it. There’s nothing aporic in it. Nothing constructive. Just unwarranted tedium on your part.
Sez the constructive aporic gadfly whose tedium is warranted.
(heh)
—
But fine, truth is not constructive, in your estimation.
—
Anyway, this election is for USAnians, not for Australians.
We get to watch and worry (or be terrified, depending on temperament), but not to interfere.
John Moralessays
[My birthday is on 5 November, and I remember 2016 when Trump got elected.
Not the best present ever.
I had my aunt and uncle over from Spain at the time, and we all commiserated.
Exactly the same feeling as when Brexit happened; WTF? How did this happen?
Why are they doing this obviously stupid thing to themselves?
But, sovereignty]
Tethyssays
Harris is running a very successful campaign that has obviously learned from the mistakes of 2016. Bernie is far more important in his current position, and I think he also learned from his mistakes.
Moving forward, I think a Harris administration will be even more progressive than the current Biden administration on many issues, including Israel.
Running a centrist campaign is a careful strategy for capturing the votes of Haley supporters and any other Conservatives who traditionally vote Republican.
She was conspicuously absent when Netanyahu visited congress recently, which was deliberate though more subtle than a resounding support of Gaza that some would have preferred.
The latest CNN poll of early voters in three swing states shows a strong lead for Harris.
MI 61% -35%
WI 60%-38%
PA 57%-40%
This is excellent news, and the Dumpster fire has already filed a legal complaint against a Pennsylvania county alleging that “long lines” were somehow preventing his voters from voting!? Nevermind the part where the election is next week and the office in question has reported that everyone in the line by 5:30 would absolutely get their ballots and have the opportunity to turn in their ballot.
Ben Meiselas gives more details (about 3 minutes in) on early voting results, a “ surprising” CNN poll, and then the news of yet another woman who has gone public about being lured to a hotel suite and sexually assaulted by that disgusting orange excrescence. I believe that’s the second one this week?
Lucky me, I live in Vermont, so I got to vote for both!
John Morales: I think there’s a very large difference between failing to respect the voting system, and failing to accept its outcome. Trump lost both the popular and the electoral vote rejected both. However you parse the will of the people, he violated it.
StevoRsays
@46. crimsonsage :
@43 StevoR
I am referring specifically to #5 Robert Westbrook and the idea that Bernie is a Russian plant at the behest of the USSR and Putin, as well as, to a lesser extent, the idea that all Bernie and his supporters are/were sexist/racist dudebros that lost Hillary the election. Perhaps Russia derangement syndrome would be the better epithet to describe that? I have always heard bluanon to describe the more conspiracy minded democrats. Like I may not agree with people here 100% of the time politically but I can usually respect that everyone is a reasonable and intelligent person of good will.
Thanks and fair enough. I was puzzled by who and what you meant by that. Appreciated your elaboration and clarification there.
@ 44. John Morales : I know – I wanted to know what they meant by it
StevoRsays
@63. John Morales :
Yes, StevoR, all that. Still, you don’t get to vote in the USA. .So… “We have one more week to go. Let’s use this time as well and productively as possible and do everything possible to make sure Kamala Harris wins.” (SR #31 italicised – ed.)
Basically, what you are is a foreign national posting social media comments endorsing one candidate, demonising the other, and providing various hyperbolic and inflammatory scenarios.
I am painfully well aware that I don’t get to vote in the USA’s election despite it having such a huge impact on the entire planet including my country. The United States of America gets to dictate much of our Aussie (& other allied nations) foreign policy here but we (Aussies and other nations) of course, get no say & have sod all influence on theirs.
I don’t think I am “demonising”Trump at all – stating the reality about him is not demonisation. I’m don’t think I ám saying anything false or misleading or inaccurate and pretty sure I can back up everything I say about him.
I don’t think I’m describing hyperbolic or inflammatory scenarios either – see end of last sentence. Hypothetical maybe? Plausible even probable in my view. Testimony from many (most?) of Trump’s own picked admin figures who worked with him about his character and plans, the existence of Project 2025, Trump’s own comments & history, all support what I’ve said and give reason for people like me and so many others to be terrified or at least deeply concerned.. .
Yes, I am a foreign national in relation to the USA but I don’t think that means I shouldn’t have a view or preference or be able to express those and argue my case which is all I’m actually able to do. To share stuff with those who can vote and argue for why I think they should vote a certain way. I’m also very far from alone and doing this with very little actual power or influence. Note journalists and influencers – which I’m not – also do this expressing views and reasons and arguing over how they think people in the States should vote. Nor is this limited to US elections, I read up on what happens in various places globally, have views on that, express them and express why I hold them and think people should agree with me on them. This is a pretty typical, basic human nature thing to do isn’t it?
Also, be aware that doing “everything possible” includes doing illegal, immoral and cruel things, as well as lying and cheating misleading and compromising and whatnot. Or assassinations.
You exclude nothing.
Actually, I was speaking about myself and by using “possible” that does exclude that – at least realistically – in practice rather than in theory. Again, language, how does it work? I have neither resources nor inclination to do anything illegal or unethical. I’m not really able to travel to the states financially or opportunity~wise at present.
Again: There is no “we” — there is the electorate which gets to vote, and there is you.
The election is for eligible USA voters, not for you.
I was using “we” in the collective sense of people generally, people like us, humans. Progressives, leftwing anti-Trump people.
Some of whoem are in the USA and can vote even if many others including myself are not. I do NOT – for the record – advocate doing anything illegal or unethical.
Personally, I would far prefer to see Trump lose the election fairly and then be jailed for his many crimes and die there, poor and disgraced, of natural causes (covid would be apt) in prison rather than see him assassinated potentially making him a “martyr” and empowering his toxic and dangerous cult and mythology.
StevoRsays
@66. John Morales : : “We get to watch and worry (or be terrified, depending on temperament), but not to interfere.”
is it “interfering” to talk and argue, analyse and try to persuade?
That’s I guess really what I’m talking about for me personally when it coems to doing everything I can tohelp Kamala Harrius win here. I’m not rich, I can’t do much else, I can’t vote, I certainly don’t have the skills equipemnt etc .. to be an assassin or hacker or suchlike here. I can and do share memes and express my opinions, encourage peopel to vote to stop Trumnpand suggest various courses like unifying as strongly as possible behind her and disencouraging thsoe who ar ethinkingof doing so fromstaying homeor voting third party spoilers. Is that interference?
John Moralessays
I’d respond in detail, StevoR, but it would be pointless.
So, just one thing: you assert you are trying to influence “Progressives, leftwing anti-Trump people”.
(If they are already progressive left-wing anti-Trump, they hardly need your influence)
jack lecousays
Tethys @68:
Harris is running a very successful campaign that has obviously learned from the mistakes of 2016. Bernie is far more important in his current position, and I think he also learned from his mistakes.
I think they’ve learned from some of the most glaring ones – schedule some campaign stops in Wisconsin, for example. I’m somewhat less convinced they’ve learned the hard ones.
Moving forward, I think a Harris administration will be even more progressive than the current Biden administration on many issues, including Israel.
I certainly hope so. It’s really hard to tell at this point though. There are signals both ways. It’s all sort of reading what we want in the tea leaves.
For example, I think the pick of Walz over Shapiro is a good sign. But then at the same time there’s some weird stuff going on with a faction that badly wants (the excellent) Lina Khan out at the FTC. It’d be nice if there was a clear signal from Harris about this, however subtle. It’s possible she’ll continue with Khan, particularly if she gets some progressive pressure on it post-election, but there are bits in her record suggesting she’s worryingly sympathetic to the Mark Cuban wing of the Silicon Valley set.
It’s very hard to tell, and that doesn’t entirely make me feel good.
Running a centrist campaign is a careful strategy for capturing the votes of Haley supporters and any other Conservatives who traditionally vote Republican.
I think the word you want there is “risky”, not “careful”. Maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t, but let’s not kid ourselves about whether or not it’s a gamble.
For one thing, there’s a distinction between a centrist campaign, and the stuff they’re doing about a “permission structure” to pick up some Republican votes. In an alternate universe, there’d really be no contradiction in running a populist progressive platform, but still having some events proxied by, e.g., Liz Cheney. The rhetoric in the latter are not particularly policy-centric anyway — they’re mainly about a patriotic duty to stop Trump, coming together and being a President for everyone etc.
So the pivot to the center part of her strategy doesn’t look like some novel piece of genius to me. Instead, it looks indistinguishable from every other Dem pivot to the center of the past few decades. I think there’s good reason to be concerned that the team is — as usual — drawing the wrong conclusions from, e.g., polling that says voters view Harris as “too radical” or whatever, and concluding that they need to pivot their policy message to address that. But those polls are driven by cultural priming on race and gender. They have nothing to do with policy, and while I think maybe they need addressing, I don’t think coming out and saying, “umm, actually, we Democrats love to abuse the human rights of immigrants too,” is the right way to go about it, and is unlikely to move that needle in the right direction.
Again, I hope you’re right. But in the last weeks of the campaign, I’d much rather Harris had been out barnstorming a message about all the fresh ideas she has, and how Trump has none. Reminding people Dick Cheney exists was kind of the opposite of that. I’m all for the Never Trumpers trying to rally their herd, but they can do that on their own time. IMO, Harris or Walz tagging along was a distraction, and AFAIK, there’s no evidence it helped much.
She was conspicuously absent when Netanyahu visited congress recently, which was deliberate though more subtle than a resounding support of Gaza that some would have preferred.
I think that was the absolute bare minimum. If she had gone to the speech, there’d be absolutely no doubt about where she stood, but not the other way around. I certainly don’t think anyone is asking for “resounding support”, but there’s a lot of room in between that and what we have.
For example, when the press asks you repeatedly about the horrific death toll in Gaza, you could maybe put something generic in your talking points about being committed to enforcing US law instead of leading with a dumb zombie line about how, “Israel has a right to defend itself.” Or there’s a needle she could have threaded where she gave private assurances to Arab-American leaders sufficient to allow them to vocally endorse her on a personal basis, without actually disclosing any policy specifics.
She did meet with some of those leaders in Michigan earlier this month, but I worry it might have been too little, too late. This is not just an academic question. There are some serious electoral consequences to making the wrong move: 100,000 Uncommitted voters in Michigan alone. My concern is that I’m not sure they think she has done as much to reassure them as you seem to think she has.
jack lecousays
StevoR @72: is it “interfering” to talk and argue, analyse and try to persuade?
FWIW, no, of course not. And absolutely nobody ever thought “everything you could” meant you were secretly funneling $billions of Australian dark money into the US race, or a leet haxor who’s been leaking Trump Jr’s emails or something.
I include Morales in that, because I’m pretty sure he knows better too. I think it’s just his “awkward uncle kidding on the square” routine. A routine that’s pretty tired, IMO, and maybe particularly inappropriate for this particular thread.
John Moralessays
jack, it is interesting to hear your interpretation.
Here’s mine: words matter.
A routine that’s pretty tired, IMO, and maybe particularly inappropriate for this particular thread.
Here: “and maybe [something]” must perforce include ‘or maybe ¬[something]’.
But, of course, only if one is trying to communicate clearly, rather than to be somewhat vague, or other things. But it is true it indicates a lack of knowledge about the factors that resolve a contingent circumstance.
(I know, I know. In ordinary language, you were being civil and polite and soft-pedalling; I still get you nonetheless)
—
BTW, are you aware that I tailor my comments to their intended recipient? That includes you.
John Moralessays
Central point you’ve loudly ignored, jack.
StevoR @72: is it “interfering” to talk and argue, analyse and try to persuade?
compare: ‘StevoR @72: is it “interfering” for Russia to talk and argue, analyse and try to persuade?’
John Moralessays
What about Israel and their proxies?
They sure are trying to talk and argue, analyse and try to persuade USA voters.
jack lecousays
@77/78
Interesting question. I haven’t heard of either of those people — do they post here? I’ve heard of people with the given name Israel, but “Russia” is a very unusual name. Is it a first name or a last name? Or is it just on its own like “Madonna”?
Anyway, no. Whoever this Mr. Israel and Mr. Russia are, and wherever they’re posting, talking and arguing with other people online about politics is fine, even if Mr. Israel and Mr. Russia aren’t from the country whose politics they’re arguing about.
As long as they’re not doing so as an agent of a foreign government, of course. Like if Mr. Israel and Mr. Russia were working for the states of Russia and Israel (wouldn’t that be a funny coincidence, with names like that!). That’d be crossing a line. Other governments shouldn’t be covertly trying to influence free foreign elections…
Obs, StevoR is not a foreign agent, though he is foreign; but he does just what they do, main diff is he believes what he writes instead of having a state-sponsored agenda.
jack lecousays
And he doesn’t work for the state.
Take it all together, and it’s kind of a huge-ass fucking distinction. (One which, I might add, you were perfectly aware of the whole time.)
KGsays
Other governments shouldn’t be covertly trying to influence free foreign elections… – jack lecou@79
I’d say covertly is the important point there. The Russian state is faking comments supposedly by American citizens, Israel is trying to suppress any and all criticism of the war crimes it is committing in Gaza and Lebanon by lying about the motivation and sources of that criticism. I don’t think it’s wrong – although it would probably be counter-productive – for a foreign govenment to comment, publicly analyse, even openly express a preference for one candidate over another.
John Moralessays
jack, I made that very clear @63. That was the point.
There is no distinction from the perspective of a social media participant.
Good intent and genuineness may indeed be magic and exculpatory, but it’s only the posts that can be observed.
jack lecousays
There is no distinction from the perspective of a social media participant.
Nonsense. Of course there is. One is a person doing normal human things, the other is a government sponsored disinformation campaign. One of those things is fine, one of them is a scourge. There’s absolutely a distinction.
Now, if you mean that one social media participant can’t tell if another is a foreign agent provocateur, well, maybe. In my experience the Russian variety in particular is generally pretty low grade and easy to spot, but it’s possible there are cleverer varieties. Maybe there are some out there masquerading as Australians with perfectly reasonable opinions for some dastardly reason.
But even if we can’t tell whether or not someone we’re talking to has secret motivations, what difference does it make? You also can’t generally tell in real life if the person standing in front of you in line at the supermarket is, say, a serial killer. Or a North-Korean sleeper agent. Or an FBI informant spying on your local Antifa group.
I don’t know about you, but the possibility that the people I interact with might secretly have bad intent doesn’t really bother me. I can only judge them on what they actually say and do. In that situation, as long as they keep the line moving and don’t use too many coupons, that’s probably more than enough.
After all, nobody would obsess about an unknowable, and then, say, yell at that person for doing something perfectly normal, and tell them that “they better not buy too many eggs because that’s something a North Korean sleeper agent would do,” or something.
Right?
Good intent and genuineness may indeed be magic and exculpatory, but it’s only the posts that can be observed.
Indeed. But AFAICT, the only posts in this thread that might need any exculpation are your own.
John Moralessays
jack:
I don’t know about you, but the possibility that the people I interact with might secretly have bad intent doesn’t really bother me.
Nor me. Not the point. I’m not the USAphile here.
(What, you thought it did?)
After all, nobody would obsess about an unknowable, and then, say, yell at that person for doing something perfectly normal, and tell them that “they better not buy too many eggs because that’s something a North Korean sleeper agent would do,” or something.
Wow. That’s pretty far into the weeds.
Who is supposedly obsessing, and about what?
(Other than StevoR about the USA election, but that’s not to what you intend to refer, is it?)
But even if we can’t tell whether or not someone we’re talking to has secret motivations, what difference does it make?
You mean, what difference does an ulterior motive make?
Dunno. What difference does election interference by foreign entities make?
(If none, well. Go for it, Russia and Israel!)
Indeed. But AFAICT, the only posts in this thread that might need any exculpation are your own.
What have I written that is allegedly culpable, and in what manner?
Go on. Do tell.
jack lecousays
What have I written that is allegedly culpable, and in what manner?
#33, and the followups. In which you have accosted someone and berated them for engaging in foreign election interference (or something? it’s unclear what the actual offense was), with no basis whatsoever, other than it’s a day ending in Y, apparently.
It’s not a reasonable thing to do. It’s obnoxious. Like someone throwing a tantrum about North Korean eggs in the supermarket.
John Moralessays
Jack, the culpability you rhetorically pretend to imagine I attached to StevoR was actually the distinction you yourself made: “Now, if you mean that one social media participant can’t tell if another is a foreign agent provocateur, well, maybe.”
BTW: had that actually been accosting someone and berating them, then what you and others have done to me is exactly the same. But it wasn’t, so it isn’t.
It’s not a reasonable thing to do. It’s obnoxious. Like someone throwing a tantrum about North Korean eggs in the supermarket.
One blog comment, is what it was.
(A tale that grows in the telling, your narrative)
jack lecousays
Jack, the culpability you rhetorically pretend to imagine I attached to StevoR was actually the distinction you yourself made: “Now, if you mean that one social media participant can’t tell if another is a foreign agent provocateur, well, maybe.”
That’s just word salad. I was not “making a distinction”. I was pointing out the tautology that someone is either an obvious troll…or they’re not.
To rephrase it, the trolling operations we actually know about are pretty obvious. In some sense, being obvious is part of the gig. It’s a selection filter, like all the grammar mistakes in one of those “Nigerian prince” emails. They’re not interested in hooking people who know what Snopes is. And, at least with Russian disinfo, the strategy is to just spew out so much shit that most people give up trying to find anything not covered in it.
Now, maybe there’s another level. Maybe there are also hyper-sophisticated four dimensional chess playing trolls out there. Sure. Maybe I’m one. Maybe StevoR is one. Maybe PZ himself is one — it’d have to be a long game after all.
Maybe. But by the very definition, you wouldn’t be able to tell, would you? Even speculating is really just playing stupid Vizzini games with yourself (“…iocane comes from Australia, as everyone knows, and Australia is entirely peopled with criminals, and criminals are used to having people not trust them, as you are not trusted by me, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you….”).
So, I’ll repeat my advice: Don’t play those games. If you’re going to comment on the internet, you can’t assume everyone you interact with is a four-dimensional chess-playing Icelandic intelligence agent trying to take over the world. That way lies madness. The only rational thing to do is to assume everyone is commenting in good faith. Judge them by the content of their posts, not the content of your imagination.
Speaking of, so far, to me, the only one who does not appear to be acting in good faith, who is sowing discord and generally acting like a troll, is yourself. For example, by making false statements like:
…your terror is of your own making.
and
You do get us doing “everything possible to make sure Kamala Harris wins” would be election interference by a foreign entity, no?
Or false accusations/misrepresentations like:
(A bit hypocritical to condemn Russia for doing it and then to advocate for others to do it as well)
Or silly non-sequiturs like:
Still, you don’t get to vote in the USA.
Or absurd, hyperbolic non-sequiturs like:
Basically, what you are is a foreign national posting social media comments endorsing one candidate, demonising the other, and providing various hyperbolic and inflammatory scenarios.
Also, be aware that doing “everything possible” includes doing illegal, immoral and cruel things, as well as lying and cheating misleading and compromising and whatnot. Or assassinations.
Or apparently deliberate misreadings like,
Again: There is no “we” — there is the electorate which gets to vote, and there is you.
The election is for eligible USA voters, not for you.
So again, if there’s a troll on here, my money would be on it being the guy jacking the thread with that sticky mess of word salad.
jack lecousays
Jack, the culpability you rhetorically pretend to imagine I attached to StevoR was actually the distinction you yourself made: “Now, if you mean that one social media participant can’t tell if another is a foreign agent provocateur, well, maybe.”
That’s just word salad. I was not “making a distinction”. I was pointing out the tautology that someone is either an obvious troll…or they’re not.
To rephrase it, the trolling operations we actually know about are pretty obvious. In some sense, being obvious is part of the gig. It’s a selection filter, like all the grammar mistakes in one of those “Nigerian prince” emails. They’re not interested in hooking people who know what Snopes is. And, at least with Russian disinfo, the strategy is to just spew out so much shit that most people give up trying to find anything not covered in it.
Now, maybe there’s another level. Maybe there are also hyper-sophisticated four dimensional chess playing trolls out there. Sure. Maybe I’m one. Maybe StevoR is one. Maybe PZ himself is one — it’d have to be a long game after all.
Maybe. But by the very definition, you wouldn’t be able to tell, would you? Even speculating is really just playing stupid Vizzini games with yourself (“…iocane comes from Australia, as everyone knows, and Australia is entirely peopled with criminals, and criminals are used to having people not trust them, as you are not trusted by me, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you….”).
So, I’ll repeat my advice: Don’t play those games. If you’re going to comment on the internet, you can’t assume everyone you interact with is a four-dimensional chess-playing Icelandic intelligence agent trying to take over the world. That way lies madness. The only rational thing to do is to assume everyone is commenting in good faith. Judge them by the content of their posts, not the content of your imagination.
Speaking of, so far, to me, the only one who does not appear to be acting in good faith, who is sowing discord and generally acting like a troll, is yourself. For example, by making false statements like:
…your terror is of your own making.
and
You do get us doing “everything possible to make sure Kamala Harris wins” would be election interference by a foreign entity, no?
Or false accusations/misrepresentations like:
(A bit hypocritical to condemn Russia for doing it and then to advocate for others to do it as well)
Or silly non-sequiturs like:
Still, you don’t get to vote in the USA.
Or absurd, hyperbolic non-sequiturs like:
Basically, what you are is a foreign national posting social media comments endorsing one candidate, demonising the other, and providing various hyperbolic and inflammatory scenarios.
Also, be aware that doing “everything possible” includes doing illegal, immoral and cruel things, as well as lying and cheating misleading and compromising and whatnot. Or assassinations.
Or apparently deliberate misreadings like,
Again: There is no “we” — there is the electorate which gets to vote, and there is you.
The election is for eligible USA voters, not for you.
So again, if there’s a troll on here, my money would be on it being the guy jacking the thread with that sticky mess of word salad.
John Moralessays
Jack, I feel the love.
So, I’ll repeat my advice: Don’t play those games. If you’re going to comment on the internet, you can’t assume everyone you interact with is a four-dimensional chess-playing Icelandic intelligence agent trying to take over the world. That way lies madness. The only rational thing to do is to assume everyone is commenting in good faith. Judge them by the content of their posts, not the content of your imagination.
You most certainly give the vibe you are assuming I am commenting in good faith.
Speaking of, so far, to me, the only one who does not appear to be acting in good faith, who is sowing discord and generally acting like a troll, is yourself.
“You”. ‘Yourself’. One of those is reflexive.
So again, if there’s a troll on here, my money would be on it being the guy jacking the thread with that sticky mess of word salad.
It would be, would it?
(Under what conditions, and why is it not the case at this point?)
—
“jacking the thread with that sticky mess”
I feel the homoeroticism.
StevoRsays
See also from where a troll posted on the wrong thread today & I’ve responded here :
Yeah, well… remember, StevoR: “Don’t play those games. If you’re going to comment on the internet, you can’t assume everyone you interact with is a four-dimensional chess-playing Icelandic intelligence agent trying to take over the world. That way lies madness. The only rational thing to do is to assume everyone is commenting in good faith. Judge them by the content of their posts, not the content of your imagination.”
jack lecousays
Yeah, well… remember, StevoR….
Are you actually illiterate? Why are you bolding the first part of that, when StevoR is plainly making a judgement on the second part. The “content of their posts” part. He’s not inventing hyper-proficient four-dimensional trolls. He’s pointing out an example of the bog-standard, run-of-the-mill doofus variety.
Because, see, there is actually a troll in the other thread. They’re pretty readily recognizable. Recognizable by, you know, the content of their posts.
Content completely unlike anything here. (Again, excepting your own posts, which are trollish in my judgement, although probably not professionally trollish.)
Look, maybe you see something the rest of us don’t. So put up or shut up: if you think someone here is a bot or paid troll — or oa troll-master — name them! Or otherwise explain the point of all the “foreign interference” BS you’ve been bringing into the conversation for no apparent reason. If not, you know, the second thing. Just please, no more of this vague insinuation via non sequitur.
John Moralessays
Are you actually illiterate?
Evidently.
Anyway, pointless to go on.
So put up or shut up: if you think someone here is a bot or paid troll — or oa troll-master — name them!
Whatever makes you imagine I think someone here is a bot or paid troll?
I’ve quite explicitly stated that StevoR is a genuine poster, for example.
“In which you have accosted someone and berated them for engaging in foreign election interference (or something? it’s unclear what the actual offense was)”
Apparently, your interpretation of my possibly illiterate word salad is that I am somehow being accusatory, though you can’t articulate how.
Just please, no more of this vague insinuation via non sequitur.
To what vague insinuations do you intend to refer?
—
Oh, right. I emphasised the part where your hypocrisy really shines, Jack.
jack lecousays
Whatever makes you imagine I think someone here is a bot or paid troll?
This:
You do get us doing “everything possible to make sure Kamala Harris wins” would be election interference by a foreign entity, no?
To what vague insinuations do you intend to refer?
To this one:
You do get us doing “everything possible to make sure Kamala Harris wins” would be election interference by a foreign entity, no?
Explain what you meant by that, like I’m 5 years old. To me, it makes no sense whatsoever.
If you’re not accusing someone of something, what was the point of saying that? Who was talking about election interference prior to that? To what election interference are you referring?
Because if you’re not saying anything, than why say it?
PS: I am also very curious about what the heck, “StevoR, your terror is of your own making.” is supposed to mean. A Trump election really is a genuinely terrifying prospect to any thinking person, anywhere in the world. He’s not imagining that. So what exactly are you saying StevoR is “making” (or imagining) there? I’m stumped. Your posts are gibberish.
jack lecousays
And this:
Oh, right. I emphasised the part where your hypocrisy really shines, Jack.
Again, what in the world are you talking about? What hypocrisy? Be specific. Use citations. Hypocrisy is saying one thing and doing (or saying) another, so you ought to be able to quote the conflicting parts.
Just please, try to remember that I’m a human person, not a fellow crab person or whatever, so try to speak the language of human people for a change.
John Moralessays
There is no insinuation, jack.
I am looking at the comment as a thing in itself, and explaining that: “Also, be aware that doing “everything possible” includes doing illegal, immoral and cruel things, as well as lying and cheating misleading and compromising and whatnot. Or assassinations.
You exclude nothing.”
It’s not complicated, and it’s about the claim, not about the claimant.
Explain what you meant by that, like I’m 5 years old. To me, it makes no sense whatsoever.
Good grief! Is it not obvious?
If it’s possible for a foreigner to, say, travel to the USA and then try to assassinate a candidate but they do not actually do that, then they are not trying to do “everything possible”, are they?
Words mean things.
PS: I am also very curious about what the heck, “StevoR, your terror is of your own making.” is supposed to mean.
I’m not terrified, he is. Same applicable circumstances. It’s not intrinsic to the situation.
Again, what in the world are you talking about? What hypocrisy? Be specific
I have been already. “Why are you bolding the first part of that” indeed.
Because you are clearly not practicing your own dictum: “The only rational thing to do is to assume everyone is commenting in good faith.”
Remember how you started your interaction with me?
“Whoever this Mr. Israel and Mr. Russia are [blah]”.
(Well, I can do that too, in good faith)
John Moralessays
“Just please, try to remember that I’m a human person, not a fellow crab person or whatever, so try to speak the language of human people for a change.”
It’s amusing to me that I am the one who gets accused of being condescending and snide. And revealing, too.
(But fine, I am not human to you. Because dehumanising people is fine if they irritate you, no?)
jack lecousays
I am looking at the comment as a thing in itself, and explaining that:…[bizarre albeit technically correct interpretation]
Ah. I think I get it — this is a crab-person cultural thing.
You may not realize it, but what you’re admitting here is that you were communicating exactly nothing. That your statement had no target, no purpose, and added nothing meaningful whatsoever to the conversation. It neither expressed an opinion, contradicted someone else’s opinion, or provided additional facts that were in any way relevant to anyone else. It was just kind of a meaningless string of tokens appended to the original string of tokens.
So, I get that crab-people from your planet might do things differently. In the interests of cross-species communication, let me try to clear things up: here on Earth, taking a comment “as a thing in itself” is in fact the opposite of communication.
In this corner of the galaxy, a comment (at least one written by a human) is never “a thing in itself”, it’s not just a free-standing string of tokens. It’s a communication, from one person to others, expressing thoughts, feelings or ideas about real things. Replying to a comment requires attempting to understand the intent behind the expression of those thoughts, and then entering into a communication with the commenter, or readers of the other comment, not with the comment itself. Because comments are not people. Your communication should try to provide something that might be relevant to the recipient, and thus add to the conversation.
If it’s possible for a foreigner to, say, travel to the USA and then try to assassinate a candidate but they do not actually do that, then they are not trying to do “everything possible”, are they?
Again, in the interests of cross-species comity, let me try to explain carefully:
In human-people land, statements have an implied context. A sort of background of meaning and assumptions and expressions and analogies and other related ideas. That context is always there as an integral part of any communication — comments and other forms of human communication are not just strings of tokens.
For example, someday you might hear a human-person say, “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.” At that point, you should understand that they do not literally mean that they intend to eat a horse. Horse is not a common food for most humans, and a whole horse would be a physically unlikely amount of for a human to consume either way. What they’re communicating is instead the simpler idea that they are very hungry. They are using what we humans call a “figure of speech”. They don’t literally mean that they want to eat a horse (or, usually, even a part of a horse), but rather, that they would like to eat a normal amount of food.
As such, it is NOT necessary to respond to their statement with an extrapolation of its literal meaning. For example, you might be tempted to provide legal advice, like, “Eating horses is considered animal abuse and is a class iii felony in your jurisdiction.” Don’t — that advice would not actually be relevant to the person (or to anyone else), because they don’t plan on eating a horse. (Or, if you possess a horse or horses, it would not be necessary to secure them against predation, or to threaten the human-person with the consequences of what would happen if they try to eat your horse(s). Again — they don’t actually plan on eating any horses.)
Likewise, the expression, “do everything possible” is a common human expression which actually means something more like “engage in an ultimately rather small and finite set of actions, most of which are likely no more than moderately difficult, and can be accomplished with a finite and proportional amount of time, effort and resources, given the physical, financial, legal and other circumstances of the human-person employing the expression.”
Indeed, “do everything possible” is often just an intensifier. “Do everything possible to accomplish X” means “do the normal things one does to accomplish X, but with some additional measure of dedication or effort.” It is NOT a statement that the person actually intends to iterate through every conceivable action-state of the Universe until X is achieved.
So, for example, if the a person said to you, “I’m going to do everything possible to get a job,” they would likely just mean that they were going to update their CV and apply for some jobs, but perhaps work at it a little harder than they would if they merely said, “I’m looking for a job.”
That person would NOT mean that they were going to, say, covertly surveil the hiring manager for a position they applied for in order to obtain blackmail material.
Or, in the case of the comment @31, the human-person StevoR was clearly only exhorting his fellow commenters to do the usual things one does in an election to get a candidate elected. That is, vote, and perhaps to volunteer for a campaign, donate money, or engage in other such ordinary election-related actions. To extrapolate his statement of “possible” to an extraordinary and unusual measure like assassination was to entirely miss the point of the original communication.
I think on some level, you actually do understand this: you must have understood that StevoR meant the usual measures, and even understood that other readers would also understand this to be what he meant. But you realized you could (mis)interpret his words in an overly literal fashion to include other measures that, while not included in the plain meaning of his words, are technically possible. For some reason you then decided to post a comment enumerating some of those, perhaps in the mistaken belief that it would useful to others.
I suppose I should congratulate you in some sense. You did manage to limit your “possible” scenarios to relatively Earthly ones. Obviously, “use a short wave radio at 37.2 Mhz to contact the crab-person mothership and request deployment of a legion of crab-troopers to occupy the US Capitol building” is also “possible” from your frame of reference, but you understood on some level that that would be a step too far, and surpass the limits of even how far you are willing to stretch the plain meaning of StevoR’s words. So…good job? Now that I understand the whole crab-person thing, I guess it was a pretty good attempt.
I’m not terrified, he is. Same applicable circumstances. It’s not intrinsic to the situation.
I mean, there are people who stick their hands into swarms of venomous snakes, or do asbestos remediation without a mask. Some of them might be able to honestly state they’re not afraid. That just means they’re idiots, not that those actions aren’t objectively very dangerous.
IOW, your personal reaction, or lack thereof, does not negate his. Maybe you have a broken fear response. Maybe you don’t understand the stakes as well as the rest of us.
Or maybe you know something the rest of us don’t, and should explain why you aren’t terrified.
Either way, “Your terror is of your own making” is unhelpful and, objectively, incorrect. It’s (barely) conceivable that StevoR (and most of the rest of us) are overreacting to the catastrophic potential consequences of a Trump presidency. But even if that were the case, it would be an overreaction to a real external situation, not “terror of our own making.”
Again, for the aid of your fellow crab-people, if what you mean is “Well, I’m not terrified, and I think I have good reason for that,” you could simply say that, and then explain your reasons. Not state something weird and objectively incorrect like, “your terror is of your own making.”
Because you are clearly not practicing your own dictum: “The only rational thing to do is to assume everyone is commenting in good faith.”
Another misquote. There’s a second clause to that statement, Mr Crab, which is not dispensable. The actual statement was that you should assume everyone is commenting in good faith, until their actions (i.e., content of their comments) tell you otherwise.
And someone’s comments here do lead me away from the good faith null hypothesis. Like that misquote you made just there, which is hard to see as anything but deliberate.
Or, maybe they just tell me that it it’s a crab-person commenting in crab-faith. So to give the benefit of the doubt, I’ll explain. In Earth logic, “do X unless Y” means that both X and Y must be part of the consideration. If you spot someone doing ~X, it is not necessarily hypocritical — you must also see if ~Y still obtains.
“Whoever this Mr. Israel and Mr. Russia are [blah]”.
That was actually me giving you the benefit of the doubt — offering you an opportunity to explain why you were trying to conflate individual actions with those of nation states.
You passed on the chance. Or perhaps, just utterly failed to understand the importance of the distinction.
John Moralessays
You may not realize it, but what you’re admitting here is that you were communicating exactly nothing.
Yet you took umbrage and now persevere at trying to tell me how it affected you.
That was actually me giving you the benefit of the doubt — offering you an opportunity to explain why you were trying to conflate individual actions with those of nation states.
You contend that I write word-salad, that I communicate exactly nothing, and yet you ask me to explain what my allegedly word-salad which supposedly communicates exactly nothing means.
This, in the same sentence where you accuse me of trying to conflate individual actions with those of nation states.
This, after I explicitly told you this, in my immediately preceeding comment:
I am looking at the comment as a thing in itself, and explaining that: “Also, be aware that doing “everything possible” includes doing illegal, immoral and cruel things, as well as lying and cheating misleading and compromising and whatnot. Or assassinations.
You exclude nothing.”
It’s not complicated, and it’s about the claim, not about the claimant.
Ah well.
As with Fook and Lunkwill, it appears that your mind is too finely-tuned to get simple, straightforward stuff.
—
I do like your attempts at argumentation, jack.
Be aware, however, that claiming both that I make no sense communicate nothing and that I am somehow (ineffably, but for sure) being accusatory and insinuative at someone are mutually contradictory claims.
jack lecousays
It’s amusing to me that I am the one who gets accused of being condescending and snide. And revealing, too.
If you say so. Not by me, AFAIK. I don’t have a problem with condescending or snide.
Actually, I’d be relieved. Condescending and snide would at least hint at some actual engagement with the thread of conversation.
John Moralessays
Ah well, I’ll spare you more time.
But even if that were the case, it would be an overreaction to a real external situation, not “terror of our own making
Better ‘were the case’, and if it’s an overreaction, then it’s of one’s own making. Words mean things.
John Moralessays
I don’t have a problem with condescending or snide.
Nor I. So, wasted effort, unless it’s what comes naturally to you.
(Is it?)
John Moralessays
“The actual statement was that you should assume everyone is commenting in good faith, until their actions (i.e., content of their comments) tell you otherwise.”
You sure about that?
Here: “That way lies madness. The only rational thing to do is to assume everyone is commenting in good faith. Judge them by the content of their posts, not the content of your imagination.”
Now, had you written “That way lies madness. The only rational thing to do is to initially assume everyone is commenting in good faith. thereafterJudge them by the content of their posts, not the content of your imagination.”, then you could truthfully make the claim you actually made.
—
Like, words mean things.
StevoRsays
@99. jack lecou : That’s spot on & exactly what I meant..
John Morales, sometimes (often even!) you really do not seem to grok how language is used by most people. Context and common expressions and how they work.
Most people myself included assume “ëverything possible” excluds rather than includes things that are illegal and unethical. Because that’s how the expression usually works. To read it otherwise is extraordinary and odd.
In general I think my own style of language here is colloquial, speaking (typing) a s most people woiuld in a conversation – with the addition of having links and quotes from those links and in my case always far too many inadvertant bloody typos.
John Moralessays
Heh, StevoR: Most people might, but not jack.
Here: “So, for example, if the a person said to you, “I’m going to do everything possible to get a job,” they would likely just mean that [blah]”
He’s basically saying the same thing as I did, just differently. See the term I emphasised there?
I know what you intended to express, and I know what you actually wrote.
They are not the same thing. So I made a brief comment about it.
It was an offhand comment, though it has obviously escalated as jack goes on an on about it.
Funny how sometimes people take umbrage on others’ behalf, eh?
To read it otherwise is extraordinary and odd.
(sigh)
I did not read it otherwise, I noted its literal meaning.
(How many times now have I noted I care not about your typographic messes and so forth? Different thing, that)
Yet you took umbrage and now persevere at trying to tell me how it affected you.
Leaving aside a debate about whether “umbrage” is the right word, I’m not sure how you think that’s a contradiction.
To recap:
You posted a series of non-sequiturs, irrelevant statements semantically indistinguishable from just copy-pasting “my hovercraft is full of eels” everywhere for as much as added to the conversation. Indeed, that might have been marginally wittier.
I asked for some clarification and, eventually, received confirmation that you were indeed posting nothing more than some elaborate kind of lorem ipsum filler text for your own mysterious onanistic (cancrine?) satisfaction.
I explain that that’s not how decent people act in public – human, crab, or otherwise — and told you off for wasting my time.
Now you think “[I said something meaningless] yet you took umbrage” is somehow a refutation?
The “yet” doesn’t belong there. It does not a refutation make. You said something meaningless, AND I took umbrage. Yes.
That’s the whole point of this pointlessness. You have confirmed you were being a troll, and now I’m calling you a jerk. Or whatever the crab-person equivalent is.
You contend that I write word-salad, that I communicate exactly nothing, and yet you ask me to explain what my allegedly word-salad which supposedly communicates exactly nothing means.
Yes?
Again, the “yet” does not seem to belong there. You say something with no apparent meaning AND I tell you so and give you a chance to clarify and provide some.
The one follows from the other. But I think we’ve clarified now that there was indeed no meaning.
This, in the same sentence where you accuse me of trying to conflate individual actions with those of nation states.
The “opportunity to explain” was referring to an interaction in a previous portion in the thread, where I still held hope that you were actually making a claim of some kind. So let me rephrase:
That was actually me giving you the benefit of the doubt at the time — offering you an opportunity to explain why your statements (which I now understand to be meaningless noise) appeared to be trying to conflate individual actions with those of nation states if one attempted to extrapolate meaning from them.
This, after I explicitly told you this, in my immediately preceeding comment:
I am looking at the comment as a thing in itself, and explaining that: “Also, be aware that doing “everything possible” includes doing illegal, immoral and cruel things, as well as lying and cheating misleading and compromising and whatnot. Or assassinations.
You exclude nothing.”
Yes. We’ve covered that — that is a statement of nothing.
You say you’re not accusing or insinuating anything. So you’re not accusing StevoR of calling for those things. Thus your “explanation” has no relation to his original statement. Someone encouraged certain activities. Then you just listed some additional activities that are also theoretically possible. Calling that an “explanation” is being very generous. It’s really just total nonsense speak. This whole irritating thing is entirely equivalent to:
Person A: “I’d like to have a birthday party, with cake, and balloons, and maybe a piñata!”
John Morales: “Piñatas are hollow and it’s possible to fill them with stinky twelve-day-old dismembered thumbs”
jack/everyone else: “But they’re usually filled with candy. Are you trying to actually say something? Is there something you know about Person A we should know about? Because they seem pretty normal to me.”
John Morales: “No, I’m not accusing anyone of anything or insinuating anything. I’m ‘explaining’ that piñatas can be filled with severed thumbs.”
jack: “Ok. You’re just a weird asshole who has nothing to contribute. Got it.”
In short, disturbing, but ultimately a huge waste of time.
Be aware, however, that claiming both that I make no sense communicate nothing and that I am somehow (ineffably, but for sure) being accusatory and insinuative at someone are mutually contradictory claims.
Indeed. Was it not clear? I now understand that you were NOT accusing or insinuating anything. You admit that you were saying nothing at all. That you were purely trolling.
John Moralessays
I have seen it; I’ll spare you a full reply, StevoR.
“It’s more that you should try to be a bit more considerate of others here, maybe not misconstrue either deliberately or accidentally common expressions of speech and quirks of language and just try to play a bit nicer with others as the expression generally goes.”
I could say the very same thing, you know.
I’d like for others to try to be a bit more considerate of me, and maybe not misconstrue either deliberately or accidentally common expressions of speech and quirks of language, and just try to play a bit nicer with me.
Take jack. I am accused of accusing you of something (he’s not sure what) though what I write is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_salad and I communicate nothing.
(Is that what you yourself think?)
John Moralessays
I’m not sure how you think that’s a contradiction.
Ah well.
John Moralessays
I now understand that you were NOT accusing or insinuating anything. You admit that you were saying nothing at all. That you were purely trolling.
<snicker>
Your fabulation fabricator has gone into overdrive, and your indignation index is hitting all-time highs.
(Very performative of you, I do appreciate it)
John Moralessays
PS re “The “yet” doesn’t belong there.”
Be aware that ‘yet’ is equivalent to ‘but’ and ‘and’ in symbolic logic.
(It’s a logical conjunction)
jack lecousays
Here: “That way lies madness. The only rational thing to do is to assume everyone is commenting in good faith. Judge them by the content of their posts, not the content of your imagination.”
Now, had you written “That way lies madness. The only rational thing to do is to initially assume everyone is commenting in good faith. thereafterJudge them by the content of their posts, not the content of your imagination.”, then you could truthfully make the claim you actually made.
No, your re-statement changes nothing.
If I had originally meant “assume” was to be unconditional and perpetual, that statement would have been self-contradictory: how would it ever be possible to judge someone on the content of their posts if we there’s an overriding imperative to forever assume good faith?
The obvious resolution is that “assume” there was not unconditional or perpetual, and meant in the normal Earth-human fashion: assume until proven otherwise.
Heh, StevoR: Most people might, but not jack.
Here: “So, for example, if the a person said to you, “I’m going to do everything possible to get a job,” they would likely just mean that [blah]”
I fail to see how you think I don’t think the same. My [blah] was, indeed, an example list containing only normal, non-illegal activities.
This is confirmed I went on to add an example of an illegal activity, which the person would NOT have meant:
That person would NOT mean that they were going to, say, covertly surveil the hiring manager for a position they applied for in order to obtain blackmail material.
How is this so confusing to you?
He’s basically saying the same thing as I did, just differently. See the term I emphasised there?
Incorrect.
I know what you intended to express, and I know what you actually wrote.
They are not the same thing. So I made a brief comment about it.
.
Meaning they were the same thing.
This is evidenced by the fact that even you understood what he meant. I assure you, so did everyone else.
IOW, he wrote a thing that caused literally everyone involved to understand what he meant. By any definition, he correctly expressed and communicated the thing he intended to express.
The fact that you took it upon yourself to take an extra and entirely unnecessary step of running it through your mental filter of what a crab person with no understanding of Earth-people and their context might think has nothing to do with what StevoR said. Your comment is only useful if crab-people are actually reading the thread. (Indeed you also phrased that comment as a warning: “be aware.” As if the rest of us need to watch out how our statements might be interpreted by crab-people. Which, to be fair, apparently we do — because they’re really obnoxious.)
jack lecousays
Be aware that ‘yet’ is equivalent to ‘but’ and ‘and’ in symbolic logic.
(It’s a logical conjunction)
Be aware that English is not symbolic logic.
Yet be aware that “equivalent” is from late Middle English referring to persons equal in rank.
John Moralessays
[meta]
Well, done this sort of thing before, and pissed-off the blog host.
Enough, jack. me @94: Anyway, pointless to go on.
It’s fine by me (I’m actually enjoying our badinage), but I am certain PZ is not impressed.
So. See what we have done here.
Accost me elsewhen elsethread if that’s your desire, but I shall not respond to you any further on this thread.
jack lecousays
Take jack. I am accused of accusing you of something (he’s not sure what) though what I write is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_salad and I communicate nothing.
Now you are also being accused of lying.
I already clarified this at @108 (though I believe I have been consistent about it throughout): my accusations are contingent and mutually exclusive. I maintain that either your comment @33 etc. were insinuating or accusing someone of something OR you were saying nothing. I currently understand it to be the latter.
It is a bit odd that this year, Bernie Sanders and Dick Cheney are both voting for the same candidate.
Great point #1. Incidentally, they are both the same age, 83.
Yeah, me too. Indeed, I did vote for Bernie in the presidential primary a while back.
Unless Trump wins* and has AOC assassinated**, we might have her as an alternative a few years hence.
________________________________________________________*a real possibility that terrifies me
**which option the gang of six has made available to a sitting president
TLDW: (too long didn’t watch) With Harris it might get better; with Trump it will certainly get worse.
Sigh. Bernie was blind to racism in his own supporters, too out of touch, and persistently tone-deaf to the concerns of POC.
His “class trumps race” arguments have repeatedly been proven to be nonsense. People are still racist and misogynistic after they get rich. They’re still both of those things after they jettison god-belief, too. How naive I was to assume otherwise. It seems that for some of these people, Bernie was merely a merkin for their misogyny.
The insurrectionists booked airline flights to DC, chartered jets, or arrived in $70k pickup trucks, toting $5k worth of tactical gear. And Bernie tries to pin it on “poverty.” If they had enough accessible cash to take days off work, travel from Snakefuck, Oklahoma to D.C. then I wish I had their problems.
He voted against the debt ceiling deal.
He complained about Trump getting banned from Twitter after inciting an insurrection.
He’s a Putin op. Is there any good faith explanation for Bernie’s life long commitment to the USSR and Putin and his refusal to sanction Russia while benefiting personally from RU disinformation? Including voting against the Magnitsky Act? No, there isn’t.
We could’ve had comprehensive immigration reform in the 2000’s, but Bernie sided with the racists like Lou Dobbs & the minutemen militia.
Anyone who supported Bernie in the past, just admit you were had, that you made a mistake, and will in the future listen to marginalized folks when they tell you why (and show you how) someone is trash.
Did everything I could in 2016. Tried talking people out of voting green, tried to get Berniebros on board, saying a Clinton loss would be apocalyptic; it’s no time for a protest vote. Now women have lost their rights, as predicted. Democracy itself is teetering. Fuck all of you who said we were overreacting. The juvenile Bernie die-hards acted on their impulse to vandalize civilization just because their guy didn’t make it.
HIs position, as always, is to point out the horrors of the Democratic party, then hypocritically corral everyone into voting for them.
Really? I am still angry at him for shitting on Hillary Clinton because he lost to her, and getting the orange asswipe elected.
Old white man chose to be a bro and made me regret casting my primary ballot for him. It’s nice that he put out this blurb supporting Harris, but I hope he feels guilty every day for his role in helping the fascists get their greedy grimy hands on my government in the first place.
Get over Hillary fucking Clinton. She was a terrible candidate and a shit campaigner. She lost to her own hubris. She was a privileged asshole and she has only herself to blame.
I think Kamala will lose which is unfortunate because she is running a much better campaign but unfortunately was thrown into a disadvantaged situation because the dumbass democratic party decided it was better to put a corpse as a candidate and they thought nobody will notice.
#8 lotharloo:
Still oozing that privilege yourself, I see.
And I think you misspoke, you really meant to say you hope Kamala loses. You want to teach the Democratic Party a lesson, but you won’t be the one getting the strap across the arse. Marginalized people will. All because of your perfection tantrum. Well, maybe you’ll be among the last against the wall when your retribution is re-elected.
It sounds as if the only person who needs to get over Hillary Clinton is lotharloo.
She was in fact the most qualified candidate for POTUS in my lifetime. More qualified than Obama, or Reagan, either Bush, rotten Orange or Jill Stein.
I’m getting more confident daily that Harris is going to win, and we can turn the page. By contrast, the GOP has managed to pretty much destroy its own party by becoming a toxic bro-cult. They’re eating the Puerto Ricans! Or dogs. Maybe geese.
Meanwhile US women are 51% of the voters, and we are so very done with bro-don assaulting women and women’s civil rights.
@Robert Westbrook:
Yeah, as a brown middle-eastern immigrant I am fucking oozing with privilege. Fucking clown. Still can’t accept the reality that you candidate sucked and if she was slightly more competent and more serious, she could have won? I thought so, better blame everything else.
@Tethys:
I am absolutely over Hillary. I don’t suddenly and randomly bring her up at all. I don’t derail threats by talking about 8 years ago. Maybe if you read the actual thread you will get a clue.
Also about the qualification, I disagree. There are no courses or degrees for POTUS so deciding whether someone is “most qualified” is very subjective but I am very bored to talk about Hillary.
I hope you are right that Trump can’t win but I think he is the favorite right now. There are a lot of good signs for Kamala but the zombie horde will be marching to elect their cult leader and I don’t think the polls are able to capture that, meaning, I am expecting him to do much better. In every election, Trump has out-performed the polls much more than the Democratic nominee by 2-3-4 points. Even if does better than Kamala by 1% this time, it is over.
Rude jerk @12
I obviously read the thread, and haven’t derailed the thread by noting Bernie’s contribution to the CURRENT
state of affairs of having to defeat a rapist for the THIRD time, instead of just once in 2018.
That would be you, with your irrational hatred of Hillary Clinton. Great back-peddling on the subject of being qualified though!
I actually suspect that Harris is going to win by far more than the current +4 odds, as the polling is significantly underestimating multiple US demographics.
Exit polling in supposedly red states shows that women’s reproductive rights and democracy are the top issues for the record breaking numbers of early voters, so that’s a good sign that they chose Harris/Walz.
Your position is to point out the horrors of the Democratic Party, while hypocritically ignoring the far worse horrors of the Republican Party, and dishonestly pretending there is at this point any third option. You are, in short, either a fascist or a fool, and it’s really not of much importance or interest which.
Robert Westbrook @5,
I’d be interested in any actual evidence that Sanders is “a Putin op”. His record on sanctions against Russai is rather more equivocal than you imply.
Tethys @10: ….most qualified candidate for POTUS…
I think it’d be more accurate to say she would have been one of the most qualified presidents. And I wouldn’t disagree with that. But the issue is precisely that before you can do that job, you have to run a campaign and perform the job of candidate, and there’s plenty of evidence that she was rather less qualified there.
Obviously, just a handful of votes in a couple of states would have changed the 2016 outcome. Hundreds of external factors in the race might have been individually larger than that tiny margin. Had Comey not pulled a Comey, maybe it’d be different. Had Russians not hacked the DNC, maybe it’d be different. If the US electorate were a quarter point less sexist asshole, maybe it’d be different. If the GOP hadn’t run a 3-decades long character assassination campaign against Clinton, maybe it’d be different. If there were a couple hundred thousand fewer credulous morons voting for Trump, maybe it’d be different.
Heck, had the weather been slightly better in a couple counties in Ohio, maybe it would have been different.
But none of that stuff actually absolves Clinton. When you’re leading a campaign, you can’t blame the weather if you lose. If you didn’t account for it, that’s still on you. All of those external speed bumps were the campaign’s — the candidate’s — job to tackle and overcome. And the bottom line is that she didn’t. Instead, she ran a singularly insipid and uninspired campaign. Arguably didn’t even do that much in, say, Wisconsin…
(And while I certainly wouldn’t say that running a campaign has much to do with being a good president in general, there is some overlap. Clinton was such a notoriously bad campaigner, it’s gotta say something. Like, at least part of her repeated failures were due to her staffing decisions. She chose to highly place various long-time cronies and hangers-on in her campaigns, cronies who were invariably as incompetent as they were overpaid. And she employed them again and again, even when they failed. My understanding is that to the extent there were any new faces in the 2016 campaign at all, it was mainly due to inheriting pieces of Obama’s machine, rather than any real attempt on Clinton’s part to reform the team that had so fubar-ed her 2008 effort. Stuff like that is not a good look for an executive, and does actually reflect on her leadership qualities.)
WaPo:
It has fallen to me, the humor columnist, to endorse Harris for president
@ KG
It would be more accurate if she had won. Of course it logically follows that the best qualified candidate would also be a best qualified President. Sadly, merit and qualifications were trumped by the excrescence, and billions in dark money contributions from wealthy foreign autocrats.
Sexism won, struck down Roe vs Wade, and now we are here in 2024 with that scumbag reenacting a Nazi rally.
As we have discussed before, voter turnout is the key to winning electoral elections. Orange “ won” with just 29% of the vote, in one of the most dismal years for voter turnout.
Comer and Bernie were a great help in depressing voter turnout.
I am cautiously optimistic that Harris will win next week.
In the mean time… What’s this with using the first names of women and the surnames of men? If you’re going to call Trump Trump, have the courtesy to call Harris Harris.
That should be Comey, obviously. Hail typnos!
whheydt, did you read te post title? The comment preceding yours?
(‘Bernie’ is not a surname)
Sorry KG, my comment 18 should have been directed to Jack Lecou. Dang tiny screens and my crappy eyesight.
Tethys @18: Of course it logically follows that the best qualified candidate would also be a best qualified President.
Maybe I’m misreading you, but no, I don’t think that follows at all. Even at the best of times, an election isn’t really a meritocratic hiring process. It’s a popularity contest.
All things considered, that’s probably a worthwhile price to pay for democracy, but let’s not pretend it’s something it’s not.
In actual fact, I think one could make a convincing case that even wanting to be president — nevermind having the qualities it takes to successfully navigate the US electoral system ca. 2000CE — is already a pretty big discount in qualification from the sort of person who’d actually make the best president. But c’est la vie.
I disagree with Bernie that a Trump win would change climate change policy in my country called Europe.
Tethys @18: Comer and Bernie were a great help in depressing voter turnout.
That’s false when it comes to Bernie. Unless you want to say that having different ideas and running against someone in a primary is automatically tantamount to killing their chances in the general. And the numbers just don’t support it either way. It’s true that there was a vocal minority in the Sanders camp that ended up going over to Trump (or sitting it out), but their visibility exceeded their actual impact. Sanders endorsed her, and in the end more Sanders voters returned to the roost for Clinton in ’16 than Clinton voters did for Obama in ’08. (Anyway, it wouldn’t actually be Sanders’ fault if he clicked with a segment of the electorate Clinton didn’t. There’s no situation where Candidate B is somehow entitled to Candidate A’s voters — they always still have to earn them.)
Now, Comer I’d grant you. He’s an asshole. But see above — there are plenty of assholes in the world. That’s just life. The blame for a losing campaign nevertheless has to start with the things the campaign could actually have changed. If Clinton had run the best campaign in 50 years, and still lost, OK, maybe now it’s on Comer. But she objectively didn’t run that campaign. E.g., she lost Wisconsin by 20,000 votes because she simply didn’t even bother to put it on the itinerary.
(Edit to my 25: s/Comer/Comey. Comer is a different asshole.)
When it looked early on like a potential Hillary v Jeb showdown (Clinton v Bush 2.0) I was in my jaded cynic phase leaning into rational ignorance of the political arena. We had seen that movie before and for me voting seemed passe’. When Trump entered the picture that viewpoint changed. I wasn’t thrilled with Hillary and liked Bernie ok. The revelation of the Russian hack soured me on the DNC more than I was already. But I still voted for Hillary and was one of the few people who got her nuance contrasting the basket of deplorables versus Trump supporters we should emphasize with. Funny how that latter part dropped from the conservative narrative and she morphed into a basher of the deplorables.
I like Kamala. Her campaign seems to have embraced the first name whheydt@19 and Hillary also before that. Bernie has first name props too, so deal with it and stop dragging people who use Kamala or Hillary unless you want to alienate them. Just what we need now with tight margins…alienated voters who got dragged for non-issues.
I’m kinda pessimistic about this election. The huge support Kamala got when she took over for Uncle Joe (aka the Senator from MBNA) that gave her an apparent popularity spike seems to have waned some. Not sure how the swing states will fall. I hope Kamala wins. Otherwise…I can’t even with that.
As for what I saw of PZ’s Bernie video, I wish we would end all military support for Israel. Too bad that will never happen even under Kamala.
OK people, 2016 was by my calculation eight years ago. Moving on, his leading point is that Gaza is a tragic issue, and that Trump would be far worse than Harris on that issue. Gaza is a current issue and important to a lot of Americans, and I agree with Sanders here.
@8. lotharloo : HRC was the choice of most Americans for POTUS in 2016. Even after decades of vile, absurd Repug slurs and hate and even despite the worst Assange and Comey did. That election revealed a hell of a lot of misogyny and was bloody awful. But she did get the most votes. She was the most popular as wellas the most qualified and clearly the best candidate seen rationally.
Problem is in the USA with the disgraceful Electoral College system blatantly favouring the reichwing she didn’t win by quite enough. All history now but I think it disproves your point. What baffles me is why you keep raising it & attacking her personally nearly a decade later. How is it relevant here and now?
You know the reichwing ran a far worse & less popular candidate than HRC in 2015 and he won that – and yet they’re running Trump again despite him being a known rapist, traitor and convicted felon..but they’ve united around him anyhow.
Right now is the time for Democratic and leftwing progressive people to unite to stop Trump. That is what matters most now and what I really think we must focus on achieving.
I love Bernie Sanders and agree with him 100%.
But do people really think a secular Jew, which is a euphemism for atheist, can win in the USA in 2024?
Or someone who uses the word socialist to describe himself? Frankly, I really think people on the left should stop using the word socialist because the right wing has destroyed the meaning of that term. We should call ourselves FDRists or even Eisenhowerists. It would be appropriate for either though FDR deserves more of the credit.
And if we do bring FDRism back, we can do it better next time and remove the racism and misogyny make it apply to women and minorities.
I am terrified by this election. The implications it has for the future are beyond gargantuan. For Climate, for Democracy, for the future of the USA and for the rest of our shared pale blue dot
That it can seemingly be so horribly close is just appalling and says nothing good about the state of American culture, politics and society..Murdoch has rotted far too many minds for far too long and the Overton window been pushed so over-stretchingly far that outright sympathising with and backing from nazis isn’t the automatic disqualifying race-ending factor it should be.
I cannot wait for it to be over. I hope and will do anything I can do to help the result being a badly needed landslide against Trump. A landslide big enough to overcome the EC and deter any Trump cultists violence and phsyical warfare to inflict him as POTUS upon the world again. I do not really know who will win but I know who needs to win for us to have any chance of saving the world as we know it..
I wish more people took this election as the matter of life and death that it truly is. So very much depends on the outcome now and so we cannot risk fucking around and messing this up.
We have one more week to go. Let’s use this time as well and productively as possible and sdo everything possible to make sure Kamala Harris wins.. Because there’s only one alternative and a Trump return cannot be allowed to happen. After the election will be the time to push for major badly needed reforms and more. Now is NOT the time for anything that hurts the Democratic party or Kamala’s chances. Get her & a Democratic Congress elected first.
Ya know I try and get over him but sucdem grandpa always brings me back. While people on the left are very vocal about not voting over Gaza I highly doubt that a significant number will actually abstain come election day. Most leftists who are abstaining are probably doing so in states in whic it doesnt matter anyway so a strategic vote has very little risk. If they are really concerned about Gaza affecting their election they need to worry more about Arab Americans who I think are rightly angry at Bidens policies.
I know anecdotally my bubble is basically all leftists and I dont think any of them aren’t voting for Coconut mommy unless they live in solid blue states, but that’s all anecdotal. I an cautiously optimistic that kamala will win she seems to be improving her margins over Brandon basically every where except Arab Americans, and Trumps base has only contracted, cus if ya know they deding. Also Trump just feels rizless, he’s outa juice and has the stink of loser on him. I hope kamala wins, as much as I dispise biden over Gaza he gas been the best president for labor in my lifetime and if kamala is even half as good that would be a massive boon to the left.
Also it’s weird to see bluanon comments here.
StevoR, your terror is of your own making.
Obs, “We” are Australians, the election is in the USA. On the other side of the world.
You do get us doing “everything possible to make sure Kamala Harris wins” would be election interference by a foreign entity, no?
(A bit hypocritical to condemn Russia for doing it and then to advocate for others to do it as well)
—
PS re “beyond gargantuan”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gargantua_and_Pantagruel
@30
Oh please! They call even the most milquetoast centrist economic policies “Communism.” There’s no point in finding a new word, we just need to stop being cowards about it and worrying about offending the rich and their bootlicking lackeys (i.e. the middle class).
@30 mark McKee
The republicans will call you a communist no matter what you call yourself, hell they sexistly are calling kamala a communist and I don’t know how much I would even consider her a progressive; or she would for that matter.
If you are a socialist you should say what you ate and stand by your deeds, running from your opponents smears just makes you look week. If you aren’t a socialist, which I don’t think you are, then the lesson remains it doesn’t matter what you call yourself you will be tarred as a commie.
What you “are” not “ate,” but ate is also funny. “I am a communist that ate trail mix and organized my workplace!”
Bubble aside,
“I dont think any of them aren’t voting for Coconut mommy unless they live in solid blue states”
↓
‘I think all of them are voting for Coconut mommy unless they live in solid blue states’
(Not sure that was the intended meaning)
[I mean, I can read it both ways. Like that hag/youngy optical illusion, or the Necker cube]
Yeah that’s what I meant. I think people make a lot of noise about not voting, but when push comes to shove they do. We see it every election cycle where self identified leftists scream about not voting dem, but then end up doing it anyway.
It doesn’t help that on the flip conservative dems use this to prop up the zombie lie that “leftists don’t vote” ergo we can and should ignore them, despite the fact the data basically says the opposite every time.
Appreciate that, crimsonsage. Ta.
IIRC, high voter turnout used to be good for Democrats. If that holds true in this election, maybe we have a chance.
I drove by the early voting place nearest where I live today, the seventh day of no-excuse early voting in Missouri, just to check out how busy it was. The line outside the building was about three blocks long. My one remaining hope is that the polls aren’t counting all the folks who are voting this time.
I get StevoR’s terror and helplessness. I’m also terrified of a Trump win, and am Canadian so I also can’t do a thing about it. Americans have to stop pretending that their politics are solely their purview. Trump would be a disaster for more than just your nation (he’s has a massive impact on global politics already, as he threw gasoline on a revanchist, right-wing authoritarian political movement, leading to similar movements finding success in many other countries, my own included). Some of the damage he’s done is irreversible – it has to run its course. But he can do so, SO much worse in a second term. And yet only Americans have the opportunity to keep him from winning, and getting a second shot at destroying everything good about his country (and there are an impressive number of good things about America), and moving the world even further away from actual solutions to the global problems we all face.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand the apathy. I want it all to end, the election BS, and I don’t even live in America. Can’t you guys just have normal elections? Set aside 12 weeks for a campaign, and just…choose between a bunch of boring candidates, none of whom will actually do very much, besides keeping the ship afloat, perpetuating neo-colonial capitalistic cultural hegemony with a mild partisan spin, communicated in inspirational messaging adverts and punchy, rehearsed interview responses. Why does every election have to be the most important election you’ll ever vote in? This messaging is getting old (even as it remains depressingly true). The Trump cult needs to die, and so do the billionaires who are propping it up (I can’t believe some people still think it’s salt-of-the-earth American working class people who are responsible for Trump’s success). And I know that many Americans are over it so hard that they don’t even care what happens on November 5th – most of these people won’t even bother voting (even if they live in a state where their vote might matter). And that’s by design, by the way – the power brokers realized they don’t have to put in the effort to manufacture consent most of the time…apathy is a more than acceptable outcome. So I disagree with Timothy Leary…I think it’s fine to turn off and tune out (preserving your sanity should be pretty high on your priority list)…but for goodness’ sake, don’t drop out. Instead, drop IN to your designated voting location and do the rest of the world (not to mention yourself) a solid, yeah?
And finally, note that I cannot stand that regardless of what happens next week, Israel is going to keep genociding brown people in Gaza, the West Bank and any other place they think they can get away with. Or that no major political party (in my country or yours) has an actual, actionable plan to ban the extraction, trade and combustion of fossil fuels in a time frame that actually could make a difference in the adverse outcomes of climate change set to happen in my lifetime (let’s call that another 4 decades), let alone that of future generations. And yet despite all of that, I am calling on Americans to please preserve a functional world order (even a shitty one) so that diplomacy can actually have a shot at solving the big problems we all face. The option here is not between good people and bad people, or good policies and bad policies. We don’t actually face a world in which one election can end all suffering. But one election can certainly lead to more…or less suffering, depending on who wins.
@ 32. crimsonsage : “Also it’s weird to see bluanon comments here.”
Blueanon? Really? What exactly do you by that and whose comments specifically are you referring to here?
That has more than just a whiff of false erquivalence to my nostrils.
Obvs allusion to Quanon but if you compare, well, who doing what to that movement..
[StevoR, you’re on the internet]
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_assassination_of_Donald_Trump_in_Pennsylvania#Misinformation_and_conspiracy_theories
“Left-wing users posted conspiracy theories of a “false flag” operation,[314] dubbed “BlueAnon”, in reference to QAnon.[308][330][331][332]”
“BlueAnon” is generally a term used for Democrat/liberal conspiracy theories about Trump. (e.g. The attempts on Trump’s life was staged. Trump had classified documents buried with Ivana. Putin is blackmailing him with a “pee tape.” etc..)
@43 StevoR
I am referring specifically to #5 Robert Westbrook and the idea that Bernie is a Russian plant at the behest of the USSR and Putin, as well as, to a lesser extent, the idea that all Bernie and his supporters are/were sexist/racist dudebros that lost Hillary the election. Perhaps Russia derangement syndrome would be the better epithet to describe that? I have always heard bluanon to describe the more conspiracy minded democrats. Like I may not agree with people here 100% of the time politically but I can usually respect that everyone is a reasonable and intelligent person of good will.
Sorry, PZ, but if you magically showed up at my apartment today I’d probably run out and find a spray bottle because of this post. “Bad PZ, bringing up voting for Sanders in 2024, bad!”
Friendly reminder that Clinton did not loose the 2016 presidential election. She won the election, by 2,868,686 votes to be precise, but Trump became president nonetheless because of the US’ archaic election process.
@32 crimsonsage
On FTB? You can find them pretty regularly on the Infinite Thread…
This time, though, it was probably a few sleeper agents from the Clinton campaign who read “I’d rather be voting for Bernie“, and it activated old, disused circuits in their brains that haven’t processed any new events since mid-2016. They were compelled to regurgitate how Yas Queen would, in fact, Slay, that she is the best candidate that can and will ever exist, and that Bernie makes their skin crawl.
@48 rietpluim
Friendly reminder that Clinton lost the 2016 election. Get over it.
rietpluim@48: Friendly reminder that Clinton did not loose[sic] the 2016 presidential election. She won the election, by 2,868,686 votes to be precise, but Trump became president nonetheless because of the US’ archaic election process.
That’s a bizarre statement. It’s like saying “Team X actually won the Superbowl because they scored more goals with kicks. Team Y were only appointed champions because of the archaic rules of American football.”
I mean, I hate the anti-democratic electoral college system as much as the next guy. More, probably. With the fury of 10,000 suns. I want it gone. But the fact is that for now — and in 2016 — it is the rules the game is played by. That’s what a US presidential election is.
Both candidates know that perfectly well when they enter the contest. It’s why neither side campaigns in, for instance, California (solid D) or Idaho (solid R). If one side also decides to ignore oh, say, Wisconsin or Michigan and thereby blows their electoral chances, nobody gets to turn around and say “but they won the popular vote!”.
That’s exactly right.
Though I would say the tragedy is a little deeper than that. I agree that we leftists invariably hold our nose and vote in the end, but that doesn’t mean the inevitable establishment Dem “pivot to the center” isn’t without a turnout cost. I think what happens (to varying degrees) is that while leftist activists might hold their nose and do their duty at the polling booth, what they might be less likely to do is also push a more apathetic friend or relative out to the polls. It’s a lot harder to wax enthusiastic to your friends about a candidate who is selling out to banks. Or, say, seems to be complicit in a genocide.
Hard to pin down down how big that effect is, but IMO it’s not insignificant.
Why would you want to vote for Sanders? Even if he’s not wrong, senile or evil, he’s still just a cantankerous old man, not someone who can actually lead; and certainly not someone who can lead in the face of determined fascist opposition. Nor has he shown himself to be much of a coalition-builder or deal-maker in Congress. Wherever his heart is, he’s just never been effective as a politician; and trust me, if he’d been the Democrats’ nominee this year, Trump would win easily, without any doubt at any time, just he would have beat Sanders in 2016.
@49 Beholder
I meant here on pharyngula specifically, most posters here seem to be pretty reasonable.
Raging Bee @53:
Well, one reason to vote for Sanders (or someone like him, but maybe a bit younger) is the fact that socialists have a much better record against fascists than centrist liberals do.
FWIW, I’m somewhat sanguine about Harris, even if she hasn’t run exactly the campaign I might have wanted her to. I certainly hope she wins — I dropped my own ballot off a couple days ago.
But I also hope that once she’s in office she makes some additional breaks from the neoliberal norms that have been poisoning the Democratic party for the last 40+ years. This is what Biden has done, in some of his most successful moments: e.g., student debt, support for unions, an FTC and a Justice Dept that actually think holding corporations to account might be part of their job. (In Bidens case, some of this may be because he is simply from an era predating those neoliberal norms. Harris could actually be the first post-neoliberal President. Or not.)
As to Bernie’s chances in 2016, obviously it’s all speculation, but I think that’s a lot less clear cut than you think. Successful wheeling and dealing in Congress is a lot less important in a presidential race — might even be a hindrance. And on the other hand, Sanders wouldn’t have had Clinton’s baggage, and might have defined a campaign with very different contours. (Like it or not, and true or not, Clinton’;s image was defined well before the campaign started: a corrupt political insider, a sellout with no principled views of her own.)
Sure, he might have been successfully tarred as a commie socialist in the general election, but very possibly only to the segment that inevitably believes the same thing about Obama, Clinton, Biden and Harris as well, regardless of the facts or their actual positions. And then, Sanders has a lot of genuinely principled (appearing) policy positions (universal healthcare, opposition to war, etc.) that might have allowed him to actually define some kind of alternative vision to oppose and undercut Trump’s 2016 image as a fresh outsider with populist ideas (Clinton, as an objectively stale insider, was left utterly flatfooted there).
In the end, most Democrats (and Republicans) would have come home to their party regardless of the candidate, so it’s largely a question at the margins. I think it’s very likely Sanders would have lost some support with, e.g., African-Americans relative to Clinton. He might not have picked up NC. But there’s plausible reason to believe Sanders could have picked up a few points with non-college whites, a segment where Clinton fell off from Obama quite badly, and that ultimately hurt her in the Midwest and Southwest. IIRC, Sanders wouldn’t even have had to beat Obama’s 2012 numbers with that segment to turn things around and carry the EC.
Our organization listened to Bernie for years before he ran for president. He isn’t perfect. But, his ideals (not ideology) outshine almost all of the alleged superstars of politics today; Raskin and AOC, Jasmine C. and a few others excepted. We supported his run and were only disappointed when he gave up campaigning. The corporate democratic machine did all they could to dishonestly assassinate his character. Thus, we condemn the duopoly and both major corporate run parties. The electoral college is a farce. Ranked choice voting seems to be a great idea that the moneyed corporate powers will never allow.
We are not strictly socialists. We support honest privately owned businesses. We will never support crapitallism. We are secular and cannot respect the superstition that is religion.
Everyone in our organization has voted already. We voted against tRUMP. However, we can’t respect Harris. She is (and has signaled she will continue to be) a co-sponsor of the genocide in the middle-east, among other drastic flaws. Based on limited info, we like and respect Tim Walz.
Fact check time:
@5 Robert Westbrook wrote complaining about Bernie
‘Sigh. Bernie was blind to racism in his own supporters, too out of touch, and persistently tone-deaf to the concerns of POC.’ ‘It seems that for some of these people, Bernie was merely a merkin for their misogyny.’
The reality is that for decades he has fought against ALL forms of bigotry. Just as he said in the video, Bernie, many times, decried bigotry, sexism and racism. And, the assertion by @5 is clearly wrong. As Bernie supporters, we have always engaged in the fight against all forms of bigotry.
And just to be very clear when I said, “We voted against tRUMP.” I am also staying that we did vote for harris/walz.
Oh, good. This has dredged up the people who inexplicably hate Sanders for… well, for the same sort of nonsense the Republicans used against Hillary Clinton for 30 years, quite frankly. Smears, lies, and distractions. Let’s be real about this — Clinton would most likely have made a pretty average president, all things considered. Obviously lightyears ahead of Trump, but then again, a potted plant is lightyears ahead of Trump.
However, she was an absolutely terrible campaigner. Not only did she never try to take control of the narrative, she never even contradicted the smears against her. She was beyond complacent, took advice from out of touch idiots, and lost as a result. Not by much, to be sure, and she could easily have still won, but she never should have been so close in the first place that Comey’s comments could cause her to lose. She made more than enough unforced errors to make up the difference and then some, even accounting for the sabotage and poor luck.
As for Sanders — he’s a good guy who genuinely believes in using his position to help people, and has never been shy about voicing his positions. It’s speculation, of course, but I believe his willingness to take control of the narrative could very easily have carried him to the presidency, if he had just won the primary, and I think he would have made an excellent president, too. He’s not as far left as I would like, but then, very few people are, and you’re not likely to see any anarcho-communists running for office anywhere. Not really our style.
I think the thing I’m more troubled by how many people here are, 8 years on, still trying to blame the 2016 outcome on Bernie Sanders of all people, and/or basically anyone and anything except the very public failures of Hillary Clinton and her campaign.
That’s very worrying when some of us saw Biden, and now Harris, making some of the same mistakes. I do think Harris is a better candidate than either of them, her support for Palestinian genocide notwithstanding.
But if — Chthulhu-forbid! — she does lose, and if we ever have another election again after that, we need to be able to examine those mistakes, learn from them, and force the Party and future candidates to do better. Or at the very least, not allow them to keep sticking their heads in the sand and scapegoating the very-much-not-in-power leftist faction for their repeated failures.
@33. John Morales :
In the same world, the same pale blue dot with the one global atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere which we all have to share.
I look at the climate graphs and trends and right now, they are screaming at us – metaphorically speaking of course.
There are a lot of .other implications if the USA falls to Trump and fascism too gioven their massive cultural influnece and our political tuies and the importing of American culture war issues to us frex the weaponisation of false late term abortion myths that recently caused one regressive Mp locally to try a bill denyiong wormn’s right’s in SA.
Sadly the election in the States does affect us all – globally.
^See : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-17/abortion-legislation-vote-south-australia/104477762
(Catching up from last night.)
Yes, StevoR, all that. Still, you don’t get to vote in the USA.
So… “We have one more week to go. Let’s use this time as well and productively as possible and sdo everything possible to make sure Kamala Harris wins.”
Basically, what you are is a foreign national posting social media comments endorsing one candidate, demonising the other, and providing various hyperbolic and inflammatory scenarios.
Also, be aware that doing “everything possible” includes doing illegal, immoral and cruel things, as well as lying and cheating misleading and compromising and whatnot. Or assassinations.
You exclude nothing.
—
Again: There is no “we” — there is the electorate which gets to vote, and there is you.
The election is for eligible USA voters, not for you.
John Morales @63
StevoR obviously feels invested in the outcome of the coming US election as the implications are global and not limited to us. Trump is a demon, no demonization needed, and amply supplies his own hyperbolic and inflammatory scenarios. No need to just add water.
No reasonable person is thinking StevoR wants “illegal, immoral and cruel things” done nor assassination (jeebus!). That’s all ridiculous word-chopping on your part. What compels you to do this to people? You’re more gnat than gadfly when you do it. There’s nothing aporic in it. Nothing constructive. Just unwarranted tedium on your part.
Yeah, well. Indeed there are. Biggest kid in the schoolyard.
Still: not up to us how the USA votes.
Basically, if Trump is voted in, it will be the will of the people.
(Attributed to Thomas Jefferson: “the government you elect is the government you deserve”)
—
To quote Jack @51: “I mean, I hate the anti-democratic electoral college system as much as the next guy. More, probably. With the fury of 10,000 suns. I want it gone. But the fact is that for now — and in 2016 — it is the rules the game is played by. That’s what a US presidential election is.”
Right?
Can’t condemn Trump for failing to respect the election result and then not respect the result oneself.
Ah, been a while since you attempted this, Hemidactylus.
“Trump is a demon”, quoth you.
What, supernatural in nature?
An extremely competent performer?
(heh)
(sigh)
Whatever makes you imagine I thought that at least one “reasonable person is thinking StevoR wants “illegal, immoral and cruel things” done”?
I quoted what he wrote.
Whatever I (or a reasonable person) thinks StevoR probably meant, I quoted what he wrote.
Again: doing “everything possible” excludes nothing that is not physically impossible to achieve.
(Words mean things)
Nope.
You ostensibly think that’s all ridiculous word-chopping on my part, which is not the same thing.
(You’re chopping meaning; much as with the ‘sanewashing’ some claim is applied to what Trump says)
Probably the very same thing that compelled you to do this to me. :)
Sez the constructive aporic gadfly whose tedium is warranted.
(heh)
—
But fine, truth is not constructive, in your estimation.
—
Anyway, this election is for USAnians, not for Australians.
We get to watch and worry (or be terrified, depending on temperament), but not to interfere.
[My birthday is on 5 November, and I remember 2016 when Trump got elected.
Not the best present ever.
I had my aunt and uncle over from Spain at the time, and we all commiserated.
Exactly the same feeling as when Brexit happened; WTF? How did this happen?
Why are they doing this obviously stupid thing to themselves?
But, sovereignty]
Harris is running a very successful campaign that has obviously learned from the mistakes of 2016. Bernie is far more important in his current position, and I think he also learned from his mistakes.
Moving forward, I think a Harris administration will be even more progressive than the current Biden administration on many issues, including Israel.
Running a centrist campaign is a careful strategy for capturing the votes of Haley supporters and any other Conservatives who traditionally vote Republican.
She was conspicuously absent when Netanyahu visited congress recently, which was deliberate though more subtle than a resounding support of Gaza that some would have preferred.
The latest CNN poll of early voters in three swing states shows a strong lead for Harris.
MI 61% -35%
WI 60%-38%
PA 57%-40%
This is excellent news, and the Dumpster fire has already filed a legal complaint against a Pennsylvania county alleging that “long lines” were somehow preventing his voters from voting!? Nevermind the part where the election is next week and the office in question has reported that everyone in the line by 5:30 would absolutely get their ballots and have the opportunity to turn in their ballot.
Ben Meiselas gives more details (about 3 minutes in) on early voting results, a “ surprising” CNN poll, and then the news of yet another woman who has gone public about being lured to a hotel suite and sexually assaulted by that disgusting orange excrescence. I believe that’s the second one this week?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1CbxDlwRcc4
Lucky me, I live in Vermont, so I got to vote for both!
John Morales: I think there’s a very large difference between failing to respect the voting system, and failing to accept its outcome. Trump lost both the popular and the electoral vote rejected both. However you parse the will of the people, he violated it.
@46. crimsonsage :
Thanks and fair enough. I was puzzled by who and what you meant by that. Appreciated your elaboration and clarification there.
@ 44. John Morales : I know – I wanted to know what they meant by it
@63. John Morales :
I am painfully well aware that I don’t get to vote in the USA’s election despite it having such a huge impact on the entire planet including my country. The United States of America gets to dictate much of our Aussie (& other allied nations) foreign policy here but we (Aussies and other nations) of course, get no say & have sod all influence on theirs.
I don’t think I am “demonising”Trump at all – stating the reality about him is not demonisation. I’m don’t think I ám saying anything false or misleading or inaccurate and pretty sure I can back up everything I say about him.
I don’t think I’m describing hyperbolic or inflammatory scenarios either – see end of last sentence. Hypothetical maybe? Plausible even probable in my view. Testimony from many (most?) of Trump’s own picked admin figures who worked with him about his character and plans, the existence of Project 2025, Trump’s own comments & history, all support what I’ve said and give reason for people like me and so many others to be terrified or at least deeply concerned.. .
Yes, I am a foreign national in relation to the USA but I don’t think that means I shouldn’t have a view or preference or be able to express those and argue my case which is all I’m actually able to do. To share stuff with those who can vote and argue for why I think they should vote a certain way. I’m also very far from alone and doing this with very little actual power or influence. Note journalists and influencers – which I’m not – also do this expressing views and reasons and arguing over how they think people in the States should vote. Nor is this limited to US elections, I read up on what happens in various places globally, have views on that, express them and express why I hold them and think people should agree with me on them. This is a pretty typical, basic human nature thing to do isn’t it?
Actually, I was speaking about myself and by using “possible” that does exclude that – at least realistically – in practice rather than in theory. Again, language, how does it work? I have neither resources nor inclination to do anything illegal or unethical. I’m not really able to travel to the states financially or opportunity~wise at present.
I was using “we” in the collective sense of people generally, people like us, humans. Progressives, leftwing anti-Trump people.
Some of whoem are in the USA and can vote even if many others including myself are not. I do NOT – for the record – advocate doing anything illegal or unethical.
Personally, I would far prefer to see Trump lose the election fairly and then be jailed for his many crimes and die there, poor and disgraced, of natural causes (covid would be apt) in prison rather than see him assassinated potentially making him a “martyr” and empowering his toxic and dangerous cult and mythology.
@66. John Morales : : “We get to watch and worry (or be terrified, depending on temperament), but not to interfere.”
is it “interfering” to talk and argue, analyse and try to persuade?
That’s I guess really what I’m talking about for me personally when it coems to doing everything I can tohelp Kamala Harrius win here. I’m not rich, I can’t do much else, I can’t vote, I certainly don’t have the skills equipemnt etc .. to be an assassin or hacker or suchlike here. I can and do share memes and express my opinions, encourage peopel to vote to stop Trumnpand suggest various courses like unifying as strongly as possible behind her and disencouraging thsoe who ar ethinkingof doing so fromstaying homeor voting third party spoilers. Is that interference?
I’d respond in detail, StevoR, but it would be pointless.
So, just one thing: you assert you are trying to influence “Progressives, leftwing anti-Trump people”.
(If they are already progressive left-wing anti-Trump, they hardly need your influence)
I think they’ve learned from some of the most glaring ones – schedule some campaign stops in Wisconsin, for example. I’m somewhat less convinced they’ve learned the hard ones.
I certainly hope so. It’s really hard to tell at this point though. There are signals both ways. It’s all sort of reading what we want in the tea leaves.
For example, I think the pick of Walz over Shapiro is a good sign. But then at the same time there’s some weird stuff going on with a faction that badly wants (the excellent) Lina Khan out at the FTC. It’d be nice if there was a clear signal from Harris about this, however subtle. It’s possible she’ll continue with Khan, particularly if she gets some progressive pressure on it post-election, but there are bits in her record suggesting she’s worryingly sympathetic to the Mark Cuban wing of the Silicon Valley set.
It’s very hard to tell, and that doesn’t entirely make me feel good.
I think the word you want there is “risky”, not “careful”. Maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t, but let’s not kid ourselves about whether or not it’s a gamble.
For one thing, there’s a distinction between a centrist campaign, and the stuff they’re doing about a “permission structure” to pick up some Republican votes. In an alternate universe, there’d really be no contradiction in running a populist progressive platform, but still having some events proxied by, e.g., Liz Cheney. The rhetoric in the latter are not particularly policy-centric anyway — they’re mainly about a patriotic duty to stop Trump, coming together and being a President for everyone etc.
So the pivot to the center part of her strategy doesn’t look like some novel piece of genius to me. Instead, it looks indistinguishable from every other Dem pivot to the center of the past few decades. I think there’s good reason to be concerned that the team is — as usual — drawing the wrong conclusions from, e.g., polling that says voters view Harris as “too radical” or whatever, and concluding that they need to pivot their policy message to address that. But those polls are driven by cultural priming on race and gender. They have nothing to do with policy, and while I think maybe they need addressing, I don’t think coming out and saying, “umm, actually, we Democrats love to abuse the human rights of immigrants too,” is the right way to go about it, and is unlikely to move that needle in the right direction.
Again, I hope you’re right. But in the last weeks of the campaign, I’d much rather Harris had been out barnstorming a message about all the fresh ideas she has, and how Trump has none. Reminding people Dick Cheney exists was kind of the opposite of that. I’m all for the Never Trumpers trying to rally their herd, but they can do that on their own time. IMO, Harris or Walz tagging along was a distraction, and AFAIK, there’s no evidence it helped much.
I think that was the absolute bare minimum. If she had gone to the speech, there’d be absolutely no doubt about where she stood, but not the other way around. I certainly don’t think anyone is asking for “resounding support”, but there’s a lot of room in between that and what we have.
For example, when the press asks you repeatedly about the horrific death toll in Gaza, you could maybe put something generic in your talking points about being committed to enforcing US law instead of leading with a dumb zombie line about how, “Israel has a right to defend itself.” Or there’s a needle she could have threaded where she gave private assurances to Arab-American leaders sufficient to allow them to vocally endorse her on a personal basis, without actually disclosing any policy specifics.
She did meet with some of those leaders in Michigan earlier this month, but I worry it might have been too little, too late. This is not just an academic question. There are some serious electoral consequences to making the wrong move: 100,000 Uncommitted voters in Michigan alone. My concern is that I’m not sure they think she has done as much to reassure them as you seem to think she has.
StevoR @72: is it “interfering” to talk and argue, analyse and try to persuade?
FWIW, no, of course not. And absolutely nobody ever thought “everything you could” meant you were secretly funneling $billions of Australian dark money into the US race, or a leet haxor who’s been leaking Trump Jr’s emails or something.
I include Morales in that, because I’m pretty sure he knows better too. I think it’s just his “awkward uncle kidding on the square” routine. A routine that’s pretty tired, IMO, and maybe particularly inappropriate for this particular thread.
jack, it is interesting to hear your interpretation.
Here’s mine: words matter.
Here: “and maybe [something]” must perforce include ‘or maybe ¬[something]’.
But, of course, only if one is trying to communicate clearly, rather than to be somewhat vague, or other things. But it is true it indicates a lack of knowledge about the factors that resolve a contingent circumstance.
(I know, I know. In ordinary language, you were being civil and polite and soft-pedalling; I still get you nonetheless)
—
BTW, are you aware that I tailor my comments to their intended recipient? That includes you.
Central point you’ve loudly ignored, jack.
compare: ‘StevoR @72: is it “interfering” for Russia to talk and argue, analyse and try to persuade?’
What about Israel and their proxies?
They sure are trying to talk and argue, analyse and try to persuade USA voters.
@77/78
Interesting question. I haven’t heard of either of those people — do they post here? I’ve heard of people with the given name Israel, but “Russia” is a very unusual name. Is it a first name or a last name? Or is it just on its own like “Madonna”?
Anyway, no. Whoever this Mr. Israel and Mr. Russia are, and wherever they’re posting, talking and arguing with other people online about politics is fine, even if Mr. Israel and Mr. Russia aren’t from the country whose politics they’re arguing about.
As long as they’re not doing so as an agent of a foreign government, of course. Like if Mr. Israel and Mr. Russia were working for the states of Russia and Israel (wouldn’t that be a funny coincidence, with names like that!). That’d be crossing a line. Other governments shouldn’t be covertly trying to influence free foreign elections…
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_web_brigades
& https://electronicintifada.net/content/inside-israels-million-dollar-troll-army/27566
Obs, StevoR is not a foreign agent, though he is foreign; but he does just what they do, main diff is he believes what he writes instead of having a state-sponsored agenda.
And he doesn’t work for the state.
Take it all together, and it’s kind of a huge-ass fucking distinction. (One which, I might add, you were perfectly aware of the whole time.)
I’d say covertly is the important point there. The Russian state is faking comments supposedly by American citizens, Israel is trying to suppress any and all criticism of the war crimes it is committing in Gaza and Lebanon by lying about the motivation and sources of that criticism. I don’t think it’s wrong – although it would probably be counter-productive – for a foreign govenment to comment, publicly analyse, even openly express a preference for one candidate over another.
jack, I made that very clear @63. That was the point.
There is no distinction from the perspective of a social media participant.
Good intent and genuineness may indeed be magic and exculpatory, but it’s only the posts that can be observed.
There is no distinction from the perspective of a social media participant.
Nonsense. Of course there is. One is a person doing normal human things, the other is a government sponsored disinformation campaign. One of those things is fine, one of them is a scourge. There’s absolutely a distinction.
Now, if you mean that one social media participant can’t tell if another is a foreign agent provocateur, well, maybe. In my experience the Russian variety in particular is generally pretty low grade and easy to spot, but it’s possible there are cleverer varieties. Maybe there are some out there masquerading as Australians with perfectly reasonable opinions for some dastardly reason.
But even if we can’t tell whether or not someone we’re talking to has secret motivations, what difference does it make? You also can’t generally tell in real life if the person standing in front of you in line at the supermarket is, say, a serial killer. Or a North-Korean sleeper agent. Or an FBI informant spying on your local Antifa group.
I don’t know about you, but the possibility that the people I interact with might secretly have bad intent doesn’t really bother me. I can only judge them on what they actually say and do. In that situation, as long as they keep the line moving and don’t use too many coupons, that’s probably more than enough.
After all, nobody would obsess about an unknowable, and then, say, yell at that person for doing something perfectly normal, and tell them that “they better not buy too many eggs because that’s something a North Korean sleeper agent would do,” or something.
Right?
Good intent and genuineness may indeed be magic and exculpatory, but it’s only the posts that can be observed.
Indeed. But AFAICT, the only posts in this thread that might need any exculpation are your own.
jack:
Nor me. Not the point. I’m not the USAphile here.
(What, you thought it did?)
Wow. That’s pretty far into the weeds.
Who is supposedly obsessing, and about what?
(Other than StevoR about the USA election, but that’s not to what you intend to refer, is it?)
You mean, what difference does an ulterior motive make?
Dunno. What difference does election interference by foreign entities make?
(If none, well. Go for it, Russia and Israel!)
What have I written that is allegedly culpable, and in what manner?
Go on. Do tell.
What have I written that is allegedly culpable, and in what manner?
#33, and the followups. In which you have accosted someone and berated them for engaging in foreign election interference (or something? it’s unclear what the actual offense was), with no basis whatsoever, other than it’s a day ending in Y, apparently.
It’s not a reasonable thing to do. It’s obnoxious. Like someone throwing a tantrum about North Korean eggs in the supermarket.
Jack, the culpability you rhetorically pretend to imagine I attached to StevoR was actually the distinction you yourself made: “Now, if you mean that one social media participant can’t tell if another is a foreign agent provocateur, well, maybe.”
BTW: had that actually been accosting someone and berating them, then what you and others have done to me is exactly the same. But it wasn’t, so it isn’t.
One blog comment, is what it was.
(A tale that grows in the telling, your narrative)
Jack, the culpability you rhetorically pretend to imagine I attached to StevoR was actually the distinction you yourself made: “Now, if you mean that one social media participant can’t tell if another is a foreign agent provocateur, well, maybe.”
That’s just word salad. I was not “making a distinction”. I was pointing out the tautology that someone is either an obvious troll…or they’re not.
To rephrase it, the trolling operations we actually know about are pretty obvious. In some sense, being obvious is part of the gig. It’s a selection filter, like all the grammar mistakes in one of those “Nigerian prince” emails. They’re not interested in hooking people who know what Snopes is. And, at least with Russian disinfo, the strategy is to just spew out so much shit that most people give up trying to find anything not covered in it.
Now, maybe there’s another level. Maybe there are also hyper-sophisticated four dimensional chess playing trolls out there. Sure. Maybe I’m one. Maybe StevoR is one. Maybe PZ himself is one — it’d have to be a long game after all.
Maybe. But by the very definition, you wouldn’t be able to tell, would you? Even speculating is really just playing stupid Vizzini games with yourself (“…iocane comes from Australia, as everyone knows, and Australia is entirely peopled with criminals, and criminals are used to having people not trust them, as you are not trusted by me, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you….”).
So, I’ll repeat my advice: Don’t play those games. If you’re going to comment on the internet, you can’t assume everyone you interact with is a four-dimensional chess-playing Icelandic intelligence agent trying to take over the world. That way lies madness. The only rational thing to do is to assume everyone is commenting in good faith. Judge them by the content of their posts, not the content of your imagination.
Speaking of, so far, to me, the only one who does not appear to be acting in good faith, who is sowing discord and generally acting like a troll, is yourself. For example, by making false statements like:
and
Or false accusations/misrepresentations like:
Or silly non-sequiturs like:
Or absurd, hyperbolic non-sequiturs like:
Or apparently deliberate misreadings like,
So again, if there’s a troll on here, my money would be on it being the guy jacking the thread with that sticky mess of word salad.
Jack, the culpability you rhetorically pretend to imagine I attached to StevoR was actually the distinction you yourself made: “Now, if you mean that one social media participant can’t tell if another is a foreign agent provocateur, well, maybe.”
That’s just word salad. I was not “making a distinction”. I was pointing out the tautology that someone is either an obvious troll…or they’re not.
To rephrase it, the trolling operations we actually know about are pretty obvious. In some sense, being obvious is part of the gig. It’s a selection filter, like all the grammar mistakes in one of those “Nigerian prince” emails. They’re not interested in hooking people who know what Snopes is. And, at least with Russian disinfo, the strategy is to just spew out so much shit that most people give up trying to find anything not covered in it.
Now, maybe there’s another level. Maybe there are also hyper-sophisticated four dimensional chess playing trolls out there. Sure. Maybe I’m one. Maybe StevoR is one. Maybe PZ himself is one — it’d have to be a long game after all.
Maybe. But by the very definition, you wouldn’t be able to tell, would you? Even speculating is really just playing stupid Vizzini games with yourself (“…iocane comes from Australia, as everyone knows, and Australia is entirely peopled with criminals, and criminals are used to having people not trust them, as you are not trusted by me, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you….”).
So, I’ll repeat my advice: Don’t play those games. If you’re going to comment on the internet, you can’t assume everyone you interact with is a four-dimensional chess-playing Icelandic intelligence agent trying to take over the world. That way lies madness. The only rational thing to do is to assume everyone is commenting in good faith. Judge them by the content of their posts, not the content of your imagination.
Speaking of, so far, to me, the only one who does not appear to be acting in good faith, who is sowing discord and generally acting like a troll, is yourself. For example, by making false statements like:
and
Or false accusations/misrepresentations like:
Or silly non-sequiturs like:
Or absurd, hyperbolic non-sequiturs like:
Or apparently deliberate misreadings like,
So again, if there’s a troll on here, my money would be on it being the guy jacking the thread with that sticky mess of word salad.
Jack, I feel the love.
You most certainly give the vibe you are assuming I am commenting in good faith.
“You”. ‘Yourself’. One of those is reflexive.
It would be, would it?
(Under what conditions, and why is it not the case at this point?)
—
“jacking the thread with that sticky mess”
I feel the homoeroticism.
See also from where a troll posted on the wrong thread today & I’ve responded here :
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2024/11/03/dont-let-small-town-values-decide-the-fate-of-women/comment-page-1/#comment-2241573
Yeah, well… remember, StevoR: “Don’t play those games. If you’re going to comment on the internet, you can’t assume everyone you interact with is a four-dimensional chess-playing Icelandic intelligence agent trying to take over the world. That way lies madness. The only rational thing to do is to assume everyone is commenting in good faith. Judge them by the content of their posts, not the content of your imagination.”
Are you actually illiterate? Why are you bolding the first part of that, when StevoR is plainly making a judgement on the second part. The “content of their posts” part. He’s not inventing hyper-proficient four-dimensional trolls. He’s pointing out an example of the bog-standard, run-of-the-mill doofus variety.
Because, see, there is actually a troll in the other thread. They’re pretty readily recognizable. Recognizable by, you know, the content of their posts.
Content completely unlike anything here. (Again, excepting your own posts, which are trollish in my judgement, although probably not professionally trollish.)
Look, maybe you see something the rest of us don’t. So put up or shut up: if you think someone here is a bot or paid troll — or oa troll-master — name them! Or otherwise explain the point of all the “foreign interference” BS you’ve been bringing into the conversation for no apparent reason. If not, you know, the second thing. Just please, no more of this vague insinuation via non sequitur.
Evidently.
Anyway, pointless to go on.
Whatever makes you imagine I think someone here is a bot or paid troll?
I’ve quite explicitly stated that StevoR is a genuine poster, for example.
“In which you have accosted someone and berated them for engaging in foreign election interference (or something? it’s unclear what the actual offense was)”
Apparently, your interpretation of my possibly illiterate word salad is that I am somehow being accusatory, though you can’t articulate how.
To what vague insinuations do you intend to refer?
—
Oh, right. I emphasised the part where your hypocrisy really shines, Jack.
Whatever makes you imagine I think someone here is a bot or paid troll?
This:
To what vague insinuations do you intend to refer?
To this one:
Explain what you meant by that, like I’m 5 years old. To me, it makes no sense whatsoever.
If you’re not accusing someone of something, what was the point of saying that? Who was talking about election interference prior to that? To what election interference are you referring?
Because if you’re not saying anything, than why say it?
PS: I am also very curious about what the heck, “StevoR, your terror is of your own making.” is supposed to mean. A Trump election really is a genuinely terrifying prospect to any thinking person, anywhere in the world. He’s not imagining that. So what exactly are you saying StevoR is “making” (or imagining) there? I’m stumped. Your posts are gibberish.
And this:
Oh, right. I emphasised the part where your hypocrisy really shines, Jack.
Again, what in the world are you talking about? What hypocrisy? Be specific. Use citations. Hypocrisy is saying one thing and doing (or saying) another, so you ought to be able to quote the conflicting parts.
Just please, try to remember that I’m a human person, not a fellow crab person or whatever, so try to speak the language of human people for a change.
There is no insinuation, jack.
I am looking at the comment as a thing in itself, and explaining that: “Also, be aware that doing “everything possible” includes doing illegal, immoral and cruel things, as well as lying and cheating misleading and compromising and whatnot. Or assassinations.
You exclude nothing.”
It’s not complicated, and it’s about the claim, not about the claimant.
Good grief! Is it not obvious?
If it’s possible for a foreigner to, say, travel to the USA and then try to assassinate a candidate but they do not actually do that, then they are not trying to do “everything possible”, are they?
Words mean things.
I’m not terrified, he is. Same applicable circumstances. It’s not intrinsic to the situation.
I have been already. “Why are you bolding the first part of that” indeed.
Because you are clearly not practicing your own dictum: “The only rational thing to do is to assume everyone is commenting in good faith.”
Remember how you started your interaction with me?
“Whoever this Mr. Israel and Mr. Russia are [blah]”.
(Well, I can do that too, in good faith)
“Just please, try to remember that I’m a human person, not a fellow crab person or whatever, so try to speak the language of human people for a change.”
It’s amusing to me that I am the one who gets accused of being condescending and snide. And revealing, too.
(But fine, I am not human to you. Because dehumanising people is fine if they irritate you, no?)
Ah. I think I get it — this is a crab-person cultural thing.
You may not realize it, but what you’re admitting here is that you were communicating exactly nothing. That your statement had no target, no purpose, and added nothing meaningful whatsoever to the conversation. It neither expressed an opinion, contradicted someone else’s opinion, or provided additional facts that were in any way relevant to anyone else. It was just kind of a meaningless string of tokens appended to the original string of tokens.
So, I get that crab-people from your planet might do things differently. In the interests of cross-species communication, let me try to clear things up: here on Earth, taking a comment “as a thing in itself” is in fact the opposite of communication.
In this corner of the galaxy, a comment (at least one written by a human) is never “a thing in itself”, it’s not just a free-standing string of tokens. It’s a communication, from one person to others, expressing thoughts, feelings or ideas about real things. Replying to a comment requires attempting to understand the intent behind the expression of those thoughts, and then entering into a communication with the commenter, or readers of the other comment, not with the comment itself. Because comments are not people. Your communication should try to provide something that might be relevant to the recipient, and thus add to the conversation.
Again, in the interests of cross-species comity, let me try to explain carefully:
In human-people land, statements have an implied context. A sort of background of meaning and assumptions and expressions and analogies and other related ideas. That context is always there as an integral part of any communication — comments and other forms of human communication are not just strings of tokens.
For example, someday you might hear a human-person say, “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.” At that point, you should understand that they do not literally mean that they intend to eat a horse. Horse is not a common food for most humans, and a whole horse would be a physically unlikely amount of for a human to consume either way. What they’re communicating is instead the simpler idea that they are very hungry. They are using what we humans call a “figure of speech”. They don’t literally mean that they want to eat a horse (or, usually, even a part of a horse), but rather, that they would like to eat a normal amount of food.
As such, it is NOT necessary to respond to their statement with an extrapolation of its literal meaning. For example, you might be tempted to provide legal advice, like, “Eating horses is considered animal abuse and is a class iii felony in your jurisdiction.” Don’t — that advice would not actually be relevant to the person (or to anyone else), because they don’t plan on eating a horse. (Or, if you possess a horse or horses, it would not be necessary to secure them against predation, or to threaten the human-person with the consequences of what would happen if they try to eat your horse(s). Again — they don’t actually plan on eating any horses.)
Likewise, the expression, “do everything possible” is a common human expression which actually means something more like “engage in an ultimately rather small and finite set of actions, most of which are likely no more than moderately difficult, and can be accomplished with a finite and proportional amount of time, effort and resources, given the physical, financial, legal and other circumstances of the human-person employing the expression.”
Indeed, “do everything possible” is often just an intensifier. “Do everything possible to accomplish X” means “do the normal things one does to accomplish X, but with some additional measure of dedication or effort.” It is NOT a statement that the person actually intends to iterate through every conceivable action-state of the Universe until X is achieved.
So, for example, if the a person said to you, “I’m going to do everything possible to get a job,” they would likely just mean that they were going to update their CV and apply for some jobs, but perhaps work at it a little harder than they would if they merely said, “I’m looking for a job.”
That person would NOT mean that they were going to, say, covertly surveil the hiring manager for a position they applied for in order to obtain blackmail material.
Or, in the case of the comment @31, the human-person StevoR was clearly only exhorting his fellow commenters to do the usual things one does in an election to get a candidate elected. That is, vote, and perhaps to volunteer for a campaign, donate money, or engage in other such ordinary election-related actions. To extrapolate his statement of “possible” to an extraordinary and unusual measure like assassination was to entirely miss the point of the original communication.
I think on some level, you actually do understand this: you must have understood that StevoR meant the usual measures, and even understood that other readers would also understand this to be what he meant. But you realized you could (mis)interpret his words in an overly literal fashion to include other measures that, while not included in the plain meaning of his words, are technically possible. For some reason you then decided to post a comment enumerating some of those, perhaps in the mistaken belief that it would useful to others.
I suppose I should congratulate you in some sense. You did manage to limit your “possible” scenarios to relatively Earthly ones. Obviously, “use a short wave radio at 37.2 Mhz to contact the crab-person mothership and request deployment of a legion of crab-troopers to occupy the US Capitol building” is also “possible” from your frame of reference, but you understood on some level that that would be a step too far, and surpass the limits of even how far you are willing to stretch the plain meaning of StevoR’s words. So…good job? Now that I understand the whole crab-person thing, I guess it was a pretty good attempt.
I mean, there are people who stick their hands into swarms of venomous snakes, or do asbestos remediation without a mask. Some of them might be able to honestly state they’re not afraid. That just means they’re idiots, not that those actions aren’t objectively very dangerous.
IOW, your personal reaction, or lack thereof, does not negate his. Maybe you have a broken fear response. Maybe you don’t understand the stakes as well as the rest of us.
Or maybe you know something the rest of us don’t, and should explain why you aren’t terrified.
Either way, “Your terror is of your own making” is unhelpful and, objectively, incorrect. It’s (barely) conceivable that StevoR (and most of the rest of us) are overreacting to the catastrophic potential consequences of a Trump presidency. But even if that were the case, it would be an overreaction to a real external situation, not “terror of our own making.”
Again, for the aid of your fellow crab-people, if what you mean is “Well, I’m not terrified, and I think I have good reason for that,” you could simply say that, and then explain your reasons. Not state something weird and objectively incorrect like, “your terror is of your own making.”
Another misquote. There’s a second clause to that statement, Mr Crab, which is not dispensable. The actual statement was that you should assume everyone is commenting in good faith, until their actions (i.e., content of their comments) tell you otherwise.
And someone’s comments here do lead me away from the good faith null hypothesis. Like that misquote you made just there, which is hard to see as anything but deliberate.
Or, maybe they just tell me that it it’s a crab-person commenting in crab-faith. So to give the benefit of the doubt, I’ll explain. In Earth logic, “do X unless Y” means that both X and Y must be part of the consideration. If you spot someone doing ~X, it is not necessarily hypocritical — you must also see if ~Y still obtains.
That was actually me giving you the benefit of the doubt — offering you an opportunity to explain why you were trying to conflate individual actions with those of nation states.
You passed on the chance. Or perhaps, just utterly failed to understand the importance of the distinction.
Yet you took umbrage and now persevere at trying to tell me how it affected you.
You contend that I write word-salad, that I communicate exactly nothing, and yet you ask me to explain what my allegedly word-salad which supposedly communicates exactly nothing means.
This, in the same sentence where you accuse me of trying to conflate individual actions with those of nation states.
This, after I explicitly told you this, in my immediately preceeding comment:
I am looking at the comment as a thing in itself, and explaining that: “Also, be aware that doing “everything possible” includes doing illegal, immoral and cruel things, as well as lying and cheating misleading and compromising and whatnot. Or assassinations.
You exclude nothing.”
It’s not complicated, and it’s about the claim, not about the claimant.
Ah well.
As with Fook and Lunkwill, it appears that your mind is too finely-tuned to get simple, straightforward stuff.
—
I do like your attempts at argumentation, jack.
Be aware, however, that claiming both that I make no sense communicate nothing and that I am somehow (ineffably, but for sure) being accusatory and insinuative at someone are mutually contradictory claims.
If you say so. Not by me, AFAIK. I don’t have a problem with condescending or snide.
Actually, I’d be relieved. Condescending and snide would at least hint at some actual engagement with the thread of conversation.
Ah well, I’ll spare you more time.
Better ‘were the case’, and if it’s an overreaction, then it’s of one’s own making. Words mean things.
Nor I. So, wasted effort, unless it’s what comes naturally to you.
(Is it?)
“The actual statement was that you should assume everyone is commenting in good faith, until their actions (i.e., content of their comments) tell you otherwise.”
You sure about that?
Here: “That way lies madness. The only rational thing to do is to assume everyone is commenting in good faith. Judge them by the content of their posts, not the content of your imagination.”
Now, had you written “That way lies madness. The only rational thing to do is to initially assume everyone is commenting in good faith. thereafterJudge them by the content of their posts, not the content of your imagination.”, then you could truthfully make the claim you actually made.
—
Like, words mean things.
@99. jack lecou : That’s spot on & exactly what I meant..
John Morales, sometimes (often even!) you really do not seem to grok how language is used by most people. Context and common expressions and how they work.
Most people myself included assume “ëverything possible” excluds rather than includes things that are illegal and unethical. Because that’s how the expression usually works. To read it otherwise is extraordinary and odd.
In general I think my own style of language here is colloquial, speaking (typing) a s most people woiuld in a conversation – with the addition of having links and quotes from those links and in my case always far too many inadvertant bloody typos.
Heh, StevoR: Most people might, but not jack.
Here: “So, for example, if the a person said to you, “I’m going to do everything possible to get a job,” they would likely just mean that [blah]”
He’s basically saying the same thing as I did, just differently. See the term I emphasised there?
I know what you intended to express, and I know what you actually wrote.
They are not the same thing. So I made a brief comment about it.
It was an offhand comment, though it has obviously escalated as jack goes on an on about it.
Funny how sometimes people take umbrage on others’ behalf, eh?
(sigh)
I did not read it otherwise, I noted its literal meaning.
(How many times now have I noted I care not about your typographic messes and so forth? Different thing, that)
@ John Morales : see also :
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2024/11/01/who-remembers-trickle-down-economics-and-other-lies-of-the-right/comment-page-1/#comment-2241856
Leaving aside a debate about whether “umbrage” is the right word, I’m not sure how you think that’s a contradiction.
To recap:
You posted a series of non-sequiturs, irrelevant statements semantically indistinguishable from just copy-pasting “my hovercraft is full of eels” everywhere for as much as added to the conversation. Indeed, that might have been marginally wittier.
I asked for some clarification and, eventually, received confirmation that you were indeed posting nothing more than some elaborate kind of lorem ipsum filler text for your own mysterious onanistic (cancrine?) satisfaction.
I explain that that’s not how decent people act in public – human, crab, or otherwise — and told you off for wasting my time.
Now you think “[I said something meaningless] yet you took umbrage” is somehow a refutation?
The “yet” doesn’t belong there. It does not a refutation make. You said something meaningless, AND I took umbrage. Yes.
That’s the whole point of this pointlessness. You have confirmed you were being a troll, and now I’m calling you a jerk. Or whatever the crab-person equivalent is.
Yes?
Again, the “yet” does not seem to belong there. You say something with no apparent meaning AND I tell you so and give you a chance to clarify and provide some.
The one follows from the other. But I think we’ve clarified now that there was indeed no meaning.
The “opportunity to explain” was referring to an interaction in a previous portion in the thread, where I still held hope that you were actually making a claim of some kind. So let me rephrase:
That was actually me giving you the benefit of the doubt at the time — offering you an opportunity to explain why your statements (which I now understand to be meaningless noise) appeared to be trying to conflate individual actions with those of nation states if one attempted to extrapolate meaning from them.
Yes. We’ve covered that — that is a statement of nothing.
You say you’re not accusing or insinuating anything. So you’re not accusing StevoR of calling for those things. Thus your “explanation” has no relation to his original statement. Someone encouraged certain activities. Then you just listed some additional activities that are also theoretically possible. Calling that an “explanation” is being very generous. It’s really just total nonsense speak. This whole irritating thing is entirely equivalent to:
In short, disturbing, but ultimately a huge waste of time.
Indeed. Was it not clear? I now understand that you were NOT accusing or insinuating anything. You admit that you were saying nothing at all. That you were purely trolling.
I have seen it; I’ll spare you a full reply, StevoR.
“It’s more that you should try to be a bit more considerate of others here, maybe not misconstrue either deliberately or accidentally common expressions of speech and quirks of language and just try to play a bit nicer with others as the expression generally goes.”
I could say the very same thing, you know.
I’d like for others to try to be a bit more considerate of me, and maybe not misconstrue either deliberately or accidentally common expressions of speech and quirks of language, and just try to play a bit nicer with me.
Take jack. I am accused of accusing you of something (he’s not sure what) though what I write is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_salad and I communicate nothing.
(Is that what you yourself think?)
Ah well.
<snicker>
Your fabulation fabricator has gone into overdrive, and your indignation index is hitting all-time highs.
(Very performative of you, I do appreciate it)
PS re “The “yet” doesn’t belong there.”
Be aware that ‘yet’ is equivalent to ‘but’ and ‘and’ in symbolic logic.
(It’s a logical conjunction)
No, your re-statement changes nothing.
If I had originally meant “assume” was to be unconditional and perpetual, that statement would have been self-contradictory: how would it ever be possible to judge someone on the content of their posts if we there’s an overriding imperative to forever assume good faith?
The obvious resolution is that “assume” there was not unconditional or perpetual, and meant in the normal Earth-human fashion: assume until proven otherwise.
I fail to see how you think I don’t think the same. My [blah] was, indeed, an example list containing only normal, non-illegal activities.
This is confirmed I went on to add an example of an illegal activity, which the person would NOT have meant:
How is this so confusing to you?
Incorrect.
.
Meaning they were the same thing.
This is evidenced by the fact that even you understood what he meant. I assure you, so did everyone else.
IOW, he wrote a thing that caused literally everyone involved to understand what he meant. By any definition, he correctly expressed and communicated the thing he intended to express.
The fact that you took it upon yourself to take an extra and entirely unnecessary step of running it through your mental filter of what a crab person with no understanding of Earth-people and their context might think has nothing to do with what StevoR said. Your comment is only useful if crab-people are actually reading the thread. (Indeed you also phrased that comment as a warning: “be aware.” As if the rest of us need to watch out how our statements might be interpreted by crab-people. Which, to be fair, apparently we do — because they’re really obnoxious.)
Be aware that English is not symbolic logic.
Yet be aware that “equivalent” is from late Middle English referring to persons equal in rank.
[meta]
Well, done this sort of thing before, and pissed-off the blog host.
Enough, jack. me @94: Anyway, pointless to go on.
It’s fine by me (I’m actually enjoying our badinage), but I am certain PZ is not impressed.
So. See what we have done here.
Accost me elsewhen elsethread if that’s your desire, but I shall not respond to you any further on this thread.
Now you are also being accused of lying.
I already clarified this at @108 (though I believe I have been consistent about it throughout): my accusations are contingent and mutually exclusive. I maintain that either your comment @33 etc. were insinuating or accusing someone of something OR you were saying nothing. I currently understand it to be the latter.
Be aware, OR is a logical disjunction.