Dem Post Mortem

[Jarhyn]

Also, seriously, fuck literally every last mealy mouthed complicit-ass controlled opposition shitheel who argued against the Dems nuking the filibuster.

Look at what the omnibus bill is being used for right now! They're enthroning a fucking king with this "big beautiful bill" designed to end democracy and judicial oversight.

It didn't make a bit of difference... And the Republicans arguing we shouldn't have nuked it at the time is every reason we should need to know we should have.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Also, seriously, fuck literally every last mealy mouthed complicit-ass controlled opposition shitheel who argued against the Dems nuking the filibuster.

This is why pragmatism is the most important trait a politician needs. Nuking the filibuster... so the ACA could be ax'd with 51 votes?

Big picture wise, there would be no stability if the Filibuster was ax'd. It is the only thing keeping each party from reversing legislation every time the Senate pivots power.

Look at what the omnibus bill is being used for right now! They're enthroning a fucking king with this "big beautiful bill" designed to end democracy and judicial oversight.

This is going through via reconciliation which has no tangency with the filibuster.

 

[Jarhyn]

This is why pragmatism is the most important trait a politician needs. Nuking the filibuster... so the ACA could be ax'd with 51 votes?

No, so that supreme Court justice can be seated with 51 votes rather than rejected so that the next administration can seat that justice...

Big picture wise, there would be no stability if the Filibuster was ax'd.

Get fucked. Something better can be instituted.

This is going through via reconciliation which has no tangency with the filibuster.

It's going through reconciliation, yes, meaning that they don't need to have the filibuster to cause instability.

And both of you are just eating it up.

Enjoy the king your fear of progress put on the throne.

 

[Derec]

Get fucked. Something better can be instituted.

Do you have an idea as to what this "something better" might be?

 

[Derec]

It was fucking stupid, but the Democrats WON and elected the first black person ever on that platform and saw very little actual change.

What change would you have liked to see? And why do you think that kind of change should correlate with the skin color of the president.

We saw a Republican plan instituted, which the Republicans all voted against because a Democrat actually brought it to the table.

Republican plan? Anyway, ACA was as bold a plan as was doable politically. Getting it passed was a major achievement for Obama.

Literally the biggest thing that the Democrats can put under their belt was an own-goal and they still lost political capital over having done it.

Why are you calling it an "own goal"?

The Democratic leadership put a corpse in a seat rather than the most popular Democrat in the country.

[citation needed] that AOC is "the most popular Democrat in the country".
I think she is going to struggle getting elected statewide even in a state as blue as NY.

Post mortem that.

Gladly!

 

[Derec]

Democrat primaries pump out moderate Democrats. They generally have since 1984. Gore beat Bradley, Obama beat... well... it was moderate verses conservative moderate, Clinton beat Sanders, Biden won.

Were Mondale and Dukakis really moderate?
I would say starting in 1992, and motivated by getting sick and tired of getting trounced in elections.

The Democrats shifted right to remain competitive overall.

That was true with Bill Clinton in 1992. But starting in mid 2010s, Dems shifted hard to the left. That accelerated after Trump was first elected in 2016. Then in 2018, we had the moderate purge and the rise of the socialist Squad.
In Summer 2019, presidential primary season started. The debates were a shit show of the gazillion candidates running one-uping each other as to who would move more left. More asylum seekers! Medicare for all! Wealth taxes! Ban fracking!
Example:

While one of the more moderate candidates, Biden, won the nomination, he was quickly pulled to the left and governed more like Bernie lite.
How Biden Surprised Progressives

 

[Derec]

The problem is that Democrat primaries, while they tend to produce "moderates", milquetoast rolling-over do-nothings, they fail to look at the serious numbers of voters who didn't vote for them and think "whelp, I guess I can ignore the clear demand for progress" and actually count on the people who they ignore.

What are you talking about? Biden bent over backwards to please the "progressives".

The problem here is that you cannot, MUST not forever ignore progressives. Give them seats at the table and committees and govern in good faith and chances to show their mettle, or lose elections and we all suffer.

Huh? Isn't that exactly what happened under Biden.
Biden, Sanders name leaders of their ‘unity task forces’ — including AOC
And Biden's $3.5T Spendapalooza was just a slightly watered down version of Bernie's spending plan.

But in the end, he was still "Genocide Joe", not sufficiently ideologically pure. Same thing with Kamala. One of the most left-wing Senators during her tenure. One of the most left-wing candidates running for office in 2020. Not good enough. Better vote for Jill Stein, right?

At some point, in certain dilemmas, the solution for everyone, the quest that we put forward for the righteous and honorable, is that when there is food, zero sum, and someone chooses violence over lottery, the food is to be spoiled.

 

[Jarhyn]

Wow. What kind of fucking idiot doesn't understand the mechanics of "mutually assured destruction"?

I simply cannot take someone seriously who doesn't understand that "follow the rules and you MAY survive in a fair lottery, or break the rules and rely on a contest of pure strength and lose any possibility of surviving" places the resource as hostage to the following of pre-contracted conflict avoidance.

 

[Harry Bosch]

Wow. What kind of fucking idiot doesn't understand the mechanics of "mutually assured destruction"?

I simply cannot take someone seriously who doesn't understand that "follow the rules and you MAY survive in a fair lottery, or break the rules and rely on a contest of pure strength and lose any possibility of surviving" places the resource as hostage to the following of pre-contracted conflict avoidance.

Why must we follow our rules? Because that is our democratic system! It's real simple, progressives haven't earned the right to be so sanctimonious. Bernie lost to HRC and Biden. Warren lost to HRC and Biden. And AOC lost to the "seated corpse" (your words, nice agism) last week. The seated corpse Connolly defeated AOC by 131 votes to 84 votes. I'm sorry but a majority of representatives in the house liked Connolly better! What would you like us to do? Change the rules so that a progressive gets double the votes? I'm sorry, but your side hasn't earned the right to be so angry. Carry an election, then let's talk. Every time the democratic candidate drifts left, we get fewer votes. Harris lost the election last time due to losing Biden voters in the swing states (moderates) and less democratic turnout. A more progressive candidate might have encouraged greater democratic turnout; and we might have won the popular vote. But it would not have changed the outcome of the election because we would have lost the moderates in the swing states. We have to win back the Biden 2020 voters that shifted their votes to Trump.

 

[Jarhyn]

progressives haven't earned the right to be so sanctimonious

Get fucked. Nobody has the right to be sanctimonious and ignore the whole fucking reason the rules exist: to ensure fair play.

Part of the rules includes giving people the full faith and credit that the party guarantees to people running under its rules, and multiple aspects of the 2016 election were not on the level there.

Cry all you want but that was not the mistake of the progressives. Strictly, it was MY mistake for voting at all, and for Hillary no less.

Even in 2016 you weren't interested in hearing it, though, so why should I expect you've learned anything since being told "this is shitty" as it was happening, being told "this is why it still feels shitty", and "this is why it felt shitty". You can ignore that but you still have to face the consequences of ignoring it.

It doesn't even really matter now, though. Things are changing. Things were always going to have to change. The problem here is that the Democrats didn't volunteer to be the vector of that change. Things are going to get worse, possibly until humans extinct themselves.

We have every right to be angry though.

Every. Goddamn. Right.

You are supporting those who are "maintaining decorum" as democracy is dying. If you had half the wisdom you claim to have, you would be electing those who would sooner let this happen over their dead bodies.

You and your support for the party leadership is exactly what led us off a fucking cliff.

 

[Derec]

Wow. What kind of fucking idiot doesn't understand the mechanics of "mutually assured destruction"?

I did not understand because your sentence made no fucking sense. Again, here's what you wrote:

At some point, in certain dilemmas, the solution for everyone, the quest that we put forward for the righteous and honorable, is that when there is food, zero sum, and someone chooses violence over lottery, the food is to be spoiled.

Maybe you were drunk or high at the time, I don't know, but what is this sentence?

I simply cannot take someone seriously who doesn't understand that "follow the rules and you MAY survive in a fair lottery, or break the rules and rely on a contest of pure strength and lose any possibility of surviving" places the resource as hostage to the following of pre-contracted conflict avoidance.

What is supposed to be the "lottery" here, and what the feats of strength?
I kind of get what you are getting at broadly - you approve of leftists cutting off their nose to spite their face because Dems are insufficiently ideologically pure for y'all.
And that despite Biden giving a lot of concessions in the way he governed.
You just can't appease extremists - they will always demand more.

 

[Derec]

Why must we follow our rules? Because that is our democratic system! It's real simple, progressives haven't earned the right to be so sanctimonious. Bernie lost to HRC and Biden. Warren lost to HRC and Biden.

Warren did not run in 2016. But she did lose to both Biden and Bernie in her own state and came in third.

We have to win back the Biden 2020 voters that shifted their votes to Trump.

Exactly!

 

[Derec]

Get fucked.

Nobody has the right to be sanctimonious and ignore the whole fucking reason the rules exist: to ensure fair play.
Part of the rules includes giving people the full faith and credit that the party guarantees to people running under its rules, and multiple aspects of the 2016 election were not on the level there.

You are not wrong here. DNC had their thumb on the scale for Hillary. But it's not like Bernie would have won the nomination without that thumb. And besides, Bernie would never have won in the general - he is just too far left for the swing states.
DNC made a mistake to try to clear the way for Hillary in the primaries. Imagine if Biden had not been held back because "it was Hillary's turn". He'd have easily bested her in the primaries; he then would have beaten Trump like a rented mule.

Cry all you want but that was not the mistake of the progressives. Strictly, it was MY mistake for voting at all, and for Hillary no less.

Who do you think you should have voted for? Jill Stein? Gloria La Riva?

It doesn't even really matter now, though. Things are changing. Things were always going to have to change. The problem here is that the Democrats didn't volunteer to be the vector of that change. Things are going to get worse, possibly until humans extinct themselves.

Biden implemented many changes, and tried to implement others. Change is best when gradual, evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. Fundamental change is rarely necessary, and even more rarely leads to good things. The October Revolution fucked up Russia and its dependencies for over a century - they are still in the world of shit because that idiot Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov took power. But I digress.

We have every right to be angry though.

Angry at whom? I am angry at the progs who did not vote for Kamala Harris because she was not sufficiently ideologically pure. I am angry at Kami for relying too much on vibes, memes and celebrities.
I am angry at Biden's inner circle for gaslighting us that Biden was ok instead of convincing him to not seek reelection in Summer 2023, so that a proper primary could be conducted. Not that AOC or Bernie would have prevailed in such a contest, so you'd still be angry, even (or especially) if the Dem candidate would have won.

You are supporting those who are "maintaining decorum" as democracy is dying. If you had half the wisdom you claim to have, you would be electing those who would sooner let this happen over their dead bodies.

Who would that be?
Dems do not have many levers left. Had they at least held onto the House, things would be different.
Hell, had Mondaire Jones not insisted that NY17 should belong to him because he lived in and represented a defunct district with the same number, SPM might not have been subject to a nasty primary fight against Alessandra Biaggi in 2022, and he might have won against Lawler. And SPM could have held onto the seat in 2024. That alone would have meant a net swing of 2 seats.

You and your support for the party leadership is exactly what led us off a fucking cliff.

The Dem leadership made many mistakes. That does not mean that taking your marbles and going home was a wise move.

 

[Jarhyn]

Maybe you were drunk or high at the time, I don't know, but what is this sentence?

Proof of someone's illiteracy, apparently. How many times does it have to be explained that the solution that works for everyone in the zero sum game is mutually assured destruction if the rules of fair play and minimization of conflict are broken?

The solution, if someone chooses contests of unequal strength over contests of random chance or true merit to survival as has been previously decided, is to destroy everything rather than persist in a world where the unjust have any power.

Maybe you are just constantly drunk or high. Every accusation is an admission, I think.

This is exactly why Hillary lost the election: she failed to commit to fair play and those committed to fair play reacted in the only way they had the power to.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The problem is the huge amount of very low quality evidence that fails to consider whether it's really seeing socioeconomic differences.

There are enough correlations to allow a margin for that.

If the pattern is real why do we keep seeing "evidence" that doesn't attempt to separate race from socioeconomic status?

In other words your question is "does blackness cause poverty that causes discrimination, or "does discrimination cause poverty which causes blackness?
Ridiculous. You might ask though,
"Does discrimination effect all poor people equally, and does money exempt all people equally from discrimination?"
ASK SOME RICH BLACK PEOPLE.
Coincidentally, I just heard Eugene Daniels on NPR this very morning, providing examples of shit that still happens to him and has been happening to him with regular frequency throughout his life.

But you are missing a critical component: time.

Past discrimination certainly caused poverty. I doubt anyone but a KKKer would disagree with that. The question is whether there is current discrimination causing poverty, or whether we are simply seeing past effects that haven't had time to fade away. The "research" continues to obsess about proving a disparate outcome and pretty much as a matter of faith assumes it's current discrimination causing it. Hey, address this! But almost nobody does. But we do see things like the Freakonomics guys finding that race drops out when you add in socioeconomic factors. That should be a major wake-up call. But the scientific world runs on finding things and this causes a major bias against the null result.

If the pattern is real why do we keep seeing "evidence" that doesn't attempt to separate race from socioeconomic status?

Because causality arrows flow in six directions between three different factors, and it is not necessary to separate them; mitigating any combination of blackness, poverty and discrimination would tend toward the desired (by 'libs') effects. The BIG PROBLEM is that the Republicans' solution is get rid of "black people" (a stand in for "Poor Others"), while the lifestyle they covet absolutely REQUIRES that somewhere several or several hundred, or several hundred thousand "black people" who are living on subsistence wages or slavery, providing the necessities of the New Global Olympic Sport: Dynastic Kleptocracy.

That's a non-answer.

You put the socioeconomic variables into your model, you see what happens. You compare the full model against subsets that exclude one or more of the inputs. If your correlation remains just as good when you drop an input then that input probably was just a proxy for something else in your model. Once again, look at the Freakonomics guys: one of the inputs that did matter was the age at which the mother had their first child. Not necessarily the child in question. That's a lifetime effect, you can't handwave it away with antidiscrimination efforts.

This has nothing to do with what MAGA would like to do. They're horrendously racist, I fully expect to see major racism in the coming years. But once again, time. What's likely in the future doesn't mean it's current.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

FFS Loren. This has been a slow burn issue for over a century now. In the 1940s and 1950s, blacks did not benefit within a magnitude of the GI Bill either. The blacks didn't benefit from the FHA either. So while white families were able to afford homes whose values would increase substantially, blacks weren't allowed to enter these areas until it was too late. Generational wealth was lost, and this was after the wealth that was stolen in the late 19th / early 20th centuries and the retraction of public services that became private once courts didn't allow prohibition of certain public amenities, in the 1920s. And banks dumped a lot of money into the suburbs from the 50s to 80s. Urban areas were allowed to degrade and decay.

It is interesting that you acknowledge that carbon release into the atmosphere between 1900 and 1970 has had an impact on the climate today, but when it comes to economics, you keep trying to find excuses as to why repeated historical attempts to withhold access to opportunity to blacks in America has no impact on the economic standing of blacks today.

1) I have never said there weren't lasting effects. There certainly are--it's just we don't have a time machine, we can't go back and undo what happened. We can either be fair going forward or we can play Hatfield and McCoy. And I favor the being fair going forward approach.

2) "Generational wealth" is mostly a fiction to try to provide a reason other than internal causes for the current inequality. The reality is most people do not receive life-altering inheritances. You can't have generational wealth without wealth in the first place! Typically people only inherit once their path in life is already established, it rarely makes a substantial change. Sure, there are some at the top that get handed life on a silver platter, but most people do not. The "wealth" we get is important but intangible--attitudes etc. Look to the future, don't just act on the now. Fundamentally, poverty is a state of mind of only looking to the present--distinguished from simply being poor but looking to better one's position. The latter generally fixes itself, the former does not.

 

[Elixir]

The question is whether there is current discrimination causing poverty, or whether we are simply seeing past effects that haven't had time to fade away.

That’s not a question. There are multi-generational effects, generational effects and immediate effects of discrimination.
To deny that there are immediate effects, claiming that long term effects are creating the appearance of immediate effects, is a total cop out. Even granting the reality of that dynamic, inferring that it implies no need or benefit to trying to address immediate effects, is a logical error. There ARE undeniable effects. Whether they are rooted in traditional racism or new-age racism doesn’t allay the immediate need to address those effects.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Bernie didn’t even run in 2008

Why are you bringing up Bernie? How are you so blind to the behavioral trend there?

"Promise change, get elected; prove stagnancy, lose election".

It's not exactly rocket science.

Hillary was exactly that, stagnancy, pelosi-style, and if you praise that geriatric mummy for "getting funding" you're praising that again for exactly what makes Trump enticing: that he can get money coming their way.

Quit digging!

The Democrats already went farther than the electorate liked. You are proposing they promise to go further.

And this wasn't even about positions, but about an army of Republican bogeymen endlessly amplified by social media.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Democrat primaries pump out moderate Democrats. They generally have since 1984

The problem is that Democrat primaries, while they tend to produce "moderates", milquetoast rolling-over do-nothings, they fail to look at the serious numbers of voters who didn't vote for them and think "whelp, I guess I can ignore the clear demand for progress" and actually count on the people who they ignore.

Sorry, but you're in a left wing echo chamber. You think people want the liberal brand of progress.

The problem here is that you cannot, MUST not forever ignore progressives. Give them seats at the table and committees and govern in good faith and chances to show their mettle, or lose elections and we all suffer.

Once again, quit digging!

At some point, in certain dilemmas, the solution for everyone, the quest that we put forward for the righteous and honorable, is that when there is food, zero sum, and someone chooses violence over lottery, the food is to be spoiled.

Then, have it made clear by one (but not all) of the conspirators to the right thing, that this is what will happen if people do not play nice: the violence will be done and everyone will still die.

"Do not deal in bad faith, excluding wantonly people's ability to participate when you need their support".

When some significant portion of the electorate wants a candidate enough that them running independently guarantees a clear loss for their cause, and then running in the primary means they will lose but maybe not challenge the outcome of the final election, you let them have as big a swing as people might want, and then when they lose, you clap them on the back and say "well, your platform got 30% of the party support, so your platform should underpin 30% of our agenda", and do that.

Not doing that makes you seem like a fucking heel. It made Hillary seem like a fucking heel. So what if Trump is also a heel! The people voting in this, the wrestling fans and the incels and whatnot, those folks, when they see two heels, they root for the bigger bastard.

You still think that if you can get your message out that you'll get the voters. No, the voters have rejected your message. The louder you scream it the more people will go to the Republicans.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

When progressives get elected, and primary dem officials, see that some of them have a real voice in the room.

The more voice you give the progressives in the primaries the less voice you give them in the general. The Democrats are already to the left of the electorate!

You are absolutely fucking gaslighting at this point when I say "offer political capital" not "give up the seat", and you're saying this like I mean to change the rules to make progressives win elections when they wouldn't; that's not the fucking point, although Ranked Choice Voting would help there.

There are a LOT of policies for progressives, including actually clapping back at these mother fuckers with actual truths like that the GOP is killing live women, and that they are destroying and dramatizing women's sports over 100 athletes who, frankly, on average suck.

But that's not what's happening. The Democrats are putting most of their power behind things the people don't want!

Dems need to actually promote the fact that progressives have a place in the party, even if it's a minority role, and they have never fucking done even that pittance and you wonder why youngsters actually believe the lie that the parties are the same?!?

But politics is about the majority. A minority voice doesn't change things.