The Race For 2024

[Derec]

That's mostly racial bias, because white people tend to get much more respect from many cops than many nonwhite people.

BS.

Socialism and communism
Solving the multiple crises of the present system is impossible without a revolution that ends the rule of the capitalist class and replaces it with a new state power that acts in the interest of the working class.

Why isn't Jack Smith prosecuting them? They are outright calling for a revolution to overthrow US constitutional order.

A state and government “of, by and for” the workers must replace the capitalist state. The foundation of any state power is repressive force—the military, police, prisons, courts and so on. The standing army and police must be disbanded and replaced by the armed people, organized in workers’ defense councils.

Again, paging Jack Smith.

Convergence on right-wing gun nuts.

The political spectrum is not flat after all. It is curved, like a horseshoe.

 

[lpetrich]

There is a big problem with the Party of Socialism and Liberation's platform, a problem that I find in a lot of the left wing. How to avoid the emergence of a new ruling class.

I do not think it is at all a coincidence that actually existing socialist countries have all been dictatorships, even relatively open ones like Titoist Yugoslavia. Socialism is a system of control by the collective, and the individual is secondary.

John Birch stereotypes.

Capitalism in practice involves a LOT of collectivism. Big businesses are VERY collectivist, not just for employees, but also for stockholders. One may have a lot of freedom to end one's employment, and one may be very free to buy and sell stock, but none of that changes the essential collectivist nature of most businesses.

Capitalism groupies often conjure up a picture of independent small farmers and artisans and shopkeepers, but that is a very incomplete picture. BTW, independent small farmers and artisans and shopkeepers all own the means of their production, thus satisfying the socialist ideal of workers owning the means of production.

Labor unions are also collectivist, military and police forces and government functions in general are also collectivist, and team sports are also collectivist. As with businesses, freedom of entry and exit does not make these entities any less collectivist.

 

[Elixir]

Provided free by the socialist government, I am guessing?

Still not getting your money’s worth for those people you hired to go after window breakers?

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Ron DeSantis, a manly man. Weird shoes, walks funny. Truly presidential.

.....
I never noticed that Ron DeSantis is short until footage emerged of his weird shoes and the even-weirder gait he has wearing them. The shoes look like medieval poulaines and his gait resembles that of a cartoon burglar tip-toeing past a sleeping museum guard.
......

Ron DeSantis appears to be wearing extreme heel lifts and is having trouble walking in them | Boing Boing

I never noticed that Ron DeSantis is short until footage emerged of his weird shoes and the even-weirder gait he has wearing them. The shoes look like medieval poulaines and his gait resembles that…

boingboing.net

 

[lpetrich]

Poverty will be eradicated by providing a guaranteed living income for any worker who is not able to find or hold a job.

I must say, as bonkers as this sounds, it does not go as too far as AOC's Green New Deal FAQ. In it, it says that there should be a federal jobs guarantee for those unable or unwilling to work.

That was a leaked draft, and not a final version. Why don't you read the resolution itself?

• H.Res.319 - 118th Congress (2023-2024): Recognizing the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal. | Congress.gov | Library of Congress
• H.Res.332 - 117th Congress (2021-2022): Recognizing the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal. | Congress.gov | Library of Congress
• H.Res.109 - 116th Congress (2019-2020): Recognizing the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal. | Congress.gov | Library of Congress

(lots of moaning and groaning about how the PSL's proposals will be paid for)
The same way your beloved cops are paid for. Derec, it may be a big surprise for you, but their pay doesn't come from money trees.

Penal institutions will be organized on the principle of social education and rehabilitation. Those convicted of unlawful acts will maintain political rights while participating in their rehabilitation.

I.e. socialist reeducation camps. Gulag archipelago? But maybe on an actual desolate archipelago, like the Aleutian Islands?

But the Soviet Union had exemplary toughness on crime, right?

I'd like to see something about care for crime victims. Like plenty of restitution.

Provided free by the socialist government, I am guessing?

The same way that your beloved cops are paid for.

 

[Harry Bosch]

There is a big problem with the Party of Socialism and Liberation's platform, a problem that I find in a lot of the left wing. How to avoid the emergence of a new ruling class.

I do not think it is at all a coincidence that actually existing socialist countries have all been dictatorships, even relatively open ones like Titoist Yugoslavia. Socialism is a system of control by the collective, and the individual is secondary.
Even if you impose socialism through a majority rule, it becomes a dictatorship of the majority, and thus a democracy in name only - an illiberal democracy rather than a liberal one.

Yea, there are lots of problem in socialism. But this is the one that bothers me the most! Socialism is a system that generates fewer economic opportunities (so why the hell implement anyway?); so of course, the only way to keep it going is with a brutal dictatorship.

 

[Elixir]

Ron DeSantis, a manly man. Weird shoes, walks funny. Truly presidential.

That’s just mean. You’d be walking funny too, if you had 8” lifts and your toes barely reached the heel of your empty boot.
You have to hand it to the guy - I don’t think I could walk ten feet in those engineered abominations. Or … a birth defect leaving the tib/fib time and a half the length of his femur.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

I still don't understand how women can walk in their ridiculous high heel ho' shoes. DeSantis and Trump having a walk down a ramp contest. I want to see that. The question is, now that DeSantis's weird shoe issue has been made public, will the media start observing his weird walkin gait at every chance? Will his fancy boots become an issue? Will attention to his shoes take precedent over content of his speeches?

 

[lpetrich]

Cornell West leaves Green Party to launch presidential bid as independent candidate - POLITICO

“As Dr. West’s campaign for president grows, he believes the best way to challenge the entrenched system is by focusing 100% on the people, not on the intricacies of internal party dynamics,” said the West campaign in a statement.

So he discovered that to get the nomination of the Green Party, he has to win the support of that party's members and defeat whatever rivals he may have in the party. He wants their support, and so he must demonstrate that he is worthy of their support. Also, I think that some long-time Greenies may not have liked this outsider coming in and wanting their support, especially someone who quit an earlier party because he only recently learned of what was going on in that party.

For a professor, he seems very ignorant of how political parties work internally.

Campaign manager Peter Daou:

“It’s a major strategic hurdle for an independent or third party to attain ballot access even in one state, let alone all 50 as a present presidential candidate,” Daou said in an interview. “So we will be applying as much rigorous analysis as we can to the best way to approach this because we don’t have unlimited resources.”

The simple part, Daou argued, is getting the signatures. What will be difficult is navigating the specific ballot access laws and requirements of every state.

Those can get complicated, it must be conceded.

 

[lpetrich]

"For a professor?" That's the problem with Dave Brat, an economics professor who unseated a big-name Republican in 2014. Though he could have been a great policy wonk, he was a nobody while in office, and he lost the election for his third term in office.

From back in 2019, A Message From the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - YouTube

What if we actually pulled off a Green New Deal? What would the future look like? The Intercept presents a film narrated by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and illustrated by Molly Crabapple.

Set a couple of decades from now, the film is a flat-out rejection of the idea that a dystopian future is a forgone conclusion. Instead, it offers a thought experiment: What if we decided not to drive off the climate cliff? What if we chose to radically change course and save both our habitat and ourselves?

We realized that the biggest obstacle to the kind of transformative change the Green New Deal envisions is overcoming the skepticism that humanity could ever pull off something at this scale and speed. That’s the message we’ve been hearing from the “serious” center for four months straight: that it’s too big, too ambitious, that our Twitter-addled brains are incapable of it, and that we are destined to just watch walruses fall to their deaths on Netflix until it’s too late.

This film flips the script. It’s about how, in the nick of time, a critical mass of humanity in the largest economy on earth came to believe that we were actually worth saving. Because, as Ocasio-Cortez says in the film, our future has not been written yet and “we can be whatever we have the courage to see.”

 

[lpetrich]

Platform - Cornel West for President 2024 -- his campaign site has been revised, and his platform is no longer a copy of the People's Party platform: Platform - Cornel West for President 2024

I'll now assess that platform's planks, and that platform has a lot of them.

ECONOMIC JUSTICE: abolishing poverty and homelessness, having a wealth tax, ensuring full employment, $27/hr minimum wage, support for worker-owned cooperatives and the like, breaking up big monopolies, ending corporate stock buybacks, banning stock trading for govermnent officials, ...

WORKER JUSTICE: support of labor unions, having at least 33% representation of workers in Boards of Directors, supporting 6-month paid parental leave and free pre-K childcare, ...

The 33% one is something called "codetermination" in Germany and some other European countries, where it is commonly practiced.

As to paid family leave and universal pre-K, it must be conceded that children are an economic drain in industrialized and post-industrialized societies. Those who complain that people should not have children that they cannot afford should not also complain about low birthrates.

ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE: not just a Green New Deal but Green Reconstruction, and declaring a climate engineering.

But it has some provisions that I don't like, like nationalizing the fossil-fuel industry, "Immediate cessation of all oil and gas leasing projects on federal lands and waters", and a "Federal moratorium on fracking, carbon capture, and direct air capture technologies, geoengineering, and other false climate solutions". Fracking may be unavoidable, it must be conceded, but direct air capture is a valuable technology for renewable-energy development -- getting CO2 from the air for use in synthetic fuels and chemical feedstocks.

HEALTH JUSTICE: "Go beyond Medicare for All towards true health justice"

Though I don't like the idea of nationalizing the healthcare industry, including the pharmaceutical industry.

 

[lpetrich]

More Cornel West platform:

RACIAL JUSTICE: A mixture of good planks, like restoring parts of the Voting Rights Act, and not-so-good planks, like a reparations commission "to address the unpaid debt to Black U.S. residents". I agree on reducing mass incarceration, especially for things that black people are punished much worse than white people for doing.

TRANSFORMATIVE JUSTICE: I like the idea of supporting "unarmed community-led forces" as an alternative form of policing, though I think that such people should be lightly armed, like with truncheons or pepper spray or Tasers. I also like the idea of eliminating crowded prison facilities by developing alternatives to incarceration. Alternatives like ankle monitors for shoplifters that alert store employees to their presence. Save prisons for very nasty offenders. Should one jail people for running red lights?

A "right to humane treatment and humane living conditions for all correctional facilities"? That's likely to be a red flag for right-wingers, who likely won't be satisfied with anything short of being horribly tortured to death for even the smallest crimes. Except, of course, when it is their favorite people, like the January 6 insurrectionists.

"Abolish the use of solitary confinement" - that's good. I also agree on ending "sentencing discrepancies based on race, ethnicity, and class" though I think that that should also be applied to policing. Why be squishy soft on crime when the criminals are white sports rioters?

I agree on voting rights for people who have been released from prison, though I'm not sure about those already imprisoned. "Confiscate all military equipment from civilian police forces" may be rather drastic, though I think that we should stop any new supply.

"End and prohibit all police training programs by military forces including, but not limited to the Israel Defense Forces" -- very good idea. I think that US police forces should instead look to European police forces.

EDUCATION JUSTICE: support of public schools and making state and community colleges tuition free. Also make funding more equitable.

"Dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline by removing police and so-called School Resource Officers from all public schools" -- presumably using the standards of upper-middle-class schools. This Is Where Donald Trump Played By The Rules And Learned To Beat The Game : NPR -- Donald Trump was sent to a rather disciplinarian sort of private school after he misbehaved a lot in school.

Not surprisingly "Cancel all student loan debt", but also "Abolish state laws that limit or remove the full and accurate study of U.S. history".

LGBTQIA+ JUSTICE

GUN VIOLENCE JUSTICE: restricting guns like restricting driving, having a national red-flag law, etc.

IMMIGRATION JUSTICE: improving immigration procedures, reducing immigration bureaucracy, ending separation of families, allowing asylum seekers in, etc.

 

[lpetrich]

The final planks in Cornel West's platform:

GLOBAL JUSTICE
- Dismantle the U.S. empire
- Slash the bloated U.S. military budget
- Disband NATO
- Expeditious and responsible closure of global U.S. military bases - AFRICOM, etc.
- Global cooperation in lieu of full spectrum dominance
- Cease all war funding and weapons to Ukraine and invest in peacemaking
- Cease military funding to the State of Israel
- End Israeli apartheid of Palestinian people and press the UN to establish a program for Palestinian dignity and liberation
- Cease all military support to nations committing war crimes
- Truth and Reconciliation Commission for U.S. Intervention in Central America, South America, Africa, and Asia
- End the Cuba embargo and normalize relations by removing the nation from the SSOT list
- No intervention, military or otherwise in Haiti
- Cancel all IMF/World Bank debts for so-called developing nations, especially nations on the African continent
- End the global patriarchy and associated violence that oppresses women around the world, and stand in solidarity with global women-led movements such as those in Afghanistan and Iran

Some of it is good, like ending the embargo on Cuba. I'd also do that on Venezuela. I like what AOC proposes: using sanctions that target leaders and their biggest supporters, like the Magnitsky Act, which targets oligarchs friendly to Vladimir Putin.

But some of it is awful, like disbanding NATO and not funding Ukraine's war against Russia. Does CW really think that VP will listen to him about the necessity of making peace in Ukraine?

 

[lpetrich]

Biden Allies Try to Squash Third-Party Candidates - The New York Times - "With Democrats worried that a third-party bid could throw a tight race to Donald Trump, President Biden’s top aides have blessed a broad offensive to starve such efforts of cash and ballot access."

That's what happened in 2000, when Ralph Nader denied a victory to the Democrats in Florida.

As attempts to mount outside campaigns multiply, a broad coalition has accelerated a multipronged assault to starve such efforts of financial and political support and warn fellow Democrats that supporting outsider candidacies, including the centrist organization No Labels, could throw the election to former President Donald J. Trump.

Mr. Biden’s top aides have blessed the multimillion-dollar offensive, ...

...
The endeavor is far-reaching. In Washington, Democratic allies are working alongside top party strategists to spread negative information about possible outsider candidates. Across the country, lawyers have begun researching moves to limit ballot access — or at least make it more costly to qualify.

At expensive resorts and closed-door conferences, Democratic donors are urging their friends not to fund potential spoiler candidates. And in key swing states, lone-wolf operators, including a librarian from Arizona, are trying their own tactics to make life difficult for third-party contenders.

 

[Rhea]

Biden Allies Try to Squash Third-Party Candidates - The New York Times - "With Democrats worried that a third-party bid could throw a tight race to Donald Trump, President Biden’s top aides have blessed a broad offensive to starve such efforts of cash and ballot access."

That's what happened in 2000, when Ralph Nader denied a victory to the Democrats in Florida.

As attempts to mount outside campaigns multiply, a broad coalition has accelerated a multipronged assault to starve such efforts of financial and political support and warn fellow Democrats that supporting outsider candidacies, including the centrist organization No Labels, could throw the election to former President Donald J. Trump.

Mr. Biden’s top aides have blessed the multimillion-dollar offensive, ...

...
The endeavor is far-reaching. In Washington, Democratic allies are working alongside top party strategists to spread negative information about possible outsider candidates. Across the country, lawyers have begun researching moves to limit ballot access — or at least make it more costly to qualify.

At expensive resorts and closed-door conferences, Democratic donors are urging their friends not to fund potential spoiler candidates. And in key swing states, lone-wolf operators, including a librarian from Arizona, are trying their own tactics to make life difficult for third-party contenders.

I am completely in support of efforts to make sure Trump does not have a chance of winning. I am appalled that any progressive parties disagree.

If a third party wants to have its way in government they need to drop this selfish entitlement that leads them to think the presidency is the right place to start. Once progressives have fully populated town councils, school boards, county legislatures and state legislatures, they will find that they have little to fear from the most progressive of the two large parties. Or, that if they still have issues, they now have the power to resolve them without the risk of fascism.

I am sick indeed of the part of the progressive movement that doesn’t want to do the hard work and instead smashes everything petulantly if they aren’t given the top job with no groundwork.

 

[Harry Bosch]

The final planks in Cornel West's platform:

GLOBAL JUSTICE
- Dismantle the U.S. empire
- Slash the bloated U.S. military budget
- Disband NATO
- Expeditious and responsible closure of global U.S. military bases - AFRICOM, etc.
- Global cooperation in lieu of full spectrum dominance
- Cease all war funding and weapons to Ukraine and invest in peacemaking
- Cease military funding to the State of Israel
- End Israeli apartheid of Palestinian people and press the UN to establish a program for Palestinian dignity and liberation
- Cease all military support to nations committing war crimes
- Truth and Reconciliation Commission for U.S. Intervention in Central America, South America, Africa, and Asia
- End the Cuba embargo and normalize relations by removing the nation from the SSOT list
- No intervention, military or otherwise in Haiti
- Cancel all IMF/World Bank debts for so-called developing nations, especially nations on the African continent
- End the global patriarchy and associated violence that oppresses women around the world, and stand in solidarity with global women-led movements such as those in Afghanistan and Iran

Some of it is good, like ending the embargo on Cuba. I'd also do that on Venezuela. I like what AOC proposes: using sanctions that target leaders and their biggest supporters, like the Magnitsky Act, which targets oligarchs friendly to Vladimir Putin.

But some of it is awful, like disbanding NATO and not funding Ukraine's war against Russia. Does CW really think that VP will listen to him about the necessity of making peace in Ukraine?

Oh wow. So he's also a Putinista. Further reason to not like him.

 

[Toni]

Because there was a Civil War that was just fought. The sides were well known. This was specifically about those traitors.

There was just an insurrection. The sides are well known. The traitor at the head of the insurrection is well known. This is specifically about that traitor.

Disagree. Traitor, yes. Head, I consider unproven. I think His Flatulence is more a puppet than truly in charge.

US head, then. Is it better or worse, morally or legally if Putin or Saudi Arabia pulled the strings?

I think that the word missing is that Trump has not been inducted on charges of insurrection yet.

I get why that is really tricky. He’s a firmer POTUS who lead an insurrection while still serving that role and is currently running for the same office. This is highly unprecedented territory with enormous constitutional stakes.

And the chance that he would not be convicted.

 

[bilby]

I like the idea of supporting "unarmed community-led forces" as an alternative form of policing

That's not an alternative form of policing. That's the original form.

Heavily armed forces, that are imposed on communities, and formed from people who are (or believe themselves) not a part of the community they police, are the alternative form, and it's a total disaster.

 

[Tigers!]

I still don't understand how women can walk in their ridiculous high heel ho' shoes. DeSantis and Trump having a walk down a ramp contest. I want to see that. The question is, now that DeSantis's weird shoe issue has been made public, will the media start observing his weird walkin gait at every chance? Will his fancy boots become an issue? Will attention to his shoes take precedent over content of his speeches?

Why does it matter that he is short? or walks with a 'weird' gait?
How do they have any effect on his ability to do the job?

 

[Elixir]

Why does it matter that he is short? or walks with a 'weird' gait?

Yes, it’s terrible how we denigrate, mock and joke about Governor DeSantis. I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes!