Although I currently do have 4 salvaged projectors I expect to only get one or two working ones after the diagnosis and repair process. So I wouldn’t say “much”, no.
All your messages to me seem to be non-sequiturs and unrelated to any of my beliefs or actions. Are you sure you aren’t attacking a straw man of your own construction, and mistakenly typing my usernym?
It’s funny because I’ve been seeing all my Facebook posts from a couple years ago begging people not to nominate Clinton in the primaries because after 30 years as a lightning rod for conservative paranoia, there was no way she could win a general election.
Mind you, this is saying nothing about her ability, record, or job performance. I’m not even denying that she would be just as good a president as any since Carter. I’m speaking purely in terms of electability. I’m talking about people who said “why yes- One third of the population thinks she’s the antichrist and the country’s most watched news/propaganda outlet has invested three decades into assassinating her character, but I’m sure that won’t have any effect on the election”
I’d say that nominating someone who polls as being widely disliked and distrusted is “a choice leading to an absolutely predictable consequence” for which the DNC has refused to accept responsibility for.
As far as whether I’m happier, I think that reactionary backlash is currently the most powerful force in American politics.
A Clinton win would have galvanized the right while demoralizing the left. Trump is doing the exact opposite- Under him, we’ve seen not one but two of the largest mass protests in world history, and we are getting unbelievable victories in downline elections- Something like eight transgendered people were elected last year. Go back and tell your 2015 self that would happen. Grassroots progressive campaigns are starting to infiltrate the Democratic establishment the same way the Tea Party did to the GOP. Right now may be a complete train wreck, but GOOD THINGS are happening, which wouldn’t have otherwise.
Far more important than the sheer obstructionism they would have employed against her, a Clinton win would have allowed the GOP/FOX complex to leverage that reactionary mentality into a massive midterm sweep. They have already been dangerously close to the number of state legislatures they need to call for a constitutional convention. That, not Trump, is our worst case scenario. A GOP with the power to edit the Constitution means abortion gone forever. LGBT rights gone forever. Evangelical Christianity as the official state religion- And no number of SCOTUS appointments could do a damned thing about it. I honestly believe that a Clinton presidency would have resulted in exactly that.
So I saw it as a choice between four years of hellish disaster followed by another FDR level social revolution, versus four years of relative peace and prosperity followed by a permanent state of that hellish disaster. How happy would you be with that choice?
Because they aren’t our allies.
Ted Nugent has a proven track record for wildlife conservation. He doesn’t believe in global warming, but he’s done more than you or I ever will to save endangered species and support natural biodiversity. That makes him an ally to the environmentalist movement, right?
Mainstream Democrats can support whatever of our common causes they want- But as long as they also support the 1% oligarchy who is raping and pillaging us every fucking day, they are not on our side.
Are the Republicans worse than the Democrats? Fuck yes. And Brock Turner is nowhere near as bad as Ted Bundy. That alone isn’t enough to say we should throw our support behind him.
And I am the father of a trans girl and uncle to gay nieces dealing with the fallout from fascist “conservative” politicians controlling the society we live in. My take is that an all-or-nothing approach will lead to nothing. The only way to get where we need to be as a society is to take a lesson form the marriage equality movement, in which stepwise reform reached a tipping point and now is the law of the land. If you have a viable way to skip the steps and get there in a single leap that will actually work I am all ears. In the mean time, right now, the most important thing is to stop the march of the morons currently running things in DC. Can we at least agree on that?
Just a quick history lesson: FDR interned American Citizens of Japanese descent during World War 2, which is probably far worse than anything Trump has done to anyone so far.
And as much as we like to wax nostalgic on the New Deal and how a mixed economy was the booster shot the American economy needed, it still glosses over the incredibly racist past that is still being grappled with in the country today.
Hey, crazy idea: swap out “economic dimension” for any other dimension, like gender or racial sentiment, or ecological concern, and see what happens to your thesis. This sort of result perhaps helps you on messaging, but has limited utility in a world where people make decisions on more than economic sentiment.
My disabilities come from an year long campaign of terror by fascists which included being beaten up in daylight close to a busy road. Just because I hadn’t mentioned it today (it’s tiresome and PTSD inducing) doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Third Way Liberals were no help to me when that happened, despite being in a position to.
This isn’t meant to be an attempt to go one up on you, it’s a reminder that even in progressive areas there are people who are willing to kill us, and if supposed allies are not willing to help then what are they there for?
My experience is that we need the revolutionaries to get the reformists to do anything, otherwise we end up with the eternal Waiting For Godot performance. Marriage reform built on revolutionary actions going back to the Stonewall Riots and earlier. Reformist movements on their own get ignored, they need the scary people to get viewed as reasonable.
(Sorry, I didn’t finish typing before putting this up)
That would be the Y axis, so vast majority blue. They are the people who voted for Hillary, and also a lot of them voted for Bernie.
Unless your point is that instead of a left wing economic message we should be going with a far-right social one. I will have to strongly disagree with you on that if it is the case.
Well considering joining the Army today is going to pretty much be have fun in sunny Afghanistan/Syria/Somalia/etc. Do you blame the kids for thinking NOPE?
No, my point is that social / identity issues don’t collapse into one dimension quite as easily as the graph supposes. What seems like a centrist solution from an economic standpoint may in fact be carefully circumscribed to resolve contingencies in social / identity ideology.
If that is the case then it is failing miserably. Women/POC/LGBT have far poorer economic outcomes in general, with a few very visible exceptions.
Well, yeah. Women / POC / LGBT have historically had far poorer economic outcomes, I’m not sure what your point here is. They have had those outcomes, not because they started out their lives poor, but because they started out their lives as women, people of color, or LGBT.
Nope.
However, the other main theme of that podcast was that the US armed forces are increasingly staffed by a hereditary military caste. People whose parents were in the military are much more likely to enlist; people with no family in the military are very unlikely to enlist.
My point is that for a group who claim to be concerned about Women/POC/LGBT, third way liberal responses have been very poor, and mostly aimed at comfortable middle class people. Trickle Down Equality. This has been my personal experience as well as observation of issues that don’t affect me and listening to the people who are affected by them.
Since I have to repeat myself I will be more clear:
WHEN I WENT FOR HELP FROM THIRD WAY LIBERALS WHO WERE IN A POSITION TO HELP ME THEY DID FUCK ALL. THIS WAS MANY GROUPS OVER A WHOLE YEAR.
This is not about ideological purity. This is about wanting to live and not just survive on a day to day basis.
You expect me and others to be happy with table scraps, because the Republicans won’t even give us that. I say fuck that, why can’t we sit at the table too?
Since you’re in England, it isn’t your table to sit at. I would say, however, that most of the centrist Democrats, even the ones who lunch with industrialists, support LBGTQ rights, even if the same people might not have 10 years ago. The contrast with Republicans, who not only don’t support these rights but desperately want to regress to a time before these conversations could even take place in the public sphere, is stark.
I could apply some of your reasoning to your UK politics. As a Jew, how could I ever vote for a candidate who refuses to see antisemitism when people point it out to him, rub his face in it, whack him over the head with it, and then has his spokespeople claim that when people like me are screaming about it we are just playing political games?
At some point one has to ask: can I support X not because he believes what I believe, but because he has decided through self interest to act as if he believes what I believe? If the answer is no, then you have to be ready to accept the consequences. For those of us on the far left who have been around for a while, history has made it quite clear that the politician who deeply believes as we do and is successful as a politician does not exist. (And I include Sanders, for whom I voted, in that statement.)
The marriage equality bill that passed in Delaware was co-sponsored by a Republican. That same Republican (Mike Ramone) came to our Unitarian Universalist church and asked what else he could do to help LGBTQ Delawareans. He also voted in favor of SB97, which prohibits discrimination based on gender identity (a bill that all other Republicans and quite a few Democracts voted against).
I offer these data points without agenda, merely to inform.
$50 says he is doing it out of personal interest. Does he have a gay daughter, son, sister, or father?
Not that I know of. But he’s a Republican representative in a district where the people he represents overwhelmingly support equal rights for all people. So, essentially, he’s doing his job right… representing his constituency’s expressed wishes even when they conflict with his party’s directions.
I’m a proletarian internationalist, I may not be personally sitting at the table but I see it as my duty to ensure that anyone in a similar situation to me (in terms of being marginalised) in any country is able to. Besides, conservatives and reactionaries do the same thing and complaining at them hasn’t stopped them. As long as I don’t actually vote I see my actions as balancing things out.
So did New Labour. I remember the discussions about the Gender Recognition Act, and the opinion of myself and the trans people I talked about it with was that it did the absolute bare minimun required by the EU, and did so in a shitty way. Having a register of people with gender dysphoria is not cool when you know that back in the 1930s Magnus Hirschfeld had one too, which ended up in the hands of the Nazis. Press For Change also made me want to bang my head against a wall on many occasions with their suggestions on how Labour could make their authoritarian policies easier on trans people.
Then, when I had people giving me death threats, these people who supposedly supported me were nowhere to be seen. I expect if they had killed me they would have made statements to the press saying how terrible it was, but I was clearly not worth anything to them when I was alive.
That is what I am complaining about, people doing the bare minimum for decency (if that) and expecting to be treated as if they are our liberators.
I have never voted for Labour, and my current opinion on Jeremy Corbyn is that if he doesn’t sort this out properly I am not about to start. It looks like I was more careful about who I associated with 20 years ago than Jeremy was, I didn’t need to like what Israel were doing to know that Hamas were not cool. However it is nearly impossible for the Conservatives to win where I live (Labour had a 43% majority at the last election, compared to 35% in 1997) so I do have the choice to vote third party.
Of course, America was and still is a pretty racist place. However I dont think socialist policies were responsible for that, or FDR or the New Deal. But for the avoidance of doubt, I wasnt hankering for lots of 1930s things, like Polio or Lynchings, and even sending Okies packing at the California border. I was hankering for the kind of political will which would see the Federal Government do things like confiscating all privately held gold holding.
Not that I specifically want that particular policy, but I am aware that if you have an inequality problem and an economic growth problem then you may find you need to enact policies that not everyone likes if you really want to address it. Like banning government officials entering the private sector jobs in related areas within 10 years of leaving the public sector.
However, (a) you can’t ensure that, and (b) that’s not what you said. Meanwhile, @anon29537550 is sitting at this table (as a proxy for their daughter and nieces) and you’re taking them to task.
As long as I don’t actually vote
You are voluntarily removing yourself from the table, but you are telling us who we should vote for?
So did New Labour…Having a register of people with gender dysphoria is not cool
I completely agree with this. My guess is that a Blairite government today would legislate differently from the way they did. The world has moved quite far since Brown. They might not genuinely believe in what they’re doing, of course, but it is better than the alternative.
when I had people giving me death threats
Your problem is not with your legislators, but with your neighbors. I don’t see racism and gender hatred disappearing as soon as it should in the North (where for example Brexit is still popular despite being a Labour stronghold). However, it should be easier for you to pressure your MP than it is for us to pressure our Congressman, as money is less of an influence in UK elections and MPs represent fewer constituents than do our legislators.
Throwing our hands up in despair, deciding that we’ll never find a legislator that supports us so why bother, is never an answer. I lived in England during the Thatcher years, and heard this kind of defeatism all the time. Blair was no great shakes, but compared to Maggie he was a progressive messiah.
