i voted early on the day it opened. texas, for those who didn’t know. not only was it a thrill to vote against greg abbot and ted cruz, it was an even bigger thrill to vote FOR lupe valdez and beto o’rourke.
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Can we hear that from someone who’s currently eligible to vote in the US? Because, sure it sounds great in the abstract, but we have more than 400 actual flesh and blood candidates at the national level in the US, the vast majority of which are not remotely close to their opponents. I would love to hear the specific case for a US congressional district from someone who actually thinks anything like this.
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I hope you double-checked.
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I feel that you’re missing my point a bit.
There is no contradiction between your statement (“there is a great deal of difference between GOP and Dem candidates”) and the sentiment I reported (“GOP and Dem candidates are both bad, and harm-minimisation/lesser-evil reasoning breaks down when even the lesser evil is catastrophic”). It is entirely possible for those things to be simultaneously true.
Two things do not have to be identical for them to both be good or bad. Bad things do not have to be of exactly equivalent badness for them to both be bad.
It’s possible to argue that the establishment Democratic Party are not actually bad, but that’s a somewhat different issue from what I was posting about upthread.
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I’d vote for 90% evil; I don’t like hypocrites.
i did. the system also registered that i recorded “no vote” in the local contests which had only the republican candidate running.
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Again, this super abstract “good” and “bad”, without any tethering to a concrete political arguments, is pointless. Let’s ground this in reality: Democrats instituted a regulation that says health insurance must cover pre-existing conditions. Republicans came within one vote of allowing states to opt out of this regulation (along with a bunch of other repugnant garbage), and so now, we have many races in 2018 that have become about the importance of allowing the ACA regulations stand.
You, a galaxy-brain, says “oh ho, look at these moral midgets arguing over the lesser of two evils, in my country, we passed universal healthcare decades ago, how can American voters vote for either of these candidates, what a waste of time!” Nevermind that there are immediate consequences for tens of millions of lives by this minor piffle between two basically-identical political gangs (amirite), what’s important here is keeping that 10,000 foot view up in the airy heights where it’s easy enough to abstract the good from the evil.
Who is the establishment? Incumbent Democrats? What other criteria are you applying here to separate the Sanders from the Donellys? Again, it’s easy to float all sorts of radical polemic when use the vague abstraction of ‘establishment’ that nobody can really check your work with.
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More willful voter suppression, this time out of Kansas (where, as in Georgia, the Republican Secretary of State is running for Governor without resigning from his current position, which oversees the election):
(Warning: there’s literally three auto-playing videos on the Wichita Eagle’s story cited in Rachel’s last tweet, which is why I opted not to link it directly.)
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The reason I’ve been using general terms is because my comment to Gracchus was on a general subject. So far in this thread I haven’t said anything about my own view of the Democratic Party.
What I said was that (1) of the people that I observe criticising the Dems from the left, most of them are not making an argument anything like “both parties are exactly the same”, and (2) their position is not fundamentally incoherent, as harm minimisation has limits and it is possible for degrees of badness to exist.
Much online left vs centre debate consists of the left critiquing flaws of the Dems, followed by centrist Dems ranting about the idiocy and moral bankruptcy of anyone who would dare to equate the two parties. It’s pointless and irritating, and has been on a constant churn for years.
There are real ideological and strategic differences between the left and centre factions, and it could be useful to have those discussed occasionally. But they almost never are, because the state of the discourse actively blocks that possibility.
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Dude. I am an American expatriate, living in Munich. I saw what happened to the SPD in the last Bavarian state elections. And how the extreme right AfD has become an established party. And yes, the Democratic Socialists in the USA are in a European sense Social Democrats and not Democratic Socialists.
We know already.
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The Berniecrats are SocDems, but most of the DSA membership are genuine socialists. And there are plenty of folks to the left of the DSA…
i rarely see that argument being stated so baldly. some discussion of a postmortem nature is important to have (especially after a loss that involves winning the popular vote by 3 million votes) as is a true debate between the left, center-left, and center-right groups within the democratic party. the argument that i have reponded the most negatively to is the one which attempts to absolve from all responsibility those democrats who didn’t vote because they couldn’t get their particular candidate to vote for. whatever the limits of a harm minimization strategy, selecting between clinton and what we ended up with are not even close to those.
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I’m not sure if you a were offended by my tounge-in-cheeks comment or if I’m just over-sensitive. Anyway, no offense meant. I assumed you knew, and was just putting my finger on it.
German domestic politics are a mess of s different kind right now. The fascists are back, and the traditional anti-fascist Volkspartei is on the way to be relegated.
(Just FTR: since you are in Munich for quite some time, you already have heard the Wer hat uns verraten? chant. So much for the social democrats/socialist relationship in Germany…)
Also FTR: Tomorrow, Sunday, is going to be decisive. Even if the CDU-Green coalition holds, the federal government might still fall apart…
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Oh, I know. From 2005 to 2010, I was a member of the SPD — strange but true! All because I made a bet that Kerry would beat Bush. So yeah, I know how the Social Democrats were targets of the original Dolchstosslegende. How Bavaria became the Freistaat thanks to Kurt Eisner. And can show you where he was assassinated. But I am now active in Democrats Abroad again, my bet satisfied and my application for dual citizenship denied.
And no, I was not offended, keine Sorge.
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Well, a US citizen in the SPD sounds already like a wild idea to me.
Wo_0t? Colour me surprised. On what grounds?
As an ex-SPD member, you might even end up on a no-fly list, or at least denied entry to the US based on your suspicious political activity…
SCNR.
Anyway, I hope you can vote for the midterms. Good luck getting out of this shit. I suspect it’s especially hard on expats - and even more so in Germany. German anti-americanism is a fun thing, but right now, even the Atlantikbrücke guys are in despair…
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Germany only allows Americans dual citizenship only if hardship can be demonstrated by the renouncement of the US citizenship. I guess the lady at the Kreisverwaltungsreferat didn’t like my looks, and told me either German or American, but not both.
I guess I tried at a time when a backlash was already building against dual citizenship. But at least my daughter gets to keep hers (it used to be that Germany forced a decision at the age of 18) and I still get to absentee vote. Go Democrats!
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I guess you followed the news and have seen that Angela Merkel declared she is fading out of politics, starting in December, with a deadline at the election 2021.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that the gouvernment will fall apart. But the probability after the results from Hesse state election is still given.
boggles the god damn mind.
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