not alienating them is not the same as letting their candidate become the democratic nominee.
i personally don’t care if socialists are in the democratic party, that’s fine with me. what i’m pissed off about is that you guys allowed a wedge to be driven into the party so deep that trump got elected. divide and conquer is what it’s all about, and you fell for it.
What you say:
What I hear:
i actually agree with you.
i’m specifically responding to one person that enjoys watching me cry about trump because he got to vote his conscience instead of making a pragmatic choice… in order to keep the most unfit person that’s ever stood for president from becoming president. i don’t want that person in my PTA, my city council, my neighborhood, my political party, my church, whatever. because that is an irrational person who would burn the world down for their ideals. that’s a dangerous person. and to the extend that that person represents bernie bros… well the rest of the bernie bros can take a hike as well.
well, you heard wrong.
Never forget that cable news pioneered the whole scaring the crap out of their audience to generate views. CNN, Fox, etc are all really good at scaring people or getting them angry. Facebook just automated the process.
Then stop wasting time arguing with someone over the 2016 primaries. Same goes for him arguing with you. Just agree on the demonstrable truth that the primaries and Clinton’s incompetent general election campaign were both sh*tshows and start looking forward.
Bringing it back on-topic, continuing this discussion only allows the domestic and foreign right-wing scumbags who gamed FB to continue driving wedges on the left (and petulant Bernie Bros who voted for Il Douche or didn’t vote in swing states are too tiny a group to worry about anyhow).
I think the future of the Internet has to be one without centralized anything beyond a basic protocol. Like I really wish stuff like FreedomBox or Holo were popular since the idea of a distributed internet with fully open software and hardware would be really cool.
That said, this business of blaming Facebook is lame deflection. If people are really basing their votes on viral social media and last minute “revelations” (about something already well covered), then perhaps we really do need to rethink this whole democracy thing.
Just because a little Robert Anton Wilson gets thrown in the mix doesn’t mean it’s not still H.L. Mencken’s world we’re living in.
So more like the Internet’s pre-Eternal September past, then. I agree, but also acknowledge that to get there distributed systems have to be much simpler and intuitive to use for the kind of lowest-common-denominator user who currently prefers centralised services like FB’s.
I never said that.
What about Hillary saying she would have similar economic policies to the British Conservative party on her own site? You don’t think that might cause problems with the left of the party? She had plenty of opportunity to change them, but didn’t. Instead she insisted that she had won and Sanders had lost, meaning she could do as she liked as if she had won the primaries by a landslide. The loss was caused by strategic fuck ups like this.
I was saying vote for her because she’s better than Trump by the middle of October but let’s face it, that’s hardly an inspiring message.
And you are still falling for it. Accept the left and work with them, giving a bit and taking a bit, but don’t stand your ground and drive them off unless you like the bitter taste of failure.
ETA: sorry, wrong link
look, that person attacked me… furthering your point.
all i ever said in this thread is that the pro-bernie, anti-hillary instagram posts were very suspicious to me, and what i get back triggers off my use of the word “press”… essentially “the press is/was biased against bernie” which has nothing to do with my point. my reply was simply i know who bernie is, i know what he stands for, and i don’t think the “press” suppressed anything about bernie, or else how can i know these facts?
when i said “the press” what i meant was “i’m glad that this question of the origin of the instagram ads is being discussed out there in the world.” that’s all.
trump barely won this election in the upper midwest… by 5 and 6 digit vote differences. petulant bernie bros might have handed it to him. i don’t know. i’m only arguing because next time i hope that some of these people will see the error of their thinking and do the right thing to avert a disaster. no reasonable person can argue that trump and hillary are “the same” after watching the events of the last year unfold.
as long as i am alive, i will never vote for a republican anything. the left wing of the party can come or go, as i said, i don’t care. they don’t represent my interests, but i am fine with their agenda.
republicans are double plus evil and corporatist democrats are just evil. that’s all i need to know.
edit: i should clarify this statement. implied is “given the choice of a democrat.” if, for instance for some reason in a general election i was forced to choose between two republicans, i’m going to go out and figure out which one is most moderate and vote for that one. in my mind, thinking i’m exonerated when something terrible happens because “don’t blame me, i didn’t vote” is far worse than “i voted for the lesser of two evils and i lost anyway.”
Fine, then if he really is a Bernie Bro (as opposed to a Sanders supporter like myself) then take the high road and stop arguing about the past with someone you think is childish and ignorant enough to believe that Dolt-45 is “the same” as Clinton. It’s as pointless as arguing with someone who believes that the Dems and the GOP are “equally bad.”
In regard to your other points, I’ll only say looking forward to a 2020 campaign when the Dem candidate for President actually takes the time to campaign in the Rust Belt states (what a concept!) and when we hold the corporate MSM accountable for its (understandable) bias against any strong candidate who challenges any version of the neoliberal consensus. I also look forward to a campaign where those who complain about a registered Socialist running under the Dem banner either work to change the rules (something no-one in the DNC is doing) or stop complaining.
My last, on-topic response to you on this matter is that I’m also looking forward to a 2020 campaign in which the Dems are better equipped to foil the efforts of Uncle Vlad and his local minions because if FB is this hapless they’re going to be back to exploit it again.
i absolutely agree. however, i feel that the 2016 influence campaign was only effective because the vote turned out to be so close. if 2018 and 2020 are landslides i think it will be very difficult for vlad to put his thumb on the scales and change the outcome.
Criticism of Facebook in 2016 (as well as political social media stewardship in general) is directly tied to the criticisms of other political things like partisan media, gerrymandering, and campaign spending. Sure, there are people lazily saying everything would have been fine if it wasn’t for Russia or Facebook, but your argument is similarly shallow on the topic.
No, not exactly, but I’m sure there were a few voters who said, “Her emails again? Fuck it,” and didn’t vote. If you can target those few fence-sitters in a close race, you can tip the balance.
And this just occurred to me: whoever was really running the show understood the Electoral College in a pretty deep way, and so, probably wasn’t Russian. We will never know who it was.
(Emphasis mine)
I figure that is the real goal of any campaign, whether it’s “I’m John Doe and I approved this message” all over TV for the month of October, or someone overseas churning out inflammatory memes. Most of us know who we would vote for, and even more of us know who we would not vote for, prior to any election. I imagine that a very small fragment changes their mind one way or the other. What’s less certain is how many actually vote, and the barrage of info drives more people not to bother with it at all.
Update: That does install a whole lot of stuff, but currently doesn’t result in a live setup. (nginx test page.) It looks like there’s a little extra configuring to do when I get the chance.
The Clintonistas would rather chase the moderate-nazi vote than that inclined toward Sanders. Bernie was the Ralph Nader factor to DNC types this go-around. Ralph’s independent run calculus was based on the previous bid by Jesse Jackson having no effect on the Democrat party’s rightward creep.
When such agendas are given the light of day, they (not the candidate) get substantial votes. Otherwise, the “self-righteous” & “privileged” votes mostly stay home.
