Hillary Clinton accepts Democratic party nomination for president

Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/07/28/hillary-clinton-accepts-democr.html

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I can’t get excited.
Even if she wins, the USA is now a country where approximately 50% of the population thinks someone like Trump is a desirable leader.

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I was thrilled for her at the moment of acceptance, thinking of how long she’s worked for this and what it means to her and so many women (and men) for her to be standing there accepting that nomination. I think Bernie-ites are right to continue being vocal. I was creeped right out when she endorsed online censorship, endpoint blocking, online surveillance and, by implication, the continued war on encryption. Like Rob said …

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Well, I did. I may have been waiting decades for the new Wonder Woman movie, but this. This. This was like what I imagine my husband felt as he watched a man walk on the moon. I hugged my little girl to my chest and I ugly cried when a woman accepted the nomination of a major political party to be president of the United States.

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Well, good, I guess. An important step, and she’ll be a good enough president. Probably much like Obama.

I wish it had been Elizabeth Warren, though.

At least the Democrats beat the Republicans to nominating a woman as candidate, unlike Labour in the UK.

Still (like Rob) I grew up with a woman as PM and another as head of state. It’s the default for me. Breaking that glass ceiling is really important, but it’s how she governs that matters. I hope (and expect) Clinton will be a lot better than Thatcher, though.

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I can’t find that in her speech.

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I’ll have to watch it again to find it. It was while she was talking about dealing with ISIS IIRC. Do you have the text?

It is how she governs and I’m just as worried about her as I was yesterday and will be tomorrow. She’s not my ideal candidate, far from it.

But I remember reading once how Barack Obama said that he and Michelle made a conscious decision that on inauguration night, they were just going to enjoy it. The moment of it. They would take that time to just let it soak in that a black man was elected president.

That’s what I’m doing tonight. I’ll go back to the rest tomorrow.

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Transcript is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/29/us/politics/hillary-clinton-dnc-transcript.html

W/r to ISIS she says she will disrupt their online efforts to radicalize young people. I suppose one can read censorship into that, but it isn’t really there in the text.

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Ha, love it!

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There’s a transcript here:

Was it this you were thinking of?

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The warmongery shite was earlier tonight. Really didn’t like the speech by that 4* General guy.

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Yes, that. It was vague and lacking specifics, but I interpreted it as I said. (Thanks for the links.)

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I’m afraid Pokémon interrupted a lot of tonight for me. On the plus side I caught five Psyducks. Picked most of Hillary’s speech, which was not oratorically masterful, and have a few cringe-points, but wasn’t bad. This was on NPR, so then I got to hear David Brooks criticize it in Brooksian terms, and just wanted to slap the guy. Sad I missed Khizr Khan.

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There’s nothing wrong with being twitchy on this stuff, but honestly finding a way to keep ISIS from getting to vulnerable young people would be a good thing. They seem to be filling a role that Jesus Freaks and Hare Krishnas did in my day.

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I hope she plans on addressing electoral corruption and regulatory capture of federal agencies, and that she ends the drone wars and special operations, and other support operations that create and perpetuate the global “war on terror.”

I hope that she vetoes a new round of nuclear weapons and delivery platform development. I hope she acts as a shield for all whistleblowers, I hope that she opposes all form of globalism that undermine national democratic sovereignty on issues of human rights, environmental protections, and regulation of industry. I hope that she’s a champion against these corrosive erosions of democracy in foreign lands, as well.

I hope that she places domestic social development higher in value and priority than foreign nation-building adventurism, often with corrupted and criminal foreign partners who were never going to act in good faith to promote our human values. I hope she is a champion for universal human rights and liberties, whether they be woman’s rights, the rights of racial or religious minorities, the rights of the genderqueer, the rights of the poor and disenfranched, the rights of foreigners to be free of US-supported war. I hope she pushes for a shift of priority to the global war on anthropogenic climate change like all our lives and the lives of posterity truly depend upon getting it right without delay.

I hope she will put an end to media ownership consolidation and control of tv, radio, and print journalism. I hope she will put an end to copyright extension beyond 25 years, 50, 75 years. I hope she will help orchestrate an absolute rational scientific unbiased influence-free FDA, EPA, and FTC, to go out and kick corporate butt, putting them back under the thumb of decency and in indentured servitude to earnest public best interests.

I hope she slays the prison-industrial complex, and extinguishes the war on drugs. I hope she clears a path to the international impartial prosecution of all US war criminals. I hope she appoints SCOTUS justices who don’t believe the constitution agrees with the fallacies “money is speech” or “corporations are people.” I hope she believes the children inherit the world and their values trump the so-called wisdom of the establishment that literally built so much of the wrong we’ve seen into our present-day world.

I could go on, but the truth is that I don’t believe she’ll be a tireless champion for most or even any of these things. She won’t lead or try to rally America around these values, or use the presidency as a pulpit to denounce the antecedents. I don’t think she really means it, she isn’t even a true centrist, must less a liberal or a progressive. She’s a cynical political weathervane, not some virtuous leader.

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That’s because 1% thinks those people are dispensable and they know it.

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Does that matter, though?

If she governs as a liberal/leftie because that’s politically expedient, I’ll take that.

By the end of her first term, we could have a liberal, female majority Supreme Court. I’d take that too.

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