What would you want him to do? Run as an independent? Tell his followers to stay home in protest? That would absolutely hand the election to Trump. I can respect him for gritting his teeth and choosing the lesser of two evils, rather than trying for double-or-nothing with a losing hand.
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Why?
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I’m not supporting an anti-Science party. The Greens have always struck me as being anti-Science.
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Did you read the article you linked to? I would read that as her opinion being that Monsanto’s influence on the FDA, as well as other aspects of our medical-industrial complex that are actually fucked-up, give rise to popular distrust of the medical establishment. That distrust gives rise to people like anti-vaxxers, and if we want to get rid of anti-vaxxers, we need fix it.
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Oh, that’s great then. That means we’ll not have to worry about anymore wannabe Putin’s in future elections if he’s defeated, right? There’s no systemic problems that either party is ignoring with our economy. It will just be all roses once Democrats control the presidency and the legislative bodies again. They can then put the utopia into effect.
…or…
He’s just the harbinger of things to come since no one is doing a damn thing.
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[quote=“enso, post:184, topic:82288”]I’m not convinced they’ll reverse the trends since Reagan or bring back the jobs and life savings destroyed since 2008 either.
You do realize that a huge part of why certain Americans are voting Trump is because of these problems and that they’re getting worse? You wanna see a fascist, wait until 2020 or 2024. That’s the elephant in the room. These people aren’t going to him primarily because many of them could be racist. They’re going to them because their lives have been destroyed, have been for 8 years, and no one gives more than lip service to doing anything about it. We’re in economic decline, no matter how rich a hedgefund manager gets. Of course, the latter are the people Clinton pals around with so what does she care?
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Well, the problem is that Sanders-style solutions–raising minimum wage, supporting labor unions, economic protectionism to increase manufacturing in the US, etc.–are also just bandaids that won’t really do much to stop the trends you’re talking about. The other elephant in the room is that machines are taking more and more of the jobs involving relatively unskilled physical labor like manufacturing along with a sizeable number of office jobs (see here and here), and that trend is going to ramp up in the next couple decades. Even if you could bring a lot more manufacturing to the US, the number of workers needed would be far less than in the golden age of manufacturing. What we really need is a transition to a basic income where not having a fulltime job doesn’t need to lead to living in poverty, but no leftist politician that I know of, not Sanders nor Stein, ever pushes for this, though it is ostensibly a part of the Green party platform (but until some party does a lot more work making this a centerpiece and promoting the idea in public, I don’t think putting it in a platform counts for much more than lip service). The one sign of hope is that while basic income is a traditionally very leftist idea, we do see more centrists and libertarians in the tech industry supporting it nowadays, as discussed here.
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I agree that we need Basic Income.
I also, though, think we need to end most of these trade treaties that incentivize companies to do all their work abroad because it is cheap and there are no penalties in doing so.
Poor people will find their own solutions if folks do nothing and we all know how that works out in the long run.
I’m not sure that all of the kleptocrats want things to change though. Many of them probably like the direction of the last few decades.
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Well, judging by every conversation on the topic in the past 9 months, I hope, but doubt primary voters will acknowledge their responsibility for what’s to come.
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But yet she’s an antivaxxer? That’s your message above. You don’t see this as dishonest, when everything she’s said about undue corporate influence and regulatory capture is factually true? I do. You’re propagating a fake category of pro-vaccine anti-vaxer (which is going even further than the hatchet job you linked) on the grounds that she shares the average American’s distrust of Monsanto and big pharma?
And, you’re objecting to her calls for scientific review rather than political review of policies that are supposedly founded in science? How exactly do you defend your condemnation of reasoned scientific review? The Greens aren’t the anti-science faction in the room here.
Which they are not; your impression is wrong. I think they are in fact the most pro-science party in America. They’ve even got a vocal pro-nuke minority (although, like most Americans, the party itself is against terrestrial fission power. )
In anti-green propaganda, the source of your impression, Greens are dirty communist hippies. The carefully crafted media image is one of loopy drugged out mystics; coverage is selected to show only the lunatic fringe that attends every political movement. This is because they are the only party that has to oppose regulatory capture and corporate political influence in order to achieve or retain any power. To the average multinational, the Greens are the absolute antichrist, and must be both trivialized and suppressed.
In real life, Greens are working scientists who have created the fastest, most awesome car on Earth. They are the backbone of the space program - I’m going to a presentation on the Near Earth Network at NASA tomorrow, and I won’t be the only Stein voter in the room! They are people who can do the math and science that shows sustainability and education are the two most important issues of our lifetimes, the key things that matter for the survival of our species.
Jill Stein is safely pro-vaccination, and the Green party platform reflects the majority American views on Monsanto, GMOs, nuclear power, and alternative medicine. No anti-science anything in there, except perhaps where the mainstream of public opinion is arguably anti-science. Meanwhile the other parties want to pursue policy that is absolutely guaranteed to be unsustainable, and they want you to think they will pull a magic rabbit out of their hats at some indefinite future date to fix everything.
“Drill baby drill, the oil will last forever and pollution doesn’t need to be prioritized” is the demonstrated policy of every political party other than the Greens. This alone makes the Greens the sole party of science, regardless of your views on real issues like education policy and corporate regulatory capture or sideshows like GMOs.
If you want to vote Brown, go ahead, I support your right to self-expression and independent opinion. But please don’t mistakenly accuse Greens of being anti-science based on your “feels”. It’s unethical to repeat false propaganda messages, and the Greens are not anti-science.
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Yes. I did. She specifically states in the article that her opinion on vaccines is that due to Monsanto’s lobbyists influencing the FDA, she feels that people shouldn’t trust the vaccines that’ve been vetted. Am I misreading it?
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I’m not, in any possible way, condemning ‘reasoned scientific review’. I simply think her perception of Monsanto’s influence on the FDA is far overstated and paranoid. I have seen no evidence apart from far-left paranoia that the vaccines being used today haven’t already been rigorously reviewed and tested.
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Remember all the hyped-up Joe Biden “will he or won’t he run?” nonsense, that ended the second that Clinton got past the Benghazi committee?
He was the DNC’s emergency backup centre-right candidate, just in case Clinton fell over. Never had any intention of running if that didn’t happen.
Democracy theatre.
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I’m still trying to figure out if it’s solely because of a bug, or if members are toggling back and forth accidentally.
If you hit ‘reply’ to one person, then hit ‘reply’ to another before hitting submit, the intended recipient toggles from the first person being addressed to the second.
Unfortunately, there’s a fair amount of people here that are not as reciprocal as they could be when it comes to conversing.
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Well, also, he’d lost his son not long before, and was in mourning. That’s the reason he gave for not wanting to run. I don’t think his tears were political theatre.
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I personally carefully read the package inserts and Red Book information on every vaccine my children received. I looked up every word I didn’t know on the Internet. In two cases, I rejected newly formulated vaccines that were recommended and substituted more expensive ones that had a stronger existing track record of effectiveness. I showed the pediatrician my reasoning and he agreed with it.
Have you done anything like that? If you haven’t done the research, I’m not surprised that you haven’t seen any evidence. Vaccines are routinely reformulated with varying results, the most extreme example being the flu vaccine. And vaccine vendors are allowed to reformulate to improve profits, not just in response to changing pathogens like the flu, and in most cases this turns out to be OK. But it’s not magic, and corporations with an unethical history shouldn’t be blindly trusted. Again, none of this has anything to do with Jill Stein - the article you linked was a hatchet job, attempting to convince you that Stein is insufficiently ideologically pure on the subject of vaccines. It’s pure propaganda; they are literally saying she’s a bad candidate because she shares the typical American distrust of Monsanto and distaste for political control of things that ought to be based on science.
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I respect your feelings and knowledge of the subject. I didn’t take that away from it; my takeaway from the linked article wasn’t the editorializing, but her direct quotes alone, which to me spoke of a mistrust of the FDA vetting process due to lobbying by GMO producers. I apologize if you thought I felt the entire article and its editorial was worthwhile or if I was reading quotes poorly taken out of context. I am indeed aware of the variances in flu vaccines (especially the difficulty of trying to essentially predict what strain will hit each year, which is a very messy and inexact science to try to pull off). Your diligence in reading up on vaccines is admirable. If I had kids I would hope to do the same. As it is, I only really deal with the flu vaccine.
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‘Captain Obvious’ moment;
Damn, the atmosphere in this thread is mad unpleasant.
Carry on.
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What? No. Everyone here is doing their damndest to be persuasive. That’s why everyone is yelling.
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I AGREE WITH THIS COMMENT
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Psssst!
I don’t think it’s working.
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