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On the topic of "fake news" and not being able to distinguish between what's real or fake made me immediately think of a recent episode of one of my favorite podcasts where they discussed deep fakes:Originally Posted by Jinsai
Like you wrote, the worst part is that it normalizes indifference. As these types of fakes become more and more prevalent, the real news gets lost in the noise.
I was nobody. Nothing.
which leaaaaves...
So you're saying we're fucked?
Active Member
Nah, not at all. Debate performance doesn't matter to me too much in terms of the quality of the candidates. Bernie would still be a transformative candidate that would turn out many that have never voted before, and would embarrass Trump. Wouldn't even be close. Warren would be similar as president & even Harris would beat him too imo. Biden's the only one where I get really nervous bc the guy looks out to lunch, has no clear vision for what exactly he wants to get accomplished, and who the hell knows how much worse he might get mentally or physically between now and next November.
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During the debate there was a transition from the topic of healthcare to the topic of prison reform. Biden kept asininely demanding the progressive candidates exain how they plan to budget their plans (even though this has been quite clear).
One of the failures of the progressive candidates was to explain that one of the benefits of prison reform is that it frees up quite a bit of money that could reasonably redirected toward things like health care.
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Good article re the characterization of Warren.
http://www.cc.com/video-clips/f15q9h...izabeth-warrenThe Media Gaslighting of 2020’s Most Likable Candidate
Elizabeth Warren has proven over and over that she’s a charismatic figure. Why do we keep casting her as a nagging schoolmarm?
At CNN’s town hall event on Monday, the American people saw something we’d been told was impossible: Elizabeth Warren winning over a crowd.
The Massachusetts senator took aim at a variety of subjects: the Electoral College, Mississippi’s racist state flag, the rise of white nationalism. Always, she was met with thunderous applause. Even a simple Bible verse — from Matthew 25:35–40, about moral obligation to the poor and hungry — prompted cheers so loud and prolonged that Warren had to pause and repeat herself in order to make her voice heard over the noise. Yet this was the same woman the media routinely frames as too wonky, too nerdy, too socially stunted. But then, Warren has always been an exceptionally charismatic candidate. We just forget that fact when she’s campaigning — due, in large part, to our deep and lingering distrust for female intelligence.
Warren is bursting with what we might call “charisma” in male candidates: She has the folksy demeanor of Joe Biden, the ferocious conviction of Bernie Sanders, the deep intelligence of fellow law professor Barack Obama. But Warren is not a man, and so those traits are framed as liabilities, rather than strengths. According to the media, Warren is an uptight schoolmarm, a “wonky professor,” a scold, a wimpy Dukakis, a wooden John Kerry, or (worse) a nerdier Al Gore.
The criticism has hit her from the left and right. The far-right Daily Caller accused her of looking weird when she drank beer; on social media, conservatives spread vicious (and viciously ableist) rumors that Warren took antipsychotic drugs that treated “irritability caused by autism.” On the other end of the spectrum, Amber A’Lee Frost, the lone female co-host of the socialist podcast Chapo Trap House, wrote for The Baffler (and, when The Baffler retracted her article, for Jacobin) that Warren was “weak” and “not charismatic.” Frost deplored the “Type-A Tracy Flicks” who dared support “this Lisa Simpson of a dark-horse candidate.”
Casting Warren as a sheltered, Ivory Tower type is odd, given that her politics and diction are not exactly elitist. Yet none of this is new; the same stereotypes were levied against Warren in 2011, during her Senate campaign.
Strangely, the first nerdification of Warren was a purely local phenomenon — one which happened even as national media was falling in love with her. Jon Stewart publicly adored her, and her ingenuity in proposing the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau a few years prior earned her respect among the rising populist wing of the party. Her fame was further catapulted when a speech — a video of Warren speaking, seemingly off-the-cuff, in a constituent’s living room — went viral. “Nobody in this country got rich on his own, nobody,” Warren proclaimed, pointing up the ways entrepreneurs benefit from publicly funded services like roads and schools and fire departments.
[...]
The “schoolmarm” stereotype now applied to Warren has always been used to demean educated women. In the Victorian era, we called them “bluestockings” — unmarried, unattractive women who had dared to prioritize intellectual development over finding a man. They are, in the words of one contemporary writer, “frumpy and frowly in the extreme, with no social talents.” Educators say that 21st century girls are still afraid to talk in class because of “sexist bullying” which sends the message that smart girls are unfeminine: “For girls, peers tell them ‘if you are swotty and clever and answer too many questions, you are not attractive,’” claims Mary Bousted, joint general-secretary of the U.K.’s National Education Union. Female academics still report being made to feel “unsexual, unattractive, unwomanly, and unnatural.” We can deplore all this as antiquated thinking, but even now, grown men are still demanding that Warren ditch her glasses or “soften” her hair — to work on being prettier so as to make her intelligence less threatening.
Warren is cast as a bloodless intellectual when she focuses on policy, a scolding lecturer when she leans into her skills as a rabble-rouser; either way, her intelligence is always too much and out of place. Her eloquence is framed, not as inspiring, but as “angry” and “hectoring.” Being an effective orator makes her “strident.” It’s not solely confined to the media, but reporters seem anxious to signal-boost anyone who complains: Anonymous male colleagues call her “irritating,” telling Vanity Fair that “she projects a ‘holier than thou’ attitude” and that “she has a moralizing to her.” That same quality in male candidates is hailed as moral clarity.
Warren is accused, in plain language, of being uppity — a woman who has the bad grace to be smarter than the men around her, without downplaying it to assuage their egos. But running in a presidential race is all about proving that you are smarter than the other guy. By demanding that Warren disguise her exceptional talents, we are asking her to lose. Thankfully, she’s not listening. She is a smart woman, after all.
Last edited by allegro; 09-15-2019 at 05:45 PM.
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NYT Opinion
Elizabeth Warren’s Formidable Stride
She comes out of the latest Democratic debate stronger than ever.
Elizabeth Warren didn’t have her best debate on Thursday night, nor was she the most poetic or passionate candidate on that overcrowded stage. Beto O’Rourke, describing the toll of gun violence, forged a moment more moving than any of hers. Cory Booker had better one-liners. Pete Buttigieg’s beautifully shaped final answer put hers, delivered minutes earlier, almost immediately out of mind.
But she demonstrated precisely why she has been on an upward trajectory in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination and why that arc won’t be interrupted anytime soon.
She showed how canny she can be. How cunning.
Criticism came her way, and she brushed it off like so much lint.
And she was evasive — not a noble quality but an essential one when you’re running for office. Idealism puts you in play. Slipperiness gets you the prize.
I’ll come back to that last observation, but first: Afghanistan. Warren’s reputation isn’t staked on foreign-policy expertise. She focuses more on domestic issues than on international ones.
But when she was asked whether she would pull remaining American troops out of Afghanistan no matter the state of the conflict there, she emphatically said yes, then gave an explanation that was its own miniature master class in political communication.
She established authority by noting that she had traveled there — in the company of Senator John McCain, no less — and that she had grilled and listened hard to generals from her perch on the Senate’s Armed Services Committee.
She framed her misgivings about this particular military engagement in accessible, even folksy terms, saying that she would repeatedly ask military leaders “what winning looks like” and “no one can describe it.”
Then came the finishing touch, which made clear that hers wasn’t merely the perspective of some disconnected politician and that plenty in her background overlaps with the experiences of less powerful Americans.
“I have three older brothers who all served in the military,” she said. “I understand firsthand the kind of commitment they have made. They will do anything we ask them to do. But we cannot ask them to solve problems that they alone cannot solve.”
Now that’s an answer. And that’s why Warren will move on from this debate in strong form.
[...]
Perhaps the most important figure on the stage was Amy Klobuchar, by which I mean that she most readily accepted and aggressively played the necessary role of suggesting that the most progressive proposals — namely, Medicare for All, backed by both Warren and Bernie Sanders — existed in the realm not of the doable but of the dream-able, and that they weren’t going to fix needy Americans’ lives anytime soon.
“When it comes to our health care and when it comes to our premiums, I go with the doctor’s creed, which is, do no harm,” she said. Then, referring to Sanders’s Medicare for All legislation, she added: “While Bernie wrote the bill, I read the bill. And on page eight — on page eight of the bill — it says that we will no longer have private insurance as we know it. And that means that 149 million Americans will no longer be able to have their current insurance.”
“ I don’t think that’s a bold idea," she concluded. “I think it’s a bad idea.”
Don’t expect her to get any traction, though. She’s campaigning — admirably — in the realm of the doable. The dream-able is always going to be more vivid and romantic, and that’s where Warren dwells.
I worry lots about how Warren’s grandly liberal plans would play in a general election, but I’m impressed by her increasingly skillful navigation of the Democratic primary. Performance-wise, she’s pulling away from Sanders. He shouts and then shouts louder. She’s hardly quiet, but she has grown better and better at layering in personal anecdotes and dabs of humor, which he has never been any good at.
He still favors the word “oligarchic,” as if saying it for the zillionth time will finally make it roll off the tongue. She instead talks of “multinational corporations” and their corrupt chief executives, using more concrete images and language and doing, from a different end of the political spectrum, what Trump did with such effectiveness: identifying a class of villains on whom all of the country’s problems can be blamed.
She has learned to sail over and around potentially choppy waters. On Thursday night she spoke of her lifelong passion for education without giving the slightest hint of how much her positions on some education-related issues had changed over time. (She once supported vouchers, for example, but not one of her opponents onstage bothered to bring this up.)
She also refused to say whether Medicare for All would require a middle-class tax increase. One of the debate’s moderators, George Stephanopoulos, asked her, and then Biden pressed her, but she never grew flustered and never succumbed, instead stressing repeatedly that in terms of people’s reduced health care costs, they’d be ahead of the game.
You could call that deceptive. You could also call it disciplined. I shook my head but tipped my hat. She’ll be in this thing until the end.
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an interesting stat about Yang is that he is only one of two candidates (the other being Biden) where 10% of Trump supporters say they'll vote for him. it's an important stat, because whoever wins the nominee (most likely Biden, sigh) they NEED to get Trump supporters and conservatives to vote for them to win. more than 10%, ideally.
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Full-blown Trump supporters are only about 38% of registered Republican voters. The rest of the 2016 Trump voters consisted of Independents and some crossover Democrats.
Democrats don’t need any “Trump voters” to win. Trump received about 11,000 more Electoral College votes than Hillary Clinton. Clinton received 2.1% more votes than Trump (2.9 million votes).
In 2016, there was proven voter suppression in Michigan and Wisconsin.
In 2018, Michigan and Wisconsin elected Democratic Governors.
But certain Dems DO provide an alternative for GOP voters (who are NOT diehard Trump fanatics) in 2020.
And there is a certain contingent of Republicans in the Yang Gang.
I like Yang, too.
Latest polls are showing nearly EVERY Democratic candidate beating Trump.
I think a big part of that is because Trump will defeat himself among Republican voters who will either NOT vote for a President or will vote for an alternative (Joe Walsh, etc.).
Last edited by allegro; 09-15-2019 at 10:39 PM.
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They don't really imo. People like Warren, Harris, Buttigieg & Bernie will excite the base to get out there as well as attract enough new voters/people that stayed home b/c of zero enthusiasm for Hillary & Trump. Bernie's whole strategy for victory is based on getting people out there that normally stay home and get them to stay voting for lefties after 2020 too. Biden's the only one wth a chance of actually winning the primary that would def. guarantee another deflated, depressed base that would make his margin of error vs. Trump very small just like Hillary.
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I was nobody. Nothing.
They're gonna show Beto's " hell yes we're gonna take your ak" clip for the rest of our lives, on the intros of shit along the lines of Alex Jones, and at NRA rallies.
In all seriousness, though, I sort of wish he hadn't said that, like that. That shit scares people, where I'm from, and I'm talking about normal, rational people.
Honestly, the idea of gvmt confiscation of guns scares ME a little. I mean, idk, it's a bit tyrannical, isn't it?
I was nobody. Nothing.
I have discovered that I REALLY like Mayor Pete.
Sadly, I don't think we're electing a gay dude. It really sucks.
That guy has that "it factor" that I was hoping to see out of Beto. He's got that young visionary thing going on.
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Yah, you're right there. Beto went to far off the deep end there. Go ahead and think it, but don't make it a quote for a meme.
#anyonebuttrump
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He’s a Harvard alumni (magna cum laude, history and literature)
He’s a Rhodes Scholar (B.A. with first-class honors in philosophy, politics and economics, Pembroke College, Oxford)
He’s an Afghanistan War vet (Navy Lieutenant)
I like him, too. I donated to his campaign early on. I don’t think his chances are thwarted by being gay. I think his chances are affected by his being moderate and his relationship to the middle class. He comes across as educated elite a lot of times.
There’s a pretty big Team Pete online contingent. He didn’t have much support from black voters because he didn’t have much support from South Bend black voters but he’s trying to fix that.
Many people note his “calm” demeanor.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opini...mn/3205479002/
I used to like Castro but that last debate? Tanked.
Last edited by allegro; 09-17-2019 at 11:21 AM.
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Plus, IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN. Nobody will ever be confiscating people’s guns.
Even after the last assault rifle ban, those weapons were required to be registered with the Feds - not relinquished.
He’s full of shit.
BADGERS
Yeah gun confiscation is a gateway to the alt right, I think it was a horrible idea on Beto's part
Alt-Left Leaning Cunt
Oh my god. Is Biden doing speedballs or something? What the hell?
I was nobody. Nothing.
And what REALLY sucks, is that now, people are assuming that we all agree with this shit. But, here we are, on a very liberal message board, roundly condemning the comment.
And now, the right can say "the democrats want to take your guns, by force! LOOk! Here's one of the candidates admitting it!"
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Alt-Left Leaning Cunt
I was there tonight. I got there about an hour and a half before it started, and I was still probably 60 yards away.
I just love her so much.
Administrator
The Republicans and the NRA told people for eight years that Barack Obama was going to take their guns away even though he never actually said it. They're going to say this whether we have candidates saying it or not, so let's say it and energize and motivate people who feel strongly about this to come out and activate the vote. I have zero problems with this and am tired of worrying about what Republicans are going to say.
He's embracing moderatism, especially as he changed his message from worrying about what Republicans say about Democrats to now being concerned about Beto's comments about taking guns back. Not for it.
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She stayed FOUR HOURS for the “selfie line.”
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Is he worried about Republicans and guns or Democrats and guns?
Contrary to mythical beliefs, there are a lot of liberals with guns.
After the last assault rifle ban, all current owners were required to register their assault rifle with the Federal Government. Then, no new sales occurred. A voluntary buy-back for the estimated 10-20 million assault-style weapons could result in the buy-back of many weapons, but any plan to “come take” even a liberal’s gun is a load of ca-ca because NOBODY knows where those guns are and who owns them. So any confiscation effort would require a search warrant for every home and vehicle and property in the United States of America.
Which only CONGRESS could institute. And would require a COLOSSAL amount of police power and money.
If the Democrats want to effect true “change” without useless rhetoric, this ain’t it.
Actually SAYING “we gonna come take your guns” in this volatile climate of stupid people with guns is NOT helpful.
Every time they get afraid, gun sales go through the roof.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...tType=REGIWALL
Last edited by allegro; 09-17-2019 at 10:50 AM.
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The urge to move to the middle by these corporatist, bought & paid for politicians is too strong. Any semblance of an independent streak they once had gets dashed after a summer or two of kissing donor/bundler ass in the Hamptons & Cape Cod. See Kamala Harris here too.
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It doesn’t MATTER how hippy liberal the President is when Congress is TOTALLY controlled by corporate money.
https://theintercept.com/2019/04/17/...ist-donations/
ONLY CONGRESS LEGISLATES.
Warren has an “anti-corruption plan.” It’s a GREAT idea.
Except it’s legislation that she tried to pass, in the Senate, in 2018, and it would STILL be legislation that would have to pass in Congress, because Presidents don’t legislate.
Last edited by allegro; 09-17-2019 at 11:14 AM.
Alt-Left Leaning Cunt
Yeah. I took a picture of the "line" as I was heading out. Lol. That would have been amazing, but I had work early this morning and the new Vice Chancellor of our whole university system is visiting today, so I unfortunately couldn't just half-ass it through my workday today.
But I gotta say - that speech last night sure did not feel like your typical speech. Some of the things she said were surprising to me.
"We're not here because of famous arches or famous men. In fact, we're not here because of men at all." is a moment that will stick with me for quite some time.
It was HEAVILY focused on women - their role in the labor and civil rights movements and political involvement even before they could vote.
I feel the same energy at her events - both when she is there and when she is not as I did during the Obama elections. There is so much excitement surrounding her, and that does not get talked about often enough.
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