Re: The Trump observations thread
Posted: 25 Sep 2022, 11:00am
Anyways, that's as far as I got. A few points to noodle over, maybe. I'll address the genuinely interesting of Dems pumping money into repub primaries to advance maga republicans, though, since you made a point that it hasn't been responded to.It pains me to do this a little, because I don't really enjoy being in the position of defending Joe Biden 1) when I have enough substantive complaints on policy grounds that I think we could just talk about that, 2) a lot of this stuff feels immaterial to the twin assertions that Trump was particularly bad and fashy (my assertion) and that Biden is one of the most responsible elected officials on the contemporary american scene for creating and fomenting structural racism (your assertion). It's not clear what, say, the Tara Reide accusation has to do with either claim (I also think that the Tara Reide claim has some major problems with it, which I can get into). But I also feel a little like I'm skipping out of a date if I don't respond, lol, so here we go.
Fair enough. I'd argue that Trump took the fertile stew of american racism and built an abhorrent, illiberal cult of personality in the soil which, left unchecked, would/will have bad consequences. But, yes, anyone - particularly at the federal level, I think we've both acknowledged the dynamic is a little different at the local and state levels still - is somewhere between culpable in our racist (and classist, sexist, etc.) institutions and actively malicious. Biden's been both at times. I don't know if it makes him unique in that sense, I guess I think it makes him pretty median.Howard Beale wrote: ↑18 Aug 2022, 5:51amI'll preface my comments here by making it absolutely clear that I think we should remain vigilant when it comes to neo-Nazi and other white supremacist groups and never stop fighting them and everything they stand for. Having said that, I'm much more concerned about the institutional racism in America that ruins the lives of vulnerable people on a much broader scale than fringe hate groups could ever dream of doing—and there's simply no denying that there are few figures in contemporary American politics that have done more damage on that front than Joe Biden.
http://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-c ... 06ecc48993
Off the bat, I have a quibble. First, this isn't a direct quote. It's close, but this image was created by the Trump for USA campaign and they didn't get it quite right. Here's the full quote and context:Source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/fac ... 045749002/Just before the remark, Biden advocated for "orderly integration of society" rather than school integration via busing. "I am not just talking about education but all of society," he said.
He addressed the expert witnesses at the hearing, and then launched into the quote in question: "Unless we do something about this, my children are going to grow up in a jungle, the jungle being a racial jungle with tensions having built so high that it is going to explode at some point."
"We have got to make some move on this," he added.
The exchange appears here in the transcript of the hearing.
Biden was not against desegregation — he just advocated for other methods, like housing integration, per the Times.
Earlier in the hearing, Biden said he thought mandatory busing had "repercussions" in terms of the "ultimate objective of seeing that we get integrated neighborhoods, of seeing that we eventually eliminate job discrimination, of seeing that we change housing patterns, of seeing alteration of the tax structure."
I think he was morally wrong on compulsory busing (supposedly he supported voluntary busing, but evidence seems scant), and I wish Congress had taken up his suggestion to focus on integrated neighborhoods. As we probably all commonly know, redlining has been disastrous for generations for racial inequality - and it's a problem that's gotten worse over the years, not better. Whether this softens the (nearly correct) quote or not, as I said, I leave to the reader. For myself, it adds some useful context.
No argument. The meat of the 1994 crime bill was abhorrent. It's interesting to consider whether the democratic party of 2022 would pass it. I suspect they would not be able to. Also of some interesting context, that the bill at the time was more heavily supported by African Americans than white people:
That's him bragging about his notorious 1994 Crime Bill, which would turn America into the most incarcerative society on the planet and disproportionately effect minority communities.Source (and more info, but it's Brookings so, ehhhh): https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2 ... rceration/According to a 1994 Gallup survey, 58% of African Americans supported the crime bill, compared to 49% of white Americans. Most Black mayors, who were grappling with a record wave of violent crime, did so as well. As he joined a
delegation of mayors lobbying Congress to back the bill, Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke said, “We’re trying very hard to explain to Congress that this is a matter that needs bipartisan support.”
Does the fact that Biden was animated by african american pressure add any context? I don't think it's exculpatory but I think it complicates the idea that Biden (and the other Dems, I suppose) were simply animated by unhinged racist fervor. They were listening to their constituency, which was leaning hard on them to support the bill. I wish the left had more conversations about how that all went so horribly wrong instead of using it as a simple morality tale (which it, but not exclusively).
I remember this from campaign season. It's well sourced and probably one of the "best" takedowns of a piece of Biden's historical record - when you click through the sources, context doesn't offer much additional food for thought. My overall history of the proto-drug war is more than a little hazy, but it sounds like there's some activity that even predates this legislation - and the articles mention Reagan was independently looking to refocus on a war on drugs, so I guess the best thing you can say about Joe is that this kind of stuff may have been inevitable, but that's less a defense of Biden than a reinforcement that these issues are truly systemic in the American system.Biden is also arguably the architect of the post-Nixon era iteration of the inherently racist War on Drugs. When even Ronald Reagan rebuffed Biden for hs overzealousness in wanting to ramp up the drug war, Biden enlisted Strom Thurmond to help him craft even more Draconian legislation.
twitter.com/chuckmodi1/status/1141678744396075008
This one's sort of interesting because the article you linked to says that the assessment from their quoted civil rights scholar is that outside of busing, Biden was pretty good on civil rights issues at the time:Thurmond was, of course, one of the most unrepentant racists of the 20th Century—which I'd say places one pretty high in the running for being the racist GOAT—in addition to being such a BFF to Joe Biden that he even gave the eulogy at Thurmond's funeral.
Biden's palling around with ultra-racists doesn't end there, as he bragged about having worked with segregationists as recently as the 2020 campaign.It's interesting, I think the popular narrative in the U.S. as the busing was a failure - but (quoting your article) - pretty mainstream academia suggests otherwise:“Biden, who I think has been good overall on civil rights, was a leader on anti-busing,” Rucker Johnson, author of the book “Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works,” said. “A leader on giving America the language to oppose it despite it being the most effective means of school integration at that time.”I would say along with the crime bill, his busing policies amount to Biden's two biggest moral stains on his record (not the only two, but those loom pretty large given some of his unique participation, particularly in busing).Federal data analyzed by Johnson and other researchers shows that busing succeeded in narrowing racial achievement gaps before frontal assaults and legislative maneuvers by Biden and others rendered it easier for districts under court order to be released from integration demands. America’s school integration efforts lasted, all told, no more than 15 years, Johnson said.
...You got me. My post, admittedly, had a blindspot with regard to the Ken & Karen contingent of MAGA, which as you say, accounts for an outsized portion of Trump's base. Let me be very unambiguous that I share your extreme disdain for the type of Trump supporter showcased in that Guardian article (which was an endurance test to get through). I think we basically agree that there's a difference between a poor person supporting Trump because they fell for his faux-populist song and dance and an affluent person supporting him as the latter isn't fueled by the same desperation. To proactively support Trump's stated vision for America when you're already quite well off is, as you point out, rather fashy.Flex wrote: ↑30 Sep 2022, 11:25pmThere's a lot to suss through, but if I try to go blow by blow I'll never get through it probably (as evidenced by several partially completed responses to previous posts of yours - although on the other hand the wife is out of town so there's no one to question what the hell I'm doing typing away on a Friday night), so I want to start by taking exception to the idea that Trump's support is primarily working class. It's way more petite-bourgeoisie-to-upper-class than it's usually portrayed. There's a bunch of articles that probe the issues, here's one: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... tion-hopes (and another older one from 538 that isn't paywalled: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/th ... s-support/). Anyways, I push back against the premise that reaching out to the working class means having to win over a bunch of trump supporters. most of his supporters are car dealership owners and hedge fund managers and a bunch of stuff like that. And of course there's exceptions. West Virginia is probably the quintessential example of, like a whole state thats super trumpy and extremely working class. When I express contempt for trump supporters it's because they're (mostly) a bunch of car dealers and proud boys and rich assholes like that couple who brandished guns outside their mansion at protesters. It's not exclusive, but that demo makes up an outsized portion of particularly his fervent supporters - like the ones who can afford to fly around the country to attend his rallies and participate in his failed putsches and so forth. I know a little bit about what I'm talking, I have done - and continue to do - political organizing and outreach work in rural Colorado, in areas that are primarily coal mining and ranching (literal Boebert country for big chunks). The folks you talk to at the door who are worried about the coal plant shutting down and angry at Just Transition policies aren't the ones jetting off for the j6 putsche. I would also say, from experience, that it's not as easy as youtube videos make it look to form connections with these folks to persuade them to support left policies. There's a ton of reasons for that, a lot of fault with how our party system works, and also a pretty big failure from socialist orgs over the years and decades.
l'd say it was in the 1920s/'30s—Roosevelt didn't give us the New Deal because he was a benevolent altruist, he did it as a safeguard against the very real threat of a worker's revolution.the labor movement has never been that strong in the United States
I hear ya. I wasn't trying to disrupt the flow of yuk yuks—God knows I've laughed at and enjoyed plenty of Trump memes—I guess I just started getting a strong let's-all-point-and-laugh-at-the-dumb-inferior-rednecks vibe that seemed to have an air of classicism about it. That may have just been a misreading on my part. If most of these memes are aimed at the McCloskey types, then hey, I wholeheartedly endorse.and, to be clear, this board serves dual functions: sometimes it's a place for thoughtful debate and analysis and sometimes it's just to blow off steam and say some bullshit that you just need to to wind down. I have mountains of cranky and mean posts about how anti-vaxers should basically drop dead that, like, of course I don't really mean
Feel free, but in terms of Reade, Christine Blasey Ford, Juanita Broaddrick, E. Jean Carroll, et al, I think it basically boils down to reading their accounts of what they allege happened and, then, you either believe these women or you don't. For the record, I happen to believe all the ones I mentioned, and I'm not in the camp that no one could ever make up such a story or that the accused shouldn't have a chance to defend themselves. The third Kavanaugh accuser Julie Swetnick, for example, had a flimsy story that fell apart pretty quickly under scrutiny.a lot of this stuff feels immaterial to the twin assertions that Trump was particularly bad and fashy (my assertion) and that Biden is one of the most responsible elected officials on the contemporary american scene for creating and fomenting structural racism (your assertion). It's not clear what, say, the Tara Reide accusation has to do with either claim (I also think that the Tara Reide claim has some major problems with it, which I can get into).
That was sound advice—I hope you took it!the missus called and told me i needed to stop and go watch a movie lmao
Yeah, I'm also reminded that most folks don't really pay the kind of in-depth attention to politics as, well, the kind of folks like us who will spend our leisure time writing having lengthy political discussions on a Clash forum. On the one hand, you end up with folks who can have pretty contradictory opinions about political issues - the old chestnut recent American example is how well individual components of the Affordable Care Act poll but when you ask them whether they support ObamaCare the answer is no - and I think there's a hill to climb because words like socialism are still so stigmatized even when we have very obvious evidence that people will support the kinds of things we are talking about when we say socialism, but you're right there's a benefit that the number of people who are ideologically committed to, say, "Trumpism" is smaller than one may think and a segment of those folks may even be fairly easily persuadable because a lot of people just don't bother too much about rigorous political consistency. Which I think at one point in my life I would have said as a criticism, but I actually think it's healthier in some ways to not get too hung up on rigorous ideological consistency. I think folks could still stand to try to be a little more thoughtful than, like, saying they love medicare and social security but hate government "benefit programs" and stuff, but I think it's important that an accessible politics leave room for people to be pretty idiosyncratic and even contradictory.Howard Beale wrote: ↑02 Oct 2022, 9:41pmThere are some small signs that we should have some hope. Perhaps because of Trump's lack of any solid ideology, I think there's a certain malleability to MAGA/"Trumpism"/whatever-you-want-to-call-it. If the populist impulses within the movement can be amplified and steered away from the illiberal cult of personality aspect that you mentioned, good outcomes are possible. You mentioned West Virginia—I think back to a House race from 2018 you might know about. Richard Ojeda was a virtual unknown who ran as a Democrat, and his campaign tapped into working-class rage pretty well. In doing so, he almost closed the near-40% lead of his Republican opponent, Carol Miller. After Miller was given an assist in the form of a Trump endorsement and campaign appearance, the race ultimately shook out at Miller-56%/Ojeda-44%—but, that was a massive improvement from the district's Democrat/Republican 24%/68% split in the previous election. That says to me that the people of WV respond to populism more than just to Trumpism.
Right, I just think when you compare the historical labor movement of the era in the United States against its European counterparts when agitating for similar reforms, its characteristics were never as uniformly socialist/militantly left wing. I don't know if we even really need to "grapple" with that as a historical issue per se, I just think there's a bigger hill to climb here in the U.S. than even the historical record suggests sometimes.l'd say it was in the 1920s/'30s—Roosevelt didn't give us the New Deal because he was a benevolent altruist, he did it as a safeguard against the very real threat of a worker's revolution.
Yeah, I can only speak for myself but I think of that little video of that guy waving his flag in the hurricane and I assume that asshole owns a yacht.I hear ya. I wasn't trying to disrupt the flow of yuk yuks—God knows I've laughed at and enjoyed plenty of Trump memes—I guess I just started getting a strong let's-all-point-and-laugh-at-the-dumb-inferior-rednecks vibe that seemed to have an air of classicism about it. That may have just been a misreading on my part. If most of these memes are aimed at the McCloskey types, then hey, I wholeheartedly endorse.
We seem to be in broad agreement on the awfulness of Biden's record vis-à-vis the crime bill and busing, so I won't spend too much time on it, but to address the thing about the '94 bill having more support among African Americans: that's definitely an interesting piece of context, but it does kinda support the general "Democrats are spineless" criticisms. They tend to be led on this issue by Republican attacks accusing them being soft on crime, which was no doubt a major factor back then as well, even apart from the support the bill was getting from the African American community. Notice how they're currently ratcheting up the "Tough on Crime"-style rhetoric in the lead-up to the midterms. It's also not as if there was no canary in the coalmine here warning of the effects the bill was going to have—Bernie Sanders was screaming on the House floor with his hair on fire about how bad this bill was:
Just to be clear, and this is probably partly a result of just copy/pasting a half finished and unsmoothed out response, but I think assault and rape should be disqualifying for any sort of office (or general position of leadership in society anywhere) in a sane world. It's not a sane world, people can make whatever calculations they think they need to, but I certainly find assault and rape disqualifying on their own. The original point of its relevance or not to a particular point is probably well past anything worth discussing.As far as why I mentioned it in the first place, well, my post was meant as a broad overview of Biden's overall shittiness (and similarities to Trump). I'd say that raping women (or creepily sniffing their hair, or touching children inappropriately during photo ops) makes someone a pretty shitty person.
I admittedly haven't followed Carroll's case much, but I believe the others. It's telling, I think, that Broaddrick's account has been held under such intense scrutiny and it's still persuasive. For Reade, I think Andrew Feinberg's breakdown of the problems with her account here pretty persuasive that there are some serious issues:Feel free, but in terms of Reade, Christine Blasey Ford, Juanita Broaddrick, E. Jean Carroll, et al, I think it basically boils down to reading their accounts of what they allege happened and, then, you either believe these women or you don't. For the record, I happen to believe all the ones I mentioned, and I'm not in the camp that no one could ever make up such a story or that the accused shouldn't have a chance to defend themselves. The third Kavanaugh accuser Julie Swetnick, for example, had a flimsy story that fell apart pretty quickly under scrutiny.
Full article: https://abovethelaw.com/2020/05/how-the ... ade-story/In his lengthy April 10 piece and subsequent tweets that have since vanished, Robinson wrote that he had spoken with Reade and her brother, Collin Moulton, as they were dealing with other media outlets. He wrote, “Back before the story came out, I actually warned Tara myself during our conversation that it didn’t sound from Marcotte’s inquiries that she was interested in being fair and recommended being cautious about her. I think that concern was vindicated. Marcotte used the fact that she couldn’t get a comment from Tara’s brother and friend as one of the ‘red flags’ that justified the media’s silence on Tara’s accusation.”
Moulton initially told The Washington Post that Reade had told him Biden had behaved inappropriately by touching her neck and shoulders and told ABC he had only heard about the sexual assault this spring. He subsequently told the Post that Biden had put his hand under her clothes and “clarified” to ABC that Reade had told him of the assault in 1993. But between his two statements to the Post, he had conferred over the phone with Robinson.
This has led to accusations that Robinson “coached” Reade and Moulton, which he has denied doing. But regardless of whether “coaching” accurately describes his interactions with them, what he did amounted to PR consulting, while operating in a journalistic capacity. This creates a significant conflict of interest — something that journalists are taught early on to avoid.
Well, you never know, Biden and Putin may both be lurkers. They're Terry era fans, though.
*Quietly airbrushes a Z on the side of my bitchin' van*