It was damn decent of Harvard and Princeton pitch in and build him a 74-room mansion made entirely out of Mumia sweatshirts.
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To date, this is how the very few interactions I've had with Never Trumpers have gone, because I want to talk about the Befor...
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It wasn't a fluke. It wasn't pilot error. It wasn't instrument failure. This is what Republicans wanted, and now they have a...
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Clapping harder is not a strategy for change.
I'm glad there are people pushing the centrists to the left. Because chants of no more war should not be drowned out with mindless chants of "USA USA USA." That's what the party I'm voting against does... actually both sides do that now.
Yes, I'll still hold my nose and vote for Hillary.
I really enjoyed it when he said that congress doesn't matter. Perhaps Mr. Kahn can loan that copy of the constitution to Cornell for a while, first. You know it's too damn long for Trump to read anyway...
-Doug in Oakland
Ya know, I don't always agree with Barney Frank, or Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders or any other adult on the face of the earth. And Dr West's purity test reminds of why I don't need or want to. There's nothing immoral about being practical. Bernie, Barney, and Hillary have all made the contributions to improving this country and so has Dr West's activism. His piousness on the other hand, has not.
It's called politics for a reason for God's sake.
Dr. West's piousness and activism go hand in hand, and always have.
You may not like his "sermonic" style but he is an irrefutable longtime champion of the Left, who's "style" resonates with multitudes (including me).
As for you Driftglass, seeing you denigrate one of our own turns my stomach.
Funny, I don't see you ridiculing Robert Scheer, Chris Hedges, etc... for their "purity"?
Do you really think that Bernie is not counting on the "purity folks", now , more than ever, to sound the alarm and pound the message that we should absolutely not step onto the Hillary Cattle Car with both feet ?
A few weeks ago, when Ali died, I wrote to you and referred to you as a champion.
This is beneath you. Please stop it.
No less a leftist than Noam Chomsky is voting for Hillary.
West deserved it from driftglass. Piety has turned more people away from the church doors than sin ever has.
Why do accusations of purity trolling only go in one direction? Why is it never incumbent upon Hillary to meet us half way but rather always our duty to compromise further in ways that surely make David F. Brooks happy?
Why aren't the purity trolls those who demand we once again give Wall Street what it wants? Or those who want fracking? Or more drone strikes? Or more military intervention? Those are positions of purity as well. But why don't the gatekeepers of information ever demand that those positions be mocked for being too pure to the point of being absurd and fantastical? Those positions are bad policy. And they lead to the sort of distrust in the system and the party that leads to insane events such as Donald Trump and Brexit. However irrational such votes may seem to us, they are the only method ordinary people have of getting a message through to the elites past the media gatekeepers.
I'm far more disappointed, a sick feeling in my gut, by the new set of cheerleaders/media gatekeepers I see on twitter and blogs that I used to think of as progressive. Balloon Juice recently had a discussion about what methods of violence would be entertaining to use against people who dared voice dissent on the floor of the Dem convention. Baseballs bats to the face? Dropping them in acid? Release the hounds? These are "liberals" talking this way. And it seems like there is a whole new generation of liberal Hillary Supporters following in the Malcolm Tucker style of politics. We get in lockstep or we are cast out as the enemy and are dismissed as cranks.
For the record, I don't think for a second think Driftglass is one of these people I'm describing. You are still my hero DG and I agree Dr. West is exasperating. Not wrong on the issues, but exasperating. That said, Jill Stein is a lost cause and the false anti-vaxx stories against her only confirm my point above about her supporters. Their dirty tricks make Hillary look bad. But we should focus on pulling them to the left on issues as well and give up on third parties.
Again, I'll vote for Hillary because the alternative is a monster. I dislike the train analogy used by Bill Maher. I think of it as being bitten by a zombie. The choice becomes letting it infect the whole body or cutting off that limb.
"Why do accusations of purity trolling only go in one direction?"
Because purity is about the inability to accept less than 100%, not policies. Teabaggers who shut down the government qualify. Hillary supporters who would have voted for Bernie if he had won don't.
"Why is it never incumbent upon Hillary to meet us half way"
For the media, the answer is obvious. For reality, she did meet us half way and needs to stick with it. This election is hers to win or lose. If she throws away the liberal vote, she'll lose.
Dis-unity has crippled our movement more than piety ever has(a massive understatement).
Eye on the ball please.
I am no Noam Chomsky, but I'm voting for Hillary too.
But,
I doubt we will ever see Noam trashing Cornel West, Kshama Sawant, or even Jill Stein, for that matter. Quite the opposite, in fact.
The morning after Hillary wins, the first thing she should hear, upon waking up, is the roar of the bulldozers from the left.
Let's just please recognize what time it is and fail to shoot ourselves in the foot yet again. I saw the electoral college maps, and they all favored Hillary right now, but as Joy Reid warned, we shouldn't let that lull us into a sense of security. Do you remember who the Republicans are? They like winning elections, they are very wealthy, and they cheat. There are many things in the world that I would prefer over what I have right now, or more to the point, over the actual, real, options I'm facing. They are, however, the actual, real, options I'm facing, and as such, as an adult and a citizen, I will choose the best among them, and for president, that is unquestionably Hillary Clinton. There's not much I can do to help her locally, as I live in Oakland (a massive Sanders stronghold, and watch the margin by which Hillary wins here), but if I lived in, say, Ohio, I would be busting my ass to get all of my friends and neighbors to the polls. This is reality, people, and denying our actions can bring on a Republican administration with majorities in both houses of congress and Trump in the White House has obvious and easily understood consequences. Can we please avoid those now, and stay engaged in our party enough to get it to do some of what we want after the election? In other words, can we be less crazy than the Republicans? All the purity in the world won't help us if we fail to do at least that.
-Doug in Oakland
Uh-oh, the Purity Police are here and they're mad.
Sit down, and be quiet, and wait for the lesson, children.
Al Franken said that come Friday morning, the morning after the DNC ended, we all have to get to work. All of us. We're still going to argue over ideology vs. compromise, but it's a far sight better to do that with a Democrat in the WH and in the Senate Majority Leader's chair than the alternative.
As for our host, well, everyone needs a break when the anger-meter screams on 11 this frequently. I'm going to take a break from him whether he takes a vaca or not. Continuous Both-siderism and GOP Detachment Disorder rants are not going to be the glue that will unify us for the next 100 days.
Like nostalgia, both dissent & orthodoxy can quickly turn pathological.
Dissident culture turns morbid when it revels in never having even a slim chance of having to govern, more than glad to sabotage its own core dogma if that is necessary to maintain the sanctity of its political hymen until it either fossilizes or rots.
Sitting on your thumbs on election day so as to let a Dunning-Kruger-afflicted fascist systematically convert your country into rubble because their pro-democracy opponent is kind of icky & individual intellectual self-esteem is the ultimate good is a stance that's philosophically valid exactly zero percent of the time.
Driftglass was right: the sole qualification of A-List TV pontificators is the ability to be a highly radioactive emitter of memes. Can you unleash a torrent of easily absorbed mic drops and flaming shit bags into the unprofitable lull between commercials? You're hired. Your job is to go on Buster Friendly and his Friendly Friends and make all the left behinds feel comfortable. Be exactly the same all day everyday forever. And while you're there, tell them mercy and empathy is a hoax.
But it sure seems like the irony of their existence is when their success as a paid Sayer of Things depends entirely on the fact that no one actually listens to the actual words actually coming out of your actual mouth. That never ends well.
Exhibit A: Dr. Cornell West. Bernie Surrogate, Learned Professor, Administrator of Liberal Purity, Professionally Unappeasable Statler to Susan Sarandon's Waldorf. His main job is getting twirly eyed mobs to wave their pitchforks and torches. The media has typecast Dr West as one of the golems invoked by the Bernierage. Having him in the ensemble checks the box marked “BernieOrBust in da hizzy”.
Problem is he's not real good at it. No, wait, that's not it. Maybe the problem is that Democrats aren't real good at being twirly eyed mobs. So Dr. West goes on Real Time with Bill Maher, the media mainstream's closet thing to an oasis of Bernieness. Bernie people are the closest thing Democrats have to a twirly eyed mob. And on this night, El Queso Mas Grande was just there, man! There's no better time than the Presence! And Dr. West began to say things.
Result: appalled silence. The only thing missing was the clang of a thrown pitchfork hitting the ground, and someone muttering, “Oh, fuck off”.
See, 'cause there's something Democrats can do that Republicans can't: We can stop. We can think about what we're doing, we can be embarrassed, we can shake it off and look at the other guy and say, “I'm sorry. That was a bit much.” We can make amends. We can bury the hatchet. We can even say “It doesn't matter whether we like each other. What matters is that we're in this together.”
Between Cleveland and Philadelphia, it was empirically proven in real time for everybody and his Uncle Frankie to see: The one thing Democrats can do that Republicans can't is be decent. This is no longer about Democrats vs. Republicans. It's about people who identify and cultivate what lifts us out of the animal kingdom, versus those who just give in to what drags us back.
I would wager that the only media-approved Bernie Supporters not fully on board with Hillary Clinton are Dr. West, Susan Sarandon, and Bernie himself. I would have included H.A. Goodman, but Bernie Supporters are found in Sportswear. Mr. Goodman can be found in Lingerie.
But even Dr. West – who is now a Jill Stein supporter – seemed to be making himself uncomfortable calling Hillary Clinton a fascist. He flubbed the line, and immediately allowed himself to be frogmarched back to civilization. Maybe he didn't notice when actually competent journalist [and competent progressive] Alex Wagner wrote “rabble rouser” on a shiv and deftly flicked it into his back.
I will give him the benefit of the doubt, that it was this vestige of decency telling him to shut the fuck up for one minute.
Point is, when it was time for this largely pro-Bernie crowd to finish the job, they did not like it. They saw what it looks like from the outside, and it made them sick. They felt what it was like on the inside, and knew they couldn't just be each other's job anymore. They saw the little origami swans and knew it was time to run. But this time, it's Dr. Cornell West who won't last.
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