Doc Avid Mornington @ docAvid @midwest.social

Not actually a doctor.

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2 yr. ago

Voting uncommitted in a primary isn't going to help Trump. After election, after election, after election, where we've been desperately trying to tell angry, fed-up voters that the time to express that is in the primary, and they have to vote against the worst candidate in the general election, turning around and telling them now that they can't even vote how they want in the goddamn primary absolutely will help Trump.

which usually leads to someone taking a look

Nevermind the idea that one reviewer is somehow sufficient, this sounds like pure fantasy. Did you forget a "/s"?

You must do what you feel is right, of course. I disagree that it is inevitable, I disagree that there is nothing you can do, and as I said above, I doubt that, should it happen, anybody will be safe, anywhere; but I wish you and yours safety and peace, wherever you go.

Pretending that there's no way for the Democratic leadership to put their thumb on the scale, other than "brainwashing", when it's been proven that they did just that, is disingenuous at best. Doing so in defense of the fundamentally antidemocratic proposition that people shouldn't be able to vote their conscience in the primary is shady as anything. You basically accused me of being a "right wing troll" in a previous comment. Protest too much?

He can play two roles, it's not as simple as either good or bad. Capitalist Democratic leadership that is dedicated more to controlling the party's left wing than defeating the country's extremist right wing has and does enable fascism. This isn't even a remotely controversial take, historically speaking. Trump owes his first presidency to the likes of Clinton and Obama, and yes, Joe Biden, who had had a long career of neoliberalism.

That said, while Biden hasn't been, by any means, a perfect president, he has been far better than I expected, possibly the most progressive president since LBJ. And he is standing, albeit somewhat vaguely, between Trump and the Whitehouse.

But stopping Trump isn't going to stop the slide into fascism. It can only, at best, delay things until the next election. To do that, we need a strong progressive movement to send a true leftist coalition to take over DC, and set a national tone and direction that moves away from the fascist ledge.

Fascism is on the rise globally. If enough decent people leave the US, we will fall into a fascist regime, and it will be the beginning of World War Three, with the US leading the equivalent of the Axis powers. No place in the world will be safe for you or your children. That's the hard, honest truth.

It's a primary. If Democratic leadership has moved on from telling people that they have to get behind the nominee in the general election, to now telling people that that can't even vote against the candidate the elites have selected in a primary, they are effectively working for Trump, and tanking the election.

Guillotine isn't on the ballot.

Democratic leadership telling people who are upset with their chosen candidate that they can't even vote against him in the primary is a direct attack on democracy, and absolutely the best way for them to get Trump elected.

No, a statement against democracy, and the exact kind of rhetoric that will get Trump reelected. If Democratic leadership is telling people they can't even vote against the chosen candidate in a damn primary now, they might as well come out and endorse Trump themselves. It's obscene.

Every time people are saying they will vote third party in the general, I argue that it's important to vote for the best viable candidate, and the time to vote against a Democrat they don't like is in the primaries. When people start saying no, you can't even vote against the party leadership's chosen candidate in a primary, what do you think they're going to do? BS antidemocratic rhetoric like that is exactly what is most likely to get us another Trump presidency. We start down that road and we can kiss democracy goodbye for good.

OK, but it's an important distinction, when you say:

The Democratic Party's ambitions extend no further and never will.

If, in that context, you mean the people who control the party, that's fine, you are correct, but other people are likely to hear that there is no hope of ever changing the direction of the party apparatus itself. We can see from the Republican party that it's not impossible to seize control of a major party - Trump and his maga cult did it. Bernie almost did, twice. We can take the reigns and steer the party where we want to go.

The people who control the party fight progressives and capitulate to Republicans. Of course the people who control the party are going to fight us to keep control of it. It remains the only viable tool to win in general elections. Blaming "the party" is like being on a losing football team and blaming the ball.

They used to, and they can again. A party is not a person or even a group of people. Let that silly anthropomorphism go. A party is a tool, a lever of power. Don't like the people who control it? Great! Neither do I. Let's take it from them.

It "feels good" but it doesn't work. The math isn't there. If you can't nominate a better candidate in a Democratic primary, with a significantly smaller and further-left voter base, you aren't even in the game for the general election. Do you want to feel good, or have an impact?

Where do you work, and are they hiring?

Yes, I can fault someone for thinking Trump was unelectable; any professional politician who thought that would have been incompetent. But more importantly, Hillary Clinton isn't incompetent - she knew it was a risk, and she played Russian Roulette with the country. Beyond that, she has been part of the neoliberal establishment that has set policies that we know historically set the stage for fascism, for decades. It's amazing to me that people can look at the most powerful, privileged, and entitled people in our country, and somehow think they are guiltless, but put all that weight on our fellow citizens.

I'm an old emacs warrior, tired of the war. I'm Church of Emacs, but why? I don't know what I don't know about the advantages of vi/vim, I only know that when I see other coders use them, they seem to weave the magic about as well as I do.

I know that I have a ton of built-up configuration code that makes emacs the perfect editor for me. I know that I can't imagine using git much without magit, or how I would organize anything without org-mode, or how I could tolerate the frustration of editing in a container on a remote server without tramp. I know that I have a huge familiarity bias.

I know that whenever I see anybody with with any of these flashy new-fangled editors, they spend most of their time futzing around with dials and buttons and other gadgets, and thinking about how cool it all is, rather than thinking about the code. They start projects really quickly, they handle some refactoring edge cases slightly faster, but they take forever to do any real work, and are completely unprepared to do anything with a new language or text structure at all.

I say: Vim and Emacs against the world.

When people talk about voting third party in the general election, I always tell them the primary is the time to vote for who we really want - in the general election, we have to vote for the best viable candidate. When you tell them to sit on their hands in the primary, too, what do you think they'll do?

Yeah, so you should be really mad at the powerful people who are flirting with that, the same powerful people who made high level decisions that lead to the first Trump presidency, not at the voters they ignore.