Biden, Trump, the left, elections…

[Mackeyser]

wv wrote:

Zooey wrote:

Liberals ARE condescending. Leftists, too. Maybe Leftists even more so. And so the masses hate universities and experts and everybody whom they feel look down their noses at them.
.

================

Well, i dunno, but I know that I find myself being condescending all the time. I also find myself fighting my own habit of being condescending all the time.
I do it. But i try not to do it. And the pattern repeats.

Why do i do it? Because I am dealing with people who choose some weird Bible phrase over Science. Religion over Science.
Or, they choose some comforting political-myth over actual History.

So when I as a leftist am trying to communicate with a right-winger it is a huge challenge. How does one communicate with someone who believes in Myths/Religions and rejects History/Facts/Science?

It often either devolves into me being condescending, Or, I just find a way to change the subject to Football.

But….I do NOT find rightwingers being condescending to ME. Mainly they just pray for me, or shake their heads.

So, my personal experience has been that lefties are condescending and righties are not.

w
v

Well, that last part is just BS. Not your personal experience, of course, but the overall conclusion.

As a reformed conservative, there is TONS of condescension among righties, but it manifests differently.

The left condescends about facts, reality, policies and the actual record.

Liberals condescend about identity, association and convenient intersectionality. Facts will be condescended about ONLY if it brings up hypocrisy on the right or furthers the needs of their corporate/donor masters.

The right condescends about conservative dogma…which has changed radically over the past 40 years… well except for that Liberals are weak and the Left is dangerous. Are you churchy enough? Are you 2A enough? Do you wanna kill brown people enough? That can look a lot of different ways from jingoism to racism and all sorts of dark combinations.

The right condescends plenty. If you’ve never had someone go further than “bless your heart”, then God bless, cuz they out there. I guess living in FL, we have a more concentrated sample to draw from.

Maybe it’s because I used to be a conservative and I still speak the language or because I considered going to seminary and have been an elder at several churches or because I served in the military, but I’m usually able to have a conversation with conservatives.

I mean… I like guns. I do. I’m a devout Christian and know my Bible. I guess I get what’s important to them.

There is a method and it’s basically the same as how I became a lefty… ask them straight questions and let them come to their own conclusions.

Like…

Cons: I’ll never have a gay son. I’ll have a dead son, but not a gay one.

Me: Wait. You love your son so little that you’d kill him over that?

Cons: You bet. No. Wait. I love my son.

Me: So you’re saying you’re better than Dick Cheney? He shoulda killed his daughter?

Cons: What? No! But the Bible says…

Me: Now wait a minute. It says in Revelation that anyone that changes one word of the book is doomed for all eternity. Right? Okay, well, then how come the story of Lot in the Bible was rewritten after a US businessman in the late 1800s went to Germany to commission a Bible that changed that story?

Cons: Wait…what?

Me: And even if you don’t want to go that deep, talking about the Council of Nicea and how the Bible we read in English… one of MANY translations…has been changed from the original Aramaic and Greek… Didn’t Jesus tell us to love one another as he loved us?

Cons: Well, now I don’t think he meant all that. My Pastor says…

Me: So, it was okay for him to break bread with prostitutes and tax collectors who in the ancient world were literally the lowest of the low, but in a world with Greek traditions and a Hebrew Orthodoxy that recognized SIX genders at that time, Jesus wanted us to love everyone but the gays?

Cons: Six what?

Me: yeah…six.

Cons: How does that even work?

Me: Well… that’s another conversation, but suffice it to say that Jesus wanted us to love everyone…even our enemies. And if he wanted us to love our enemies, then how could he not want us to love our own children?

And… it goes on from there.

Now… this can’t work on anyone stuck in dogma and that goes for anyone of any stripe. I’ve had convos where folks had all the barriers torn down and they just said, “nope, not changing my mind because I don’t want to even as you’re pointing out why I’m wrong using my own reference materials” Not much you can do there.

If a conversation can be made, then I usually have good success talking about things.

But yeah, one way to sort of judo pivot away from condescension is to frame new information as being part of the group that’s “in the know”

We all had to learn sometime, right?

I dunno… I descended into riffing like half way into this post…

Sports is the crucible of human virtue. The distillate remains are human vice.

[wv]

[wv]

[wv]

Mackeyser wrote:

wv wrote:

Zooey wrote:

Liberals ARE condescending. Leftists, too. Maybe Leftists even more so. And so the masses hate universities and experts and everybody whom they feel look down their noses at them.
.

================

Well, i dunno, but I know that I find myself being condescending all the time. I also find myself fighting my own habit of being condescending all the time.
I do it. But i try not to do it. And the pattern repeats.

Why do i do it? Because I am dealing with people who choose some weird Bible phrase over Science. Religion over Science.
Or, they choose some comforting political-myth over actual History.

So when I as a leftist am trying to communicate with a right-winger it is a huge challenge. How does one communicate with someone who believes in Myths/Religions and rejects History/Facts/Science?

It often either devolves into me being condescending, Or, I just find a way to change the subject to Football.

But….I do NOT find rightwingers being condescending to ME. Mainly they just pray for me, or shake their heads.

So, my personal experience has been that lefties are condescending and righties are not.

w
v

Well, that last part is just BS. Not your personal experience, of course, but the overall conclusion.

As a reformed conservative, there is TONS of condescension among righties, but it manifests differently.

The left condescends about facts, reality, policies and the actual record.

Liberals condescend about identity, association and convenient intersectionality. Facts will be condescended about ONLY if it brings up hypocrisy on the right or furthers the needs of their corporate/donor masters.

The right condescends about conservative dogma…which has changed radically over the past 40 years… well except for that Liberals are weak and the Left is dangerous. Are you churchy enough? Are you 2A enough? Do you wanna kill brown people enough? That can look a lot of different ways from jingoism to racism and all sorts of dark combinations.

The right condescends plenty. If you’ve never had someone go further than “bless your heart”, then God bless, cuz they out there. I guess living in FL, we have a more concentrated sample to draw from.

Maybe it’s because I used to be a conservative and I still speak the language or because I considered going to seminary and have been an elder at several churches or because I served in the military, but I’m usually able to have a conversation with conservatives.

I mean… I like guns. I do. I’m a devout Christian and know my Bible. I guess I get what’s important to them.

There is a method and it’s basically the same as how I became a lefty… ask them straight questions and let them come to their own conclusions.

Like…

Cons: I’ll never have a gay son. I’ll have a dead son, but not a gay one.

Me: Wait. You love your son so little that you’d kill him over that?

Cons: You bet. No. Wait. I love my son.

Me: So you’re saying you’re better than Dick Cheney? He shoulda killed his daughter?

Cons: What? No! But the Bible says…

Me: Now wait a minute. It says in Revelation that anyone that changes one word of the book is doomed for all eternity. Right? Okay, well, then how come the story of Lot in the Bible was rewritten after a US businessman in the late 1800s went to Germany to commission a Bible that changed that story?

Cons: Wait…what?

Me: And even if you don’t want to go that deep, talking about the Council of Nicea and how the Bible we read in English… one of MANY translations…has been changed from the original Aramaic and Greek… Didn’t Jesus tell us to love one another as he loved us?

Cons: Well, now I don’t think he meant all that. My Pastor says…

Me: So, it was okay for him to break bread with prostitutes and tax collectors who in the ancient world were literally the lowest of the low, but in a world with Greek traditions and a Hebrew Orthodoxy that recognized SIX genders at that time, Jesus wanted us to love everyone but the gays?

Cons: Six what?

Me: yeah…six.

Cons: How does that even work?

Me: Well… that’s another conversation, but suffice it to say that Jesus wanted us to love everyone…even our enemies. And if he wanted us to love our enemies, then how could he not want us to love our own children?

And… it goes on from there.

Now… this can’t work on anyone stuck in dogma and that goes for anyone of any stripe. I’ve had convos where folks had all the barriers torn down and they just said, “nope, not changing my mind because I don’t want to even as you’re pointing out why I’m wrong using my own reference materials” Not much you can do there.

If a conversation can be made, then I usually have good success talking about things.

But yeah, one way to sort of judo pivot away from condescension is to frame new information as being part of the group that’s “in the know”

We all had to learn sometime, right?

I dunno… I descended into riffing like half way into this post…

================

Now wait just a damn minute here, how can you be a Christian? 🙂

I knew you used to be one, but i figured you’d left that behind.

What kinda Christian are you? I mean, do you think a guy named Jesus rose from the dead and went up to heaven to save us, etc?

w
v

[waterfield]

wv wrote:

I was pondering the old conundrum last night about why so many people vote for the GOP, counter to their own interests. And I was thinking that part of it is that those voters, like Trump supporters, are really low information voters, ya know. Nothing new there. But that doesn’t answer the question. They’re low information either way, so how does the GOP get their allegiance?

“I was pondering the old conundrum last night about why so many people vote for the GOP, counter to their own interests. And I was thinking that part of it is that those voters, like Trump supporters, are really low information voters, ya know. Nothing new there. But that doesn’t answer the question. They’re low information either way, so how does the GOP get their allegiance?”

Personally, I think that the changing demographics is the engine driving their allegiance. White folks-in the GOP-look at how fast “their country” is changing. Color wise, information technology, gay rights, career changes, women advancements, population increases, etc-“it ain’t what it used to be”. We remember how good things used to be. Computers baffle us-especially when they breakdown-, smart tvs, smart phones, blah blah. Life just seemed to be much simpler and far less stressful. White males especially, 50 plus, yearn for those simple days. Probably due to my age I admit to some of that. I’ve come to hate technology. I tell my wife often when our tv remote breaks down: “I remember when you could walk up to the tv and change the channel with your hand, and I got as much information then as I do today. “. That’s when she gets up and leaves -after throwing the remote at me.

Anyway, the GOP understands all that and taps into it while the democrats engulf it. IMO GOP voters are intentionally stuck in the sand and either want to go back or at least slow the forward movement down as much as they can. When you add to that malaise the racists, truly ignorant, evangelicals, and wealthy business and corporation owners who want nothing more than getting rid of regulations so they can profit more-well there you have the GOP. I suppose you can add to that Nazis who want to take over the country and now I have to take a nap.

[Zooey]

Radical left: Healthcare plz

Radical right: let’s kidnap a Governor

— Dary Rezvani for SCCCD Trustee Area 3 🎃 (@DaryRezvani) October 8, 2020

[Mackeyser]

Now wait just a damn minute here, how can you be a Christian? />

I knew you used to be one, but i figured you’d left that behind.

What kinda Christian are you? I mean, do you think a guy named Jesus rose from the dead and went up to heaven to save us, etc?

w
v

I’m a devout radically left Christian. The true Christ of the Bible was pretty radical, eschewing the aggregation of wealth, put helping people even above the orthodoxy of being religiously pure and holding corrupt authority in violent disdain.

Of course, I question… every day.

And if the conclusion I came to was that Jesus was the God of Polo shirts, private jets and the prosperity Gospel… I’d disavow it all in a heartbeat.

Are leftist Christians like Log Cabin Republicans? I dunno. I know in the Christian community, we’re a small sect and not really acknowledged by the mainstream.

Also, I’m kinda like Thomas insofar as I’ve had what I can only describe as supernatural experiences which I can only interpret as divine.

I’ve seen things, ya see…

Sports is the crucible of human virtue. The distillate remains are human vice.

[Mackeyser]

Also why, when I quoted WV did the emoji become gigantic???

Sports is the crucible of human virtue. The distillate remains are human vice.

[zn]

Mackeyser wrote:

Also why, when I quoted WV did the emoji become gigantic???

It’s just a dumb thing in this software. Either just edit it out after the fact or quote only by blueing out the bits you want to quote and then hit quote.

[wv]

Mackeyser wrote:

Also, I’m kinda like Thomas insofar as I’ve had what I can only describe as supernatural experiences which I can only interpret as divine.

I’ve seen things, ya see…

================

Yer talkin about the Proehl catch.

Granted, science cant explain it yet, but
I’m sure Nittany has some theory or other.

w
v

[zn]

waterfield wrote:

IMO GOP voters are intentionally stuck in the sand and either want to go back or at least slow the forward movement down as much as they can. When you add to that malaise the racists, truly ignorant, evangelicals, and wealthy business and corporation owners who want nothing more than getting rid of regulations so they can profit more-well there you have the GOP. I suppose you can add to that Nazis who want to take over the country and now I have to take a nap.

Yeah that’s a good summary.

[wv]

zn wrote:

waterfield wrote:

IMO GOP voters are intentionally stuck in the sand and either want to go back or at least slow the forward movement down as much as they can. When you add to that malaise the racists, truly ignorant, evangelicals, and wealthy business and corporation owners who want nothing more than getting rid of regulations so they can profit more-well there you have the GOP. I suppose you can add to that Nazis who want to take over the country and now I have to take a nap.

Yeah that’s a good summary.

============

I dunno. I think Waterfield has become some sort of leftwing extremist.

Fires. Must be smoke inhalation or somethin.

w
v

[JackPMiller]

[Zooey]

wv wrote:

Sigh. Just when i think Biden has it in the bag.

Newsweek poll:https://www.newsweek.com/less-month-until-election-donald-trump-doing-better-swing-state-polls-this-time-2016-1535611
With Less Than a Month Until the Election, Donald Trump Is Doing Better in Swing State Polls Than This Time in 2016

[waterfield]

Zooey wrote:

wv wrote:

Sigh. Just when i think Biden has it in the bag.

Newsweek poll:https://www.newsweek.com/less-month-until-election-donald-trump-doing-better-swing-state-polls-this-time-2016-1535611
With Less Than a Month Until the Election, Donald Trump Is Doing Better in Swing State Polls Than This Time in 2016

I’ve never liked the “are you better off ” questions. They assume the worst of Capitalism. It’s all about you. Not about the homeless, not about healthcare, not about education, not about environment, not about criminal justice, etc. Only one’s selfish interests.

[zn]

waterfield wrote:

I’ve never liked the “are you better off ” questions. They assume the worst of Capitalism. It’s all about you. Not about the homeless, not about healthcare, not about education, not about environment, not about criminal justice, etc. Only one’s selfish interests.

It’s a collective question though. True, it is addressed to voters who tend to have incomes. And there’s nothing wrong with assuming American neo-liberal style capitalist policies are a problem. What else causes all of these at once: homelessness; a privatized health insurance system that underwrites a healthcare system that is both too costly and too ineffective and even then is out the reach of many; the de-funding of education; the wreckage of the environment, which is both caused and defended by private interests in the name of profit; a criminal justice system based on fear which does not even criminalize the most common form of theft which is wage theft.

[wv]

Just a chart floating around:
==========

[Billy_T]

Last time I took the Political Compass test, I had minus nines for both, and was nearly maxed out to the bottom, far left.

Obviously, none of those tests are even meant to be definitive, but it’s weird that no politician is close to — I’d bet — any of us here, when it comes to the bottom left quadrant.

Recently took the 8values one too, and it put me in the libertarian socialist camp, though my score on economic equality was something like 93%, which cudda placed my in the libertarian communist camp too.

Almost finished with Erich Fromm’s (Frankfurt School) really interesting To Have or To Be (1976), and I could probably add “socialist humanist” to the labels for meself. That term isn’t used too often these days, but it fits for me in many ways.

That said, as per the thread I started earlier, I’m feeling a bit “homeless” these days, politically. I think the smartest way out of that feeling is to concentrate a hell of a lot more on non-political stuff . . . more on the Arts, Music, Philosophy, life. More on what Fromm talks about as the move from “having” to “being.”

[wv]

Billy_T wrote:

That said, as per the thread I started earlier, I’m feeling a bit “homeless” these days, politically. I think the smartest way out of that feeling is to concentrate a hell of a lot more on non-political stuff . . . more on the Arts, Music, Philosophy, life. More on what Fromm talks about as the move from “having” to “being.”

==========================

Its tough for hardcore leftists to find the healthy balance.
Politics calls to us.
Like Sauron’s Ring.

My Presh-us.

w
v

[wv]

Biden is a commie. A tool of Comrad Castro.

=============

MELTDOWN. MELTDOWN. https://t.co/ghdpfwWTdu

— James Foster #GrassrootsVoice (@JamesEFoster) October 10, 2020

[wv]

The suspense is killing me. I have no idea how accurate these polls are.
======================================

“Even if every undecided or current third party voter went to Trump now, he'd still be down about 5 to 6 points nationally.” https://t.co/MIn53aVP8E

— Krystal Ball (@krystalball) October 11, 2020

[zn]

wv wrote:

Politics calls to us.
Like Sauron’s Ring.

My Presh-us.

w
v

[Zooey]

How did the challenger fare in 1936?

[wv]

Jeezus. What if the polls are right. I dunno.
==============

[Mackeyser]

I still think Trump wins, but I think the turnout will be higher than in 2016 thanks to the cult of Trump creating demand on both sides.

Sports is the crucible of human virtue. The distillate remains are human vice.

[wv]

Gerald Horne. Historian.

[wv]

…at the six minute mark of that Vid above: “….vote democrat With an Olympic Footnote”

w
v

[wv]

I read somewhere Cusack is hard to work for, but i bet he’s easy to work for if you are a leftie.
JC:https://progressive.org/magazine/john-cusack-interview-nichols/

…Q: You campaigned for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries, and you were quite critical of Joe Biden. Now, however, you find yourself arguing that a vote for Biden is urgent. Give me a sense of how you’re thinking about the November election.

John Cusack: I think we vote for Biden and then, the very next day, we haunt him with every one of Bernie’s policy positions. We go: health care, living wage, student debt, green energy. We keep that pressure on him from day one.

We have to recognize that, as Noam Chomsky says, we are voting against neofascism, and yet we are also voting for more neoliberalism. After the election, we have to push the neoliberals back into the New Deal framework that the times demand. There’s going to have to be an FDR-like intervention.

There has to be a reckoning.

It’s interesting that the Democrats want to bask in the glow of FDR, but they don’t want to actually do any of his policies. I don’t know why they’re not just saying, “There will not be a permanent underclass that is in crippling debt with the Democrats in charge. We are going to make the billionaires pay, and we’re going to get economic justice coming in all across these various fields where we all know that needs to happen.”

So what I’m really saying is that, if you don’t feel like you can vote for Joe Biden, then you vote against Trump. You vote out Trump and then fight….see link

[Mackeyser]

Yeah… the problem with that is that it ignores a few things.

1) the DNC is ideologically, structurally and financially incapable of embracing left policies. They dismantled their ground game in the 90s in favor of corporations and donors.

2) The DNC is on record with thought, word and deed that they would rather embrace very hard right neofascism rather than do anything more than pay lip service to even center left ideas.

3) the DNC has been complicit in disenfranchising (to the point of election fraud) voters by a number of means including, but not limited to voter roll purging, gerrymandering, and undercutting progressive candidates with a chance of defeating Republican candidates with Center-Right candidates with NO chance of winning… (see: DNC running Amy McGrath, a self-styled Trump Democrat over Charles Booker, a progressive with grassroots support)

4) #2 needs to be repeated. There has been no fight about Trump’s court appointments. There was no fight to get Obama’s court appointments through.

So… to all of the Cusack’s out there…

I don’t begrudge your take, but it’s fantasy.

If Trump wins, the DNC wins because they can fund-raise the shit out of Roe falling and continue to make millions with hysterical emails.

If Biden wins, the DNC wins as they can say that their center-right neoliberal schtick has a “mandate” and this proves that America want’s what their selling.

I can’t with all that bullshit.

Both parties ensure that there are only two different brands of shit soup on the shelves and they really want to argue over which tastes better based on sales while ignoring their mafia-esque grip on what the store is ALLOWED to sell.

Honestly, American democracy is more and more a sarcastic joke or an oxymoron than a thing.

Sports is the crucible of human virtue. The distillate remains are human vice.

[Zooey]

People Biden is vetting: John Kasich, Meg Whitman, Jeff Flake, Charlie Baker, Charlie Dent

People Biden is not vetting: Anyone who endorsed Bernie Sandershttps://t.co/yxA1pjuc8p

— Krystal Ball (@krystalball) October 20, 2020

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