One man's view:
There have always been nutjobs and idiots in politics and there always will be, but I think a disturbing trend in recent years has been smart non-crazy people getting invested in sanewashing bad actors.
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) June 23, 2021
By "sanewashing," Matt is referring to the practice of trying to explain away insane statements. For example, "Defunding the police doesn't really mean defunding the police. It really means _______"
Now, for some reason this is not an issue on the right. Their nutcases get to say anything they want and nobody cares. I acknowledge that this is totally unfair. But who cares? The goal of politics is to win elections, not to lose and then whine about the unfairness of the other side having some advantage you lack.
On the left, which is what I care about, this is a big issue, and it's a big issue for one specific reason: it scares off people who might vote for us. Go ahead and ask your moderate conservative friends why they're afraid to vote for Democrats even though they admit that Trump has turned the Republican Party into a clown show. The answer is almost always going to be a litany of complaints about the most extreme progressive policies out there. They're afraid Democrats want to spend another $6 trillion because one guy proposed it. They're afraid Democrats want to open the border with Mexico because a small clique approves of it. They're afraid Democrats want to get rid of the police because three or four people suggested it. They're afraid Democrats want to pack the Supreme Court even though this is a distinctly limited view.
I could go on, but you get the idea. These kinds of things are killers for a party that wants to win more votes, but everyone is afraid to publicly denounce them hard and fast for fear of being branded racist/sexist/transphobic/etc. by a few extremists. And that's all the opening that Fox News and others need to make it seem as if this stuff might really be the goal of mainstream liberals.
Mainstream liberals should not be afraid to make a distinction between proposals that are merely to our left and proposals that are batshit crazy. The former we can oppose in a normal way (and vice versa), but the latter should be swatted down with extreme prejudice. It doesn't matter if the folks proposing the crazy ideas are white or Black, young or old, or men or women. Have the guts to call them nutcases if that's what they are and to accept the inevitable accusations of racism, sexism, ageism, or whatever. Just tell the truth. If something is crazy, call it crazy.
After all, you want to win, don't you?
Maybe you should take it as a project to issue ritual denunciations every time some leftist proposes something extreme. Would that take care of it? As for me, I don't have time for that.
You couldn't even bother to read what Kevin wrote. Given that, why should anyone your opinions to be worth reading, let alone give them any consideration?
I agree. I have no objection in theory to KD's thoughts here, and yes, we want to win, not complain about the other side's unfair advantage after we lose.
But this would be a never-ending job -- not because of the number of leftwing nuts, but because the right will never tire of finding something someone on the left said to complain about.
That said ... maybe instead of calling out every crazy thing as crazy, maybe just stop embracing and trying to explain stuff we find crazy?
Two words: swing voters. And by that includes whether they think it's worthwhile or not to go out and vote.
Who said "Defunding the police doesn't really mean defunding the police. It really means _______"?
It would be helpful if you gave some examples of actual insane statements and who said them, along with some examples of people trying to explain them away.
More generally, calling out extreme statements from the left might help if the right were operating from good faith, but that ship sailed long ago. Identifying extreme statements of a few seems like a lot of effort to convince at best two or three sane Republicans.
Ah the predictable Pedantic Quibble and pretension that something never happened....
It doesn't matter if the right is operating from good faith as long as there are a non-trivial amount of scare-of-the-left voters operating from good faith. Plenty of people are smart and reasonable, but just don't have the bandwidth to deeply engage with politics. So they just take at face value the conventional wisdom they hear. If all of that comes from Fox news, that's what they will believe. If they also hear people pushing back against this, in some cases that will make a difference.
But Fox News isn't going to show the pushback. This is a one way ratchet. Even non-extreme stances will require denunciation. Also, random twitter posts shouldn't be weaponized to represent current progressive stances.
Right. And a dedicated Fox News viewer is probably not going to vote Democrat anyway. But there are a lot of people who don't watch Fox News but hear about these things from people who do. If they also talk to liberals, whether these liberals push back against the Fox caricature of the left or try to justify and excuse it, that could make a big difference.
Pushing back doesn't have to mean denunciation. It can just mean pointing out that these things are caricatures that very few people on the left actually believe. As opposed to defending -- or "sanewashing" -- them.
Uh, just about everyone? If you're demanding examples you're _way_ out the loop.
+1
This could be the start of a beautiful relationship 🙂
Here an insane lefty idea I'd like you to denounce. One Billion Americans. I await your response.
Have you ever met a "Quiverfull" believer?
Not lefties.
And here is an insane lefty idea to prevent 1 billion Americans.
Free birth control.
Where would those one billion Americans come from? Immigration? Last I knew the US fertility rate is below replacement. Without immigration our population will start to shrink.
NYUH-UH PEPPERMINT ROLL.
Uh. the point that is being made is that Matthew Yglesias wrote a book calling for one billion Americans, to be achieved mostly through immigration, an idea that would indeed sound crazy to most Americans
Thank you.
This is where I'm perhaps an insane lefty. If we want to be able to maintain our lead over China, and prevent China, and the corresponding total lack of any care for human rights, from being the dominant power in the world, we need to be focused on how we are going to increase the American population via mass immigration, and should be trying to figure out how to naturalize ~100M new Americans per decade minimum.
Anything short of that means that the massive population leverage China has will ultimately allow China to eclipse the US as the core world power.
Interesting, I realized that you used capital letters and found the Yglesias book. Apparently he and I have come to the same conclusions.
I am all for constraining global population to mitigate climate impacts, and I don't particularly want to see the US birth rate go up. The nuance here is that I think it's better for the world *and for the climate* if we were to get more people to move here from other countries. US population growth doesn't have to mean driving global population growth.
Unless and until per-capita emissions in the US drop below the level required globally for sustainability, anyone moving to the United States from almost anywhere else on the planet means a net increase in emissions.
Do we want to maintain our lead over China? Why?
Also, China's population is aging rapidly (because of the one child policy). Is a country of 2 billion old people really that threatening?
Answer is that while Pax Americana has a lot of downsides to it, Pax China is going to be much much worse for global human rights.
I'm not saying we are perfect, but we at least do try to crack down on the human rights violations we can have some influence over. A Pax China will actively encourage worldwide human rights abuses in the name of order.
I want to point out that China has literal concentration camps for Uighurs where they use rape and torture to purge their identity. A world where China is the sole or most powerful superpower is a world where the superpower uses their power to *support* nations committing ethnic cleansing, not one where the superpower uses sanctions or military intervention to curb it.
Answer is that while Pax Americana has a lot of downsides to it, Pax China is going to be much much worse for global human rights.
There's a long way to go between China gaining some kind of lead and a "Pax China" where it defines and runs the world system.
I want to point out that China has literal concentration camps for Uighurs where they use rape and torture to purge their identity.
You don't know very much about American history, do you?
A world where China is the sole or most powerful superpower is a world where the superpower uses their power to *support* nations committing ethnic cleansing, not one where the superpower uses sanctions or military intervention to curb it.
You don't know very much about American history, do you?
That's probably an insane number of people. The housing strain alone would be immense, not to mention the ecological hit if any significant number of them wanted to move to California, which is pretty much a desert with pumped in water.
I actually am pretty hawkish on China but tripling the US population is a terrible idea even for Yglesias (a font of terrible ideas). Aside from the insane rise in emissions, we already lack the jobs to give people a good life now and with most of the west settling into massive drought feeding that many people is questionable. The internal social disruptions brought by such a rapid immigration increase in a multicultural society may also consume attention and resources to an extent that prevents the country from coherent action. Multi-ethic societies are HARD.
Keep in mind, Yglesias isn't a China hawk. He was happy to trade putting millions of Americans into poverty to bring tens of millions of Chinese into the middle class. Or at least he was in the early 2010s.
All things being equal, isn't that actually the most humanitarian thing to do? 9 million net people into the middle class is a huge win. Just because I was born in the same country with a set of people doesn't mean I should value their experience 10x over that of someone else. Optimizing for the maximal number of people leaving poverty, regardless of where they happen to live strikes me as a deeply positive policy.
We don't need more people to stay ahead of China (unless the only metric in play are population numbers). History is full to the brim with small nations handing large, populous empires their butts.
I think One Billion Americans is a great idea. I'm not a big fan of the guy who wrote the book but this idea is an excellent one. If you want the future of this country to look more like the "Honey, I Shrunk the Empire" UK, then you should be against expanding the population. If you want the future of the world to be dominated by large undemocratic powers, then you should be against expanding the US population. But if you want the US to remain a first-tier nation, then we need to grow our population significantly. Despite our problems, I think America is a big net-plus for the world, and in general, the more Americans the better.
That said, One Billion Americans is a campaign slogan for exactly nobody. If it were, I'd question that politician's fitness to run for office. Smart politicians should be for policies supporting growth and for a more sane and humane immigration policy. That's not so hard.
Re Kevin's post: I support the general thrust, but I would distinguish between:
a.) Good ideas / proposals that the public is not ready for (e.g., gay marriage until about a decade ago)
b.) Bad ideas / proposals that are bad and unlikely to ever be considered popular (e.g., "defund the police")
I think you are overreacting to the conservative discourse.
They will make us look and sound insane no matter what we do.
Yes, occasionally they have some easy shots and a specific incident merits stomping on by lefties against crazy lefties. but most of the time it is Fx news and other lying media outlets amping whatever it is up.
Why couldn't they come up with something both pithier and poppier? Like Police The Police</em?
But where the rubber hits the road is that they still defend the slogan on the grounds it is 'accurate' after it's been pointed out how damaging it is to Democratic electoral prospects.
"Police the Police" is pretty good, actually.
Than kew, very much.
Because many of the activists feel (correctly) that reform has been promised and tried and failed. A number of them don't want to police the police, they actually do want to defund them.
We already have one batshit extremist party. We don't need a second one. I do think the far left is a bit of a problem but much less of one than the far right so I won't have an equal reaction to both of them. Although I do think they amplify each other's extremism in some sort of feedback loop (clashes in Portland come to mind).
the huge difference is the extremist lefrtist statements tend to be from some random internet person with no power. The rightwing ones are from Senators and Comgressmen
"The rightwing ones are from Senators and Comgressmen"
...as well as, you know, highly-organized armed militia groups storm the US Capitol to launch a coup to keep their leader in power.
Apparently that's nothing compared to some adjunct professor at a rally talking about CRT, though.
The fundamental core problem for the left is always the same one. As a group, we would rather be "right" than in charge.
I get that an ends justifies the means perspective can go some really dark places fast, but we get beholden to a purity of thought that doesn't allow for iterative change. I think we need to figure out how to get our side to embrace the idea that so long as we're getting closer to the lighthouse, we don't need to always be faced directly towards it.
We need to save the fight for the people who want us to be going the opposite direction, not the people who are tacking but still taking us in the right direction overall.
We need more pragmatism.
I agree, though I would describe it differently. Activists are not politicians. They aren't trying to win elections. They work toward a different agenda. They want to draw attention to an issue. They want to get people to talk about it. They operate by the old adage "there's no such thing as bad publicity".
This puts them at odds with people who do want to win elections, for sure. And, it may play a vital role in bringing about change.
That adage is old and outdated.
If activists want to see actual change, they really should be focused on being able to execute policy, just sayin'.
Part of what the Wingnut Wurlitzer (tm), led by the Fox prime time lineup, does so well is picks some comment by or interview with some progressive activist or campus radical -- not a party chairman, congressperson, or anyone with any institutional influence in Democratic politics -- and then makes it look like this is now the mainstream Democratic position. It's why Republicans are now convinced Joe Biden supports open borders and wants to defund the police despite him having said a million times that he in no way supports that. If Democrats ran around denouncing someone every time this happened, they'd have no time for anything else -- which is precisely the point: Suck up all the oxygen and control the messaging. The closest thing to a real leftist in mainstream Democratic circles is AOC, and she, quite frankly, is freaking Winston Churchill compared to MTG, Boehlert, Gomert, or 20 other completely batshit rightwingers all the way up to Trump himself who actually *do* control the Republican party.
+++
No kidding. Kevin has to be reading this wrong, if Donald Trump isn't the biggest example of "sanewashing" in human history after, I don't know, Hitler? Who is?
De fund the police isn't an example of some extreme left wing Dem proposal which needs to be sanewashed, by the way.
Its an example of a ridiculously vague slogan which has no practical meaning, and correspondingly is ridiculously easy to attack while at the same time needing to be explained. I don't know who came up with it but the problem was not that its a "crazy" idea, the problem was it was so inside baseball that 95% of the country had no idea what it meant.
Donald Trump's influence is from Black Africa. That is truth. The Hitler obsession with him by white liberals speaks to their own fears within.
The reason that 95% of the country had no idea "what it meant" is that what it supposedly meant directly contradicts its wording. And, quite naturally, when supporters then shuffle their feet, clear their throats and explain that it really means shifting some resources away from armed response towards other approaches to social problems that spill over into legal infractions, people are suspicious of a motte and bailey.
On top of that, there *are* people out there who actually do want to completely defund and abolish the police. They're a small fringe, but they are rather vocal, and it is easy for opponents to highlight them.
"Defund the police" is likely to be remembered as the stupidest political slogan of the century.
'Motte and bailey'. Haven't heard anyone use that terminology for a good while.
Bingo
Name 3 crazies on our side who are receiving this sanewashing treatment?
The "abolish the police" people certainly got it. That's probably the paradigmatic example- instead of just saying "it would be insane to abolish the police", a lot of people went out of their way to portray it as if it was just a set of relatively sane and moderate reforms.
You can argue that the critical race theory types are getting it right now, not that CRT is the most important issue in the world. "Nobody's really teaching about CRT, what people are calling CRT is really just opposition to racism", etc. Matt Yglesias tweeted out some actual critical race theory saying that the government and capitalist system must be overthrown and liberalism defeated. It seems to me that folks can say that THAT is crazy.
The other big one I thought of is the position that the US should do no border enforcement at all; that anyone who gets to our borders should be let in, no effort be made to deport people who lose their asylum petitions, no statements be made to discourage people from coming, etc. Heck, I'm basically for open borders in the sense that I think we should make create lawful means for people who want to come here to come here, but even in my perfect world, there's gonna be a border patrol and people can't just come in unchecked. The notion of no border enforcement at all is crazy.
"The other big one I thought of is the position that the US should do no border enforcement at all"
Can you name anyone who is arguing for that/
Hillary Clinton argued for a version of it in a 2016 debate, but nowadays it's all over online discourse. E.g., criticizing Kamala Harris for saying "don't come", criticizing Biden for requiring asylum seekers to go through legal channels, etc.
No, she did not.
And no, you cannot name anyone who is arguing that the United States should do no border enforcement at all.
Sure, I am personally acquainted with Susan Calvin, Heywood Floyd, and Clifford 'Kip' Russell. Done.
I meant this as a reply to another post, so please disregard.
Al Sharpton being treated as anything but a pariah is certainly one.
Nina Turner.
Nathan Robinson.
Jill Stein.
I'm pretty sure I've seen more op-eds saying "'Defund the Police' is the dumbest thing ever" than I have seen anyone other than the sad street corner schizophrenia case saying "Defund the Police". In fact, I believe Tom Friedman in the NYT said it again just in the last day or two. It seems denouncing "Defund the Police" will never stop.
Meanwhile, the message really SHOULD be: the IRS is the police for rich people. Why does the GOP insist on defunding the police?
Really? Every time I comment that it is a stupid slogan I am bombarded by comments calling me a troll.
I never ceased to be astonishingly amazed at how many online "friends" (and actual friends who comment online) I have who incessantly push memes for defunding the police. Once in a blue moon, I comment something like, "you know this is the dumbest slogan ever, right?" And I inevitably get some version of, "but the slogan doesn't mean what it says!" Now that's strategy! or not.
I saw so many of those from "friends" during the protests last year. But they always end up including a 7 paragraph long explanation about why "defund the police" doesn't actually mean what it says. If your slogan causes you to spend all your time explaining what it really means instead of actually pushing for change and reform, it's a bad slogan.
That's exactly the point though. We've spent so much time debating over the slogan that it hasn't been worth it.
Isn't "the squad" still yapping about defunding the police?
As well they should be, since their job is to boost GQP turnout as the controlled opposition to your side.
As you know, since you have the same Muscovite masters.
Somebody gets it.
I'm getting the feeling that since he started this blog, Kevin has been watching FOX all day. Am I the only one?
First, the nutcases are not "ours" in any sense. People like Bill Maher, Michael Moore, Susan Sarandon, and now Naomi Wolf are not "ours" at all. They are persistent enemies of the Democratic Party and our candidates.
Second, the things Kevin lists that people are afraid of? If none of them existed, FOX would make up new ones and the exact same people would be afraid of those. They are people who hate Democrats for (usually) race-based or influenced reasons but know they are not supposed to say that out loud, so they go with "Biden wants open borders!!!"
Third, we should condemn Democrats for the lies that FOX tells about them? No, Kevin, we should not do anything remotely like that.
Laughable.
1) If there’s a party that’s been “investing in sanewashing bad actors,” it’s pretty clearly not the party that nominated a 40+ year Washington moderate. Rather it’s pretty clearly the party that nominated a TV charlatan who profited from the Presidency, “locker room” talked about assaulting women, drew on Hurricane maps, extorted foreign allies, obstructed investigations, pardoned his criminal friends, fomented an insurrection, and generally lied like he breathed.
2) Fox News invents BS strawman arguments like CRT whenever they need a whipping post. It happens all the time and practically out of nothing (See also; death panels, caravans, BENGHAZI!, etc.) You can no more stop it than prevent the sun from rising in the east. Your “conservative friends” who “believe” this nonsense don’t believe it because Democrats don’t push back strongly enough. They believe it because they are willing dupes. Full stop.
Right, and Mr. Drum argues as much in his constant incantations about the ills of Fox News. Where is the disconnect?
1 is irrelevant to the argument and 2 is wrong -- or at least not entirely right. The most effective Fox News attacks are one that have a germ of truth. The American left *is* trying to remake how history is taught in schools in a fairly fundamental (and to a lot of people disagreeable) way and so the Fox stuff resonates, no matter how technically inaccurate it is.
#1 is relevant and #2 is 100% accurate.
Fox News doesn’t use a “germ of truth,” it employs a strategy of throwing innuendo and conspiracy at real world events. Hence, why I said “practically out of nothing.”
E.g., Benghazi was a real world event in which four Americans died. That isn’t “a germ of truth,” it’s an event that happened. Enter Fox News and suddenly questions are swirling about stand down orders and Hillary Clinton. Eight congressional investigations and $30 million later......It’s 100% bullshit propaganda, but it “feels” truthy to all the Fox viewers who are already predisposed to believing Hillary is the devil. The same goes with every..single..shiny..object at Fox.
#1 is relevant and #2 is 100% accurate.
Nope: #1 is irrelevant and #2 is not entirely right.
The Benghazi example is a good one -- it was not only a real world event in which four Americans died, but one which was handled badly at the time by the US government, particularly in terms of security on the ground (and this is the State Department's own analysis of what went wrong, not anything GOP related). That was the initial germ of truth that, eg, Fox seized on to try and make the (ludicrous) connection to Clinton.
No. To OP’s original point FOX was always keen on throwing innuendo at Benghazi suggesting that Hillary engaged in some nefarious activity. That’s a wholly different implication when contrasted with your “germ of truth” theory.
No
Yes.
That’s a wholly different implication when contrasted with your “germ of truth” theory.
No.
surely you can see the difference between alleging that State made mistakes that led to Benghazi and whatever FOX was insinuating.
surely you can see the difference between alleging that State made mistakes that led to Benghazi and whatever FOX was insinuating
What part of the phrase "germ of truth" do you not understand?
There is no “germ of truth” regarding any nefarious agenda on the part of State, only innuendo. Put more simply, we fucked this up =/= we intentionally fucked this up.
Sigh. Now we're back to my original point, which is that the germ of truth in the Benghazi case was the US screwed up. Dude, at least read what I'm saying.
The crazies on the left get all the attention. Who gets the photo on the front page of the NYT during an anti-war protest? The grandmothers for peace or the goofball from the AnarchoMarxist party wearing the giant paper mache mask?
That's why 'The Squad' are such tools and why people at the top of the other side like it that they're in the public eye so much.
It’s quite telling that the only “batshit” idea anyone here - including Kevin - can name explicitly is abolish/defund. I imagine that this is because as you all comb your Twitter feeds to find these leftist crazies, you’re overcome by the dissonance arising from the realization that your opposition to these ideas places you firmly right-of-center.
To hear you all tell it, the “far left” is simultaneously a fringe set of idiots and a well-organized machine capable of detailing the entirety of the liberal agenda - as though Republicans in the United States wouldn’t operate in bad faith no matter what positions Democrats embrace. Give me a fucking break.
derailing * not detailing.
- Open borders
- Fee College
- college debt forgiveness
- reparations
- wealth tax
The only objectionable thing here is open borders, and nobody is arguing for that. The rest are legitimate policy ideas that you don’t like.
A few weeks ago, Dem Rep. Cori Bush made public statements referring to “birthing people” who die every day: “Every day, Black birthing people and our babies die because our doctors don’t believe our pain.”
Whatever her intentions may have been (some have defended her by saying that she was referring to midwives) it’s easy to believe that she substituted “birthing people” in place of mothers or women. I believe she later attempted to justify her choice of words by saying that she believes in trans rights (or something like that). And good for her, I believe in trans rights too! What I don’t believe in are pointless gestures towards political correctness that convince moderate voters that the Dem party is insane. And her statement led to headlines on news sites (such as Yahoo news) that declared the Dem party wants to refer to Mothers as birthing people. I don’t even know who owns yahoo news these days, maybe Rupert Murdoch bought it while I wasn’t paying attention? But that’s kind of the point, a lot of other people won’t know either: they’ll just see too many scary headlines about DEMs because of crazy or careless comments that a few Dem politicians (or activists) make.
So I wrote what seemed like an anodyne little blog post on daikyKos, and it sounded somewhat similar to this post by Kevin: if we want to win, maybe don’t make statements that sound as if we’re trying to refer to Mothers or women as birthing people?
The comments were not kind to me: I was told (by all those left-leaning people) that I was a snowflake, that I was twisting Rep Bush’s words, that I shouldn’t be writing on the topic at all if I’m not a black women, that I should be reported to a site moderator, that there were rules (on that site) against sounding like a conservative, etc. I later received a message that my post had been flagged for some kind of violation (I forget what it was).
And that’s what can happen when we try to point out what seems like misguided (or crazy) stuff on the left: lefties will apparently fall all over themselves to prove how politically correct they are. I don’t know when this pendulum starts to swing back away from this extreme, but hopefully before 2024?
Have you considered that Rep. Bush actually thought her words out carefully and she just doesn’t agree with you? There’s all the talk about the “far left” forcing people to bend the knee, but all that actually happens is liberals calling progressive attempts at inclusion crazy and self-defeating. Projection is a hell of a drug.
Of course she may have thought her words out carefully. I don’t think that’s the point. Here’s what she does not seem to have thought out carefully: the reactions that her words would create, the headlines they would generate, and the manner in which her words could easily be used to scare moderate voters away from DEMs.
The point under discussion is this: do we want to win? If so, call out every Dem candidate who (among other things) apparently refers to women or mothers as
“Birthing people.” That’s an example of a strategy that gains us nothing, accomplishes little if anything, and loses us votes.
It’s a meaningless gesture that gains nothing - except, of course, the affirmation of parents for whom “mother” does not suffice. It’s an inclusive choice of words that should cost exactly 0 to incorporate in the lexicon as it doesn’t stop anyone anywhere from referring to themselves as “mother” if they want.
Instead of coddling people who don’t want to have their views challenged, why not choose to educate? Again, it costs literally NOTHING.
It could easily cost us votes. And that’s an enormous cost. So, again, the question under discussion is whether or not we want to win. When viewed through that perspective, it’s best to avoid Rep Bush’s choice of words;
In an ideal world, of course it would be nice to use inclusive language.
But that’s not the discussion we’re having. We’re talking about how to win political battles in this world (and in our country). And, in that context, we cannot just use the most left-leaning and idealistic language available. Not if we want to win. And winning is more important.
As someone who under the “birthing people” lexicon would I assume be referred to as a “sperm provider” I will assert that inclusion is not free and one should or dare I say must consider whether that inclusion is a net gain.
I don't really care whether people say "birthing people", in the sense that it's a pretty meaningless issue and language changes over time. If the public accepts it, that's great. We say "Black" or "African-American" now, rather than "Negro", like they said in Martin Luther King's day. No problem.
But I would also say that the trans activists who push this sort of thing also don't seem to realize it's a meaningless issue. Referring to "mothers" isn't some grand conspiracy to erase trans people; it's just a natural way to refer to a certain set of issues. Most of the time, when people make such references, they aren't even thinking, one way or the other, about trans people.
And most importantly, no trans person is going to be injured in any way or have his/her/their rights violated because someone refers to "mothers".
So yeah, it's a non-issue. But that's a good reason not to take it on if we are going to lose voters over it.
What are you talking about? If you give birth, you are a mother.
Re: t’s a meaningless gesture that gains nothing - except, of course, the affirmation of parents for whom “mother”
Such people have no reason to take offense at the plain old completely non-insulting words "mother" and "father". And yes, there are families lacking one of those: mine did after my mother died when I was 9 and before my father remarried a few years later. Losing a parent was painful but the word "mother' was not some sort of unendurable injury to me. Even as a nine year old I was not that extreme sort of snowflake. Why would it be any worse for a gay family with two fathers or two mothers and no one has died?
the inability to abide the evolution of language is not a mark of pragmatism; you’re just an idiot.
Such people have no reason to take offense at the plain old completely non-insulting words "mother" and "father".
This is what bugs me the most. We’re constantly told that the “far left” is forcing everyone to bend the knee with all these big, bad new words; yet here you are dictating how other people should feel for no other reason but you don’t approve. Again, projection is a hell of a drug.
Whatever, Bro. And no, I haven't forgotten what you guys did in 2016. Neither has anyone else.
If Cori Bush wants to go into Nazism, so be it. When you start taking things racially, all socialists should see things racially, including white socialists. My view is, it won't end well for "black people". No more than for Christians.
The answer is "no."
I have no idea who owns Yahoo news, but covering one US representative using the phrase "birthing people" instead of (I am guessing here) women, or mothers, is to my mind an act of right wing propaganda, no more, no less.
You can't respond to propaganda with factual arguments. Or, to be more accurate, sure you can, but that won't dull the effect of the propaganda.
The problem is that we don't have our own propaganda department, nor do we really have a counter-propaganda department either.
Either way, there is no point in adopting what Kevin implies, which is something along the lines of "adopt the other side's propaganda before they do."
Its guaranteed not to work and to be a waste of time.
I am on record (above) in saying this is NOT a big deal. But I do think that people notice weird expressions they haven't heard before, and sometimes have a negative reaction to them as if someone is trying to call language they used all their life "bigoted", and it's not just a media phenomenon.
When someone tells you who they are, believe them,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/06/23/paul-miller-gypsy-crusader/
And now he's sorry. If this mental case had had one person in his life he could talk to who wasn't also a raving idiot this would never have happened.
When you find yourself talking to a social conservative, of the right or the left, remember how isolated they are and always have been.
However social they may appear to be, they will often surround themselves with a cloister of the like-minded, all of them utterly isolated.
Less than 900 rounds of ammo? Puhleeze
I know, best case scenario he could kill 900 people with that, but you gotta do what you gotta do.
Depending on caliber and type, ammo is regularly purchase lot of -- on a very rough average -- 50. There's nothing remarkable at all when it is bought in bulk for the price break. Furthermore, if you read more carefully, it was actually 848 rounds for three weapons. There's more than a kernel of truth to the rant that 'liberals know nothing about guns'.
Certainly true! And my default position is the world would be a better place if every one of them were steamrollered.
But, that is probably unrealistic. The serious point gun nuts can make is about self-protection, and then they will immediately expand that to claiming god meant them to have enough weaponry to personally start WWIII. This can appear to limit serious engagement pretty dramatically.
If you can back them up a bit, their point is self-protection. If you're going to repeal the Second Amendment, the only way that will ever be managed is if you replace it with something that addresses self-protection as a Constitutional right, which, in any practical sense, can be limited to a small capacity hand gun. But you cannot say that to any leftists or anti-gun activists, with whom it must be all or nothing.
It's because of the misuse of the idea of self-defense by lunatics and it's continual invocation in the wingnut fantasy world, but it is the kernel of truth their pearl of madness is formed around, and it seems obvious to me that serious address of this one real point the other side has is clearly the only way forward.
I grew up in gun culture (The covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord in my later teens, before that, Oregon militia groups) so trust me, I know all about these nuts. The problem with solutions like this is that the horse has already left the stable. There are literally _millions_ of these 'self protection' type of firearms out there and from my own experience anyone who really wants one of these would have no problem getting there hands on one.
About the only thing you can do at this point, IMHO, is to have mandatory and very stringent gun safety programs for anyone who wants to buy a gun for 'self protection'.
There has to be something we can say is ameliorative between absolutist views or conversation isn't even imaginable.
I would ban everything that isn't a handgun outright, and that restricted to one per household, with some provision for hunting weapons kept in a public facility, and shooting the entire population of gun owners to do it would be fine with me.
Where can I see common ground?
Leftist's don't believe in open borders. That is a "right wing" capitalistic thing. Always has been. Donald Trump flooded the US with illegal immigrants and it was done on purpose while using "fig leaf" "restrictions" on stuff like "refugees" which barely count for 5% of total yearly immigrants.
Maybe getting rid of the right/left junk will end the confusion.
This hasn't been pointed out yet, but it's an important point: Unlike the far right always follow their marching orders, their counterpoints on the left will cheerfully sabotage the Democratic party if they don't get their own way. What they are doing is nothing less than outright extortion. I'm looking at you, Bernie Bros.
yeah, it’s pretty easy to fall in line when the platform is 100% victimhood and completely devoid of any coherent policy goals.
Call out the fringes you either get “Trumped” or “AOC/Sandersed” depending…
Sanders "my revolution" is toast though. The 2016-20 mess they had that spilled over to 2020 simply didn't work on the platform. My guess he retires in 2024 laughing all the way to Jane's kids bank accounts. Democrats are going to have upheaval starting with the 2022 election. DSSS no longer picking candidates is definitely going to "white male" the primaries and Pelosi retiring is going to hurt the Social Liberals from 2023 onward.
Republicans are having that issue now. Many vacant seats against a party that is a bit desperate and wants to experiment a bit in the 2022 candidate pool. Trumpers may not work so well. Especially if you go against nasty populists who can trash the rich and foreigners for nothing but a chance to run. I won't say Democrats are in early 1960's desperation like the Republicans were at that time, but the party simply isn't getting majorities as a institution under corporate friendly policies and socially liberal mantra's. 30 years is a enough. It doesn't work. Time to shake things up a bit.
Ok, I'll do it. This is a nutcase-level idea.
Why do we have to "call out" ideas we don't like or disagree with as nutcase ideas? I happen not to agree with the ones mentioned but I don't see "packing the supreme court" as an undisputed product of a diseased mind.
Just disagree with something, come on. We don't have to fall for this.
It occurs to me that left/right have a more significant imbalance: the left thinks many things are Generally Bad and want to change. The right thinks things are generally OK and any change from that side are usually so ineffective that they either won't make a difference to most of the right OR will get swatted down by the left/judges/admin/Deep State/whatever so there's a lot more tolerance of right wing crazy (repealing the ACA, removing the minimum wage, reverting to the gold standard, shooting refugees at the border, giving Biden a cognitive test, Anything TFG says now or before.)
So there's always a change the We Need Change Left will implement some of the Screwy Left notions and ... screw things up. Throw in White Fragility (lately CRT) and Capitalism is The Best Thing Ever (aka who cares there's income inequality?) It's just Safer to be 'conservative' and block everything. Only when they are shamed on an issue that is only marginally impactful (marriage equality, Juneteenth, teachers salaries) will they go along, or rather, NOT use the Constitutionally Invested minority powers to block sh-t.
It's not an equal playing field. The Left is playing techno-chess and the Right is playing tiddley winks.
I would describe it as there is almost always some dust grain of reality social conservatives will form amazing clouds of imagination around and those clouds invariably intersect with other clouds formed around other, far distant dust grains and the whole becomes a marvelous, self-explanatory cloudscape of imagination, an aesthetic that's easy to appreciate because you don't have to actually know anything to appreciate an aesthetic, and thereby easy to forgive someone who may be watching the stormier parts.
Conservatives will never vote for democrats regardless of how much hippie punching we do to convince them it’s ok. This is astonishingly naive. I’m sorry Mr. Drum has fallen for the scam.
Ban abortion and throw the gays back in the closet. Cut taxes on the rich and repeal Obamacare. Do these things and democrats still won’t get rewarded. I mean… what would be the point of moderates voting for them? They already achieved their policy goals.
If you're entertaining the thought of voting for a Republican in 2021, it's too late.
You're a full right-wing authoritarian who is positively looking forward to Republican Authoritarianism and a boot stamping on a human face— forever.
Speaking of nutcases,
John McAfee found dead in his jail cell in Spain,
https://www.euroweeklynews.com/2021/06/23/breaking-news-antivirus-creator-john-mcafee-found-dead-in-catalan-prison-cell/
Has Marjorie Taylor-Greene tweeted "Mc Afee didn't kill himself" & tagged #clintonkilllist?
I would have thought he hired some guy to kill himself for him so he could join John Kennedy, jr and Private Citizen Princess Tiny Paws in their struggle against Satan and his pedophiliac hordes.
C'mon, man, this is such malarkey! As others have said, right-wingers spend their time misrepresenting liberal actions and aspirations or simply making stuff up about them. Republicans even ran a whole convention in 2012 based on a blatantly dishonest misrepresentation of something Obama said.
It wouldn't matter how often liberals repudiated what someone had said, right-wingers will continue to claim it's what liberals think or simply lie about it. You see it in online discussion threads every day. The goal is to goad liberals into engaging in a long pointless rehash of the same arguments they've been engaged in for the last umpteen years, thereby shutting down any possible progress in developing genuine liberal ideas. That's exactly the kind of dead end public debate Kevin wants us to do more of. Not me, thanks. I'm not willing to spend the rest of my life copying and pasting arguments explaining that Obama didn't agree Iran should get the bomb, or that tackling climate change doesn't require a meat-free diet.
Oh, and the number of "moderate conservatives" who could be persuaded to vote for the godless Democratic commies could hold a meeting in a phone booth. I had hoped they would at least stay home last November. Instead, they turned out in record numbers to vote for the man who's "turned the Republican Party into a clown show".
In addition to your point — which others have made here, but yours is particularly good — is the quirk of human cognition that correcting (or, in these cases, "disavowing") stuff doesn't actually work. It backfires because it *amplifies* the very message it's fighting.
Kevin has this exactly backwards: people on the left should oppose proposals or policies advocated by others on the left when they think they're wrong... but only amongst ourselves, not in public. The less the moderates even hear of these ideas which alienate them, the better.
It's not about changing minds. It's about getting them to turn out.
Those of us old enough to remember Clinton's first election recall the phrase "Sister Soulijah moment" -- Clinton went out of his way to pick a fight with someone significantly to his left, before he could even be accused of supporting her agenda, in order to draw a line between his positions and the positions of other Democrats who he disagreed with.
Kevin is right -- when some of our fellow Democrats come up with disastrous policy suggestions, we really do have to come out against them, or they'll cost us votes we shouldn't be losing.
There are plenty of examples: unworkable proposals for reparations for slavery; canceling all student debt; teaching Kendi/DiAngelo-style anti-racism lessons to junior high school students, and the ever-popular defund the police.
+1
We agree again!
I love it when people find common ground. 🙂
The best way to push back against the crazy crap is to have someone heading your ticket who is reassuringly non-radical in terms of political brand. Someone like the president. Black voters in South Carolina did the Democratic Party and the United States of America a huge solid.
For the record, Biden stated he opposes defunding the police. Biden and Harris both said they would not characterize the US as a racist society. Seems they are swatting at the center-left, not just the far left.
Since when is stripping police forces of ALL funding merely "liberal"?
I'm a flaming progressive, and I never supported that. It's idiotic and so was that rallying cry.
Cue the disillusioned liberal meme.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/06/24/dems-disillusion-dc-gridlock-495682
“One Democratic strategist who works with major party donors said bluntly that the party is “f----- in the midterms if we don’t get s--- done soon.”
So… either the left will be disillusioned because democrats don’t get anything done or the moderates will be disillusioned because the left has crazy ideas which, thankfully, are never implemented. This is a lose lose proposition.
At this point it’s not the lefty nutcases who are the problem. It’s the fools in the media who spare read this nonsense. The average voter wants to reinstate trump and the evil republicans because democrats are incompetent and the media amplifies the nonsense. Have at it.
I'm sorry, Kevin- your case is predicated on two things:
1) That it will make any difference to call out inanities, in the general political "debate" (quotations obligatory)
2) Conservatives care one way or the other, and would not and have not created stupidities out of whole cloth when they are not available from "leftists".
Neither is remotely true. Call out Public Officials and Politicians when they say things which are false, disingenuous, misleading, and destructive. Everybody else really doesn't matter.
I completely agree with Kevin. I consider myself a "reasonable republican". I'm not a Trump a republican. I voted for him in 2016 hoping he would become more presidential. I would have had any other of the republican candidates win the nomination instead. There are many mainstream (i.e. moderate) democrats I respect and would support/vote for. However, the fringe of the party is what makes me reluctant to ever do so. Doing anything that gives more power and voice to people like AOC and Cori Bush scare me. The thing that many liberals don't seem to understand, is that we (republicans) aren't just judging your party by your actual candidates. We're also looking at all the nutjob activists, academics and anyone else that Kevin in generally referring to. Those are the people that are a barrier for us pulling the lever for someone with a D next to their name.
i love that this screed is intended to be an argument *for* placating conservatives. AOC calling for universal child care made you vote republican despite that party’s embrace of, well, *gestures at everything*.
give me a break.