2024 General Election Thread

Discussion in 'The Red Room' started by shootER, Mar 28, 2024.

  1. Nova

    Nova livin on the edge of the ledge Writer

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    I'll admit that it randomly crossed my mind "gee, I didn't know those two lived so near each other" (close enough to date) but it never seemed to be worth remarking on.
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  2. Bailey

    Bailey It's always Christmas Eve Super Moderator

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  3. Nova

    Nova livin on the edge of the ledge Writer

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    if you ascribe at least one prominent aspect of her loss to "I'll never vote for a woman for president" and hold all other factors equal, you could come to that conclusion.

    But no one (except Joe maybe?) things you could hold all other things equal in that scenario.
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  4. tafkats

    tafkats vagina filled dick balloon Moderator

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    Yeah, that's his ego talking.

    The same thing that caused him and Bernie Sanders to look at the unprecedentedly diverse candidate field in 2020 and go "gee, I think what this race really needs is an old white dude."
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  5. 14thDoctor

    14thDoctor Oi

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    I'm not saying Biden would have won, as the "liberal media" was absolutely determined to undermine him and elevate Trump, but it's annoying to see people claim that the only candidate to ever actually defeat Trump in a presidential election couldn't have done so again. Hillary, Harris, Haley, every single other Republican primary candidate in 2016, all of them failed to stop him even once. :clyde:
    Since Biden won in 2020, it seems like he was right about the racing needing one old white dude in particular. :bergman:

    And as for Sanders, if none of the other candidates were offering up the same vision he was, and he thinks he's still up to the job, then he was right to run again too. Why should he give up on trying to enact his admittedly very popular agenda just because there's several women and minorities proposing... not those things? Primaries should be about ideas, not identity politics. :shrug:
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  6. TheLonelySquire

    TheLonelySquire Fresh Meat

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    I don't know anyone that wouldn't vote for a qualified biological female for president. That's just silly.
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  7. Nova

    Nova livin on the edge of the ledge Writer

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    Bernie would have gotten at least 90% of his wish list (in terms of presidential policies and priorities) from Elizabeth Warren and we can only guess how she would have fared had he backed her fully. But it would certainly have been her in the Final Two instead of Bernie which should have been an outcome he'd like.
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  8. tafkats

    tafkats vagina filled dick balloon Moderator

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    Yep. Her four-year M4A phase-in plan was slightly different from his four-year M4A phase-in plan — which was enough for some of his supporters to decide that anyone who voted for Warren was functionally no different from a murderer — but they agreed on damn near everything.

    I really thought that Warren had the potential to be a paradigm-shifting, narrative-rewriting, transformational president in the same way that Roosevelt and Reagan were (the former for good, the latter for ill). But we'll never know.
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  9. TheLonelySquire

    TheLonelySquire Fresh Meat

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  10. Coloratura

    Coloratura 3% Fruit Juice

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    Elizabeth Warren is a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist but in the FDR sense where should would give weight to people like me and have our voices heard, and I see that as a great stepping stone to something better. She's also very good at slapping the hands of banks trying to dip into the public trust. If she ran, I'd vote for her.
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  11. tafkats

    tafkats vagina filled dick balloon Moderator

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    I'm not sure what "something better" would be, short of a Star Trek-style post-scarcity economy.

    We've seen examples of command economies and complete state control of industry, and it never goes well. A market-based economy is the best system we've been able to come up with ... it's just that that needs to be the BASIS, not the entire thing. Then on top of it you need a strong safety net, free public education to enable economic mobility, strong public investment in shared resources, and reasonable regulations to prevent abuses.
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  12. Coloratura

    Coloratura 3% Fruit Juice

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    We could get rid of capitalism, which is killing us. I'm not talking about commerce, a lot of people do synonymize those, and they are not the same. Markets are one thing, they've been around since humans figured out they could trade goods and services. Capitalism requires a small group at the top becoming extremely rich at the expense of everyone underneath them while requiring infinite growth in a finite system, and that is something that needs to be dealt with before it ends up burning our planet to the ground. We don't need shareholders, we don't need much of what should be public infrastructure to be privatized, those don't exist to help anyone except the people who "own" the products and services they withhold from the public good.

    Electricity, water, housing, medical care, food production, all of these things should be nationalized. These ideas were considered reasonable less than 100 years ago, but the US has become so privatized and hyper-capitalistic that people can't even imagine a world without some greedy billionaire extracting all of a country's wealth for their own gains, and then calling that exploited country "third world."

    We have the ability to do better. We have the means to do better. We practically live in a post scarcity society, if only we would take those resources from the people hoarding them.
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  13. Bailey

    Bailey It's always Christmas Eve Super Moderator

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    Ehh, insisting all things should be nationalised isn't a sensible solution either, and I'm not aware of any large scale examples of where things like all food production was nationalized without it ending up badly.

    Reality isn't a videogame with a set of sliders you can just push all the way to max to achieve a perfect outcome.

    Same with housing. I'm a big proponent for how there should be more public housing, but where that works well is in setting a baseline, a safety net. It can also effectively act as a form of standard setting that is more effective and requires less active regulation and enforcement activity. Currently those at the bottom of the housing market are subject to slumlord landlords and the like. A strong public housing option as the base level means that the market has to do better than that.

    Same with schooling. Private schools should be an option, but the public ones should be so good that there are no non-ideological reasons you wouldn't want your kids to go to one.

    Investment and taking chances in new business is good for our society, and people knowing they might make it rich if they pan out is part of that. However taxes on the upper end should be higher, because we know from our own nations histories that even if they are, people can still do well and will see it as worth taking those chances.
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  14. tafkats

    tafkats vagina filled dick balloon Moderator

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    I can roughly half agree with you.

    Broadly, I think that the absolute worst scenario for any public good is complete control by one private business. Being a government service is somewhere in the middle. Then the ideal is a scenario with robust but well regulated competition, maybe with government as one of the players, maybe not.

    Electricity is public in some areas, and there's a lot of evidence that public utilities provide better service than for-profit ones. I don't know that it needs to be nationalized (remember, decentralization is one of the biggest remaining checks on Trump's ability to totally fuck us over), but public electric utilities are a good idea, especially since the nature of distribution makes competition between private entities practically impossible.

    Water is already public in most places. Again, not sure there's any benefit to nationalizing it. I would also say, because it is a basic need, that municipalities should bill it differently. A certain level of consumption, say what is needed for the average household to function, should be free or incredibly cheap and presumed to be covered by taxes, and fees should only come into play when you use a lot of it (because you still want people to conserve it, and because an entity should pay something if, like a commercial client, they are using the public resource to generate a profit).

    Housing: You know how in the former Soviet bloc it's standard to have rugs hanging on your walls? That's because the state-owned housing complexes of the Soviet era were utter shit, and people had to do that to keep their apartments warm and keep from hearing the neighbors all the time. There is definitely a role for government in making sure affordable housing exists, and in keeping landlords honest, but completely state-owned housing just gets you block after block of identical, and identically shitty, apartment complexes.

    Medical care: Yes and no. Having all care be federally controlled is inviting problems like the VA has had (and it also opens the door for somebody like Trump to much more effectively ban all care he doesn't like). Having people be able to choose between care providers incentives quality. What we need here is a public option to keep insurers honest (assholes like United HealthCare will have to convince people that they're better than the public plan) and a strengthening of the ACA's protections while preserving competition.

    Food production: I'm not totally sure how this would work, but I have trouble imagining that it would lead to better quality of life when compared to the current system, but with better protection against monopolies and a better safety net to ensure access to food.
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  15. Coloratura

    Coloratura 3% Fruit Juice

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    The problem with going halfway is that it won't take long for those services to once again be consumed by the private sector, and as long as the private sector is given more power, which it is under capitalism, enshittification will continue until we're right back where we started in under a decade. Capitalism does not exist to serve people, it exists to serve the aggregators of capital. There's a reason so many public services suck these days, and it's because the people who are paid off by capitalists, many of our politicians, are compensated for removing funding to those public services until people are convinced private services are the way to go.

    How do I convince you, John Q. Voter, to elect me and let me privatize the mail service? I hire Louis DeJoy, I get my people in congress to vote that the mail service has to pre-fund its retirement benefits for employees for 50 years in advance, and then when the system inevitably collapses from the weight, I explain why a private system would be much more efficient, but they're not much more efficient for anyone who needs a job, or food, or housing. They're efficient for capitalists who make money whether or not people are able to provide for themselves.

    Capitalism starts from exploitation. People in "third world" countries are robbed, their resources stolen, their labor exploited by their own corrupt governments who have been bought out by large corporations. Nestle doesn't even believe human beings have a right to water, and they've proven that belief many times over. The corporate history of the United States is filled with blood, its systems designed to funnel wealth upwards at all costs. It's why millions of people in the US are food insecure, homeless, working multiple jobs while the stock market soars. The whole system is built upon the exploitation and oppression of others. It can only exist as long as there is a slave class to keep the wealth flowing upward, and that system is unsustainable. It will be the death of the majority of humanity if we don't do something about it within the next few decades.

    What I'm talking about isn't even extreme. FDR was willing to make half of it actually happen before he died, and had started policy efforts to that effect. He was a deeply flawed man, but I believe he knew which way the winds were shifting. Well, 80 years later, here we are, where people are working just to keep on working, they're not even living, they're just working, being underpaid, and using that money to continue working. What is worth living in this life if all you can do is work it away for a corporation that will drape a tarp over you when you fall down dead and tell their employees to keep working?

    Capitalism is the economic ideology of a cancer cell. Any usefulness it may have had even 100 years ago has long been spent, and all we have left is this late stage shell that continues to feed on everything in order to get larger, in a system that cannot support it, and yet instead of actually working to stop its insane growth, our government is beholden to it, and is always finding new ways to feed it while starving everyone else.

    If nothing else, it should be completely understood that a service designed to address the needs of the public should not be based on profit. Medicine, food, housing, utilities, these should be standard services that are available to everyone regardless of ability to pay.

    We can pour $1 trillion a year into weapons of war that we'll never use, but when it comes to national services we wonder how we're going to pay for it? Nonsense. We can pay for it. We do pay for it, we just don't get the services in return.
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  16. Coloratura

    Coloratura 3% Fruit Juice

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    I should add, thinking of it now, @tafkats, that I'm not actually trying to start a debate or argument about how to move forward. It's something that thousands of people are constantly working on at any given moment and have yet to build concrete finalized answers, and we're not going to accomplish that feat here on a message board.

    What I posted above really is conversational rather than confrontational in tone, just to be clear. I get annoyed when I see a whole bunch of text directed my way, so don't feel as if you need to address everything or create some comprehensive post in response. I don't do that anymore, and I don't require it of anyone else. You don't have to agree, and we're not really going to agree a lot of times. At the end of the day, I'm more interested in trying to make things better in the short and long term with the resources we have. So no pressure, okay?

    That goes for everyone else who posts in good faith.*


    *Terms and conditions apply for bad faith assholes.
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  17. Uncle Albert

    Uncle Albert Part beard. Part machine.

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    And if the people in those industries reject your control, you can take them by force.
    :commie:
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  18. RickDeckard

    RickDeckard Socialist

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    She's literally saying that "the people in those industries" should own them. You're the one advocating continued rule of the oligarchs.
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  19. Jenee

    Jenee Driver 8

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    I can’t take her seriously after the bullshit she did in 2016. In 2014, while looking for a candidate to support in 2016, I happened on Warren. I liked her and “subscribed to her newsletter”. She openly, proudly, and loudly suggested everyone support Bernie. Then we know what happenened in 2016.

    Yea, I voted Democrat in 2016, 2020, and even this year. But, I no longer believe ANY of them. If they’re a politician, they’re lying.
  20. Crosis36

    Crosis36 Author

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    Mmm, yes, your vision of utopia is much more appealing. One where the top 1% control over 90% of the wealth, where the average citizen struggles to afford food, shelter, clothing, medical care, and education, where there are armed thugs on every street corner to ensure none of those 1 percenters get gunned down in the street.
    Yep. Albertopia sounds lovely.
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  21. Bickendan

    Bickendan Custom Title Administrator Faceless Mook Writer

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    1% to 90%? Damn, that sounds down right utopic! Don't you mean .5% and 95%? :(
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