Oh don't repeat this accelerationist drivel. It essentially boils down to "I'm intentionally making things worse so people suffer more! That'll fix things!"
That's a fundamental misunderstanding. It's not about making things worse. It's about making the level of bad things already are more obvious.
In which scenario is the frog more likely to survive? If the temperature is raised slowly by a remote operator under a pot in a room both painted to look like cool mountain streams? Or when the cook blasts the heat to max right away while laughing maniacally in the frog's face about their impending doom?
The same threat is faced either way.
Preferring the latter scenario is not making things worse. It's making them more apparent.No. Better policy is self-evident and makes it possible for further betterment. Not only because of the movement of the Overton Window leftward, but also because the right is all about entrenching their power with propoganda and corruption. The Democrats aren't above that, but they are much worse at both. And ideology does matter. Sure the Democrats were happily warmongers under Bush and Obama, but at least the Democrats gave a damn about environmentalism, labor rights, education, political representation, welfare, infrastructure, network neutrality, and fiscal responsibility... if they did not, there would have been nothing for Trump to destroy.
And you're making my point for me. Do you actually know that Democrats are any better at those things? Or do you just believe it because Democrats ensure their association with those words via enough repetition by talking heads and on campaigns that you take it for granted to be true?
Environment:My favorite. I love when people claim Democrat high ground on this one.
- We had the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the largest oil-spill in U.S. history while Obama was in office. While this wasn't... entirely his fault (although without the direct intervention of an Obama admin appointee, that oil rig would not have been operating pending the completion of an environmental impact report), his response was mostly to allow BP to handle the disaster themselves, while rejecting offers of help from other countries. It took him a month to even seriously acknowledge it. BP proceeded to take 5 months to plug the leak, and did an absolutely horrible job with clean-up. Obama put a short moratorium on offshore drilling following the disaster (reversing an announcement just a month before the spill that he was going to be opening up vast swathes of ocean to drilling in violation of campaign promises), but then proceeded a year later to continue with opening up more ocean to oil exploration and drilling.
- He was also defacto extremely friendly to oil pipelines, which have also been consistently environmentally disastrous. Environmental activists have been constantly speaking out and putting their lives on the line to stop pipeline constructions over the last 20 years. Standing Rock wasn't a unique event. It has been the norm, and was the norm throughout the Obama era, that even as court proceedings are taking place to challenge pipelines and construction is supposed to be halted until those cases are resolved, that police violently intervene against protesters to allow pipeline construction to continue. And you could argue that Obama/Democrats cannot be directly faulted for this. But Standing Rock really showed the reality of it, I believe. As state governors used their domestic police forces as private militaries to invade sovereign Native American lands to support the construction of the pipeline. He allowed that horrendous precedent to be set, and it's ridiculous to me to suggest that there was nothing he could do about it as law enforcement falls under executive branch and they were being used across state boundaries in flagrant violation of jurisdiction, thus transcending states rights. A federal issue. Directly under the president's jurisdiction.
- Since Standing Rock, a trend of state bills targeting environmental activism has sweeped the country, with hardly any Democrat opposition and in some cases the bills have even been introduced by Democrats.
- Nevermind that globally, being an environmental activist is the most dangerous job in the world. Environmentalists are murdered at a rate of more than 2 per week, mostly in South America where American economic imperialism is a direct influence. There are U.S. business ties in almost every case, sometimes based on security policy directly handed down from American CEOs, but I challenge you to find me an example of a Democrat ever bothering to say anything about it. You're far more likely to find them having backdoor relationships with the businesses responsible.
- But if this all seems like I'm just trying too hard to be uncharitable, here it is from his OWN DAMN MOUTH exactly two years after Deepwater Horizon literally boasting about his friendliness with the #1 enemy to the environment. Such an inspiring legacy on the environment!
Labor Rights/Welfare/Fiscal Responsibility:These are all aspects of the same issue -- inequality and the disproportionate privilege and influence of the wealthy.
And what if Biden gets the nomination?
Will Blue No Matter Who serve you when Mr Blue is someone who has been trying to cut social programs for 40 years? Who is one of the people in government most personally responsible for the student loan crisis? Who was also instrumental in setting up the modern crisis of mass incarceration? Who doesn't support Medicare for All? How much of a Republican in practice does someone have to be before people stop believing that any Democrat is better than a Republican?
Political RepresentationDo... do I really need to go into this? How can you even include this one only a few posts after I mentioned how the party's lawyers literally argued in court that they have no obligation to care about their voting base's input in their primaries? Do I really need to go into detail about the massively anti-Democratic shitshow in 2016?
I could go on and on and on.
The way I see it, Democrats could not possibly survive as a party in power because then they would be forced to actually follow through with what they claim to stand for, which when given the opportunity they prove to be a lie more often than not. Their rhetoric only works when they get to play the part of obstructionist to someone else in power who's worse at PR than them, and they can claim that their direct participation in destructive policies was forced upon them by vague "harsh strategic political realities". The Democrat establishment is neoliberal first and foremost, and neoliberalism is the enemy of the poor, workers, and the environment. Never-ending growth of the economy (not measured in any way that directly relates to the well-being of common people) and corporate profits always take precedence. The #1 reason we're seeing a global rise in fascism around the world right now is because neoliberal policies result in popular desperation, which expresses itself in either progressive or fascist reactionary directions, and neoliberalism is more compatible with fascism than with true progressivism. If given free reign to implement whatever policy they wanted, it would be more of the same. Everything getting worse in the same ways it is now. But at a softer, slower pace, with more layers of better designed abstraction to hide their direct responsibility for the outcome.
The Iowa article states that it's difficult to be confident in the new app's cybersecurity because it relies on security through obscurity, the DNC won't tell us who developed it, and caucus leader will use it on their personal phone rather than dedicated hardware. However, it is not a remote voting app, but rather one of the lines communication for reporting in-person votes to the DNC. It's started purpose is to help caucus leaders crunch math and quickly transmit their results. The article states that the caucus will still have a paper trail and the results will also be determined and transmitted the traditional way involving witnesses, so after a delay we will know the accuracy of the app's findings.
You're right I did miss that there would still be a paper trail. Although, the thought of trying to correct a wrongly reported result after the fact forces me to recall the horror of Florida in 2000. Which is kinda-sorta acknowledged also in the article.
"Once you report something, it's really hard to undo it, no matter how many retractions you print, no matter how many apologies you say, it's too late," Jones says.
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