Biden for President?

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uke2se said:
No.



Trump is a unique and immediate danger. Failure to remove him now will have dire consequences.



That's a possibility. Another possibility is that Biden with a Democratic House and Senate manages to adress some of the systematic advantages the GOP enjoys, and that future elections will better reflect the majority opinion.



I agree. Bernie isn't that foil either. What you are talking about cannot be achieved easily or by any single person. It's a group effort that takes time, and step one must be to take back control of the system. Otherwise you cannot make changes to the system.
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Trump is not unique. Not in history, not in contemporary global politics. He may go, but the underlying problems in this country remain. He is a immediate, dire threat, but so are whoever comes next and after them and so on.

The people taking back control, through a Biden win, are not interested in changing the system. That's the point. The entire Biden message is one of nostalgia and the promise of status quo stability to those who are advantaged by the system as it exists now.

Biden is, at best, 4-8 years of treading water while the currents pull us steadily out to sea.
 
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SuburbanTurkey said:
Trump is not unique. Not in history, not in contemporary global politics. He may go, but the underlying problems in this country remain. He is a immediate, dire threat, but so are whoever comes next and after them and so on.
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No, by definition, those threats are not immediate, dire as they may be.

SuburbanTurkey said:
The people taking back control, through a Biden win, are not interested in changing the system. That's the point. The entire Biden message is one of nostalgia and the promise of status quo stability to those who are advantaged by the system as it exists now.
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A return to status quo would be going in the right direction. However, the left wing in US politics have made headway and are influencing policy now like they have not done before. Because of that, I don't share your view on Biden or whomever you believe are gaining control.

SuburbanTurkey said:
Biden is, at best, 4-8 years of treading water while the currents pull us steadily out to sea.
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I completely and totally disagree. Biden would be saving the US from imminent disaster.

I think of your position as standing on the bridge of the Titanic, ice-berg in view, and arguing that because the wheel doesn't turn sufficiently to the left for your taste, there's no point turning it at all, and that'll teach the people constructing ships in the future.
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
Yes, that is true. Biden is lesser evil, no dispute from me.

It's also possible for the lesser evil to still be a catastrophe.
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This is true. However, when a hurricane strikes, you can either prepare for it and board up your house and maybe suffer some damage, or do nothing and let it be destroyed. Trump is the latter catastrophe. He is the catastrophe we know, rather than the catastrophe that is possible. Anyone, including Bernie, could be a catastrophe.
 
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uke2se said:
I think of your position as standing on the bridge of the Titanic, ice-berg in view, and arguing that because the wheel doesn't turn sufficiently to the left for your taste, there's no point turning it at all, and that'll teach the people constructing ships in the future.
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Meanwhile, all the "life-boat" bros are bound and gagged in the brig, having annoyed the crew with all their hysterical doom-saying about dangerous icebergs weeks earlier.

Luckily for us, all those engineers and liner executives on board that insisted the route was safe will get first dibs on the limited supply of lifeboats.
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
Meanwhile, all the "life-boat" bros are bound and gagged in the brig, having annoyed the crew with all their hysterical doom-saying about dangerous icebergs weeks earlier.

Luckily for us, all those engineers and liner executives on board that insisted the route was safe will get first dibs on the limited supply of lifeboats.
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You can expand upon the metaphore if you like, but it sort of dillutes the point.

As for the "life-boat" bros; are they aware of the fact that there's no way to expand the number of life-boats after the ship has left port? Maybe try to get the ship into safe harbor and then expand the number of life-boats?
 
uke2se said:
You can expand upon the metaphore if you like, but it sort of dillutes the point.

As for the "life-boat" bros; are they aware of the fact that there's no way to expand the number of life-boats after the ship has left port? Maybe try to get the ship into safe harbor and then expand the number of life-boats?
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Ok, let's set aside tedious metaphors.

Joe has no interest in radical change. He's said so himself.

He's a placeholder until something better comes along, which will probably be too late. One last gasp of the professional managerial class that centrist libs love so much before the jackboots take over.
 
uke2se said:
A return to status quo would be going in the right direction.
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The status quo is movement. It's movement in the wrong direction. We've never left the status quo. We've just given it a representative with the mind of a three-year-old instead of the adults who've mostly represented it before.

uke2se said:
However, the left wing in US politics have made headway and are influencing policy now like they have not done before.
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Getting the corporate Democrats to occasionally talk like they're going to do something leftish between rounds of going along with whatever the Republicans want is not influencing policy yet. It's influencing rhetoric, which might be a step toward maybe influencing policy sometime later, at most. (And really, corporate Democrats have been talking that way for a long time anyway.) The Republicans' recent history has demonstrated the only way to influence policy: the voters need to be willing to make the elected officials think they can't count on the voters' automatic support without doing what the voters want them to do. Right now, "blue no matter who" tells the elected corporate Democrats the opposite message: no matter how much you work against the left, you can keep taking advantage of them.
 
Delvo said:
The status quo is movement. It's movement in the wrong direction. We've never left the status quo. We've just given it a representative with the mind of a three-year-old instead of the adults who've mostly represented it before.

Getting the corporate Democrats to occasionally talk like they're going to do something leftish between rounds of going along with whatever the Republicans want is not influencing policy yet. It's influencing rhetoric, which might be a step toward maybe influencing policy sometime later, at most. (And really, corporate Democrats have been talking that way for a long time anyway.) The Republicans' recent history has demonstrated the only way to influence policy: the voters need to be willing to make the elected officials think they can't count on the voters' automatic support without doing what the voters want them to do. Right now, "blue no matter who" tells the elected corporate Democrats the opposite message: no matter how much you work against the left, you can keep taking advantage of them.
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Agreed. But the choices right now are to be exploited by the left or destroyed by the right. That's why people keep saying "the lesser evil". If there were more options nobody would choose to have diabetes, but if the only options are to have diabetes or have stage IV bone cancer we're going to go with the diabetes.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Agreed. But the choices right now are to be exploited by the left or destroyed by the right. That's why people keep saying "the lesser evil". If there were more options nobody would choose to have diabetes, but if the only options are to have diabetes or have stage IV bone cancer we're going to go with the diabetes.
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Exactly.

I see this same reasoning failure in addressing Covid-19 too. Everything that needs done to avoid even more death and damage to our standards of living (oh, and the economy), get met with, 'but that will hurt the economy and some people will still die!'. Yeah, we know. There are no options left that don't do that. Denying the reality of the situation just because the situation sucks isn't helpful. Throwing **** at everyone who is actually engaged in harm reduction might make you feel righteous, but it isn't.

Besides that, people are acting like the only lever they have to change things is the Presidential vote. It isn't. I'm going to copy from Facebook here.

"Frustrating is an understatement. But voting for the accused rapist who doesn't brag about it leaves me with peaceful levers to pull to change the things that made me make that choice in the first place. I still have community organizations, laws to advocate for and a way to get those laws passed (and not overturned by cronie judges). There would still be meaningful elections for Congress where I can push more candidates like AOC.

If I don't, then those levers are no longer meaningful. And that leaves an even dirtier choice to be made.

There was never a way to get through a fight with the factors backing Trump 'pure'. It was always going to be a question of how dirty we were going to have to get. It sucks that we are now to the point of getting this dirty, but it might get worse. Vote for an accused rapist, or let more accused rapists be put on the bench, remove abortion rights, restrict the current limited ability to go after all rapists to say nothing of making actual advancement there...or worse and we have to start getting actually dirty hands.

It's a ******* tragedy."

I stand by my earlier statements about robust investigation of the claims against him, but the investigations so far haven't been very supportive of the claims.

Besides that, Joe Biden is if nothing else a consensus Democrat. To change what he would do, you just basically have to convince most Democrats to agree with you. Which you'd have to do anyway with just about every major decision. It doesn't change much there because while he isn't a positive on a bunch of things, he's also not a negative. And yes, it is sad that the best harm reduction right now is to argue that the candidate at least won't 'get in the way' but that's the horrible place we are right now. Pretending we have other choices we don't have isn't going to change that, and being pissy about people actually trying to fix things doesn't work either.
 
Sideroxylon said:
Dems cancelled metoo.
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Nope, you're just confusing "double standard", with two profoundly different examples of applying the same standard.

In Ford (and Ramirez) vs. Kavenaugh, the women stuck to their guns on the important issues, while Kavanaugh lied and screamed and vowed vengeance. The women, thus, have credibility that Kavanaugh completely lacks.

Comparing Reade and Biden, Reade's story keeps changing to fit new information, while Biden is calm, respectful, and welcomes an investigation into all relevant details. And then there's her "tic toc" tweet. Thus, Biden has some credibility, while Reade basically torched hers.

Had Biden responded like Edwards or Weiner (or Cosby - I'd add R. Kelly but his serial child rape/porn had been known a *long* time before even his first trial), I'd say "Wow, that's suspicious."

This isn't "Biden raped one women, but at least he's better than Trump", it's "Biden plans to build on what Obama started and faced a false accusation that falls apart under inspection, while Dolt 45 is an evil man who wishes nothing more than to harm or kill anyone who isn't a straight white man - thus why he's plainly a serial rapist."
 
I should probably also mention that, as the name suggests, #metoo is in fact a solidarity movement to tell younger victims of sexual assault that they aren't alone, and not a tool to be used to prosecute, much less bash, all men as it's right-wing detractors loudly insist. Of course, it started on black Twitter, and to be blunt, white right wingers never get anything invented by black people right, as if they can't understand basic concepts when expressed by black people, and black women in particular, so it's no shock they they're bewildered by this basic idea as well...
 
Mumbles said:
Comparing Reade and Biden, Reade's story keeps changing to fit new information, while Biden is calm, respectful, and welcomes an investigation into all relevant details.
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I wonder why Sideroxylon doesn't let this fact bother his opinion on this situation. Actually, I'm not wondering why, I know exactly why.
 
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