Cont: The Biden Presidency (3)

[Stacyhs]

It depends on how red the state is.

Yes, it depends on how red the state is, which is why I said he'd have a chance in swing states. N. Dakota? Montana? Wyoming? Oklahoma? No way. But neither does any Democrat.

I'm thoroughly convinced if he wasn’t gay, Pete would be an excellent candidate for President. Sure, it might be better if he had experience in Congress. But I don't think that experience is necessarily all that important. I think it helps if he understands how to deal with Congress. But having to have been one is debatable.

Of course it's debatable. But you can't deny having experience in Congress would make him a better candidate than not.

But no Democrat is better at dealing with right wing media.

Agreed.

 

[Delvo]

If he weren't gay, the media wouldn't have been fawning over him, so nobody would be particularly impressed by him even if they had heard of him, which most wouldn't have. (Just think how many other mayors there are whom you aren't praising and haven't even heard of because the media didn't anoint them.)

 

[Stacyhs]

If he weren't gay, the media wouldn't have been fawning over him, so nobody would be particularly impressed by him even if they had heard of him, which most wouldn't have. (Just think how many other mayors there are whom you aren't praising and haven't even heard of because the media didn't anoint them.)

Is being negative just a knee jerk reaction?

You're making a hell of a lot of assumptions there with no evidence at all.

I've been impressed with him since I first encountered him. He's a brilliant Rhodes Scholar, a graduate of Harvard magna cum laude and Oxford, a former Naval officer who served in combat. He won the Profiles in Courage award with his winning essay being "the integrity and political courage of then U.S. representative Bernie Sanders of Vermont" which should ring even your bell.

He has the courage to go on Fox and handles them with ease. So instead of making assumptions based on absolutely nothing, do some research first.

 

[acbytesla]

If he weren't gay, the media wouldn't have been fawning over him, so nobody would be particularly impressed by him even if they had heard of him, which most wouldn't have. (Just think how many other mayors there are whom you aren't praising and haven't even heard of because the media didn't anoint them.)

Is being negative just a knee jerk reaction?

You're making a hell of a lot of assumptions there with no evidence at all.

I've been impressed with him since I first encountered him. He's a brilliant Rhodes Scholar, a graduate of Harvard magna cum laude and Oxford, a former Naval officer who served in combat. He won the Profiles in Courage award with his winning essay being "the integrity and political courage of then U.S. representative Bernie Sanders of Vermont" which should ring even your bell.

He has the courage to go on Fox and handles them with ease. So instead of making assumptions based on absolutely nothing, do some research first.

What she said.

 

[Roger Ramjets]

If he weren't gay, the media wouldn't have been fawning over him, so nobody would be particularly impressed by him even if they had heard of him, which most wouldn't have.

I would be impressed by him, but every time I see him all I can think about is EW-GAY!

This reminds about when I started reading about this Obama guy. Seemed to be an excellent candidate for President - until I finally saw a picture of him. OMG, he's BLACK!

 

[dann]

Hard to disagree with that. My main objection to Pete when he was running for President was simply his lack of relevant experience, the way that Republicans likely would have exploited that, and the extra problems that would arise from having to deal with the aftermath of their large scale sabotage of the government without relevant experience to fall back upon. He's pretty consistently shown that he's amazing in interviews.

It's what they loved and still love about Trump, who had even less relevant experience and still doesn't have any.
His sexual orientation would probably be a bigger problem, and Stacyhs' idea about the LGBTQ+ community coming out for him might make it worse, but it may work in his favor in hostile interviews if the interviewers expect him to be as weak as the poor gay kid they bullied in school and they then get humiliated by him.
However, the humiliation of Trump in recent interviews doesn't seem to have hurt his popularity much.

 

[Delvo]

What she said.

"Negative" would be if I'd brought up his job performance, or his behavior in debates, or even his behavior toward his husband. Pointing out the mere lack of anything particularly special & great about him and the fact that there's been nothing to pump him up but the media's gimmickry is entirely neutral because those are circumstances that can also sometimes happen to actually good people.

In a way, the most dismal thing about him is just that... not the stuff I'd point out about him if I were actually criticizing him, not the fact that the media obsession with him alone tells me his policy positions must be the usual crap the media loves, but just the fact that anybody plays along with his media narrative at all just because it's what the media says to do. It's the same old routine with the media's other empty-shell Democrats they've told us we were supposed to love for no reason before. The more the people can be tricked into just downloading whatever thoughts the media chooses to distribute instead of putting a moment of thought into where these ideas even come from or what the candidates will actually be like on the job, the further lost and without hope this country really is.

 

[Stacyhs]

"Negative" would be if I'd brought up his job performance, or his behavior in debates, or even his behavior toward his husband. Pointing out the mere lack of anything particularly special & great about him and the fact that there's been nothing to pump him up but the media's gimmickry is entirely neutral because those are circumstances that can also sometimes happen to actually good people.

In a way, the most dismal thing about him is just that... not the stuff I'd point out about him if I were actually criticizing him, not the fact that the media obsession with him alone tells me his policy positions must be the usual crap the media loves, but just the fact that anybody plays along with his media narrative at all just because it's what the media says to do. It's the same old routine with the media's other empty-shell Democrats they've told us we were supposed to love for no reason before. The more the people can be tricked into just downloading whatever thoughts the media chooses to distribute instead of putting a moment of thought into where these ideas even come from or what the candidates will actually be like on the job, the further lost and without hope this country really is.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

If he weren't gay, the media wouldn't have been fawning over him, so nobody would be particularly impressed by him even if they had heard of him, which most wouldn't have. (Just think how many other mayors there are whom you aren't praising and haven't even heard of because the media didn't anoint them.)

I don't agree. He's quite intelligent and he has a pleasant smile and attitude.

 

[dann]

Buttigieg seems to have learned from his study trip to Europe when he was still a mayor:
Demokraternes stjerneskud var på inspirationstur i København: To år senere fik hans by en cyklistpris (DR.dk, Feb 12, 2020)

Fast Company: You traveled to Amsterdam and Copenhagen when you were a mayor, along with then-Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx. What did you learn about the role that street design plays in how much people bike?

Pete Buttigieg: There are three things that I really took away from that trip.

The first is that design really does matter in creating an environment that supports bicycle commuting, not just as a hobby or kind of quirky thing for a handful of people to do, but as a mainstream way to get around. That really makes a big difference.

That was what we were expecting to see, [but] two of the things were a little more surprising. They went through the numbers of how bicycle commuting and active transportation grew in places like Copenhagen or Amsterdam. And what you saw is, it didn’t start out that way. The perception [in] the U.S. is maybe that, you know, this is just ingrained in Nordic culture—they’ve always been different and always will be. [But] if you look at a picture of downtown Copenhagen in the ’60s or ’70s, it’s as car-centric as any place in the U.S. So what happened wasn’t automatic or completely organic: They made a set of choices. And those choices helped. They make policy decisions and design decisions to help make it a great place to walk or bike.

The third thing was that you see a kind of step change in the use of bikes, and particularly to get around, once you hit a threshold of about 2% of people. And the thinking is that once you hit that rate of use, enough people do it that drivers become more conscious of bikes, and it becomes dramatically safer for everybody. So, I often think about where the tipping point might be in any given U.S. city, or for the U.S. as a country, and look for investments and policies [that] will help get us to that tipping point.
‘If you were starting from scratch, cars wouldn’t make sense’: Pete Buttigieg on redesigning cities (FastCompany, Nov 10, 2022)

But he got the third thing wrong: You don't let bicyclists 'take one for the team' and ride around unsafe to make drivers "more conscious of bikes, and it becomes dramatically safer for everybody". You make the city dramatically safer for bicyclists by separating them from other traffic as far as it goes, you make it obvious to drivers where bicyclists have right of way, and in the end enough people will start riding bikes.

 

[Segnosaur]

The thing is, Chris...unless you're living in outer Mongolia with no internet or phone service...it's quite clear that the conspiracy train chugged out of the GOP Station on Crazy Right-Wing Street early on:

Trump: "Does anybody really believe that the COCAINE found in the West Wing of the White House, very close to the Oval Office, is for the use of anyone other than Hunter & Joe Biden.

Here is a question I don't think anyone has ever brought up...

Did Hunter Biden ever actually use "plain" cocaine? Every reference I have seen to his past drug addictions has mentioned his use of crack. (Crack is a form of cocaine but has been modified to make it smokable.) But I haven't found anything to suggest he used cocaine in its powdered form.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

But he got the third thing wrong: You don't let bicyclists 'take one for the team' and ride around unsafe to make drivers "more conscious of bikes, and it becomes dramatically safer for everybody". You make the city dramatically safer for bicyclists by separating them from other traffic as far as it goes, you make it obvious to drivers where bicyclists have right of way, and in the end enough people will start riding bikes.

No, no no! you see, people will just respond to changing conditions, no need for state intervention. /s

If anything, increasing bicycle use in the US without separated, protected lanes would just result in an increase of hostility from car drivers towards cyclists. There's nobody more psychotic and bloodthirsty in this country than a car driver that's been slightly inconvenienced on the roadways.

That's Buttigieg for ya, two anodyne, obvious observations masked as wisdom and a spurious conclusion that lets government off the hook from having to take direct action.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

If he weren't gay, the media wouldn't have been fawning over him, so nobody would be particularly impressed by him even if they had heard of him, which most wouldn't have. (Just think how many other mayors there are whom you aren't praising and haven't even heard of because the media didn't anoint them.)

Pete had the "Obama aesthetic" cargo cult down 100%, and people thought that would mean he's the new hotness in Democratic politics.

Yet to see anything actually impressive in his resume. Mayor of a not particularly large city and head of a Transportation dept that is overseeing massive, scandalous screw ups by our privatized, under regulated transportation system. He's an empty suit

 

[Beelzebuddy]

That's Buttigieg for ya, two anodyne, obvious observations masked as wisdom and a spurious conclusion that lets government off the hook from having to take direct action.

"We get the bike use we design for" may seem obvious to you, but a mayor saying that is unusual. A more typical response is "la la la la I can't hear you lalala freemarket freemarket refer to committee."

 

[TurkeysGhost]

"We get the bike use we design for" may seem obvious to you, but a mayor saying that is unusual. A more typical response is "la la la la I can't hear you lalala freemarket freemarket refer to committee."

That's more or less where Buttigieg lands though. He seems to believe if people just start cycling driver attitudes will change and "sharing the road" will sort itself out.

That belief itself would make any further adoption of cycling extremely unlikely, because it will never sort itself out. So long as cycling is only for the crazy brave willing to mingle in traffic with 2 ton death machines, it will only ever be a niche mode of transport.

There will never be a "tipping point" until locales start adopting safe, convenient cycling infrastructure that covers a meaningful portion of the area.

 

[Beelzebuddy]

That's more or less where Buttigieg lands though. He seems to believe if people just start cycling driver attitudes will change and "sharing the road" will sort itself out.

That belief itself would make any further adoption of cycling extremely unlikely, because it will never sort itself out. So long as cycling is only for the crazy brave willing to mingle in traffic with 2 ton death machines, it will only ever be a niche mode of transport.

There will never be a "tipping point" until locales start adopting safe, convenient cycling infrastructure that covers a meaningful portion of the area.

That's the third thing. The first two are the explicit need to build for bikes, and the third is that when it hits the 2% adoption mark everyone will be like "oh biking is so obvious of course this is a bike friendly community it always has been" and city planners can stop having to force the issue themselves.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

That's the third thing. The first two are the explicit need to build for bikes, and the third is that when it hits the 2% adoption mark everyone will be like "oh biking is so obvious of course this is a bike friendly community it always has been" and city planners can stop having to force the issue themselves.

I mostly have an issue with the tone of the discussion. In many, even most, cases these infrastructure choices are zero-sum, in that improving bicycle and pedestrian safety reduces how optimized these roads are for cars. We're talking about narrowing car lanes and intersections, which reduce car speed, and taking away parking and lanes of travel to build protected bike lanes and sidewalks, or eliminating parking minimums for businesses and residences.

There are smarter ways to do things, sure, but ultimately this isn't something that is going to have a technocratic solution that makes everyone happy. Everyone drives cars in this country because we build infrastructure primarily or exclusively for cars, and changing that will mean a direct confrontation with that culture. I don't care for how Pete minces around with this reality, it belies an unwillingness to see these supposed goals to fruition if it means annoying car drivers.

When you look at the global examples of where cities have been made less car centric, there's a certain willingness for confrontation among the advocates that is almost entirely missing in Buttigieg's approach.

For example, NYC just passed a congestion fee for trying to drive your car into the most dense parts of the city, and they took the attitude of "too ******* bad, take the train you suburban hogs" as a defense against critics, which strikes me as a much more realistic and good-governance approach to the issue of urban planning than pretending everyone is going to be happy.

 

[Beelzebuddy]

I mostly have an issue with the tone of the discussion. In many, even most, cases these infrastructure choices are zero-sum, in that improving bicycle and pedestrian safety reduces how optimized these roads are for cars. We're talking about narrowing car lanes and intersections, which reduce car speed, and taking away parking and lanes of travel to build protected bike lanes and sidewalks, or eliminating parking minimums for businesses and residences.

There are smarter ways to do things, sure, but ultimately this isn't something that is going to have a technocratic solution that makes everyone happy. Everyone drives cars in this country because we build infrastructure primarily or exclusively for cars, and changing that will mean a direct confrontation with that culture. I don't care for how Pete minces around with this reality, it belies an unwillingness to see these supposed goals to fruition if it means annoying car drivers.

When you look at the global examples of where cities have been made less car centric, there's a certain willingness for confrontation among the advocates that is almost entirely missing in Buttigieg's approach.

For example, NYC just passed a congestion fee for trying to drive your car into the most dense parts of the city, and they took the attitude of "too ******* bad, take the train you suburban hogs" as a defense against critics, which strikes me as a much more realistic and good-governance approach to the issue of urban planning than pretending everyone is going to be happy.

Yes that's how I read his statement. He's also trying to be a national level politician which means being tolerably civil even to ****heads because a sizable fraction of the country self-identify as ****head or ****head-adjacent. I've seen enough local politics to know that if he wanted to pass the buck there'd be a lot more mealymouthing about local business and community involvement.

[ETA] I get that you don't like the guy, he's not my favorite either. He said the right soundbites in 2020 but his actual policy came out depressingly conservative, although he does earn some points just by not being statistically dead. But like him or not his statement here is a plan of action, even if it remains to be seen whether he could have put it into action.

 

[acbytesla]

I mostly have an issue with the tone of the discussion. In many, even most, cases these infrastructure choices are zero-sum, in that improving bicycle and pedestrian safety reduces how optimized these roads are for cars. We're talking about narrowing car lanes and intersections, which reduce car speed, and taking away parking and lanes of travel to build protected bike lanes and sidewalks, or eliminating parking minimums for businesses and residences.

There are smarter ways to do things, sure, but ultimately this isn't something that is going to have a technocratic solution that makes everyone happy. Everyone drives cars in this country because we build infrastructure primarily or exclusively for cars, and changing that will mean a direct confrontation with that culture. I don't care for how Pete minces around with this reality, it belies an unwillingness to see these supposed goals to fruition if it means annoying car drivers.

When you look at the global examples of where cities have been made less car centric, there's a certain willingness for confrontation among the advocates that is almost entirely missing in Buttigieg's approach.

For example, NYC just passed a congestion fee for trying to drive your car into the most dense parts of the city, and they took the attitude of "too ******* bad, take the train you suburban hogs" as a defense against critics, which strikes me as a much more realistic and good-governance approach to the issue of urban planning than pretending everyone is going to be happy.

You're comparing apples in oranges. NYC and Europe can easily take a confrontational approach. Despite the large number of cars in NYC, like Europe it isn’t a car centric. They can say "deal with it."

This isn’t true for the most of the US. The fossil fuel industry doesn’t want it to change. People love their cars. Pete must not be confrontational because there isn’t the political will to make such changes.

 

[bruto]

I suppose it depends on how you read things, but it sounds as if Pete is saying that first they made some infrastructure changes to make cycling easier and safer, but of course it did not utterly isolate cyclists and make them utterly safe, and then, as it caught on, driver hostility decreased. That seems reasonable even if it's insufficient. Drivers will always be initially peeved when something interferes with their entitlement, but eventually they can get used to it. Some of it is perceptual more than real. People get all sorts of upset if they have to slow down for a bicycle, even if they can make up the speed in seconds afterwards or if the sum of their inconvenience is to complete a 50 mile trip 12 seconds later.

We see some of that up here in Vermont, where a couple of towns have made greater accommodation for bicycles. The towns are still car oriented, and dangers are still real, but as bikes become more common and obvious, it gets better. Most motorists, even if they don't like bicycles, don't actually want to hit them and run them down and end up in court.