The Democratic Party needs to pick up House and Senate seats, hopefully progressive candidates like former SenatorRuss Feingold, Wisconsin...
Hopefully, Bernie will pick up a key position, maybe a chairmanship on a Senate committee, where he can continue to make inroads, move the wave of reform forward...As for his supporters, they did an incredible job to bring their message to this convention...More power to them....
And Elizabeth Warren is a powerful voice to be heard as well...Plus key members of the House...
The Dems have to find younger, principled candidates for office...

The irony..calling the 27$ candidate privileged. So trying to bring up a candidate's religion(Bernie's Jewishness) to divide was ok for the democrats, so much for "Stronger together". Such bullshit from the establishment and you still wonder why the Bernie supporters are angry and why Drumpf is where he is.
And whatever personal traits of Assange, I don't think they matter or should matter or affect anything relative to what he's done. It's toooo small of an issue. You guys either turn to religion and their perfect prophets or take the good in these assanges and snowdens and all.

And also, to be fair, it was utterly easy for the democrats this time, The Drumpf convention was too easy to trump.

arsedoc md wrote:

The irony..calling the 27$ candidate privileged. So trying to bring up a candidate's religion(Bernie's Jewishness) to divide was ok for the democrats, so much for "Stronger together". Such bullshit from the establishment and you still wonder why the Bernie supporters are angry and why Drumpf is where he is.
And whatever personal traits of Assange, I don't think they matter or should matter or affect anything relative to what he's done.  It's toooo small of an issue. You guys either turn to religion and their perfect prophets or take the good in these assanges and snowdens and all.

And also, to be fair, it was utterly easy for the democrats this time, The Drumpf convention was too easy to trump.

i agree with the sentiment and the bernie bros need to follow your advice. 

anyway the negative in these assanges and snowdens is that they are putin's flunkies and that's more concerning than anything they expose.

and i never said bernie was privileged, his "i will never get over this" supporters are though.

To feel so secure that you would simply not vote in this election rather than have Hillary in charge is indeed a privileged position.

i think they weren't gonna vote anyways, from usual apathy though, not security.
Didn't know about the leakers being putin flunkies, very bad if so. Any link would be appreciated.

Coombs wrote:

To feel so secure that you would simply not vote in this election rather than have Hillary in charge is indeed a privileged position.

I suppose it's a bit different kibbitzing about US politics from afar.

I'm getting a bit exhausted by the false dichotomy between urgent demands to vote and extra-electoral activism, or the model of US politics that suggests everything precesses from the personal tics of the President.

You can get up on Tuesday in November and vote before breakfast for the lesser evil, while still devoting the entire rest of your life to whatever, including bringing down the system.

Vote refusal could in some cases be a powerful gesture, but certainly not if you do it silently or without objective. And simply voting does away with this liberal shibboleth that it's people's "disengagement from democracy" that is causing the problems, as opposed to primarily vice versa.

The Khan's may have swung the mood in this election firmly in Clinton's favor.

Lol at multimillionaire Trump comparing sacrifices with that of the Muslim couple who lost their son!!

Trump doesn't give a shit. I am just stunned by my Republican friends who will vote him because despite his faults, he's still better than that woman who should be in prison.
Just this week he's fighting the Khans on his sacrifice, and then blatantly lying about the NFL asking him to move the debates that Crooked Hillary had scheduled to coincide with gridiron games. The Republican party needs to be burned to the ground and rise again.

i don't have any republican friends that would vote for trump. i have some neighbors who i'm cordial with, but i couldn't be actual friends (people who i love and care about their well being) with someone who would vote for trump.

arsedoc md wrote:

The irony..calling the 27$ candidate privileged. So trying to bring up a candidate's religion(Bernie's Jewishness) to divide was ok for the democrats, so much for "Stronger together". Such bullshit from the establishment and you still wonder why the Bernie supporters are angry and why Drumpf is where he is.
And whatever personal traits of Assange, I don't think they matter or should matter or affect anything relative to what he's done.  It's toooo small of an issue. You guys either turn to religion and their perfect prophets or take the good in these assanges and snowdens and all.

And also, to be fair, it was utterly easy for the democrats this time, The Drumpf convention was too easy to trump.

I too think Assange is a narcissistic cunt but as you say you have to take the good with the bad, I wouldn't denounce his work just because I don't like him. Also what happened to him in Sweden is a disgusting crime regardless of what I think of him.

Not sure about this nonsense of them being "Putin's flunkies", Putin for all his war crimes, silencing of journalists and whatnot isn't a patch on your Obamas, Bushs and Clintons. I don't see Russian submarines (discounting the embarrassing repeated lies of Russian submarines in Swedish waters from last year) in everyone's backyard, I haven't heard of Russia's plans for a New Russian Century and I don't see Russian mass surveillance on the whole fucking planet either.

Lol Jones. You might have heard of a place called Crimea...

jones wrote:

arsedoc md wrote:

The irony..calling the 27$ candidate privileged. So trying to bring up a candidate's religion(Bernie's Jewishness) to divide was ok for the democrats, so much for "Stronger together". Such bullshit from the establishment and you still wonder why the Bernie supporters are angry and why Drumpf is where he is.
And whatever personal traits of Assange, I don't think they matter or should matter or affect anything relative to what he's done.  It's toooo small of an issue. You guys either turn to religion and their perfect prophets or take the good in these assanges and snowdens and all.

And also, to be fair, it was utterly easy for the democrats this time, The Drumpf convention was too easy to trump.

I too think Assange is a narcissistic cunt but as you say you have to take the good with the bad, I wouldn't denounce his work just because I don't like him. Also what happened to him in Sweden is a disgusting crime regardless of what I think of him.

Not sure about this nonsense of them being "Putin's flunkies", Putin for all his war crimes, silencing of journalists and whatnot isn't a patch on your Obamas, Bushs and Clintons. I don't see Russian submarines (discounting the embarrassing repeated lies of Russian submarines in Swedish waters from last year) in everyone's backyard, I haven't heard of Russia's plans for a New Russian Century and I don't see Russian mass surveillance on the whole fucking planet either.

I think you have your mind made up on the matter and see only what you want to see. 

"Silencing" the journalists is also a nice way to put it.

Pretty much.

Jens wrote:

jones wrote:

I too think Assange is a narcissistic cunt but as you say you have to take the good with the bad, I wouldn't denounce his work just because I don't like him. Also what happened to him in Sweden is a disgusting crime regardless of what I think of him.

Not sure about this nonsense of them being "Putin's flunkies", Putin for all his war crimes, silencing of journalists and whatnot isn't a patch on your Obamas, Bushs and Clintons. I don't see Russian submarines (discounting the embarrassing repeated lies of Russian submarines in Swedish waters from last year) in everyone's backyard, I haven't heard of Russia's plans for a New Russian Century and I don't see Russian mass surveillance on the whole fucking planet either.

I think you have your mind made up on the matter and see only what you want to see. 

I can only return the compliment.

The wording on the journalist part I concede was poorly chosen. But I did in fact criticise and condemn Putin for those crimes several times even here in this forum. What some here don't seem to understand is that you can think the US are a bigger danger to world peace than Russia without being a Putin fanboy. Putin has committed many crimes but ironically his biggest ones are barely talked about in the West, instead we get fabricated horseshit like his submarines invading Sweden, his hackers "attacking" the US (if he was indeed responsible I'd say well done) or like flobs mentions the supposed annexion of Crimea where over 95% voted for a secession of the Ukraine, understandable given the anti-Russian laws which were pushed through by the pro-West Poroshenko and Jazenjuk and their marauding Nazis. But ask anyone in the West what happened there and you'll hear Russia invaded the peninsula.

It's the same issue I see with Hillary vs Trump, just because the latter is a grotesque piece of shit doesn't mean that you have to throw your lot behind Hillary, this partisan line of thinking doesn't do anything for me. Politics isn't a football match where you have to pick sides.

So what do you do ? Nothing ?

Despite you continually claiming Hillary is worse than Trump, it is quite clearly not true. Everyone knows both are poor options, but one would be infinitely worse for the country in terms of foreign policy and race relations, gender equality, religious freedom and only God knows what else.

If you can't see that, you're obviously irrationally biased.

Jonesy's putting his point a bit starkly, but he's less wrong than someone who declares blindly "Putin bad, Obama good"—inspection of world affairs reveals the US is responsible for more deaths, more military threats and more military incursions than Russia, either directly or by proxy.

I think you should be able to point that out without being accused of Putin apologism. 

I also feel a lot of distaste for the comparison of the "domestic" political atrocities of countries with those of empires—after all, being empires, their reach is transnational and they're capable of relocating and outsourcing the worst of what they do, which as we know, the US does. Pax Americana hasn't grown out of virtuous US democracy alone, only US democracy linked by alliances to a shifting archipelago of tyrannies.

Likewise, I'm not convinced the weighing up of the US and Russia (or China) as notional militarily opposed global superpowers has the same relevance as it did in the post-WWII period. I don't think that war is how it will fall out with world economies so fragile and interlinked. More likely there will be a long process of chipping away at US dominance as China is currently doing off its coast, leading to a differently configured entente.

These questions of nearly false choice between two more or less bad options—whether it be two nasty world powers, or Trump and Clinton—plague politics at the moment because people have no power.

I would absolutely vote Clinton over Trump because I believe the epiphenomena of a Trump Presidency in US society would be a lot worse, but I think the US is going to keep declining either way. A President is just a President, and the fantasy of transformation from these larger than life personal brands doesn't eventuate.

Doesn't eventuate without some broader rupture, I should say—which is probably still a way off.