That's actually true, I don't really get the whole Bidenbro meme and excessive love for Obama, but I can't deny its existence.

The TL;DR of it is that Bernie Sanders wanted to frame the struggles of women and minorities in terms of economic issues, i.e. as actual ****ing actionable problems, rather than bread and circuses social identity politic talking points that the government can dance around for 100 ****ing years without doing any actual work to rectify.

Kinda like, you know, gay marriage, before millennials and the Supreme Court made up Clinton's mind for her.

Maybe what people don't remember is that Obama originally ran as an anti-establishment "hope" candidate against insidiest-of-insiders Clinton and McCain, and despite governing pretty much exactly the way either of them would have, he never fully shook off that anti-establishment image.

Biden memes, though. Dude has a sad story and a battery of goofy mannerisms. What more do you want, really?

Devout Amiga worshippers, who would so amusingly drop $3K on an AmigaONE X1000, actually get my sympathy, even with their sad devotion to that ancient religion, which has not helped conjure up the stolen home computer market.

As for "stolen" elections, well, to the extent that there ever was a cult around HRC beyond the presumption of being the "anti-Trump", I really hope that these die-hard supporters become as obscure as Amiga users, the minute a politician comes around who has half as much of the charisma that Obama needed to scoop her.

Which is what I totally expect to happen, because really, politicians with the charisma of a wet rag have rather shorter nostalgic staying power than electronic entertainment devices from our childhood.

And the irony of it is, is that the people who hate Sanders the most want to make economics into social identity politics, so that being a capitalist is the core of your identity and anything useful becomes in-actionable because it would conflict with your self image. And so, in two solid punches, almost the entire nation is ideologically possessed and locked into shouting matches.

EDIT:When I started writing this it started out as a joke but I'm pretty ripped off my **** so by the end i forgot and it turned into ****ty social commentary sorry

One of these days, I will wake up to the realization that all of my 'serious' online conversations were with people who were either high or trolling.

Today could be that day if you too become ripped off your ****.

A decent amount of my posts were influnced by alcohol. Like I am right now. Eyo.



Anyone else watch the video where Clinton announces she does not support gay marriage? In 2001 or something, presumably because polling suggested it was still unpopular.

Hail satanistics.

That could be. Another thing is what the fault lines were that split the outsider and the insider Democratic candidates in 2008 vs in 2016. It's true that in both 2008 and 2016, the outsider ran as an idealist who advocated change untempered by realistic expectations, while the insider ran as a hard-headed pragmatist whose goals were supposedly more restrained and grounded because of her experience. In that respect, they seem pretty similar. (Obama also possessed "celebrity", while Bernie had managed to create a "movement".)

But there were also some crucial differences. In 2008, an anti-elite (especially, anti-financial elite), anti-corporatist message didn't also define the attraction to the outsider candidate in the same way it did in 2016. In other words, the dividing line between Obama and Hillary wasn't between leftists and left-of-center liberals, in the way it was between Bernie and Hillary in 2016. In 2008, Obama wanted to expand the role of government and provide more robust public services than HRC. Once he was president, he governed as a corporatist. But he wasn't a hypocrite, because anti-corporatism had never really been a large part of his message.

When Obama ran in 2008, it was still anathema even for a Democrat to talk about seriously about income inequality (one of the big achievements of Occupy Wall Street was to make discourse about income inequality permissible on the left). But by 2016, a large enough portion of the democratic primary electorate had mobilized around the issue that a candidate who ran on it could pose a serious threat to the favored Democratic candidate.

TL;DR: HRC is criticized so much more than Obama because Hillary ran against a leftist, and Obama didn't. There was no candidate to the left of Obama who had a serious chance of beating him. And since Obama didn't have to defend himself from a genuine leftist candidate, it wasn't in the interest of a significant number of people on the left to defame him. That's not true for Hillary. The contempt so many have for her is largely a result of an especially divisive Democratic primary, with Democrats divided along ideological lines in a way they weren't in 2008.

I also think that it matters that HRC has been widely criticized (and has even inspired ire) for a long, long time -- even when her husband was running for president in 1992 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-namImCszCk). Being in the public eye for decades and having had a stinky reputation for years and years is a difficult thing to overcome. In 2008, it was seen as a significant liability, that made voting for Obama rather than Clinton appear to be a strategic choice for some: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3DeCLPwxXI. In 2016, critics of HRC on both the left and the right had a long history of defamation to draw on. Not to mention, she did things that made her especially susceptible to the leftist critique (e.g., the speeches to the financial industry).

Also, this is some cold **** from May 2008: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90864878

Yet another double standard. Obama didn't support gay marriage until 2012.

One of the really impressive things about Bernie is that he's had the same beliefs on social and economic issues for decades. He was really ahead of the curve. In the 2000s, and especially in the early 2000s, nobody of stature was talking about marriage equality -- except maybe Dennis Kucinich, who, on the whole, was taken about as seriously as Ralph Nader was. And, after the 2000 election, he was likely despised as much as Ralph Nader was, because he was seen as being similar to Nader: he was who many leftists would vote for if they felt entitled to ignore the practical costs of voting for a third party candidate and vote their conscience. In 2000, that cost was very high: Nader was seen by many as responsible for costing Gore the election. There was a certain degree of stigma associated with "voting your conscience" after 2000. (Another one of Bernie's achievements was removing the stigma of voting for a leftist candidate, or even, to be a leftist candidate who appeared to have a chance of winning.)

But the Democratic party has now moved further to the left, and, in doing so, it's basically caught up with Bernie's progressiveness -- at least as far as social issues go. Social liberals these days are incredibly intolerant of any views on social issues that aren't as "progressive" as their own, and they've quickly naturalized/normalized their beliefs (that is, they've succeeded in marking views that disagree with their own as "offensive"). Since Bernie was so far ahead of the curve, when social liberals look at Bernie's past, they see someone whose views are basically the same as their own. But when they look at almost any other politician, they'll see "regressive" or "backwards" beliefs, just because those were the views democrats ran on before 2012 and 2016.

If I could magically decide who was and who wasn't allowed to run for the Democratic nomination in 2020, I wouldn't let anyone run if they ran for national office/governor before 2012. They -- like Hillary -- would have too many skeletons in their closet, too much fodder for YouTube videos, just because they will have expressed views that were normative in the 2000s, before polarization intensified.

Going back to the question, "why wasn't Obama criticized as much as HRC even though they were both corporatists": 2012 also matters. Obama succeeded in casting himself as a defender of the little guy, and of labor, against his opponent, whom he successfully associated with fat cats, and with capital, because of all Romney's ridiculous gaffes. And for Obama to maintain that position, he didn't have to cast himself as a democratic socialist in the manner of Bernie. He only had to uphold the Democratic status quo against the Republican party's typical small government, anti-entitlement spending, pro-privatization, anti-regulation, pro-Citizens United, "corporations are people", "I love big bird", "47% won't vote for me", blah blah blah blah line. Obama may have paid at most occasional lip service to Occupy Wall Street and to its aftermath. But if you cared about income inequality, Obama was as good as you were going to get. It wasn't really in anyone's interest to attack him from the left.

There was also all this bull****: https://newrepublic.com/minutes/129335/feminist-gloria-steinem-says-young-women-support-bernie-want-attention-boys

That is, the Clinton campaign trying to guilt young women into voting for her. Which is to say: rallying people around HRC based on identity/feminism and stigma (something like: Bernie supporters are men, which means they're bad, and women who support Bernie are sex-frenzied sellouts to their tribe).

The problem with HRC has been known as long as JK has been out. She is pretty much the flesh incarnate of Rorty's critique of the 'new left', that he wrote about in his 1997 book, Achieving Our Country.

TL;DR: Following the end of the Vietnam war, gender studies classrooms somehow convinced the left that their fake cultural Marxist sophistry was more important than working with unions who might (gasp) be predominantly white and male.

It was a dumb idea then, and after 20 years of repeating the same mistake, it is still a dumb idea, and if you search this thread somewhere in the first 10 pages, you will even find that I quoted Rorty pretty much predicting the rise of a Trump when the white working class just completely loses patience with being ignored and insulted, and throws in with orange Hitler.

That seems like a totally fair analysis of where the left is these days. And I'll admit that Clinton adopted social liberalism (to borrow Douthat's term for it), too, in a way that even Obama didn't (and, further, in a way that Obama didn't have to, since he didn't have to work nearly as hard Clinton to convince African-Americans to vote for him.) But she's not the embodiment of it. It's much bigger than she is.

Still, it's amusing just how entangled social liberalism is with a pro-corporate message. The Pepsi commercial for some reason was treated as a massive scandal. But the shamelessness with which corporations and media companies have appealed to the ideology of social liberalism to sell their products and to Netflix specials is so widespread it's stunning that more people aren't attuned to it.

Also, it's notable how it serves the interest of corporations. Convince white college graduates who start their careers providing free labor in the form of unpaid internships (despite having massive debt from college, they're told they should feel "lucky" to have their internship) that they're "privileged", and that they're actually part of the dominant class, whose mastery of society pits them in a zero-sum conflict against minorities? And teach them to feel guilty for "exploiting" others, while they get exploited? Sure, no way that that serves the interests of the billionaire class.

You do know, uh, that cultural Marxism, aka cultural Bolshevism, is a term the Nazis used to describe the made-up efforts of Jews and communists to subvert German culture, right?

It's probably best to not use that term, unless you want to be associated with the alt-right.

Whoops, that's not so great. Let's instead call that political movement the "feminists who repurposed Marxist language for identity politics tactics" crowd you'll find at universities.

I only said they were cultural since they don't address economic issues in a uniform and culturally neutral way, thus distinguishing them from actual Marxists (and for other reasons perhaps from actual feminists for that matter) but I better avoid that term, so thanks.

"what libtard cucks say"

There's Marxist feminism who criticize capitalism for not accounting the unpaid labours of women. Not sure if that's what you're talking about.

I formally declare this thread long enough to be a filesystem.

This post has been deduplicated by the filesystem daemon.

Shh. It's ok.

Also: https://twitter.com/TheOnion/status/859437833945194500

I said deduplicated, not garbage collected, contrary to Finnish hopes.

What if we secretly moved all Massassi discussion into this thread after we move it to where he can't see it? :-P

Can we get the Asheron's Call forum back?

So the only reason leftism has become weirdly obsessed with identity politics is because, frankly, identity politics are in no way threatening to a capitalist system. But its rise has nothing to do with any conscious effort. It's just a result of the natural workings of capitalism. If leftism is permitted to exist, it must be non threatening. As a logically equivalent statement, if leftism is threatening, it can't be permitted to exist. That's why unions are so eagerly suppressed, that's why co-ops and other semi-anarchist organizations are violently harassed. Identity politics don't pose this threat, unless they demand paid maternal leave, in which case suddenly there's massive resistance to it.

But if you complain endlessly about how terrible it is that more women aren't CEOs, you're basically applauded for your brave journalism. One because it's impossible to do anything about, and two, you're giving legitimacy to the current economic organization of society.

It's not that much of a mystery, it's just what happens when effective leftism is suppressed, and useless leftism is ignored.

This so much. The stuff coming that has been churning out of the universities has let the left crawl so far up the asses of their own voting blocs that they pretty much forgot that the point of a democracy is to convince a majority of the population that your candidate is going to do a good job making life better for everybody.

They made the mistake of counting the number of groups they had locked down as voters, as a substitute for counting numbers of convinced people, inside (and outside) whatever groups they've constructed.

It would have been harder to convince people that aren't part of your identity politics, but by the same token it would have forced you to come up with a better platform.

They tried to sweep this under the rug and repeat mantras about changing demographics, but in the end it all blew up and they ought to be totally reinventing themselves.

Rather, it's used by cynical companies for free PR.

But let's be real. According to intersectionality theory and the "progressive stack", did anyone really think that "one man, one vote" would survive?

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

Kinda funny when HRC, as the neoliberal who campaigned largely on emotional and blatant identity politics marketing, is on both sides of this opposing equation, esp. when you think of how catastrophically bad she ended up being for both masters she sought to serve.

OMG, the people in that Twitter thread seem mostly oblivious that the video is satire, or were seeming rubbed the wrong way by the suggestion that identity politics isn't a panacea.

It's almost as if {leftists who can take a joke or accept criticism} ∩ {people who can recognize the joke without also being an anti-SJW warrior} ∩ {Twitter users} = Ø.

It's a good rule of thumb to ignore any and all futurism/futurology ****posting. People obsessed with that sort of thing are mentally unstable. As in, it's literally just science fiction that pretends to be literal so nerds can jerk off/get distracted about how great life will be in the future. Even though the take of that is dystopian aka "I read 1984 once" politics.



The only reason Obama didn't run against a leftist in 2012 is because he was incumbent, and his opponent came across like even worse of a pro-corporate *******, with that infamous line about half of Americans being lazy. I'm pretty sure the anger people felt in 2016 is exactly what they felt in 2012, it's just the space for criticism was more open in 2016. The feelings from OWS are still very widely felt by all.

Also, maybe the general feeling among the liberal left is kind to Obama, but most leftists never really liked Obama, even moreso when they realized he backed up none of his more populist policies and ACA wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

Okay, it's just the Wikipedia mentioned Keynes.

What I seem to get is that, economies can be locked into a cycle where there's not enough demand to maintain growth. Though the Wikipedia mentions a couple potential causes. Which do you find particularly convincing?



Does Google follow under this category with their collusion?

It could also just be that people's moral standards have changed?

I'll grant that many people are unfair with regards to Obama and Clinton, but if Obama were running in 2016 for the first time, I feel he would have been raked over the coals for these sorts of things. Sentiments about gay marriage have changed drastically from eight years ago.

I wonder if we could review polls? It's my impression more that people thought of Romney as a bigger ******* than Obama, I remember OWS holding a bunch of resentment against Obama for "selling out", yet it wouldn't get better with Romney.

I remember seeing an article in a PEOPLE (I'm ashamed to admit I flipped through it) that basically said "if you're a woman and you don't vote Hillary then you're throwing away everything women have struggled for".

I think it escaped them that shaming women into voting a certain way is not empowering women, it's sort of the opposite. It was weird too, because the tone was hostile, it wasn't even a positive "go women" thing. It was just straight pressuring women to vote Hillary.

Well I guess they were going for the strong weak woman vote. The ones who were supposed to respond to all the emotional adverts, and apparently as well the ones who need to be told how she could have been president, that she tried her best, but it wasn't her fault she lost because of Comey's meddling.

Indentity politics and woman branded advertising are not feminism! Clinton lost because her top down and empty appeals to identity belong in the trash along with the advertising industry in general, along with other brilliant ideas proginated from the corporate / elite intellectual circles she trafficked in.

That said, she might have been a good policy wonk and a conscientious person within the bounds of her political calculus. Like Obama.

Edited: 5 gazillion times

I mean if you are going to treat your voting bloc like cattle, and take their vote for granted so long as your marketing guru can check items off a clipboard about hitting your demographic in the right advertising markets, is it any suprise that

1. the Clinton campaign would be utterly cynical in its focus on emotional appeals
2. it wouldn't work, especially since she was not even half as black as she'd needed to have been, according (I am willing to guess) to market research to overcome the disappointing results of Obama

Not that any of this would have been good enough, since this entire strategy already cost her the uneducated white vote and therefore an embarrassing number of Midwestern states.