I definitely think there's moral hypocrisy and sexism at work but mostly Hillary is so much more of a raw nerve for America that I get why people are screaming at her and glossing over Bill's behavior.

As to what we should do, I'm sympathetic to the realpolitik argument. We're < a month away from what might be the last chance backstop for America's descent into fascism. Does it really make sense to revisit Paula Jones in depth right now? Why not dig up the various allegations against Clarence Thomas that never got aired in public? I dunno, doesn't seem like the best time for a "Dems do it tooooooo" moment. Let's wait till midterms and then discuss how Bill was probably a gross sex pest.

the bottom line is that, right or wrong, justified or not, hillary and bill have become absolutely toxic, politically speaking. they need to show some humility and acknowledge that fact, and then stfu and go work on the clinton foundation or something

I'm prepared to believe they don't give a rat's ass about how Dems do in 2018 or 2020 if they aren't on the ballot and that the Trump tax cuts suit them just fine.

The poverty rate was lower in the 70's and late 90's/early 00's just off hand. It was 11.05% according to government data over the last 10 years. It was lower than that average every year from 1995 to 2008, 1986 to 1990 and 1968 to 1980.

I'm not saying everybody should be able to go out for fine dining or steaks once a week, I'm saying people shouldn't starve. Same applies to each standard, except healthcare. People should be able to survive without suffering in America, yes.

This sounds to me like a bad faith argument. There is a lot of room between giving everyone everything they want even if they're just being lazy sitting at home and letting people die in the streets.

Nobody is out there saying people should be able to sit on their ass all day if they're capable of working and just live off other people. We can strive for all of the stuff I said without giving handouts to people. (And I'm really not worried if a tiny fraction of 1% game the system, data shows us that generally speaking they aren't worth the expense of trying to catch them.)

I also do think we are heading toward a future where UBI is necessary anyway, so yeah, people will get paid to sit at home in that scenario.

I don't think there are conservatives with enough integrity to actually do anything about it. When they bring it up it seems more of a transparent smear campaign than search for justice. They've been calling wolf about the Clintons for too long so I think it gets lost. I also wouldn't be surprised if Bill had a word with the Republicans about what evidence he has on them, but I agree, it's definitely time for them to go away.

My kneejerk was against UBI, but I’m warming up to the idea. I would like to see some contingencies, though. As I see it, the main problem isn’t a lack of opportunities to better one’s financial circumstances. They’re out there. The bottleneck is people not taking advantage of those opportunities. There are plenty of valid reasons for them not doing so, ignorance, time, money, etc., as opposed to lack of motivation or just plain lazy. But it would be nice if UBI could be applied in a way to open up that bottleneck.

The main reason I think UBI is going to be necessary is that we're going to see so many jobs eliminated by automation that we'd literally be headed for unprecedented amounts of poverty, homelessness and starvation, which would lead to an uprising. When I say we're heading to a future where UBI is necessary, I literally mean necessary.

I'm all for giving people opportunities to work, eliminating bottlenecks, etc... I think in a lot of ways UBI will create opportunities for people to be entrepreneurial, because a lot of people won't be anywhere near satisfied with UBI given that it would likely be implemented as only a small amount of money.

Sure, but, this seems like the "most aren't that credible" track I was talking about earlier. I agree, the right is completely disingenuous when they pretend to care about Paula Jones or Kathleen Wiley or really anything because tax cuts and telling racist jokes are the only things they actually care about in this world. BUT, like, Juanita Broaddarick seems pretty credible for instance. That's on us to deduce, not left open to right wing trogoldytes to settle for us.

And also relate: this feels pretty deflective! Maybe you don't mean it, but the right just got done try thread this EXACT needle right now with Kavanaugh: "well sure, we can't really figure out what Kavanaugh did or didn't do, but this is a smear campaign, not a search for justice! Shame Feinstein. They've been screaming about sexual assault so long it all gets lost. CONFIRM KAVANAUGH."

That is to say: our moral agency isn't dependent on how cynical the deplorables are. Just as the right's failure to internalize the claims made by Ford and chalk the whole affair up to Democratic dirty tricks and wash their hands of it was a moral abdication. An excuse to get out of a messy, politically inconvenient spot with something to say to save face.

Again, I ain't leaning into this that deeply, because I think relitigating the Clintons is entirely ****ing tedious, it's really subservient to right-wing interests to do it. They'd love nothing more than to make the next 20 years a never-ending referendum about the Clintons, in fact they will probably try to do just that. And they'll do it because actually Bill Clinton was and probably is a bad person and should go away, and they recognize they can get a lot of mileage re-litigating Clinton sex pest stories, and literally any Clinton aggrandizement the Democrats engages in is inviting completely cynical and ham-handed right-wing scrutiny. Give em an inch and they'll take miles.

But here I think we're all in furious agreement that the Clintons need to please just go somewhere ****ing else forever. But I wanted to point out that in any morally righteous world, it's actually Bill that's the really bad apple here. Hillary embodies the worst qualities of the political elite, and that's bad, but Bill is like probably a legit rapist / predator.

Bill is 100% a rapist. It sucks for hillary that society meant he had to be pres rather than her when she was the smart driven one and he was a dumb hick rapist but she engineered that situation and now is stuck with the consequences.

A. Speak for yourself

B. Beneath the tankie fire and brimstone of the newly enamored young communist, Einbert is essentially just talking about New Deal Democrat ****. Like Bernie was. Like AOC is. How in the **** is that far left?

C. You're the enemy (?)

im pretty sure einbert has gone full mao on us (idk, stopped reading his posts)

it's problem

https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/...101557248?s=19

(Someone has to cover the trading losses of Chelsea's husband.)

Bill’s track record as President was pretty damned good.

No, it wasn't. The only good thing he did was luckbox his way into an economic boom.

Bill was in no way dumb or not driven.

It's the same story arc for all good people with passion and anger who want a just, egalitarian society and dive into communism. They go through a phase of being smitten by the ideas of hellfire revolution but then realize it's not early 20th century Russia, and we're not fighting the ****ing tzars, so some recalibration is needed. It's all good.

I just want to see a movement for a constitutional amendment banning anyone named on Jeffery Epstein's flight logs from executive office. No chance of passing, but the public debate would be amusing.

He did a lot of stuff that sucked, but during a boom he raised taxes and ran a surplus. Pretty good Keynesing. The opposition specializes in anti-Keynes, making for bubbles and debt or recession instead of recovery.

Also, FP in Bosnia, Iraq, Rwanda and Haiti weren't right, but his FP was possibly the least bad of my life, but that's damning with faint praise. If Rabin weren't assassinated and Oslo held he might have been a legit Nobel winner.

All of this, plus I assume that many Dems (I can name several anecdotally for what that's worth) see his failed impeachment as vindication. I can't square that circle but lots of folks can. Plus there are plenty on the left who enjoy how Bill triggers the right, obviously the right doesn't have a patent on that kind of thinking.

? tweet deleted

A. As for the bolded, which was, "there will NEVER be a party anywhere near as far left as you would like. A lot of us are left of center and would never want to see a major US party go that far left." I stand by it. There's never going to be a large/effective communist party in the United States. "A lot of us" would never want that, which is correct. That doesn't mean you can't want that, or he can't want that, but it's never going to happen here. (Okay, maybe I shouldn't say never, but the odds of it in the next ~50 years are virtually 0, and the odds of it in the next ~200 years are very low as well.)

B. I think einbert is talking about something very different from Bernie and AOC. I like them, I agree with them on many (not all) issues, and I voted for Bernie in the primary in 2016. I'm not trashing the Bernie wing of the party, I'm trashing straight up communism.

C. Umm, okay?

Einbert is talking about something different, but incremental change may well not be enough to deal with the end stage capitalism and global environmental destruction stuff. Within 50 years or 200 anyway, catastrophe may make that clear. There is also AI which makes predicting things 50 years off pretty difficult.

There is a fundamental problem with capitalism, increasing market efficiency, the hunt for harder to find profits, the need for low wages and increased consumption and all of this happening in a world with finite resources and heads in the sand about externalities. You can say that people have been saying this for a hundred years, yeah, but some of these things are changing exponentially. It's gettin kinda hectic.

I didn't pay much attention to the claims so I can't speak for their veracity. Of course they should be investigated, I'm just tired of playing Charlie Brown to the Conservative's Lucy. They don't care about women, so I'm not necessarily interested in moving their crocodile claims to the front of the queue when there are so many more prominent men who need investigations.

The disruption is there. Whether or how much that translates into permanent unemployment for a large segment of society, I’m not so sure about. We’ve seen this movie before, along with all the dire warnings, and things worked out okay.
I agree. Economists have been predicting forever that if people make too much money they won’t work as much. If anything history has shown the exact opposite. It seems like the more people get the more they want.

European countries did largely reduce their work weeks when productivity increased. The US didn't though. Most probably because European countries have larger worker oriented parties that could push for reduced work weeks while the US didn't.