It’s weird how scheduling fewer debates and during times which guaranteed lower viewership and by exercising voter disenfranchisement in key areas might hurt the unknown candidate and change the vote totals.

Tappakone: “it is worth noting that sanders lost because he had fewer votes”

Someone who isn’t brainwashed: “yeah but what about all these underhanded things the DNC did to make it so Sanders would have fewer votes”

I love the idea that tappakone just created some straw man where people in the thread were suggesting that Sanders actually won the primary and the DNC just waived it off and picked Clinton.

“Well actually Clinton had more votes than sanders”

No ****, really??? Clearly if Clinton had more votes then everything was legit!

Thank god we have tappakone here for that kind of nuanced analysis. Everyone here actually thought Sanders has more votes. Good thing we have a volunteer DNC reputation advocate to help us.

Meh, it was the response that article deserved. Same level of nuance in both.

Filthy posted an article in which Chris Hedges argued that "serious meddling ... stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders." This meddling took the form of the Democratic Party hijacking its own governing committee (how would that even work?), stealing the Nevada caucus (didn't happen), purging voters from the rolls (voter rolls are not kept by the Democratic Party), and some other bull****.

(I haven't read very many Hedges articles, but whenever he writes about a topic with which I'm at least passingly familiar, it makes me think I shouldn't believe a word he says without double-checking.)

My humble counterpoints to this are: 1.) If you want to write about the causes of Sanders's defeat, you ought to focus on why Clinton was more popular than him among Democratic primary voters in specific and Democrats in general, which certainly isn't the route Hedges took. 2.) The caucuses are undemocratic by any reasonable standard and abolishing them should be included in any list of reforms to the primary system, even if they happened to favor Sanders in 2016.

I'll grant that I am not terribly interested in abandoning my life of relative opulence.

I think it’s reasonable for the party haierarchy to prefer one candidate over another (who wasn’t even a party member), but their failure was in trying to hide it and to work in the shadows.

In general, I’m amenable to the ‘wrong level of the system to use democracy’ line of argument about the us primary system.

I might be if we had a system were more than two parties were viable. But given the way politics in the US actually works it's giving up a lot for one of the only two viable parties to select candidates through less democratic means.

Clearly there's some room between "perfectly democratic" and "boss selected the candidate in the back room" but mostly I just think the "wrong level" argument is problematic for practical reasons. Implement proportional representation and give me more viable options and then I care less.

I think I do now understand what you mean by "contradiction". Like if you rob a house enough times, there is eventually nothing left to take.

And overproduction being solved by trade only leads to "imperialism", whereby trade arrangements are either compelled by force or otherwise leveraged for further exploitation (in your technical use of the word) and in any case carried out with their own set of disfavorable consequences.


Does this problem require a zero-sum picture of wealth? When there's only so much gold to go around, you take so much that there is none left to take.

But if you can simply make more gold, why can't you have unlimited growth on both sides? Especially with periodic, redistributive purges (ie, taxes) to keep one side from too far outpacing the other?

Abolish caucuses
Abolish superdelegates
Abolish closed primaries

Did Nixon actually defeat communism, on the most profound level?

So just a big, broad, general election with an ultimate runoff?

You'd still have endorsement contests, right? And if so, isn't that ultimately the Party system anyway?

Communism defeats itself by the contradiction of Communists all dying.

The way Cuba does elections is pretty good. Much more democratic than in the US

Weird claim to make as 2 billion people currently live in China.

The US most the Vietnam war, actually

Are you happy calling China today communist?

Yeah I think so. It’s obviously a complex situation and I might not object to someone saying that China has become somewhat revisionist the past few decades.

But it is definitely a project that is trying to abolish the current state of things.

50% of republican voters polled are scared MS-13 will directly come in contact with them or their families, according to a huffpo/yougov poll.

pretty sure you have a large population of dumb people that believe all the propaganda and are victims of continued fearmongering.

I'm by no means an expert, but it seems reasonable to refer to the Chinese system as a form of state capitalism still, right? Maybe I should be distinguishing between the political system and the economic system, the former of which is communist and the latter of which is state capitalism.

August 13, 1971 - Nixon suspends the convertability of the US dollar into gold

January 27, 1973 - US officially ends war in Vietnam (troop withdrawal takes a couple months)

February 1973 - Japan and EEC (proto-EU) countries float currencies



Maybe the timing is coincidental, or maybe Containment became moot.

There are 2000 troops in Syria and 1500 of them were put there under Trump.

listening to npr today, someone was talking about how great american values are. i couldn't think of a single one that was great.

what are some great values that america has? freedom? millions in prison. natives living on reservations in poverty. rampant homelessness, endless war, no health care, global pollution, drone strikes, mass surveillance, everyone working non stop and in debt

Yeah state capitalism may be an appropriate term to describe the stage China is now in. But I don’t see “communism” as a set of ideals to be attained but rather a project/movement toward a classless society. Or perhaps even more generally just a movement to destroy capitalism. Such a movement likely requires a stage of state capitalism in China—especially when capitalism is heavily entrenched in the rest of the world.