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wildcat09

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Everything posted by wildcat09

  1. This has been explained several times in this thread.
  2. Those are shitty terms. Why does it have to be the first thing I tell them? I might as well say you've got to tell them you think this guy has some decent points: You and I are both saying they need to be able to message both social and material issues. I don't think you even disagree with the emphasis I've placed on the importance of fighting for social issues, so much as the exact wording I used in one post. You damned well know my point isn't that we've got to convert every voter to being 100% pro trans in their hearts, my point is that retreating from the political debate on social issues is ineffective and surrenders ground on issues we can and should actually be on the popular side of.
  3. That gets into a bunch of self-identification stuff, but for these purposes if you've vehemently against Trump and the modern GOP, I don't really consider that in "the middle." In terms of political strategy, Dems don't need to worry about trying to win your vote any more than they need to worry about trying to win mine.
  4. Voters in the middle are people who don't know what they want or believe and are easily swayed to go with whoever is more popular and/or seems more mainstream. Ironically, it has been Democrats' attempts to avoid culture war issues (which have required them to pre-emptively surrender on them and concede that Republicans are on the right side of them) that has cost them with these voters.
  5. There are some things the GOP did that can't really be effectively copied from another angle, but I think their approach to media can. Dems need to build up a partisan media outlet (and appurtenant popular cultural commentary) and mercilessly attack the mainstream media for its bias. We need more people to see the mainstream media as owned and controlled by Republican-aligned interests, which should be doable because that's actually the truth and there is a ton of supporting evidence.
  6. When did a Democratic candidate make a special interest social issue the center of their agenda? We passed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in 1964 and 1965, respectively. Were we a less racist country then? Or did liberals become too scared of speaking affirmatively in support of civil rights? Would we be better off right now if Manchin and Sinema had voted for the new Civil Rights Act in 2022, or was their concern about appearing too focused on social issues to support it correct? In 2016, North Carolina passed an anti-trans bathroom bill. At the time it was so controversial that the NCAA pulled the NCAA Tournament out of the state, the NBA moved the all star game, and numerous major companies withdrew business from the state. What changed between then and now? Did the Democrats become vocally more pro-trans rights? Did any Democrats center trans issues in their campaigns? Or did many of them begin acknowledging that Republican messages on trans rights were correct, in an attempt to defuse it as an effective political issue? There is no running from social issues to focus on material issues. Democrats have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.
  7. @Goredho, I'll try another tack. There's some Dem commentators suggesting that Dems shouldn't attack Trump on Epstein: This is of a piece with the "avoid culture war" shit. Do you agree with her?
  8. Are you seriously treating "everybody should be able to vote" with "only white men should be able to vote and we should round up everyone else and put them into concentration camps" as equally bad options?
  9. This "deal" is (1) never being approved by the EU, and (2) will be unilaterally changed by Trump on a whim within a couple of months.
  10. Guys, where the fuck have I ever given the impression that I don't think Dems should talk at all about material issues? I have been incredibly consistent on this very simple point for a long time now: Dems need to stop running and engage in the culture war. Bozo's way works, but that's not the only way. There are a thousand different ways to do it depending on the issue, context, and candidates involved. Yet every time I push back on "Dems need to run away harder from the culture war!" with this point, people who agree with me go "NO THAT'S COMPLETELY WRONG!" Our fundamental perception of what the party even is and does and has been doing is so completely broken. ETA: there was a time, not that long ago, when being openly racist would've immediately disqualified a candidate even among the Texas GOP. Did the state just become 500% more racist within the past 15 years? Or is something else behind that change?
  11. Are you saying you will refuse to vote if Dems say actually we need to pass a new voting rights act?
  12. Why do so many people constantly talk about a fake version of the Democratic party that's even worse at politics than the real Democratic party? Why is their "solution" to the problems of this fake party always what the real party has been doing (and which has proven insufficient)? Dems have been trying to hide from social issues, duck culture war shit, and focus on kitchen table issues every single election since 1992. When do you think that will start actually working? Before or after they've herded us all into gas chambers? Ducking from culture war fights is how you lose the fucking culture war and that fight is much more important to most people than economic issues they don't understand. When you tell voters that your opponents are right on their culture war shit, you're telling them to vote for your opponents. THAT is what has driven people to vote Republican. It wasn't telling them that we support trans rights, it was refusing to tell them they should too.
  13. It's not really possible to deradicalize at scale. Our best bet is to splinter their political coalition, destroy some of the major financial sources of their political power (particularly car dealership owners, MLMs, and crypto), and find some charismatic liberal politicians who can make being conservative seem lame and stupid again to younger people. We can disillusion many of Trump's voters so much that they never vote again. But we can't deradicalize them, and doing what we need to do to diminish their political power will radicalize many of them further.
  14. No, it was much more important to tell people that republicans are right that trans people are gross and trying to harm their kids.
  15. I don't think aligned interests will be able to keep the media from helping Trump change the story like Democratic officials calling him a pedophile would. The Pod Save bros can't drive mainstream media coverage like Hakeem Jeffries or AOC can.
  16. And yet the overwhelming majority of Americans never knew most of it. That's a media failure and that's a failure of the opposing political party.
  17. It's not about taking control of the scandal. It's about making sure they're out there stoking the fire, because if they're not Trump and his allies in the media will douse it. We've seen this happen with literally dozens of scandals and every time smart and sophisticated Democrats go "don't interfere when the enemy is making a mistake!" and then it all fucking goes away because Dems don't know how modern media or political rhetoric work. It's an entire fucking political party of George McClellans, going "maybe if we play prevent defense and run Greg Davis-designed wide receiver screens against OU it'll work this time!" Doing nothing has never been the winning move in politics. It's not the winning move now. The Dems need to stop trying to be fucking clever and just need to constantly attack Trump and the entire GOP for being pedophiles. It wouldn't even be a lie, there's an endless fucking volume of supporting evidence that pedocon theory is a theory like gravity is a theory.
  18. Oh my fucking god. "Yeah, the thing they've been doing literally forever, the thing that's brought us to the brink of ruin, is how we'll get out of this." Stop this nonsense. When the other team is begging you to stop running the play that they can't stop, you keep running that fucking play.
  19. Man, mother nature is some bullshit sometimes.
  20. I wonder how many nazis were as tedious as as daggerhorn in their justifications. "They grabbed that child on his way to school, not at school, before sending him to the concentration camp" is some of the lamest sophistry I've ever seen.
  21. I was shocked when she confirmed that texashammer was in the room with them when they did it.
  22. "We will never have a holocaust because I will deny it."
  23. I don't even think this is true. Doesn't mean he shouldn't have withheld support, but Israel has their own military industrial complex and they're committed to this.
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