Kinja reply list

Read More
heartbraiderHamilton Nolan
7/28/16 5:29pm
People love the idea of a politician being bipartisan, but the compromise necessary to accomplish bipartisanship is anathema to ideological purity.
Reply
- Read More
  pre-emptive sighheartbraider
  7/28/16 5:36pm
  When you’re elected to regulate an industry and then you take money from the industry and don’t regulate it, you might call it compromise, I would call it ‘selling out,’ ‘double dealing,’ or just plain ‘corrupt’
  Reply
- Read More
  illadelph halflifeheartbraider
  7/28/16 5:37pm
  Damn...what is happening to this place? First we have the emergence of the “Shut up or Trump” crowd and now we’re trying to maintain a “purity”.
  
  I don’t know if this is just the Trump hysteria having every just a bit high strung or what...
  
  This shit isn't progressive.
  Reply
Read More
emooHamilton Nolan
7/28/16 5:38pm
God, it’s so much easier to like these people when they just talk about ideas instead of actually doing things! What’s up with that? Why can’t we just elect politicians who keep giving us that sweet sweet rhetoric instead of you know, tangible things like roads and social programs?
Reply
- Read More
  RobertMadooemoo
  7/28/16 5:45pm
  Yeah, why isn’t the left happy with Democrats doing things that the left doesn’t support??
  Reply
- Read More
  emooRobertMadoo
  7/28/16 6:01pm
  Because “the left” supports a whole collection of mutually exclusive nonsense.
  
  Let me tell you a story (stop crying!).
  
  I was a co-chair for a green community group in Northern California. We started with something close to 100 people who showed up to meetings and whatnot. And we decided, collectively, that we would do some outreach, beginning with handing out reusable bags.
  
  We democratically selected a logo, chosen from images submitted by group members. Then we had to pick a bag to buy. Our budget allowed us to get maybe 20 cotton bags, or 500 (or something) polypropylene bags, and so we told everyone the deal, and voted to see which bags we should buy. Remember, these are to hand out to people at Farmer’s markets or whatever.
  
  The group picked plastic. And immediately, a third of the members quit. Like, fire and brimstone “FUCKING SELLOUTS!” emails were sent for weeks. And one of the people who quit, was the other co-chair’s mom, who had designed the winning logo.
  
  We were democratic. We were committed. We all agreed that climate change was a huge problem, and we all wanted to tackle it. And we all lived in a pretty small, relatively affluent zip code. And we couldn’t even pick a fucking bag without heartbreak and vicious, incredibly personal attacks on people who just stood back and counted votes.
  
  So when you talk about “things the left doesn’t support”, that includes shit like: building housing that isn’t Leeds certified, raising the minimum wage by $6 instead of $8, supporting organic farming but not hating GMOs hard enough, giving out the wrong kinds of reusable bags...
  
  The left makes the perfect the enemy of the good every single time, and then wonders why people ignore them. What “the left wants” is an amorphous mass that evaporates when you look at it too hard.
  Reply
Read More
RobertMadooHamilton Nolan
7/28/16 5:30pm
In before the standard “please, in your own words, what exactly do you mean by neoliberal, citing no less than 10 sources that I deem acceptable.”
Reply
- Read More
  MWarnerMRobertMadoo
  7/28/16 5:46pm
  To Refer to Corey Booker or the policies he implemented in Newark as “neoliberal” is to have absolutely no idea what the term neoliberal even means.
  Reply
- Read More
  RobertMadooMWarnerM
  7/28/16 5:47pm
  I would have expected you to add a little something to it and not literally just regurgitate the thing I was preemptively making fun of. Oh well.
  Reply
Read More
iElvis Found Trump's Tax Returns Too Late to Save GawkerHamilton Nolan
7/28/16 5:31pm
What exactly is a “centrist liberal”? Would you call someone a “centrist conservative”?
Reply
- Read More
  Sparky PolastryiElvis Found Trump's Tax Returns Too Late to Save Gawker
  7/28/16 5:40pm
  It’s kinda like a ‘jumbo shrimp’ or a ‘competent Texan’
  Reply
- Read More
  ╰(　´◔　ω　◔ `)╯< Woke and BokeiElvis Found Trump's Tax Returns Too Late to Save Gawker
  7/28/16 5:49pm
  Yo diría, es uno que puede mantener un trabajo.
  Reply
Read More
TRUMP DELENDUS EST (fka Chatham Harrison)Hamilton Nolan
7/28/16 5:43pm
This is the most unwelcome aspect of this discourse, in my eyes:

EDDIE GLAUDE: —to think strategically about the vote and what does it mean to actually embrace a radical Democratic vision.
If you are a centrist liberal, own that.
MICHAEL ERIC DYSON: Right. Here’s my point.
EDDIE GLAUDE: If you’re not, then embrace a different kind of politic.

Forgive me if there are some of us who advocate for strong liberal policies and also believe in governing the country. Tip O’Neill did it. Ted Kennedy did it. Bernie Sanders did it just this week. Radicalism is the luxury of the outsider. Centrism is the vice of the insider. Effective liberal government avoids either.

Reply
- Read More
  Chief Wiggum, P.I.TRUMP DELENDUS EST (fka Chatham Harrison)
  7/28/16 7:02pm
  I think everyone you named would be called a centrist sellout by the people in question; hell, we heard a group Bernie’s own supporters booing him for it. There are a lot of people who’d rather lose a fight trying to get 100% of what they want than take 65-70% and know it’s a win.
  Reply
- Read More
  TRUMP DELENDUS EST (fka Chatham Harrison)Chief Wiggum, P.I.
  7/28/16 7:36pm
  That’s because a 70% win is 30% OPPRESSION.
  
  The Tea Party was built with one objective in mind: get like-minded people into office. Where they succeeded, they have been mostly loyal. Where they failed, they still had their voters support the best candidate available, at least until the day after Election Day. And they have almost always defended Republicans, even RINOs, if the alternative was a Democrat.
  
  If even Bernie Sanders can lose their support, literally no one in the entire federal government is progressive enough for the Green Tea Party. Within a democracy, a movement that refuses to support any winning candidates is a movement that marginalizes itself. If they continue to refuse to concede in the face of defeat, the only question is to what degree they can manage to discredit liberalism or the Democratic Party in the process of their self-destruction.
  Reply
Read More
Richard PunchHamilton Nolan
7/28/16 5:49pm
This is so fucking stupid. Frankly, it’s below you, Hamilton.

Politics means working with other people to get shit done. Grow the fuck up and deal with that simple fact.
Reply
- Read More
  angriest-squirrelRichard Punch
  7/28/16 5:55pm
  Thank you. I can’t get over how idiotic this post is. The author never actual describes any of Booker’s policies that represent the apparently DISASTROUS (but unnamed) consequences of neoliberalism in Newark. Further, the evidence of the falling of Booker’s star is comprised of a single conversation on Democracy Now! between people who “might have loved him” ten years ago.
  
  What?
  
  So, my questions would be: 1) What were the neoliberal policies and/or dealings that Booker advanced in Newark? 2) What were the consequences of these actions? 3) How have people outside of a couple of folks on Democracy Now! (and Hamilton Nolan, I guess) reacted to this consequences? And then my other question is:
  
  What?
  Reply
- Read More
  Richard Punchangriest-squirrel
  7/28/16 6:10pm
  You know what I learned from this?
  
  Hamilton listens to Democracy Now!. That is not a compliment, but it is informative.
  Reply
Read More
VanNostrandHamilton Nolan
7/28/16 5:55pm
Time to bust this out again..

/r/politicaldiscussion

/u/TheGreasyPole

Because “progressive change” is, well, progressive.
Each small increment to the left, moves the overton window to the left... and moves in ideas from outside the window, to inside.
This decades “centrism” is last decades “left wing” is the decade before’s “extreme left”.
The sanders campaign, for example, was only viable this year (reaching 45% of the primary), because the overton window had been moved to the left over the previous decade. The overton window had been shifted such that Sanders was inside the mainstream (for the first time in 40 years!). Another decade of leftward shift, and his platform will be the consensus view of the democratic party. In 2024 a “Sanders Style Candidate” might be attacked from the left!
So, “neoliberal incrementalism” isn’t just kicking the can down the road, it’s kicking the can to the left of the road :)
- When Obamacare is the status quo... a public option is a mainstream left alternative, not a crazy socialist proposal.When a $12 minimum wage is the status quo... a $15 minimum wage is the mainstream left alternative, not a crazy socialist proposal.When LGBT people are respected equals... gay marriage is the mainstream left alternative, not a crazy social justice proposal.
BUT.... Shun neo-liberal incrementalism.... let the right wing shift the overton window to the right ?
- Well, when federal minimum wages are abolished.... reinstating the $9 minimum wage is the alternative left proposal.When the rich have received a massive tax cut.... reinstating the previous income tax structure is the alternative left proposal (see Obama after Bush)When they’ve built “the wall”.... tearing it down and re-instituting some immigration is the alternative left proposal.
Thats how politics work.
Its how Europe and Canada became left wing. Each decade shifting a little more to the left, and bringing new left-wing ideas that were previously “crazy” inside the mainstream.
Reply
- Read More
  FuriousFrankVanNostrand
  7/28/16 6:01pm
  Yep. And yet...
  Reply
- Read More
  ThatGirlGirlVanNostrand
  7/28/16 6:32pm
  Can Gawker please post this as an article instead?
  Reply
Read More
FuriousFrankHamilton Nolan
7/28/16 5:56pm
Question: Does the desire to smack everyone involved in a “people’s microphone” make me a neoliberal?
Reply
- Read More
  boaboaboatengtengtengFuriousFrank
  7/28/16 6:17pm
  Answer: no, because loads of socialists I know who were involved in OWS hated that/the jazz hands. Apparently it all goes back to certain activist strains that are rooted in Quaker meeting halls/practice—I read an article about it a while ago but can’t find it.
  Reply
- Read More
  EatTheCheeseNicholsonboaboaboatengtengteng
  7/28/16 6:47pm
  Yeah, they were Quaker practices that were first absorbed into the early feminist movement and became a core part of mainly anarchist circles from there on out. David Graeber talks about it a lot in The Democracy Project, but I don’t have an online source.
  Reply
Read More
yoshinoyaHamilton Nolan
7/28/16 5:50pm
It’s hard to emphasize just how little the average American cares about shit like this. We’re talking about a country this close to electing Donald Trump as its leader, and you’re posting about some academics’ quibble about whether Booker is the right kind of liberal? We’ll be lucky to not be living in a dictatorship in seven months.
Reply
- Read More
  TheRealFrying_slothyoshinoya
  7/28/16 5:57pm
  This...so much this.
  Reply
- Read More
  Joliet Jake Bluesyoshinoya
  7/28/16 6:12pm
  8% of Bernie supporters are voting for Trump according to the latest Pew poll.
  
  When I say half of Americans are too stupid to find their ass with both hands, I think I'm being generous.
  Reply
Read More
pre-emptive sighHamilton Nolan
7/28/16 5:31pm
~~Cory Booker’s Name~~ Democrat Has Become a Synonym for “Sellout”
Reply
- Read More
  JCBadger34pre-emptive sigh
  7/28/16 5:39pm
  So edgy. I know you’re gonna run and tell your Bernie Facebook meme group about how you just got in a sweet burn in the comments on Gawker!
  Reply
- Read More
  pre-emptive sighJCBadger34
  7/28/16 5:49pm
  If it makes you feel better, Republicans are sellouts too, but they’re more open about it.
  Reply

Cory Booker’s Name Democrat Has Become a Synonym for “Sellout”