domain:traditionsofconflict.com
roystgnr
4m ago
You don’t like Bernie, that doesn’t mean that other people don’t.
Lots of people like Bernie. After Super Tuesday, when the vote was no longer split between anybody but him and Biden, he still got millions of votes, something like a third as many primary votes as Biden. But "a third as many as Biden" isn't enough to win a Democratic primary, and he's much less popular with independents and Republicans than with Democrats.
If Bernie was so unpopular, why did the Democratic Party have to undertake heroic action every single primary to thwart him?
The 2020 "heroic action" mentioned originally was that three candidates who were doing much worse than him or Biden dropped out of the race after (significantly after, in Warren's case) their trajectory became apparent, and picked someone to endorse instead. That's not heroic action by the Democratic Party, that's just what losing candidates do to make the loss less expensive and less embarrassing.
For other less inactive forms of Party action, though? Insanity happens at this level, where people have orders of magnitude more power than average but not much more brains than average. Why did Clinton push the "pied piper" strategy with Trump? Because she didn't think Trump had a snowball's chance in hell at winning either. If her fans overestimated Bernie's odds in the primary too, well, clearly they're just not the best estimators.
And even if Bernie couldn’t win, it would have been better to let him take his shot, lose bigly,
3 to 1. Even counting the earlier votes from when the pro-Biden block was split, it was still 2 to 1.
and put the issue to bed for good instead of creating a permanent Lost Cause myth
What would it have taken? 5 to 1?
and losing the left wing of the party for good.
Despite my expression of annoyance with Duverger's Law in another comment, I do admire the way it selectively encourages people who are bad at math to disenfranchise themselves. Though this is another way in which plurality fails "democracy's equally-critical job of convincing your voters that they were the ones who picked the leader", the "democracy's job of trying to pick a good leader" thing is important too. It may be for the best that people who can't hack game theory end up with less influence over mechanism design.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
11m ago
· Edited 8m ago
There shouldn’t be a specific taboo on psychologically analyzing another poster’s motivations, or making meta observations about their style of argument or topics of interest, as long as the comment otherwise meets the normal standards of cordiality. Such observations are often extremely germane to the discussion.
(Never watched GoT and I have no idea who “Grima Wormtongue” is but that seems pretty anodyne as far as name calling goes.)
aqouta
16m ago
I do agree that another voting system might be useful but it's not even the first past the post thing, it's also that they do every state in sequence. It's actually pretty hard to design a system around this kind of thing, especially because the primary isn't just about the voting but had also kind of morphed into a narrative building function. If you get rid of them and ran it all at once then you'd have the campaigns be very driven by polling which has its own problems.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
17m ago
The value of TheMotte is precisely in the fact that it allows for cordial discussion of extremely controversial views, including racist views. The system is working as intended.
aqouta
21m ago
They didn't. Refusing to do something stupid that is required for him to win is not a heroic effort. Bernie is not entitled to the people representing the more popular platform splitting the moderate lane 4 ways so that he can win with a minority of the vote. "why didn't you let the guy that your base didn't want lose so that his followers, who never liked you anyways would whine less" is jot a serious argument.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
26m ago
So where exactly are they talking about it? They don’t say that as their agenda in most public facing platforms. Kamala didn’t run on “let’s be more socialist” nor was there a Socialist Agenda 2025 that would get that to happen. Kamala and most of the apparatus ran specifically as Anti-Trump, referring to the agenda as dangerous fascism, scaremongering about white Christian nationalism and Project 2025. They started calling JD Vance weird. And keep in mind that this was the Presidential Election Campaign, and they were pouring everything into winning, but they never really said “we want universal healthcare” or “let’s build a bunch of infrastructure” or “the government should raise the minimum wage.”
To me, this points to one of two things: either the agenda is unpopular and they know it, or they don’t have an agenda to run on. It just doesn’t make sense to say that socialism is popular and they want socialism, but they are running on Orange Man Bad Evil Fascist With Kooties.
6tjk
30m ago
Hispanics use SNAP at a far higher rate than whites and are also more obese and less educated than whites. I don't get what the point of your anecdote is.
6tjk
34m ago
But the way historical America existed was keeping naturalization exclusive to whites only. Why does Japan get to keep its historical standard but not America?
Lizzardspawn
39m ago
As I will never get tired of explaining - the fact that something is racist doesn't make it wrong or false.
6tjk
39m ago
I mostly agree with you, but I think that the levels of integration mean that if it comes to it, European countries can simply expel their migrants, while any immigration-caused decline in America will be permanent because the migrants have assimilated.
AFAIK the reason the Maronites did not carve out their own state was because it would not have been economically self-sufficient, they even lobbied the French for the inclusion of Muslim-majority agricultural areas such as the Bekaa Valley into Lebanon in order to avoid a repeat of the famines that had occurred under Ottoman rule. That being said, Maronites and Lebanese Christians in general have a weird sort of self-conception as Lebanese, given that they were the ones who lobbied for their rapey Muslim Lebanese countrymen to come to Australia. I can't imagine Europeans feeling that kind of kinship to their foreign underclass.
Lizzardspawn
40m ago
Those shirts looks badass.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
41m ago
See the original comment, since we're talking about adopting out of foster care here:
The factoid that I always try to bring up concerning homelessness in the US is that, depending on the source you cite, between ~30% and 50% of every homeless adult spent time in the foster care system.
NunoSempere
43m ago
Relatively quiet week this time:
Anthropic has a $200M contract with the US DoD , as have a few other companies
A good roundup of rumours about Xi
OpenAI agent
Israel bombs Syria
Africa records over 4,200 cholera, mpox deaths in 2025
Gunmen Kill 1,111 Nigerians, Abduct 276 in June
Syrian troops accused of executing civilians in Druze amid Israeli strikes
IDF Ordered To Strike Syrian Regime Forces Invading Druze-majority Suweida
Syria Druze reach ceasefire with central gov, though a previous one fell. Israel also fired on the central gov in Damascus
They have been negotiating with the Islamist-led authorities in Damascus since the fall of Bashar al-Assad in an attempt to achieve autonomy but have yet to reach an agreement that defines their relationship with the new Syrian state. ...reports The Guardian. Btw, the Spanish federal system, where the central government defines foreign policy, and some formerly rebellious provinces (the Basque country) don't pay federal taxes and have special priviledges (fueros) could be a good model here.
Almost 300 killed in wave of violence in Sudan's North Kordofan
Israeli-linked ringleaders and elements arrested in southwestern Iran, says Iran's news agency
Israel launches airstrikes on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon's Bekaa valley
US demands to know what allies would do in event of war over Taiwan
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
44m ago
What about the everyday immigrants who do nothing all day, and get housed in private hotels, paid for by the government? Or the ones setting up grooming gangs that the police and social workers run cover for?
That's not something that happens in America.
Yeah, we should be doing that ourselves.
Poverty fetish again.
From the essay:
A scrub would not throw their opponent 5 times in a row. But why not? What if doing so is strategically the sequence of moves that optimize your chances of winning? It's "cheap," though, throwing is cheap. And it's not just throwing, it's also a long list of somewhat arbitrary maneuvers. If you keep a scrub away from you by zoning them with projectile attacks, you'll probably be called cheap. If you do one move over and over, that's cheap. If you get a lead, then do nothing for 30 seconds so that you can win by time-out, that's cheap. Nearly anything you do that ends up making you win is a prime candidate for being called cheap.
Let's specifically consider the case where you do one move over and over. This goes right to the heart of the matter: why can the scrub not defeat something so obvious and telegraphed as a single move done over and over? Are they such a poor player that they can't counter that move? And if the move is, for whatever reason, extremely difficult to counter, then wouldn't you be a fool for not using that move? The first step in becoming a top player is the realization that playing to win means doing whatever most increases your chances of winning. The game knows no rules of "honor" or of "cheapness." The game only knows winning and losing.
... to be more charitable, their argument could be that the game becomes less fun if they use tactic X, or character X, or whatever. That might be true temporarily until they figure out how to beat whatever it is, but ultimately the experts are having a more nuanced exchange, more opportunity for expression, for clever plays, for smart strategies, and so on.
The scrubs' games might be more "wet and wild" than games between the experts, which are usually more controlled and refined. But any close examination will reveal that the experts are having a great deal of fun on a higher level than the scrub can imagine. Throwing together some circus act of a win isn't nearly as satisfying as reading your opponent's mind to such a degree that you can counter their every move, even their every counter.
And if the two groups meet, of course the experts will absolutely destroy the scrubs with any number of tactics they've either never seen, or never been truly forced to counter. This is because the scrubs have not been playing the same game. The experts were playing the actual game while the scrubs were playing their own homemade variant with restricting, unwritten rules. The actual game really should be more fun if it's not degenerate.
The thing is, this works okay if you can keep the low-level players and the high-level players apart. But a) that doesn't work for real-life friend groups and b) it means you're either stuck in the little leagues forever or you have a long, long, hard grind before you can play with the experts. Thus rafa's original point, which is that if you open everything up to maximum competition with everyone all the time, only the monomaniacal grinders will have any fun.
cae_jones
45m ago
It's confusing, because it makes more sense if this is a foreign relations thing... but then why not just say that and only release the names of U.S. citizens and their role in the files? All the people want isto know who to send to the guillotines. We aren't supposed to be the world police according to Trump, so just leave the foreigners out of it. If that is impossible (I highly doubt, given the descriptions of the physical media involved), that would be ... troubling.
roche
46m ago
This is why I guard against the idea that things have purely gotten worse over time, because from another standpoint 2009 or thereabouts was already well after the death of the 'net. So it helps a lot to define in clear terms what exactly you think the modern net is lacking, and in my case I'd say it's "learning and discovery". As a disclaimer, a young person is naturally going to have way more to absorb from their surroundings than an adult, so the kind of knowledge that impressed 15 year old me is now totally rote and mundane, and any space with that stuff will also seem really banal and empty. /caveats
What feels most different now is the lack of paths towards "secondary" or deeper knowledge. Once you discover something exists, that's usually it. The internet really used to be designed like a rabbit hole, where if anything caught your eye you could just go on a deep dive and find out progressively more about it until you exhausted the subject. Nowadays you can definitely still go down rabbit holes on Twitter, Insta, and Tiktok, but it's harder to learn things this way. I wonder if anyone gets exactly what I mean.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
48m ago
They control an entire congressional district
This is an utterly ridiculous statement that can be debunked in 30 seconds of Googling. Ilham Omar's district is 17.1% Black, which will include some pre-65 "native" Blacks as well as Somalis. She was sent to Congress by white liberals. There's an important theme here, a lot of what the anti-immigrant Right habitually blames on immigrants is actually done by white liberals.
cae_jones
53m ago
Identity politics can't only go in one direction forever. :marseyshrug:
IDK, the Jews and the Philistines have been going at it for at least 3000 years with no signs of stopping ...
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
53m ago
In his book Shadows of the Rising Sun, he detailed how he lived and worked in Japan as an adult, so he presumably went back at some point.
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
53m ago
I usually just play turbo as mid ogre and hit Q and 4x multicast
I hope I am never in the same game as you. Either with you or against you...
cae_jones
56m ago
IDK, now I'm getting flashbacks to Calc 2 and how useless it was to ask the instructor anything in the interest of understanding. Then sequences and increasingly absurd integrals came along without explnation of the utility ... and that's how I got the worst grade in Calc2. F? OK, retake it. C? Eh ... maybe that's more poor study strats than lack of understanding. But D? They wouldn't let me retake the class and I had absolutely no business moving on because I learned ... hmm, as I remeber, I learned the professor's opinions on Liebnez Vs Newton, and there was something involving a log cabin pun.
Dude's office was right by the CS departments's offices. I frequently heard far more enthusiastic convos coming from there on my way to see a CS prof. Maybe the secret wasn't showing an interest in the subject, but to be a perky flirtatious student? It's been 19 years; just be glad you remember any calculus and hit comment ... ☹️
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
57m ago
I agree our society is too credentialist. The issue is not "they're bad because they went to a third-rate university" so much as "they're bad because they have an inferiority complex around having went to third rate university, and that's where the fetishization of manual labor comes from."
I did not expect someone to miss a LOTR reference on TheMotte. Ever.
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