America....

[faul]

Not even worth going point by point anymore since you're goalposts pretty much every post, but I'll once again emphasize that you've got a fundamental misconception about the nature of American democracy and this pure democratic process you're seeking has never existed here. That's pretty much why you don't think "the ends justify the means" even though the "means" happen to be a more accurate representation the overarching electoral process and reflects the popular vote will more often than not.

Speaking of which, thanks for finally catching on - I didn't know how much of a bigger truck I'd have to drive through the 2008 refrain before somebody noted for themselves that Obama did indeed lose the popular vote to the DNC's darling and still managed to get enough superdelegates to win based on the strength of massive grassroots activism that didn't actively alienate the party apparatus. Hopefully this helps clarify why my default assumption is that anybody who is whining about superdelegates now (without mentioning that they hurt Clinton in 2008) is actually whining more about Sanders losing and probably found out what a superdelegate is last year.

[arkaza]

War will happen around the first of June per my awesome intel! Here's a little forplay.

"According to Reuters coalition jets have struck an Assad convoy in Southern Syria; near Tanf where US and British special operations forces have been training Syrian rebel fighters near the border with Iraq and Jordan. A US-led coalition spokesperson has confirmed that coalition strikes in southern Syria struck Syrian government militia "after it moved against US-backed forces in Syria."

[Firimei Lang]

War will happen around the first of June per my awesome intel! Here's a little forplay.

"According to Reuters coalition jets have struck an Assad convoy in Southern Syria; near Tanf where US and British special operations forces have been training Syrian rebel fighters near the border with Iraq and Jordan. A US-led coalition spokesperson has confirmed that coalition strikes in southern Syria struck Syrian government militia "after it moved against US-backed forces in Syria."

Trump and co didn't figure with the Mayans then!

[arkaza]

No Mayans here, just McCains!

[Firimei Lang]

[quote="arkaza"]No Mayans here, just McCains! [/quote

Better than Ryan's]

[sauin]

Not even worth going point by point anymore since you're goalposts pretty much every post,

No goalposts have moved, my stance is the same as it was as the start, it's just taken you this long to stop presuming my argument for me.

And I'd like to preface this with thanking you for dodging the entire argument around the DNC's actions in the last run of the primaries. Apparently either you consider it to be perfectly acceptable to pre-decide winners in elections, else you don't believe this and consider it to be an uncomfortable point that you would rather ignore.

Speaking of which, thanks for finally catching on I didn't know how much of a bigger truck I'd have to drive through the 2008 refrain before somebody noted for themselves that Obama did indeed lose the popular vote

I thought this was evident from the start, the DNC's method of using superdelegates subverted the popular vote and was in and of itself not just "not an open democracy" or even a representative democracy, but blatantly undemocratic. I've been somewhat confused if anything as to why you're supporting my argument while claiming to be against it.

Perhaps I should make it blatantly clear for you: Clinton should have won the 2008 primaries by any measure of a democratic electoral system. Which obviously does not describe the democrat's electoral system.

still managed to get enough superdelegates to win based on the strength of massive grassroots activism

That is almost a contradiction in terms. He had so much popular support that he lost the popular vote so the establishment supported the "non-establishment" candidate (who had been a member of the establishment for the past decade and had held an elected position for four years longer than clinton had at that point).

Hopefully this helps clarify why my default assumption is that anybody who is whining about superdelegates now (without mentioning that they hurt Clinton in 2008) is actually whining more about Sanders losing and probably found out what a superdelegate is last year.

We've already established that you're just assuming things and not actually responding to the argument, I'm not sure why you're restating this.

That's pretty much why you don't think "the ends justify the means" even though the "means" happen to be a more accurate representation the overarching electoral process and reflects the popular vote will more often than not.

And there it is. The means is a representation of an already flawed system. The means, as previously described was intentionally created to move control away from the population and into the hands of the powerful few, and you have already prepared to accept that the means will give the same answer as the rest of the population "more often than not". When the far simpler solution, with near perfect accuracy is to just let the popular votes stand and stop this internal party puppetry.

I have no idea why you're so accepting of the wisdom and benevolence of your sponsor minded political overlords in selecting who you should vote for, for you.

[Reyne]

The superdelegates don't make sense. Studies have shown people are more likely to vote for the side they think is already winning so when the primary starts and one candidate is already up a couple hundred delegates there's clearly already a massive advantage for the person the superdelegates have backed. In addition, they only reason a superdelegate gets picked is to reward party insiders which does indeed make it harder for someone who isn't playing the politics game or isn't plugged in with the DNC to be successful. As much as I dislike the GOP I have to admit their primary process seems a lot fairer.

And for what it's worth, the DNC's CFO emailed other party leaders about how it might be a good idea to smear Bernie for being Jewish or call him an atheist. It's not like Bernie supporters are just mad they lost and criticizing the DNC based on total fabrications.

The DNC is now even arguing in court that they aren't legally obligated to follow their party rules and bylaws so they can essentially do whatever they like and "impartial" is undefinable anyway.

The DNC’s lawyer also implied that, despite the DNC’s charter and bylaws stating that it must be neutral during Democratic primary contests, there’s no contractual obligation to follow through.

“There’s no right to not have your candidate disadvantaged or have another candidate advantaged. There’s no contractual obligation here… it’s not a situation where a promise has been made that is an enforceable promise,” Spiva said.

Yeah, in a legal sense they are correct in that argument but that's one of those "technically right but still makes you an asshole" things I think. Then there's this gem:

In one of the more strange defense rationales, Spiva evoked baptism to suggest the term “impartial” is too vague and open-to-interpretation to be enforced legally.

“You have a charter that says you have to be — where the party has adopted a principle of even-handedness, and just to get the language exactly right, that they would be even-handed and impartial, I believe, is the exact language. And, you know, that’s not self-defining, your Honor. I mean that’s kind of like, you know, saying, Who’s a Baptist?”

The entire reason the "fair and impartial" stuff exists in the DNC rules in the first place is because after the loss of the 1968 election people were disgusted with the party's internal politicking and party support was falling dramatically as a result. Do we really want to go back to that? (Funnily enough that gave us Nixon...)

Personally I just feel like it's worth taking a serious look at what happened so as to fix it for next time - if everything in that vein becomes "Bernie Bros just mad" then we're kind of getting set up to get stomped on again in 2020 or even the midterms. There's a lot of emotions running high (understandably) but that isn't really helping us determine a path forward.

Just my humble opinion of course.

[faul]

The superdelegates don't make sense. Studies have shown people are more likely to vote for the side they think is already winning so when the primary starts and one candidate is already up a couple hundred delegates there's clearly already a massive advantage for the person the superdelegates have backed. In addition, they only reason a superdelegate gets picked is to reward party insiders which does indeed make it harder for someone who isn't playing the politics game or isn't plugged in with the DNC to be successful. As much as I dislike the GOP I have to admit their primary process seems a lot fairer.

Couple of things: we conveniently/incidentally have no idea what the back end of the Republican primary process really looks like. We can't point to internal emails that indicate that the RNC was in on, say, Romney's anti-Trump announcement (they were). We just know that Trump overcame it due to a combination of things, not the least of which was a LOT of free media coverage.

Second, if you don't want to play the politics game AND don't want an uphill battle, my suggestion would be to just stay out of politics. You can't go in with the disengaged mindset an actually get anything done, what makes anyone think someone unwilling to work with the people they need to convince for a campaign is going to negotiate actual change when they get to DC? If you want all the benefits of a party apparatus minus the engagement, you're asking for the world and not willing to give anything else. In fact, in the same leak that you mentioned, for what it's worth, this was also leaked:

Another email posted online by Wikileaks, a May 21 message purported to be from Deputy Communications Director Mark Paustenbach, asks: "Wondering if there's a good Bernie narrative for a story, which is that Bernie never ever had his act together, that his campaign was a mess. Specifically, DWS had to call Bernie directly in order to get the campaign to do things because they'd either ignored or forgotten to something critical."

The email posted on WikiLeaks also says: "It's not a DNC conspiracy, it's because they never had their act together."

The recipient of that email, Communications Director Luis Miranda, apparently replies: "True, but the Chair has been advised to not engage. So we'll have to leave it alone," according to the documents released by Wikileaks.

It's always strange to me that people who are willing and able to draw the link between the psychology of forecasting and voting behavior somehow totally miss that being an asshole to ANY group of people will probably make them less willing to go out of their way to work with you. It's basic stuff that the Obama Campaign lived by, no matter what kind of a magnanimous populist you assume yourself or others to be.

And for what it's worth, the DNC's CFO emailed other party leaders about how it might be a good idea to smear Bernie for being Jewish or call him an atheist. It's not like Bernie supporters are just mad they lost and criticizing the DNC based on total fabrications.

Totally unprofessional email to send, but it's obviously something neither the DNC nor the Clinton campaign ran with at any point, unless you can point something out. Strangely not pictured by Wikileaks: the responses or chains that resulted in this not going anywhere (if they exist).

Personally I just feel like it's worth taking a serious look at what happened so as to fix it for next time - if everything in that vein becomes "Bernie Bros just mad" then we're kind of getting set up to get stomped on again in 2020 or even the midterms. There's a lot of emotions running high (understandably) but that isn't really helping us determine a path forward.

I'm still not sure anyone has proposed a good fix that just boils down to rhetorical masturbation. No matter how much people want to wish away the superdelegates as something just purely fabricated to "help insiders", there *are* legitimate reasons for it. Off the top of my head, I consider the following most important:

Plurality - you can win 30% of the popular vote if you're different enough from 3 other very similar candidates that split the other 70% by less than 30% each. Superdelegates typically ensure that does not happen and that the nominee represents the whole party.

Consistently viable candidates - Dems were consistently putting out candidates that could not win the generals prior to superdelegates - in fact, they were getting straight smoked. Retrospectively, we can probably infer there was a solid chance that HRC would have lost to McCain, even if she edged Obama in the populars. Can't do anything if you can't get there.

Base-pandering - Republicans have to pander to the extremes in their party. Democrats don't have to pander as hard to the extremes, and I'm okay with that.

I think the only way Dems get smoked again in 2020 is if they are morons again and convince themselves that either option coming out of the primary is actually worse than the Republican option. It's easy to blame the DNC, but if they're putting out Sanders or Clinton quality candidates as a default, the electorate has to take some responsibility for being hoodwinked into NOT turning out hard for either of them and helping Trump.

[faul]

And I'd like to preface this with thanking you for dodging the entire argument around the DNC's actions in the last run of the primaries. Apparently either you consider it to be perfectly acceptable to pre-decide winners in elections, else you don't believe this and consider it to be an uncomfortable point that you would rather ignore.

Ooookay:

Part and parcel with being an outsider is that you don't necessarily have the entire apparatus of a party at your disposal from the get-go. Not even Sanders was super shocked the DNC rank and file grumbled about him or had Clinton as their candidate of choice.

I think you've confused me for someone who thinks that the DNC's biggest issue was favoring a loyal Democrat over someone who ran as a Democrat out of convenience. You can wax poetic all you want, but that's just not how anything works. You want the advantages of a large party apparatus, you either have to have experience with them or court them successfully. Feel free to apply that to anything in life: life seems considerably less fair when you want to get to C from A without putting in any effort towards B.

I thought this was evident from the start, the DNC's method of using superdelegates subverted the popular vote and was in and of itself not just "not an open democracy" or even a representative democracy, but blatantly undemocratic. I've been somewhat confused if anything as to why you're supporting my argument while claiming to be against it.

This doesn't make any sense, considering that argument wouldn't actually apply for 2016, which is all you were talking about. Since, you know, the popular vote wasn't actually subverted "as you've admitted over and over again".

That is almost a contradiction in terms. He had so much popular support that he lost the popular vote so the establishment supported the "non-establishment" candidate (who had been a member of the establishment for the past decade and had held an elected position for four years longer than clinton had at that point).

It's only almost contradictory if you don't actually understand the nature of superdelegates and lazily write them off as "establishment donors" and nothing more, when a number of them are extremely devoted to progressive causes and care enough about them to accept incremental change over potentially fifty steps backwards. And you've sort of been circling around the idea that Obama was more established than Clinton with the Democratic Party -- just stop. That's just not true, no matter how much you creep towards saying it.

We've already established that you're just assuming things and not actually responding to the argument, I'm not sure why you're restating this.

Just being clear, you seem to be a fan of repeating stuff over and over again.

And there it is. The means is a representation of an already flawed system. The means, as previously described was intentionally created to move control away from the population and into the hands of the powerful few, and you have already prepared to accept that the means will give the same answer as the rest of the population "more often than not". When the far simpler solution, with near perfect accuracy is to just let the popular votes stand and stop this internal party puppetry.

I have no idea why you're so accepting of the wisdom and benevolence of your sponsor minded political overlords in selecting who you should vote for, for you.

And I have no idea why or how you've confused American democracy for something it's never been. I'd love for popular vote to be the be-all, end-all, but if that's not how it is at the generals level, then there's always an argument for running primaries in some other way. Even for being "so undemocratic" in their process, the Democratic candidate has won the popular vote twice in my lifetime while losing the electoral college. This does not point to a lack of popular support among voters as an overbearing issue for Democratic candidates.

[Firimei Lang]

I'm glad I made this beast ..This thread has a good cross section of trolling..facts..alt facts and flames.. A regular political banquet indeed.