2020 Democratic presidential primary

because ball is life

Romney loves hoops too

"Read “Lizzo, the Clash, and ‘Old Town Road’: What the Democratic Presidential Nominees Walked Out to This Weekend” and “Will Weezer Ever Stop Being Disappointing?” over on the Pitch."

(amazingly the second article doesn't even mention "Can't Knock The Hustle")

re: Buttigieg's service plan, that is not a de facto terrible idea, particularly if said service is not mandated to be military (ie, working in nursing homes, implementation of civil engineering projects, agricultural work, what have you). There is a laundry list of things that people could do to be more directly connected to contributing to the welfare of others living this country that don't involve being a soldier and having a federal program that rotates young people through these positions helps ensure that there are people available to do them; said program should also give these young people a living wage and some benefit to those who pursue further academic or vocational training afterward. (A terrible implementation of it would use young people as free, expendable labor and turn them loose with neither help nor offer of guidance once they satisfied the terms of their service.)

omg of course Weezer supports Yang

possibly not, since they were heavily billed to appear but 2/3 of them didn’t

a “climate corps” suggests Yang does not have a practical and realistic proposal for national service

Yang Buttigieg

A terrible implementation of it would use young people as free, expendable labor and turn them loose with neither help nor offer of guidance once they satisfied the terms of their service.

^these are called internships and it’s what we have now

a “climate corps” suggests Yang does not have a practical and realistic proposal for national service

― now let's play big lunch take little lunch (sic), Monday, November 4, 2019 12:24 PM bookmark flag link

Yang Buttigieg

― now let's play big lunch take little lunch (sic), Monday, November 4, 2019 12:25 PM bookmark flag link

I mean, I don't know what a "climate corps" is; it might make sense

A terrible implementation of it would use young people as free, expendable labor and turn them loose with neither help nor offer of guidance once they satisfied the terms of their service.

^these are called internships and it’s what we have now

― Its big ball chunky time (Jimmy The Mod Awaits The Return Of His Beloved), Monday, November 4, 2019 12:25 PM bookmark flag link

otm

I mean, I don't know what a "climate corps" is; it might make sense

true, if it turns out to mean arming and approving teens to put the heads of all management-and-above agents of the 100 companies responsible for climate assault on pikes in the public square, I can get behind it

probably means ppl to build sea walls or other "we're doomed" mitigating measures. could maybe mean he read one of those reforestation/carbon sink articles and wants to plant five hundred billion trees but i'm guessing yang does not have a plan in place to seize all the land to do that.

I've seen Yang with support from some surprisingly far-left places but I'm not convinced yet.

4 takeaways from listening to a recap of candidates speaking at a big annual dinner event held in iowa over the weekend

biden sounds like a big fucking loser, at least in iowa. he's heading toward 3rd or worse. and he's trying to make "beat him like a drum" his thing. jfc.

lots of enthusiasm for warren, buttigieg, and sanders (in iowa, at least).

steve bullock is a joke

yang has zero chance. his whole thing is UBI and self-driving cars. i love that he's talking about UBI and i hope that some day before i die we get a version of it in the united states. but he has no chance in 2020.

The only passionate Yang supporter I know IRL is a college friend-of-friends who lives in Harlem who recently waxed rhapsodic on Facebook about how wonderful it was that Amazon delivered $2 apples to his door; he also is big into charter schools. (He is an African-American education entrepreneur.)

Yang Gang - the portion of Ron Paul 2008ers who didn't become open white supremacists

(A terrible implementation of it would use young people as free, expendable labor and turn them loose with neither help nor offer of guidance once they satisfied the terms of their service.)

when this was last brought up from another candidate as a precursor to college tuition being state-paid, my impression was that "service" in order to get college funding was an addition, not supplement to, the volunteer work, school activities, etc that kids have to have on their application in addition to academics to get into more selective schools

Buttigieg's proposition seems a little better, but it seems to boil down to "expand Americorps and the Peace Corps"
https://peteforamerica.com/policies/a-new-call-to-service/

I like Yang, actually, but he's running to be CIO of the USA in 2024 or 2028, not POTUS in 2020.

a lot of the u.s. public is still in eyerolling mode at self-driving cars and automation and UBI, but yang's focus on these things will seem prescient

Buttigieg's service plan, that is not a de facto terrible idea, particularly if said service is not mandated to be military

I agree in substance with DJP's thinking. As an idea, it is fine and has intentional echoes of the Peace Corps that JFK created (making Pete 'the new JFK' in this scenario, as I am sure he also intends).

The problem is that the proper kind of implementation that DJP outlined would never happen. It would interrupt the lives of young people, pay them no more than minimum wage (if that - because making it mandatory makes it tempting to make it cheap or free, too), and apportion the service of its draftees no more intelligently than the US Army is able to distribute the talents of war-time draftees into fitting jobs. Such an implementation would undercut its popular support and create divisions and resentments over its harsh terms - splitting along the usual lines of partisan division: old vs. young, middle class vs. poor, south vs. north, liberal vs. conservative.

also it would be good to get someone under the age of five trillion to keep an eyes on tech in the government

xp

fwiw AmeriCorps doesn't pay shit and a lot of people in it who have graduated college get recruited into Teach for America, which has its own issues

the main issues with service jobs/public service apprenticeship-style programs/pre-college volunteer programs is that you need skilled management to handle everything and the funding hasn't been there to get people who can effectively lead

Teach for America is an interesting idea, but instead of helping young teachers learn how to do well, it's resulted in schools in underprivileged areas being staffed by new graduates with few mentors

I bless the Yangs down in Africa

also it would be good to get someone under the age of five trillion to keep an eyes on tech in the government

It's almost as if you're speaking about replacing an administration in which the president's cybersecurity czar - one Rudiculous A. Giuliani - got locked out of his iphone

I did the AmeriCorps program City Year. It's better than Teach for America in that it doesn't replace local professional teachers with random out-of-towners with little teaching experience. But it still planted a bunch of kids without any connection to the local culture into disadvantaged schools with inadequate training to handle the tough situations we were going to face. It paid a stipend that was half of minimum wage, in an expensive city. We were expected to work 50-60 hour weeks, every week. The organization was very aware of how punishing the work was, and used cult indoctrination techniques to keep us from quitting -- making us do call-and-response chants, use City Year exclusive lingo with each other, have creepy struggle sessions where we were encouraged to talk about extremely personal things and deep traumas in front of the entire corps, and do "unity rallies" in high-traffic public spaces where we got into military formations and did chants and exercises.

A lot of the work we did was positive, but it was completely hobbled by the fact that we were exhausted, dramatically underpaid, manipulated, and disrespected. It felt like we were being taken advantage of. The US government didn't want to expend the effort and money to fix the educational system, so it threw us hungry, underemployed, and idealistic young people at the problem to serve as a band-aid and keep us busy.

These kinds of programs are not a real solution to anything, and they harm the people who join them.

thanks for relating your experience

and, yikes

that's an extreme situation but i think most of those boss tactics and work issues, in essence, apply to any entry-level not-for-profit education/civics/arts job

and yeah, sorry it was as rough as that

Almost three-in-four Democratic voters say they will back whoever becomes the party's nominee, according to a new Hill-HarrisX poll.

The survey, released Monday, found that 73 percent of Democrats would support the party’s pick to challenge President Trump, even if their preferred candidate doesn't become the nominee. Twelve percent of Democratic respondents said they would not vote if their candidate doesn't become the party nominee.

Just 8 percent said they would support the GOP nominee, who is likely to be Trump, if their preferred candidate didn't win the Democratic nomination.

who the fuck are these people

A lot of the work we did was positive, but it was completely hobbled by the fact that we were exhausted, dramatically underpaid, manipulated, and disrespected.

aka teaching

xp mostly upper-class folks who think Trump's an idiot and an embarrassment but most of all don't want to pay to make anyone else's lives better

biden voters mostly

Just 8 percent

Just?!

xp Teaching does have a lot of these issues, but I know what it's like to be a teacher, and this was a lot worse and crossed more boundaries. At one of those "struggle sessions" I mentioned, I watched a dude get manipulated into standing up in front the entire corps of around 200 people and talking about his childhood sexual abuse until he was weeping too hard to continue.

yuck.

Come to think of it, City Year was kind of like teaching without the protection of a teacher's union, or any of the more standard legal protections like minimum wage. City Year is essentially neoliberal in character: figure out who will do this extremely hard work for the least compensation and in the worst conditions, then manipulate them into wanting to do it, while dressing the whole enterprise up in the language of public service. We literally had a high-paid consultant visit us and give the whole corps a lecture on self-help, which none of us could actually follow due to our crushing workloads.

It's no wonder Mayor Pete loves this sort of thing, the guy is neoliberalism personified.

I mean, I am not really for the idea of mandatory civil service that includes as part of its remit telling a bunch of strangers about your most intimate traumas. That sounds insane and immoral.

Yeah, fuck that. I was (briefly) in a cult/commune; I don't ever need to experience that shit again.

Here Macron is trying to bring back a national service requirement of like a month or two the summer after high school, but the military doesn’t want this because it will be very annoying and expensive to manage. You won’t have to choose military service but most will and so the plan may not end up enacted.

going to be really awkward when Pete advocates working for a corporate management consultancy as part of an extended character-building plan

Buttigieg has more momentum than I'd ever have thought he could get. Could someone explain to me?

A white, younger, gayer Biden.

It's not difficult!

ILXors being mystified that 8% of Democratic voters would even consider voting for Trump and ILXors being mystified that Buttigieg has non-negligible polling numbers are related I think

yes

yes to the former and no to the latter.

I like Buttigieg, kind of.

Could someone explain to me?

imo Buttigeig has been carving out his niche as the comfortable-feeling candidate for white, middle class, college-educated, middle-aged and under voters, who are not politically active and who are relatively secure with the status quo, but who feel uneasy about the socially-repressive agenda of the Republicans and for whom Biden feels old and out of touch. If he can pull about 14% in Iowa and 16% in NH, he'll be poised to get a big push from the media as the exciting dark horse no one saw coming.

His best chance is to outlast Biden, while Warren and Sanders split the progressives, making his eventual 40% look stronger than their combined 60%. He could do this, because some big money backers are quite ready to bankroll him if he can make that strategy work, and they've already given him the seed money to see him through Iowa and NH.

It's important to remind y'all that few people are paying any attention now, and they won't until at least January.

thanks Aimless (and everyone else.)

Biden is fading badly in Iowa. Good lord he is a shitty candidate. My explanation of the rise of Buttigieg is along your lines but also that he's surviving the inevitable implosion of a few other seriously flawed candidates.

I wonder how many Republicans would vote for a gay person.

the thing that boggles my mind is how many people are just interested in candidates and are looking to check them out socially

I mean, getting the bad out is huge. The first caucus struggle is getting prospective voters to come out. The second is getting people who don’t actually vote at all, and maybe never have, to do more than browse a local event

the majority of complete non-voters I’ve met in Iowa are in the northwest corner of the state, unsurprisingly