2020 Democratic presidential primary thread, pt 3: life is very long

I’m not scrolling back to find who posted it here, but that sentiment analysis thing that purports to prove anything about the meanness of Bernie bros or anyone else Is absolute dogshit and it’s embarrassing to see otherwise rightly tech-skeptical people share it.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Monday, March 9, 2020 11:10 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I figured as much, and my prior is that I don’t really care about the truth one way or another as it is probably unknowable and subjective, but could you explain why?

xp Neil Peart?

"sentiment" is a very reductive measure of something completely unrelated to whether people are being nice. it's kind of a joke in the machine learning community. but even if it weren't, out ability to measure anything related to human language in a reliable, automated way using machine learning is dubious at best, not least because if you show two _people_ the same document they won't agree about the answer.

This past week politico had a story about Bernie staring into own grave and one about how Michigan could be his burial

Very normal

Obi-Wan Bama hovers in the b.g.

pic.twitter.com/J9pR69N6dh

— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon) March 9, 2020

lol i also kept thinking y'all were talking about Doug Henning, who i know only from revelations about some of his famous (?) illusions in classic 80s bathroom reader /Bigger Secrets/

"sentiment" is a very reductive measure of something completely unrelated to whether people are being nice. it's kind of a joke in the machine learning community. but even if it weren't, out ability to measure anything related to human language in a reliable, automated way using machine learning is dubious at best, not least because if you show two _people_ the same document they won't agree about the answer.

I buy this; at the same time, "bernie has much more twitter followers than other candidates" (and more online supporters more broadly) makes more sense to me as an explanation than "bernie's big bad mean man behavior uniquely unleashes the ids of leftists" or whatever

are there even primaries today? turnouts are going to be horrible.

good luck usa

538 has Biden over 99% to win, we're doomed

it would be really really funny if (redacted) got (redacted) and just dropped (redacted)

I had a dream the other night that a doddering Trump dunked hard and consistently on an even more doddering Biden during a debate. Maybe it was actually a premonition, who knows.

almost certainly tbh

sorry I don't know why I censored that last post, the redacted words were "Klobuchar", "a record deal" and "a sweet mixtape"

the small but real possibility that something could happen to render Biden incapable of continuing his campaign is probably just about the only real reason for Bernie to stay in the race if he gets throttled today.

If something happens to Biden, pledged delegates have discretion in how they align themselves.

You are, I hope, also aware that "something could happen" to render Sanders incapable of continuing his campaign, and the same applies.

yes we all know that thx, we're speculating about nice things that could happen, for kicks

yeah of course i am.

certainly all of Biden's delegates could jump to someone new at the convention but I guess at least Bernie would have a case if he'd amassed a good number himself, anyone else would be just parachuting in

I hope that we, as a country, are taking serious stock of the current situation so that we can avoid having an all-septuagenarian slate of presidential candidates in the future. 100% octogenarian or gtfo, imo.

I'm sorry, that fact just keeps smacking me right in the face and it seems more patently absurd every fucking time.

younger candidates could help by sucking less next time

I don't think Castro sucked, but he never really had a chance.

The party bosses should start setting more standards about who can run. Perhaps a prequalifying questionnaire could focus on potential candidates' stances on the issues that are most relevant to Cranky Olds: the early bird special at Denny's c/d. Sandals with socks y/n. Kids on lawns y/n. t/s Dentucreme vs. Polident. Depends vs. Pampers.

clouds: to yell at or not to yell at?

I like the "draw a clock" idea.

younger candidates could help by sucking less next time

it seems to me that the desire to be POTUS is usually a red flag that a person should not be considered

I just finished writing a really long thing that I intend to post on FB prior to the Ohio primary next week on why I am voting for Sanders. The older members of my family who are Democrats are all ride-or-die for Biden now and I'm trying to convince them otherwise.

the lord's work

The older members of my family will die.

it seems to me that the desire to be POTUS is usually a red flag that a person should not be considered

― brooklyn suicide cult (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, March 10, 2020 2:11 PM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

There's a sci fi short story where a guy tries to get his drivers' license but they make him watch movies or do some VR thing of tragic car crashes. At the end it turns out that anyone who still wants their license is disqualified from getting one. I think about that story a surprising amount.

See also: Groucho Marx's "I would never belong to any club that would have me as a member."

Jay Inslee didn’t suck and wouldn’t have been septuagenarian until three weeks after inauguration

100% octogenarian or gtfo, imo.

Biden 2028

inslee might be a good candidate for the 2024 primary that will happen no matter who wins. people will at least hopefully recognize his name enough to keep him afloat for the early part of the primary

Yeah, that's one thing I keep coming back to. All other arguments against elderly candidates aside, should we not be nominating/electing someone who we believe has a reasonable chance of maintaining their wits and their life for another eight years? Like, if Uncle Joe is elected, what kind of state is he gonna be in come 2024?

i'd say no way he'd run for reelection, but the shamelessness of the 'pragmatic' Dems prevents me

"bernie has much more twitter followers than other candidates" (and more online supporters more broadly) makes more sense to me as an explanation than "bernie's big bad mean man behavior uniquely unleashes the ids of leftists" or whatever

That's probably part of it, and a predictable part given the demographics of his supporters. And I don't think many people have said -- here or elsewhere -- that there's something about Bernie personally that either inspires or encourages bad mean behavior. It seems to me it's more that his campaigns have been -- **AMONG OTHER, LARGELY ADMIRABLE THINGS** -- vehicles for an emergent group of online Angry Young Men (not all of them necessarily young or men, but mostly) epitomized by the Chapo gang who would have probably latched onto any candidate running a populist progressive campaign, especially one with Bernie's career bona fides.

I think a lot of Bernie supporters have heard criticism of "the bros" as criticism of the campaign, and of course some of it has been and in any case it's hard to completely disentangle them. But I think the real-if-exaggerated phenomenon we call "Bernie bros" is more a free-floating subset of contemporary American progressivism, in the same way the 4Chan crowd is not in an official part of the Trump apparatus. And I don't think they're equivalent, I'll take mean people on the Internet who support m4a over mean people who want poor people to die, any day. For that matter, I'll take them over civil people who want poor people to die.

But thinking about it as a phenomenon separate from Bernie that has essentially used his campaign as a vehicle for their grievances also highlights the reality that they will continue to be a presence for at least the near future, and future progressive candidates will probably have to reckon with how to handle them.

if a left-wing candidate ever gets a big enough coalition to actually win, "the toxic online discourse" will be shown to be the non-sequitur non-issue (as in, not an issue that actually impacts turnout or results, not to say no one gets harassed etc.) it actually is imho

like, in all the polling that's ever been done of what voters care about / vote for / vote against iver the course of these primaries, has "bernie bros", "civility" or some variant thereof ever turned up?

weird how this became a big issue with the media but not Trump supporters literally sending death threats to journalists on a regular basis

I interpret voters' interest in "climate change" as a desire to change this climate of vicious disagreement and online gif hurling

Family update: teenage son still all in for Biden, preteen daughter, who was a Warren booster with me, is now Biden, not sure how my wife is leaning

lol the Bernie bros shit is an almost exact copy of the “so much for the tolerant left!!!” shite that accompanied Corbyn being elected leader of the Labour Party. It is and always has been a distraction and clear attempt at delegitimising the politicians in question.

Like you had people with high-profile public columns engaging in fake outrage at some rando twitter account while at the same time calling people who were excited about a left leadership “thick as pigshit” (Janan Ganesh) and utterly refusing to discuss policy or the reasons people might have voted for Corbyn. The fact this is so prolonged and just fucking refuses to die is just so damning and everyone giving this oxygen is following the exact same path.

weird how this became a big issue with the media but not Trump supporters literally sending death threats to journalists on a regular basis

Biden now at 99/100 according to 538.

I wonder if there's a way to measure whether the online discourse of the Bernie Brothers is more or less toxic than that of the current President of these, our United States.

Biden on MSNBC last night said of his vote for the Iraq War, "I didn't believe he had those nuclear weapons. I didn't believe he had those weapons of mass destruction."

He said his vote was for inspectors to prove they didn't have WMDs.

This isn't backed by our reporting. pic.twitter.com/O3Tq0Ihzxt

— andrew kaczynski🤔 (@KFILE) March 10, 2020

I think the toxic behavior of Trump supporters, online and off, has been a central recurring media narrative about him basically since the beginning.

Cool, must be imagining the dozens of concern trolling messages in these and other threads.

I think the vast, vast majority of people don't pay attention to either.

Like, Trump has, what, 70 million twitter followers? And that's for a free global platform that one can just sign up for and follow passively.