Harris/Walz Catch-All | Harris to do Oprah interview

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And you are free to quibble with details, but I think you have to admit that the ideas in the video offer a metric shit ton of explanatory power.

I mean can't you see how Citizen's United made wealthy individuals and Corporations into Keys to Power overnight?

Why are the Democrats are touting that it's a win that medicare can negotiate only 10 drug prices per year? Why not all drug prices all at once? You're offering me zero explanatory power. I watch the CGP Grey video and it's obvious to why that should be the case.

Why are there no earnest and good politicians? Why was there an Obama disillusionment hangover, why don't even the most idealistic and energetic of politicians continually fall short when it comes time to deliver us the goods?

You have a better explanation? I'm all ears.
 
dukeman92 said:
This is more of the double standard. We're dinging her for not being super detailed and Trump is inciting hate crimes and getting himself shot at.

I get the gist of what you're saying and I'd like more openness too, because ultimately, she's cemented my vote and it's the "undecided" she needs to capture... I just wish these two were covered equally.
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yup. Elizabeth Warren had a plan for everything. She was basically told "if you are explaining, you are losing." People who bitch about lack of specifics are generally looking for a reason to opt out that makes them feel smarter/ better.
 
superrific said:
Have you read that book? Do you know if it's empirically accurate? The lead author is a well-known self-promoter. I mean, you can trace the basic ideas back to Machiavelli. That doesn't make them correct, except in a general sense.

I would also note that the lead author is affiliated with the Hoover Institute. There's a long tradition in conservative philosophy of shitting on democracy by calling it nothing more than a battle between interest groups. I have no idea if that's where Mesquita situates his ideas, but let's just say I have found the democracy skeptics to be more or less distilled cynicism who offer little reason to believe that their stories are true. They are internally consistent, but aren't convincing. A good read if you already hate democracy.
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Odd. I have read it and I love democracy. I'm not sure there's a more strident pro-democracy voice on this forum than I. Maybe we can swap door knocking stories, you and I?
 
Ddseddse said:
And you are free to quibble with details, but I think you have to admit that the ideas in the video offer a metric shit ton of explanatory power.

I mean can't you see how Citizen's United made wealthy individuals and Corporations into Keys to Power overnight?

Why are the Democrats are touting that it's a win that medicare can negotiate only 10 drug prices per year? Why not all drug prices all at once? You're offering me zero explanatory power. I watch the CGP Grey video and it's obvious to why that should be the case.

You have a better explanation? I'm all ears.
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1. I do not admit that at all.
2. No, Citizens' United actually did not do that for wealthy individuals and corporations. For one thing, the part about "corporations" in that opinion has largely been misinterpreted in public discourse. While the ruling applied to all corporations, most big public companies are not funneling money into political campaigns -- at least no more than they did before. Public companies still exert their power the way they traditionally have -- lobbying, lawyers, localities. And the wealthy have been keys to power forever.

What Citizens United did was allow the creation of special purpose corporations, the so-called Super PACs, which would not be subject to any regulations, because the regulations placed on them in the McCain-Feingold bill were deemed unconstitutional and thus without force. Congress could pass a new law to regulate these more in accordance with the regulation of individuals, but it hasn't because the GOP. And while you could say, "see, this is a key to power! The politicians have to make the donors happy!" it's also true that the political process produced those campaign finance restrictions in the first place. In fact, the death blow was dealt by the Supreme Court, which has no discernible keys to power.

This is why relying on cartoon videos on youtube isn't always great. You end up with theories that are false in most of their details, which equates to a bad theory. I mean, I'm not going that far because I haven't the time to review everything, but this example about Citizens United is characteristic.

3. Why not all drug prices at once? Because it's not clear that the negotiating all drug prices is good policy. Again: the same type of democratic systems that produced the no-price-negotiation rule in the US produced price-negotiation rules in most other major democracies, so that's not much explanatory power at all.

As a description of the United States, the Keys To Power fails miserably from what I've seen. And I'm pretty confident that would remain true if I dove in more deeply. The book was written more to explain dictatorships (e.g. the title of the book) and there it's at least directionally correct, though again it fails in many of the specifics. That's probably because it's actually really hard to come up with overarching theories of human relationships that are generally true across cultures, peoples and histories.
 
Ddseddse said:
Odd. I have read it and I love democracy. I'm not sure there's a more strident pro-democracy voice on this forum than I. Maybe we can swap door knocking stories, you and I?
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I didn't mean to imply that it's only a good read for people who hate democracy. I'm saying that it's written in a tradition that emerged from conservative suspicion of democracy. Still, I will delete that offending sentence because I didn't even mean to keep it in the first place. It's just kind of dangling there at the end of a paragraph.
 
superrific said:
I didn't mean to imply that it's only a good read for people who hate democracy. I'm saying that it's written in a tradition that emerged from conservative suspicion of democracy. Still, I will delete that offending sentence because I didn't even mean to keep it in the first place. It's just kind of dangling there at the end of a paragraph.
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I think maybe we have different approaches. I think maybe you are looking for a type of ideological purity in what ideas you consume. A type of pursuit of perfection.

For me, I know who I am and I know what my values are. Given that, I don't care whole lot about source purity. I'm not afraid that reading something is going to make me wake up one day with a desire to make life a hell on earth for outgroups, or to cancel democracy.

I pick up ideas where i find them as they explain things better than my old ideas., I cast them off when new ones better explain the world around me. I'm not afraid of "not being right", nor am i afraid of becoming contaminated with mean-spiritedness. I'm only afraid of not growing and learning.
 
Ddseddse said:
I think maybe we have different approaches. I think maybe you are looking for a type of ideological purity in what ideas you consume. A type of pursuit of perfection.

For me, I know who I am and I know what my values are. Given that, I don't care whole lot about source purity. I'm not afraid that reading something is going to make me wake up one day with a desire to make life a hell on earth for outgroups, or to cancel democracy.

I pick up ideas where i find them as they explain things better than my old ideas., I cast them off when new ones better explain the world around me. I'm not afraid of "not being right", nor am i afraid of becoming contaminated with mean-spiritedness. I'm only afraid of not growing and learning.
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Not in the slightest. It's not about source purity. It's about who I trust to believe with respect to empirical claims that I can't evaluate for whatever reason. I don't trust anyone fully, and I always try to look at the primary source material myself if possible. But I'm a hell of a lot more likely to believe, say, Elizabeth Warren than some asshole at the Hoover Institute.

The disagreement is mostly about whether we believe that the video communicates any empirical truth. I don't think it has zero validity, but I think it's hilariously over-simplified and lacks, well, much explanatory power at all -- because it doesn't accurately depict, well, anything really.
 
I think this is a smart strategy by Kamala. I think the lack of policy specifics was intentional, as we have discussed on this thread. But the flip side of withholding the "plans" is that they can be release them if it seems like voters are asking for it. Meanwhile, it keeps them one step ahead of the criticism. I previously used the analogy of putting bugs in my computer code so I could fix the complaints from users very easily. Well, so too here. Trump and Vance start training on her lack of specifics -- well, now there are more specifics. And there can be more and more coming.

Basically, "where are your plans" is an easily fixable bug for a Dem, or even a non-Trump Pub.
 
superrific said:
They used to work. Is that the case any more? Seems to me that Trump has never had a plan and he won once and almost won again. Biden didn't have much in the way of plans, though that was a weird election. HRC did have a lot of plans; it did not help her win. Same with Elizabeth Warren, although that's a bit different.

Voters generally don't think "there is no way Congress will pass that," but they also aren't thinking, "I think a graduated increase in the capital gains tax over time and income would be preferable to a one time change." Maybe we're working off different understandings of what is meant by "details" in this context.
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These days people are voting for the candidate they dislike the least overall. And to his credit, Trump has concepts of a plan, he just isn't president yet.

Rocket Raccoon: What percentage of a plan do you have?
Star-Lord: I don't know, 12%?
 
A few comments:
1)I probably should have put a paragraph break in my statement after the second line. The first two sentences were more specifically about Kamala's interview...the last line applies to politicians and spin doctors more broadly. In my line of work, Ive had to do a fair share of rerouting (actually took some media training to learn how to deflect and reroute).

2) I don't need a detailed plan from politicians, but I don't want broad musings either. Yes, there will be a negotiations that impacts what can actually get done.

3) I'm lamenting that being a bit more specific and straightforward has an electoral cost that is usually negative. Sucks that elections speak to the lowest denominations.

4) having said that I do think there are times that candidates do stick to their guns. Just wish they did it more often (and that applies to elections not just in the US).

5) comparing anything to stuff that Trump says really has little traction. Trump has made a career of throwing crap against a wall to see what sticks.
 
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