5 ms·

From an outsider's perspective, the leadership of one party recently tried to hang on to power by a variety of underhanded means, and in fact continues to deli

by Nursie 5y ago

From an outsider's perspective, the leadership of one party recently tried to hang on to power by a variety of underhanded means, and in fact continues to deliberately undermine faith in US democracy itself. I would have sincere and heartfelt suspicions of those who continued to support that party while this stuff is going on. It's beyond party politics at that point.

pibechorro 5y ago
You mean the DNC blatantly cheating at the primaries.. again?
- spamizbad 5y ago
  I hate what the Democratic party did to Bernie Sanders in both 2016 and 2020; It was profoundly caustic. However, a political party's primaries are its own business and they are free to run them as un-democratically as possible. Even without the "cheating", the Democratic party already has a goofy system of superdelegates, caucuses, and other things that skew things away from the will of the voter. I think a lot of this is perhaps a function of the fact that the US electoral system is really only built to support 2 parties. The Democratic party knows it has a captive audience of voters sympathetic on social and economic issues that it is under limited obligation to deliver on because of its opposition.
  - esarbe 5y ago
    > I think a lot of this is perhaps a function of the fact that the US electoral system is really only built to support 2 parties. As far as I know, the electoral system wasn't built to support two parties. George Washington famously was against having any party system at all. The two party system is - to my understanding - the undesirable consequence of the first-past-the-post voting system. Nowadays of course the political parties are well entrenched and pretend that everything is working the way "The Founders" intended it. In that they are supported by pretty everyone in the political establishment.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > As far as I know, the electoral system wasn't built to support two parties It was built in a way which structurally encourages duopoly, and largely modeled on a preexisting system in which such duopoly was observed. Yes, Washington in particular railed against partisanship, but the framers as a whole knew what they were building; they weren't idiots. > Nowadays of course the political parties are well entrenched and pretend that everything is working the way "The Founders" intended it. Washington aside, the Founders (well, the Framers more accuratt, but there is significant overlap though the latter acted a decade and half later) not only built the system which structurally drives toward and preserves duopoly, they almost immediately created the first two parties while the ink was still wet on the Constitution.
- esarbe 5y ago
  Since the DNC is organizing the Democratic primaries and therefore makes the rules, it - by definition - cannot "cheat" in the primaries. Did the establishment use every available lever to ensure that their preferred candidate had a leg up and that any outsider candidate was disadvantaged from the start? Bet you they did. Just as any establishment power usually does.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > You mean the DNC blatantly cheating at the primaries.. again? The DNC didn't cheat in any primaries. DNC leadership has had an outsized influence in the overall candidate selection process in which primaries and caucuses are embedded (less so in 2020 as a direct result of changes after 2016)—as does RNC leadership on the other side (though the mechanisms in place for that in the RNC are different), despite failure of the elite to coalesce around one candidate leading an outsider to benefit from the system engineered to provide that influence in 2016—though it's less in both cases than the ironfisted control they had before putting much of the process in the hands of primaries and general-membership caucuses, nor is it cheating.
0xy 5y ago
How do you contrast the denial of the 2020 election's results by the Republicans with the denial of the 2000 election's results by the Democrats? Both lobbed lawsuits and continue to say it was rigged or unfair. For example, Hillary Clinton compared the 2000 Florida election recount to rigged elections in Nigeria. [1] The Democrats continue to believe 2000 was rigged. How about something more recent? Oh yeah, Hillary Clinton claims the 2016 election was "not on the level". Going much further, she calls the result "illegitimate", citing hacking (never proven) and voter suppression (no evidence). [2] [3] As recently as 4 years ago the Democrats were doing the exact same thing the Republicans are doing now. [1] https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=8314204&page=1 https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=8314204&page=1 [2] https://news.yahoo.com/hillary-clinton-maintains-2016-election-160716779.html https://news.yahoo.com/hillary-clinton-maintains-2016-electi... [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trump-is-an-illegitimate-president/2019/09/26/29195d5a-e099-11e9-b199-f638bf2c340f_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trum...
- thatswrong0 5y ago
  If you think the magnitude of the response by the Trump campaign to categorically undermine faith in our elections (think 60+ lawsuits, a literal insurrection in the US capitol) is at all equivalent to Democrats being miffed about losing Florida by 537 votes and pointing out Republican voter suppression (which ABSOLUTELY has supporting evidence if you consider that Trump won two swing-states prone to voter suppression by 3% [0][1]), then I don't even know what to tell you. [0] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-the-republican-push-to-restrict-voting-could-affect-our-elections/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-the-republican-push... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_United_States#Modern_examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite...
  - 0xy 5y ago
    Where's the proof the 2016 election was rigged, which Democrats have repeatedly claimed? You should have lawsuits won by DNC lawyers proving the illegitimacy of the election, right? Where's the proof? Extraordinary claims (like denying the results of elections) require extraordinary evidence, of which you haven't provided. Democrats' claims are on the same level as Republicans' 2020 conspiracy theories. It's even worse because they claim moral superiority on the issue of election rigging claims, when they did it 4 years earlier on a huge scale.
zo1 5y ago
Both parties do it from the other's perspective. E.g. Republicans complain about the left injecting politics and other issues (e.g. Trans and race topics) into primary school curriculums, which is arguably indoctrination and programming rather than genuine debate. To them this is straight out of the Nazi playbook of using children to control society. Point is, don't think that only one side has genuine concerns about the other trying to "undermine democracy". The whole thing is broken.
- Nursie 5y ago
  I'm sorry but none of that is remotely equivalent to the deliberate and overt attempts to undermine democracy that the republican party have been involved in over the last 12 months. You don't have to commit to the other side, nobody says you have to love the democrats and all they stand for, I surely don't. But you can't look at the actions of the republican party over the last year and see them as anything other than anti-democratic and dangerous?
  - caeril 5y ago
    I can't tell if this is a troll or not. HN is explicitly anti-political, but it's difficult to resist the bait. Dang, if you have an issue here, please consider the obvious bait, predicated on lies. There was a coordinated campaign amongst ALL left-leaning media organizations, including social media like Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc, to suppress a materially important story about the Biden family influence with Ukrainian and Chinese counter-parties just a few weeks ahead of the election. The story, broke by the NY Post, was factually correct, but deemed "misinformation" on dubious grounds by all major media apparatuses, because it did not support their chosen candidate. There was no other reason. There is NOTHING MORE ANTI-DEMOCRATIC than a Press that lies to the very people tasked with deciding elections. And that press overwhelmingly leans in a specific direction. To claim that the Right is uniquely anti-democratic is both insane and factually incorrect. Hanlon's Razor rarely applies on HN (a bastion of competent, high-IQ posters), so it's fair to say that you are lying out of malice, not some sort of innocent misunderstanding of reality. Your bad-faith arguments are ridiculous and not grounded in any semblance of reality.
sleepysysadmin 5y ago
>From an outsider's perspective, the leadership of one party recently tried to hang on to power by a variety of underhanded means, and in fact continues to deliberately undermine faith in US democracy itself. I am also an outsider. You have to be careful with this. You clearly don't see the bigger picture and it's bad to push the narrative that it was just Trump. The probability that the election was fraudulent is in question. Biden is the most popular president in history, as per his own words. Though also from his own mouth he has the most extensive voting fraud org. They never quite explained that one. >It's beyond party politics at that point. If the election was fraudulent. What was the actions taken? https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/30/politics/voter-suppression-restrictive-voting-laws/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/30/politics/voter-suppression-re... CNN is obviously biased and is portraying it as 'voting rights under attack' but what does it say? It says the republicans as a whole saw the election was fraudulent and needed to fix voting rules. The republicans cant just say the election was fraudulent and leave the country or something. You go and do exactly what CNN is describing.
- locopati 5y ago
  you're a fucking nutter
- Nursie 5y ago
  > The probability that the election was fraudulent is in question. No, it's not. There has been nothing but hot air on this, I've followed it closely, there is no evidence of fraud. > Though also from his own mouth he has the most extensive voting fraud org. Oh jesus, that was a quote about a voter protection program taken out of context, this is stupid. You accuse me of not seeing the bigger picture and then you use a meme as evidence. https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-fact-check-biden-voter-protection-not-idUSKBN27E2VH https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-fact-check-biden-voter-pr... > It says the republicans as a whole saw the election was fraudulent Republicans saw fraud because their leaders have lied to them, over and over again. They think voting rules need to be fixed because their leaders have, absent any evidence at all, repeatedly lied to them about fraud that they once again, have no evidence for. The republican party have gone off the rails and Trump explicitly attempted to overturn the democratic process.

by Nursie 5y ago

pibechorro 5y ago

You mean the DNC blatantly cheating at the primaries.. again?

spamizbad 5y ago
I hate what the Democratic party did to Bernie Sanders in both 2016 and 2020; It was profoundly caustic. However, a political party's primaries are its own business and they are free to run them as un-democratically as possible. Even without the "cheating", the Democratic party already has a goofy system of superdelegates, caucuses, and other things that skew things away from the will of the voter. I think a lot of this is perhaps a function of the fact that the US electoral system is really only built to support 2 parties. The Democratic party knows it has a captive audience of voters sympathetic on social and economic issues that it is under limited obligation to deliver on because of its opposition.
- esarbe 5y ago
  > I think a lot of this is perhaps a function of the fact that the US electoral system is really only built to support 2 parties. As far as I know, the electoral system wasn't built to support two parties. George Washington famously was against having any party system at all. The two party system is - to my understanding - the undesirable consequence of the first-past-the-post voting system. Nowadays of course the political parties are well entrenched and pretend that everything is working the way "The Founders" intended it. In that they are supported by pretty everyone in the political establishment.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > As far as I know, the electoral system wasn't built to support two parties It was built in a way which structurally encourages duopoly, and largely modeled on a preexisting system in which such duopoly was observed. Yes, Washington in particular railed against partisanship, but the framers as a whole knew what they were building; they weren't idiots. > Nowadays of course the political parties are well entrenched and pretend that everything is working the way "The Founders" intended it. Washington aside, the Founders (well, the Framers more accuratt, but there is significant overlap though the latter acted a decade and half later) not only built the system which structurally drives toward and preserves duopoly, they almost immediately created the first two parties while the ink was still wet on the Constitution.
esarbe 5y ago
Since the DNC is organizing the Democratic primaries and therefore makes the rules, it - by definition - cannot "cheat" in the primaries. Did the establishment use every available lever to ensure that their preferred candidate had a leg up and that any outsider candidate was disadvantaged from the start? Bet you they did. Just as any establishment power usually does.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> You mean the DNC blatantly cheating at the primaries.. again? The DNC didn't cheat in any primaries. DNC leadership has had an outsized influence in the overall candidate selection process in which primaries and caucuses are embedded (less so in 2020 as a direct result of changes after 2016)—as does RNC leadership on the other side (though the mechanisms in place for that in the RNC are different), despite failure of the elite to coalesce around one candidate leading an outsider to benefit from the system engineered to provide that influence in 2016—though it's less in both cases than the ironfisted control they had before putting much of the process in the hands of primaries and general-membership caucuses, nor is it cheating.

0xy 5y ago

How do you contrast the denial of the 2020 election's results by the Republicans with the denial of the 2000 election's results by the Democrats? Both lobbed lawsuits and continue to say it was rigged or unfair. For example, Hillary Clinton compared the 2000 Florida election recount to rigged elections in Nigeria. [1] The Democrats continue to believe 2000 was rigged. How about something more recent? Oh yeah, Hillary Clinton claims the 2016 election was "not on the level". Going much further, she calls the result "illegitimate", citing hacking (never proven) and voter suppression (no evidence). [2] [3] As recently as 4 years ago the Democrats were doing the exact same thing the Republicans are doing now. [1] https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=8314204&page=1 https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=8314204&page=1 [2] https://news.yahoo.com/hillary-clinton-maintains-2016-election-160716779.html https://news.yahoo.com/hillary-clinton-maintains-2016-electi... [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trump-is-an-illegitimate-president/2019/09/26/29195d5a-e099-11e9-b199-f638bf2c340f_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trum...

thatswrong0 5y ago
If you think the magnitude of the response by the Trump campaign to categorically undermine faith in our elections (think 60+ lawsuits, a literal insurrection in the US capitol) is at all equivalent to Democrats being miffed about losing Florida by 537 votes and pointing out Republican voter suppression (which ABSOLUTELY has supporting evidence if you consider that Trump won two swing-states prone to voter suppression by 3% [0][1]), then I don't even know what to tell you. [0] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-the-republican-push-to-restrict-voting-could-affect-our-elections/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-the-republican-push... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_United_States#Modern_examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite...
- 0xy 5y ago
  Where's the proof the 2016 election was rigged, which Democrats have repeatedly claimed? You should have lawsuits won by DNC lawyers proving the illegitimacy of the election, right? Where's the proof? Extraordinary claims (like denying the results of elections) require extraordinary evidence, of which you haven't provided. Democrats' claims are on the same level as Republicans' 2020 conspiracy theories. It's even worse because they claim moral superiority on the issue of election rigging claims, when they did it 4 years earlier on a huge scale.

zo1 5y ago

Both parties do it from the other's perspective. E.g. Republicans complain about the left injecting politics and other issues (e.g. Trans and race topics) into primary school curriculums, which is arguably indoctrination and programming rather than genuine debate. To them this is straight out of the Nazi playbook of using children to control society. Point is, don't think that only one side has genuine concerns about the other trying to "undermine democracy". The whole thing is broken.

Nursie 5y ago
I'm sorry but none of that is remotely equivalent to the deliberate and overt attempts to undermine democracy that the republican party have been involved in over the last 12 months. You don't have to commit to the other side, nobody says you have to love the democrats and all they stand for, I surely don't. But you can't look at the actions of the republican party over the last year and see them as anything other than anti-democratic and dangerous?
- caeril 5y ago
  I can't tell if this is a troll or not. HN is explicitly anti-political, but it's difficult to resist the bait. Dang, if you have an issue here, please consider the obvious bait, predicated on lies. There was a coordinated campaign amongst ALL left-leaning media organizations, including social media like Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc, to suppress a materially important story about the Biden family influence with Ukrainian and Chinese counter-parties just a few weeks ahead of the election. The story, broke by the NY Post, was factually correct, but deemed "misinformation" on dubious grounds by all major media apparatuses, because it did not support their chosen candidate. There was no other reason. There is NOTHING MORE ANTI-DEMOCRATIC than a Press that lies to the very people tasked with deciding elections. And that press overwhelmingly leans in a specific direction. To claim that the Right is uniquely anti-democratic is both insane and factually incorrect. Hanlon's Razor rarely applies on HN (a bastion of competent, high-IQ posters), so it's fair to say that you are lying out of malice, not some sort of innocent misunderstanding of reality. Your bad-faith arguments are ridiculous and not grounded in any semblance of reality.

sleepysysadmin 5y ago

>From an outsider's perspective, the leadership of one party recently tried to hang on to power by a variety of underhanded means, and in fact continues to deliberately undermine faith in US democracy itself. I am also an outsider. You have to be careful with this. You clearly don't see the bigger picture and it's bad to push the narrative that it was just Trump. The probability that the election was fraudulent is in question. Biden is the most popular president in history, as per his own words. Though also from his own mouth he has the most extensive voting fraud org. They never quite explained that one. >It's beyond party politics at that point. If the election was fraudulent. What was the actions taken? https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/30/politics/voter-suppression-restrictive-voting-laws/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/30/politics/voter-suppression-re... CNN is obviously biased and is portraying it as 'voting rights under attack' but what does it say? It says the republicans as a whole saw the election was fraudulent and needed to fix voting rules. The republicans cant just say the election was fraudulent and leave the country or something. You go and do exactly what CNN is describing.

locopati 5y ago
you're a fucking nutter
Nursie 5y ago
> The probability that the election was fraudulent is in question. No, it's not. There has been nothing but hot air on this, I've followed it closely, there is no evidence of fraud. > Though also from his own mouth he has the most extensive voting fraud org. Oh jesus, that was a quote about a voter protection program taken out of context, this is stupid. You accuse me of not seeing the bigger picture and then you use a meme as evidence. https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-fact-check-biden-voter-protection-not-idUSKBN27E2VH https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-fact-check-biden-voter-pr... > It says the republicans as a whole saw the election was fraudulent Republicans saw fraud because their leaders have lied to them, over and over again. They think voting rules need to be fixed because their leaders have, absent any evidence at all, repeatedly lied to them about fraud that they once again, have no evidence for. The republican party have gone off the rails and Trump explicitly attempted to overturn the democratic process.