The Joe Biden 2020 tracker thread (7 Viewers)

Humperdoo said:

I regret that title Jim and changed it. Should be better than that.
It has nothing to do with her gender or race.
I just don’t work that way, wasn’t raised that way and I didn’t raise my little ones that way.

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This goes to what I was saying about believe you probably aren't an butt crevasse. However, I would say that it's more likely that you consciously don't work that way. There's also sorts of things at play with our sub-conscious that are hard to unpack, and you can't do it unless you deliberately set about trying to dismantle it, and most of us don't do that.

Humperdoo said:

I have many family members and lifelong friends that are minorities and or liberals. We get along great even when we vehemently disagree on something.
I still don’t get how it’s ok to thro around nasty terms at Trump, on here or in the real world. All the time. I see it so much here that I got down in the mud with my title. That’s why I changed it realizing it was wrong and made me as bad as those that throw insults at our President.

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So, I generally agree that constant insults and belittling politicians are not generally helpful, but I will also admit that I don't do much to stop it against Trump. There's a very specific reason for that though (not necessarily a great reason but a reason). He dishes it out constantly. He always has - even before he ran for President. He's crude and vulgar and unrepentant about doing those things. When you have a man who will send a photo of a reporter he doesn't like to her with the words "Face of Dog!" (which he did before he was a politician), I don't think he has much room to complain about how he's treated. He spent 8 years harshly criticizing Obama - which is his right, he actively promoted the birther conspiracy. He called Ted Cruz's wife ugly, and insinuated his father was a murderer. He comes up with demeaning nicknames for his political adversaries. So, if he can dish it out, I think he ought to be tough enough to take it. And I don't think he is. He is an incredibly weak man.

So, I think it's counterproductive from getting what I want out of him (ie, if I were the Democratic leadership I would have started buttering him up from day one and gave him his wall, and I bet I could have gotten universal health care out of him if we agreed to call it Trump Care), I also don't feel particularly inclined to defend someone who dishes it out as frequently as he does.

UncleTrvlingJim said:

This goes to what I was saying about believe you probably aren't an butt crevasse. However, I would say that it's more likely that you consciously don't work that way. There's also sorts of things at play with our sub-conscious that are hard to unpack, and you can't do it unless you deliberately set about trying to dismantle it, and most of us don't do that.



So, I generally agree that constant insults and belittling politicians are not generally helpful, but I will also admit that I don't do much to stop it against Trump. There's a very specific reason for that though (not necessarily a great reason but a reason). He dishes it out constantly. He always has - even before he ran for President. He's crude and vulgar and unrepentant about doing those things. When you have a man who will send a photo of a reporter he doesn't like to her with the words "Face of Dog!" (which he did before he was a politician), I don't think he has much room to complain about how he's treated. He spent 8 years harshly criticizing Obama - which is his right, he actively promoted the birther conspiracy. He called Ted Cruz's wife ugly, and insinuated his father was a murderer. He comes up with demeaning nicknames for his political adversaries. So, if he can dish it out, I think he ought to be tough enough to take it. And I don't think he is. He is an incredibly weak man.

So, I think it's counterproductive from getting what I want out of him (ie, if I were the Democratic leadership I would have started buttering him up from day one and gave him his wall, and I bet I could have gotten universal health care out of him if we agreed to call it Trump Care), I also don't feel particularly inclined to defend someone who dishes it out as frequently as he does.

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Great post and I totally understand that line of thought.
Trump carries himself as an arse.

N.O.Bronco said:

Can you give me an example of an internal bias that a person harbors about a perceived inferiority of another race/gender that allows them to retain the same moral footing as a person who has all the same traits but doesn’t hold that racial bias? Because this one I’m struggling with a bit.

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I'm not sure that I even brought up moral superiority. But let's say you don't have an inherent racial bias, but you have an inherent bias against short people, I'm not sure one is better than the other, right?

The point is we all have inherent/implicit/sub-conscious biases. That isn't our choice, so there's no moral judgement to be made there. It's when given space to make a decision and we cling to those biases against objective evidence that provides moral weight.

We are constantly bombarded with negative images of minorities. It can be as simple as watching the local news every night and seeing all the suspects of local crimes that are mostly minorities. You might logically know that there are issues with structural poverty in minority communities, and that poverty is the driving factor in the crime rate, but at a subconscious level, you are seeing a parade of minorities being listed as wanted suspects. It's why you see a number of black cops implicated in shooting unarmed black men, while still showing restraint for white suspects. A black cop certainly knows that a black man should be given the benefit of a doubt just like a white man, but that's the rational mind talking, when adrenaline is pumping and if training is poor, all those negative images that society pushes on us have a much greater weight than your rational mind.

N.O.Bronco said:

By all accounts there are and were a lot of segregationists that are and were good family men. Loved their wives, took their kids to school and worked hard to put food on the table. They just also happened to reinforce a system of white supremacy that oppressed, marginalizes, and killed their fellow citizens. That’s legacy is with us today. That’s legacy torch bearers are still with us today.

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I'm not sure how that is germane to the discussion. Segregation was a conscious policy choice, I'm clearly talking about inherent cognitive biases.

N.O.Bronco said:

And I struggle to see how their intent or motive are ultimately all that relevant when their actions are what ultimately matter? Spreading or promoting misogyny and bigotry(actively or passively) because you are ignorant or because you are being malicious doesn’t change the fact you are promoting and spreading bigotry. It seems to be only relevant if your intent is to understand the racist, which there are certainly reasons you might want to, but it doesn’t easily appear to me to materially change the effect their activities and actions produce for society or those that are the victims to these biases.

If a person is delivering the same misogynist patterns of behavior maliciously or just because of ignorance, what is the difference, functionally, to the outside world?

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I think it matters in how you frame a response. You need to know what the problem is before you can solve it. The vast majority of people know that racism is wrong, but there is still a strong residual effects of racist policies that are lingering today. So, this is thread is a good example of how framing a response can have an opposite effect of what was I hope intended. I think it's more effective to talk about the effect of certain policies, or language or actions, than the motive. It's impossible to prove what someone's motivation was, but you can use stats and examples to show the effect. If you try to talk about motives, the discussion derails over a topic that is impossible to prove anyway.

UncleTrvlingJim said:

I'm not sure that I even brought up moral superiority. But let's say you don't have an inherent racial bias, but you have an inherent bias against short people, I'm not sure one is better than the other, right?

The point is we all have inherent/implicit/sub-conscious biases. That isn't our choice, so there's no moral judgement to be made there. It's when given space to make a decision and we cling to those biases against objective evidence that provides moral weight.

We are constantly bombarded with negative images of minorities. It can be as simple as watching the local news every night and seeing all the suspects of local crimes that are mostly minorities. You might logically know that there are issues with structural poverty in minority communities, and that poverty is the driving factor in the crime rate, but at a subconscious level, you are seeing a parade of minorities being listed as wanted suspects. It's why you see a number of black cops implicated in shooting unarmed black men, while still showing restraint for white suspects. A black cop certainly knows that a black man should be given the benefit of a doubt just like a white man, but that's the rational mind talking, when adrenaline is pumping and if training is poor, all those negative images that society pushes on us have a much greater weight than your rational mind.



I'm not sure how that is germane to the discussion. Segregation was a conscious policy choice, I'm clearly talking about inherent cognitive biases.



I think it matters in how you frame a response. You need to know what the problem is before you can solve it. The vast majority of people know that racism is wrong, but there is still a strong residual effects of racist policies that are lingering today. So, this is thread is a good example of how framing a response can have an opposite effect of what was I hope intended.

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First off, thanks for the response, this sort of discussion is a breath of fresh air from most of this thread recently.

I dont really subscribe to that sort of moral relativism tbh. There is understanding and recognizing how cultural influences affect cognitive processes but to take that as reason to remove value judgement doesnt make sense for me. As what gets produced is still able to be weighed and measured. Otherwise morality basically gets removed entirely. And people are still accountable for their behavior, especially when the effects are made clear to them. Which I think there is very few people in this country isolated enough to not know racism is wrong and where their biases are potentially rooted in it. Absent that you might as well consider determinism and remove all accountability from a person.

I think you would recognize that due to societal and cultural forces, all biases are not on equal footing either? And your own post sort of backs this up. Bias against short people doesn’t feed back into a poisonous and dangerous feedback loop that is ingrained across society and is carrying ongoing legacy harm to members of that group.

If I embrace a bias against people with brown hair, it is not contributing to a system of black hair supremacy that’s residuals and compounded harm is still raw and damaging a swath of your fellow citizens. So by any objective measure that bias is far more morally troubling and harmful. And it’s effect far more visceral and the effects far more obvious to those suffering the bias. So theIr inability to correct their bias, especially after being confronted, reduces the level of empathy one can realistically have.

As to framing a response, If you want to try and “fix” the racist, go ahead, we need people to do that, but it Is good to keep in mind it should never be the default of any axiom or policy that the victim or ally should have the responsibility to fix the racist, or impose polices that ultimately control how the victim or ally should respond or react in the face of reasonably deduced racist attacks or behaviors. And that in crafting communal spaces, like a forum, you have to ultimately set a standard that is either going to take a hard line or a soft one on the sort of rhetoric that prompted this extensive derail, and a soft line ultimately means that the victims of racism are being asked to endure their abusers so you can have the space to “fix them.” Which ultimately creates it’s own value judgement of placing the import of protecting minorities below giving space to fix racists....And if you’re not actually fixing racists, all you are functionally doing is prioritizing their comfort above minorities.

N.O.Bronco said:

First off, thanks for the response, this sort of discussion is a breath of fresh air from most of this thread recently.

I dont really subscribe to that sort of moral relativism tbh. There is understanding and recognizing how cultural influences affect cognitive processes but to take that as reason to remove value judgement doesnt make sense for me. As what gets produced is still able to be weighed and measured. Otherwise morality basically gets removed entirely. And people are still accountable for their behavior, especially when the effects are made clear to them. Which I think there is very few people in this country isolated enough to not know racism is wrong and where their biases are potentially rooted in it. Absent that you might as well consider determinism and remove all accountability from a person.

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So, I might not be explaining my position clearly b/c I don't buy into moral relativism either. I'm trying to draw a distinction between implicit and explicit bias. Because for me morality involves choice and conscious thought. We don't choose our implicit biases, and we all have them. Making a snap decision about someone based on superficial characteristics is pretty common - pretty people get way more help than ugly people. Where morality comes into play is holding onto those snap decisions after giving careful consideration and absent facts. Even then, cognitive biases are hard to break. You have to work to break them. This isn't determinism.

N.O.Bronco said:

I think you would recognize that due to societal and cultural forces, all biases are not on equal footing either? And your own post sort of backs this up. Bias against short people doesn’t feed back into a poisonous and dangerous feedback loop that is ingrained across society and is carrying ongoing legacy harm to members of that group.

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So, the big difference is there were decades of explicit policies designed to oppress a specific minority group. So any current implicit biases are for one, largely a result of those explicit policies, and two exacerbate pre-existing obstacles. So the effects are different, but the driving impulses are the largely the same.

Again, from an issue of morality, it's what you do with your conscious actions that should be judged not the bundle of cognitive biases that make up a fair amount of our reactionary responses. Granted, I think most people should also take the time to actively work against cognitive biases. But that's really hard work.

N.O.Bronco said:

As to framing a response, If you want to try and “fix” the racist, go ahead, we need people to do that, but it Is good to keep in mind it should never be the default of any axiom or policy that the victim or ally should have the responsibility to fix the racist, or impose polices that ultimately control how the victim or ally should respond or react in the face of reasonably deduced racist attacks or behaviors. And that in crafting communal spaces, like a forum, you have to ultimately set a standard that is either going to take a hard line or a soft one on the sort of rhetoric that prompted this extensive derail, and a soft line ultimately means that the victims of racism are being asked to endure their abusers so you can have the space to “fix them.” Which ultimately creates it’s own value judgement of placing the import of protecting minorities below giving space to fix racists....And if you’re not actually fixing racists, all you are functionally doing is prioritizing their comfort above minorities.

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I don't think about it as trying to "fix racists". There is an end result I'd like to see - ie, more equality of opportunity, correction of past injustices, less barriers based on race or gender (whether they are intentional or unintentional), and I try to figure out the best way to get there.

I have a baseline assumption that most people know and believe that racism is wrong and don't think of themselves as racist. This is both good and bad. It's good in that we're mostly accepting a norm that I believe is inherently good. But it can be problematic if someone truly believes they aren't racist, they can have a blind spot to their own inherent cognitive biases and resistant to acknowledge it as such. This is true for pretty much everyone with our cognitive biases. Merely calling someone racist, or a position they hold as racist almost never modifies behavior in my experience, and it usually has the opposite effect. There are dozens of studies that trying to bludgeon someone with an argument not only entrenches their position, it usually draws sympathy from bystanders, thus creating the opposite result than the one you want (more support for things you believe to be racist).

People generally like to think of themselves as good people, so if you're trying to effect change, you need to spend time proving how the effect is bad without assigning mal-intent to strangers. It's more work, but I think yields better longer term results.

UncleTrvlingJim said:

So, I'll address the last point first. When I'm able to take a step back and approach a post rationally, I try not to ascribe motive or intent behind any of them. I don't really know any of you, your experiences or whatever else might make up your internal cognitive biases. You have to keep in mind that I don't think someone who has an internal cognitive bias against a certain race to be necessarily a bad person. Ie, I don't think someone who has an unconscious or implicit bias to believe women or minorities to be of below average intelligence to be any worse than someone who thinks the same of Republicans, or Democrats, or Falcons fans (well, ok that one might be true). There are lots of cues from society that none of us choose that give us an initial bias that gets reinforced based on our surroundings.

I have little reason to doubt that Humperdoo is able to overcome those inherent biases when interacting with a minority or a liberal, and getting to know them as a person and then treat them as such. Because I don't have any reason to believe that he's an butt crevasse.

So, I don't know the motivation behind calling AOC very stupid (or whatever the exact quote was - it was more than just calling her a little slow). I do think it was driven by an inherent bias (he talks often about hating socialism and AOC is being held up as a sort of socialist boogeyman), which again doesn't make him or anyone else a bad person. Liberals do it often with conservatives.

I'm going to start to ramble, but I think if you're interested in combating internal biases, it's important to pre-define your criteria for evaluation first, and then rigorously apply that criteria to everyone. I think it's pretty objectively certain that AOC is well within 1 standard deviation of mean "intelligence", so the term stupid is probably not accurate.

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IDK, I suspect Hump may be the most decent guy on this board. But, he doesnt really appreciate that on the internet good faith can and will be used against you.

Beach Friends said:

IDK, I suspect Hump may be the most decent guy on this board. But, he doesnt really appreciate that on the internet good faith can and will be used against you.

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Thanks Beach. I do my best to be a good man, and judging by the people in my life and how I get along with others, I know who I am and feel good about who I am. No matter what strangers on the internet try to label me as. I lose no sleep.

I’m the furthest thing from a racist, sexist, misogynistic person that there can be. So to be labeled those things makes me chuckle. My brother visited today and I told him about the folks on here and how they act, what I’ve been labeled as and he died laughing and chided me for wasting my time on an internet board. He’s a full fledged Socialist, left as they come and yet he knows who I am. We get along great and have cordial albeit passionate talks about societal issues and politics.

I did what I considered to be the most important job we can do, raised two little ones to be open minded tolerant loving and independent thinkers. I did great as they both are just that. My son is way more left than I care to be, but I love him and always have told him I’m proud of him for finding his own voice.

So an admin says to move on and to keep things on the topic of the thread and the same discussion continues. You guys are bold.

I’ll cease and desist Admiral.

It's amazing how well Biden is doing from his basement. I am still a huge skeptic, but Biden's strategy of not getting in the way of Trump's bumblings appears to be working.





If this holds, Florida is going to be insanely tough win for Trump

A Fox News poll from mid-April found Biden with a slim 3-point lead over Trump and running even among voters 45 and older, while a Quinnipiac University survey from the same period found Biden up 4 points overall in Florida and leading Trump 52 percent to 42 percent among voters 65 and older. If this holds, this would represent a big swing from 2016, when Trump won Florida voters 45 and older by 13 points, and those 65 and older by 22 points, according to the CCES.

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J-DONK said:

It's amazing how well Biden is doing from his basement. I am still a huge skeptic, but Biden's strategy of not getting in the way of Trump's bumblings appears to be working.

Are Older Voters Turning Away From Trump?

There are different “gaps” in American politics, but one that has consistently shown up in recent presidential elections is the age gap. That is, younger voters…

fivethirtyeight.com

If this holds, Florida is going to be insanely tough win for Trump

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Trust the polls! They did so well for Hillary in 2016.

I just hope that Biden is on the ticket in November. You never know when something like a leaked audio tape of him talking more about trading cash for the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor is gonna turn up.

Beach Friends said:

Trust the polls! They did so well for Hillary in 2016.

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538 has a good article on what happened with that as well, not that you'll read it.


P.S. I knew the conservative response was going to be "lol polls".

GrandAdmiral said:

Joe Biden finally makes up nickname for Trump: ‘President Tweety’

Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden has finally unveiled his moniker for 2020 rival President Trump, saying he calls his opponent “President Tweety.”

nypost.com

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Oh, that's almost as good as "no malarkey."

GrandAdmiral said:

Joe Biden finally makes up nickname for Trump: ‘President Tweety’

Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden has finally unveiled his moniker for 2020 rival President Trump, saying he calls his opponent “President Tweety.”

nypost.com

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He'll never win over the Trump voters that way -- needs to have some obvious racial/misogynist connotations to be able to appeal to them. I'll give the effort a D+.

It is neither necessary nor possible to scientifically determine whether the former vice president has dementia. On the other hand, you don’t need an astronomer to know that the sun rises in the east. If you have encountered dementia, you know Biden has it.

Joe Okc said:

Biden obviously has dementia and should withdraw from the race

It's anti-American and unpatriotic to vote for someone suffering from dementia for a position with exclusive control over nuclear launch codes.

www.japantimes.co.jp

It is neither necessary nor possible to scientifically determine whether the former vice president has dementia. On the other hand, you don’t need an astronomer to know that the sun rises in the east. If you have encountered dementia, you know Biden has it.

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Who is Ted Rall? The Mayo Clinic wants to have a chat with him.

Also, how do you feel about what he says about Trump?

Humperdoo said:

I regret that title Jim and changed it. Should be better than that.
It has nothing to do with her gender or race.
I just don’t work that way, wasn’t raised that way and I didn’t raise my little ones that way.

I have many family members and lifelong friends that are minorities and or liberals. We get along great even when we vehemently disagree on something.
I still don’t get how it’s ok to thro around nasty terms at Trump, on here or in the real world. All the time. I see it so much here that I got down in the mud with my title. That’s why I changed it realizing it was wrong and made me as bad as those that throw insults at our President.

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What do you think about the Golden Rule?