Handwringing over Biden's age has Democrats worried about a repeat of Ruth Bader Ginsberg's refusal to step down

return2ozma@lemmy.world to politics @lemmy.world – 123 points –
Handwringing over Biden's age has Democrats worried about a repeat of Ruth Bader Ginsberg's refusal to step down
businessinsider.com
201

You are viewing a single comment

Stewart wasn't retired, mind you. He's had a show for the past two years. He only recently got cancelled for speaking of subjects Apple didn't like.

Also, please don't rehash our conversation. It's still written up there. The only possible purpose of that exercise is to put together a straw man. I remember what I said.

You could have skipped to the last line, which is where we disagree and where I think democrats and their larger sphere of influence are repeating a catastrophic mistake.

He's a campaign staffer. You're a campaign staffer. Everybody is a campaign staffer until such time as the opposing force isn't a fascist cult of personality.

If you don't see that, you're part of the problem. If Stewart is back to pretending that he can "restore sanity" by acting as if the other side had legitimate concerns that should be heard, he's part of the problem. That's not the game we're playing anymore. If you didn't realize the rules had changed when Trump won the first time, surely you must have noticed after January 6th, or when the poll numbers of the, again, actual rapist refused to climb down.

So no, his honest statements aren't irrelevant. They're a drop in a pond of, once again, information warfare. The wilful blind spots and bothsideism may be naivete or disingenuous misinformation, but my entire point is at this stage it doesn't mater. They don't belong. We're past those. You either play the game we're all playing or you're playing for the other guys.

True, he wasn't retired during that time. I was wrong. He just wasn't the frontman sitting behind the desk each night.

If you think I'm part of "the problem" because I do not identify as a campaign staffer and do not assign that role to others during an election cycle, or that valid criticisms of candidates are off the table during the election cycle, then we can end the discussion here. As far as I'm concerned, you're part of the problem because you assume, ultimately, that any nuanced discussion is invalid because Americans are too stupid or ignorant for that kind of discussion to ever be anything more than ammunition for the opposition, which I know isn't the case. Have a good one!

To be clear, I think being part of the problem isn't the same as being malicious, hostile or stupid. I think being stubbornly naive about the system working the way it's supposed to has its uses. It's a powerful tool to get the corrupt to shy away from breaking the rules if enough people assume the rules will be followed.

But I also think we punched through that wall like a bunker buster dropping from orbit years ago and a lot of the US is a toad that has been simmered to being full-on al dente by this point. Well meaning people hoping to get through this as if it's... you know, an actual democratic election are part of the problem despite themselves.

I don't think I'm being "stubbornly naive about the system" by thinking it's okay for people to engage in nuanced discource. You and I will not agree on this, and I am not interested in further engaging with someone whose hardline rhetoric has gone so far as to demonize valid criticism.

There's nothing Biden could do to lose my vote in this election, but I'm not going to pretend he's a perfect candidate. And anyone who thinks we need to treat him as such is deluded. Democrats and progressives (like me) knew he wasn't a perfect candidate in 2020, but they knew he could garner enough support to beat Trump, and he did. Will he do it again? No idea, but I'm not interested in silencing valid criticisms now any more than I was in 2020, because the game hasn't changed since then. You think January 6 changed anything? Ask any given Republican if January 6 changed which party they'll be voting for. There's your answer.