The Struggles of the Politically 'Purple'

[ReijiTabibito]

Almost like the system was designed so that if only one side wanted something done, then the other side would undo that, so that the only things that lasted were things both sides agreed on.  But I'm no Constitutional expert.

[Lexandria]

For someone not on the extreme other end of the pendulum, I'm really hoping for Andrew Yang to start gaining some major ground: a lot of his policies run a fair middle ground, and he's got real logical reasoning and data behind his ideas. He's likable in the same sort of  "a regular guy/not a politician" way that folks wanted when they saw Trump as someone different. Difference is that he has spent years actually trying to create jobs in areas hit hard by the economic shift. He's done work to help people for years, which helped him see what factors are hurting folks who are just trying to get by and what was causing folks to lose their jobs in this economy that only works for big companies and screws over the workers. His message resonates with a lot of folks on both sides of the isle (those who have heard of him and watch his long-form interviews, rather than just short sound bites, anyway), which is really what we need at this point to get rid of Trump: need to pull from Republicans and moderates and energize the younger folks to really come out and vote. And he doesn't shame people for voting for Trump, or imply 'we told you so' to folks who regret having done so. He doesn't like beating down or talking about Trump: he'd rather focus on solutions. I like that. The more we focus the media on Trump, the more be grows in our minds and the less we can focus on real solutions to the huge problems we have inn this country.

I don't think Biden can pull anyone but older die-hard democrats: he's too out of touch, his ideas aren't exciting, and he's already lost the faith of the young voters; nor can he pull Republicans across the isle, especially as he leans too heavily on 'I was Obama's VP!', besides that he doesn't have a lot to say.

Bernie really had my confidence in 2016, and he's my number two currently because I do like him, but he's lost some ground since 2016; he has some health issues that combined with his age is very concerning, and leans so far socialist that he'd can't pull many across the isle even though he's pretty famous for working with anyone to make things work.

Warren is way too far left, has been so villainized already by the Trump campaign and the Republican base media that I feel there's no coming back from that; she's also out of touch with a lot of modern issues, and tends to misinterpret facts and data in a way that makes me question her viability. I also read some stuff (here) that I don't care for regarding her campaign financing that stikes me as both morally grey (at best) and incredibly hypocritical. She's my least favorite and has the most vulnerabilities to attacks to her character and policies.

Pete Buttigieg seems like a fine fellow, but I don't really see a lot of ideas that he hasn't pulled from other candidates (and I'm not clear on if he gives credit to the places he gets his ideas or not, i hope he does) and none feel particularly cohesive to me; several positions he's taken, while popular to democrats, are polarizing enough that he's likely to lose a lot of potential voters from rural areas (his position on the Electoral College, for example). I also feel he's 'playing the game' as he, to me, doesn't feel sincere at all. I feel president is a notch on his belt, like it is for Trump, and that bothers me a lot.

Almost like the system was designed so that if only one side wanted something done, then the other side would undo that, so that the only things that lasted were things both sides agreed on.  But I'm no Constitutional expert.

Our system wasn't designed to be a two-party system, that's why it's so dysfunctional.

[TheGlyphstone]

Yang has built his campaign around a universal basic income proposal, hasn't he? It's what I remember most about him, along with wondering how he plans on paying for it. It's only been tried a few times experimentally in Europe, which is for the most part significantly more left leaning than the US.

[Lexandria]

Yang has built his campaign around a universal basic income proposal, hasn't he? It's what I remember most about him, along with wondering how he plans on paying for it. It's only been tried a few times experimentally in Europe, which is for the most part significantly more left leaning than the US.

He actually has over 150 policies that fit together like puzzle pieces to improve a ton of stuff.

His big unique policy is a Universal Basic Income of $1,000 per month for every adult American citizen. It doesn't stack with means tested programs (for example: a person can still collect Veteran's Benefits, SSDI, Social security retirement Benefits, but SSI and welfare programs would be excluded as they are means tested) but most folks would be better off (no reporting income, no restrictions on how much money you can have saved or what you spend it on, etc) with a chunk of money they can spend (or save) on anything they need than money they can only spend on certain things and cannot set aside for emergencies. For folks who want to work but can't risk losing their SSI due to income inctease, a UBI would let them find a way to earn money instead of being struck worried that they'll be punished for trying to improve their lives. It would be opt-in, so folks who get more out of the means tested programs, or prefer them, can stay on those of they'd like. He's not about to force folks out of something that works for them.

He plans to get a big chunk of the funding from a Value Added Tax at half the European level (10%) that is variable (meaning luxury goods like yachts get the full 10%, but diapers or food would get much less or nothing added). The rest would come from consolidating (NOT eliminating) some social welfare programs (reduces administrative bloat); the saved expense from those means tested programs that folks opt out of; $100 – 200+ billion from saved expense due to folks bing able to take better care of themselves and/or stay out of jail/emergency room/homelessness due to the universal income giving them additional stability and security (which some studies have shown $1 towards low income families can save $7 in savings/economic growth); new revenue from the UBI money circulating through the economy and the new jobs created from that; and (direct quote from his site) "Taxes on top earners and pollution: By removing the Social Security cap, implementing a financial transactions tax, and ending the favorable tax treatment for capital gains/carried interest, we can decrease financial speculation while also funding the Freedom Dividend. We can add to that a carbon fee that will be partially dedicated to funding the Freedom Dividend, making up the remaining balance required to cover the cost of this program."

He is also funding a UBI experiment where he's giving 12 families $1,000 per month (2 of which he's been paying out of his own pocket, the rest from his campaign funds), to see if it improves their lives. They're have been experiments in Canada, and i believe there's an experiment or two happening the the US either now or soon.

[Twisted Crow]

The dread I have for the next Dem president is that I am trying to anticipate what they next Chewbacca Defense character argument is going to be. Especially if it's a woman:

"Oh, you don't approve of what Warren is doing because you're obviously sexist!"

"You just don't like Buttigieg because you're a homophobe."

This type of venom is why I cringe at many people that are on board the Team Blue Party Ship. Whether or not they are the majority of Democratic supporters is irrelevant. They are, unfortunately, the loudest. It is my opinion that these trolls are, in a roundabout way, a major reason why Trump came into power in the first damn place.

[Twisted Crow]

To add for a certain effect, something that I once mentioned about my military past before is that I was effectively pigeon-holed from the very things that were going to take care of me during Obama's administration. So there is a bit of resentment there from when I have expressed (in the past) some legitimate criticism while the only counters to it was more race-baited strawman + ad hominem from the "progressives". This ignorance didn't get anyone anywhere save creating a culture of fear in being labeled something they were not. An example of how the so-called "counter culture" abuses what privilege it has available without ever having to hold itself responsible.

It isn't to say that there wasn't racism levied at Obama, but his people had many opportunities to reach out to people like me and merely stuck to playing the game. Furthermore he didn't seem to mind using people like me to pat himself on the back for the op on Osama bin Laden. If one could just fit themselves in my worn-out boots, one might understand the sort of frustrations  I have with the culture this affords.

[TheGlyphstone]

I was going to post an extremely relevant Oatmeal comic, but for some reason I cannot find it anywhere on the Oatmeal website. It was about how the smallest 10% of both political groups are the loudest 90%, so the other side only sees/hears them and takes it as representative of everyone in that group. It had triangles and squares.

Anyways - can you really call it a Chewbacca defense (in itself not really accurate, you're more describing a reverse ad hominem attack) when the loudest and most visible of their opposite number on the right really are sexist/racist/homophobic? You say it's irrelevant that they aren't the majority of Democrats, but that means it would be equally irrelevant that the majority of Republicans/conservatives aren't hanging Obama effigies from nooses or deep-faking Clinton/Warren rape porn. Trolls beget trolls, and if the loudest/ugliest of our number are permitted to represent us, the only way to go is downhill.

[Twisted Crow]

So what if they are? This is part of my point. Because the other side is acting like a jackass doesn't magically remove accountability in one acting like a jackass. It is weak justification to excuse a behavior that fundamentally undermines progress. This country has been hyper polarized for far too long. As I had mentioned with Dylan Davis and people like this: people have to realize that it has to stop somewhere. It has to be okay to ask questions again, something that people are less allowed to do anymore with political matters.

In example, I understand (now) that a lot of what hindered Obama was that he had a hard time gaining traction with Congress. But could I have these conversations back then? Nope. Because race always managed to find a way to muddy the waters on figuring out how to solve problems that had nothing to do with race. If more people cared about putting the flames out instead of fanning them, we wouldn't be in this mess.

But as they say, hindsight is 20/20 for some people.

Also, I wish one of these people running for president would change their last name to Hindsight for next year.  ^-^

[Twisted Crow]

It doesn't seem like we disagree, actually. I just get the feeling that we are sort of talking around each other more than anything. :-)

[Twisted Crow]

So what if they are?

Correction: I meant to put a comma here so it reads "So, what if they are." My apologies!

[TheGlyphstone]

It doesn't seem like we disagree, actually. I just get the feeling that we are sort of talking around each other more than anything. :-)

I think we are, yeah. It wasn't meant as an excuse, rather the opposite - jackasses don't excuse jackasses, but we also can't call out one side for its jackasses and ignore the jackasses on the other side. The two are fundamentally intertwined, created by and feeding off each other while the rest of us deal with the fallout. I know a couple people at work who simply don't vote at all because they're sick of the bitter fighting and feuding that dominates the news cycles; I lament that this sort of fatigued disengagement just makes the situation worse - if only the zealots/extremists feel engaged enough to participate, the process will by nature become ever more extreme.

My fear is that the divide will soon be irreconcilable. The zero-compromise mandate of the GOP was cold-blooded, calculated political strategy when Gingrich put it into action, but for his successors it's become a fundamental (heh) doctrine of no retreat. The consequence of this as I perceive it is the rise of people like AOC, hyper-progressives who have spent the majority of their lives with a Republican party that rejects bipartisanship on principle and see the only viable strategy being just as inflexible and resistant to compromise. If she and those like her become the rising power in the Democratic party, we truly will have a house divided against itself and impossible to reunify.

[Twisted Crow]

If it is one thing I have learned, simply "not voting at all" doesn't help either. I understand now that it's important to at least say something.

I also feel bad for forgetting about Andrew Yang, as Lex mentioned him earlier. Wasn't ignoring that, by the way. Sorry, Lex. I just had some thoughts when reading that regarding our future situation.

[TheGlyphstone]

Yang does sound interesting, after Lex's description. I'm always slightly more favorable to candidates when they have specific plans for how they will deliver on their promises, rather than empty platitudes and emotional appeals. But it's a sad reality I can't ignore than emotional appeals and non-specific promises get bigger traction with the voting base as a whole.

[Lexandria]

If it is one thing I have learned, simply "not voting at all" doesn't help either. I understand now that it's important to at least say something.

I also feel bad for forgetting about Andrew Yang, as Lex mentioned him earlier. Wasn't ignoring that, by the way. Sorry, Lex. I just had some thoughts when reading that regarding our future situation.

No worries!

Yang does sound interesting, after Lex's description. I'm always slightly more favorable to candidates when they have specific plans for how they will deliver on their promises, rather than empty platitudes and emotional appeals. But it's a sad reality I can't ignore than emotional appeals and non-specific promises get bigger traction with the voting base as a whole.

He has pretty detailed plans about all the things (even weird little stuff), and alot of them work together, which I like. He's not saying "I'm going to change this. Also this thing over here. And that other thing there" but more like "I'm going to make this change here in this way, and these are the problems I think it will solve, also over here, I'll solve this other problem, which should work together with my first change and cause this other thing over here." He also backs up everything with studies and data and numbers. I'm a very logical person, so that appeals to me a ton. I won't say his solutions are perfect, but I really like the majority of them, or, at least, I could see conservative folks finding many of his changes to be reasonable and a fair compromise to an 'all or nothing' scenario.

To use the electoral college I brought up as a example with Pete Buttigieg: Yang isn't against the electoral college, as he does acknowledge that it does keep the smaller, more rural areas from getting walked all over by the higher-population areas. He'd like to improve it so that it can't be so easily exploited, but still allows those in low-population areas from being left behind. He would do that by shifting it to a proportional selection system. But at the same time, as a different policy point, he'd like to work towards ranked-choice voting, making it easier to vote (automatic voter registration and early vote/vote by mail, restoring voting rights for felons once they've served their time, prohibiting voter id laws, make sure that voter with disabilities have access to vote, and ensure that no american has to travel huge distances just to cast a vote (this is a big problem on Reservations and in states like Alaska where folks are really spread out), and amending the voter rights act so that polling areas can't be closed early to suppress votes), and working on ways to wash out the big corporate/special interests money that fuel so much of our politics (his Democracy Dollars policy and his policy to overturn Citizens United and Valeo and in other ways work at eliminating dark money, but that'll take longer than Democracy Dollars). Almost all of his policies fit with other ones to make a much bigger picture. And he keeps adding them. When I started looking into them he had about 80-90 on his site (which is now updated to sort by overarching issue (like education, politics, health, etc), and now he's to over 150.

[ReijiTabibito]

For someone not on the extreme other end of the pendulum, I'm really hoping for Andrew Yang to start gaining some major ground: a lot of his policies run a fair middle ground, and he's got real logical reasoning and data behind his ideas. He's likable in the same sort of  "a regular guy/not a politician" way that folks wanted when they saw Trump as someone different. Difference is that he has spent years actually trying to create jobs in areas hit hard by the economic shift. He's done work to help people for years, which helped him see what factors are hurting folks who are just trying to get by and what was causing folks to lose their jobs in this economy that only works for big companies and screws over the workers. His message resonates with a lot of folks on both sides of the isle (those who have heard of him and watch his long-form interviews, rather than just short sound bites, anyway), which is really what we need at this point to get rid of Trump: need to pull from Republicans and moderates and energize the younger folks to really come out and vote. And he doesn't shame people for voting for Trump, or imply 'we told you so' to folks who regret having done so. He doesn't like beating down or talking about Trump: he'd rather focus on solutions. I like that. The more we focus the media on Trump, the more be grows in our minds and the less we can focus on real solutions to the huge problems we have inn this country.

Yang's problem is that the people are willing to listen to his ideas, but as Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone pointed out, to succeed in national elections these days, you need the gatekeepers of the media on your side, and Yang doesn't have them.  The media hates guys like Yang, even if his ideas make sense and people can follow them easily.  The media hates Yang for three specific reasons:

#3 - He's a businessman, not associated with government and/or academia.  Just as the GOP has never found a businessman it didn't like, the DNC have their own preferred source of candidates, and those come from time in public office or on a college campus.  Look at the rest of the field who is out front.  Sanders and Biden have been in government for longer than I've been alive.  Warren is new to government, but she was an academic at Harvard for many years.  Buttigieg is the twice-elected mayor of a small town.  Here's the thing.  It's not that the DNC doesn't hate business-friendly peoples - check two decades ago when it put up Clinton - but that the vocal base of the left-wing increasingly proclaims guys like Bezos, Gates, and Buffet as the people who are sending society into a death spiral.  And the media is fully plugged into Twitter, which it continuously makes the erroneous assumption is how people feel instead of what it is, a place for people to yell on the Internet.

#2 - Yang's Freedom Dividend puts an end to a lot of government bureaucracy.  He will collapse a bunch of various social programs into this, and turn them into a check cutting agency.  Generally speaking, you don't need thousands of government workers arrayed across a dozen-plus agencies to cut checks, you just need a fraction of that.  If he ever got into office, and came anywhere near instituting the ideas, I could guarantee you that within a few days, someone somewhere would start wringing their hands and going 'what about all the people in government who are going to lose their jobs?'  As Yang has stated himself, his Freedom Dividend works on one specific idea: that government cuts its citizens a check, and that the citizen can decide what to do with that money.  You'll be hard-pressed to find that mindset in an increasingly technocratic-minded media, people who are convinced they can use government and technology to make people's lives better, whether they want it or not.

#1 - Yang has said, repeatedly, that Donald Trump is not the problem.  He is the sign of a problem.  The media have breathed for the last near-three years off hatred of Donald Trump, of proclaiming that he is an Enemy of the Republic and representative of All Evil Everywhere.  For the media to support Yang fully, they would have to embrace that message.  They can't.  They've come too far, pushed too hard, to admit that they were wrong about him.  Trust in our media institutions is at an all-time low, and they know that if they back down and change their mind, that will shatter what they have left - admitting they were wrong won't bring the people they've alienated back to the table, and it will lose them the activist crowd on Twitter.

I like Yang, and he would be one of three candidates I would vote for in the election, but he hasn't any chance of being elected...but he might be able to change the nature of the game, and that in the end, could be the bigger victory.

I don't think Biden can pull anyone but older die-hard democrats: he's too out of touch, his ideas aren't exciting, and he's already lost the faith of the young voters; nor can he pull Republicans across the isle, especially as he leans too heavily on 'I was Obama's VP!', besides that he doesn't have a lot to say.

No Democrat has ever won the presidency without the overwhelming support of the black community - and as hard as he leans on being Obama's VP, that is how he's captured that voting bloc.  None of the other frontrunner candidates have double-digit support amongst the black community - it's all his.  Yes, Joe Biden is President Boring - but that may well be just what the country wants after years of constant agitation by Trump and the media (takes two to tango) - nothing happening, everything quiet, people just going about their lives in relative peace.  There is something to be said for that.

Bernie really had my confidence in 2016, and he's my number two currently because I do like him, but he's lost some ground since 2016; he has some health issues that combined with his age is very concerning, and leans so far socialist that he'd can't pull many across the isle even though he's pretty famous for working with anyone to make things work.

Bernie had my confidence in 2016, too, but that was because my other choices were people I believed totally incapable of meeting the basic criteria of being POTUS.  Bernie looked a lot better in 2016 because HRC was a status quo candidate in a change election, and Bernie was a change candidate.  His voting base has proven as durable as Biden's, but he's got a few problems - some shared with Biden, some not.  Biden and Bernie share an age problem - people are worried about the possibility of them dying in office and having their VP take over, in which case it may come down to who they pick to share their ticket with.  Another problem Bernie has is that for all his revolutionary talk, he did ultimately support Clinton in 2016, and some of his base took that as betrayal of principles.  (Note to all of you who have principles: it's never realistic to say that you will never violate your principles.  You will.  It's just a question of which ones you're ultimately willing to violate, and how often.  Saying you won't violate them is an insane purity test inflicted on you by people who never bother either having principles, or living up to them if they do.)  I understand his rationale - that Trump constituted a bigger threat - but there's a difference between being anti-Trump and pro-Clinton.

His other problem is that in 2016, he was the only one saying what he did.  Now everyone is stealing from his playbook.

Warren is way too far left, has been so villainized already by the Trump campaign and the Republican base media that I feel there's no coming back from that; she's also out of touch with a lot of modern issues, and tends to misinterpret facts and data in a way that makes me question her viability. I also read some stuff (here) that I don't care for regarding her campaign financing that stikes me as both morally grey (at best) and incredibly hypocritical. She's my least favorite and has the most vulnerabilities to attacks to her character and policies.

Assuming she doesn't run out of cash like Kamala Harris did, expect Warren to get a lot of favorable treatment in the media because she hits a lot of the buttons the media likes.  She's an academic.  She headed up the effort to found the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that was created after the 2008 housing crash, and was its first director.  Most importantly, the way you get the media on your side in an election is to make them feel like the smartest people in the room, and you do that by playing into their confirmation bias.  'I have Problem X.  I think we should fix it with Solution Y.  Elizabeth Warren also thinks we should use Solution Y.  Ergo, Warren is correct because I am.'  And she's done that expertly.

Warren has three major problems.  One, as you pointed out, is her financial situation.  She decried people who raise money from millionaires and billionaires, but she did that for her Senate race, and then transferred the leftover funds into the current race.  On top of that, she's worth around $12 million, according to Forbes.  If the Democrats are really serious about 'the 1%' not making decisions for our country, then everyone on that stage except for Mayor Pete needs to GTFO and the DNC needs to scrounge up some new candidates.  (They won't, because they're a bunch of hypocrites whose only objection to 'millionaires and billionaires' is that they don't share the same politics.  If Jeff Bezos came out tomorrow as Justine Bezos, expect some heads to explode.)

Warren's second problem is that she approaches everything as an academic.  The ivory tower of academia has been portrayed - correctly - as removed from larger society for a reason: what goes there is not how it goes elsewhere.  There's a scene in the Rodney Dangerfield flick Back to School where he's sitting in an Econ 101 class, and he and the professor go back and forth for a few minutes.  The Econ professor is dealing with the abstracted, the ideal, the model - Dangerfield is dealing with the reality, the actual, the day-to-day.  As example, Warren wants to solve the student debt crisis by making public colleges free for everyone.  Okay...you can do that, but why do that as your solution when you have other options?  Things like encouraging trades apprenticeships, taking a low-wage job and then saving up for going to college, or even just cutting out the excess of college bureaucracies?  (Answers?  Because tradespeople don't get aspirations of becoming academics; some of those people in the low-wage jobs will get promoted and decide they don't need college; and because then the administrator will have to compete in private enterprise.)

Her ultimate problem is that she presented herself as 'the ideas guy' - her own catchphrase is "I've got a plan for that" - but if that's the road you're going to take, then you are in the position of having to explain your plans.  And nobody is buying her explanations.  Nobody believes her wealth tax will work - if she's elected, the people that that tax will hit will start moving the day after the election.  (Turns out having a gigantic pile of money means you can buy a plane ticket.)  Nobody believes that all of her plans - Medicare for All; free public college; government assistance for child care - or even any of them, will be paid by taxing the 1%; her response has been to repeatedly say 'costs will go down,' but people don't care about that, they care about if their taxes go up.

Pete Buttigieg seems like a fine fellow, but I don't really see a lot of ideas that he hasn't pulled from other candidates (and I'm not clear on if he gives credit to the places he gets his ideas or not, i hope he does) and none feel particularly cohesive to me; several positions he's taken, while popular to democrats, are polarizing enough that he's likely to lose a lot of potential voters from rural areas (his position on the Electoral College, for example). I also feel he's 'playing the game' as he, to me, doesn't feel sincere at all. I feel president is a notch on his belt, like it is for Trump, and that bothers me a lot.

Buttigieg, I think, isn't in this race strictly for the Presidency.  He's already gotten onto the national stage, and set himself up for being a voice in politics for the next 40 years.  He might also be looking at Joe Biden and going 'that guy's going to need a Vice President...'  But yeah, I don't necessarily know a lot about him, either.

Our system wasn't designed to be a two-party system, that's why it's so dysfunctional.

Our system wasn't even designed to have parties.  The Framers repeatedly stated in the Federalist Papers that their big worry was 'the mischief of factions' - most notably Madison in #10.  But the natural inclination of people is to seek power, and they do that by organization.  Tale as old as time.

Our system wasn't designed to have the Senate decided on by the people; it was decided on by state legislatures, as a check by the individual states against the federal government.  But someone came along and said 'that's not fair,' and then they changed it.

Our system is not dysfunctional by mere circumstance - it has been made so, by factions (to use Madison) who see it as an impediment to their singular view of what the future should look like, and ultimately detest the central principle of self-government: that people know their own lives and are better positioned to make decisions about them than some distant figure.  That's why we rebelled against George III.  Their ultimate plan is to make the system suck, show that the system sucks, then say 'I have a better system,' and get the people to discard the old system for the new one to solve their problems.  That new system will most likely involve people not being able to solve their own problems, but hey, doing something like trusting a bunch of people to make a better world?  Please. [/sarcasm]

[Oniya]

All right - you know what I really want more than anything right now in a President?

I want a President who considers his own intelligence department more reliable than Putin's say-so.
I want a President with at least a high-school level of understanding of the way government works.
I want a President who isn't going to make up nicknames like an elementary school bully when someone has a different point of view.
I want a President who doesn't crack 'jokes' about '16 more years!'
I want a President who can sit down with world leaders and have an informed conversation about global issues.
I want a President who doesn't consider war criminals to be 'fine people.'
I want a President who can accept that they aren't always right.

I'm not looking for a damn unicorn.

[Tolvo]

I'd prefer someone at least left-ish like Bernie or a bit left leaning like Warren but I'd settle for other Dem options if I have to but not gonna lie Biden is basically less competent Hillary. Not to mention his history of sexual harassment and just in general really awful moments and white supremacist views. Not as much as most Republican candidates but he's pretty awful. Tulsi a genuinely horrible person, Williamson is an anti-vaxxer and thinks mental illness, disability, and fatness comes from moral impurity and that religion solves medical issues more often than medicine. Kamala Harris protected pedophiles for years and is horrible on the rights of prisoners and criminal justice reform. A common problem is outside of Bernie or Warren you have to sacrifice a lot of people for the others. Who are better than Trump but it is basically telling people "Hey it'll be better for us, probably still horrid for you, but think of the greater good." And Warren is quite a gamble as we actually haven't gotten to see a long history of her voting for and passing the things she claims to want especially considering she was a Republican for a very long time. I just wish we had better candidates or any actual far left candidates. Rather than a bunch of right wing people and centrist people with some being left leaning.

[Oniya]

Kamala Harris has dropped out.  (A week or so ago, I think.)
Tulsi Gabbard shot herself in the foot during the impeachment vote.  (Not to mention the fact that Trump and Russia Today and a crazy bot-network have been shilling for her.  Wut?) 
Williamson hasn't made a ripple on the news scene in months.  I'm not sure how many people even remember that she's running.

[Tolvo]

I'm speaking broadly about what has been in consideration though many of them are pretty much done or actually done now. Only a few of the many have stayed in the public consciousness(Marianne Williamson only shows up sometimes in he news because she's good at making clips where she says a few good comments in between her talking about how we should pray AIDs away).

[Twisted Crow]

My brain is still being spun in circles a bit, vexing me with something in particular lately. I'll... try my best to identify it clearly and legibly. Please bear with my ignorance and try to help me out a bit, here...? This is maybe a bit of moaning while mostly just trying to figure something out.

I am getting more and more bothered in my confusion in seeing '-phobia' attached to everything (homophobia, transphobia, islamophobia, etc.). This makes me think of phobias such as agoraphobia, claustrophobia and what have you. A claustrophobic would likely be looked at with compassion or pity, a homophobe would likely be denounced just as soon as they were 'diagnosed'. It isn't just the predictably rash and absolute attitude that frustrates me for compounding this problem when I see it come up, it's mainly how we are wielding these words that bug me. Medically speaking, a 'phobia' is an irrational fear that generates crippling anxiety. However, in common parlance, a phobia is just a 'big fat fear' or strong aversion or hatred towards something. This is too fluid for me, too ambiguous. I have a strong aversion to crappy video games and movies. Yet, I'd hesitate to call either of them a 'phobia'.  :P

Yet, how it is so often used (as being synonymous with hatred) and (in a roundabout fashion) regenerating a source of ire from that which is (either, correctly or incorrectly) being diagnosed as fear. Fear is a very natural beast; fear of something one doesn't understand is a very common one to have. It's too loose when compared to the disorders I mention. It gets me thinking that it is wrong to misrepresent this as a fear and treat the symptoms of the fear as if they were the cause.

Things like transphobia and homophobia are often 'defaulted' as being on the same grounds as racism. The problem I have with that is that this seems like a serious 'misdiagnosis'. On numerous levels, even. It's like conflating a case of mistaken/ignorant misidentification with genuine racism and malice. Would you get likely mad at a person with cancer for having cancer? How about getting mad at rape victim for having residual trauma from being raped? To put it more bluntly than I'd like to... Why does it seem like are we equating 'being an asshole' with a medical condition? Why am I so bothered that these two are being dumped in the same water?  :-\

Don't get the wrong idea. I'm not saying we should ignore the plight and discrimination of homosexuals, transexuals, etc. What I am asking is are we really accurately identifying the problem with the words in question? Are we getting our diagnosis right on this?

... Am I making any sense to anyone, here?

[TheGlyphstone]

Common use parlance of words often drifts from their roots. It's a hot debate between linguists and language expert son whether this should be encouraged.

I personally feel clearly transmitted meaning/intent is more important than the literal meaning of a word, and everyone knows what  'phobia' means in this instance even if it is linguisticallyp incorrect

[Twisted Crow]

No arguments there. I guess I'm more or less feeling (overly-)idealistic in that we could/should make a new word or term. The problem with that is just like anything else with language; it will inevitably be misused and have it's meaning distorted from what it meant originally.  :-\

[Oniya]

I remember seeing someone using the suffix -misia for this (Greek derivation, also found in prefix form in 'mysogyny', among other words.)  As I look at it, though, 'transmisia' would look more like it has to do with 'transmitting/transmission' than transgender. 

[ReijiTabibito]

I'm hearing you, and I agree with you.  Case in point.  I have been personally called an Islamaphobe before, to my actual face, because I raised concerns with how Islam treats people - specifically women and the non-heterosexual.  My basic refutation was that - as you pointed out - that someone being phobic means that their fear is irrational.  My fear of Islam, on the other hand, is very rational.  I followed up by saying that I wasn't sure about their opinion, but given that we hear more about Islamic violence than any other of the major religions on the planet, I would prefer not to be caught up in an Islamic terror attack.

Here's why I think the word 'phobia' gets added to things in cases like these, where it's inaccurate at best and malicious at worst.  First?  It's quick.  It's punchy.  It fits well into a 30-second sound bite, which is what our media world is increasingly devolving into.  Nobody wants to take the time to sit down and have a long, drawn-out discussion about these things.  (Well, except maybe Joe Rogan.)  Did you ever see the movie Spotlight?  It was about the newspaper reporting team that broke the scandal about Catholic priests in Boston back in 2002.  One of the major problems the Spotlight team dealt with - which was almost two decades ago now, I remind - was that the increasing pace of news and the desire to cover more and more of what's going on.  The Spotlight team's work took months of research and investigative journalism in order to produce its work.  Contrast that with how the news is increasingly run today, which pulls from Twitter and Facebook and discusses that instead.  In all fairness, I can understand why the 30-second sound bite format is taking over.  It's easier.  It's less intensive.  You don't need to spend days, weeks, months doing research and putting together something fit to print; you just go onto a website, pull what half a dozen people are saying about something, and write your article from there.

The second reason, and if I see this demonstrated, that often is a sign (to me) that the misuse of the word is malicious - is that if you are a phobic, your phobia is overriding, even to the point of insanity.  As pointed out, a phobia is an irrational fear - fear of something when there is no reason to fear it.  How do you deal with that?  How do you help the sufferer?  It can be done, but that's usually through exposure to the thing being feared and learning that there isn't actually anything to fear about it.  But literally no one I know fears the transgendered.  Makes them a little uncomfortable, sure, but outright fear?  Bit of a stretch, that.  But you don't seek to understand a phobia, because a phobia by its nature is irrational; there's nothing to be understood about it.

It's like what Kyle Reese says in the first Terminator movie: it can't be bargained or reasoned with.  It doesn't feel pity, remorse, or (funnily) fear.  And it will not stop, ever, until you are dead.  You don't seek to understand a Terminator because it is inhuman and evil.  (Though, again, funnily, a large point of the second movie was demonstrating that was not the case.)

If you admit that someone's fear is rational, however, then you have to ask yourself the question: why are they afraid of it?  Is it right or wrong for them to be afraid?  Questions that might lead to one actually humanizing the fearer.  And it is always easier to dehumanize than admit that they may have a point.  I personally don't give three craps about someone's sexuality - what you do behind your doors with someone else is none of my business - but the extreme authoritarian response by the religious right to gays in the last two decades, I think, triggered a similar response from their opposition, to the point where I have heard that 'we have to stop the homophobes otherwise they'll make being gay illegal again.'  Literally no one I know of - mainstream or otherwise - is saying that.  Except maybe the WBC, but they're clearly labeled as the extremist viewpoint they are.  Phobia stops being about one thing and becomes something else.

[Regina Minx]

The mistake I think Reiji and Dallas are making is to assume that the function of words that end in phobia are, outside of a clinical, psychological sense, meant to mean the same thing as within psychology. Imma just quote Wikipedia:

Coined by George Weinberg, a psychologist, in the 1960s, the term homophobia is a blend of (1) the word homosexual, itself a mix of neo-classical morphemes, and (2) phobia from the Greek, phóbos, meaning "fear", "morbid fear" or "aversion". Weinberg is credited as the first person to have used the term in speech.  The word homophobia first appeared in print in an article written for the May 23, 1969, edition of the American pornographic magazine Screw, in which the word was used to refer to heterosexual men's fear that others might think they are gay.

Conceptualizing anti-LGBT prejudice as a social problem worthy of scholarly attention was not new. A 1969 article in Time described examples of negative attitudes toward homosexuality as "homophobia", including "a mixture of revulsion and apprehension" which some called homosexual panic. In 1971, Kenneth Smith used homophobia as a personality profile to describe the psychological aversion to homosexuality. Weinberg also used it this way in his 1972 book Society and the Healthy Homosexual, published one year before the American Psychiatric Association voted to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. Weinberg's term became an important tool for gay and lesbian activists, advocates, and their allies. He describes the concept as a medical phobia:

    [A] phobia about homosexuals.... It was a fear of homosexuals which seemed to be associated with a fear of contagion, a fear of reducing the things one fought for — home and family. It was a religious fear and it had led to great brutality as fear always does.

In 1981, homophobia was used for the first time in The Times (of London) to report that the General Synod of the Church of England voted to refuse to condemn homosexuality.

However, when taken literally, homophobia may be a problematic term. Professor David A. F. Haaga says that contemporary usage includes "a wide range of negative emotions, attitudes and behaviours toward homosexual people," which are characteristics that are not consistent with accepted definitions of phobias, that of "an intense, illogical, or abnormal fear of a specified thing." Five key differences are listed as distinguishing homophobia, as often used, from a true phobia.

Words don't have definitions, they have usages. I don't think anyone who calls another person a homophobe or an Islamaphobe is using it with clinical connotations. They are, like Haaga describes, referring to the intensity, abnormality, or irrationality of the fear, aversion, or dislike.