o_0

{ West is not responsible for Biden’s low approval rating among likely Democratic voters.

It is fanciful to think that those voters will vote for Biden in large numbers if West is not on their ballot as the Green Party presidential candidate in 2024. A convenient fanciful notion is — wait for it — fanciful, no matter how much we might enjoy it. The fact that it is convenient, or even desirable, does not make the notion credible, let alone persuasive.

Voters who hold lukewarm views about Biden’s presidency have several options. Some will vote for him anyway. Others might vote for a third-party candidate (such as West) with whom they more strongly agree. Some voters might decide to “stay home.”

People concerned about West’s Green Party campaign for the U.S. presidency do not think that disgruntled and lukewarm Democratic voters are likely to vote for Trump, or for any of the other politicians currently campaigning to be chosen as the Republican Party nominee in 2024. They fear that Trump’s right-wing base of white religious nationalists, neofascist imperialists, military adventurist and free market capitalists will vote Trump back into power unless disgruntled and lukewarm Democratic voters re-elect Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

But if Biden cannot persuade voters that he deserves their votes, no one should blame West. Instead, we should admit that those voters are free to vote for a presidential candidate whose record squares with their views and values.

They owe Biden no political fealty and are not required to serve the interests of the neoliberal capitalists who run the Democratic Party, whether West runs for president or not. Their voting preferences should be based on their realities, their histories and their hopes. }

tldr: The DNC argued in court that they have the right to rig their primaries, and in the end the courts sided with them: the DNC is legally entitled to rig their primaries

{ Jared Beck, the attorney representing Sanders supporters in the class action lawsuit [said this in court]

“People paid money in reliance on the understanding that the primary elections for the Democratic nominee—nominating process in 2016 were fair and impartial,” Beck said. “And that’s not just a bedrock assumption that we would assume just by virtue of the fact that we live in a democracy, and we assume that our elections are run in a fair and impartial manner. But that’s what the Democratic National Committee’s own charter says. It says it in black and white. And they can’t deny that.” He added, “Not only is it in the charter, but it was stated over and over again in the media by the Democratic National Committee’s employees, including Congresswoman Wassermann Schultz, that they were, in fact, acting in compliance with the charter. And they said it again and again, and we’ve cited several instances of that in the case.”

Later in the hearing, attorneys representing the DNC claim that the Democratic National Committee would be well within their rights to “go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way.” By pushing the argument throughout the proceedings of this class action lawsuit, the Democratic National Committee is telling voters in a court of law that they see no enforceable obligation in having to run a fair and impartial primary election.

The DNC attorneys even go so far as to argue that the words “impartial” and “evenhanded”—used in the DNC Charter—can’t be interpreted by a court of law. Beck retorted, “I’m shocked to hear that we can’t define what it means to be evenhanded and impartial. If that were the case, we couldn’t have courts. I mean, that’s what courts do every day, is decide disputes in an evenhanded and impartial manner]

if you're wondering how the case turned out here's the wikipedia:

{ Their suit was dismissed by Judge William Zloch of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida for lack of standing.[1] The judge found that none of the plaintiffs had claimed to have donated to the DNC on the basis of promises contained in the DNC charter, and therefore the plaintiffs could not claim to have incurred damages.[1] The court held that "To the extent Plaintiffs wish to air their general grievances with the DNC or its candidate selection process, their redress is through the ballot box, the DNC’s internal workings, or their right of free speech — not through the judiciary." }

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilding_v._DNC_Services_Corp.

see also: https://observer.com/2017/08/court-admits-dnc-and-debbie-wasserman-schulz-rigged-primaries-against-sanders/

!cornelwest2024@slrpnk.net

I really never expected to be shilling for a candidate like this, but I've been a fan of Cornel West for over 10 years, I don't agree with him on everything ( i'm not a christian) he's the only candidate talking about Cop City or Prison Abolition, he has a better stance on Israel than many leftists, he's constantly name dropping revolutionaries like CLR James or Angela Davis, he say of his campaign that it's "looking at the world through the eyes of what Franz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth" and saying other things I would never Imagine a Presidential candidate ever saying in a million years. So I think he's gonna get a big following and educate/radicalize a lot of people, maybe even de-radicalize some right wingers.

Anyway that's my spiel, if you're unsure about West's politics -- there has been a lot of just bad faith takes and misinformation out there -- I implore you to listen to one of his recent interviews, like this one with the Mau Mau hour

"In the socialist tradition I would be closer to council communists than vanguard communists, you know "the Soviets Without Bolshevicks" that was what happened at the Kronstadt rebellion when they were Crushed. Soviets were workers organizations so that the vanguard parties were imposing their will upon the workers organizations so that the workers councils got crushed, So people like Pannekoek.. "

come hang out at !cornelwest2024@slrpnk.net

This article is from 2000 that's destroys a lot of the anti 3rd party talking points coming from the DNC Lately

After pointing all all the bullshit with the uncounted votes and the courts which clear was the deciding factor;

{ The media pontificates about whether the new president can be considered "legitimate" after the counts, recounts, non-counts and court cases in Florida. But there is a deeper question of legitimacy than that posed by a few hundred votes. Neither Bush nor Gore can claim to be the people's choice, for the only clear finding of this election is that Americans didn't want either of them. The close popular and electoral votes were not a reflection of evenly divided support, but of which guy people would vote to throw off the island first. Both "won" this negative contest. Let's do the math:

• 52 percent of eligible voters either did not vote or voted for third-party candidates.

• Among the 48 percent of Americans who cast ballots for Bush or Gore, there was an even split, giving each roughly 24 percent of eligible voters.

• But wait -- a good half of these voters were not actually choosing the candidate they checked on their ballots, but rather voting against the other guy.

This means that neither Bush nor Gore could muster the support of more than 12 percent of the electorate. This is the real crisis for our democracy.

How is the Democratic Party establishment dealing with this crisis of legitimacy and its own declining numbers? By blaming Ralph Nader. Partisans wail that Nader denied Gore the few hundred votes he needed to prevail on election night. Indeed, Nader polled some 95,000 votes in Florida, which prompted New York socialite and Hillary Clinton moneyman Harry Evans to blurt angrily, "I want to kill Ralph Nader."

(...)

1. Seniors. By a 51-47 percent margin, Gore lost the over-65 vote in Florida. Bush got 67,000 more senior votes than Gore did, even after all the Democratic scare talk about vanishing Social Security benefits. Had Gore simply broken even with this constituency, he would have won.

2. White Women. This group typically votes Democratic in Florida, or splits evenly. Gore lost them to Bush by 53-44 percent. Had he gotten 50 percent of these votes, he'd have added 65,000 votes to his total -- plenty enough to have put the state in his column election night.

Now it gets really ugly for the Gore campaign, for there are two other Florida constituencies that cost them more votes than Nader did. First, Democrats. Yes, Democrats! Nader only drew 24,000 Democrats to his cause, yet 308,000 Democrats voted for Bush. Hello. If Gore had taken even 1 percent of these Democrats from Bush, Nader's votes wouldn't have mattered. Second, liberals. Sheesh. Gore lost 191,000 self-described liberals to Bush, compared to less than 34,000 who voted for Nader.

Why would Democrats and liberals vote for (gag) Bush? Some Democrats may have been so appalled by Clinton's personal behavior and Gore's fundraising escapades that they flipped all the way to Bush, while others found no defining economic difference between Gore and Bush, so they voted on the basis of George W.'s (false) claim to be the integrity candidate. Some liberals noted that Bush actually has proposed less of an increase in the Pentagon's already-bloated budget than Gore did, and some were so angered by the vice president's atrocious record of selling out working families, environmentalists and farmers that they wanted to give him the double-whammy of taking a vote from him and giving it to Bush. In any event, Gore failed to close the deal with these voters -- a fact that has nothing to do with Nader. }

{ Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) said Sunday he wants President Biden to stand down on his 2024 Democratic presidential primary bid to give another Democrat a shot at the White House.

Why it matters: Phillips has previously called on others to challenge Biden in the 2024 Democratic nomination but is not committing himself to running as of yet.

• "I would like to see Joe Biden, a wonderful and remarkable man, pass the torch — cement this extraordinary legacy," Phillips said on NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday.
• "And by the way, this is not how everybody thinks, but I do believe the majority wants to move on," he added.
• Phillips said his views on Biden stepping down are not based on the president's age but rather "how people feel."

By the numbers: 56% of U.S. adults said they had an unfavorable opinion of Biden, compared to just 32% of those with favoring opinions on the president, according to a CNN poll in June.

• Prospective voters in the CNN poll also had an unfavorable view of former President Donald Trump at 59%.
• An April poll from NBC News revealed that 70% of Americans think Biden should not seek another term. Of those responses, 51% came from Democrats.
• 60% of those polled by NBC also thought Trump shouldn't run for president again. Of those, a third identified themselves as Republican voters.
• "Joe Biden right now is down seven points in the four swing states that will decide the next election," said Phillips, who also pointed to Biden's historically low approval numbers.
• Phillips added that he's not saying Biden is "not up to a second term," but that the numbers reflect that Americans want change and a new Democratic candidate. }

Hey Everybody, I just wanted to make a general chit chat / getting-to-know-you thread, and also lay out my goals with making this sub, feel free to say Hi in the comments or bring up any issues or requests you might have

This Space, tho it will probably always have fairly little reach can serve as a base of operations and launching point on other platforms ( twitter, reddit, facebook ) it can also help to draw people off of corporate platforms and into the fediverse

Mission Statement:

• Form a Central Hub to share resources and coordinate activity the Cornel West's campaign on the Fediverse and beyond
• Produce and Distribute Memes and Talking points useful for the campaign
• Challenge DNC Smears with Facts and compelling arguments
• Raise Awareness of General Issues beyond the campaign: Mass Incarceration, HealthCare etc.
• Show Solidarity with Grassroots Movements: Striking Workers, the CopyCity protestors etc.
• Network between activists, talk strategy, build connections between poor communities: particularly between black white and latine, between citizens and immigrants etc.

I welcome any edits / additions to this list

Hello, I just wanted to start a conversation here, since personally I have been increasingly leaning towards what I would think is an animistic or pantheistic worldview, apparently many people are also of the same mind so I just wanted to get some other perspectives.

I increasingly do not think that humans have some monopoly on consciousness or intelligence it also appears that there is something more to evolution than simple random selection, that there is some kind of underlying intelligence to how all life operates, adapting perfectly to it's environment, this and having had some very powerful experiences on psychedelics ( and yes I do think it's more than trust a high-dea ) that maybe there is something like consciousness underlying all existence, that everything, even non-living things are in a way "alive"

Other ideas that make me wonder are the discoveries of quantum physics and observation of subatomic particles, which seem to imply that observation itself influence or creates reality. Many New Age types have jumped on this to promote their own Neo Idealistic theology, I think we should be skeptical of those aspiring prophets, but these discoveries do pose serious challenges to the traditional positivist way of understanding reality.

It really makes you wonder like maybe Hegel was right, and that everything is just Mind, history is just God figuring himself out or whatever the fuck he was talking about

All that being said I don't strictly believe in 'spirit' or 'soul' and I'm not a fan of crystals and all that mystical woo shit. There may well be something deeper to our consciousness than just the observable brain, that our ability to observe, is based on some rudimentary basis of energy becoming consciousness of itself and maybe we're all just part of one cosmic consciousness, but to me that would mean that the consciousness is physical in origin, and that actually all matter has some underlying living quality to it. Like maybe the Earth or the Sun or Galaxies themselves are "consciousness" and "alive" in the sense of dynamic self regulating organisms.

All that being said I still think the skeptical/empirical worldview is the best way to go about operating in the real world, and we can speculate about these things, but it is very dangerous to form any rigid dogmatic belief, lest we turn this isn't some other dogmatic religion, which we humans should have learned by now, is not the way to go.

Thanks for reading, I look forward to seeing other perspectives