261–270 of 553 posts
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Was Hillary Clinton "buying the election" when she outspent Donald Trump roughly 2:1? Or is it only "buying the election" when it's a candidate you dislike? My vote isn't for sale and I assume that's true for other Americans. If I thought otherwise, I'd have a hard time convincing myself that democracies can work.
A big difference is Bloomberg currently is 100% self funding his campaign while the '16 Hillary campaign had a lot of money yes but it came from donors supporting her. Bloomberg is self funding and is only where he is because of the massive amount of money he's throwing around from his own pocket. Also it's not about explicitly buying votes but there's a lot of lower information voters out there who currently are pri…
It's not clear at all that Bloomberg would have failed had he run a traditional campaign.
I'm not bothered by self-funded campaigns because my vote isn't for sale (and I assume the same is true for others). Winning elections is about convincing people, not brainwashing them. Money increases visibility, but it didn't save Hillary Clinton.
> Also it's not about explicitly buying votes but there's a lot of lower information voters out there who currently are principally hearing from Bloomberg because he's spending lots of money in later states where the more traditionally funded campaigns haven't because they're on lower cash reserves.
"Lower information voters" is just code for "dumb people who disagree with me". Your perspective is that voters are dumb animals who flock to whoever spends the most on ads.
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The candidate with broad appeal is Bernie Sanders.
Broad appeal among democrats , but the candidate with the best chances in the national election is not the center Democrat, it's the center American, which if you imagine Democrats and Republicans being two ranges butted up against the center, is the rightmost Democrat!
Most voters don’t have a coherent ideology. The ever-appealing “center” is not a real thing; it exists only wherever voters can be convinced it exists.
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"His attempt to simply buy an election is.. annoying, if not unseemly." How about subvertive of the democratic process?
It's actually perfectly in line with our democratic process. It's not subverting it, it's working exactly as designed. Spending a personal fortune is well within the rules. We should be criticizing the design, not the people taking advantage of the design. In other words, hate the game not the player.
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Stop & frisk.
He didn't enact and he stopped it. I assume you aren't from NYC, stop & frisk pre dates Bloomberg by a decade.
Assume what you want, but that claim is just false. He also defended it for years even after it was ruled unconstitutional.
Stop and frisk is only the tip of the iceberg, by the way.
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I hate to tell you this, but all money that exists in the money supply is invested in products, services, and jobs - unless it's stuffed in a mattress somewhere. Wealthy people do 'hoard wealth like a dragon', by definition - otherwise they would not be wealthy.
Everyone that saves for retirement is hoarding wealth like a dragon by this definition which makes the definition useless.
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> Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with billionaires Debatable. Find me a billionaire who didn't get where they are through exploitive labour practices, monopolistic consolidation, political manipulation, massive environmental damage, or inheriting wealth earned in one or more of those ways. A world where billionaires can exists seems like a perversion of the ideals of "healthy" capitalism to me.
I hope you are not posting this from an Apple or Microsoft produced device because if you are you fall as a hypocrite to at least half the things you decry in this post.
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I just don't get the socialist views people have here. Where do you think the moral cash limit should be? 10 million or 100 million? When does your success turn you evil? I don't see how you can say those things when you live in such a nice capitalistic economy when the rest of the socialist/communist world is in such turmoil. You're in the field that embraces capitalism the most, and it's beautiful. You can start a…
> When does your success turn you evil? There are plenty of people making $100k/year exploiting labour and/or damaging the environment. But when you're one of the ~2000 billionaires in the world you are pretty much by definition responsible for such a massively larger amount of that harm than the guy making $100k. > when the rest of the socialist/communist world is in such turmoil There are plenty of degrees of socia…
(hint: it's because the economy generates so much wealth)
I don't think your Canada/Scandinavia economy argument is going to win any vote from any American.
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Right now if you want to win the electoral college in the US you can largely rely on manipulating a smaller mob than you would have to otherwise...
You can keep calling it manipulation all you want. But I truly believe both HRC's message reached the voters and that Trump's message also reached the voters and they chose accordingly. Are you suggesting that their respective messages weren't heard? At no point did someone fail to deliver their message. HRC's message (to the extent that it could be parsed) just didn't click with a lot of people. Trump's did.