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lol LITERALLY the first result on google search result for bernie sanders ghetto

 

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/bernie-sanders-ghetto-gaffe-highlights-campaigns-struggle-race

 

there i did the hard work for you

People being ignorant of the word "ghetto" and what it means to Jewish people is not a fault of Sanders'. This is an illustration of American media at large being wrong for browbeating a person on something it doesn't understand. "Ghetto? YOU MEAN BLACK PEOPLE." Or y'know. The ghettos Jews were placed into multiple times in their history.

 

This is shameful, Twig.

 

Edit - By the way, 'white people' - the name we give to predominantly white Christians / atheists - don't know what it is like to live in a ghetto. Any other ethnic or religious minority can make the claim they have experienced ghettos directly or some variation of them. Sanders is right, and people just blowing by that point over semantics is gross.

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You're right, black people saying it bothered them is completely beside the point.

 

FFS I like Bernie and you're making me want to hate him.

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"Ghetto" is literally a part of Jewish history since the 1500s. Black people can be bothered by it and be mistaken about the implication of the statement. And it's not like that history of Jews and ghettos went out of style historically speaking. There was kind of an infamous period of time in the 1930s/1940s that kept that bullshit going.

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So what you're saying is that Jewish people -- many of whom are white -- do, in fact, know what it's like to live in a ghetto? In direct contradiction to Sanders's statement that "when you're white, you don't know what it's like to live in the ghetto?"

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So what you're saying is that Jewish people -- many of whom are white -- do, in fact, know what it's like to live in a ghetto? In direct contradiction to Sanders's statement that "when you're white, you don't know what it's like to live in the ghetto?"

My Jewish roomie says "fuck off" and I'm inclined to agree with her. You're being disingenuous and ew.

 

This is some anti-Semitic shit starting up here. I'm out. Peace Idle Thumbs forum.

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:poring: :poring: :poring: :poring: The connotations behind words and phrases changes with time and circumstances :poring: :poring: :poring: :poring:

"Ghetto" is alive and current for Jewish people across the globe so holy shit. Fuck off.

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This is some anti-Semitic shit starting up here.

 

|:

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My Jewish roomie says "fuck off" and I'm inclined to agree with her. You're being disingenuous and ew.

 

This is some anti-Semitic shit starting up here. I'm out. Peace Idle Thumbs forum.

 

Hey, as a Jewish person, I'm more offended by your attempt to use the Holocaust to excuse Sanders's gaffe (which isn't even that huge a gaffe, but is still a gaffe), so to each their own.

 

And I'm not being disingenuous. It's just really hard to see the point you're trying to make about Sanders saying "when you're white, you don't know what it's like to live in the ghetto" by bringing the Holocaust into the discussion. It's very confusing.

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so i heard there's gonna be a presidential election in about 7 and a half months????

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My Jewish roomie says "fuck off" and I'm inclined to agree with her. You're being disingenuous and ew.

This is some anti-Semitic shit starting up here. I'm out. Peace Idle Thumbs forum.

They are largely agreeing with you? This whole thread reads like you're looking for a fight. Chill out.

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"Ghetto" is alive and current for Jewish people across the globe so holy shit. Fuck off.

Jesus christ dude take a chill pill.

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Henroid you're literally driving the tone of the thread into the tone of conversation when twitter eggs wandered into the Gamergate thread. How can you not see this?

 

edit: I didn't know much about the american election but you really soured me on Bernie

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I am a staunch Sanders supporter who thinks he could be the most important American Presidential candidate since Huey Long. But you need to acknowledge that he is capable of being wrong and that he is an imperfect candidate at best.

I will probably vote Green over Hillary, but seriously cool it dude, you are making Sanders look bad. The wonder of internet debate, especially on forums, is you can cool off before posting.

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I'm seeing a lot of stuff on my Facebook wall about how Sanders is a better candidate vs. Trump - he polls better against Trump than Hilary does, he's less hated than Hilary is, he's tapping into the populism/anti-establishmentism stuff that fuels Trump in a way that Hilary isn't, etc. One thing I find interesting about this is how it highlights how close Sanders and Trump are, and how far from Hilary they are, when it comes to one specific issue, which is free trade, economics, foreigners, the middle class, and so on. Both Sanders and Trump have a sort of "fuck the rest of the world, America needs to be as rich as possible, free trade is evil, we should protect our own industries, you deserve a well-paying job by virtue of being American and those foreigners don't deserve shit, free trade is the devil" going on. I remember the time when I really soured on Sanders was when I read this Vox interview. I think the whole section is worth quoting in full:

Ezra Klein

You said being a democratic socialist means a more international view. I think if you take global poverty that seriously, it leads you to conclusions that in the US are considered out of political bounds. Things like sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders. About sharply increasing ...

Bernie Sanders

Open borders? No, that's a Koch brothers proposal.

Ezra Klein

Really?

Bernie Sanders

Of course. That's a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States. ...

Ezra Klein

But it would make ...

Bernie Sanders

Excuse me ...

Ezra Klein

It would make a lot of global poor richer, wouldn't it?

Bernie Sanders

It would make everybody in America poorer —you're doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don't think there's any country in the world that believes in that. If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people. What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don't believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs.

You know what youth unemployment is in the United States of America today? If you're a white high school graduate, it's 33 percent, Hispanic 36 percent, African American 51 percent. You think we should open the borders and bring in a lot of low-wage workers, or do you think maybe we should try to get jobs for those kids?

I think from a moral responsibility we've got to work with the rest of the industrialized world to address the problems of international poverty, but you don't do that by making people in this country even poorer.

Ezra Klein

Then what are the responsibilities that we have? Someone who is poor by US standards is quite well off by, say, Malaysian standards, so if the calculation goes so easily to the benefit of the person in the US, how do we think about that responsibility?

We have a nation-state structure. I agree on that. But philosophically, the question is how do you weight it? How do you think about what the foreign aid budget should be? How do you think about poverty abroad?

Bernie Sanders

I do weigh it. As a United States senator in Vermont, my first obligation is to make certain kids in my state and kids all over this country have the ability to go to college, which is why I am supporting tuition-free public colleges and universities. I believe we should create millions of jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and ask the wealthiest people in this country to start paying their fair share of taxes. I believe we should raise the minimum wage to at least 15 bucks an hour so people in this county are not living in poverty. I think we end the disgrace of some 20 percent of our kids living in poverty in America. Now, how do you do that?

What you do is understand there's been a huge redistribution of wealth in the last 30 years from the middle class to the top tenth of 1 percent. The other thing that you understand globally is a horrendous imbalance in terms of wealth in the world. As I mentioned earlier, the top 1 percent will own more than the bottom 99 percent in a year or so. That's absurd. That takes you to programs like the IMF and so forth and so on.

But I think what we need to be doing as a global economy is making sure that people in poor countries have decent-paying jobs, have education, have health care, have nutrition for their people. That is a moral responsibility, but you don't do that, as some would suggest, by lowering the standard of American workers, which has already gone down very significantly.

Now, I mean, I'm not even close to a libertarian, and unregulated free trade can lead to all sorts of horrible results for people in poorer countries, especially indigenous people on land that gets taken from them for commerce or polluted via factories, and so on and so forth, but Ezra Klein is 100% right that people in other parts of the world have it much worse than people in the United States, and one way to help make this better would be to open up our borders to the people who want to come here.

So much of Sanders's response made me sad. First is the knee-jerk "anything the Koch bros. say must be wrong!" I mean come the fuck on, I'd like to see even a modicum of intellectual honesty from someone who wants to be the president of the United States, and if your first reaction to a classic socialist position is "the Koch brothers support it so I don't" that's a fucking joke.

Second is his defense of his position in terms of how he doesn't "think there's any country in the world that believes in that," as if something can't be a good idea unless everyone else is already doing that. How about being on the moral vanguard for a change? Every idea starts as something that nobody believes in. One of the points of socialism is that it has no borders, which is why historically most "countries" have against it. Socialism envisions the end of the state!

Third is how focused on America (and even on Vermont?) he is. This is the place where the similarities with Trump are really clear: both Sanders and Trump seem not to give much of a shit about what it costs the rest of the world, so long as we can make the middle class in America better off. People in parts of the world are getting by on less than a dollar a day (as Klein points out, "poor by US standards is quite well of by, say, Malaysian standards" and Sanders would rather worry about free college for Vermonters.

Fourth is how he turns every question into his stump speech about the 1 percent vs. the 99 percent, but whatever.

Clinton, meanwhile, at least seems to give a shit about what happens in other countries. Granted, the form this takes is her being willing to send in the army and blow shit up until things get better, which I think is typically the wrong response, but at least her intentions are in the right place, you know? Ditto for free trade - again, I'm no fan of the form it often takes, and I was against TPP as much as anyone else, but at least Clinton doesn't seem to have a knee-jerk "fuck the world if it's going to cost the American middle class anything" attitude that Trump and Sanders do.

I'll also note that, yeah Henroid, you're making this thread a really unhappy place. You need to dial a bit back on everything.

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I struggle to think of Clinton as actually giving a damn about what's going on in the rest of the world, other than when it interferes with American interests. Her ideas of "sending the army and blowing shit up" seem to come from the same place as they have from other presidents in the past: keeping the military industry busy, establishing governments that are sympathetic to US companies and so on. If anything, it's the ultimate self-involved attitude, where they're willing to actively change the lives of millions (to the worse, in general) so that American companies can reap profits. 

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I'm seeing a lot of stuff on my Facebook wall about how Sanders is a better candidate vs. Trump - he polls better against Trump than Hilary does, he's less hated than Hilary is, he's tapping into the populism/anti-establishmentism stuff that fuels Trump in a way that Hilary isn't, etc. One thing I find interesting about this is how it highlights how close Sanders and Trump are, and how far from Hilary they are, when it comes to one specific issue, which is free trade, economics, foreigners, the middle class, and so on. Both Sanders and Trump have a sort of "fuck the rest of the world, America needs to be as rich as possible, free trade is evil, we should protect our own industries, you deserve a well-paying job by virtue of being American and those foreigners don't deserve shit, free trade is the devil" going on. I remember the time when I really soured on Sanders was when I read this Vox interview. I think the whole section is worth quoting in full:Now, I mean, I'm not even close to a libertarian, and unregulated free trade can lead to all sorts of horrible results for people in poorer countries, especially indigenous people on land that gets taken from them for commerce or polluted via factories, and so on and so forth, but Ezra Klein is 100% right that people in other parts of the world have it much worse than people in the United States, and one way to help make this better would be to open up our borders to the people who want to come here.

So much of Sanders's response made me sad. First is the knee-jerk "anything the Koch bros. say must be wrong!" I mean come the fuck on, I'd like to see even a modicum of intellectual honesty from someone who wants to be the president of the United States, and if your first reaction to a classic socialist position is "the Koch brothers support it so I don't" that's a fucking joke.

Second is his defense of his position in terms of how he doesn't "think there's any country in the world that believes in that," as if something can't be a good idea unless everyone else is already doing that. How about being on the moral vanguard for a change? Every idea starts as something that nobody believes in. One of the points of socialism is that it has no borders, which is why historically most "countries" have against it. Socialism envisions the end of the state!

Third is how focused on America (and even on Vermont?) he is. This is the place where the similarities with Trump are really clear: both Sanders and Trump seem not to give much of a shit about what it costs the rest of the world, so long as we can make the middle class in America better off. People in parts of the world are getting by on less than a dollar a day (as Klein points out, "poor by US standards is quite well of by, say, Malaysian standards" and Sanders would rather worry about free college for Vermonters.

Fourth is how he turns every question into his stump speech about the 1 percent vs. the 99 percent, but whatever.

Clinton, meanwhile, at least seems to give a shit about what happens in other countries. Granted, the form this takes is her being willing to send in the army and blow shit up until things get better, which I think is typically the wrong response, but at least her intentions are in the right place, you know? Ditto for free trade - again, I'm no fan of the form it often takes, and I was against TPP as much as anyone else, but at least Clinton doesn't seem to have a knee-jerk "fuck the world if it's going to cost the American middle class anything" attitude that Trump and Sanders do.

I'll also note that, yeah Henroid, you're making this thread a really unhappy place. You need to dial a bit back on everything.

 

Free trade is a really complex issue. Yes it gives jobs to workers in poorer parts of the world, but it also gives those companies tons of power to influence those governments and lets them produce in places with little to no worker protections or environmental laws. Without balancing out job losses in with some kind of assistance for workers you can get chronic unemployment and people supporting demagogue candidates like Trump.

My company is actively outsourcing our calling to the Philippines, while I am glad for the Filipino workers it is coming at the direct expense of workers here. The low skill space is shrinking and there is little to no interest in government with dealing with it.

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 The low skill space is shrinking and there is little to no interest in government with dealing with it.

 

It's even happening in the high skilled space because on paper it's more cost effective to pay 10 Indian workers or 4 Irish workers instead of 1 American worker. I don't think it's a controversial opinion that the president of a country would want to create a bump in quality of life for it's poor/middle class and be protective it's economic livelihood. 

 

I don't really think a race to the bottom is good for anyone except the corporations that benefit from it. 

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Interesting historical comparison: this Rolling Stone article in favor of Clinton and several others have said that this election is a tipping point in American history "like none since before the Civil War," but they have not actually teased out the connection that they're making there.

 

After the Dred Scott decision, there were broadly two camps of anti-slavery advocates in American politics. On the one hand, there were the abolitionists, a motley crew espousing a "revolution" to abolish a fundamental but morally corrupt fixture of social, political, and economic life in America. On the other, there were the doughfaces and other moderates, the more "reasonable" group who argued for compromise and for working within the system to effect slow and incremental change. President James Buchanan—who, as a former secretary of state, senator, and ambassador, was easily one of the most "qualified" presidents in American history—hailed from the latter camp. Driven by the political demands of his party and his country more than by personal conviction to address the repercussions of the Dred Scott decision, he cooperated heavily with Southern slaveholders, tapping into his longstanding political relationships with many of them, to try to finesse conflicts over the expansion of slavery in the west. Instead, he severely miscalculated the depths of the division between pro-slavery and anti-slavery advocates and the particular intransigence of the former, tearing the country apart and making the Civil War all but inevitable. His most famous quote and selling point? "What is right and what is practicable are two different things."

 

Buchanan's attempt to find a "reasonable," "gradual," and "bi-partisan" solution to the issue of slavery has repeatedly been rated the worst mistake of any president in American history. I don't know how history will judge the attempts of the American political establishment to deal with the issue of income inequality, but I still think about this example a lot when people tell me that Clinton is "experienced," "practical," and a "dealmaker." Yes, it's important that the Know Nothings don't get their candidate in office, but being a bad president (or the wrong president for the wrong time, at least) is not just a matter of being inexperienced, ignorant, or immoral.

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I think it's important to temper that view of Clinton with someone like Coates's view of Sanders.

 

Here is the great challenge of liberal policy in America: We now know that for every dollar of wealth white families have, black families have a nickel. We know that being middle class does not immunize black families from exploitation in the way that it immunizes white families. We know that black families making $100,000 a year tend to live in the same kind of neighborhoods as white families making $30,000 a year. We know that in a city like Chicago, the wealthiest black neighborhood has an incarceration rate many times worse than the poorest white neighborhood. This is not a class divide, but a racist divide. Mainstream liberal policy proposes to address this divide without actually targeting it, to solve a problem through category error. That a mainstream Democrat like Hillary Clinton embraces mainstream liberal policy is unsurprising. Clinton has no interest in expanding the Overton window. She simply hopes to slide through it.

 
But I thought #FeelTheBern meant something more than this. I thought that Bernie Sanders, the candidate of single-payer health insurance, of the dissolution of big banks, of free higher education, was interested both in being elected and in advancing the debate beyond his own candidacy. I thought the importance of Sanders’s call for free tuition at public universities lay not just in telling citizens that which is actually workable, but in showing them that which we must struggle to make workable. I thought Sanders’s campaign might remind Americans that what is imminently doable and what is morally correct are not always the same things, and while actualizing the former we can’t lose sight of the latter.
 
A Democratic candidate who offers class-based remedies to address racist plunder because that is what is imminently doable, because all we have are bandages, is doing the best he can. A Democratic candidate who claims that such remedies are sufficient, who makes a virtue of bandaging, has forgotten the world that should, and must, be. Effectively he answers the trenchant problem of white supremacy by claiming “something something socialism, and then a miracle occurs.”
 
No. Fifteen years ago we watched a candidate elevate class above all. And now we see that same candidate invoking class to deliver another blow to affirmative action. And that is only the latest instance of populism failing black people.
 
The left, above all, should know better than this. When Sanders dismisses reparations because they are “divisive” he puts himself in poor company. “Divisive” is how Joe Lieberman swatted away his interlocutors. “Divisive” is how the media dismissed the public option. “Divisive” is what Hillary Clinton is calling Sanders’s single-payer platform right now.
 
So “divisive” was Abraham Lincoln’s embrace of abolition that it got him shot in the head. So “divisive” was Lyndon Johnson’s embrace of civil rights that it fractured the Democratic Party. So “divisive” was Ulysses S. Grant’s defense of black civil rights and war upon the Klan, that American historians spent the better part of a century destroying his reputation. So “divisive” was Martin Luther King Jr. that his own government bugged him, harassed him, and demonized him until he was dead. And now, in our time, politicians tout their proximity to that same King, and dismiss the completion of his work—the full pursuit of equality—as “divisive.” The point is not that reparations is not divisive. The point is that anti-racism is always divisive. A left radicalism that makes Clintonism its standard for anti-racism—fully knowing it could never do such a thing in the realm of labor, for instance—has embraced evasion.
 
 
I think examining Sanders's policies with the same scrutiny that people apply to Clinton's ultimately results in a very samey kind of approach. He's still incrementalist, and still avoids things that are too divisive. He talks a big game about some things, but his real, actual policy -- as I've come to understand it -- is lackluster.

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Henroid, dial it down by about 500% please. If you can't, please just stay out of this thread.

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Interesting historical comparison: this Rolling Stone article in favor of Clinton and several others have said that this election is a tipping point in American history "like none since before the Civil War," but they have not actually teased out the connection that they're making there.

 

After the Dred Scott decision, there were broadly two camps of anti-slavery advocates in American politics. On the one hand, there were the abolitionists, a motley crew espousing a "revolution" to abolish a fundamental but morally corrupt fixture of social, political, and economic life in America. On the other, there were the doughfaces and other moderates, the more "reasonable" group who argued for compromise and for working within the system to effect slow and incremental change. President James Buchanan—who, as a former secretary of state, senator, and ambassador, was easily one of the most "qualified" presidents in American history—hailed from the latter camp. Driven by the political demands of his party and his country more than by personal conviction to address the repercussions of the Dred Scott decision, he cooperated heavily with Southern slaveholders, tapping into his longstanding political relationships with many of them, to try to finesse conflicts over the expansion of slavery in the west. Instead, he severely miscalculated the depths of the division between pro-slavery and anti-slavery advocates and the particular intransigence of the former, tearing the country apart and making the Civil War all but inevitable. His most famous quote and selling point? "What is right and what is practicable are two different things."

 

Buchanan's attempt to find a "reasonable," "gradual," and "bi-partisan" solution to the issue of slavery has repeatedly been rated the worst mistake of any president in American history. I don't know how history will judge the attempts of the American political establishment to deal with the issue of income inequality, but I still think about this example a lot when people tell me that Clinton is "experienced," "practical," and a "dealmaker." Yes, it's important that the Know Nothings don't get their candidate in office, but being a bad president (or the wrong president for the wrong time, at least) is not just a matter of being inexperienced, ignorant, or immoral.

 

It feels as if any recent attempts to change anything gradual have failed, but also the government is setup to prevent anyone from doing anything extreme instead. Prevention of radical change isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially if it's Trump that's elected in November, but it leaves behind gridlock where it feels like nothing is getting done, year after year. 

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