Yes, I actually agree with you here. It was always dishonest and in bad faith when republicans brought up Biden's support for the crime bill to attack his purported hypocrisy. Back in the day, crime was so bad that many black and brown people were themselves calling for this kind of crime reform. As did Republicans, it was the zeitgeist back then.

its not bad faith to criticize a racist and destructive crime bill that devastated communities over minor crimes, while the cartels and gangs and mafia kept on plugging away. both (D)s and (R)s deserve blame here, but only politician bragged about authoring said bill: the ‘leader’ of the (D) party

same can be applied to the Iraq war disaster.

Criticizing the crime bill is fair. Criticizing the politicians who passed it is not. The Iraq war was a different story. Anyone with two brain cells could tell that it would lead to disaster and only enrich the neocons and the military-industrial complex. With the crime bill, it was less clear how much of a destructive impact it would have. Another key distinction is that many voices from within the black community supported the crime bill, while barely any Iraqis supported the American invasion.

yes it is. people pay taxes and the politicians draw large salaries from this so i will continue to criticize their short-sighted decisions derived from foolish bureaucratic decisions

did the minority communities say please lock up the guy or gal selling dime bags on the side for 25 to life? i doubt it, but i was young then so provide examples if so. locking up ruthless killers we can all agree with.

lol almost no one wants to be invaded, that’s a little silly

joe who?

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/09/joe-biden-crime-bill-and-americans-short-memory/597547/

The bill had the support of James Clyburn, two thirds of the Congressional Black Caucus and the black mayors of Detroit, Atlanta, Cleveland, Denver, and Baltimore.

oof, imagine supporting a bill that ended up locking up tens of thousands people who sold dime bags and then blaming the results on ‘racism’

There's merit to this argument but you also need to adapt to the times. Successful politicians evolve and learn. Unsuccessful ones i.e. Bernie Sanders, the least successful Jew of all time become pariahs or simply lose elections. I certainly wouldn't characterize Biden as being a pushover either. The guy is Mr. No to progressives. He has proven to not be afraid of publicly taking a shit on their beliefs. As for the crime bill, this is leftist revisionist history that would make the 1619 Project blush. It passed the House by VOICE VOTE and only had 4 Senators opposing it. Black people WANTED this so it certainly wasn't "unnecessarily punitive." As for amnesty, that's been talked about for nearly 50 years now. Reagan did it and it's going to happen again eventually for a large portion of illegal immigrants. It's just the pragmatic thing to do if someone is contributing to this country and lived here for multiple decades.

You've also been saying that populism is a good thing so how is that any different than governing according to the polls?


Um, he has a lot. You must not be paying attention.


They were "communities" in the sense that Fallujah was a community lol. The streets needed to be cleaned up, plain and simple.

This is also where it comes down to implementation versus idea. Ideas that aren't racially motivated on their face can be implemented in a way that's racially motivated, such as how current policing is done where minorities are targeted and profiled even when otherwise indistinguishable from their white counterparts. Think stop and frisk, which was meant to be neutral but overwhelmingly targeted minorities and was used as a fear campaign.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Dec 6 2020 02:57pm

True, but good leaders (try to) shape the times/the zeitgeist they are operating in, as opposed to exclusively being driven by it.


Governing by the polls is dangerous. Polls can be genuinely off. They can be off on purpose, e.g. push polls or what I would call "propaganda polls" funded by actors with a partisan intest. Public opinion can also be fickle or ephemeral. And last but not least, it can be better for the country to lean back and wait and see rather than to enact sweeping change based on narrow majorities with large and enthusiastic opposition.

Populism, in the broadest sense, pits the interests of the common people against those of elites or institutions, and prioritizes the former. Hence, the success of populism (on the substantive level) hinges on appropriately determining what the interests or the will of the common people actually are. Polls are a very flawed and unreliable way of filtering out this "true will of the people". They are also prone to manipulation.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Dec 6 2020 03:32pm