Vancouver @ NYRB
LA Galaxy @ Orlando
Atlanta @ RSL
Montreal @ LAFC
NYCFC @ Chicago
FC Dallas @ Vancouver
DC United @ New England
Portland @ Philadelphia
NYRB @ FC Cincinnati
Houston @ MNUFC
Columbus @ Colorado
Seattle @ Sporting KC
San Jose @ Toronto

(Let me make this clear before you continue reading, I don't know any good solutions)

Recently, all over the internet, I feel like I am seeing more and more companies filtering out content that are considered hate speech. I personally do not like this for two reasons.

1. I think it is a band-aid solution. People who have their voice taken away from themselves are not suddenly going to change their mind.
2. In a way, it is a form of removing freedom of speech. Now, I understand that a lot of the companies that are censoring hate speech are doing it primarily for the sake of sponsors, but I mean this in a more broad scope.
3. It is effectively hiding societal problems.

I think one argument for the increased censorship is: even if it doesn't combat hate speech, it stops the spreading of hate speech. By spreading, I mean more people believing that hate speech. Though at first this could be a good idea, I think it is the wrong way to go about it. I really don't know what exactly is the right way to deal with this issue. Maybe more inclusion of different communities? Maybe education? Learn how to think critically?

Here are a couple other things I have been thinking about, but I am not too sure about. I do not know if they are true or not, but if any of you could provide more insight, I would like to know more:

1. Hate speech is actually lower than ever. The reason why some people feel like it is higher is because the hate speech is entering to people's bubbles through the internet. Before the internet, there was still that kind of talk, it was just in a different medium.
2. Though not hate speech, but in a way related, with Anti-vax, the people who are most susceptible to converting to an anti-vaxxer, are parents. A lot of times these are the people who didn't grow up with the internet, the way they view the internet is not exactly how younger people view the internet. There is more doubt in what we see online between younger people than older.

And I have had people say I must be a white upper class person to have these kinds of opinions. No. I am not white. Not upper class. I have dealt with racism in one way or another for all of my childhood, less so as an adult.

week nine is here, and while we don't have a lot of candidates this time, we still have a bunch of stuff to go through. the opinion section is back this week, since there were a few pieces of the sort, but it's pretty short this week. we actually have more [LONGFORM] tagged pieces this week than op-eds, so that's always interesting. anyways.

the usual note: common sense should be able to generally dictate what does and does not get posted in this thread. if it's big news or feels like big news, probably make it its own post instead of lobbing it in here. like the other weekly threads, this one is going to try to focus on things that are still discussion worthy, but wouldn't necessarily make good/unique/non-repetitive discussion starters as their own posts.

Week 1 • Week 2 • Week 3 • Week 4 • Week 5 • Week 6 • Week 7 • Week 8

News

General Stuff

• from Buzzfeed News: [LONGFORM] “Abolish ICE” Was The Call Of Last Summer. 2020 Democrats Have Moved On.. despite the big hooplah surrounding this last year, it's been surprisingly quiet on the abolish ICE front since then, to the chagrin of many immigration activists. given the fact that it's fairly radical (despite ICE only being an agency since 2002), don't expect a lot of movement here; many of the democrats running who adopted the drumbeat last year have almost totally dropped it and show no signs of really picking it back up.

• from The Atlantic: [LONGFORM] The 2020 Presidential Candidates’ Families Look Like Americans’. this is an interesting piece which analyzes how even the "nuclear" family which we're all so used to has essentially ceased to exist on the campaign trail, on both sides of the aisle, and become more reflective of what you'd expect of such a large and diverse country:

Of the 24 candidates, eight have blended families: Donald Trump has children with multiple partners; the candidates Elizabeth Warren, John Hickenlooper, Bill Weld, and Joe Biden are married and have children from previous marriages, while Bernie Sanders is married and has a son from a previous relationship; Sanders, Tim Ryan, and Kamala Harris all have stepchildren. Seven are remarried divorcés or divorcées (Trump, Warren, Hickenlooper, Weld, Sanders, Eric Swalwell, and Tulsi Gabbard), and four have no children of their own (Harris, Gabbard, Pete Buttigieg, and Cory Booker). One has a spouse of the same sex (Buttigieg), one is a remarried widower (Biden), and two are unmarried (Booker and the self-help and spirituality author Marianne Williamson). Two candidates have at some point lived as single mothers (Warren and Williamson).

• from Pacific Standard: What Role Will Religion Play for Democratic Presidential Candidates in 2020?. religion has been largely absent from the democratic side of presidential elections for awhile, but interestingly even as organized religion starts to decay in america, this year you're seeing a few democrats pick up the banner of religion in their campaigning. this might be because WASP-types tend to vote heavily republican and even scalping a few of them or making them more hesitant to pull the lever for republicans could render a republican unable to win nationwide except in particularly unique circumstances--but it could also just be that there are a lot of candidates this year, and some of them just happen to be openly religious and democratic. either way, it's too early to really say how this will shake out in future elections, but keep an eye on it.

• from FiveThirtyEight: [LONGFORM] How Will Democrats’ Move Away From Caucuses Affect The 2020 Race?. a lot of states which used caucuses in 2016 are not going to be doing so again in 2020; in fact, the caucus system is basically dead at this point in the democratic party. besides turnout, though, it's unclear how this will actually affect the 2020 race. maybe the biggest subplot of this will be the party-run primaries some states will be having (which differ significantly from government-run primaries: "While state governments might open hundreds or thousands of polling places statewide for 12 hours or more, party-run votes might provide less than one voting location per county or keep the polls open for just four hours on primary day. These party-run affairs will likely offer forms of early and absentee voting in 2020, but seeing as they won’t be able to rely on the state-run systems that normally handle these kinds of election administration, it’s unclear how effective the parties will be at managing this on their own.") beyond that? shruggie.

Joe Biden

• from POLITICO: ‘Slow and steady’ strategy pays off for Biden. biden's early game so far has been pretty laid back compared to just about everybody else. this is very much intentional--biden has several reasons to not want to attempt the wild pace of everybody else, namely that he's old and gaffe prone--and so far, seems to be working. biden's lead has been retained thus far in the primary and doesn't seem to be really abetting yet.

• from The Atlantic: Joe Biden’s Bet That 2016 Didn’t Change Everything. this piece by The Atlantic goes into a bit of detail about the big bet of the biden campaign: "that in the four years since Trump launched his campaign, the country hasn’t changed, the Democratic Party hasn’t changed, and politics hasn’t changed." it's an interesting bet, one which i'm not sure is exactly correct. also, this feels like possibly the most accurate summary of biden's case for the presidency thus far:

[...]It’s early days yet in the Democratic primary, but Biden’s campaign is discussed in some circles as a self-fulfilling prophecy: that he will win the Democratic nomination simply because he appears the likeliest to win the nomination, that he will beat Trump simply because everyone is talking about how electable he is—not because voters are actually excited about him or the specifics of what he’s running on.

• from NBC News: Joe Biden at rally casts himself as candidate who could unify the nation. not surprisingly, biden's angling remains as the centrist unity candidate. in his words:

"I know some of the really smart folks said that Democrats do not want to hear about unity. The Democrats are so angry, the angrier that candidate could be the better chance to win the nomination. I do not believe it," Biden said. "I believe Democrats want to unify this nation."
[...]
"I am running to offer our country — Democrats, Republicans and Independents — a different path, not back to a past that never was but to a future that fulfills our true potential,” he said.

Elizabeth Warren

• from POLITICO: How Sen. Elizabeth Warren would protect abortion rights. warren is pushing a few new proposals on protecting reproductive rights. specifically:

Warren would call on Congress to pass laws enshrining the right to an abortion that would preempt any state attempt to ban the procedure or impose onerous regulations on abortion providers. She would also push for the repeal of the Hyde amendment, a long-time prohibition on federal funding for abortion and sign executive orders rolling back recent Trump administration moves aimed at cutting Planned Parenthood out of the Title X family planning program.

a lot of this is contingent on congress, you might note, and this is one of the big weaknesses of her plan here. democratic control of the senate in either 2020 or 2022 is far from a given, meaning that in the event they fail to take control of the senate this plan basically cannot go through since it'd fail on a party-line vote. (she might be banking on the democrats splitting the chamber 50-50 since it is unlikely they'd--in 2020 anyways--outright win the senate.)

• from CBS News: Elizabeth Warren introduces bill to curb defense lobbying. warren's also introduced a bill in congress which, among other things, seeks to "ban defense contractors from hiring senior officials directly from the Defense Department and extend to four years the ban on former generals lobbying the Pentagon", "[disqualify former contractors who join the government] from working on any issue that could help or hurt their former employer for four years", and "limit foreign governments' hirings of U.S. national security officials."

• from CBS News: Elizabeth Warren introduces plan to reduce military's carbon footprint. aside from abortion and lobbying, warren's also been busy with climate policy. specifically she's pushing for "the military to reach zero carbon emissions for all non-combat bases and infrastructure by 2030." this is a surprisingly ambitious goal, because the military's carbon emissions have been increasing recently.

• from Jacobin: How Warren’s Climate Defense Bill Undermines Itself. of course, warren's bill isn't without some controversy. jacobin argues that some of the provisions of the bill essentially undermine it completely, specifically the "market waiver" and the "war waiver":

WAIVER: the Secretary of Defense may waive the requirements of this section . . . [if] he determines that market conditions for a product or service make it difficult for the Department to acquire that product or service and the waiver will accelerate the Department’s acquisition of the product or service.
[...]
WAIVER: the Secretary of Defense may waive the requirements of this section . . . [if] he determines that meeting these requirements would adversely affect the national security interests of the United States . . .

in their view these waivers are likely to be exploited to such an extent by the government that they essentially offset any benefits the bill could have and render it incapable of addressing climate change in the way climate change needs to be addressed in the time we have.

• from In These Times: [LONGFORM] When It Comes to U.S. Militarism, Elizabeth Warren Is No Progressive. more broadly, In These Times makes an argument for warren being basically joined at the hip with military interests, even as she tries to address some of the biggest problems with it. specifically they note that her voting record outside of yemen on military issues is not the best, and they often stand in contrast to some of the policies and rhetoric she espouses on the issue.

• from Vanity Fair: Can MAGA Country Learn to Love Elizabeth Warren?. vanity fair notes meanwhile that warren seems to be gaining some traction with trump voters, at least on policy issues:

[...]In a recent focus group observed by Axios in Sioux City, Iowa, voters who flipped from Obama to Trump “strongly supported” Warren’s plan to cancel up to $50,000 in student debt for voters whose families made less than $100,000 a year. They echoed her message that many Americans are not reaping the benefits of a booming economy, pointing to stagnant wages and a declining quality of life. And there was a strong consensus that big financial institutions should be taxed to pay for infrastructure.
The only catch? The focus group wasn’t told that the student debt plan was Warren’s. All but 1 of the 11 Obama-Trump swing voters in the group said they would re-elect Trump if he were running against Clinton.

Kamala Harris

• from POLITICO: Kamala Harris' next target: Banning AR-15-style assault weapons. a few weeks back harris outlined her plan for gun control (Kamala Harris Says She’ll Take Gun Control Into Her Own Hands As President If Congress Doesn't Act), and this seems to be an extension of that. this would be an extensive measure:

Harris wants to ban AR-15-style assault weapon imports and suspend all other assault weapon imports until the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives can analyze whether they should be permanently banned under U.S. law. Her campaign argues the weapons could be banned because they aren't "suitable for or readily adaptable to sporting purposes." This includes all 44 AR-type models listed in the latest assault weapons ban that was introduced in Congress.

• from POLITICO: Kamala Harris: Biden would make ‘great’ running mate. one of the weirder subplots of the week is the row that's been stirred up by a few members of the Congressional Black Caucus suggesting harris would make a good running mate for joe biden. harris herself mostly dismissed this with the humorous jab in the title here, but...

• from POLITICO: 'It's infuriating': Kamala Harris team galled by Biden veep talk. ...her campaign was less than enthralled with this, to say the least. making it doubly awkward, harris is--as a significant black democrat--a pretty visible member of the CBC, so they had to figure out how to address this without egging this on further. this ultimately seems to have been where harris's jab came from:

Anticipating questions from news media on Wednesday, Harris and her advisers settled on the humorous one-liner, according to an aide.

harris remains committed to running for president, obviously.

Cory Booker

• from Mother Jones: Can Cory Booker Really Turn His Back on Silicon Valley?. a significant booker sticking point so far (although it's gone mostly unreported) is his desire to step in on silicon valley and social media; he's been angling himself in this way for the past few years. the problem with this, of course, is that booker has a long history with silicon valley himself. for the most part, he hasn't really been punished for this by the voters, it seems (not that there are many to punish him in the first place of course--he's sitting on like, 4% in the polls now), but it is a legitimate question whether or not his barnstorming on this issue can necessarily be backed up.

• from Buzzfeed News: Cory Booker Vows To Make Roe V. Wade The Law Of The Land As President. on another note, he is one of several candidates who have pledged to do this. not surprising, and i'd be shocked if anybody besides maybe biden eschewed eventually stumping on this, but it's interesting to see how openly people are running on this.

• from POLITICO: Booker campaign official urges donations for Gillibrand to ensure debate spot. also, perhaps demonstrating the extent to which democrats are trying to avoid conflict, booker's campaign is encouraging people to donate to the perennial disappointment of a campaign that gillibrand has been running so she doesn't miss out on a debate spot. kinda wild!

Everybody Else

• from Buzzfeed News: Bernie Sanders Has A Plan To Fix Racial Segregation In American Schools. bernie sanders unveiled a proposal combatting racial segregation in schools this week while swinging through the south on a four-day, four-state tour:

Sanders’ plan would ban for-profit charter schools, which make up a small slice of charters nationwide, and put strict limits on nonprofit charter schools, temporarily banning federal funding for new charters. Charter schools tend to be more segregated than public schools — the NAACP has called to ban them outright — though they are also popular among black voters.
[...]
One significant roadblock for Sanders’ sweeping plan: the reality that the federal government plays a relatively small role in K-12 education. The vast majority of money for education comes from states, which set their own policies; some states ban for-profit charters, and others allow them to proliferate.

• from Buzzfeed News: This Democrat Is Running For President Behind A $9 Trillion Climate Change Plan. jay inslee is getting some attention this week from the media, mostly for his extensive second climate proposal. seriously, it's huge:

Other notable components of Inslee’s new 38-page policy proposal includes investing $35 billion in clean energy and climate solutions research, a big increase over current levels; creating a $90 billion "Green Bank" at the federal level to help finance clean energy development; phasing out potent greenhouse gases called hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, in line with global agreements; proposing federal agencies get all of their domestic energy production from clean energy sources and purchase only zero-emission vehicles by 2024.
To pay for it all, Inslee proposes a federal investment of about $300 billion a year, which his campaign anticipates will generate an additional $600 billion a year in outside funding. This adds up to $9 trillion in total investment over a decade.

• from POLITICO: ‘He’s white, male and gay’: Buttigieg hits obstacles with black voters. buttigieg is one of the few democrats who might have genuine problems appealing to black voters, most of which is outlined in this POLITICO piece. in a field this large with multiple minority candidates, he's going to have a hard time (and already is having a hard time, honestly) establishing himself as a candidate minorities should go for. for the most part, i think that his status as white is going to be the bigger barrier than him being gay (at least with the majority of black voters--the article notes the big generational disparity on that: "In 2017, 69 percent of African Americans aged 18 to 29 backed same-sex marriage, but just 40 percent of African Americans aged 65 and older did, according to a Public Religion Research Institute poll."), but we'll see.

• from The Atlantic: [LONGFORM] Democrat Steve Bullock Won a Red State in 2016. Can He Beat Trump in 2020?. steve bullock is one of the latest candidates to throw himself into the woodchipper. hailing from the nominally red state of montana, though, he probably has a better case for the presidency than most of the perennial 1% polling crowd. this article mostly outlines who he is, what he wants, and what he's shooting for, because honestly unless you're a politico, you probably have no clue who he is or what he stands for (he's the governor of montana, for the record).

Opinions & Other

• from GQ: Elizabeth Warren Deserves Your Undivided Attention. this piece by drew magary is basically an op-ed, even though it's not labeled such by GQ. anyways, magary basically lays out all of the places where warren's policies would be good, and why in his view they'd be good. it's not that special nor is it the most elegant basically-an-oped ever written, but GQ doesn't exactly run a lot of pieces like this so i figured i shouldn't pass it over.

• from The Guardian: Joe Biden would be a disaster for climate change. this was a theme with last week's post where people raked biden for his awful climate change policy. maybe the biggest takeaway from this op-ed, though, is this line: "As atmosphere scientists Andrew Dessler told HuffPost’s Alexander Kaufman, Biden’s plans would “be more in line with stabilizing at 3-4C of warming, rather than staying below 2C”." this is... not optimal! it's actually barely an improvement over donald's policy, which is in line with 4C+ warming.

• from The Guardian: If New Yorkers won't back Bill de Blasio, nobody else will. oh, by the way, bill de blasio is running for president. nobody cares about him, though, and he's a perennial 1% candidate. super funny how badly he polls, though:

In a Quinnipiac poll last month, 76% of New Yorkers agreed that their mayor should not run for president. This included 70% of black voters, who usually make up De Blasio’s strongest base of support. As the Washington Post’s Philip Bump pointed out, De Blasio was a standout in another poll, this time of national Democratic primary voters, for being the candidate with the highest unfavorability ratings. He was also the only candidate with net unfavorability, with more respondents having an unfavorable than favorable view of him. The Quinnipiac poll even showed that one-third of Democrats in De Blasio’s home city – what ought to be his main bulwark of support – disapprove of his job performance.

anyways, feel free to as always contribute other interesting articles you stumble across, or comment on some of the ones up there.

EDIT: minor spelling stuff

DC United @ Toronto FC
Portland Timbers @ Houston Dynamo
Atlanta United @ Vancouver Whitecaps
Orlando SC @ Seattle Sounders
FC Dallas @ LAFC
New England Revs @ Montreal Impact
Toronto FC @ Real Salt Lake
Chicago Fire @ San Jose Earthquakes
Seattle Sounders @ Philadelphia Union
Columbus Crew @ MNUFC
Vancouver Whitecaps @ Sporting KC
DC Unived @ Houston Dynamo
FC Cincinnati @ Orlando SC
Atlanta United @ NYRB
LAFC @ FC Dallas
Colorado Rapids @ LA Galaxy

So I kind of want to try the Nokia 8110, it's a feature phone with an app store that contains it's own version of Google Maps and Assistant. I use my phone an awful lot, and I'm thinking that a less capable phone would be helpful in using my phone less for browsing the internet, news, and discourse and using it more for what I would want to do with it, calls, texts, navigation, music and podcasts.

Unfortunately, the Nokia 8110 is only available on AT&T in the States, and they stink, so I was wondering if anyone had any picks for devices that would scratch that itch, specialized apps, or other tools that could be used. I like the idea of another device that I could use as a daily driver so I can put some physical distance between myself and my current phone, but if you have an app or a system that you swear by, I'm down for it.

Also kind of interested in maybe combining the ZeroPhone Raspberry Pi with support for Alexa or Google Assistant, but that seems like a time waster and a half.

This is something I've been thinking about for a while.

One of the future mechanics for tildes is the trust system (see https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics-future). People talk about building it but I think we already have a small part of it in place.

Invites are a form of trust.

By allowing inviting the community is trusting you with the ability to add new members. That ability can be taken away or could even result in the banhammer if you persistantly invite assholes. I know that made me cautious with who I've invited to join.

With there being a clear trail of who invited who, bad actors will have to work harder to get a foothold here. I also think that spammers are deterred with having to get an invite for every new account they make.

A simple analogy is that you're having a party and a friend asks if they can bring a friend of theirs you don't know. Your friend says they're cool and you trust your friend due to past experiences with them so along they come. Now if this person ends up kicking your cat, pissing in the fridge, and then trying to burn your house down then the trust you had in your friend is going to diminish. Next time they want to bring a guest the answer is hell no!

We can use the invite system as an initial way to build trust.

Now that it's legal in Canada to grow cannabis, I decided to try my hand at growing a few plants indoors. I started with a simple setup and a couple of seeds in a closet. As I did more research, I slowly started upgrading my equipment and methods. There is so much more to growing good cannabis indoors than I originally thought, and it's become a very interesting hobby for me. There is also a lot of misinformation and pseudoscience out there, which can make it difficult for new growers.

Anyone else into this hobby? What's your setup like? Anyone thinking of getting into it?

Toronto @ Atlanta
LA Galaxy @ Columbus
New England @ Chicago Fire
Montreal @ NYRB
Portland Timbers @ Vancouver Whitecaps
Montreal @ FC Cincinnati
NYRB @ FC Dallas
Philadelphia @ Toronto
NYCFC @ LA Galaxy
LAFC @ Columbus
San Jose @ New England
MNUFC @ Chicago Fire
Real Salt Lake @ Colorado
Houston @ Seattle
Orlando @ Atlanta
Sporting Kansas City @ DC United

A little bit about me -- I'm in my mid-to-late-20s, male, single, recently graduated college, and I quit drinking about a year and a half ago. I never really considered myself an addict; there was never a point where I wanted to quit but I couldn't and it never interfered with work or school. I just woke up one day and told myself, "I don't want to do this anymore," so I just stopped.

The problem, for me at least, is that I live in a relatively rural part of the world. There's not a lot to do here on Friday night other than go to the bars, which never really bothered me anyways because I work nights anyways and don't really like crowded scenes. Most of my free time is in front of my computer, I've recently started getting into distance running as a hobby, and I like playing board games when I can. All of this is fine except for the fact that I can't really seem to make friends in those mutual areas of interest without alcohol anymore.

I signed up for meetup, which seems like a great way to meet new people, and I'm sure it is, in bigger cities at least. But around here, both the closest board game meetup and run club are an hour and a half away. It seems like everyone around here just wants to meet up to drink, and maybe do some other stuff along the way. (Don't get me started on making my own events here -- crowded bars already give me anxiety so organizing my own meetup with people I've never met before would be a new, special type of hell)

I think at least part of this is compounded with the fact that since I graduated, I've had a hard time making new friends. I work a very isolating job, and teetotaling only further compounds the issue that I haven't met very many new people. It's something I've thought a lot about while searching for a partner as well -- I can't/don't want to meet people at bars, and I don't really find much use out of dating apps.

Sorry if this is unorganized or hard to read, it's just a lot of thoughts I've had over the past year.

edit: another part of it too is that, since I quit without the assistance of AA or any support group, I don't have any like-minded people to do things with.

FC Cincinnati @ Philadelphia Union
Vancouver Whitecaps @ Colorado Rapids
LA Galaxy @ NY Red Bulls
FC Dallas @ Houston Dynamo
Toronto FC @ Orlando City FC
NYCFC @ Montreal Impact
New England Revolution @ Philadelphia Union
Columbus Crew @ DC United
Seattle Sounders @ MNUFC
Portland Timbers @ Real Salt Lake
FC Cincinnati @ San Jose Earthquakes
Chicago Fire @ LAFC
Atlanta United @ Sporting Kansas City

week six comes slightly early, because i have way too many links and i actually started writing this yesterday because it's just over a page and fuck writing all this in one day, lol. the [LONGFORM] tag continues and finally returns, offering up two pieces to us today.

the usual note: common sense should be able to generally dictate what does and does not get posted in this thread. if it's big news or feels like big news, probably make it its own post instead of lobbing it in here. like the other weekly threads, this one is going to try to focus on things that are still discussion worthy, but wouldn't necessarily make good/unique/non-repetitive discussion starters as their own posts.

Week 1 thread • Week 2 thread • Week 3 thread • Week 4 thread • Week 5 thread

News

General Stuff

• from FiveThirtyEight: What The Potential 2020 Candidates Are Doing And Saying, Vol. 16. a pretty quiet week for most of the candidates. most of the highlights came after the end-date for this volume and will be reflected in next week's.

• from NBC News: Can a woman beat Trump? Some Democrats wonder if it's worth the risk. even though it's pretty inane, this topic is probably going to be a recurring theme, because voter preferences are some of the absolute weirdest, most unfathomably illogical shit possible. electability is a large part of why this is probably going to be a theme: clinton might have poisoned the well for all of this year's "first" candidates by fucking up in 2016, and that might make voters hesitant to pull the lever for another one. but again, who the fuck knows. voter preferences have an uncanny tendency to make zero sense.

• from the Guardian: Black female voters to Democrats: 'You won't win the White House without us'. another recurring topic is going to be the black female vote, which is consistently the most democratic bloc possible. in really any place where there's a significant minority vote, democrats have to turn these voters out significantly, and obviously presidential primaries and elections aren't exceptions to that rule. most of the candidates don't seem to be doing the best job of winning them over yet.

• from Reuters: Democratic presidential candidates seek union support at workers' forum. union voters could be significant in the democratic path to the presidency, and so you're seeing a lot of democrats try and angle themselves as union candidates also. which one will win out here? i have no fucking clue.

• from NPR: The Democratic Field Is Set: 8 Questions About What Comes Next. NPR offers up a series of questions about the trajectory of the primary, which will probably aid us in the coming months:

1. How far does name identification go?
2. It's there for Biden now, but can he prove himself?
3. Can Bernie Sanders expand beyond his loyal base?
4. Does Pete Buttigieg continue his momentum?
5. Does Elizabeth Warren find her lane?
6. Does Beto O'Rourke get edged out or does he find his way in?
7. Can Kamala Harris supercharge her candidacy – and fend off Biden in South Carolina?
8. Can others have a breakout moment?

Joe Biden

• from the Atlantic: Unlike His Rivals, Biden Sees Trump as an Aberration. we begin this week with how biden is framing his candidacy. one of the cruxes of biden's campaign is that trump doesn't reflect a change of values in the american public or even in the republican party, necessarily. in his view, the status quo hasn't really changed, and if we return to electing people like biden then trumpism will effectively cease. whether you buy that, i leave up to you.

• from Vox: The health care industry is betting on Joe Biden in its war against Medicare-for-all. another thing about biden is that he has very decisively positioned himself against medicare-for-all, which mostly reflects his status as an establishment candidate. this, as it happens, is super great if you're a lobbyist for the healthcare industry, which is unsurprisingly and firmly in biden's camp in this election.

• from Buzzfeed News: Joe Biden Backs A Public Option — Not Medicare For All — As He Argues For Electability. as far as biden is concerned though, this is mostly a matter of electability. among his other points of policy: "[a] on noncompete clauses ... a $15 minimum wage and ... a more simplified process for issuing professional licenses."

• from the Guardian: 'Battle for America's soul': Biden comes out swinging at first 2020 event. beyond that, biden also has this for policy: "reversing Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations" and "enacting the so-called “Buffett Rule” – which would apply a minimum tax rate of 30% on individuals making more than $1m". he's supposed to unveil more of this in the near future.

• from Slate: 10 Questions Joe Biden Needs to Answer About His Views on Race. Slate offers up 10 questions that they feel joe biden is obligated to give us better answers on, thanks in no small part to his incredibly long history of being a dumb politician who might now be on the wrong side of the political traintracks.

Bernie Sanders

• from Buzzfeed News: Bernie Sanders Is Getting A Shadow Organizing Campaign In The Midwest. bernie sanders has had a quiet week in the media, relatively speaking. one of the only notes from this week about him came in the form of people realizing that yes, our revolution does actually exist and yes, it does actually do things. the sanders campaign is probably going to need things like this to win this year.

Beto O'Rourke

• from the Guardian: Beto O'Rourke is coming to California. Can the trip redeem his campaign?. beto has been busy in california the past few days trying to drum up support, which is easier said than done because he's on the wrong side of a wave now. he's been quietly slipping in the polls for the past little while, to a point where he's now usually sixth or so in the order. will stumping in california help with this at all? probably not, but he's gotta do it at some point.

• from NBC News: Beto O'Rourke releases $5 trillion plan to combat climate crisis. on the policy front, he's finally getting around to expanding on what he's running on. his climate change plan is fairly extensive:

The plan begins with proposed executive actions, including rejoining the Paris climate agreement on day one of an O’Rourke administration and moving quickly to raise efficiency standards for buildings, cars and appliances. Longer term executive actions include setting a net-zero emissions carbon budget for federal lands by 2030 and adding more national parks and monuments to protect land and seascapes.
The meat of the O’Rourke plan is a promise to send Congress, as his first piece of legislation, a bill that would mobilize $5 trillion over the next 10 years to upgrade infrastructure and spur innovation — including more than a trillion dollars in tax incentives to reduce emissions, and $250 billion dedicated directly to research and development.

• from Buzzfeed News: Beto O’Rourke Is The Latest Democrat To Make Climate Change Central To His Campaign. Buzzfeed News helpfully fills in some of the other details, such as this:

His plan, starting day one in the White House, would include spending a record $5 trillion on climate action over ten years and mandating the US reduce its emissions to net zero by 2050. (This means the nation, by midcentury, would no longer be emitting more climate pollution into the atmosphere than it was pulling out of it through trees and other ways.)

Elizabeth Warren

• from POLITICO: Warren puts Bernie on defense. POLITICO pitches the interesting take that warren is putting sanders on defense by pushing a shit ton of policy. this seems... dubious? at best, given that warren is polling at literally half of what sanders does, sanders has greatly outraised her, and in general the two just have not interacted especially significantly at any point in the campaign so far. but a take is a take.

• from Truthout: [LONGFORM] Elizabeth Warren’s Student Debt Plan: An Outsized Economic Boon for People of Color. truthout provides an analysis of elizabeth warren's student debt plan, suggesting that it would be the best for people of color. this is interesting, because...

• from Slate: Elizabeth Warren’s Student Loan Forgiveness Plan Mostly Helps the Middle Class, Think Tank Finds. one of the big takeways most other sources have had is that it would be a boon for the middle class instead. figure that one out.

Pete Buttigieg

• from the Atlantic: Authenticity Just Means Faking It Well. this article is more about authenticity than it is about buttigieg, but its catalyst is buttigieg so i'm placing it in this section. what constitutes "authenticity"? who the fuck knows, honestly, but buttigieg is apparently it in a way that resonates with voters.

Opinion/Ideology-driven

• from Truthout: [LONGFORM] None of the 2020 Frontrunners Go Far Enough on Climate. Truthout opines that realistically, absolutely none of the current frontrunner candidates have a compelling platform on climate change that will work. this might change now that o'rourke has actually unveiled a comprehensive plan, but in general outside of inslee (who is running as The Climate Change Candidate), so far climate change hasn't really played much of a role in the primary.

• from the Guardian: Joe Biden is the Hillary Clinton of 2020 – and it won't end well this time either. this take opines that biden is basically this cycle's hillary clinton and that biden basically does not get it. perhaps the best distilling of this argument is in this paragraph:

Biden’s answer to Trump isn’t systemic change that will make America a more equitable place. He’s not offering progressive policies like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. His is the vaguest and most centrist of battle cries: let’s go back to, you know, “all those good things”. Let’s go back to a time where racism was a little more polite and white people could pretend America was a post-racial society. Let’s fight for the soul of America by pretending that Trump is the problem, not just a symptom of the problem. Let’s pretend that Charlottesville was a direct result of Trump – an aberration – and not a product of a racism that has always existed in America. Let’s rewind the clock a few years to when everything was just fine and dandy.

• from the Guardian: Bernie Sanders v the Democratic establishment: what the battle is really about. this piece takes an interesting alternative frame on the major split that seems to divide sanders from the rest of the democratic party. in essence, it is this:

The Shakir-Tanden debate about money in politics at Cap is also the larger debate Sanders is sparking in the Democratic party. Joe Biden opened his presidential bid by allowing a Comcast executive to host a fundraiser for him at his home in Pennsylvania. Sanders, on the other hand, has written off such fundraisers and is insisting on relying on small donor funders, not corporate executives or lobbyists.

anyways, feel free to as always contribute other interesting articles you stumble across, or comment on some of the ones up there.

EDIT: minor grammatical stuff

It’s no secret that data science is a good career path. The jobs are in demand, the salaries are compelling, and the work is interesting. So how does someone break in?

In particular, I’m interested in how an experienced IT professional can move into data science. What advice would you give to someone with, say, five years of computing experience, who wants to break into the field? Tell me about the skills required, where you’d tell your friend to go to acquire them, and how to get a job without a specialized degree. What would make you say, “I want to hire this person, even if the individual lacks the relevant schooling”?

DC United @ Columbus
Montreal @ New England
LA Galaxy @ MNUFC
San Jose @ Seattle
Orlando @ NYCFC
Portland Timbers @ Toronto
San Jose @ FC Dallas
Philadelphia @ Vancouver
Colorado @ Atlanta
FC Cincinnati @ NYRB
Columbus @ Houston
New England @ Sporting Kansas City
Chicago @ Montreal
DC United @ MNUFC
LAFC @ Seattle
Real Salt Lake @ LA Galaxy

raindrop

on the tongue

of the parched, de-

flated beach ball

in the hands of the young, lit

cig 'tween the fingers

of a nun,

one sin's never gonna be enough

fuck the prose

words will never be enough.

the writing's on the walls

but you can't read it

you aren't here

i need a sign you

can't ignore or a call

you're bound to hear

.

the words just aren't enough

on their own

to pull my heart strings

i can't find peace

without my blood

on guitar strings.

.

the words are going cold

the poetry has not a heartbeat.

i need to take the stage

and pray to god that they can't see me.

week five begins with another page worth of links, a big presidential announcement, and the long creep of this cycle that will make us all go fucking crazy by the end of it. the [LONGFORM] tag continues, but i don't think there's any longform this week either, so c'est la vie.

the usual note: common sense should be able to generally dictate what does and does not get posted in this thread. if it's big news or feels like big news, probably make it its own post instead of lobbing it in here. like the other weekly threads, this one is going to try to focus on things that are still discussion worthy, but wouldn't necessarily make good/unique/non-repetitive discussion starters as their own posts.

Week 1 thread • Week 2 thread • Week 3 thread • Week 4 thread

News

General Stuff

• from FiveThirtyEight: What The Potential 2020 Candidates Are Doing And Saying, Vol. 15. if you're curious what candidates have been up to, FiveThirtyEight has you covered with this week's roundup.

• from FiveThirtyEight: Who Might Make The Democratic Debate Stage?. this is probably the most important question now that the field is basically set: how many people will qualify for the debate stage? the DNC has said the cap is 20 candidates, and we have at least 21 running with potentially more on the way. a lot of them meet at least one criterion for being included. the DNC seems to have prepared extensively for that possibility, so it's not like they're on the backfoot here, but i suspect the politicking surrounding this for some of the smaller candidates is going to be pretty wacky.

• from The Atlantic: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Race: A Cheat Sheet, like CBS News's roundup, this extensive piece covers every candidate currently declared, why they're running, and what they're running on. pretty good resource for those of you needing to cite something.

• from The Atlantic: The Strategic Move That Gave Bernie Sanders a Fundraising Edge. despite its title, this article mostly focuses on fundraising and how it's been either lackluster for democrats or not been, depending on who you ask and under what criteria, and whether or not that even matters in the grand scheme of things. it's an interesting discussion.

Joe Biden

we begin with two words: HE'S RUNNING. The Atlantic first reported this in a piece on the 19th called Joe Biden Is Running for President, and he was expected to announce yesterday but curiously, something (Biden's team was warned about announcing 2020 bid on same day as forum focused on women of color) seems to have interfered with that master plan that joe biden should have known about, so he announced this morning instead.

here is his announcement video:

The core values of this nation… our standing in the world… our very democracy...everything that has made America -- America --is at stake. That’s why today I’m announcing my candidacy for President of the United States.

and nobody was really surprised. anyways, onto articles covering his announcement. take your pick of source:

• NPR: Biden Launches 2020 Campaign As Rescue Mission For America's 'Soul'
• NBC: Biden launches 2020 presidential bid, says 'we are in a battle for the soul of this nation'
• The Guardian: Joe Biden announces 2020 presidential run
• CBS: Joe Biden says he's running for president, in video announcing bid
• Buzzfeed News: Joe Biden Is Running For President

moving on to analysis:

• from Time: Joe Biden and the Hard Choices for Democrats in 2020. this article mostly focuses on biden as a living example of the wedge between the progressive, youthful faction of the democratic party and the older, more traditionally moderate wing of the party. whether or not he gets selected is probably mostly going to come down to what voters prioritize, since the next biggest frontrunner is sanders who is on the literal opposite side of the spectrum from biden. for an alternative perspective on this angled more with respect to biden and #MeToo, you may refer also to this Vox article: The Joe Biden culture war - There’s a split among Democrats on #MeToo and more. Biden might have picked the losing side..

• from The Guardian: Biden brings broad appeal in battle for 2020 – but don't expect a revolution. biden's appeal as a candidate is definitely not going to be for his progressive chops. aside from his... frankly odd ideas and not-ideas of what "progressive" means in the modern discourse (and his identification or lack thereof with the term), it's pretty obvious he's not going to be approaching this race with the intent of radical change. whether that endears him to voters or sinks him also remains to be seen.

Bernie Sanders

• from Buzzfeed News: Bernie Sanders Isn’t Fighting The Wars Of 2016, His Campaign Says — The Democratic Establishment Is. in case you haven't noticed, we're still religitating the bullshit that characterized the 2016 primary because nobody can drop it. nowhere is this more clear than with the sanders campaign, who feel like they're still having to defend themselves from the same lines of attack they did back then. whether or not this is accurate is probably debatable, but it's pretty obvious that this isn't going to just go away, so expect it to continue to be a fracture point this year.

• from The Guardian: Sanders dares Democrats to stop him – but is he the man to beat Trump?. in a similar vein, the sanders campaign seems to be contending with the prospect of the democratic party trying to meddle in the primary and anoit a non-sanders winner, as they were accused of doing in 2016. this is going to also likely remain a fracture point, because the democratic party no doubt feels it has reasons to step in here--but also, it would absolutely be inviting trouble if sanders is the leading candidate when everything is said and done at the convention and they step in, given 2016.

• from Vox: Republican strategist Karl Rove says Bernie Sanders could beat Donald Trump in 2020. whether realpolitik or genuine concern (and in contrast to rick wilson in the above piece), karl rove seems to think that sanders is the exact sort of candidate who would beat donald in 2020.

Beto O'Rourke

• from Buzzfeed News: A Top Adviser To Beto O’Rourke Has Left His Presidential Campaign. beto's campaign lost two people significant to his presidential campaign a few days ago on what appear to be mutual, pre-determined terms. the article gives the reason for these two departures:

In a statement about her and Malitz’s departure to BuzzFeed News, Bond said it was “time for us to move on to other challenges.”
“Launching a presidential campaign without a big staff or even a campaign manager was no easy feat and it took everyone pitching in,” she said. “We’re proud to have been part of the team of deeply dedicated staff and volunteers who nearly pulled off a historic upset in the 2018 Texas Senate race and broke records launching Beto’s campaign for the presidency.”

• from the Huffington Post: Beto O’Rourke’s Non-Media Strategy. on a more strategy-driven note for beto, his campaign has interestingly been one of the only thus far to not have a nationally televised town hall. this seems to be intentional. as the article notes:

O’Rourke ... sa[id] he preferred interacting with voters “eyeball to eyeball” rather than by doing TV, as evidenced by his dozens of events where he regularly takes questions from the audience and reporters alike. But he acknowledged “at some point, I may have to give in” to doing cable television.

it's a bold strategy for certain, but i do suspect that he's going to have to at some point get his voice out nationally. he's been slightly slipping in recent polls, mostly to candidates like buttigieg, and it suggests that he's lost a bit of his lustre with democratic voters.

Elizabeth Warren

• from TIME: Elizabeth Warren Calls for House to Start Impeachment Proceeding Against President Trump. warren decided to become the first democratic candidate to stake her claim to this particular idea. as far as i'm aware, nobody has gone out on this limb with her, but i'd be shocked if she isn't eventually joined by someone else.

• from NBC News: Warren's plan to wipe out student debt (and how she'd pay for it). another one of warren's seminal policies is wiping out student debt, which NBC News helpfully has a piece on (and of course, how she intends to pay for it since the question is literally inescapable). to save you some trouble: she pays for it with her wealth tax.

Pete Buttigieg

• from Buzzfeed News: Pete Buttigieg’s Presidential Run Has Many LGBT Democrats Eager For Their Obama Moment. buzzfeed has a piece on the significance of pete buttigieg to LGBT americans and how he's been able to leverage that to tap into a donor network that's usually pretty splintered. it's unclear to me that he's going to be able to parlay that untapped base into success, though, and more recent polling seems to have buttigieg sorta stalling out around 10% with the logjam of other sorta-kinda-frontrunner candidates.

• from CBS News: Pete Buttigieg on the presidency as a "moral office". this is mostly a personality piece on buttigieg and both his history in afghanistan and his electoral history, and how that has influenced his current candidacy and what he views as priorities. it's kinda straightforward and the title sorta speaks for itself, so there's not actually that much to be said for it.

Kamala Harris

• from Buzzfeed News: Kamala Harris Says She’ll Take Gun Control Into Her Own Hands As President If Congress Doesn't Act. kamala harris has decided that congress will do something about guns in a reasonable timeframe if she becomes president, or else she's just gonna take the nuclear option and just start dropping executive orders:

Harris said she would mandate universal background checks on anyone selling more than five guns a year, ending a loophole that allows private gun sellers to bypass background checks on 1 in 5 gun sales nationwide, bar people classified as fugitives from buying guns. She would also, her campaign said, close a loophole in federal law that allows perpetrators of domestic violence to keep their guns if they are not married to their partner.

• from POLITICO: Kamala Harris says she supports adding third gender option to federal IDs. she also supports the fairly small idea of adding a third gender option to federal IDs. i guess you gotta have some tiny policies in there too with the big ones for maximum efficiency. it is possible this raises questions about her history of LGBT policy, though, which is probably not something that she wants to litigate because it's not the best.

Everybody else

• people who joined the race this week: Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts representative
• people who did not join the race this week: Terry McAuliffe

Opinion/Ideology-driven

• from the Guardian: Joe Biden is the ultimate centrist Democrat. Is that a liability or strength?. this oped mostly focuses on whether or not biden's whole centrism thing is actually good, or whether or not it's just going to end up splitting the party now that biden is in the race. this is a legitimate question, and i'm not sure anybody really knows how it's going to shake out.

• from NBC News: Cory Booker wants to be the nicest Democrat running for president. But his own past makes that difficult.. this one, i think i'll just quote directly since the last paragraph kinda summarizes the whole thing:

For voters, Booker's Wall Street ties and his T-Bone stories are part of the same problem: Authenticity. Can you be a liberal Democratic willing to take on billionaires, entrenched corporations and the deregulation unleashed by the Trump Administration after years of cozying up to Wall Street and pharmaceutical donors? Can you address the racial divides in America — not just what's in people's hearts, but the problems of differential education, mass incarceration and inequality of opportunity — if you can't bring yourself to call Trump a racist? And can you be trusted to tell the truth of why you've arrived at your liberal politics if you made up a T-Bone to explain to white people a cartoon version of black intergenerational trauma?

• from NBC News: Kamala Harris' candidacy requires a nuanced debate about her record, race and gender. Is the left ready?. this op-ed focuses on the issue of parsing out where harris is being actually held accountable for things she genuinely took a "bad" stance on, and where she's just being held to a standard that nobody would expect of a non-minority, non-female candidate. it's a tough question, of course, and it's also not exactly one you can have with soundbites and hashtags--but that's probably not going to stop people from continuing to do that.

• from NBC News: Bernie Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign will face the scrutiny Clinton got in 2016. Here's what voters missed.. this op-ed mostly focuses on the not-exactly-perfect record of voting and policy positions of bernie sanders prior to the 2016 election, and how that will likely come to the forefront this time around since it was barely focused on in 2016 and sanders wasn't running against literally 20 other people.

• from NBC News: Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton and the sexist hypocrisy of the 'likability' media narrative. Here we go again.. this op-ed is not necessarily about elizabeth warren in the same way the other op-eds are about candidates--rather, it's more of a piece that uses warren as an example of how the standard of "likability" that tends to be assigned to female candidates is kinda arbitrary and usually bullshit, and how the narrative of warren's candidacy has changed as she's gone from a sort of outsider-looking-in to a near frontrunner.

• finally, from NBC News: Elizabeth Warren's ideas blow rival 2020 Democrats away. Her public lands plan is no exception.. this other warren op-ed is more candidate focused, and basically makes the case that warren's plans are super good and that literally no other candidate comes close to having policy like it.

anyways, feel free to as always contribute other interesting articles you stumble across, or comment on some of the ones up there.

Hello, Music Makers.

What are you all working on? Any pieces/tracks you've created that you're particularly proud of? Any part of your process that warrants special mention? Any part of your process that is particularly dull?

Let it rip.

LAFC @ Vancouver
RSL @ FC Cincinnati
MNUFC @ Toronto FC
Houston @ LA Galaxy
Colorado @ Chicago
Montreal @ Philadelphia
Vancouver @ Orlando
FC Dallas @ Atlanta
Portland @ Columbus
NYRB @ New England
SKC @ San Jose
NYCFC @ DC United
Seattle @ LAFC

week four is upon us because i have simply run out of space to put links in. i have a literal page of links that comprise today's post, and that suggests to me it's probably time to make another one of these. the [LONGFORM] tag continues (although this week there are no longform pieces) and once again, i will also be sorting by candidate--but also with a Fundraising header today since reporting deadlines came yesterday and there are a lot of pieces on that, and a Polling header since we have a few polls going now.

the usual note: common sense should be able to generally dictate what does and does not get posted in this thread. if it's big news or feels like big news, probably make it its own post instead of lobbing it in here. like the other weekly threads, this one is going to try to focus on things that are still discussion worthy, but wouldn't necessarily make good/unique/non-repetitive discussion starters as their own posts.

Week 1 thread • Week 2 thread • Week 3 thread

News

Fundraising

• from FiveThirtyEight: What First-Quarter Fundraising Can Tell Us About 2020. probably the seminal piece of fundraising reporting from the slate since it's 538, this article is pretty straightforward. in general, this means basically nothing for the actual 2020 election--but it means a lot for the primary, since fundraising is a decent barometer for energy and likability and suggests a candidate will be able to hold their own. 538's metrics suggest that sanders, warren, and harris, and gillibrand are punching well for their weight class and the primary itself, while beto, buttigieg, booker, and others are punching well for their weight class, but not necessarily the primary.

• from Vox: 7 winners from the first big presidential fundraising reports. Vox takes a slightly more subjective approach to their reporting than 538, but a similar story arises: they name their winners on actual fundraising as sanders, harris, warren, and buttigieg. interestingly, they also name biden a winner because nobody did truly "exceptional" in fundraising in their view which keeps his path slightly open; john delaney's consultants get an amusing mention for shaking him dry of money.

• from NBC News: Six things we've learned from the 2020 candidates' fundraising reports. NBC News gives raw numbers on contributions, cash on hand, burn rate, so if you're curious about the numbers themselves, this is your source. as far as analysis, NBC crowns the two big winners as sanders and o'rourke on their fundraising totals, mostly on their average daily amount raised (sanders 445k over 41 days; o'rourke 520k over 18 days). they note that most of the senators in the race are doing respectably (although outside of kamala this is partly because of campaign transfers), and also think castro is the big loser with a paltry 1.1 million raised, less than some of the minor candidates like yang and marianne williamson.

Polling

• from Emerson, a B+ pollster on 538's pollster rankings: April National Poll: Bernie Takes Lead for Democratic Nomination, Mayor Pete On The Move

A new national Emerson poll, including 20 Democratic candidates for President, found Senator Bernie Sanders ahead of the pack with 29%, followed by former Vice President Joe Biden at 24%. They were followed by Mayor Pete Buttigieg at 9%, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke and Senator Kamala Harris at 8%, and Senator Elizabeth Warren at 7%. Entrepreneur Andrew Yang and former HUD secretary Julian Castro were at 3%. The poll was conducted April 11-14 of Democratic Primary voters with a subset of n=356, +/- 5.2%.

• from Morning Consult, a B- pollster on 538's pollster rankings: April 15 Morning Consult Poll (National & Early Primary States) [PDF warning!]

Joe Biden on 31%, Bernie Sanders on 23%, Kamala Harris on 9%, Beto O'Rourke on 8%, Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg on 7%, Corey Booker on 4%. All others below 3%. n=5,000, +/- 1%.

Buttigieg ticks up again, and now has 7% of the Democratic primary vote share. This is the fourth straight week his vote share has increased. High income earners in particular are warming to Buttigieg: in the last six weeks, his vote share among Democratic primary voters earning more than $100k has risen from 1% to 11%. Bernie Sanders holds a strong lead with young voters: 41% of 18-29 year-old women and 39% of 18-29 year-old men support Sanders as their first choice. Andrew Yang lands in 5th place with 18-29 year-old men, with 5% of the vote.

If Biden doesn’t run, Sanders has the most to gain. A projection based on second choice vote shows that Sanders would pick up 12 points if Biden opts not to run, enough to give him a 23 point first place lead.

• from Monmouth University, an A+ pollster on 538's pollster rankings: April 11 Iowa Poll: Biden leads pack in Iowa; beating Trump a priority for caucusgoers

In a field of 24 announced and potential candidates, Biden holds the lead with 27% support among Democratic voters who are likely to attend the Iowa caucuses in February. He is followed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (16%), South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg (9%), Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren (7%), California Sen. Kamala Harris (7%), former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke (6%), Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar (4%), New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker (3%), and former cabinet secretary Julián Castro (2%). Former Maryland Rep. John Delaney, New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan, California Rep. Eric Swalwell, and entrepreneur Andrew Yang each receive 1% support from likely caucusgoers. The remaining 10 candidates earn less than 1% or were not chosen by any respondents in the poll.

Bernie Sanders

• from The Guardian: How Sanders left political wilderness to become leader of Democratic pack. this article focuses mostly on the rise of sanders as a figure and the ideas he has in the democratic party, and whether or not they can continue to grow or will hit a ceiling in the very near future. the difference could be crucial, obviously, given the number of people in the race and all the positions they could take which could scalp potential sanders voters.

• from The Daily Beast: Bernie’s Fox News Town Hall Was a Ratings Smash. More Dems May Follow Him There.
  . sanders's main coup over the past week was his big fox town hall, which by all accounts appears to have been a big success for him (although some would contest this as having enabled the network's absolutely shitty employees). this appears to have actually jarred some other democratic candidates into trying it for themselves--we'll see how that progresses.

• from Jacobin: Bernie 1, Fox 0: Bernie Sanders didn’t just face down Fox News and prevail — he called the bluff that underpins our whole two-party system.. for a more meta narrative on sanders's town hall and its apparent success mixed in with some analysis of the implications, jacobin has this article. (this is, like all jacobin articles, a leftist take and not a liberal one, so it does not spare the democratic party of criticism by any stretch of the word).

Cory Booker

• from Reuters: Booker launches 'Justice' tour, aiming for surge in U.S. presidential bid. cory booker ostensibly kicked off his middling campaign a few days ago, starting on a two-week whistle stop tour that'll see him around the country like the other candidates. booker is in a weird position, polling wise. he's not quite a frontrunner, but he's also not irrelevant (and he's probably siphoning votes from kamala, to be honest). theoretically, he has a path to the presidency, but i'm not entirely sure that the way he's trying to position himself is going to be particularly helpful in that end.

• from NBC News: Booker kicks off campaign in hometown of Newark, promises to stay above the fray. NBC News has a more policy-focused article on booker's campaign launch: "Democratic ideals of health care for all, LGBTQ rights, economic equality and a pathway to citizenship for immigrants" among other things. he's also trying to embrace civility politics, it would seem. how well that works for him remains to be seen, but i would bet on him staying about where he is for the time being.

• from Buzzfeed News: Cory Booker’s Campaign Hasn’t Gotten The Candidate’s Memo On His Message Of Urgency. the booker campaign as a whole is also fighting a battle of contradictory messaging: booker is an energetic candidate--his campaign, however, is very much a slow and steady affair. the booker campaign in general seems to be admitting it won't be able to keep the pace of the frontrunners, and so instead of fighting a battle it knows it can't win, it'll instead sit back and try and gain institutional backing that will benefit booker's chances in the likely event that the primary doesn't end with a presumtive nominee. it's an interesting strategy (it probably will not work, though). there's also some additional policy in this article that NBC and Reuters don't touch on, if you're curious about that.

Pete Buttigieg

• from The Guardian: Does everyone really love Mayor Pete? His home town has some answers. pete buttigieg's record and history as south bend, indiana's mayor is getting some traction in the media this week (as you'll see from some of the other articles in this section), and this is no exception. this article focuses mostly on the favorable reception south bender have toward both buttigieg and his candidacy, and the good things that his mayorship did for the city.

• from NPR: Pete Buttigieg Helped Transform South Bend As Mayor, But Some Feel Left Out. contrast NPR, which has this article (similar to last week's Buzzfeed article) on the people who are less thrilled with buttigieg's tenure as mayor and his efforts to win the presidency, and the greater context they place buttigieg in.

• from Slate: The Mayor Who Wants to Be President: Pete Buttigieg is a long shot. But so was Donald Trump.. this is the transcript of an interview that one of slate's podcasts did with pete buttigieg about a week ago, mostly focusing on his political history and policy issues but also on some of buttigieg's personal history like coming out. probably a good place to start if you're unclear on who he is or what he says he stands for.

• from Reuters: Millennial 'Mayor Pete' Buttigieg makes case for U.S. presidency. this small article mostly focuses on buttigieg's formal launching of his campaign, which occurred a few days ago. we have a tildes thread on this, so i feel like there's not much to be said here that hasn't already been said there.

• from Vox: Pete Buttigieg, Barack Obama, and the psychology of liberalism. this article basically puts into context one of the ways buttigieg seems to be trying to position himself and his campaign, and there's not a whole lot more to be said about it. this article is one of those ones that really only makes sense if you read it, and trying to explain it back to people just makes it a bit confusing all around, so if you're curious about this one, just read it.

Kamala Harris

• from Reuters: Kamala Harris carves distinct early-state path in her 2020 White House bid. the kamala harris path to the white house probably does not involve many of the early states necessarily, but that has not stopped harris from stumping in places like iowa and south carolina extensively in the past few weeks. harris would probably be the frontrunner if she were to do very well in the early states; california will be favorable to her, you would think, and comes very early in the 2020 primary cycle (early march) this year relative to where it fell in 2016.

• from CBS News: Kamala Harris releases 15 years of tax returns. harris is also the frontrunner in this weird litmus test democrats have going on. will anyone upstage her on this? probably not. is it important? probably not. but here you go, if you wanted to know what her tax returns are like.

Everybody else

• from CNN: Seven takeaways from CNN's town halls with Andrew Yang and Marianne Williamson. andrew yang and marianne williamson both got town halls, and both of them are pretty interesting people when you actually press them on issues instead of having them shoot things into the wind without needing to really back them up. williamson is arguably the more interesting of the two, but really i think you'll find some of what CNN took away here from the both of them as pretty novel.

• from FiveThirtyEight: Can Julian Castro Rally Latino Voters?. 538 poses this question--to which the answer seems to currently be no by most accounts. to be clear he's positioning himself pretty well with latino voters, but his problem isn't really latino voters so much as everybody else. he does quite badly with all non-latino demographics, to put it lightly, and him getting the latino vote only really matters if he can do well with other demographics on top of that. maybe he'll turn it around, but judging by his fundraising numbers, i think we might already be able to relegate him to the bin with yang and williamson and the other 'basically novelty' candidates

General Policy

• from CBS News: Democratic presidential candidates stay vague on immigration. despite what you might think based on how much of an issue it's been, julian castro is literally the only democrat so far to have a particularly detailed immigration policy plan. most candidates thus far have been pretty quiet on the subject, although i'm sure you can at least guess how most of them would structure an immigration plan. we'll probably see some be rolled out later on in the primary cycle as the race actually gets going, but at least for now this is the one thing castro can pride himself on that other candidates cannot.

• from NPR: Democratic Candidates Are Releasing Tax Returns, Answering Big Questions For Voters. tax returns are a litmus test this year, and you can expect to see more of them in the future since most of the major candidates have either released them already or will do so at some point in the future. pretty straightforward.

Opinion/Ideology-driven

• from The Guardian: Elizabeth Warren is the intellectual powerhouse of the Democratic party. this op-ed mostly focuses on warren's extensive policy proposals and how, in moira donegan's view, this makes warren the aforementioned intellectual powerhouse of the democratic party. this is not wrong--warren is probably far and away the most policy-driven candidate so far in the campaign--but also it's not necessarily indicative of anything voters want. in the last election, hillary clinton had a pretty extensive set of policies, to which voters kindly responded by electing our non-clinton president. it does remain to be seen if they're more kind to warren, or if her ideas get picked up by other people in the race.

• from The Guardian: Buttigieg is the Democrats' flavour of the month. Just don't ask what he stands for. nathan robinson hammers home one of the bigger criticisms of pete buttigieg in this op-ed, namely that nobody seems to know what he really stands for and he very much reeks of a "flavor of the month" democrat who is going to peter out at some point when the novelty wears off. robinson is actually pretty brutal to buttigieg here, to a point where i think i'm just going to quote him to give you an example of how not-sparing this op-ed is:

But politics shouldn’t be about people’s attributes, it should be about their values and actions. Buttigieg is a man with a lot of “gold stars” on his résumé, but why should anybody actually trust him to be on their side? (Amusingly enough, in his campaign book Shortest Way Home, Buttigieg describes an incident in which a voter asked him how he could prove that he wasn’t just another self-serving politician. Buttigieg couldn’t come up with an answer.) The available evidence of his character is thin. Has he spent a lifetime sticking up for working people? No, he worked at McKinsey before he entered politics. Has he taken courageous moral stands? No: while Gary, Indiana, declared itself a sanctuary city in response to Donald Trump’s immigration policies, Buttigieg’s city of South Bend did not.

yeah.

• from The Guardian: How wide is Bernie Sanders' appeal? This cheering Fox News audience is a clue. bhaskar sunkara has another op-ed this week about the sanders fox news town hall, which he uses as proof that sanders has more widespread appeal than people give him credit for. considering that you're already seeing other candidates try and arrange similar plans, there's probably something to be said about whether or not that also applies to other candidates and the modern democratic message, too. (also, it does seem somewhat weird that candidates don't do this more often considering how much bipartisanship gets played up.)

• and lastly, from NBC News: Fox News, Bernie Sanders and the value of discomfort. steve krakauer on the other hand argues a more pragmatic viewpoint: sanders going on fox news for the town hall was good for both himself but also for fox news because it pierced the filter bubbles that exist in modern politics, and allowed crosspollination of viewpoints that don't normally do so.

anyways, feel free to as always contribute other interesting articles you stumble across, or comment on some of the ones up there.

Vancouver @ Chicago
Columbus @ Montreal
San Jose @ Houston
Toronto @ Seattle
NYCFC @ MNUFC
Atlanta @ New England
Portland @ FC Dallas
Orlando @ Real Salt Lake
DC United @ Colorado
Philadelphia @ LA Galaxy
FC Cincinnati @ LAFC
NYRB @ Sportland Kansas City

week three brings a deluge of essays and pieces long enough that i'm going to break this week down by the candidate. news today is sorted by candidate, while opinion will remain unsorted for now since there's not much going on there worth talking about. i've also, for clarity's sake, added a [LONGFORM] note to the longer pieces in this slate for those of you on a time crunch.

the usual note: common sense should be able to generally dictate what does and does not get posted in this thread. if it's big news or feels like big news, probably make it its own post instead of lobbing it in here. like the other weekly threads, this one is going to try to focus on things that are still discussion worthy, but wouldn't necessarily make good/unique/non-repetitive discussion starters as their own posts.

Week 1 thread • Week 2 thread

News

Bernie Sanders

• from the Huffington Post: Bernie Sanders Says Felons Should Be Able To Vote While In Prison. bernie sanders called for the end of felony disenfranchisement over the week, which is a thing that almost all states do currently in some form. iowa in particular has possibly the most severe such law, something that the republican governor kim reynolds has been (unsuccessfully) trying to change, making it a fairly large issue there. this currently is not a litmus test for the Democratic Party, but don't expect it to go away, because the ACLU is pushing for candidates to adopt it as a plank.

• from Jacobin: Votes For All. for a leftist take on the above, Jacobin has you covered. this article mostly focuses on the historical push by socialist and socialist-adjacent movements in america to do away with felony disenfranchisement and achieve universal suffrage, and sanders in that broader context.

• from Slate: The Favorite: Can Bernie Sanders finally start acting like the one thing he’s never been?. slate mostly focuses on sanders's curious status as a genuine goliath in this race here, in contrast to the underdog status which has characterized basically the entirety of his political career previously. in many respects, this is unprecedented territory for sanders, and it is a genuine question whether he'll be able to adapt to that fact (or if he'll need to at all).

• from TIME: Sen. Bernie Sanders Unveils New 'Medicare for All' Plan With Support From Some 2020 Rivals. policy wise, sanders unveiled his idea of what medicare for all looks like. this appears to have the support of gillibrand, warren, booker, and harris, who signed on to it (although they've also signed on to less things like a public option), so at least for now, you could probably say it's the leading healthcare reform option on the table.

Pete Buttigieg

• from CBS News and TIME: Buttigieg challenges Pence on LGBTQ rights: "Your quarrel is with my creator"; Pete Buttigieg Criticizes Vice President Pence in Speech About LGBTQ Rights: 'Your Quarrel, Sir, Is With My Creator'. buttigieg is the first person i'm aware of to take shots at either of trump or pence besides sanders, who has led with it the whole of his campaign so far. it's not surprising that the inflection point here is LGBT rights--buttigieg is gay, obviously--but for a presidential campaign, this is fairly unprecedented.

• from NBC News: Pence: Buttigieg is attacking my faith to stand out in 2020 crowd. pence responded to buttigieg's remarks this morning by the way and basically called it a political ploy. i suspect this is not the last we will hear of this particular issue between the two.

• from Slate: How Astonishing Is Mayor Pete’s Rise?. slate has an article on the meteoric rise of buttigieg--although it does note that it's not all roses for buttigieg, who is still only polling about as well as cory booker and amy klobuchar despite basically becoming a media golden boy in the past few weeks. still, buttigieg is doing an order of magnitude better than you'd expect of someone whose mayorship presided over a city of a little over 100,000 people. (compare this guardian article which i highlighted in the last thread).

• from Buzzfeed News: [LONGFORM] What Happened When Pete Buttigieg Tore Down Houses In Black And Latino South Bend. of course, pete also has skeletons which are bound to come out, and his redevelopment plans in south bend probably count as those. officially they were successful, but some people do (understandably) contend that came at the cost of people and essentially led to gentrification in parts of south bend. whether that's a knock on him or just the cost of doing business as mayor of a rust belt city, i leave to you.

Kamala Harris

• from The Atlantic: [LONGFORM] Kamala Harris Takes Her Shot. this is a pretty comprehensive piece on harris, who made a big splash early but is now mostly trying to tread water without losing further ground to bernie and biden or giving up position to warren, buttigieg, or o'rourke. it's humanizing, but it also covers a lot of the criticisms and contradictions of harris's political history, and some of the nagging questions surrounding her political positions as she bids for the white house. if you're curious about or unfamiliar of what some of those criticisms people often launch at her are, this piece is probably for you.

• from Buzzfeed News: Kamala Harris Wants Her Teacher Pay Raise Proposal To Bring Young Black Americans To The Profession — And To Her Campaign. as far as policy, harris has been staking her wagon to teachers in the form of pay raises. those of you who pay attention to the news might have heard her bring this up previously, as it's been an early feature of her campaign so far. it'll be interesting to see if other people take up the beat if she finds success with this issue--so far nobody really has, explicitly speaking, which might be because it's gotten relatively little attention.

Everybody else

• from TIME: California Rep. Eric Swalwell Announces Candidacy for the 2020 Presidential Race. just in case the race wasn't crowded enough for you, eric swalwell decided to become "significant" candidate number 19 in the clowncar of a race that this is. i have no idea what he's running on or what he's angling himself to be, i'm afraid, but i'm sure CBS has it over at the 2020 contenders page.

• from Dissent Magazine: [LONGFORM] Yang Gang Education: If Andrew Yang’s fans are this excited about UBI, imagine how they’ll feel when they learn what socialism can do for them.. this piece is a fairly straightforward critique from the left of andrew yang's UBI proposal and some of the problems that will likely inhibit it from doing what yang wants it to do; however, it's also a general discussion of yang's supporter base and how their support for him is perhaps indicative of receptiveness to more leftist ideas than just UBI.

• from NBC News: Warren targets big business with $1 trillion 'profits' tax. warren has remained mostly on the policy beat so far in her campaign, and this is just the latest of the big sweeping policies she's seeking to sell to the american public. in case you've missed out on her other big policies, see her WaPo op-ed on her proposed Corporate Executive Accountability Act, and her Medium post on her proposed farming policy.

• from Vox: Kirsten Gillibrand used to have moderate positions on immigration and guns. Voters want to know why she’s changed.. kirsten gillibrand is running a pretty sleepy campaign so far, of which this might be the biggest recent headline. she's repositioned herself a bit in the trump era, and she's currently the senator who votes with him least often according to 538, but previously she's been a more moderate voice in congress. people haven't let that slide, and it does suggest her efforts to sell herself as the "resistance" candidate probably aren't helping her campaign much. maybe things will change, but things aren't looking great for her so far.

• from the Huffington Post: Senator Cory Booker Announces He’ll Offer Bill To Study Potential Reparations. cory booker is pushing the reparations litmus test into some form of actual legislative action, signalling that we're probably going to have that become a wedge issue in this primary on top of some of the other stuff. that'll be a fun conversation.

• from the Huffington Post: Amy Klobuchar Says She’s Raised More Than $5.2 Million For Her Presidential Campaign. amy klobuchar's fundraising numbers are about where booker was, so behind beto, sanders, harris, and buttigieg. given where she's polling, that's probably about what you'd expect. there will definitely no shortage of money in this primary.

• finally, from The Atlantic: Mike Gravel’s Plan to Rock the Democratic Primary. those of you who read the first week of this may remember the Buzzfeed News piece on mike gravel's then newly-launched campaign to make the democratic primary stage. he might not make it, but so far it's not for lack of trying--his campaign has 8,000 donors, and the american left is putting a decent amount of weight behind him so far. i think most of us can at least agree it'd be pretty entertaining to see him on stage, so on some level i do hope he makes it.

Opinion/Ideology-driven

• from In These Times: The Case for Using Ranked Choice Voting in the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primaries. this article makes the case for the primaries using ranked choice voting which, to be honest, would probably really help when there are literally going to be like sixteen people in iowa next year (especially given the fact that the democratic party has a 15% popular vote threshold for attaining any delegates in a state). this will definitely not happen this year, but maybe we'll see movement in the future toward something like RCV being used.

• from The Week: The Democratic Party Is Not Going Nuts. It's Coming to Its Senses.. this piece by The Week puts foward the argument that the lurch to the left by the Democratic Party isn't some sort of weird mirroring of the lurch to the right in the GOP, but rather the Democratic Party realizing that centrism isn't really what people want. whether or not that's an accurate assessment, i'll leave to you.

• finally, from The Guardian: Barack Obama is stuck in the past. He represents the old Democratic party. this piece is by bhaskar sunkara, who you may know as one of the figureheads of Jacobin. his case here is mostly that obama's remarks last week about cautioning the party to not become a circular firing squad are motivated more by his desire to continue to hold power within the party than by genuine desire to see the party succeed. again, whether or not that's an accurate assessment, i'll leave to you.

anyways, feel free to as always contribute other interesting articles you stumble across, or comment on some of the ones up there.

edit: some minor grammar stuff

after some delay, we're back with the second week of this thread as we chug headlong into what will probably be a shitshow of a primary and an even bigger shitshow of an election. this is going to be longer than the last one, because there's been quite a bit going on, and i'm going to split the actual news from pieces that are either opinion or ideologically driven.

as with the previous thread, common sense should be able to generally dictate what does and does not get posted in this thread. if it's big news or feels like big news, probably make it its own post instead of lobbing it in here. like the other weekly threads, this one is going to try to focus on things that are still discussion worthy, but wouldn't necessarily make good/unique/non-repetitive discussion starters as their own posts.

Week 1 thread

News

from CBS - The 2020 contenders. this is probably one of the most comprehensive rundowns of who exactly all of these people are, what they stand for, are what their qualifications are. (it also demonstrates what an absolute clown car of a race this is already, but that's another thing). if you're shopping around for a candidate in the democratic primary to support, this might be a good place to start.

from FiveThirtyEight - What The Potential 2020 Candidates Are Doing And Saying, Vol. 13. in case you were curious what all of these people scurrying around the country were up to this week, 538 has you covered. of note are the whistlestop tours that sanders, o'rourke, yang, and harris are going on in iowa, as well as the ones gillibrand, booker, and currently speculative candidate michael bennet (the democratic senator from colorado and just-diagnosed pancreatic cancer victim) are going on in new england.

from NPR - Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan Joins 2020 Race With A Populist Pitch To Blue-Collar Voters. the clown car of a primary continues to grow with tim ryan's announcement. tim ryan, for the unaware, is a democratic congressman from ohio who currently sits in a district that voted D+6 in the last election, but is probably quickly sprinting to the right along with most of ohio. whether this is him trying to get ahead of what will probably be a hard seat to hold on to or him just being opportunistic, i dunno, but he's a fringe candidate to say the least. i'd be surprised if he made the debates, and he'll likely retain his seat since ohio is a state that allows you to run for two offices at the same time.

from The Hill - Swalwell running for White House on gun control: report. incidentally, we should also know by next week whether or not the primary will gain another member in representative eric swalwell (rep for california's 15th congressional district), who appears to be angling himself as the gun control candidate. for those of you keeping track, this will make him candidate number 19 if he does run (20, if you count ojeda before he withdrew). we're probably on track for at least 20 declared candidates, seeing as biden is presumably going to announce at some point.

from NPR - Sanders Tops Democratic Fundraising As O'Rourke, Harris And Buttigieg Draw Big Sums. fundraising is a very large part of the early stages of the race, and so far it's been a bonanza of cash for the frontrunners. sanders hauled in 18 million, harris hauled in 12 million, o'rourke 9.4 million, and buttigieg 7 million among others. smaller candidates will probably be releasing their numbers in the next few days or, if they don't, we'll see them on april 15th.

from Buzzfeed News - Andrew Yang Is Finding New Ways To Get Attention Offline. support for andrew yang is largely an internet phenomenon, but that hasn't stopped yang from campaigning like he isn't. we'll see if it pays off for him (he's seemingly in a weird middle ground between the second-tier of viable candidates and the ones that are basically guaranteed to get 1% in iowa and drop out), but i suppose actually being in front of the media can't really hurt him right now.

from Buzzfeed News - Joe Biden Says He'll Be "More Mindful" About Personal Space After Allegations Of Inappropriate Contact. if you've paid any attention to the news, you've probably seen the raking of joe biden recently for his history of being touchy-feely toward people who don't necessarily want it. this is his first personal acknowledgement of that, and while we'll have to see how it goes over, i don't think this is the last you'll be hearing of that particular subplot.

from The Guardian - Why the populist wave is setting the tone for Democratic candidates. this is a pretty straightforward piece on the undercurrent of populism--or the decided lack thereof--in the campaigns of many of these candidates on the campaign trail. expect to see this label come up a lot now that it isn't only sanders who it gets applied to.

Opinion/Ideology-driven

from Vox - Howard Schultz hasn’t gotten into policy specifics. Here are 4 ideas from women candidates who have. one of the early issues people are taking with the media so far in reporting on the primary is the decided lack of attention given to the female candidates (to which there may or may not be merit based on 538's tracking of candidate mentions). enter vox, then, with this piece highlighting some of the policy proposals they have. i could have probably categorized this under news, but it feels more like an opinion piece than not, so i'll leave it under this subheading.

from The Guardian - Democrats need a 2020 candidate who inspires. Joe Biden isn't it. biden is a fairly popular democrat both inside and outside of the party, but whether that lasts and whether or not people think he's worth voting for is a different story. there are plenty of people who have criticisms of biden, and this op-ed goes into a few of those criticisms. they're probably familiar to you if you've gone anywhere biden gets discussed, and whether or not they'll tank him if he runs remains to be seen.

from Slate - In a Diverse Candidate Field, How Is Pete Buttigieg’s Sexuality Factoring Into His Appeal? and A Conversation About Pete Buttigieg, Identity, and Diversity in the 2020 Race. these two pieces on buttigieg have been slightly controversial over the past week in their point that buttigieg, gay man as he is, doesn't really get treated like a gay man because he's also white and well off and shares more in common with sanders and o'rourke than any of the female or minority candidates. that's of course something you can probably dispute, but it's an interesting discussion to have (which is probably why there's a follow-up piece in the first place).

lastly and also from Slate - Elizabeth Warren’s Proposal to Imprison More Corporate Executives Is a Bad Idea. this article makes the case for the misguidedness of one of warren's proposals (which you can find here and also find her op-ed about here). on premise i personally agree, but i do find it curious that this objection comes when it's about corporate executives, seeing as corporate executives aren't exactly immutably corporate executives and they're also not a large portion of the population. i dunno, food for thought.

anyways, feel free to as always contribute other interesting articles you stumble across, or comment on some of the ones up there.

LA Galaxy @ Vancouver Whitecaps
Montreal @ NYCFC
LAFC @ DC United
Chicago Fire @ Toronto FC
MNUFC @ New York Red Bulls
New England Revolution @ Columbus Crew
Colorado Rapids @ Orlando City SC
FC Dallas @ Philadelphia Union
Portland Timbers @ San Jose Earthquakes
Real Salt Lake @ Seattle Sounders
Sporting Kansas City @ FC Cincinnati

Personally, free speech to me means that while platforms like Facebook and YouTube are not required to host it, if they so choose to host it they should be able to do so. Speech should not be restricted because it is offensive or because it is viewed as immoral. This applies doubly so to political speech, which terrorism is the most extreme form.

NYCFC @ Toronto FC
NYRB @ Chicago Fire
MNUFC @ New England
Montreal @ Sporting Kansas City
LAFC @ San Jose
Philadelphia Union @ FC Cincinnati
Atlanta United @ Columbus Crew
Houston Dynamo @ Colorado Rapids
FC Dallas @ Real Salt Lake
Seattle Sounders @ Vancouver Whitecaps
DC United @ Orlando City
Portland Timbers @ LA Galaxy

in the interest of trying to slightly curtail the domination of politics in ~news for people who don't care for it while also consolidating discussion for people who potentially do, i think we should try one of those weekly threads that's so hip and popular on the rest of tildes, so here we go: this is a test run of a weekly thread on 2020 presidential news/analysis/etc. it's probably not going to get any lighter from here, news wise, so it might pay to establish a recurring topic like this before the media really gets rolling with election coverage (and potentially before ~news becomes a deluge of 2020 topics).

i think common sense should be able to generally dictate what does and does not get posted in this thread if it works out, so i guess i'll just say: if it's big news or feels like big news, probably make it its own post instead of lobbing it in here. like the other weekly threads, this one is going to try to focus on things that are still discussion worthy, but wouldn't necessarily make good/unique/non-repetitive discussion starters as their own posts.

leading off (and demonstrating that there really is going to be no dearth of 2020 primary and election news about this despite this week being pretty quiet on that front):

from NBC - Why some Democrats say: Don't sleep on 'Mayor Pete' Buttigieg. buttigieg is a pretty small candidate in a field of big names, but that hasn't put the damper on people's optimism for him as this NBC piece shows. i personally don't think he's got the runway necessary for takeoff, but with the debates, who knows. it might be that the debates stratify the field even more than it's already stratified--or it might be that they level it out a bit, to the benefit of people like buttigieg

from Buzzfeed - The Romance Of Mayor Pete In The Season Of Scam. another piece on buttigieg. this one is a bit light on substance and is basically an opinion piece, but if you're curious about buttigieg's qualifications you might be interested in it.

from Heavy - Bernie Sanders’ Los Angeles Rally Draws So Many, Overflow Crowd Fills City Hall Steps Across the Street [PHOTOS]. bernie sanders made the second of three stops in california yesterday, and he drew a pretty major crowd that's currently estimated at around 15k--and could potentially be as high as 20k or 25k, depending on the setup of the venue. his stop the day before was in san diego where he drew a crowd of about 6,400, and today he'll be in san francisco, which could lead to an early messaging and marketing win if he can draw a comparable crowd to kamala harris's kickoff in oakland (which drew 20k).

from The Guardian - The B-Team: are Beto, Biden and Bernie the best Democrats can offer?. i'll let this one present itself: "...But three of the top-polling candidates for 2020 so far are white men: Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, O’Rourke and former vice-president Joe Biden, who has not even declared his candidacy. Does that present a problem?" one of the big criticisms of the democratic party is that, even as it diversifies its slate of candidates across the board, its biggest hitters generally remain white and male, especially in this presidential election. whether or not that's a particularly valid criticism, i'll leave up to you.

from POLITICO - Harris and O'Rourke go straight for each other's strongholds. sanders wasn't the only one buzzing around this week: o'rourke and harris have both been on tours of their own in states that will be pretty instrumental to the path of any democrat that wants to win the nomination. o'rourke, you may remember (tildes discussion), is the current day-one fundraising leader, and it appears we now actually have his individual donor numbers now (112,000, average donation of $55). so far, he doesn't appear to have parlayed that into particularly large crowd sizes (and outside of her campaign launch, harris hasn't really either) but we're still very early on, so i anticipate as their campaigns ramp up they'll start pulling larger numbers.

from NBC - Beto O'Rourke could be a threat — to Biden on his right and Sanders on his left. this article, as you can probably guess by its title, mostly focuses on how beto is trying to position himself in the primary, but also how some of the people he appeals to feel about his candidacy and why they support him.

lastly, from NPR - Small Donors Hold The Key To Campaign Buzz And The Democrats' Debate Stage. this NPR article on push by democrats to incentivize campaigns to build up their small donor bases in the leadup to 2020. the democrats have pretty much always been the undisputed champions of small-donor politics since the internet became a significant player in american politics, mostly on the back of things like actblue. nevertheless, there are still a lot of places they've been looking to improve (and it's really only a matter of time before republicans build infrastructure of their own), so it makes sense that they're really trying to shore up that advantage where they can while they can.

this isn't even every article that i could have tossed on here, but i've already been working on this post for like an hour, so i think that'll suffice for now. feel free to contribute other interesting articles or comment on some of the ones up there.

I see this a lot on the internet these days. The phrase "just because [some agreed-upon statement], it doesn't mean that [contested statement]."

That's fine when used correctly, but I've seen a lot of cases where it's used in a questionable way and people just jump on board with the phrase anyway.

I saw it again today in a conversation about video games, and one game in particular that everybody loves to hate. Someone said "I enjoy this game though," and someone else said "Just because you enjoy a game doesn't mean it's good."

Now, the impulse is to agree with the second statement because agreeing that there might be hidden subtlety in a matter is almost always safe, and nearly everyone involved in the conversation upvoted/reacted positively to that statement.

But the statement was really used to say "your opinion is wrong because there might be hidden subtleties that make me right," which seems like a fallacious position to me, or at least a pretty meaningless one. And when you stop to think about what was said, you realize that in fact, enjoying a video game might indeed be the most important, if not the only, metric in assessing its quality.

But the inclination to agree with anyone using the "just because, doesn't mean" format is definitely there I think. I'm not sure if that falls under the category of some other identifiable fallacy or not, but I thought I'd see what others thought.

Seattle Sounders @ Chicago Fire
FC Dallas @ Columbus Crew
Vancouver Whitecaps @ Houston Dynamo
San Jose Earthquakes @ New York Red Bulls
Montreal Impact @ Orlando City SC
Real Salt Lake @ DC United
Minnesota United FC @ LA Galaxy
Los Angeles FC @ New York City FC
Portland Timbers @ FC Cincinnati
Philadelphia Union @ Atlanta United FC
New England Revolution @ Toronto FC
Sporting Kansas City @ Colorado Rapids

An undoubtedly horrific subreddit that always seemed to comply with reddit TOS and the admins has been banned, probably related to the NZ shooting video that was in the subreddit yesterday until it was taken down by admins. Looks like they're getting ahead of MSM discovering that this shit exists on the site?

Will add any updates here.

r/gore is gone as well.

From @nacho:

It's not ahead of controversy, it's in response to the Reuters article calling out /r/watchpeopledie.

Members of a group called “watchpeopledie” on internet discussion board Reddit, for example, discussed how to share the footage even as the website took steps to limit its spread.

Reddit - which has over 20 investors, including Conde Nast owner Advance Publications - said it was actively monitoring the situation in New Zealand.

“Any content containing links to the video stream are being removed in accordance with our site-wide policy,” it said.

So, a little background, my profession is technical writing. I want to write a novel but I'm struggling a little with getting the creative side of my brain going. Technical writing seems to further inhibit my creativity with all its rules.

I'm looking into local writers' workshops but they're all full at the moment. In the meantime, I was wondering if anyone here has any advice for exercises or things I could do to stimulate my creativity and free my mind from all the rules of technical writing. Thoughts?

I have an amazon server that I use to host my email and my simple website. I'm considering setting a vpn up on it, but I'm not sure if it's worth it. Would my data be as secure as with 3rd party vpns? Would Amazon see my traffic? It seems like if I go this route, anything that I do could be traced back to me, because the see the ip of my server and than ask amazon who owns it.

It's a simple question, or is it? How would you measure best? Complexity? Realism? Creativity? Detail?

I think it's fairly obvious that Tolkien has set the gold standard of all worldbuilding, but more recent authors like GRRM, Brandon Sanderson and JKR or the late Terry Pratchett have also created beloved worlds.

Some, like GRRM, are apparently more interested in complex worldbuilding itself rather than finishing their novels while others like JKR use the worlds more as a window dressing without keeping it fairly consistent. Is it alright if the Wizarding World is inconsistent if it serves the plot? How complex can Westeros become before it gets in the way of the story?

I think that GRRM and JKR are both extremes on the spectrum. When reading The Song of Ice and Fire, I felt like GRRM needed a proper editor to reign him in while JKR managed to build a fantastical world in 7 books which, upon closer inspection, makes no sense. On the other hand you have Terry Pratchett, who with the Discworld was clearly more interested in creating a parody of the real world, but still managed to make it very interesting and unique.

Thoughts?

Orlando City @ Chicago Fire
Columbus Crew @ New England Revolution
LA Galaxy @ FC Dallas
Montreal Impact @ Houston Dynamo
Vancouver Whitecaps @ Real Salt Lake
Minnesota United FC @ San Jose Earthquakes
Philadelphia Union @ Sporting Kansas City
Colorado Rapids @ Seattle Sounders
DC United @ New York City FC
FC Cincinnati @ Atlanta United
Portland Timbers @ LAFC

A list of matches for the week:

Toronto FC @ Philadelphia Union
New York City FC @ Orlando City FC
New York Red Bulls @ Columbus Crew
New England Revolution @ FC Dallas
Real Salt Lake @ Houston Dynamo
Portland Timbers @ Colorado Rapids
Minnesota United FC @ Vancouver Whitecaps
Chicago Fire @ LA Galaxy
FC Cincinnati @ Seattle Sounders
Montreal Impact @ San Jose Earthquakes
Atlanta United FC @ DC United
Sporting Kansas City @ Los Angeles FC

I just had an "Impossible" burger here in Vegas. I honestly couldn't believe it wasn't meat.

I'm not vegan or Vegetarian, but I eat it from time to time.

Any other good recommendations out there for good meat substitutes?

Good news: I'll be starting my new work in Cape Town, South Africa soon.

Not so good news: I have depression, and is currently on the antidepressant Sertraline.

My question would be the following:

How are prescriptions of the antidepressant handled in the South African health care system? Can I obtain, from either a GP or a Specialist, a sort of "long-standing" prescription, valid for (say) a few months, that will allow me to refill at pharmacies or dispensing GPs, without me having to be referred to a Specialist each time I need a refill? I understand that recurring examinations by a Specialist are likely necessary, but I don't expect those to be frequent, as my condition is fairly stable now.

Also a related question: I'm otherwise young and physically healthy, not affected by chronic conditions except depression. However, it seems that any health insurance schemes there that cover my condition would be rather expensive. Those policies typically include a broad coverage of chronic conditions, most of which I don't foresee a need. For one like myself, what suggestion would you give in terms of health insurance selection?

Many many thanks <3

Does anyone have any good recipes for bread?

My wife and I have been doing a lot of baking lately and I absolutely love making bread. It's easy (most of the work is sitting around waiting for it to rise/proof) and we've been making fresh sandwich bread to use in our lunches for the past few months.

I've found two recipes that I really like:

• BA's Best Sandwich Bread
• Simple Country Load

I have writing, prose and in verses, that I want to start submitting to magazines. I can't decide if I should use a pseudonym or not. My reasons for using one:

• I have problems with my name: it is ideologically loaded, people can tell my dad was a nationalist, which is an ideology I reject and oppose

• I feel like it would somehow good for me to distance myself a bit from my work, don't know why really

• I guess I am intimidated by potential failure a bit, so maybe "getting my feet wet" with a pseudonym could help me get over it.

But I also want to own my work, and feel like using a pseudonym with complete secrecy is a bit... cowardly, if I am totally honest. I consider using a pseudonym which I will publicly own later, but then, is there a point to it?

What do you think about it?

What is our policy about posting original contents (e.g. me submitting a blog post I wrote, which I just did a few minutes ago)?

IMO, if it is a personal blog, it should be okay, and not really different from submitting a text topic here. Especially if the blog is not tracking you.

cw: discussion of specific types of bigotry

I used to kind of think that Reddit's bigotry was relegated to the hate subs (TD and friends), and that you'd only find it if you went looking. But wow, Tildes has made me realise that it is EVERYWHERE.

Whenever I take a trip back to Reddit, I'm always blindsided by the fact ordinary threads about unrelated topics are so hateful. For example today I was on an r/movies thread about the new Terminator movie and there's queerphobia, transphobia and sexism all highly upvoted, right near the top of the comments. I guess being immersed in that environment for the last seven years of my life made me a bit desensitised to it, but now I'm horrified everytime.

Reddit is a far worse cesspit than I realised, I'm glad Tildes exists and I hope it keeps getting better and better. The internet needs it.

I feel like it's impossible to remember passwords that are long, random, and unique for every service. I have too many accounts.

On the other hand, I don't like the idea of giving up control of my passwords to a password manager and using the ones it generates and stores. It feels weird that I wouldn't "know" my passwords.

Is this a hangup I should just get past? What do I do if I need to login somewhere but cannot access my password manager?

pretty straightforward ask. i have some basic, rusty Spanish (on and off learning) and a bit of Esperanto to my name (currently learning) but not much else

eventually i want to speak French conversationally since my boyfriend can and i think it'd be neat to converse with him in more than English, but that's a long term goal.

Oof Grandma... Get your head out of your ass woman.(This is in Jest, Grandma knows and thought it was funny. ya'll chill)* Where are you getting your news lately because I just sent you an article from our national news organization and you just told me you can't believe it... Why?

We live and love in the beautiful free country of Canada and despite any individual political leader, we can find comfort in the fact that we have many elected officials that listen to their constituents and ultimately intend to better the lives for our nation. Canada is a mighty developed country and she has designated important bodies to help protect us from the wolves that prey on the weak. We have the CBC a nationally funded non profit organization that has authorship and integrity to the journalists they hire and a long history of helping the truth and redacting and outright dismissing disinformation (now more commonly called fake news). In this article I've sent you, it has sources directly involved in the measles outbreak, including doctors who are licensed through a board that verifies their integrity and ethics and authority in medicine. Also sourced is the CDC; another body that was appointed by Canada herself to keep her citizens healthy and safe, these are not groups of scientists with a vested interest to lie to anyone as that would jeopardize the safety to our entire nature... Yet these highly educated and well funded scientists are refuting your hypothesis grandma.

I think in order to understand what is happening here we need to both step back and ground ourselves in a neutral territory towards a scholarly pursuit and work towards the advancement of our society. To do this we need to frame our perspective to that of a scholar to which I think you and I both agree we are proud to call ourselves anyway. Me, a university student and you an independent researcher: truth be told, as a student of an organization like Ryerson, I have access to a wider breadth of knowledge in our online resources and databases of peer reviewed articles that I can search through with ease, but our goal will be the same and can be achieved only if you think critically with everything you read - you seem well versed in this regard so kudos let's proceed.

As a critical thinker and scholar we are nothing without our authority which is provided through our knowledge-base in factual information. I don't need to be an expert in biology, medicine, or even journalism to be able to have confidence in reading the news article I sent you; but as a scholar I have the ability to verify the authority to the people making the claims in the article. Every person involved in a professionally investigated article are sourced and cited and provide proof to their authority. It's why the CBC discloses their journalists and is also why they'll happily fire them if they fuck up - their integrity is on the line - same with every scientist working for the CDC. Canada does not have a vested interest in the perpetuation of fake news and disinformation, this isn't fucking Russia! (or the U.S. for that matter - Fox news is GOP run television FYI).

This is critical thinking and needs to be understood before you assume authority to the Facebook posts you read. Think of the platform you are getting your news from - Facebook: an American company with a vested interest in advertising to its users. They are NOT a news agency and have zero regulation in verifying the authority of authorship. Anyone can write any shit they like, and the more clicks they get, the more money Facebook makes. In-fact they will happily sell any message you like so long as you're willing to pay for it. I can post just about anything under the guise of "free speech" so long as it does not contain "hate speech" (technically a crime in Canada) and then pay Facebook a couple hundreds of dollars to get that post higher up on my friend's walls. It's how their platform works and regardless of whether a post has been promoted by Facebook themselves or not they are in the business of clicks. In this age of terrorism and fear mongering, the posts, articles, links, and videos that induce the most controversy and fear will gain the most clicks - this is human nature! Facebook doesn't care, they got their money as they are now one of the largest messaging services in the world, second only to WeChat which is a government controlled chinese messaging app linked to their social credit system meant to repress their citizens... hmm...

As Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan famously said in his thesis Understanding Media, “For any medium has the power of imposing its own assumption on the unwary… But the greatest aid to this end is simply in knowing that the spell can occur immediately upon contact, as in the first bars of a melody.” unfortunately the advent of social media has only perpetuated the scaling of the media, the importance of the messages, and the shallow knowledge-base of its users to apply the unwary en masse.

To quote a larger bit of McLuhan to drive this point home:

“The American stake in literacy as a technology or uniformity applied to every level of education, government, industry, and social life is totally threatened by the electric technology. The threat of Stalin or Hitler was external. The electric technology is within the gates, and we are numb, deaf, blind, and mute about its encounter with the Gutenberg technology, on and through which the American way of life was formed. It is, however, no time to suggest strategies when the threat has not even been acknowledged to exist. I am in the position of Louis Pasteur telling doctors that their greatest enemy was quite invisible, and quite unrecognized by them.” (McLuhan was a man before his time., this was written in 1954) “For the “content” of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The effect of the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another medium as “content.” The content of a movie is a novel or a play or an opera.
The effect of the movie form is not related to its program content. The “content” of writing or print is speech, but the reader is almost entirely unaware either of print or of speech.”

Do not kid yourself, social media is no different than any other media. The content of the message is NOT the message. Who is posting the dribble and fake news and WHY? understand the author and their authority and you will begin to think critically again. You wouldn't pick up a history book without knowing who authored it would you? Facts are facts, and fake-news is disinformation by another name.

Now to return to our CBC article about measles and your claim that there is a connection to the MMR vaccine which has the potential to cause autism (despite how fucking stupid this shit is, I'll entertain your hypothesis for a moment).

1. Where are your critical sources and statistics to prove any semblance to propose such an outlandish hypothesis? Because I can't seem to find any real ones in my databases here and every time I've asked you for your proof you've failed to provide any.

2. If the vaccine were to cause autism you accept that there is a chance this vaccine may put a child at harms risk. The reality is you are saying you'd rather risk your child potentially getting a deadly disease and potentially becoming maimed and permanently injured through contact with the disease and worse contaminating others and spreading the harmful pathogens to others just out of fear of potentially could get autism... again, supported without any fact or evidence? Janet's post from Antivax-moms facebook group is non an authority of fact and no medical body has rightfully confirmed a case of autism to the MMR vaccine... so where is our proof again? Big-vaccine is out to give autism to our children?

3. By not immunizing your children you are immorally upholding your child's life over that of your nations and against those you interact with on a day to day basis. You are no longer in a small town - we are a massive country with very loose borders so we can invite friends and family to visit. But when we don't protect our basecamp, the wolves will get in. That goes for fake news just as much as it goes for measles. We already have guards on duty to protect our children, our sick, our immune deficient elders and infants from harmful diseases. These treatments work and you and I are the proof in the pudding. Where is this form of tribalism coming from where you would rather "protect" from autism but not measles, mumps, and rubella? These are the wolves we must fight, and we can't let our guard down just because a post of Facebook has a few thousand clicks.

We are in the age of disinformation and globalization, whether we like it or not there are a select few who are controlling the messages we perpetuate online. Unfortunately it's the confusion and lack of authority to the messages that has guided us towards a harmful future that is now killing children all over the world.
https://medium.com/the-method/anti-vaccination-is-killing-children-in-europe-658415c54a04

stop spreading misinformation and think critically. You are better than that... you are a scholar!

I love you, and I hope you take this to heart.

EDIT*
Seeing that the post was more appropriately moved to ~talk I'm hoping I can start a bit more of a dialogue that has unraveled from talking with the rest of my family. I told my internal family about my conversation with Grandma which we've all had by now, we bring fact, she still isn't sure there isn't a bigger picture that she isn't seeing. She's been fed too many stories to really believe the true ones. How are we meant to respond to this? My dad kinda pissed me off, he said it's like pushing on rope and said it wasn't even worth the effort - especially since someone like my Grandmother doesn't intend to have anymore children and all her family members are well ingrained in the Ontario health system... despite his position, we get issues where families are believing information and causing significant harm to our society... what do?

My bad argument style aside, has anyone else felt like they've been pushing on rope lately?

For me, it has to be getting up the moment I wake up. No matter if I wake up before the alarm, I still get up. That helps a lot with fighting oversleeping. Not only am I late, but I also feel bad after spending a lot of time in bed, my head often hurts. So I only figured I better spend less time sleeping than more. And it works, too!

I'm making an effort to cut out meat from my diet and I'd love to hear what everyone's favourite vegetarian meals are.

For a long time I have been making pasta with ground beef and I recently found out that I can just not put the beef in and it tastes even better. The tomato sauce really gets a chance to shine without the beef.