I normally never take reports of ufos seriously, but major news outlets are reporting on videos taken by Navy pilots and the news anchors seem to take it as a joke. Even if these ufos are just high tech government drones or weather balloons, you'd think people would at least be curious in finding out what these things are.

Around the office normally I hear chatter about the news and current events, but nothing about these ufos. Nobody brings them up. On discussion forums, talk about the ufos seems really sparse as well. Even subreddits dedicated to ufos seem to not care very much about these videos being on the mainstream news. Now with legitimate proof that there is something strange in the air, why does nobody seem to care?

What are the leading explanations to what these things are? One explanation I've heard for at least one of the videos is that it's a stationary weather balloon that only appears to be moving due to the camera on the plane moving. I can accept this explanation for that video, but what about the other videos? And what about the navy pilot testimonies? Is this all just a publicity stunt for History Channel's new show?

welcome to week ten. this week sees a lot of smaller candidates making news and getting their own little sections and pieces. the opinion section is once again short, and [LONGFORM] gains some representation for the second week in a row.

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 • Week 9

News

General Stuff

• from NPR: Biden, Sanders Highlight Familiar Split In Democratic Party. we begin with the two frontrunners, biden and sanders, and the broader issues surrounding them. most of these are familiar refrains: they're both white men in a field that is very much not exclusively white and male; but also, they're two very divergent candidates. sanders is seeking transformation of the US, biden is seeking more of a status quo ante. there are also outstanding questions about whether or not the party is eventually going to come together in spite of all of this.

• from Buzzfeed News: Democrats Running For President Say Social Media Companies Have A White Nationalist Problem. Some Think Regulation Should Be The Answer. regulation of the internet and the big corporations is already an issue, so buzzfeed asked around with respect to hate, and in summary:

• Biden, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Sen. Michael Bennet, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, Rep. Tim Ryan, Gov. Steve Bullock, and Mayor Wayne Messam: did not comment
• Sanders: supports regulation of platforms
• Harris: would hold social media companies accountable for the “hate” spreading across their platforms; believes companies have a “responsibility to help lead the fight” against the “threat to our democracy.”
• Buttigieg: in favor of applying the same strategies used to combat “foreign radicalism” to address domestic white nationalism
• Booker: "part of the problem with dealing with these issues is getting the social media platforms to even acknowledge that they have a problem on their hands"; however, did not clarify if he’d specifically support regulating social media companies to curb white nationalism
• Williamson: “The companies should shut down hate speech that incites violence. I support regulation of the platforms so they are not used to perpetrate violence on blacks, Jews, the media, or others”
• Moulton: “Social media companies must take the lead in developing the rules and processes necessary to combat white nationalism online”
• Inslee: “I applaud Facebook for its recent decision to ban praise and support for white nationalist ideals, but this is a beginning to a solution and not an end.”
• Castro: “[Banning white nationalist content] is a start, but they're playing catchup and need to do better at extinguishing hate speech quickly.”
• Yang: appreciates Facebook’s move after the Christchurch shooting but that the social platforms are not in the best position to figure out what changes are needed to curb white nationalist violence.

• from Buzzfeed News: Almost All The 2020 Presidential Candidates Say They Want To Make Roe V. Wade Law. it may seem unsurprising, but pretty much every democrat--even the 1% randos like wayne messiam, marianne williamson, andrew yang, seth moulton, eric swalwell, and others--supports roe v wade explicitly, according to buzzfeed. the two people who did not respond to their requests for comment are bill de blasio and tulsi gabbard.

Joe Biden

• from POLITICO: Biden nets fundraising windfall in 2-day Florida swing. biden began the week by casually raising 2.2 million in a swing around florida. this is one of a series of several fundraisers since biden announced; according to POLITICO biden raised $700,000 earlier this month in Hollywood, and $700,000 of the $6.3 million biden raised in the first 24 hours of launching his campaign came from an event.

• from Slate: The Premise of Joe Biden’s Campaign Is That Every Left-Wing Criticism of the Democratic Party Since 2008 Has Been Wrong. slate's article takes the stance that joe biden is essentially bucking the democratic orthodoxy since obama's first win in trying to work as a bipartisan candidate, appealing to white-working-class voters, and by continuing to use big donors over grassroots organization. so far, it's working pretty well--but see also that NPR article above which notes much of this so far is seemingly driven by name recognition.

Beto O'Rourke

• from POLITICO: Slumping O'Rourke looks to regain mojo at prime-time town hall. beto o'rourke has slumped pretty badly in the past few weeks, and this has led him to take on something he said he wouldn't really do: cable television. this townhall was o'rourke's first big media appearance, amazingly enough, and it's a part of his changing strategy toward the media as he seeks to figure out how to actually become relevant again in the primary.

• from FiveThirtyEight: Beto O’Rourke Ignored Cable News — And It Ignored Him. unfortunately, o'rourke's reboot has come to largely coincide with a few new candidates. consistently behind the major frontrunners of the campaign already in terms of cable news mentions, o'rourke got pushed behind new york dipshit bill de blasio for the week of may 12, which is laughable. this will probably not help him any.

• from POLITICO: O’Rourke feels 'really good' about 2020 campaign. o'rourke is still optimistic, though, about his chances. he rejects the media's narrative that his bubble has basically burst and that his fleeting Candidate of the Month moment has passed.

Elizabeth Warren

• from the Atlantic: Elizabeth Warren Takes a Different Strategy to Court the Black Vote. warren's approach to the black vote is getting some attention from the media this week. education policy and other policies related to racial discrimination are the crux of warren's approach here so far, with a particular emphasis in this case on things like funding for HBCUs (which have been pushing for such for awhile now). for the most part, this has been received quite well by the black community--it is up in the air though whether or not warren's policies could pass congress though, which is... bad, to say the least, about a lot of education reform.

• from the Guardian: 'Let's figure this out': Elizabeth Warren's calls to supporters delight the internet. warren's also been calling up supporters randomly, which has caused quite a bit of internet attention. to my knowledge she's the only person to really make this a part of her campaign so far, and while this has been done in the past by candidates, it hasn't really been done to the extent warren's been doing it recently (she's been doing it since she announced her campaign!)

• from Vox: What’s behind Elizabeth Warren’s comeback in the polls. warren has seen a slow, but steady uptick in her polling for about the past month, amounting to a movement of about 3 points. that's not much, of course, but it's allowed her to solidify her position as the 3rd place candidate in the primary on average. she also is one of the net most liked people in the primary and it seems like she only has an ability to go up.

• from the Center for Public Integrity: Elizabeth Warren decries big money in politics. Her campaign treasurer embodies it.. it's not all good for warren, though. her campaign treasurer, Paul Egerman, is tied to a number of positions on campaign finance that stand in apparent contradiction to how warren is angling herself. this is obviously not a deal breaker for the overwhelming majority of people, but it is a mild annoyance that probably could have been avoided.

Kirsten Gillibrand

• from the Guardian: [LONGFORM] Kirsten Gillibrand can't break through – is sexism to blame?. the guardian has an interesting piece on the course of the gillibrand campaign so far, and whether or not sexism (or gillibrand just not being that compelling of a candidate and lacking the national profile to break through) is to blame for her failure to really get anywhere with future primary voters. the answer is probably both: gillibrand simply isn't that interesting and doesn't have enough recognition, but she's also not being aided by the media in that end.

• from CBS News: Kirsten Gillibrand proposes "Family Bill of Rights" to make raising children safer, more affordable. policy-wise, gillibrand has proposed the "family bill of rights". CBS reports the following:

Focusing on various aspects of childcare up to kindergarten, Gillibrand said her plan "levels the playing field starting at birth" for children and parents.
The plan also aims to fight pregnancy complications and maternal mortality by "providing states and hospitals with access to new resources to develop and implement standardized best practices." Gillibrand also proposed solutions modeled after a 2017 bill introduced by former North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, which called for funding to study maternal and obstetric health records in rural regions of the country.
The "Family Bill of Rights" would implement equal adoption rights meant to prevent discrimination against prospective parents belonging to any religion, socioeconomic class, or gender. To make adoption more affordable, the plan offers a refundable tax credit for families that have adopted.

• from Vox: Kirsten Gillibrand’s new policy platform is about making parenting affordable. Vox also has a good breakdown on the tenets and ideas the plan brings to the table. compare also elizabeth warren's ideas.

• from POLITICO: Gillibrand zeros in on abortion in wake of new state laws. most recently, gillibrand has honed in on abortion rights, although as the article notes even this scantly distinguishes her from her better known, better polling counterparts.

Cory Booker

• from Vox: Cory Booker wants banks to stop charging so many overdraft fees. in between campaigning, cory booker is taking on overdraft fees, trying to get a bill passed which would: "bar banks from imposing overdraft fees on debit card or ATM transactions. It would also curb the number of overdraft fees that could be levied on check-based transactions and prohibit banks from reordering the sequence of user activity." i imagine if this does not get passed, he will probably start campaigning on it (provided he isn't already).

• from POLITICO: Booker builds out campaign team. booker's campaign team is being built up this week. among other things, his team is taking on a number of clinton campaign staffers, EMILY's List folks, and a few staffers from 2018 gubernatorial and senate campaigns.

John Hickenlooper

• from CBS News: John Hickenlooper releases plan to reduce gun violence. john hickenlooper released a plan on gun violence, which to my knowledge makes him the third or fourth candidate to do so. compare cory booker's plan to combat gun violence; the two are relatively similar, but also have quite a few differences.

• from NPR: Former Colorado Governor And 2020 Candidate Urges Distance From 'Socialism'. hickenlooper has also clearly sorted himself to the right side of the pack already, mostly through his emphasis on bipartisanship and distancing himself from the left-wing shift of the party. hickenlooper was known for being fairly moderate as colorado's governor, it should be noted, so this is not out of character for him.

Everybody Else

• from POLITICO: Kamala Harris says she now backs independent probes in police shootings. kamala harris came out in support of independent probes into police shootings, which appears to be the first time she's come out in support of this during her political career:

“I had a very real, personal experience where I had to fight to keep my case — and my argument was, ‘I was elected to exercise my discretion, and no one’s going to take my case from me,’” Harris said in the MSNBC interview. “It was that personal experience that informed my principle, which is that these cases shouldn’t be taken from the person who was elected to exercise their discretion.”
But Harris said it’s now clear to her that there needs to be an independent entity brought in to probe the recurring shootings and brutality by police officers from the beginning.

• from the Guardian: 2020 candidate John Delaney pitches vastly unusual climate change plan. john delaney, the first candidate to announce for the 2020 presidential primary all the way back in 2017, has an unorthodox climate change plan. in essence according to the Guardian, his idea is "to capture carbon dioxide pollution heating the planet and transport it in pipelines criss-crossing US" which is... novel? i guess? this is of course not going to happen. delaney is a <1% poller and he has no profile at all, but add it to the list of ideas.

• from NPR: Julián Castro Wants To Redefine Which Immigrants Have 'Merit'. julian castro has mostly been focusing on immigration issues, which shows in his interview here with NPR. this is unsurprising for fairly obvious reasons--castro being the hispanic candidate that he is and mostly drawing his support mostly from hispanics.

• from Buzzfeed News: [LONGFORM] Democrats Like The Idea Of A Gay President. But They Are Quietly Worried About Mayor Pete. pete buttigieg has been cruising fairly nicely since he entered the race, but behind the scenes it's unclear even among the democratic caucus whether or not he'd ever be able to get over the hump in the primary, much less the general. as this longform piece notes:

Nearly 30% of Democratic voters believe it is “always wrong” for “same-sex adults to have sexual relations,” a 2018 poll found. In a poll just last month, 86% of Democrats and left-leaning independents said they are “open” to electing a gay male president — but a majority said they didn’t think the country was ready.
That’s a stark contrast to 2007, when most voters said they thought the country was ready for a black president, and in 2015, when most voters said the country was “ready” for a woman.

it's also pretty likely that things would get wacky in the general, given that buttigieg is already drawing small, anti-gay protests.

Opinions & Other

• from the Guardian: The Democratic 2020 frontrunners are too old. And I say that as an old man myself. this opinion presents a common refrain with the frontrunners, who are all quite old and would be pushing it in age by the end of their first terms (much less their second term if they seek it). there's of course no real way to get around this short of electing one of the less significant, younger candidates, so...

• from NBC: Democrats shouldn't focus on impeaching Trump. They need to focus on beating him in 2020.. this is one of the other refrains, although it's less common. whether or not it's a valid one is debatable, though.

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

week eight graces us with a particularly large edition of This Week in Election Night, 2020. a lot of candidates have been in the news, for good reasons and bad, and there's a bunch of stuff to go through. no opinion pieces this week, since i didn't end up compiling any particularly good ones and this is going to be pretty long already.

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 • Week 6 thread • Week 7 thread

News

General Stuff

• from NBC News: As Biden predicts a shorter race, rivals dig in for long fight. we begin with a prediction by biden, and disputes by everybody else, basically. this could honestly go either way, and it's really contingent on what happens on super tuesday in 2020. so many states vote on that day (13 states, falling on march 3) and they represent such a large share of delegates (almost half of them in total) that if anybody takes super tuesday decisively they're pretty much a lock for being the favorite at the convention--however, if super tuesday isn't decisive, it could very well come down to the wire.

• from the Guardian: California: why the cash cow state will take center stage in the 2020 race. in that vein, the biggest crown jewel of the super tuesday states will by far be california, having something obscene like 500 delegates. any candidate which decisively carries california is setting themselves up well for the convention (and incidentally in this respect harris has an inherent advantage since it's her homestate), so expect candidates to really target this state as we get closer to primary day and try and build a ground game there for the future.

• from Fast Company: Black women are the key to victory in 2020. Stop ignoring them. i said in the last thread that this was unlikely to go away, and unsurprisingly it remains an issue. see also last week's Women of color want 2020 Democrats to work for their vote and week 6's Black female voters to Democrats: 'You won't win the White House without us'.

Joe Biden

• from Reuters: Exclusive: Presidential hopeful Biden looking for ‘middle ground’ climate policy. we begin on a high note, with joe biden deciding... well... this: "Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden is crafting a climate change policy he hopes will appeal to both environmentalists and the blue-collar voters who elected Donald Trump, according to two sources, carving out a middle ground approach that will likely face heavy resistance from green activists." as far as details, this appears to be the most we have so far:

The backbone of the policy will likely include the United States re-joining the Paris Climate Agreement and preserving U.S. regulations on emissions and vehicle fuel efficiency that Trump has sought to undo...
The second source, a former energy department official advising Biden’s campaign who asked not to be named, said the policy could also be supportive of nuclear energy and fossil fuel options like natural gas and carbon capture technology, which limit emissions from coal plants and other industrial facilities.

• from VICE: A Biden Presidency Would Be a 'Death Sentence,' Climate Activists Warn. to put it lightly, biden's plan is getting fucking obliterated by climate activists. activists are unsurprisingly worried that biden, by trying to seek a middle ground, is basically just going to bring us into hellworld--a likely prospect, honestly, just going off what we have. VICE also expounds on just how unhelpful and non-specific biden's climate policy is so far with this detail:

Biden’s campaign website contains only three sentences about the greatest crisis ever to face humankind, and these are located midway down a secondary page. “We must turbocharge our efforts to address climate change and ensure that every American has access to clean drinking water, clean air, and an environment free from pollutants,” the site reads.

• from Mother Jones: The Planet Is Heading to Catastrophe and Joe Biden Apparently Wants to Take the “Middle Ground”. Mother Jones also has some other reporting which expounds on the amazing fact that biden somehow was the first person to really introduce climate change into the political arena, and yet his policy on it is borderline regressive nowadays. not the best look, although i doubt it'll change votes

• from POLITICO: Bernie Sanders: Biden’s reported climate plan ‘will doom future generations’. if you thought this criticism stopped at voters though, you'd be wrong, because sanders is just as unimpressed with this plan, and i'd imagine he is not the only candidate like this. this is probably about as strong of a rebuke as you'll ever see this early on: “There is no ‘middle ground’ when it comes to climate policy,” Sanders tweeted Friday. “If we don't commit to fully transforming our energy system away from fossil fuels, we will doom future generations.”

• from POLITICO: Florida takes shape as Joe Biden’s firewall. on a lighter note for biden, he is--for now anyways--the solid frontrunning candidate. florida in particular looks like a key state for him to win, which would be good news for him since it'll give him an advantage in the later half of the primaries (it will, in 2020, be one of the last large states to vote on account of not being a super tuesday state). given its demography, if he's on track to lose in this state, don't count on him realistically winning the primary.

Bernie Sanders

• from Roll Call: Bernie 2020 becomes first unionized presidential campaign in history. bernie sanders made history earlier this year by having his staff unionize (tildes discussion), and this seems to have finally been completely formalized this week. will this be a forebearer of a future presidential standard? i dunno, but it doesn't look like anybody else is going to pick up the idea this cycle, at least as things currently are, so probably not.

• from Pacific Standard: Bernie Sanders Says His Campaign's New Sexual Misconduct Policy Is the 'Gold Standard'. this was an issue in sanders's last presidential campaign (and it's also increasingly a campaign issue in general), so unsurprisingly sanders has rolled out a sexual misconduct policy this time around. this article mostly focuses on dos and don'ts, i should note; the original reporting here was done by the guardian o'er yonder and you can find the actual document for the campaign here.

• [LONGFORM] How Can Dems Win Back Rural America? Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren Agree on the Answer. this is both a sanders and a warren piece, focusing mostly on their commonalities in agricultural policy. this has been a theme for the both of them early on; sanders has a very comprehensive set of proposals; of course so does warren. this article also goes into the general background of the issues they're trying to tackle.

Elizabeth Warren

• [LONGFORM] from TIME: 'I Have a Plan for That.' Elizabeth Warren Is Betting That Americans Are Ready for Her Big Ideas. i don't have a whole lot to say here. we have a tildes discussion on this piece, as it was posted earlier this week, so i would encourage you to post there if you have thoughts on this one like i did.

• from POLITICO: Trump backers applaud Warren in heart of MAGA country. warren's been hustling around a bit in the past week and change, even stopping over in rural west virginia on friday to talk about the opioid crisis and other socioeconomic factors which have been massively fucking over the region. pitstops like these presumably aren't going to be swinging things blue in west virginia again anytime soon, but as the article notes: "...Warren was here to try to send a message that she’s serious about tackling the problems of remote communities like this one." also, in case you're curious, you can find her policy on the opioid crisis here.

• from Reuters: Democrat Warren confronts 2020 electability question head-on in Ohio. she was also over in ohio this weekend, where she barnstormed on similar issues of tackling income inequality and the likes of that.

• from Slate: Warren Has Earned Her Wonk Reputation. this article from Slate is mostly an overview of the many, many policies that elizabeth warren has proposed just over the course of the campaign so far. it's a lot! the article does note that currently she seems to lack detailed policies on many of the big issues prioritized by democratic voters, but we're still pretty early in the campaign so i assume she'll roll those out in the future.

Kamala Harris

• from NBC News: Kamala Harris blows past Democratic rivals in fundraising in communities of color. kamala harris has been relatively quiet on the media for the past bit, but she's making headlines this week for her fundraising. she seems to be the significant frontrunner among minority communities as far as that goes. NBC finds that:

Harris pulled in at least $1 million from ZIP codes where most residents are not white, about two-and-a-half times the total of former Rep. Beto O'Rourke of Texas, who was second to Harris, raising more than $408,000 from the same set of neighborhoods, the analysis showed. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., was third, about $1,400 behind O'Rourke, and Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., was fourth, with at least $391,000.

• from CNN: Kamala Harris eyes black voters, women in campaign tour to win over Midwest. aside from fundraising, harris spend most of last week swinging through the midwest barnstorming in minority communities; her current angle seems to mostly run through women and minorities, and while she's doing relatively poorly in polling, people do seem to have interest in her campaign. CNN's most recent polling found "...Harris at 5% but leading the field at 23% among those polled when asked which candidate they'd most like to hear more about."

• from Reuters: Kamala Harris stood up to big banks, with mixed results for consumers in crisis. one of harris's signature points on which she's been campaigning is, in Reuters's words, "the $20 billion relief settlement she secured as California attorney general for homeowners hit hard by the foreclosure crisis"; this article proceeds to pour a bit of cold water on how this played out in practice, though, as harris's actions didn't prevent significant damage to many people's livelihoods.

Amy Klobuchar

• from The Guardian: 'Iowa slingshot': Amy Klobuchar plots midwest route to victory in 2020. klobuchar has also been pretty quiet (and been polling quite badly), but she's also gotten some attention this week. as this article talks about, her path to the presidency has always been basically the same: win over midwestern voters which democrats have been collapsing with since obama cleaned house in 2008. she has the electoral history to back this up: despite relatively close races up-ballot being pretty regular in minnesota since 2000, klobuchar has regularly destroyed her republican opponents statewide and won otherwise-republican-voting white people.

• from Politico: Klobuchar says she isn't worried that older white men are leading the 2020 race. she's also pretty optimistic about her chances. she notes that her campaign is still in the early stages and that despite the dominance of white men, there's still harris and warren in the top-eight, which suggests that she too could have capital as her campaign continues.

• from the Huffington Post: Amy Klobuchar On Female Presidential Candidates: ‘Discount Them At Your Own Peril’. and of course, she notes that discounting female candidates is something to be done at your own peril--female candidates have been particularly successful in recent electoral cycles.

• from Reuters: Klobuchar pitches pragmatism as she seeks to carve identity in Democratic presidential field. klobuchar's main ideological approach so far has been to be the "pragmatic" female candidate, advocating for a more incremental tackling of the issues instead of sweeping progressivism as advocated by people like warren. no signs of this changing, although she does openly consider herself to be a progressive in the same vein as people like warren and sanders.

Pete Buttigieg

• from POLITICO: Mayor Pete blindsides Kamala Harris in California. california has been a state targeted by just about every candidate so far, but the one with probably the biggest impact relative to how they poll has been buttigieg, who is putting a lot of people who might otherwise be donating to or endorsing harris in an interesting position with where they're going to place their support. LA mayor eric garcetti, who appeared at an event with buttigieg on thursday, might summarize this best:

“We have a lot of people who are very candidate curious,” Garcetti notes. “Kamala has a ton of love up and down the state, but people might say, ‘That doesn’t mean I’m not going to shop around … Maybe I’ll keep her as my senator and go with somebody else as president.’”

• from CBS News: Could Pete Buttigieg make history in LGBTQ-friendly Nevada?. buttigieg is also, obviously, hoping to make history with his candidacy, and he's been making overtures toward LGBT organizations accordingly. on saturday he was a headliner at the human rights campaign gala in nevada--nevada it should also be noted has a pretty large LGBT population, which is likely to help him significantly in the state.

• from NBC News: Buttigieg is the only top 2020 candidate not offering staffers health care yet. however, buttigieg hasn't had all good headlines this week. NBC news highlighted his campaign's failure to offer healthcare to staffers, an ignominious feat for him and something which stands in contrast to the rhetoric he's espoused on the campaign trail so far. NBC reports:

Buttigieg’s campaign currently has 49 workers, but has been staffing up rapidly, and plans to hit the 50 mark imminently.
“Crossing this threshold will put us in a position to get a good multi-state group plan, which we are currently negotiating,” said Buttigieg press secretary Chris Meagher.
In the meantime, the campaign is giving salaried staffers a $400 monthly stipend to buy health care themselves. That’s just enough for a single adult with no children to cover a “silver plan” through the Obamacare exchanges, according to national cost data analyzed by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Everybody Else

• from Buzzfeed News: Beto O’Rourke Has Hired The “Unsung Hero” Of Obama’s First Campaign. beto o'rourke scalped jeff berman, one of obama's most important staffers, which seems like pretty good news for him given that his campaign has been a bit of a mess with staffing in the past few weeks. berman was integral to obama's first presidential campaign, and was also on clinton's staff in 2016.

• [LONGFORM] from The Guardian: The astonishing disappearing act of Beto O’Rourke. of course, o'rourke is still in a great deal of trouble, having slid back into middling popularity with the democratic base, and this piece by The Guardian goes into detail both on his past, his current, and what he's hoping will be his future.

• from the Huffington Post: Kirsten Gillibrand Vows To Only Nominate Judges Who Uphold Roe v. Wade. despite only polling at like, 2%, gillibrand is still pushing the resistance angle. in contrast to donald, she is pledging to only nominate pro-choice judges.

• from CBS News: Cory Booker unveils "Justice Academy" to recruit, teach volunteers. cory booker meanwhile is kicking up his campaign organizing, setting up training camps for volunteers and all that fun stuff. the purpose of these: "Volunteers ... will learn community organizing techniques to engage supporters around a wide array of Booker's main campaign issues, including criminal justice reform, gun violence prevention, and health care."

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

When Edge died, I got worried about loosing competition to the Blink engine and as such, I went exploring other alternatives to realize.. there's not a whole lot, there's blink, gecko and webkit.

So with that, I decided to try epiphany - Gnome's web browser. It uses Webkit which is what Blink was forked from so it's not terribly different in theory but the years apart has made that more apparent. It's fairly elegant in my opinion and it lacks some features, sure.

Anyways, to get to what I wanted to do this week, well, I'd like to challenge you all to use it for a week, mostly for bug hunting purposes and possibly to throw ideas at the project. Worth mentioning, I'm not affiliated with the project, just a user.

So to make sure we're all on the same page, we'll use the development Epiphany flatpak, this way we can be sure that the problem is in the current codebase. So, to install it :

Let's install the gnome-nightly repos as per instructions here :

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists gnome-nightly https://sdk.gnome.org/gnome-nightly.flatpakrepo
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists gnome-apps-nightly --from https://sdk.gnome.org/gnome-apps-nightly.flatpakrepo

Then, let's install the development version by doing so :

flatpak install org.gnome.Epiphany.Devel

Then just launch it and have fun with it!

if you run into any bugs, look at the contribution guide here and report the bugs in the repo after checking that the bug is not already present of course!

So what I want to know is whether or not this is that unusual for someone in real estate.

The discussion on r/politics is myopic and the discussion on /r/tax lacks detail.

From the NYT article:

The numbers show that in 1985, Mr. Trump reported losses of $46.1 million from his core businesses — largely casinos, hotels and retail space in apartment buildings. They continued to lose money every year, totaling $1.17 billion in losses for the decade.

Trump's statement/tweet:

“You always wanted to show losses for tax purposes....almost all real estate developers did – and often re-negotiate with banks, it was sport,

Now my very limited understanding of real estate and taxes is this:

• You can depreciate the building but not the land
• Depreciation can be carried over multiple years
• When you sell property you can roll those proceeds into the purchase of another property, thus delaying income tax

Are those accurate? If so, do they explain Trump's taxes?

I'm thinking not (I suspect Russian money laundering is the real source of income). However, I have yet to read a good discussion of the specifics. Has anyone read such a discussion or have insight to add?

Main story from NYT:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/07/us/politics/donald-trump-taxes.html?action=click&amp;module=Top%20Stories&amp;pgtype=Homepage

CNBC's article about Trump's response:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/08/trump-defends-tax-tactics-after-nyt-story-says-he-racked-up-more-than-1-billion-in-losses-it-was-sport.html

EDIT: As an aside, I got into a wee bit of trouble because my wife's (very) small business lost money three years running. The accountant that I worked with informed me that if a business losses $ three years in a row, the IRS considers it a "hobby" and you can't subtract those losses from your personal taxes. Is that in play with Trump at all? If not, why not?

EDIT2: I'm going to answer my own question I think. I heard a good segment on NPR yesterday that addressed my question. You can read the transcript here: https://www.npr.org/2019/05/08/721552462/president-trump-defends-himself-against-report-he-did-not-pay-taxes-for-8-years

The bottom line is it's not so unusual but it doesn't exclude the possibility of him running his businesses poorly either. So I think it's not really what the headlines have made it out to be.

week seven comes a bit early this week again because this week offers up what might be the most articles that i've covered in one of these so far. no [LONGFORM] articles this week, but we do have a lot of policy stuff, mostly from the secondary and lesser candidates!

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 • Week 6 thread

News

General Stuff

• from NBC News: Democrats face defining 2020 question: Does defeating Trump outweigh all else?. this is possibly the biggest question democrats have to answer this election cycle, and it's not a question that is readily or easily answered since a lot of it ties into other problems like representation and electability. expect this to continue to be a major theme since it's already been one from the beginning.

• from Pacific Standard: The 2020 Democratic Candidates Are Split on Letting Incarcerated People Vote. one low-key issue that seems to be becoming a defining issue is the matter of incarcerated people voting. i imagine this is an issue that is not going to receive much coverage, nor be center fold in most candidate's platforms, but nonetheless, some people have already taken stances on it (sanders is a yes, buttigieg is a no).

• from Vox: Women of color want 2020 Democrats to work for their vote. this was also a point of note last week in the Guardian (see Black female voters to Democrats: 'You won't win the White House without us' with the 'She the People' forum, and i anticipate this is not an issue that's going to go away.

Joe Biden

• from NBC News: Biden is the Democratic front-runner, but a vulnerable one. we begin with NBC News and their big takeaway from biden's entry to the democratic primary:

Bottom line: 96 hours in, Biden looks more like John Kerry of 2004 (the slight front-runner in a volatile Democratic field) than Al Gore of 2000 or Hillary Clinton of 2016.

• from Jacobin: Joe Biden Is Not a Blue-Collar Candidate. jacobin offers up this take, arguing that biden is not a blue-collar candidate because his voting record suggests he sells out the working class often, and while he is generally acceptable at representing the white working class, he fails to really represent minority working class voters and therefore cannot be a properly blue-collar candidate.

• from the Atlantic: Biden Is Betting on Unions. They Might Bet on Someone Else. biden is of course angling for the union vote and union endorsements, which he's already winning to some extent with an endorsement from the (admittedly in the biden tank) International Association of Fire Fighters (membership: 300,000). he's going to have a hard time garnering labor endorsements, though, because he is far from the only candidate with union ties. as the article notes, among the other candidates vying for the backing of the unions are sanders, warren and harris, and each of them have arguably just as much claim to the working-class as biden does (see also last week's Democratic presidential candidates seek union support at workers' forum).

Bernie Sanders

• from CBS News: Bernie and Biden: Fighting for Trump voters. one of the side effects of how this primary is being waged is that obama-trump voters are being targeted significantly by just about everybody involved. this targeting by the two ends of the primary (and the related issues involved with that) is the subject of this article by CBS News.

• from Reuters: Bernie Sanders promises help for family farms, rural residents on trip to Iowa. policy-wise, sanders has focused on rural communities in recent weeks, promising among other things to "strengthen anti-trust laws to block new corporate agriculture mergers and break up existing monopolies" and "changes to farm subsidy programs to shift the benefits away from bigger farms to smaller and mid-sized operations".

Everybody Else

• from Buzzfeed News: Almost Two Months In, Beto 2020 Is Still In Flux. Staffers Know They’re Behind. despite looking like a relatively early frontrunner in the race, beto has been worse-than-stagnant in the past few weeks, dropping back behind warren, harris, and buttigieg. things aren't looking up either: as the article notes, the campaign is still in the process of trying to fill positions and not lose people (see also, week 5's somewhat related A Top Adviser To Beto O’Rourke Has Left His Presidential Campaign).

• from CBS News: Elizabeth Warren bets big on policy to break through crowded Democratic field. warren's focus on policy so far has been well documented, and this CBS news article mostly focuses on that in comparison to other candidates, who barely have sketches. it also tackles the electability issue, though, which it notes could be a problem that weighs down warren's prospects (cf. last week's Can a woman beat Trump? Some Democrats wonder if it's worth the risk):

New Hampshire is a state where Massachusetts candidates like Warren typically do quite well, but a Suffolk University survey of Granite State Democrats released earlier this week had her in fourth place behind Biden, Sanders, and Buttigieg. When asked why, nearly 1-in-5 non-Warren voters said the main reason they don't support her is because they doubt she can beat Mr. Trump.

• from the Atlantic: Mayor Buttigieg Is Working Remotely Today. this article mostly focuses on the interesting issue buttigieg has--which is, of course, that he is still the mayor of south bend while he's out campaigning. since buttigieg has state he has no intentions of stepping down from the mayoral position he holds (and his term expires in november), this is probably going to be an interested background note of his campaign for the next little while.

• from POLITICO: Gillibrand proposes public campaign financing plan. kirsten gillibrand has policy too, folks! admittedly, i have no idea why her policy takes this form, but she nonetheless proposes that:

...eligible voters could opt into her “Democracy Dollars” program and register for vouchers, provided by the Federal Elections Commission, to donate up to $100 in a primary election and $100 in a general election each cycle. Each participant would get $200 for each type of federal contest: House, Senate and presidential elections.
But there would be limits on both donors and candidates in order to use the public voucher program. Voters could contribute only to candidates in their state — including House candidates outside their district but within their state. In order to accept the public money, candidates would have to restrict themselves to accepting only donations of $200 or less.

• from Roll Call: Klobuchar plan to combat addiction draws on experience with her dad. klobuchar also has policy! this mostly focuses on addiction and mental health, and a summary was helpfully provided by a press release i don't have on hand:

“Amy will support incentives for state governments to enact ignition interlock laws for those convicted of drunk driving to help reduce repeat offenders. Since problems with alcoholism often start early, Amy will support educational initiatives that focus on the risks of alcohol as well as early identification and treatment of alcoholism,” a summary said.

supplemental reporting by CBS News also notes the following: "The Minnesota Democrat wants to pay for treatment for those addicted to opioids by charging a two-cents-per-milligram fee to companies that make the drug."

• from Vox: Cory Booker now has the most ambitious gun control proposal of any 2020 candidate. cory booker meanwhile is focusing on gun policy. as vox writes:

His plan includes the typical Democratic proposals: universal background checks, an assault weapons ban, better enforcement of existing gun laws, and more funding for gun violence research. But Booker’s plan goes further by requiring that gun owners not just pass a background check but obtain a license to be able to purchase and own a firearm. It’s a far more robust gun control proposal than any other presidential candidate has proposed.

in many respects this is similar (but more comprehensive in some respects and les comprehensive in others) to the current gun policy of massachusetts. booker's plan also includes a national database for tracking firearms, and also limits on purchases to prevent things like resale. vox's part of the writing here also has info on the underlying research and statistics with respect to whether or not these policies work (for the most part, they seem to).

• from CBS News: Jay Inslee unveils plan for 100 percent clean energy by 2030. jay inslee is a lower-rung candidate, but that hasn't stopped him from pushing the limits on climate policy. among other things, his ideas include: "100 percent clean energy, mak[ing] all new vehicles zero-emission, and [eliminating] the carbon footprint for all new buildings." you can find his policy specifically here.

• from Grist: A tale of two Washingtons: How Jay Inslee aims to take his climate plan nationwide. Grist goes into more detail on inslee's policy, mostly focusing on how they're being implemented in washington, inslee's home state, and how they compare to the other climate policies in the race already like beto's.

• from CBS News: 2020 hopeful John Hickenlooper unveils plan to "re-energize trade with the world". john hickenlooper has hitched his wagon to trade, of all things. the main planks of his policy on fair trade, which is possibly one of the least energizing seminal issues a campaign can run on, are:

• Ensure trading partners adopt and enforce fair labor and safety standards
• Ensure the protection of IP rights of American companies
• Require trading partners to enforce environmental and climate standards
• Ensure U.S. firms enjoy equitable and comparable investment rights abroad
• Ensure U.S. workers have assistance to adjust to job displacement from trade

if you're interested in that sort of thing, CBS also helpfully embedded the five-page outline going into more detail on those planks in the article.

Opinion/Ideology-driven

• from Pacific Standard: There's No Good Way to Determine Electability Other Than Holding Elections. this is an interesting piece which is hard to summarize, but probably the best summary of it is what it concludes on the matter of electability:

...the discussion around the topic is fraught, particularly for the Democratic Party, which has defined itself in recent decades as the party that embraces and seeks inclusion and diversity. If you're going to assert that a white man is better qualified for a job (the party's nominee) by virtue of being a white man, you really need to be sure on your facts. And the facts just aren't there.

• from Jacobin: Stick With Bernie. this jacobin piece argues that progressive/leftist types need to rally behind bernie given biden's strength, or else they risk a biden v trump general election which would likely (in their view) go the same way as clinton v trump did in 2016. it's pretty much impossible to tell this far out, but honestly, it's pretty easy to see their point here given biden's circumstances.

• from Truthout: The Era of “Centrist” Establishment Democrats Is Over. this op-ed from Truthout strongly rebukes the "centrist" tendency of the democratic party, arguing that there is basically no place for that tendency anymore and that it simply does not and cannot produce a winning coalition at this point. bold and new ideas which buck the traditional orthodoxy in this view are the only way to mobilize and produce a winning coalition, because otherwise either too many people stay home, or not enough people vote democratic.

• from the Guardian: Bernie Sanders needs black women's support. So what's his plan to win us over?. bernie's biggest failing so far between his two presidential runs has almost certainly been his failure to appeal to minority voters, particularly black women. this is of course an issue because he likely needs black women to win the primary and the general. as allison writes here: "Black voters and women of color do not want another president who does not see or value us. Sanders needs to let us know that he understands deeply how frightening, difficult and dangerous this political moment is for us, and for the entire country."

• from the Guardian: Joe Biden wants us to forget his past. We won't. perhaps the biggest failing of biden on the other hand is his absolutely god awful track record, for which he is raked here and will likely continue to be raked. the main crux of the op-ed:

As times have changed, Biden has expressed retrospective misgivings about some of those earlier actions and stances. For example, he very recently attempted to offer an apology of sorts, more like an unpology, to Anita Hill, which she quite understandably rejected. And he remains a pure, dyed-in-the-wool neoliberal, as much as ever a tool of Wall Street and corporations. We deserve better than a candidate who wants us to look past his record and focus only on the image he wants to project and, when that tack fails, can offer progressives only a “my bad”.

• from the Guardian: We can't save the planet with half measures. We need to go all the way. this is one part an op-ed written about climate change, one part an op-ed responding to beto o'rourke's climate plan. on one hand, it does note that o'rourke's plan is good--but it also notes that "good" is not nearly enough to avert the problem, and it's also a downgrade from what o'rourke originally endorsed, which was net-zero emissions by 2030.

• from the Guardian: Is Elizabeth Warren's college plan really progressive? Yes. this op-ed is pretty straightforward and argues against the somewhat-weird position that warren's college plan isn't progressive because it also helps middle-and-upper-class people that's been advanced by a few people.

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

Hey Tildians,

This is going to be a really long post that is an ongoing search and conversation I am having with myself. Its going to be about religion and culture. Sorry for the shitty title, I am really bad at coming up with titles, I tend to ramble a lot.

I'm currently going through a crisis both of faith and cultural identity. Not because I am questioning either, but because I have never had either. I'm a white man from america. Growing up as a kid, my parents gave me the option to look at religions and choose one if any that spoke to me. None did, so I didn't go for a long time. In high school I attended Methodist Church every weekend because I felt pressured by my Boy Scout troop to be Christian, the Methodist Church let us use their church for our meetings despite none of the troop being members of the church, and the priest there at the time was a really great guy that I liked a lot. I spent a lot of time talking about faith with him and eventually, he said to me "let's face it, you don't believe the things I am preaching. That is completely fine. You're welcome in the church, it'll always be home, I'm always here to talk about faith or life or anything, but you don't believe in Christianity and you owe it to yourself to try and find something you do believe." And he was right, I didn't. So I studied a few things here and there and none ever stuck. So I've just been agnostic. But I desperately want to believe in a religion and have a sense of community and just, something to tie my individual beliefs to the world and know other people feel the same way I do.

Similarly, I grew up pretty much "American". I know my heritage is from Ireland, Poland, UK, Croatia, Germany because I did reports on ancestry in school, but they've never been a part of my identity. We never talk about being from Poland other than explaining to people why my last name is spelled the way it is (WHICH IS STUPID BECAUSE IT'S NOT A WEIRD SPELLING OR PRONOUNCED DIFFERENT THAN IT LOOKS). It just isn't a thing. I've always envied my friends whose families are very proud and invested in their heritage. And that's not for a lack of trying, I've tried to get invested in them, but there aren't really communities around me for it, my family doesn't give a shit, and even if I did, I'm like 15% everything so it doesn't feel like I'm REALLY from that culture. I guess that's why some people are so extreme about being American. They're such a mix of so many different European countries that if a parent isn't invested in a specific culture, it's hard to identify with any single one, so they rally behind America. It is all they have.

I don't know. It's very weird crisis that came out of nowhere in the stupidest ways (rewatching avatar and then having a crisis of faith looking at a chacra candle in a used book store). I've realized that I am paralyzed by the lack of a foundation of my identity. Personality traits and political views and hobbies are all malleable and change over time and so what I define myself as now could be completely gone and irrelevant in 2 years time and something about that terrifies me. It makes me wish there was something I could tie myself to that doesn't change, like what country my family is from. And if not that, an felling like I undestand the world around me would be great, and something religion provides. Also, the community wouldn't be something I'd hate to have.

Tangentially to this, I'm having a weird relationship with faith in another way. I keep finding myself gravitating towards budhism. I don't know why, but it just is what I keep ending up looking at. I have 6 different bibles, a torrah, and a quran that I've read. None feel quite right. I keep ending up reading more about budism. But I feel SO WEIRD about it. It feels like I'm that white dude everyone hates that wont stop talking about budism. I don’t know. I know I shouldn’t let the outside world’s perceptions affect my religious views. But that doesn’t mean it is easy not to.

Guess to make this more of a convo I’ll ask some questions to generate discussion:

Religious folks: How has growing up with a religion effected your life? Do you think you’d be a drastically different person without it?

Atheists: How weird does this sound to you? Did you go through a similar crisis before landing on atheism

People who grew up with a strong cultural identity: How has that effected your life? Are you generally happy that you have that identity and community? Were there ever times you wished you weren’t a part of it?

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.

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.

Hi, I'm new here. I use an extension for Firefox called Vim Vixen that allows the user to navigate webpages pretty effectively via the keyboard. One of its features allows the user to press the f key to bring up an overlay of keybindings over all links on the page, and pressing the keys associated with a link causes the browser to follow the link. I'm not intimately familiar with how the extension works, but with some basic Inspect Element-fu, I'm reasonably sure this feature is implemented with an iframe that is injected over the entire page.

On Tildes, the iframe is visible in the top left corner and shifts all the actual content over accordingly. Normally, it is invisible. This is the only time I've ever had a problem with the extension, which is why I'm posting here first rather than reporting an issue with the extension. If someone more knowledgeable is interested in creating a fresh Firefox profile and comparing how the extension works on Wikipedia and on Tildes, I'd appreciate it. The code for the iframe appears to be identical on both sites, and it's at the end of the page body.

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.

Inspired by discussion here.

Toxic players don't create toxic games. Toxic games create toxic players.

About a year ago, I wrote up a comprehensive report on why Overwatch's community is such a shitshow. Give it a read if you're at all interested in why game communities turn toxic, or if you're curious why Overwatch didn't stick longer as a phenomenon.

(At this point, with Overwatch now past its prime and usurped by other games due in large part to reasons I described there, I'd like to also offer a nice fat 'I told you so' to actiblizz. I didn't want to stop playing...)

The baseline question was this: Overwatch has great representation, an entertaining formula, and good messages. The game is super fun to play on the surface, and offers hundreds of hours of unique new experiences. So why is it so easily considered to have one of the most toxic competitive communities out there?

There's no explanation or reason for why naturally toxic players would gravitate towards the title, stick around, and infect the rest of the community. Nothing about Overwatch would indicate that it was going to somehow filter out the worst of the worst and keep them for itself, and that's because - bumbudaaa! It didn't.

Toxic players didn't infect Overwatch; Overwatch created toxic players.

The same things can be said for basically any other huge competitive game on the market, with CS:GO, LoL, and DOTA2 being the easiest examples. Their communities are all total swamps.

Despite this, there is virtually no game on the market which properly addresses the root cause of community-destroying toxicity: the game itself.

I'd rather not repeat myself because that above link will do a better job of going in-depth and can be applied to a lot of games, but the baseline problem is this: games catch and ban bad apples, but do nothing to stop those bad apples from forming. Failing to realize that parts of an otherwise amazing experience are fundamentally frustrating, the focus and blame is put on the players for reacting (see above thread) in exactly the way the games are designed to make them.

Chief among these issues? Games demand teamwork, cooperation and a community voice, but do nothing to facilitate them. Games that are designed to be fun casually will be frustrating competitively - and vice versa. Toxic communities will not form where every style of play is catered to, which is sometimes balance, but often a fundamental disconnect between what the game was built for, what's actually promised, and what the player's trying to get out of it.

So, I'd rather send the discussion in the other direction, which is why I posted this here. Rather than blame the community, it's time to look for solutions from the actual people responsible.

(To be clear: yes, there are assholes in the world, and yes, they play games. But the idea that the culture has only just now soured to a patch of racism and misogyny is laughable to anyone who grew up playing Xbox Live. It's been blown completely out of proportion by a fundamental discontent with games themselves, like further kindling on a fire, driven mostly by competitive culture.)

I've noticed lately that on certain social media websites, particularly Reddit and Facebook, there has been an uptick in articles about fake hate crimes and false rape reports. The comments on these articles especially fan the flames on the subjects of homophobia, racism, and sexism. While the articles themselves are still noteworthy and deserving of attention, the amount of attention that they've been receiving has been disproportionately high (especially when considering how fairly unknown the individuals involved are) and the discourse on those articles particularly divisive.

On top of that, there are clear disinformation campaigns going on to attack current Democratic presidential candidates in the U.S. It seems pretty clear that we're having a repeat of the last presidential election, with outside parties stoking the flames of discrimination and disinformation on social media in order to further ideological divisions, and the consumers of that media readily falling for it.

I would caution readers to be mindful of the shifting representation of historically controversial or contentious topics moving forward. Even if the articles themselves are solidly factual, take note of how frequently you're seeing these articles, whether or not they're known to be contentious topics, and how they're affecting online discourse.

In short: make sure that you can still smell bullshit even when it's dressed up in pretty little facts.

The current news report: 'Our little brown rat': first climate change-caused mammal extinction

The recent government statement: Stronger protection for threatened species

The news report from 2016: First Mammal Species Goes Extinct Due to Climate Change

The scientific report from 2016: Confirmation of the extinction of the Bramble Cay melomys Melomys rubicola on Bramble Cay, Torres Strait (PDF)