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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Someone posted an article on a subreddit I frequent. It was an extremely long and rambling hit piece against antifacism, littered with long academic words, written for a completely fake Sociology college in London. While checking the source's reputability, I found out that it's part of what is known as the Neoreactionary movement.

Here's an article about it: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/behind-the-internets-dark-anti-democracy-movement/516243/

Here's a more "fun" write-up from RationalWiki: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Neoreactionary_movement

It's the most bizarre thing. They are basically a pseudointellectual alt-right who quite literally advocate for a monarchy. They are very secretive of their identities and write contrived "theses" under pen names (which, strangely enough, seem to be stolen from actual published academics both living and dead). They think they are a secret society attempting to overthrow existing governments, but in reality they are little more than a collection of fanfic authors.

Has anyone else come into contact with any of them? I am particularly interested if any of our Reddit moderators have anything to say.

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.