Well, interesting take. I have a slightly different view but not by much. What wrecked the democratic party was the arrogance at the top of the DNC for at least the past 10 years. They don't really want a competitive race it seems. If you go back to 2016 with the Super-delegates for Hillary. The DNC top decided they wanted a coronation not primaries. Bernie showed up and almost toppled the self-appointed coronation. Hillary went on to run a terrible campaign for President, and with the demoralized supporters of Bernie, the rest was inevitable history.
2020, maybe Joe was ramrodded but it was COVID, and the country was maybe ready for 4 years of less action. The real betrayal was people with access to Biden, hiding his condition in 2024, and really poo-pooing any candidates. Dean Philips threw his hat in the ring, because he thought someone had to. The DNC did everything to sabotage the candidacy.
You can redistrict the US to create as many competitive districts as possible, but an election being competitive isn't mandated by the constitution.So changing gerrymandering by the vested interests is probably impossible,
The irony here was Trump was headed to a landslide in the spring. If he had waited to debate Joe in September, this would have been such an epic disaster for the democrats. Instead Trump jumped the gun and actually had a tighter race on his hands. The question for 2028, have the democrats learned anything and will actually let the primaries be competitive.
Republicans have separate issues, but you can't blame this all on Trump. He is merely the accelerant. The table was being set since at least the time of Newt Gingrich, and then by the people who decided to fund the local elections who understood control over districts would yield such dividends and what a great bargain it was from the amount of cash required. .
Your education is relevant for discussion because over the past four years, you keep on gratuitously reminding the forum about it. I expect self-proclaimed historians to offer cogent takes based on evidence, not unsubstantiated, shoot-from-the-hip gainsays.
You not only conflated news with editorial (again, quite the error), but you also missed on the context. After all, analysis of context of various sources is an essential part of a historian's task, no?
One reads one's sources while doing research, does one just blindly put the perspective of the respective authors as neutral, or does one think about what their proclivities and biases might be? In analyzing a past event, does one just read about what happened, or does one seek to understand underlying reasons? All that requires analysis of context.
So when you, self-proclaimed historian, makes a sweeping remark without thinking through the context behind the event, that's an omission.
You can't be more wrong, on both of your first two sentences, re: my motivations. But then, you aren't trained as a mind reader and you have already demonstrated your difficulty in assessing context, so I really shouldn't expect any better.
I think you're pissed about the current situation in the election and venting on a bike forum. I get it, you want Harris to win, and anyone who doesn't support her is evil and self-interested. I think Trump is a turd and Harris has run a terrible campaign after being hamstrung by Biden hanging on too long.
@htwoopup put this very cogently, and I defer to his analysis. In sum, when a paper genuflects to a potential power to curry favors, it puts serious doubts as to whether that paper can still be trusted. That's the reason for cancellation. And in grand scheme of things, an op-ed piece is the least of my concerns, as I want to ensure actual news reporting don't get nixed as well. Sure, there's a supposedly time-honored "firewall" between news and editorial at a publication, but how is one to believe that Bezos won't put his fingers on the scale when it comes to news coverage after this?
For all the faults of Murdoch, at least the WSJ's news section remain stellar, and I'm thinking of switching to WSJ reporting in place of WaPo. It was John Carreyrou, a dogged reporter at WSJ, who broke the news on malfeasance of Theranos. It probably wouldn't surprise anyone that Holmes tried to pull rank and get the story nixed, but Murdoch actually stood by his paper.
Now let's play some hypotheticals. Trump were in office, and a WaPo journalist were to come across something nefarious and want to publish that story. How confident are we that Bezos would act the way Murdoch did?In 2015, Murdoch led an investment round by pumping $125 million into Theranos, making him the company’s biggest investor. (Other big-name Theranos investors who have now lost at least $600 million total include current U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim and members of the Walton family of Walmart heirs.)
Eventually, when Holmes learned that Carreyrou was investigating Theranos, she turned to Murdoch, whose media empire includes the journalist’s employer, The Wall Street Journal. Carreyrou writes that Holmes tried to get Murdoch to kill the story, telling the billionaire “the information I had gathered was false and would do great damage to Theranos if it was published. Murdoch demurred, saying he trusted the paper’s editors to handle the matter fairly.”
Ah yes, if that were the case, why is the figurative turd (your own phrase) still floating in the toilet, with the water flow into the tank shut off most of the times and the downpipe clogged when there is water in the tank?I think the country is too strong to be destroyed by any one candidate and have faith in our system of democracy.
The first time that I sat for the International Baccalaureate history subsidiary level exam, I got a score of 1. It utterly shocked everyone in my school's administration and faculty because until then, the commonly held belief was that one can score a 2 just by writing in one's name (7 is, or was, full mark). To put it another way, I made school history that year.
Anyway, carry on.
Chikashi Miyamoto
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