{"id":21851,"date":"2016-05-20T01:12:57","date_gmt":"2016-05-20T08:12:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=21851"},"modified":"2016-05-20T01:12:57","modified_gmt":"2016-05-20T08:12:57","slug":"an-obligatory-nevada-wtf-post","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=21851","title":{"rendered":"An obligatory Nevada WTF post"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"nevada-democrats\"<\/a><\/p>\n

[This is a guest post , reposted from Now Face North<\/a> with Lirael’s kind permission. –Amp]<\/em><\/p>\n

As I\u2019ve mentioned before, I am a Bernie Sanders supporter! I also have some thoughts, regarding different subsets of people, about the mess in Nevada and some of the resulting Internet conversation.<\/p>\n

To the people who doxxed, harassed, and threatened a Nevada Democratic Party official<\/strong>: Stop being assholes, okay? And no, the fact that the relevant info was publicly available doesn\u2019t make it better<\/a>. Doxxing and harassment have a long and ugly<\/a> history in the anti-abortion movement, that predates the word \u201cdoxxing\u201d even existing. Leave that kind of targeting of people to them, leave it to the Gamergaters, leave it to right-wing talk radio hosts (I was doxxed, albeit incompetently, by a right-wing talk radio host after my arrest last year). I mean, fight them, don\u2019t just leave it to them and then call it a day, but don\u2019t join<\/i> them. Okay? I don\u2019t understand why this is hard. Why would you threaten somebody\u2019s grandkids?<\/p>\n

If you are saying \u201cBut some of those weren\u2019t threats! They were only saying that she should be hurt, not that the person was going to do it!\u201d then you should consider that they are obviously meant to frighten the person they\u2019re directed at. They are threats in a common-sense understanding. \u201cYou should be hurt\u201d is a threat. And use some empathy, for chrissake. Last year after my arrest, in addition to the right-wing talk radio release of what the host believed to be my then-home-address, I got some threats of this nature, in the form of tweets and comments on news articles. Notably, a guy who runs a certain well-known and longstanding sportsbro media outlet, as well as a radio show of his own, posted to his legion of followers that we should be slowly and gruesomely publicly beaten to death. By the logic that some people are using when talking about Nevada, I shouldn\u2019t have considered this to be threatening. I am irritated about the downplaying. If you\u2019re defending threats this way, you might support the same candidate as I do at the moment, but you\u2019re not some kind of compatriot, you\u2019re not trustworthy, and I believe that you\u2019ll turn on me as soon as something pisses you off.<\/p>\n

To Bernie Sanders<\/strong>: Sorry, your statement was bad. I get that you have some concerns and complaints about the process, that you feel like you\u2019re beating your head against a party infrastructure that is dubious about you. I get that you think the Nevada party leadership is singling out your supporters, when your own staff in Nevada were apparently targeted for violence by unknown persons during the Nevada campaign. None of that belongs in your statement. It\u2019s not adequate to throw in a bit of \u201cAnd of course I\u2019m against violence.\u201d You need to condemn the harassment against and threatening of the state chairwoman and anyone else who was targeted, and intimidating behavior like chair-throwing on the convention floor or use of misogynistic slurs. Full stop. Nothing else belongs in that statement. Process concerns can go into a different statement. Violence against your staff is abhorrent, and was not an issue of the recent convention, and can be addressed in statements that are not responses to the convention. Bringing them into your statement muddies the waters, and these are waters that shouldn\u2019t be muddy.<\/p>\n

To some subset<\/em> of Nevada Sanders delegates<\/strong>: I don\u2019t know how many of you have a background in street protest. Maybe you do, maybe you don\u2019t and you just know what you\u2019ve seen on TV or the Internet. But in either case, this is not street protest. You chose a \u201crespectable\u201d role for this one. You chose to formally represent a major campaign (and possibly your local Democratic party; I\u2019m not sure how that works in Nevada) at a party insider business function. Nobody made you decide to do that instead of, say, marching through the local streets or sitting down in an intersection outside the building. Nobody made you pursue the electoral route to advance your causes at all. And believe me, I\u2019m not dragging you for your choice here. I support your choice! I believe in diversity of tactics \u2013 actual diversity of tactics, not the sometime protest euphemism for breaking windows. I believe that the boundaries between institutional politics and protest politics, between within-the-system and outside-the-system, should be fluid, with activists able to assume different roles at different times if they want to, and people understanding and respecting the usefulness of different roles.<\/p>\n

Hell, I\u2019m a street medic who just finished going through the court system after an arrest, and I\u2019m also a delegate in my upcoming state Democratic convention. Which, to my eternal relief, does not have to touch the Hillary vs Bernie issue, because we already chose the candidates\u2019 national delegate allocations through our primary process. There would be something really weird going on if I didn\u2019t believe in being able to move among different activist roles and tactics.<\/p>\n

However, different<\/i> is a key word here. Some of the Nevada delegates didn\u2019t act like they understood what they were there for, from a tactical perspective. They didn\u2019t learn the rules, to the extent that they even scored an own-goal when it came to constructing the party platform<\/a>, and then were upset when they lost. They responded to procedural things not going their way by angrily going toward the stage and yelling. Protest politics vs institutional politics is not totally binary, and you can certainly do institutional politics with an edge (Bernie Sanders has in fact made a career out of that) or mix the two up a little. But, this isn\u2019t breaking a kettle. It\u2019s not pulling aside the barricades to Wall Street. It\u2019s not disrupting a public Trump rally, or some other kind of antifa-ish action. It makes sense to change your tactics based on the context, and what will advance your goals in the context that you\u2019re working in. If you choose the ground of a major presidential campaign and a state party convention to plant yourself in, then I think you should follow through with it. And just like you\u2019d go to a direct action training, or a know-your-rights training, or a protest health & safety training, or seek out advice from experienced protest-goers, before a big protest, if you\u2019re going to be a delegate, you should do what you can to learn how to be a delegate<\/i> for the relevant convention, which is something I am trying to do now. I would even be willing to believe that some of the reports of delegate behavior have been skewed or unfair \u2013 I wasn\u2019t watching the live feed, and lord knows that\u2019s common enough with protest<\/i> reporting \u2013 but the fact that people accidentally removed a section that they cared about from the platform because they didn\u2019t understand what they were doing, and then were angry about it, is hard to get around.<\/p>\n

To some subset<\/em> of Clinton supporters on the Internet<\/strong>: You have good reasons to complain here. The fact that progressive politicians were booed is not really, in my opinion, one of them. I get that it is upsetting to see progressives that you admire and think have done great work, booed. But no politician is owed unbroken deference by members of the public, and dealing with a little booing and heckling is part of a politician\u2019s job. \u201cWhere do these ungrateful twerps get off, daring to boo when a progressive hero like Barbara Boxer is speaking?\u201d is a very<\/i> different statement from \u201cBooing Barbara Boxer as a delegate at a Democratic Party event probably doesn\u2019t help either Sanders\u2019 campaign or the advancement of his policy agenda.\u201d<\/p>\n

To the many, many people in 2011-2012 who criticized Occupy on the grounds that what it really needed to do was to be more like a left-wing Tea Party, to try and take over the Democratic Party from within<\/strong>: Congratulations! You spoke, and some people both inside and outside of the movement listened and concluded that you were right! They decided to channel their energy, their desire to move the country leftward, into an election, into gaining power within the Democratic Party. Wait, why do you look so upset? Why are you going on about how the primary is damaging the party or damaging its chances in the general? Isn\u2019t the Sanders campaign an example of what you straight-out told people to do if they wanted to be Effective Responsible Leftists?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[This is a guest post , reposted from Now Face North with Lirael’s kind permission. –Amp] As I\u2019ve mentioned before, I am a Bernie Sanders supporter! I also have some thoughts, regarding different subsets of people, about the mess in … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-elections-and-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/46"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21851"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21851\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21853,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21851\/revisions\/21853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}