Democratic Primaries

Hasty generalization is a logical fallacy. It's one way to do racism. An individual (or even several) African Americans kill somebody. Then, we hear "They are going to keep killing whites."

This is exactly what is wrong:

Some guy Matt what's-his-face and some few others say something stupid. Then people turn it into "THEY, i.e. Bernie supporters are trying to do X." People take a collection of anecdotes and use them for some kind of agenda or just because they hold a grudge. Who knows. It's logically false and it is destructive, not constructive.

The vast majority of Bernie supporters are not Matt.

How should we approach this Matt fellow instead? We need to address the core of his argument!

We have to admit that VP Joe Biden was wrong about a few things with Iraq, but propagandists also exaggerate his wrongness. They will point to him being chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee in 2002 prior to the 2003 declaration of war on Iraq. They will point to him making some false statements about WMDs. BUT that's because Joe Biden was tricked by the Bush Administration. He was tricked by false intelligence reports that the Republicans made up. So was I initially, like many Democrats.

Even though Joe Biden was tricked, he didn't pull some switch and say "okay, George W Bush kill a million people." NO, he made an amendment or a bill that said we could go into Iraq for the purpose of dismantling WMD, not for regime change. The bill also called for international (UN) oversight and reporting requirements to congress. So Joe Biden was very much NOT in favor of a no holds barred war against Iraq but wanted a much smaller scope in order to save American lives and put various checks on the Administration.

see The Los Angeles Times, 02 Oct 2002, page 8:

This is a reasonable position when you are given false information.

Things clearly did not turn out this way and Bernie's instinct on it was better. But we can't pretend that Joe didn't value Iraqi lives or that he's an imperialist or some other extreme term that propagandists outside the Democratic Party will use as a competitive means to get progressives into their fold.

Let me repeat that in another way. When we look at far-left ideologies such as Marxism, we observe that they discuss a term "imperialism" and this term describes not only literally empire--the root word--but profit being redirected in capitalist society to the victors--to the ownership class. It is entirely plausible that this description is apt in connection to Dick Cheney's Project for a New American Century and all the fringe defense industry and oil company benefits they were receiving directly and indirectly. However, Joe Biden's proposed resolution clearly does not fit this Marxist paradigm because its scope was far too small and was not about profit under capitalism in any way aside from incidental that we all operate under capitalism. A far more parsimonious explanation of Joe Biden's proposed resolution is that he was interested in saving both American lives and Iraqi lives.

This tells us that Joe Biden and we share the same values. It tells us that he also shares those values with Bernie. We are all on the same team here.

We should try to act like it.