Hegseth orders Navy ship USNS "Harvey Milk" to be stripped of its name

Sailed over your head, comment did.

but how has no one added

In The Navy…

Almost like saying lbgq stuff up at union halls and then using Disney as an example

 

Harris won union members by 16 points ... better numbers Biden did.

Why have democrats lost working class voters and union members over the years? How about I sum it up in one headline:

Jared Polis vetoes Colorado labor movement’s priority bill. Union leaders say they’ll be back.

Unions are at 9.9% of the labor force now (lowest ever I think), its increasingly a fringe constituency that politicians feel free to ignore.

 

Do they? Can you give me an example? The biggest gay rights policy initiative in my life time was done by an unelected conservative supreme court. Obama famously opposed gay marriage. I dont remember Biden or Harris (or Republicans) offering much in the way of policy while campaigning, maybe rainbow buttons or something. You can buy union buttons too.

 

You are so close to getting my point. Stick in there.

I think, that when Trump came out with his They/Them commercials, the left had a choice.

Come forward and say something along the lines of, "While we strongly support the americans freedoms the Trans issue is a private issue, one where i believe our government should have little if any role. Mr trump's ads do not represent my position, and are using cheap tricks to distort my position."

Or she could decide to ignore it and allow her opponent the opportunity to paint her as "pushing" the agenda.

She chose to stay silent for fear of alienating the gay community, and it was at least one reason she lost.

 

Who is the 'left?' Because the "left" as I understand that term does not control the Democratic party, its choice of candidates, its paid consultants, or overall strategy.

 

Wow... I am out.

 

If you are going to talk about 'the left' you should be able to say what you mean by that. People throw around that term as if its well-defined. Is it Bernie Sanders? Joe Biden? Anyone to the left of Mitt Romney? Any Democrat? DSA? People to the left of the Democrats? All of the above?

 

I get it, but I don't like to argue semantics. You are right I should have just said Kamala.

 

You're correct that I shouldn't have oversimplified my position originally as "trying to get a coalition of LGBT acrivists and Union members to coexist". That doesn't change the fact the Dems have lost the working class.

The "far left" used to be defined as strong Union support and the like. Now, being "far left" is defined by culture war stuff. Even strong labor advocates like Bernie have to get painted with the culture war stuff too. Even though I personally don't give a shit about it in a negative light, it's a losing battle as is.

 

Again, I don’t object to Tubman. If you put me in charge of naming ships, I probably would recommend sticking to traditional names (Enterprise, Constellation et al), historic battles (Saratoga, Ticonderoga et al), and naval heroes / Presidents who have been dead for greater than 50 years (Chester Nimitz, Theodore Roosevelt et al). If for no other reason than to avoid unnecessary political drama like this.

 

So you think some bland, carefully poll-tested scripted remarks could have changed the game? This is like 30+ years of Democratic thinking lol. To me that is the problem ... they think there are some magic words that will make politics go away. Like what you wrote avoided saying something as simple as "the Republicans are lying to you" ... maybe the reason Dems fail with some working class voters is their lack of authenticity? You yourself are saying they should do things you and maybe even them dont agree with personally. That's about as phony and cowardly as it gets IMO.

 

I don't really see that. But I suppose that depends on who is defining it. In fact, there is a broad section of the "far left" that more or less think any deviation from material-oriented politics aimed at the working class into "identity" constituencies is a "liberal" view. Anyways the left, at least in how I understand that word is more or less divided by class reductionists vs. intersectional struggle against capital. Anyways, you cant go to a DSA meeting without people talking about the working class and unions. You can go to a meeting of your local Democrats and not hear anything about the working class, broadly or non-teacher unions (especially in the South/RTW states). Partly thats because the active Dems are older, more affluent in general vs. DSA/left who are typically younger and less financially secure.

And to your point, the reason Bernie gets painted is because he's associated with the Democrats, who lack any sort of coherent ideology other than the one the opposition presents to the public. But he's still easily one of the most popular Democratic politicians, perhaps because unlike many others, people know where he stands on things and he's perceived as a person who fights for it.

 

You have a point, and I think I have the answer for that. I don’t think very many people knew (or wanted to) about Milk’s OTH discharge from the Navy at the time. I certainly didn’t. I remember when the ship was named, thinking to myself, “Why are they naming a ship after him? Oh, he was a naval officer? Didn’t know that. Whatever. Moving on.” Most people believed he had an Honorable discharge because of the Randy Shilts (same guy who wrote And the Band Played On) biography that elevated Milk’s fame posthumously and was the basis for the movie. Shilts wrote only briefly about Milk’s naval career, included none of the documented misconduct, and stated he had received an Honorable discharge. That may have been by mistake or it may have been a deliberate whitewashing. We will never know. Shilts died of AIDS in the early 90s. Since his was the first major work on Milk, it served as the basis of others’ research and the falsehood got perpetuated even after the ship naming. I think it’s fair to assume even under the Obama Administration if someone had captured that Milk had received an OTH due to a pattern of misconduct that they probably would not have named a ship after him. It just does not brief well.

 

Would agree in principle, but that ship left the harbor a long time ago and now it has become political football.

 

Would think the US Navy would do a better job providing feedback on that if there was an opportunity to do so in the process if it was such a dealbreaker. Again, no one cared until Trump, with his typical divisiveness came into the picture and I'm sure on the list of sins, we've named ships after traitors, slave owners, and probably much worse and never blinked an eye.

 

Again I dont think his Navy service was relevant to any of this. More of a coincidence. Tubman, John Lewis, Sojourner Truth, Dolores Huerta, Thurgood Marshall, Lucy Stone, RBG weren't in the service at all. Only RFK was in the Navy too. Earl Warren was in the military. Now you can quibble with why RBG needs a military ship named after her, or from my perspective why some of these people should be associated with the military at all given their advocacy of peace and liberation, but that is a different matter. Ultimately we can simply agree that this whole thing is a case of whats good for the goose is good for the gander, turnabout is fairplay, etc.