It wouldn’t be a Trump administration without reality TV drama. That harms millions of people.

The party The people that vote in the primaries for the party that claims to be “for the people” keeps putting centrists in charge.

Most people don’t vote in the Democratic primaries. Did you?

They weren’t, but they were a hell of a lot stronger than Trump. And Biden for that matter.

The reality is there’s clearly a double standard in how Americans - both male and female - view women as candidates. Look at how they attacked Kamala for having a monogamous relationship with Willie Brown while Trump cheated on 3 spouses and sexually assaulted somewhere between 1 and 25 people.

Does anyone think there’s a chance that a woman who was caught cheating on her spouse could get elected? And it’s not just sex stuff, the way opinions and mannerisms are scrutinized is different too. There’s 100x as many ways for a woman to be cringe as a man.

I get where you’re coming from, but in the interest of keeping my comment simple I left out that he claimed to be hiking in Dumbarton Oaks Park, which is not far (and downstream) from the picture I posted such that it wouldn’t be plausible that it would be that narrow.

But I’ll also point out the level of incredulity my comment is getting on a social media site, vs. RFK Jr.'s, which should strike anyone familiar with Rock Creek as almost certainly wrong. Yet everyone in the whole news media is either willfully ignoring this or just too lazy to look into it. And honestly it pisses me off because this lack of giving a fuck about basic facts from reporters who we falsely imagine as being employed in reporting facts shows how much we’re in a post-truth society and why we got a con artist as our president.

THIS IS NOT ROCK CREEK FFS

Everyone including major media sources is parroting what RFK Jr. said in his instagram account as if it’s gospel. Go to google maps. Look at Rock Creek. Look how big it is. This is not Rock Creek.

Strictly speaking that’s not true. For example, business elites almost certainly favored Romney over Obama’s second term. But when it’s someone as wooden as Romney, it doesn’t matter how much money they pour into the race.

This time around Republicans are probably going to run some Trump stooge who’s planning on the third term end-around to put Trump back in office, assuming Trump lasts that long. I think they’re going to have a similar problem this time.

Not to derail the topic into the lab leak thing. It just annoys me that this is so commonly taken as gospel when the vast majority of disease scientists disagree. I’ll just refer you to: https://youtu.be/EuwpDY5uFNQ

What annoys me is that “doing your own research” actually makes sense in a lot of contexts. Our modern politics driven news is 90% bullshit and you’re better off fact checking everything they say by looking at reliable sources and tracing the origin of dubious claims. But these people have ruined that by acting like “do your own research” means “blindly trust some guy with a podcast who tells you what you want to hear.”

There’s definitely giant inadequacies in American democracy, but still I fail to see how voting isn’t good enough. If people voted for Gore instead of Nader, American history would be very different. We’d have avoided a giant tax cut for the rich l, withdrawing from Kyoto, and a trillion dollar unnecessary war. Wealth inequality wouldn’t be as bad, there would definitely be earlier progress against global warming, and we could probably afford real universal health care by now.

Ideally after voting in the right people, we’d fix all the democracy problems. But still I’d say voting alone would make a huge difference. Anything else meanwhile - protests (BLM, Gaza), violence (Matthew crooks, Luigi) has at best accomplished zero, and in reality seems to have done serious damage to the causes they were seeking. The one exception I’d give is boycotts - like the Tesla boycotts that have destroyed their sales numbers.

Well yeah, but part of the voter propaganda is telling people both sides are the same. I get that there’s pro capitalist media bias which at its root is caused by extreme financial inequality. But fixing that financial inequality requires government action, and that requires voting. For the people who will do the inadequate version over the people who want to make it worse. Incremental change through pressure + time, just like everything else on earth.

Voting caused the problem, it can solve it too. But here’s the thing: for voting to solve the problem, you have to actually do it and play the game.

Every 20-25 years some rightwing psycho wins and inflicts some horror on us because new voters don’t remember what happened the last time people said “both sides are the same”. You kids know that whole Iraq war and torture thing was avoidable, right? So was Reagan’s annihilation of the middle class.

I mean obviously, they tried in 2020. But they’re also very, very dumb. That being said, with the four years in-between, they may have figured out how to book a hotel room by now.