rational_lib

In 2020 Trump's approval was so low that Bill Cosby could've beaten him.

Biden was a long-time failed presidential candidate even when he was younger and better at speaking. In the same primary election in 2008 where Obama was first and Hillary was second, Biden was a total embarrassment - if I recall he didn't get a single delegate. But in 2020 he rode the popularity of the Obama administration to the top just like Clinton did in 2016.

The tendency of democratic voters, especially in early primary states to pick some familiar name is completely devastating to Democrat electability. The last candidate to win on his own merits rather than being associated with someone else was Obama and he crushed it. Anyone associated with past administrations needs to be ruled out from the get go because they almost certainly suck.

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'm just thinking back to 2016 when someone got the idea that Joe Biden should run. And somehow nobody could stop it.

The most politically incorrect truth is this: People are not good or bad, individual people do a variety of good and bad things. Mister Rogers told his gay friend to stay in the closet and marry a woman. Hitler banned animal cruelty. We don't like to talk about these things, but it's a true principle and a useful one to live by.

People create content knowing others are going to get filthy rich off it and they'll get nothing in return. Except total loss of privacy.

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.

Well you gotta admit though, that's kinda hilarious. I mean just think of it - the most high and mighty nation about protecting rights, and then we just pick Mungo from Queens, who's like "Mungo no like habeas corpus!" And then we just go to the gulag or whatever. And people are running around like "Oh no why did we pick Mungo, what were we thinking." I mean it's at least kinda funny.

It would be hilarious if a reporter asked Trump to explain what habeas corpus is.

The country was in decline for at least a decade before Trump took office.

Well 4 years of that decade was Trump being in office, and 4 other years was the result of people being willing to vote in literally anyone who wasn't him. So really 8 years of that decade was Trump's fault. And the other two years? Not bad.

As for the rest, Trump is cutting funding for research like crazy. That won't just affect things today, that's going to make stuff shitty for decades. And that's exactly the kind of harm that the emotion-laden American news and social media simply won't cover. So I don't think there will be a backlash, rather the opposite - politicians will realize bullying scientists, government agencies, immigrants, and other voiceless Trump targets is just good politics, and keep doing it.

Of course future prediction is hard, so who knows what will happen. But I'm not seeing the path for this to turn around anytime soon. The same media that created MAGA, and made it even more popular 4 years after it proved itself to be a horrific disaster is the same media we have today. Democrats will probably win the next two elections because people can see what Trump is doing in real time, but after that I have no hope for America. If I have to predict the future, I'd guess the EU becomes the new global leader, driven by relatively high democracy and pro-science policies compared to the rest of the world. This could even occur in a relatively short time frame, like 5 years.

I'm plenty open to questioning every part of copyright (has the idea ever actually been proven to be worth the enormous costs? It's like an infinity-percent tariff on anything information related.) but the same copyright should apply to everbody. It sounds like this proposal gives a specific pass to corporations developing AI - anything these corporations can access should be accessible to the general public as well. If you can use a song to train an AI for free, a human artist should also be allowed to use it directly and turn it into a new work.

“This is crazy, we voted for Trump, we trusted him, his word, what he promised Latinos,” she said.

And what promises were those, exactly? What Trump promised latinos was to deport all the other latinos they don't like.

That's Trump's magic. He tells one group of people and says "I hate the same people you hate." Then he goes to another group of people and says the same thing. Eventually he's convinced everybody he hates everybody, but not themselves.