The dude 100% believes that there will be a mass murdering purge of all doctors and healthcare workers this year when the “RFK Autism report” comes out.

…does he not realize that he is also capable of contracting illness? Who does he think is going to take care of him when he breaks his hip or has a stroke?

Don’t they keep it for life?

That was one of the things that boggled me the most. I understood why they e.g. wouldn’t call out Israel, dumb and evil as it was, but to keep hammering on how “great” the economy was, over and over, despite all evidence that indicated people were struggling? It blows my mind. I can’t imagine a better way to get people to vote against you.

Tbh, I’m not convinced either of them are compromised by Russia in that sense (though wouldn’t be surprised, to be clear. We pretty much know Trump has assaulted and raped underage girls; I wouldn’t be surprised if Musk has also). I think they’re both just scared little boys who are trying to impress who they see as a big, strong man, in order to get the kind of fatherly approval that they never received from their actual fathers. They’re both childishly impulsive and both try comedically hard to be seen as strong and capable, and then get emotional when they see that image being challenged.

Where’s DOGE on this waste and abuse?

He’s a billionaire.

Allegedly. His inability to pay some of the judgments against him calls that into question, e.g. the E. Jean Carrol suit. If nothing else, he definitely has a billionaire mindset.

Hopefully they survive this administration.

Some such people are really good at pretending to have empathy. I used to be with a narcissist who was a nurse. She could put on a good face, but in actuality she just got off on the sense of power over people who needed her help. In areas where being an awful person didn’t threaten her job security, she had zero qualms about hurting or taking advantage of others, and she did so without hesitation when she felt it would benefit her.

They believe the propaganda that others hate them or are trying to destroy their way of life, and that dollar-store Hitler is their champion fighting for them.

Nice. If they’d had that as a color option, they might have sold more!

I think they even made a new department for that. I bet that waste will be resolved in no time!

Trump and co haven’t ordered sexual harassment training to stop? I’m genuinely surprised.

express shipping them to heaven.

Do we have a c/brandnewsentences yet?

I’ve worked with a lot of people who have chronically abused opioids. None of them look like this guy. I suspect it’s chronic, heavy smoking plus a horrible, horrible diet. And maybe using some comedically nonsensical, quacky health ‘supplements’ of some kind.

Fwiw, Autism Speaks eventually shifted their official position and they now endorse vaccination, and no longer fund research trying to find/prove non-existent links between vaccines and autism.

I like this idea in theory, but I think it would be easy for bad-faith actors to game the system. Expertise can be faked and reputation can be manipulated. Governments or other powerful/wealthy organizations could easily fund a large effort to shift agreement metrics toward their preferred narrative. We know Russia and China already have whole farms of people on social media trying to skew narratives and perceptions. Hell, I could see a tech-savvy individual distributing a software package to like-minded (or gullible) people in order to effectively automate the process of skewing the agreement metrics.

I have found myself wondering if Israel’s actions are causing Hamas to grow faster than they can kill its members. Where’s the saying come from, “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”? Were my family and friends being killed just for existing, with the sole excuse being that there might possibly have been terrorists in the area maybe, I can’t say I’d be content to sit idly by to watch others suffer the same. And I suspect I’m not alone in that.

If he was found to have done nothing wrong, it would have been released immediately and all conservative media would have been parading it out saying “look, it really is a democratic witch hunt against conservatives!”

The mere hesitancy to release it confirms what we’ve known all along: dude did some bad stuff, probably involving sex with minors.

Except China is doing exactly that, and it has been known for years, with multiple US federal agencies taking various steps to counteract it. E.g.:

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/chinas-role-in-the-fentanyl-crisis/

https://www.npr.org/2024/04/16/1244964595/fentanyl-china-precursor-overdose

China, specifically the CCP, has an obvious interest in weakening the US, and has demonstrated that they have no qualms with injuring people to achieve their ends (for further reading, look up Hong Kong, the Uygher people, and Tibet). (And no, before you think it, I’m not saying that getting poor white Americans addicted to opioids is equivalent to genocide of Uyghers.) We have a massive opioid crisis in the US, and it has been fueled in the last few years by fentanyl. Virtually all of the illicit opioids available here now contain fentanyl or are comprised entirely of fentanyl, and it’s routinely found contaminating other drugs.

It’s a problem that is recognized by both parties. To say “China is flooding the country with illegal drugs” is, yes a gross oversimplification of the problem, but it’s a simple narrative the Republicans can use to try to convince their voter base that tariffs are somehow a sensible course of action. If their voter base was wont to grasp and meaningfully contemplate complex geopolitical issues, they’d never have voted Republican in the first place.

For all his faults and evils, Vance is not a narcissist who pathologically seeks the approval of those he sees as high status, which is what has compelled Trump to try so hard to be buddies with dictators. Vance is more cunning than Trump and would need to have a profit motive beyond just an ego stroking before putting his position at risk (even if the risk is evidently slight, but his relatively low popularity / lack of cult following makes me think/hope he’d have a harder time getting away with stuff than Trump). I suspect most dictators don’t have much to offer Vance in the way of profit that he couldn’t just as easily secure for himself as president without the personal risks of selling out the country to foreign adversaries, and the most salacious scandal we’ve heard about him has to do with a couch rather than Epstein so the kompromat is probably minimal or nil.

Don’t get me wrong, a President Vance would be awful in a lot of ways, and arguably worse than Trump in some ways. It’s just that I don’t imagine him as being quite as much of a national security risk. But, again, maybe it’s just naive hope. 🤷