That’s not the point I’m making. I’m saying between inciting an insurrection, spending campaign funds for silencing pornstars, telling people to inject disinfectant in their veins, and sexual assault sentences… I’d say one shady rape allegation that never went anywhere is definitely not the main reason why he shouldn’t be president.

…which confirms that there’s no new info.

Some X users appeared to believe that the document is a recent filing. The post was shared after about 150 pages of transcripts related to a 2006 grand jury investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s rape and sex trafficking of teenagers was released to the public on Monday.

However, the document included in the X post isn’t connected to those papers, but actually comes from a lawsuit filed in the months leading up to the 2016 election by an anonymous plaintiff using the name “Katie Johnson.”

Now, I wouldn’t be surprised if he actually did it, wouldn’t even be the worst thing he did. But that is indeed the general consensus, afaik.

EDIT: the article posted by Flying Squid would be more relevant to current events.

…does it? I tried googling a bit but couldn’t find anything recent.

EDIT: okay, there’s articles talking about the Epstein documents, but they don’t seem to be explicitly connected to this specific case. Would’ve been better to post that article instead of a 8-year old one.

Well, as others said, it’s probably because it’s a 2016 article about a story that never got anywhere.

Maybe it was true, maybe it wasn’t, who knows. But it’s definitely not the best thing to give press announcements about, especially considering all the horrible stuff Trump has verifiably done.

And splitting the votes of the sane Americans among multiple parties, allowing Trump to get a second term and enact Project 2025 is a productive and thought-out strategy?

You answered yourself, it’s because Republicans need to lose consistently, and it’s been over 70 years since the last time they even lost three consecutive terms.

Meanwhile, did you see what happened after three consecutive Republican terms? Clinton. Reagan + H. W. in a row definitely shifted the overton window to the right, and forced Dems to react accordingly. That’s what needs to happen, in reverse. Allowing Trump in office again would send the message that racism is the winning strategy, and Dems might get even worse.

Waiting for the window to shift might look like a pie in the sky to you (and you’re not even that wrong, considering how the DNC keeps pushing their worst), but a third party winning is a pie in straight outer space.

Thanks for the sources, I was genuinely not aware of how many people supported Perot.

third party votes can’t force the biden regime and the democrats to abandon those positions, but they can show the democrats how much support they could pick up by taking them on.

But even then, it’s usually not enough support for it to actually change the outcome. In the case of Perot it was, apparently, but even then it still didn’t push either of the candidates to change their views on nafta. If support that big is still not enough for them to worry, it’s hard to believe it can ever make a difference.

you said every major candidate runs on platforms that the majority of americans don’t support. you’re right. why can they get away with that? is it possibly because people have accepted the “throw your vote away” logic?

No, it’s because the US got so divided on stuff that’s supposed to be a given, that contributing to an ongoing genocide isn’t the most important thing for voters right now. When the main candidates are polar opposites on key issues in people’s lives like Abortion or LGBT rights, anything happening outside of the country becomes an afterthought.

I don’t know the answer to that, but i do know that actually expressing what we want with the only voice we are given that politicians can’t deny is a phenomenal way to change it!

It is, but not by voting third party. I can understand it if the candidate is actually leading in polls like Perot was, but right now hoping for a third party (or worse, Kennedy is apparently the most supported after the main two so FOURTH party) exploit is way too unrealistic to take the risk.

As I’ve said in another post, to me the only feasible way to get stuff to actually change is to keep voting for the “least bad” of the main candidates. If Republicans keep losing every election, eventually they’ll resign to the fact that they can’t keep running on christofascism and give their platform to a candidate that at least has the same opinion as the Dem one about basic human rights. And only at that point, when Dems won’t be able to run on “my opponent is literally Satan”, they’ll have to shift to more progressive positions to keep getting elected. If at that point they still don’t, you can safely vote for third parties because “wasting your vote” isn’t that much of a risk.

You said “if anecdote isn’t enough, they’re both well-studied”, so I thought some research actually existed about it.

I’m not saying third party campaigns are useless or always spoilers, I just don’t think they can actually force a change since it seems they can successfully be ignored with no repercussions. Sure, major parties can pick up bits from their programs if they want to, but they’re definitely not in a situation where they have to or else they’ll risk the election.

Even now for example, I think every non-major candidate except Kennedy is against funding Israel. But despite that, and despite (I think?) the majority of Americans being against it as well, both Biden and Trump are running with it. Because they know it’s not an issue that actually “matters” to the campaign, since there’s no viable alternative that doesn’t support it.

What I’m saying is, how did those studies reach the conclusion that said third parties were actually a factor in those changes, and didn’t just happen at the same time?

Because again, considering the statistics for recent years’ elections, third parties haven’t been a threat to the major two for over 50 years. I’m interested in why would they care about the relatively small voter base of those parties when they wouldn’t have changed any recent American election.

I’ll admit I’m not that well-informed on those elections, but would’ve they really been capable of being more than a spoiler candidate, had they not been “listened to”?

Looking at the data, every election in the past 200 years has been won with more than 50% of the electoral college. Latest one where a state has been won by a third party is ‘68. If those phenomena have been studied I’m interested, because it really doesn’t seem like they did anything looking at the results at a surface level.

That’s not feasible in a FPTP system. Best you can do is keep voting for the least bad between the two “real” candidates and shift the Overton window overtime.

Or have a violent revolution, but that’s a bit more difficult to coordinate.

Would she? I’m not that informed on her politics but I think Bernie supported her, and Bernie is definitely a progressive even by rest-of-the-world standards.

I’m absolutely convinced I read something about him regarding a controversy with China and Fast & Furious but I can’t find anything about it now. Am I just imagining it?

The thing is, a lot of times people think they’re informed enough even when they aren’t. There isn’t a clear indicator of “how informed” you are on any subject, and self-assessment is a faulty thing. The Dunning-Kruger effect probably plays a part in that too.

Sure, I agree, but unfortunately the human mind is prone to jumping to conclusions, especially when they fit their narrative. One should always be sure of what happened before forming an opinion on it, but sometimes you “get the feeling you’re sure” even when you don’t have all the necessary information.

Just look at how widespread the “Biden doesn’t know the alphabet” thing got when the original was very clearly satire.

To be honest, the headline is really misleading. Yes, people should definitely RTFA, but not everyone has the time to do that and a headline should be specific enough to avoid spreading misinformation.

But, as you said, it’s a private organization, focused on Conservative Political Action. What’s discussed there should more or less fit the agenda of the Republican Party, I figure if someone goes there and starts preaching socialism they’d get kicked.

The fact they aren’t kicking Nazis is at the very least admitting they’re not opposed to their ideas, and if we follow the Nazi bar analogy, they agree too.

Unless I missed them, I don’t see comparisons to war veterans, at most the second one compares them to civilian survivors.

In any case, I don’t think anyone is questioning the fact that sex workers need way safer working conditions, it was the very point of the first commenter. “Treating them like other workers” was meant in a good sense, as they’re currently treated worse.