US Presidential Election 2024

[Bully Wee Villa]

It'll be Trump or someone even worse, and their first act will be to pardon Trump. 

[TxRover]

50 minutes ago, Bully Wee Villa said:

It'll be Trump or someone even worse, and their first act will be to pardon Trump. 

Only works for Federal crimes…already indicted in New York State and facing the same in Georgia…which leaves the possibility of Trump being elected, only to be in jail in New York or Georgia on Inauguration Day…then we get into some really weird scenarios. The other fun one is if the State cases are underway and Trump is elected, he could get the cases moved to Federal Court, and have his AG instruct the Justice Department to not show up.

[Guest]

Cornel West announced as seeking the candidature for the Green Party. He was originally going to run for the People's Party, a new party who he seemingly hadn't done his due dilligence on as they have a reactionary element to them. Green Party seem a more natural fit for his politics. West has a significant media profile but his problem will be that Americans have little class consciousness yet that's what he's trying to appeal to. Many American votes are cast out of identity concerns and West has no obvious constituency there. Despite himself being Black, he's not going to attract "the Black vote" as he's an east coast academic not a Southern pastor. His impact will likely be neglible. The folk he's advocating for are mostly too disenfranchised to vote. Then those who do vote just won't hear his message, such is the funding disparity between the Green and Democratic parties.

Edit: I originally put he was confirmed as Green Party candidate. That's wrong. He has only joined them and is seeking to become their candidate. 

Edited June 14, 2023 by FreedomFarter

[Theroadlesstravelled]

On 14/06/2023 at 15:07, FreedomFarter said:

Cornel West announced as seeking the candidature for the Green Party. He was originally going to run for the People's Party, a new party who he seemingly hadn't done his due dilligence on as they have a reactionary element to them. Green Party seem a more natural fit for his politics. West has a significant media profile but his problem will be that Americans have little class consciousness yet that's what he's trying to appeal to. Many American votes are cast out of identity concerns and West has no obvious constituency there. Despite himself being Black, he's not going to attract "the Black vote" as he's an east coast academic not a Southern pastor. His impact will likely be neglible. The folk he's advocating for are mostly too disenfranchised to vote. Then those who do vote just won't hear his message, such is the funding disparity between the Green and Democratic parties.

Edit: I originally put he was confirmed as Green Party candidate. That's wrong. He has only joined them and is seeking to become their candidate. 

This is blatant racism. You’re basically saying that black people won’t vote for an academic because they’re low brow.

You were also antisemitic on another thread.

 

@admins get this fud banned.

[Guest]

4 hours ago, Theroadlesstravelled said:

This is blatant racism. You’re basically saying that black people won’t vote for an academic because they’re low brow.

You were also antisemitic on another thread.

 

@admins get this fud banned.

The South has the highest concentration of Black people in USA. These are still white-majority states, though, as well as Republican voting states because most of that white majority vote Republican. That means, however, that of the Democratic party's vote in these states, a large chunk of those votes come from Black people. This makes the South the only region of USA where the "Black vote" can be considered as a significant bloc. Not for swinging the outcome of the state in a presidential election, it always goes Republican, but for effecting who wins the Democratic nomination.

Sanders was leading Biden in 2020 until the Southern states voted and the Black vote mobilised for Biden. This happened because the Democratic Party has a deep hold upon the Black churches in these states. Biden was the party's preference not Sanders, so the party made sure the pastors told the congregants to vote Biden.

The only time this mechanism has been overcome was when Jesse Jackson twice ran for the Democratic Party candidacy in the 1980s. He was a Black Southern Baptist minister so he was able to obtain the Black Southern vote away from the Democratic Party's preferred candidate. He even managed to run Dukkakis fairly close in 1988 for the party nomination.

Cornel West is hoping to run for the Green Party and its likely his aim will be to peel off some Democratic Party votes in the presidential election. Not so many votes as to prevent Biden beating the Republican candidate but enough so as to be noticed. That could have the impact of moving the Democratic Party slightly leftwards to try and regain those votes lost to West and his Green Party. 

I think there's little chance of this happening because West is not known enough among the working class. He has appeared in media but working class Americans don't watch the Bill Maher Show (quite rightly). The relevance to him being an academic is that there's an ivory towers component to that. He is not someone who's been embedded in a working class community for decades, building up grass roots support. He also won't be able to capitalise on any identity vote such as the Black vote because even Bernie Sanders couldn't crack that from within the Democratic Party so West has no chance of doing it from outside. He may be Black but he's not of Jesse Jackson's background.

 

You're a racist, antisemitic fud.

[OmegaSpeedyPro]

The empire is crumbling , america is now a banana republic .

The alphabet agencies now openly corrupt and working against the people and doing political favors for the most detestable characters you could imagine currently democrats.

Trump is literally the last chance saloon to save the republic.

RFK would be the savior of the other side but the swamp creatures won't allow that to happen.

[D Angelo Barksdale]

11 hours ago, Theroadlesstravelled said:

You were also antisemitic on another thread.

Was he aye ? Post the evidence then.

[Theroadlesstravelled]

2 hours ago, Herc said:

Was he aye ? Post the evidence then.

Are you his maw?

[TxRover]

4 hours ago, OmegaSpeedyPro said:

The empire is crumbling , america is now a banana republic .

The alphabet agencies now openly corrupt and working against the people and doing political favors for the most detestable characters you could imagine currently democrats.

Trump is literally the last chance saloon to save the republic.

RFK would be the savior of the other side but the swamp creatures won't allow that to happen.

Christ, it’s spreading.

8 hours ago, FreedomFarter said:

The South has the highest concentration of Black people in USA. These are still white-majority states, though, as well as Republican voting states because most of that white majority vote Republican. That means, however, that of the Democratic party's vote in these states, a large chunk of those votes come from Black people. This makes the South the only region of USA where the "Black vote" can be considered as a significant bloc. Not for swinging the outcome of the state in a presidential election, it always goes Republican, but for effecting who wins the Democratic 

There’s a few basic problems with that analysis, to start with:

1) Texas is majority minority, that is the largest voting bloc is non-Hispanic white, but it is no longer 50%+1. Change to Deep South and you are more correct, but Florida fails to have a so called African-American vote by your standards.

2) Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia and Florida will be majority minority by 2030.

3) Georgia most certainly didn’t vote Republican, with 33% Black vote, but Mississippi did with 35% Black vote…the reverse you’d expect with a “voting bloc”.

4) Florida has been a few thousand votes away from a tie for several cycles with a (relatively) low African-American population and despite a high Cuban-American population.

[D Angelo Barksdale]

1 hour ago, Theroadlesstravelled said:

Are you his maw?

No.

Interested to see his antisemitic posts though. Put them up.

[Theroadlesstravelled]

12 hours ago, Herc said:

No.

Interested to see his antisemitic posts though. Put them up.

It’s in the Labour thread. You’ll need to look through the last 5 or so pages.

If you’re interested in reading antisemitism that is.

[Theroadlesstravelled]

Joe Rogan, and friends have offered $1.5m to charity for Dr Hotez to debate RFK Jr after Hotez claimed in a Vice article that RFK Jr was spreading vaccine misinformation.

Hotez has said no. He’d probably come across terribly against RFK Jr and ruin his reputation but would you rather take medical advice from RFK Jr or Hotez?

I’d definitely take diet and lifting advice from RFK Jr before Hotez tbh.
 

 

[Trogdor]

God save the queen, man.

[welshbairn]

1 hour ago, Theroadlesstravelled said:

Joe Rogan, and friends have offered $1.5m to charity for Dr Hotez to debate RFK Jr after Hotez claimed in a Vice article that RFK Jr was spreading vaccine misinformation.

Hotez has said no. He’d probably come across terribly against RFK Jr and ruin his reputation but would you rather take medical advice from RFK Jr or Hotez?

I’d definitely take diet and lifting advice from RFK Jr before Hotez tbh.
 

 

What a fraud, he eats junk food like crisps or a burger a couple of times a week and he's telling people that vaccines are good for them!

Edited June 18, 2023 by welshbairn

[Theroadlesstravelled]

23 hours ago, welshbairn said:

What a fraud, he eats junk food like crisps or a burger a couple of times a week and he's telling people that vaccines are good for them!

Hotez is overweight. I’d say a packet of crisps a week is underselling it. I don’t believe doctors should smoke, take illegal drugs or be fat fucks. That’s me though.

He has since appeared on MSNBC. The Democrat version of Fox News. He’s making a political statement. 

[RuMoore]

On 18/06/2023 at 18:05, Theroadlesstravelled said:

Joe Rogan, and friends have offered $1.5m to charity for Dr Hotez to debate RFK Jr after Hotez claimed in a Vice article that RFK Jr was spreading vaccine misinformation.

Hotez has said no. He’d probably come across terribly against RFK Jr and ruin his reputation but would you rather take medical advice from RFK Jr or Hotez?

I’d definitely take diet and lifting advice from RFK Jr before Hotez tbh.
 

 

Absolutley gone at the idea this credible guy in the medical professions reputation being ruined because he doesn't argue with a crank on Joe Rogan. 

If you're after lifting technique from those boys ill give you a great tip

Spoiler

It's steroids.

 

[ICTChris]

The problem with debating people like RFK is that he just huffs out bullshit continually.  In order to properly go through it you have to methodically go through all the references he makes, all the studies he cites and read them to check what he says is accurate.  That isn't about debating, it's the process of reviewing what he says - it's how scientific studies work.  That doesn't lend itself to debate, which is a public performance.  Debate is about rhetoric, broad arguments.  Discussing why trace levels of aluminium in childhood vaccines are not responsible for increases in autism is not something to prove or disprove in a debate, it's done through scientific inquiry, use of statistical analysis and understanding of physiology and chemistry.  Wrap that up in two minutes - it isn't possible.

I haven't watched the podcast he did with Rogan but RFK has been an anti-vaccine activist for years.  All the claims he makes are baseless and have been shown to be time and time again.  He has huffed onto every bandwagon going - he denied that there was a link between HIV and AIDS, claimed that anti-viral drugs given to AIDS patients caused their condition, he claimed that childhood vaccines cause autism, he is now claiming that Covid vaccines cause all the usual things.  Amazing that the only people in the medical establishment who want to tell this truth are mad cranks.  

He's also not going to win the Presidency, or come anywhere near the nomination.  He's competing for the Democratic nomination and Joe Biden is very popular among Democrat voters.  Vaccines are very popular among Democrat voters - and the US in general where 70% of the population have had at least one dose of a Covid vaccine.  Of course, he isn't trying to win the vote, he's trying to hoover up money from idiots and set himself up as a media commentator, podcaster, buy-my-latest-book guy.

One short story sums up what a person like RFK Jr is like.

This is Eliza Jane Maggiore

Her mother, Christine Maggiore, tested positive for HIV in the early 1990s.  SHe had embarked on a treatment programme but became enamoured with the alternative theories of AIDS pushed by Dr Peter Duesberg.  She refused to take AZT or any other retrovirals for HIV positive people.  She seemed healthy and she had two children with her husband, including Eliza Jane.  She refused the treatments that prevent in utero transmission of the virus and breast fed both babies, although that is known to increase the chances of parent-child transmission.  Eliza Jane developed cold like symptoms, was taken to her doctor but sadly died of pneumonia when she was three and a half.  Her post-mortem showed that she had the HIV virus and had developed AIDS.  Her mother also later died of AIDS.

In RFK Jr's book on Fauci he approvingly quotes Duesberg dozens of times.  He refers to Christine Maggiore as a hero.  I wonder if he ever thinks about Eliza Jane Maggiore, who died because of the crap that RFK propogates.  I doubt it - he wants to make money by lying about her.  That's the sort of person he is.

Edited June 19, 2023 by ICTChris

[D Angelo Barksdale]

Didn't have the insurgent Democrat candidate doing debate me bro stuff on Joe Rogan on my 2024 Election bingo card.

 

[Theroadlesstravelled]

 

1 hour ago, RuMoore said:

Absolutley gone at the idea this credible guy in the medical professions reputation being ruined because he doesn't argue with a crank on Joe Rogan. 

If you're after lifting technique from those boys ill give you a great tip

  Hide contents

It's steroids.

 

It’s not a debate with Joe Rogan.

[ICTChris]

Here is a good review of RFKs book about Dr Fauci.  It's by Theodore Dalrymple, a doctor who is not noted for being particularly left wing or liberal - quite the opposite in fact.  It's published by the Claremont Institute, which is about as left wing as Attila the ***.

https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/whats-up-doc/

Just as the war in Ukraine called forth many people’s inner military strategist, so the COVID-19 pandemic called forth many people’s inner epidemiologist. Never before had medical statistics been examined by so many with such close attention. People started to look at the numbers of daily deaths in the obsessive way that traders look at stock prices. The certainty with which they put forward their own analysis of the problem was not necessarily proportional to the strength of the evidence in its favor, and many held divergent positions with an almost religious fervor.

If there is one lesson that the pandemic ought to have taught, it is intellectual modesty. Unfortunately, this is not the main characteristic of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s The Real Anthony Fauci. Kennedy refers to his career as a tort lawyer as if this stood as a guarantor of righteousness, and accordingly wherever bad motives can be imputed to those with whom he disagrees, he imputes them. He lives in a world in which there are fighters for truth (he and those with whom he agrees) and conspirators who are in the pay either of Bill Gates or the pharmaceutical companies, or both. That there is skulduggery in the world and much that is murky which only time will reveal is true, but Kennedy’s book has all the objectivity of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

* * *

I was myself skeptical of much of what was done in the name of public health. When I went from France to the Netherlands at the height of the lockdown, for example, all shops in France except for groceries were closed, whereas they were open in the Netherlands, where nevertheless there was a curfew. What could have been the scientific basis for this discrepancy? Masks were first deemed useless and then obligatory, more in accordance with their availability than with the evidence for or against their efficacy.

Kennedy, however, is not skeptical but suspicious and even paranoid. He sees conspiracy everywhere and sprays his insults about like confetti. For example, he calls Neil Ferguson, the epidemiologist at Imperial College, London, a scammer without providing the slightest proof of dishonesty on his part. (I suppose this does not count as libel because it is common abuse.) Toward the end of the book, he says that in his projections of mortality rates Professor Ferguson was off by more than an order of magnitude, which is simply not true. He said that if his suggested policies were not followed, there might be up to 500,000 deaths in Britain. There have in fact been 175,000 deaths in Britain attributed to COVID, which is not an order of magnitude different from his worst-case projection (and some of his suggested policies were followed, though whether they did any good is another question).

Although Kennedy accuses many of dishonesty—many times with many epithets, presumably on the grounds that vehemence reinforces truth—he is far from scrupulous in the matter of truth himself. He needlessly exaggerates over and over again, damaging his own case. “Dr. Fauci,” he writes, “doesn’t do public health. By every metric, his fifty-year regime has been a catastrophe for American health.” But this is absurdly, if characteristically, hyperbolic. In Kennedy’s own argument, public health depends on much more than medical care. But if we take two “metrics,” life expectancy and infant mortality rate, the former increased by nine years and the latter decreased by almost three quarters during that “catastrophe” that lasted half a century. This may not be as good as in some other countries, but it is not what is normally understood as a catastrophe.

* * *

When I looked up at random five of the medical papers Kennedy cites, I found that he had misrepresented all of them. For example, an Argentinian trial which he describes as randomized and controlled specifically says in its text that it was unrandomized. In another instance, he claims “[t]he UK government’s latest Office for National Statistics report on mortality rates by COVID vaccination status shows that for age-adjusted mortality rate, the death rate by October was higher among the vaccinated than the unvaccinated.” This is misleading. There are only numbers, no rates: Kennedy evidently believes in numerators without denominators. Furthermore, the age-adjustment to which he refers was not exactly fine-honed: it divided the population into those under 50 and those over 50. This is important, given the age distribution of risk of death. And Kennedy omits the following from the paper:

Two doses of vaccine remain highly effective, with 60-80 per cent effectiveness against infection, 90-99 per cent effectiveness against hospitalization, 90-95 per cent against mortality, and 65-99 per cent against symptomatic disease.

In another case, he cites a trial that he claims showed a “dramatic” effect of the drug ivermectin. Again, it showed no such thing; one would have to be a hysteric to call the effect dramatic. What’s more, the trial was of 12 patients in each arm, so it was practically useless from a statistical point of view, even had the results been less trifling and more dramatic than they were.

He contradicts himself. He spends pages denying that HIV causes AIDS, and then says that he believes that it does. He calls America’s media “bought, brain-dead and scientifically illiterate,” and then frequently quotes from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, as well as from television channels.

He is no great scientific thinker himself. He assumes that Koch’s postulates (formulated to determine whether a particular microbe causes a disease) are still universally upheld in their original form, which they are not; and very early in the book he gives what he calls “Anthony Fauci’s report card,” which consists of raw death rates per million from COVID-19 of 19 countries, with the United States the worst and Tanzania the best (Dr. Fauci being responsible for the former). He shows no awareness that these figures require some qualification, in fact so many qualifications that they are useless as presented, and evidence only of his own scientific illiteracy or his extreme parti pris.

* * *

He asserts things that are simply not true. For example, he says that Ukraine’s low death rate from COVID is attributable to the availability there of hydroxychloroquine. In fact, Ukraine has a high death rate from COVID.

He claims that the measures taken against the pandemic—lockdown, social distancing, etc.—caused far more deaths than the disease itself. A glance at the Nightingale Diagram of Mortality for England and Wales (at www.cebm.net) should have been enough to alert him to how implausible (to put it mildly) his claim is. The dramatic increase in deaths, rising to twice their normal rate for two or three weeks, followed by an equally precipitous fall back to normal, was precisely what one would expect of an epidemic of infectious disease. The diagram does not tell us the cause of the excess deaths, of course, or how many years of human life were lost—a baby dying at 6 months causes the loss of as many human life-years as the deaths of 80 85-year-olds—but the excess deaths occurred at precisely the time that hospitals were almost overwhelmed by patients with the disease.

Kennedy makes wild claims for the efficacy of two drugs, hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, further alleging that they have not been used because of the Judeo-Masonic—sorry, the Pharmaco-Fauci-Bill-Gates—conspiracy. He several times calls them miracle drugs, which should alert us to the fact that we have entered the realm of religious belief rather than that of normal therapeutics. He calls Professor Didier Raoult’s studies on hydroxychloroquine “powerful” when, again, they were nothing of the kind, but—from the scientific point of view—useless. He makes much of the fraud practiced on or by the Lancet with regard to hydroxychloroquine, but nothing of the frauds perpetrated on the other side. He makes much of the need for disinterested Cochrane reviews but fails to mention the Cochrane review of ivermectin which came to the conclusion that there was no evidence of its efficacy (but also none of harmfulness). In short, what he writes reads as the pleading of a tort lawyer—which, of course, is what Mr. Kennedy is.

* * *

It is a pity that the book is so full of errors and gross misrepresentations that nothing the author says can be taken as true unless known for certain to be so by the reader, because there are indeed many questions to be answered about the pandemic, its origins, and the worldwide response to it. It is rare that conspiracy theorists such as Kennedy have absolutely no evidence in support of what they say, albeit that they make two plus two equal a thousand. For example, Kennedy’s damnation of remdesivir seems to me justified. When I read a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) about this drug, I thought that the paper was so bad that it smacked more of stock manipulation than of medical science: and then, of course, the question arose as to how so obviously worthless a paper could have been published in the first place, especially when the NEJM must receive scores of better papers hoping for publication every week. I am not in a position to answer this question definitively, but I would not be human if I had no suspicions.

Future social and economic historians, if there be any, will study this pandemic as closely as the Black Death has been studied (though the latter caused incomparably more deaths). All things considered, populations accepted heavy restrictions and abrogation of their freedoms, to which they were supposedly deeply attached, with surprising docility. Protest was extremely limited (it might not be again if the same restrictions were re-imposed). Limitation of medical freedom to prescribe and piecemeal censorship were imposed, again with very little protest. This book, however, will be of very little use to future historians, except as an example of the strain of extreme paranoia that is an ineradicable, but not admirable, part of human nature in response to crisis.

Theodore Dalrymple is a physician and psychiatrist, and a contributing editor to City Journal.