“Our society thrived when everyone was smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey,” wrote Daily Wire commentator Matt Walsh, completely ignoring the countless, well-documented, negative impacts (violence and death) of those two American vices. “We became the most powerful nation in the world with liquor and nicotine. No country of potheads has ever thrived, or ever achieved anything at all. Every city that legalized it became an even bigger shithole basically overnight. The entire history of western civilization tells us that marijuana is far, far worse for society.”

Dumbest fucking take I’ve read regarding weed in the U.S. in probably the past two decades. This is another one of those things that’s like so low on the list of outrageous things that require attention right now, but it’s just so fucking unbelievably dumb that it somehow becomes salient enough to be noticable above the chaos that is the normal background.

The way he is so confidently trying to gaslight society like an overbearing parent, as if we have no frame of reference regarding marijuana policy other than what we learned in D.A.R.E.

Those shithole cities with their absurd abundance of tax revenue from marijuana sales.

Opioid sparing effects in Medicare enrollees with access to medical marijuana.

Fewer lives ruined due to a reduction of nonviolent incarceration rates.

I’m not sure what kind of utopia Matt Walsh believes he is advocating for by rolling back even more evidence based progress, but it sounds like a shithole.

I mean I feel like Walz is a pretty good example of someone who had a career and then became involved in politics.

I don’t think you necessarily need to throw your career away, and I’m not sure we really need term limits for house and Senate seats (although 6 years between reelection is a bit ridiculous).

There are definitely some career politicians who have proven that they earned and deserve their seat, it would just be nice to see a bit more variety in the track most people take to politics.

Probably around 2020

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/warren-and-buttigieg-had-a-tense-exchange-over-fundraising-and-more-from-the-democratic-debate/

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/buttigieg-leads-2020-rivals-wall-street-contributions-n1106161

https://time.com/6255811/elizabeth-warren-buttigieg-monopoly-antitrust/

To be fair my problem with him is the same problem I have with most politicians. I would vote for him if it came down to him vs Vance no question, but just seems like at the end of the day his loyalty is with his donors before anyone else.

This definitely didn’t help change my mind on how genuine he seems https://www.commondreams.org/news/just-tell-us-what-you-believe-buttigieg-torched-over-non-answer-on-israel-palestine

When I say career politician, I mean the not so great aspect of politicians. Jon Stewart actually seems like a genuinely caring and empathetic person, and I would prefer someone like that to someone who is willing to compromise their values for a check.

I would vote for him if he was the nominee, it’s just not ideal to keep having TV stars at the helm of a country. He probably would make some really well informed and bad ass cabinet picks. I’m kinda picturing him as the anti-Reagan.

If Jon Stewart was the nominee, I’d vote for him. I’d honestly prefer him to someone like Buttigieg bc he seems more genuine, but I wish America would just give a scientist or an economist (or really anybody that can make educated decisions about the policies being created) a shot before we turn to another TV star. I know it’s never going to happen in my lifetime, but that would be my preference.

He definitely shouldn’t have pretended to grab that lady’s tits while she was sleeping (I believe she was a soldier??? she was a reporter) and taken a photo, but honestly in hindsight he probably should have just apologized, and put in a lot of effort to making up for doing something like that instead of resigning.

He did something really dumb, but he still wasn’t a rapist or a pedophile. America has set a very low bar in his absence.

I’m going to go with no. I appreciate John Stewart, but can we please stop having TV stars run for office? Same goes for career politicians.

I mean, I voted for her, and would vote for her again any day if it meant voting against Trump, but he’s not wrong.

She’s not really unique in that aspect compared to any other mainstream Democrat vs any outsider or mainstream Republican, and that’s probably ~90% of the DNC’s problem when it comes to overcoming voter apathy.

Realistically, most people are not expecting Dems to refuse large donations, but accepting a donation should not mean that you then compromise your own values to accommodate 1% of voters on any issue. That’s not how a democracy is supposed to work. That’s just pay to play.

Ok Donald. If you get Putin to leave Ukraine on Zelensky’s terms, then maybe we can talk about something other than Epstein for 5 minutes. Maybe.

However, if you fuck over Ukraine, and then try to claim a victory for authoritarianism as a victory for peace (which you almost assuredly will) we double down on Epstein so fucking fast even JD Vance will start to regret betraying you to Rupert Murdoch before the midterms.

Customers need to already have the data they want to work with—Palantir itself does not provide any.

It blows my mind that the role of Michael Kratsios during Trump’s first administration as CTO has been basically ignored by the media.

He was brought into the White House by Thiel to help the president with “technology issues.” He is quoted in interviews as early as 2017-2018 saying the administration was trying to gain access to large protected government databases in order to train AI.

Thiel was planning for government data to be ready for Palantir to use ~8 years before the current administration began handing Palantir billions of dollars in contracts and giving employees military rank.

Kratsios is now science advisor for the POTUS, but still somehow barely receives press coverage. The rare coverage he does receive is never critical. Do you remember the big scary Elon Musk is running the White House, stealing our data, and we should all be terrified media narrative?

Musk was only executing the plans Kratsios made during the first Trump administration, and he stepped down as soon as Kratsios was confirmed by the Senate.

It’s like we can state the obvious, “This could be a way for an authoritarian regime to destroy civil liberty.” But nobody will just come out and say “Peter Thiel has already built a platform that will allow an authoritarian regime to destroy civil liberty and crush dissent, and he started planning it nearly a decade ago. Michael Kratsios is the flying monkey who made it possible for him to build it, and continues to quietly do his bidding.”