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Is this what folks voted for? To pressure for the release of a man who openly brags about pushing women into sex work and profiting from their labor? It's amaz

• silverquiet 2y ago
  After the "grab them by the pussy" thing, I'd think people are rather eyes-open about who they voted for.
  • wkat4242 2y ago
    Except they aren't because they voted for him after that and then again this time. So we must conclude that they support this behaviour. Kinda weird considering his audience is super conservative especially on sexual topics. But I've given up trying to understand it. I'm just glad I don't live in the US.
    • magicalhippo 2y ago
      The US internet buddies I've talked to who voted republican did it more because they did not under any circumstance want to vote for the democratic party. Based on how intensely they despised the thought of voting dem, I got the feeling the republican candidate could literally have been Satan and they'd still vote rep. I too gave up trying to understand.
      • HappySweeney 2y ago
        It's easy to understand, though? Daily outrage and vilification porn. Highly addictive stuff, and people will equivocate and believe the most preposterous things you've ever heard in order to keep the outrage righteous and their pornographer of choice credible.
        • magicalhippo 2y ago
          Yes but no. Right after the 9/11 attacks, one of the TV channels here started sending Fox News during the night (previously they had no 24/7 programming). This was the first chance I got to really watch US news for more than a few minutes at a time, and the experience was quite eye-opening. From what I can gather, it's way worse these days. Still, no, I just won't understand why anyone "in the land of the free" would vote for someone so blatantly against freedom.
          • HappySweeney 2y ago
            They have no choice to believe that he is the one that promotes freedom, and his adversaries the opposite. Not believing that would mean their outrage is not righteous, which would make future supply worthless, and their brains will just not allow that.
            • wkat4242 2y ago
              Yes I'm really surprised and scared to see how much people actually like being consumed by anger and hate. We see the same in the Netherlands now since the radical right party came to power. I've tried to 'disarm' this in some of my ex-friends with actual facts to show that they've been duped into many of their sources of anger. But it's like they don't want to know. Like you say, they want to hold on to it. I don't see them anymore because I can't deal with that negativity.
      • antifa 2y ago
        Republicans are really good at misinformation, they've convinced their entire base that all democrats are AOC and Bernie Sanders types and billionaire elites and there's a massive conspiracy to LGBT everything and open borders and remove Israel's right to self defense. Democrats are really bad at appealing to their base. During the election, they attempted to flank Trump from the right on several conservative talking points like immigration and the Israel-Palestine conflict, while promising their base mostly "fundamentally nothing will change" vibes. We're hoping this leads to the collapse of the democrat party into a new party (both parties currently represent billionaire elites), but I suppose the Democrat party can remain irrational longer than you can remain unrepresented.
        • mrguyorama 2y ago
          The Democratic party has been slowly dying since Reagan almost entirely because of Fox News. It was apocryphally invented entirely to prevent another republican president from having to step down due to the unpopularity of their acts. Since then, America voted for the "TV personality" president in such a landslide that it killed all democrat power in the US. The democrats adopted the conservative's economic policy in response, and that got us Clinton, but Americans kept watching Fox News, and voted for a literal nepobaby for their new president, who immediately started at least one outright illegal war, which every republican who voted for him will insist was awful but also they can't vote for democrats because they are evil, and they mostly voted for him again in 2004! Everyone who said "Democrats want to trans our kids" got their information from right wing information sources, and they did it willingly and purposely, and EXCLUDED OR IGNORED any source that tried to carry the actual left wing message. What the hell counter-party to this system do you think could possibly rise out of the ashes? Any counter to the republicans has to contend with the same effect of a population that willingly and purposely opt in to a propaganda outlet? Fox News lost viewership after they said the 2020 election wasn't stolen! My brother, who agreed the 2020 election wasn't stolen, still spends his time in right wing information spheres and still votes for republicans. "For guns" he says, but no democrat has ever done anything to his guns and our supposedly liberal state enacted constitutional carry. He still wants to shoot all democrats. Hell, my most right wing uncle who consistently posts hateful anti-women memes on facebook (to the point that the rest of my conservative family members who mostly agree with "women are lesser" in practice still thought he was problematic!) insisted that he wished Trump would get the fuck off twitter. You can bet he reads all of trump's tweets. There is ample study that shows that people who vote republican will APPROVE of a progressive ideology right up until you tell them a democrat wants it.
      • jaredklewis 2y ago
        The “Trump is the lesser evil” camp has got to be tiny. Trump overwhelmingly won the primary and something like 84% percent of republicans give Trump a favorable approval rating in polls this month. I’m confused as ever, but republicans love Trump.
  • rob74 2y ago
    Nah, that's just slander propagated by the enemies of the people! Besides, Trump has been saved by God himself when that assassin tried to shoot him last year, so even if he looks like the devil and quacks... er, talks like the devil, he must be the Saviour reborn to redeem America! /s (just in case...)
    • josefritzishere 2y ago
      There was literally a tape... and it's completely consistent with his other behavior. We should be honest with ourselves about politicians, warts and all.
      • bediger4000 2y ago
        I acknowledge your point that politicians of all stripes (Clinton, some Kennedys, Gingrich, Trump, Larry Craig, Eric Massa as examples) flout sexual mores. I think the difference here is that conservative politicians in the past have used a "character matters" stance to do things like impeach Bill Clinton. Did you know Brett Kavanaugh was deeply involved on the Republican side? I agree we should be honest about politician's warts, and I'll even go so far as to say that some things go too far, and should be impeachable.
    • cultofmetatron 2y ago
      that /s was much needed. Im in florida at the moment and a LOT of people unironically believe everything you just said
    • tewr123317 2y ago
      [flagged]
      • akdor1154 2y ago
        > The above is just locker room talk which probably 90% of American men have participated in. If that's the case then you have far worse issues than your president.
      • 2y ago
• roland35 2y ago
  Yeah it sucks that all the worst people seem to be doing great now!
• tmp202502 2y ago
  > Is this what folks voted for? To pressure for the release of a man who openly brags about pushing women into sex work and profiting from their labor? Yes!! Now, to qualify, I don't mean all Trump voters voted for this, or would align themselves with other individual things, say, stopping the development of an oral covid vaccine, or pardoning violent criminals and international dark web drug kingpins, or giving a billionaire essentially unfettered control over the federal government (and then pretending someone else is in charge when called on it). I don't even mean that the reasons people vote for people are individual (though of course they are). What I mean is, the promises the Trump campaign made were highly segmented and targeted, in ways that are not obvious from a national or international media perspective because that media perspective was dominated by what Trump says. (And since Trump voters don't listen to the words, they listen for the tone -- the shared anger and the feeling of being heard -- they will often "listen past" anything Trump says that directly contradicts the campaign outreach) For example, Latinx voters were sold a very different, more nuanced picture of immigration reform through outreach than the national picture. Muslims in Dearborn will have seen voter suppression efforts if not outright claims that Trump would get a better deal in Israel. Clearly libertarians believed, with some justification, that they'd get RFK Jr (a priapic lunatic) in charge of healthcare and they'd get Ross Ulbricht (a man who is credibly accused of having purchased a murder) pardoned. I strongly suspect that if you dig through the outreach they made to the young-manosphere on social media, on Tiktok etc., you will see ways they presented themselves as sympathetic to the Tates' plight that will make this look like acting on a hinted, if not explicitly stated, promise. Someone will have said "we're going to strongly look into that". Now, I am not going to pretend I think Trump is good for anyone. He's not. And I am not an American. But I think the Democrats need to understand something important: they spent all that time laughing at the hamfistedness of Elon Musk's wasteful ground game, which probably was useless and counterproductive, and they ignored how effective, organised, and segmented weird little Charlie Kirk's ground game was. It's clearly one of the greatest successes in campaigning history: they sold a crooked, bullying, manipulated, intellectually ignorant felon to an electorate and won. Do I think first-time-voting and angry/lonely/divorced twenty-and-thirtysomething men were targeted by a campaign that spoke to them in Andrew Tate's language and suggested he was being unfairly treated? Fuck yes. (Posting throwaway because I no longer have an account)
• ty6853 2y ago
  Profiting from (others') labor is basically every business in the US, and sex work is rapidly being seen as something women are allowed to do. I see it as matching what people would vote for were it we had a direct democracy.
  • paulryanrogers 2y ago
    If I were pressured into a line of work by a love interest with ulterior motives, have to pay 50%+ to this pimp, and risk social being ostracized or at least loss of future prospects, then I'd be quite unhappy. Are such 'businesses' ethical or even legal? Apparently not in Romania.
  • acdha 2y ago
    They were charged with rape, holding women against their will, trafficking minors, and laundering money. The debate over legal sex work doesn’t really intersect with that.
  • Tadpole9181 2y ago
    I highly recommend actually knowing what a conversation is about. Read the charges, you're defending an actual rapist and human trafficker...
  • jfengel 2y ago
    It's not the profit, it's the force. Many agree that women should have the right to do sex work, and even for others to profit from that, but not that it should be possible to compel or defraud them into it.
• randcraw 2y ago
  It's indisputable that half of this country has voted for the most unrepentantly anti-christian candidate ever. Twice. So it should be no surprise then that when we jettison all moral values (Christian or otherwise) in pursuit of only power, we get an antichrist and all his degenerate acolytes that make this kind of misdeed possible (like the Tates and Musk). Trump's incoherent misdeeds of this past month are just the beginning. Without wholehearted and unyielding opposition to more of this, Trump will push us all into depths of slime never before imagined in America.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • gbuk2013 2y ago
    Technically only about 22% of the country actually voted for the current president, if you consider voter turnout. And less than half voted for the top 2 candidates combined.
    • Swelbig345 2y ago
      [dead]
    • randcraw 2y ago
      I wish those facts were more encouraging. They make it clear that, despite knowing Trump's history, 40% of us passively sat by and let this mess happen.
• mariusor 2y ago
  To put on a stiff upper lip on the situation: we should be waiting for a cabinet nomination any day now.