This sounds like a stupid question, but I’m being genuine.
He is telling people to eat more meat, which sounds absolutely insane to me.
What qualifies him to give health advice ? Why are americans trusting him ?
This is honestly a disgusting take because it shows how biased you are against addicts. Not a stupid question. Just a nasty one. Your 2nd and 3rd are good questions though. I don’t think there’s jack shit qualifying him to give health advice in reality. He’s a crackpot supplement pusher. Which I feel kinda answers your 3rd; americans have a long history of being stupid and blindly trusting whatever the pill-pusher says, because they hear what they want to hear. Unfortunately.
I hate RFK and all the damage he’s done/is doing to our country’s general state of health. His history of addiction is literally last on the list of reasons not to trust him. In my view, a history of addiction (now being in recovery) usually gives you a pretty sane view of health, since it brings you so close to death. The overwhelming majority of recovering addicts that I know lead healthier lifestyles than non-addicts. Oftentimes when people see with clarity how much damage they’ve done to themselves, they desperately want to treat their body better.
This was exactly my first thought. He should be disqualified for many reasons, but that ain’t one of them. Thinking that way is why we have him.
People with old, dead, rotten brains recognize his Dad and Uncle’s name. It reminds them vaguely of a time when their own father’s were in charge of all the hard decisions, their joints didn’t hurt and they had an undefined future that could have been wonderful. That future has come though and turns out they are just themselves… they failed, nothing fun they wanted really happened and everything confuses them now. They feel like frauds about to be found out and forgotten at the same time.
So seeing something they think they recognize voting for “a Kennedy” makes them indirectly fell that their own Dad will magically come back to life, tell them he’s proud and then they will be millionaires and attractive people will want to have have sex with them and fix their iPhones.
It’s just that.
Why are americans taking health advice from a man who got brain worms from eating roadkill and didnt learn his lesson?
Thats the more appropriate question.
Most of us aren’t. Hell, most of us didn’t listen to the Secretary of Health and Human Services before.
Because he says ‘things weren’t like this when I was a kid’ and it resonated hard with dumb people who see stuff like autism and transgender problems to be eradicated
I’m an American, and I’m certainly not taking any advice from him
As much as I wish this dude would immediately suffer cardiac arrest from a clogged artery, him being a former addict has nothing to do with anything, and in itself doesn’t devalue anything he says. That kind of thinking is pretty problematic, and you need to have a real hard think about the way you obviously look down on people who are recovering from addiction, cause honestly you’re being pretty shitty right now.
Mmmm, I think there’s still a point to the question. Being an addict is not a moral failing; it doesn’t make you less of a person. But the vast majority of people who believe in RFK also believe being an addict is reprehensible.
t’s like how people ask Christians why they vote for someone who’s been married x times. Personally idgaf how many times Trump has been married, I care about how many women and children he has assaulted. I don’t think divorce is a moral failing; hell, I don’t believe in the institution of marriage by the state. But, the very same people who hold him up also claim to believe that it should make him unworthy.
vast majority of people who believe in RFK also believe being an addict is reprehensible.
While true, they’re also the segment of the population most impacted by the opioid epidemic.
There is no logistical consistency in the conservative mind, we have to stop trying to make square pegs fit into something that doesn’t even have holes. These folks go with how they feel, and they adore having a health and human services leader who gives them validation for believing in magic water, essential oil and avoidance of scarrrrryyyy needles and vaccines. That’s ALL they care about, nothing in his background would change that. NOTHING.
He spent his entire life literally destroying his mind. Is he bad because he is an addict? Perhaps not, but he has significant brain damaged because of the drugs.
I am all for recovery but the truth is he will never have the mental faculties to be a leader because of his life choices. He will never be able to make a full recovery. That is not discrimination, that is just reality.
No. This logic is fatalist bullshit.
Drugs have consequences whether you accept it or not.
They do, i know. Theyre not certain. The consequences depend on lots of factors. To disqualify someone because they used drugs without looking more into how it affected that specific person is fatalist bullshit.
When oxygen to the brain is habitually suppressed, brain damage can occur. That’s not fatalist, it’s just reality.
That doesn’t imply addiction is a moral failing. It’s a disease, and diseases can have permanent effects.
I agree brain damage CAN occur. Thats not the same statement i was criticizing.
You can’t get a security clearance with a history of narcotics addiction. Nor can you join the military. Because the addiction compromises you and your judgement.
There is no such thing as a ‘former addict’.
Because the addiction compromises you and your judgement.
so does having questioned the US or Israeli governments, or participated in any protests or activism. as an example, yours was a pretty bad one.
Uh huh. Apply for a security clearance sometime and see how far they sniff up your ass before you’re granted access to that scif you need to do your job.
More simple than you’d think, dumb people only trust other dumb people’s advice, there is no cure for stupid, unfortunately
I’ve got nothing against people with former drug problems. I don’t trust him because he’s a doofus.
Did everyone forget he drove around with a dead animal, and dumped it into a park?
No one should listen to this insane lunatics ramblings. But the addiction is a symptom, not the problem. He likely became an addict because he was mentally ill. Or, the addiction (and brain worm, and eating random dead things) made him mentally ill.
Either way, someone with delusions shouldn’t be in charge of anything.
He chopped the head off of a whale, strapped it to the family car, and drove it home as the viscera dripped into the cabin onto his wife and daughter.
He was doing drugs 30 years ago. He’s a spoilt rich kid
Because we don’t have a choice of who is in that position. The Grand Old Fascist Party has completely removed any form of democracy in this country. So now we are just stuck watching it happen.
We could, you know, stop voting for fascists.
Fuck rfk, but him being a former heroin addict is probably his least worst trait.
I’m sure he was just as crazy before and during as he is after.
They’re not. Make no mistake, MAGA is full of a myriad of ideologies ranging from fascists, christian nationalists, white supremacists, anti vaxers, misogynists, transphobes/homophobes/terfs, pedophiles, capitalists/monopolists, incels, manosphere bros, and more.
They don’t care about what they together stand for, because as a single entity? They only stand for one thing: the power to take away social and civil liberties. To fuck the public, and maximize profit and control, to MAKE us all, at home and abroad, comply.
Even amongst MAGA, RFK Jr is a joke, only a small subset of MAGA take him seriously and luckily they’ll be dead of heart attacks and treatable diseases soon. What’s sad is they’ll have taken down so many innocents along with them. RFK Jr is there to distract the American public of the real issues with our Health Care System which is mainly affordability, access, and a competitive public option. It’s not that he’s even in the pocket of Big Pharma, though that is likely true. But even if he isn’t, Big Pharma still benefits from his incompetency, from the sideshow he creates.
Hopefully that clears things up. Americans aren’t stupid because they don’t have access to the medical research and information, Americans are stupid because their pride tells them that their intuition and their echo chambers of validation make them right in spite of aforementioned research and information. That’s MAGA, that’s America.
Basically all of us are choosing the devils we know because we gave up on looking for angels of our better nature long ago.
Wonderfully put. If people really want to make MAGA go away, they need to first understand the underlying structure.
90% of MAGAts aren’t taking RFK seriously. But he’s there to appeal to the 10% that want him there. Now who’s that group? Mostly the people that opposed the health measures put forth during the pandemic. Remember that anti-health and even anti-vax groups were extremely small and irrelevant before the pandemic. The (in my opinion) justifiably tough measures we had to endure unfortunately created disenfranchised individuals who felt attacked and wanted revenge on the system afterwards. MAGA offered a place for them to go to. Some of them aren’t actively anti-LGBT or anti-immigration, but they thought the other side tried to poison them and their kids, therefore they’re bad, therefore let’s vote Republican.
That’s how everything works. The anti-immigrant crowd doesn’t really care about vaccines for the most part. But they’ve seen too many tiktoks of brown people shoplifting or doing X or Y bad thing. So now they feel the country has been taken over by a hostile mob of aliens. ICE and Kristy Noem appeal to that crowd.
Meanwhile, Technofascists probably aren’t anti-health and also probably don’t care too much about immigration, but they absolutely hate regulations, taxes for the wealthy and want to make as much money in digital grifting as possible. So they ally with the religious nuts, the anti-vax nuts and the racists because they can make more money.
The incels and contrarians are mostly internet edgelords who saw far too many blue-haired libs and women trying to ruin video games for them, so they grouped together to bring down wokeness. Because to them, wokeness ruined fun, ruined Star Wars and Ghostbusters and a bunch of other things they feel were ruined by Hollywood. This was the main group in charge of radicalising younger people.
And the Christian right is a mix of all of the above, but take the hardcore churchgoers from every group.
There are others. Anti-trans, anti-LGBT, etc. Each group has actually little to do with the other. Like the anti-Hollywood incel crowd is extremely antisemitic, while the Technofascist crowd claims to be super pro-Jewish (they’re only pro-Israel). In theory they should be opposed to each other. But MAGA is the temporary truce between them to fight this hypothetical common enemy.
That’s why they’ve fabricated this idea of the Antifa domestic terrorist in kahoots with the immigrant criminal gangster. They need to idealize these two groups as part of the larger problem because if they don’t, the entire MAGA movement collapses.
Therefore, fascism in the US can realistically only be stopped by:
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The internal collapse of MAGA: Infighting or a big enough issue to make the gap between them insurmountable.
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Military intervention: the armed forces or other groups with enough control of violence and weapons overthrow the government.
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A civil war: the country reaches a breaking point and devolves into full on insurrection movements, separationist movements, and renders MAGA useless as it becomes the only allowed ideology in one of the two (or more) combatants.
I know people on Lemmy love the idea of insurrections and revolutions. But if someone doesn’t want to see a lot of bloodshed in the next few years, then they’d be hoping for one of the first two options.
Dude, either you are me, or I’ve been spending waaaay too much time on Lemmy, or both, lol.
Same fucking page. You broke it down better than I did. No notes.
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A lot of us are dumber than shit. They elected a president who is dumber than shit and he picked a secretary of health who is dumber than shit. I personally ignore everything RFK Jr. says.
We aren’t. Most of us aren’t anyway.
Fuck RFK but I will never hold being a former heroin addict against him.
Yea it’s not the addiction or even the brainworms that disqualify him, it’s simply his stupidity.
Stupid people are redeemable as well. But this asshole has seen the science, ignores it, and continues to spread his lies that will harm and/or kill people for political reasons…
But you must consider the possibility that heroin and brain worms damaged his brain, contributing to the stupidity, and his own stupid choices led to those circumstances that possibly increased his stupidity. Thus he remains open to criticize on all those topics.
I don’t think heroin addiction necessarily damages your brain, and if you make it out the other side you will have learned quite the lesson (presumably)
Anything that causes respiratory depression lowers available oxygen to the brain and can cause damage over time.
I understand the sentiment of destigmatizing addiction, but let’s not lie and say it can’t cause permanent damage. It’s a disease, right? And diseases can have aftermath.
If this was true those on chronic opiate medications would be given supplemental oxygen. There would also be studies demonstrating the neurodegenerative effects of opiates.
Opiates are rather safe outside of overdose and sequelae of unsafe injection / smoking. They are incredibly benign in the sense you could take 20-40-80-160mg OxyContin your whole life and not have any issues beyond constipation.
