Bernie is a social media merchant. Dude is an expert at looking like he’s challenging the status quo, while never doing anything that could truly piss them off. Dude straight up ended an interview when the interviewer started suggesting Schumer face a primary challenge.

Trump is awful, but his election is in its own way proof that the American people are willing to reject the status quo and embrace change.

Democrats don’t need their own Trump, but they do need someone who is results oriented and willing to abandon a lot of longstanding assumptions.

This is facetious. He had no problem running to be the democratic nominee, and is a member of the democratic Senate caucus.

The current senator minority leader is Chuck Schumer. He’s incapable of being an effective opposition leader. The dude is addicted to the status quo, terrified of rocking the boat, completely disconnected with the American people, and overall stuck in the mindset of a 20th century politician.

There is a lot of frustration with him among democratic voters, but he’s maintained his power among the donors and other senators.

A huge part of his argument is that there’s nobody else that can replace him. At the moment, he’s not wrong. His rivals in the Senate are either cut from the same cloth as him, or are in their own way content with the status quo. I know people on Lemmy love Bernie, but the man was elected to the Senate the same year Pokemon Diamond and Pearl hit the shelves and is no closer to the revolution he promised.

While this filibuster doesn’t accomplish anything itself, it’s part of a larger effort Booker is making to raise his national profile and position himself so he can replace Schumer. In that context, it’s an important and smart strategic move.

Ironically this filibuster was probably less physically and emotionally exhausting than trying to teach all of his Senate colleagues how to effectively use TikTok.

I’m 30 years old, and even when I was 15 I wasn’t really friends with the super mean girl gossip types. Throughout my life, I’ve been friends with women who largely identify as feminist and sort of reject those stereotypes.

The problem is that post #metoo it became normalized to take the whole “support women” thing to such an extreme that it enabled toxic behavior. While there were women who tried to pull the whole “it’s sexist to criticize me for making poor life choices” crap, other women would get super offended for them attempting to use feminism in that way.

It’s extremely frustrating that the 19 and 20 year old women I knew in college had better moral compasses than the 25 to 40 year old women I know now. That’s really not supposed to be how it works.

So one thing I noticed is that women betraying their partner has become extremely normalized

• Every “ethical non monogamous” relationship I’ve seen IRL is just a woman pressuring their long term monogamous partner into a situation where she has multiple partners and she’s struggling
• “Monkey Branching”, where a woman starts dropping hints at one guy while still seeing another in hopes of making a seamless transition, is pretty accepted. Emotional affairs are only a thing for men apparently
• While it’s always been acceptable to leave a guy if he can’t “provide” for you, it’s really fucking stupid in the context of modern feminism
• Women who use OLD are often encouraged to have a “roster” of men, who they form a well beyond casual connection to.
• There’s a large number of 30+ year old women breaking up with their long term partners to “find themselves”. I put that in quotations because this usually just involves a ton of casual sex. It’s basically the modern day equivalent of a guy leaving his wife for the secretary
• There are a million different love triangles on TV. They are almost all two guys and a woman who is disrespectful of both. The guys get mad at each other and the women’s behavior is not portrayed as toxic.
• Like 80 percent of holiday movies involve a woman leaving her fiance for a man she just met. This is always seen as romantic, instead of psychotic.

In addition to all that, women are extremely reluctant to criticize other women. This stands even when another woman is behaving in an almost objectively toxic way. I moved post covid. The first year I witnessed a fuckton of toxic behavior, but when I tried to point it out I would get dirty glances from women. The second year there I ended up getting close to other women in those conversations who took it upon themselves to tell me in a smaller setting that they actually agreed with me, but they didn’t want to appear unsupportive.

Whatever the intention there, the mentality enabled a subset of women to be shitty and probably convinced a lot of men that such behavior was something most women were okay with.