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Maine Senate Candidate Graham Platner Outed as an Actual Rapist.
Platner officially denies the allegations, but you can tell from his statement that deep down he knows it's true. He can't admit to it because he would go to actual jail, but everyone knows his campaign is over.
The haters said he would crash and burn, and they were correct. Honestly great call by the haters.
The Maine Democratic Party has one week until the ballot deadline to pick a candidate while stepping on as few toes as possible. Let the games begin.
I haven't followed this story closely enough to assess the facts or Platner as a person.
But I worry that a system of "Your ex-lover says bad things about you and now you are toxic waste" is basically a system that bans normal people from running for office.
The vast majority of exes have bad things to say about their former partners. Crazy, bipolar, abusive, violent, lying, cheating, scumbags all of them.
And the only way to be sure you never have a crazy ex is to never date. Crazy ex girlfriends might seem sane when you meet them, or they might be sane when you meet them and suffer a mental break later*.
Per a quick Grok, 90-95% of ever-married Americans have premarital sex. The median partner count is about six for a 42 year old man. That's six rolls of the dice, and if you roll under 5 on a d20 you can't ever run for office. And you can't really know how you rolled until you've already staked your whole life and fortune and reputation on the run.
That's not really any way for a country to function. Normal people have to be able to run for office. Otherwise our only politicians will be freaks, people who have lived their whole lives in a kind of asceticism designed to protect their future political careers.
Sex and romance are a full contact sport, and we want to issue lifetime bans to anyone who commits a foul.
*Growing up my father got letters from a woman he dated some time in the 70s before meeting my mother. She went through a mental health crisis after moving to a foreign country and marrying a man there, and sent FiveHour the elder hundreds of letters making up dozens of stories to...idk maybe get him back or something? She actually died at one point, at which time her "sister" started sending the letters, then she came back and sent the letters herself again. I suppose this experience informs my views.
Perhaps it's better that the electoral system filters out unlucky people. Then again, this is probably a very lossy and inefficient way of filtering such people out; a more direct approach would be to just make every candidate play one round of Russian Roulette together.
But also, it might not be better for you if your elected representative has better luck. Him having good luck could mean that him and everyone around him avoid the bullet, or it could also mean that he avoids the bullets while everyone else around him doesn't. So perhaps wed want him to be on the lucky end of the spectrum but not too much luckier than the people he's representing.
So select for people with exes with moderately bad things to say about him.
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