It's hardly surprising as it's almost the defining feature of Trump - pettiness and revenge minded.
(though strangely, he hasn't publicly insulted his Pennsylvania would-be-assassin, but luckily his ear has healed remarkably well and so maybe he feels no need to do so)
When someone demonstrates actual power, he backs down and cowers. It's why he always ends up doing awkward submissive gestures when interacting with foreign autocrats. No real confidence, all bluster.
Please, some reasonable Trump voter explain how this is acceptable. How can the sitting president still be openly claiming that a previous election was fraudulent after all this time?
I mean, this is very obviously retribution. But nobody's going to reply to you saying "yes, I want those who have wronged my beloved president to be annihilated." So I'm not sure what you're expecting here. There's no good faith explanation for these events save for whatever vague spin Fox News can come up with.
Not a trump voter or supporter by any means, but you can reflect on what made this action possible from the pr perspective (even considering the above quoted unnecessary own goal - they could have done the same thing with even more plausible deniability)
There was indeed a campaign to fight "misinformation", with active cooperation between the previous administration and social media companies. There was an official effort to establish a disinformation fighting team within the government. Some of the stories like Hunter biden's laptop and COVID origin stuff blew up as what looks like potential partisan censorship cases. And frankly while I'd attribute the latter, and most of these efforts, to stupidity, the former looks like malice even to me. So now one sides idiotic authoritarian self own can be used by the other side to justify even more idiotic even more authoritarian "corrective" action.
First of all, I don't especially like Trump. He has many faults. But I truly believe, after all this time, that he wants to be a good president. He is a self-made multi-billionaire who does not need to put up with all the shit he has taken just for some title. All of his problems would have went away, at any time, if he would have dropped out of politics. He was a very popular celebrity until he became a serious contender. Then many of his Hollywood friends and political allies (mostly Democrats) suddenly turned on him.
The margins were extremely thin in 2020, and there were many sketchy things going on around mail-in ballots and stuff. Sure, you can point to partisan experts who assert that there was nothing fishy going on, but they are just covering for their team. (Before you say "bipartisan" I want to remind you that many Republicans don't like Trump, and are essentially Democrats under a red banner.) There has been evidence of fraud. One could argue that there is always fraud. But ask yourself: "Which party supports actual election integrity more? The one that insists on US citizens voting in person with valid id (nothing special, just the id that we all need to get by in society), or the one that made a huge deal out of allowing votes with no id and in some cases no US citizenship, voting by mail, an open border, etc.?" I don't think any serious person can look at Democrats and say that what they have advocated for speaks to their competency and sincerity about having legitimate elections.
By the way, Hillary and her cronies never accepted the 2016 election. We actually had a farcical situation on many social media platforms where questioning the 2020 election was banned, and questioning the 2016 election or any other election never was banned or interfered with. If you don't see the media lies, cult mentality, and rank hypocrisy around the Trump pearl clutching, it is unlikely that anyone can convince you with a few HN comments.
> But ask yourself: "Which party supports actual election integrity more? The one that insists on US citizens voting in person with valid id (nothing special, just the id that we all need to get by in society),
You mean the ID that around 21 million US citizens who are eligible to vote do not have and don't have the time and/or money to get that ID? Here's a comment that contains links to a whole bunch of articles covering this, many of which contain extensive links to sources [1].
It is cute how some people can simultaneously believe that (1) you need the type of ID that Republican voter ID laws require for voting in order to get by in society (and so everyone already has the ID they need), and (2) there are tens of millions of illegal aliens who have been living in this country long term (and hence are obviously getting by).
This implies either that you don't actually need such ID to get by or that illegal aliens can easily obtain such ID (which makes the ID law ineffective at preventing fraud).
>You mean the ID that around 21 million US citizens who are eligible to vote do not have and don't have the time and/or money to get that ID? Here's a comment that contains links to a whole bunch of articles covering this, many of which contain extensive links to sources [1].
That is all a bunch of hogwash. Most people can get ID for like $20 from their state. Even if I accept it, the answer is not to lower standards. It is to actually help these people get the ID that they need. Anything else permits rampant fraud. This is so obvious that I have to assume people like you are malicious actors, with all due respect.
>you need the type of ID that Republican voter ID laws require for voting in order to get by in society (and so everyone already has the ID they need),
Is there any case where a state ID such as a driver's license is not adequate? I don't even care. Go try to open a bank account or cash a check without ID. Everyone will tell you GTFO if you don't have the same type of ID needed to vote.
>there are tens of millions of illegal aliens who have been living in this country long term (and hence are obviously getting by)
These people are issued ID, and besides that they often work for cash or in other ways that dodge the law.
>This implies either that you don't actually need such ID to get by or that illegal aliens can easily obtain such ID (which makes the ID law ineffective at preventing fraud).
If there is simply a field on your ID that says if you are a citizen, and that shit is verified at the time you register to vote or at the time you actually vote, it would be as effective as the enforcement. We have Democrat precincts where poll workers have been forbidden from asking for ID. It is pure insanity, so egregious that it seems engineered to outrage everyone with a shred of common sense. I keep having to mention all of these things on this site amid a flurry of downvotes because too many "hackers" have drank the Kool-Aid.
> That is all a bunch of hogwash. Most people can get ID for like $20 from their state
There's also the cost of finding and getting copies of supporting documents, which are often in another state (e.g., the state you were born in, not the state you now live in). Records for many older Americans have not been digitized or even centralized so if your family moved when you were very young you may have to search the physical records in multiple counties to find yours.
> Even if I accept it, the answer is not to lower standards. It is to actually help these people get the ID that they need.
Obviously, but the same people passing voter ID laws are also making it harder for people to get ID. They reduce the number of offices that issue IDs, with the reductions disproportionately being in districts that tend to not vote for the people who are passing those laws. They say it is because those districts have much lower drivers per capita so don't need as many DMVs (which are usually the offices that deal with ID).
In the offices that remain they'll reduce the hours in which IDs are issued, getting rid of evening and weekend hours. For many poor people that can mean a full day of lost work to go try to get an ID, and many cannot afford that. Besides the loss of a day's pay these places often have terrible public transit so they are looking at an expensive ride on commercial transportation.
For people in low income jobs these barriers can be huge.
> Anything else permits rampant fraud
Then how come no one has been able to actually find evidence of such fraud? No matter how well funded the search they all come up empty.
> Go try to open a bank account or cash a check without ID. Everyone will tell you GTFO if you don't have the same type of ID needed to vote
23% of people earning under $25k/year do not have bank accounts but manage just fine. On that comment I gave you early with all the links to research that you ignored, someone asked how people live without ID and I posted a response there covering some of the ways they get buy.
Look, I don't like waiting at the DMV either but doing it for a few hours every four to eight years is part of life. I don't believe anyone with a job is actually disenfranchised by this requirement. If they won't do that, then they won't register to vote either. In many cases, you can simultaneously get ID and register to vote too. By the way you can't get a job legally without providing ID, unless you are working gig jobs for cash. The elderly are often given IDs that don't expire.
I might be biased but I don't want people who can't manage to get or keep an ID telling us how to run the country. If you can't manage such a basic task, then you can't run your own life and have no business having a say in how other people live or die. That said, the real solution that would make everyone happy is to subsidize the issuance of ID somehow and to make employers accommodate the required absences. We do that for jury duty, more or less, so we can do it for ID and voting too. The solution is definitely never going to be to get stupid and have zero requirements for ID at the polls.
> don't believe anyone with a job is actually disenfranchised by this requirement.
You are betraying your own ignorance. You clearly have never associated with people from a ghetto if you are saying that.
> If you can't manage such a basic task, then you can't run your own life and have no business having a say in how other people live or die.
There's probably some merit to that but I think it would really depend on why. If you can't in the sense that you just don't follow through that's one thing. Whereas working the same hours that the ID office is open, not having PTO, being unable to afford taking unpaid time off, not being able to afford a personal vehicle; if you can't simply because you are poor that hardly seems a reasonable basis to disenfranchise someone.
If nothing else, it certainly isn't consistent with either the word or the spirit of the current law. If you want to change that then the appropriate course of action is to lobby the general public for it. If you believe you won't manage to convince them then I would like to suggest that it is your views that have no business being imposed on others.
Oh and the kicker? It's a poor filter anyway, at least for the purpose that you stated. Someone who doesn't work will have little issue passing it since he has no scheduling conflict with office hours and what's a multi-hour trip on public transit to him?
> The margins were extremely thin in 2020, and there were many sketchy things going on around mail-in ballots and stuff.
These allegations from Trump supporters have been disproved in court many times. What will iy take for you to admit that he's misusing his power to target people who disagree with his election lies?
Considering how ill-treated Trump and his supporters have been and still are by courts, it is no wonder that they don't trust the courts. Regardless of what you or I think, he is going after people he believes are corrupt. The exact same people who targetted him unfairly for years, in some cases. I'm not losing sleep over this.
It's not ill treatment, they're being targeted by courts because they're doing illegal shit.
It's not that libs are avoiding courts because they're favored, it's just that there's nothing to, you know, try them with. They didn't pull an insurrection. They don't constantly make up lies about everything. So...
> there were many sketchy things going on around mail-in ballots and stuff.
Just because Fox News repeats false claims over and over doesn't make them true. Do you have sources? 2000 mules was debunked. Fox News settled for their false claims against Dominion. Court awarded damages to that one victim who was accused of smuggling a flash drive of "fraudulent votes" or whatever. Don't fall for the firehose of bullshit. Please share what specifically convinced you of this.
>By the way, Hillary and her cronies never accepted the 2016 election.
She conceded. Trump did not concede when he lost the 2020 election. These are facts. Get real.
>She conceded. Trump did not concede when he lost the 2020 election. These are facts. Get real.
She "conceded" then continued smearing Trump for years and literally called him illegitimate. Not just her but the entire Democrat media machine that backed Hillary over other plausible candidates. The smearing and denial cancel out any good will she gained by "conceding". Shall we talk about the Russiagate hoax that went on for years, that Hillary herself started by commissioning the Steele Dossier? I suggest you go educate yourself on all of that and how she paid a fine for election interference (and how Trump did not).
Given up being a debunked 2020 election conspiracy apologist?
The Steele Dossier was commissioned in 2016, before the election. Trump is claiming the 2020 election was "stolen" well after. Both bad. But not the same.
Trump's allies challenged the election results after losing, 60 times. (edit to add: Challenging, and getting their day in court, is fine! However,) No credible, election-result-changing fraud found. (edit to add: Despite losing in court, they continued to spread debunked conspiracies, and still claimed it was "stolen" without evidence. And still tried to hold on to power, Trump asked Pence to "do the right thing", and declare Trump the winner despite losing. This is the bad part.) Clinton did not challenge the election results after losing. Not the same. Not even close.
>Trump's allies challenged the election results after losing, 60 times. No credible, election-result-changing fraud found. Clinton did not challenge the election results after losing. Not the same. Not even close.
I think the key here is that not enough was proven to change any results. But the margins were close. Candidates routinely challenge elections (even Kamala was fundraising to challenge her clear defeat), and some (like Hillary and Trump) never accept it all the way. These things are all similar. The media pretends that everything is uniquely bad when Trump happens to do it and they turn a blind eye to Democrats doing the exact same stuff. It is exhausting to argue with people who refuse to understand this hypocrisy happening right before their eyes.
> The media pretends that everything is uniquely bad when Trump happens to do it and they turn a blind eye to Democrats doing the exact same stuff. It is exhausting to argue with people who refuse to understand this hypocrisy happening right before their eyes.
Got it. Did Clinton try to gain the presidency despite losing? Did she ask the vice president to "do the right thing" and throw out electoral votes?
Ok it is not exactly the same but it is quite similar. Clinton and fellow Democrats initiated a years-long legal campaign against Trump using her connections in 2015. They even had his whole campaign wiretapped. Trump did not even prosecute her for her mishandling of classified data. Now that the political persecution chickens are coming home to roost, these people have no actual answer besides to fearmonger about Trump even more.
Acceptance and formal concession are two different things, just like clarification versus moving the goalposts. The real bullshit here is trying to avoid the actual issue at hand by attacking my choice of words when you know damn well what I mean.
Prove that Russians bailed him out, please. I've got to hear this.
He did inherit money, like $10M if I recall correctly. But he made the rest of his money. Even if not literally a rags-to-riches case (I never said he was, either), he does not need money. Compare that to, say, AOC who is suddenly worth millions of dollars after a few years on a salary of $180k. Who is more suspicious?
He inherited money, ran through it, went back and fleeced his dad and siblings of their money. Ran through that. Racked up hundreds of millions of debt, then ran for president. Now he bastardizes public office and exploits his position to generate wealth.
> But Trump eventually made a comeback, and according to several sources with knowledge of Trump’s business, foreign money played a large role in reviving his fortunes, in particular investment by wealthy people from Russia and the former Soviet republics. This conclusion is buttressed by a growing body of evidence amassed by news organizations, as well as what is reportedly being investigated by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the Southern District of New York. It is a conclusion that even Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., has appeared to confirm, saying in 2008—after the Trump Organization was prospering again—that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.”
> According to the most recent disclosure from 2023, Ocasio-Cortez had documented that she had no more than between $1,001 and $15,000 in each of three different bank accounts. The total for these three accounts would land somewhere between $3,003 and $45,000. She also recorded in the disclosure having between $1,001 and $15,000 in additional funds in a fourth account for a 401k plan. Further, she noted in the disclosure that she was still paying off student loans, with an "amount of liability" landing somewhere between $15,001 and $50,000. In other words, Ocasio-Cortez was at least $940,000 short of being a millionaire, with the maximum possible amount of the four accounts totaling $60,000, and that's before even factoring in her student loan debt.
Do you get your information from anywhere other than random twitter posts?
>Why do you speak so confidently around something you clearly know nothing about?
I know about as much as you my man. I could sit here and throw links at you, and neither of us would leave thinking any different.
I am not gonna argue about AOC. I think you might be right as it seems like the top stories now support the theory that she is not rich (despite ostentatious things like showing up in a $12k dress to a charity event) and I don't have time to research it now. But there are many members of congress that are far sketchier than her. Such as the queen of insider trading, Nancy Pelosi.
Trump is definitely rich, and has been at least since the 80s. He has done some sketchy stuff, but it's not even close to what happens routinely in Congress. He is not accepting his salary as POTUS either. Has that ever happened before? But here you are trying to spin it like he has no money, or else he owes it all to Russians who somehow have him on a leash.
So, I saw evanjrowley's post before it was flagged, and did my own research, following what his links said, to the sources they linked.
Simply put, evanjrowley's links are lies. The Kreb's specific claims are lies. They link to sources that are carefully edited, and even then, it's clear that is being presented by evanjrowley's sites is not what is being said.
Simply put, evanjrowley is trying to spread disinformation.
My experience is that everyone who's not close to any of these impacts is apathetic or treating events like they're reality TV, and even light attempts at convincing that there's more going on and that we might be in a historic and bad situation is met with hostility as if you just told someone's small kid that Santa isn't real.
At best they care about the financial parts of the news.
I see that as a broad trend. Very very few people have guiding principles these days.
The "problem" with principles is that living by them sometimes means going against something we want right now. People don't want to concede anything, even for their own ideals.
The people who hang out here are the lucky 90th percentile of our society that are just barely able to tread water at this point. Everyone else is drowning.
Try to imagine living on $60k, then think about the fact that that’s a good salary to a majority of US workers.
It makes sense for our industry, a bad economy means vast layoffs and a terrible job market in tech.
A tech worker who graduated and entered the market in 2012 could easily retire in their 40s with millions. One who graduated in 2022 is going to struggle to stay afloat and employed, and you are surprised people care about that?
It might be wiser to emigrate if you cannot trust your fellow citizens and neighbours to care about your country becoming fascist. If you've got brown skin, then you'd be better off leaving on your own terms rather than being exported to a concentration camp in El Salvador.
You mean the guy with the federal dismantlement and looting agency that sends credentials to federal IT systems to Russia, openly talks about a third term where people "wouldn't have to vote anymore", crashes the world economy based on some dubious theory about the US dollar being overvalued being the root of crumbling US power and is currently testing the waters to deport US citizens into an overseas prison nobody ever leaves after ignoring a supreme court order for doing the same to a legal resident (the most legal residents, since they targeted those going through the proper naturalization route) is business as usual?
As bad as W was (and I started considering leaving after the 2000 election, but I was a minor) it didn’t seem likely that there would no longer be reasonably fair, even if flawed (with minorities disenfranchised), elections. I am no longer confident there will be a fair election, even in the midterms. And even W respected when the courts forced respect for habeas corpus for Guantanamo detainees.
Politics and media has for the last two decades been operated on generating engagement through outrage, and it seems that we have arrived at the peak of what that model was able to do, with a very sharp decline into apathy. More outrage will not convince people to care. Even the financial parts had very limited impact towards political engagement.
A related change on the people's part has been decreased understanding of how to leverage their own political power.
Congress-critters are concerned about losing reelection. (And of being primaried even in safe districts)
Yet the minification of attention spans has confused the average American voter that they're impotent, when really they're just lazy, ignorant, and unwilling to muster real-world action.
When's the last time you saw someone pepper a House district with self-made signs?
There are things every single person can do, but just doesn't. And because of this, media has been able to turn political engagement into profitable passive consumption.
> When's the last time you saw someone pepper a House district with self-made signs?
Never, because it would be totally ineffective. Incumbents in Congress have about a 95% win rate[1]. For almost everywhere in the country, districts are what they are and no amount of hand drawn signs are going to change it.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing, but I think it's worth pointing out that you don't have to win in order to have an impact. It could well be that the incumbent retains his position because he made moves to address your concerns.
"The Constitution explicitly forbids Congress from issuing bills of attainder—laws that single out individuals for punishment without trial. While that restriction technically applies to the Legislative branch, the spirit of it clearly applies here. A president cannot simply declare someone an enemy of the state for contradicting a political narrative. That’s not national security—it’s authoritarianism, dressed up in executive language."
So the Constitution does not forbid it. All executive orders, it could be argued, are authoritarian, not just the ones that you happen to dislike.
The moral? Be damned careful to whom you give this authority.
Well the way it should work is that executive orders are not laws and should not be treated as such. They’re supposed to be memos about how executive agencies should interpret the law. Somehow though, as congress has languished they’ve been accruing more and more power
Congress largely relinquished that power by creating bills that establish rule-making executive agencies rather than writing the rules themselves. That leaves congresspeople free to do things like trade stocks and raise money for their respective parties. They claim they would be too busy to read all the rules they would have to pass, but (1) that's the point and (2) they pass massive bills they don't read anyway. This version of America is fundamentally broken, but it seems to be the nash equilibrium of the system given greedy congrespeople and a greedy executive.
Requiring Congress to get involved every time a regulatory agency needs to adapt to new circumstances or new technology would leave us at the mercy of unscrupulous corporations who can and will "move fast and break things."
No; Congress relinquished their power when Congressional Republicans chose to become "the party of No" and just prevent anything from happening under Obama. That's when executive orders started to become much more common.
I think you need to read some history, because what I'm talking about happened in the 1930's-60's, when Obama wasn't even born yet. The regulatory agencies are ponderous and slow, too. They are just unelected so they can do unpopular things without it impacting their careers.
Executive orders are the latest extension of the trend of do-nothing congresses. They have been growing exponentially over time.
> They are just unelected so they can do unpopular things without it impacting their careers.
Yes, this (to an extent), but more importantly, they're also experts. The people hired at these agencies aren't politicians, they're professionals.
Seems to me most congress people can barely tell their ass from a hole in the ground these days. Do we really need them chiming in on what medicine is okay and what isn't?
I'd call that the rule of law. If Congress is unable to perform that duty, it falls upon themselves to resign their position in favor of an fairly elected candidate who will.
It sounded like you were going to disagree, but then I think you arrived at the same place more or less. Congress, on net, isn’t doing what it needs to be doing. Is that not a critical problem? If the executive who takes up that slack is Trump, suddenly people notice what a problem it is. But, it is not about Trump specifically, but rather an ongoing and systemic issue with our two party system, and it will predictably escalate due to partisans in Washington and their unwavering supporters.
I was emphatically disagreeing with their first sentence. The idea that Congress shouldn't be delegating its power to regulatory agencies was a fringe one until very recently, with the obviously-corrupt SCOTUS ruling ending Chevron deference.
Delegating power to regulatory agencies also has nearly nothing to do with Congress's recent gridlock and ineffectiveness, or the spate of executive orders that has prompted.
> The idea that Congress shouldn't be delegating its power to regulatory agencies was a fringe one until very recently
Between about 1985 (Chevron) and 2010 (the populist movements in both parties), this idea was at its nadir of popularity. For the entire rest of US history from 1776-1980 and 2010-2025, a distrust of a large executive branch was very popular, and pretty much bipartisan most of the time. Just because you do not remember a time when this idea was popular, it does not mean that it was a fringe one only until very recently.
Congress is designed to be gridlocked. That's its natural state. We are now learning why it's a good idea to have a relatively ineffective government.
No in fact I'd say we are learning why its bad to have ineffective goverment. It lets people believe any blowhard thats claiming to be able to get things done. And its easy to do stuff when you don't care about destroying things or making things worse or following the law
I think my mileage varies a bit. I was an Obama/Clinton supporter, and I have always felt strongly that the legislative branch was… less than efficient. Delegating away the hard non-glamorous stuff is incentivized and nothing changes because the DC system as a whole just works that way. Both parties want less accountability and more power, but citizens need the opposite. There has to be some reasonable amount of legislation coming from the legislature or what are they there for other than grandstanding, fundraising and performative outrage?
When a law is passed that says "Do what the executive agency says.", then it makes executive orders that control that executive agency on the level of laws. Even with some limits in the original law, the executive order becomes like a law at least within those limits. But it isn't a law, meaning that some protections based on laws aren't offered. So now we run into an issue where we have things that aren't laws that effectively work as a law as far as the common man cares. The only simple fix I see for this is to require that all laws must clearly define what is and isn't illegal without any regard to another system's interpretation of the matter (but as with any simple fix, it is never that simple).
They don't even pass a budget anymore.. which they're explicitly required to do. They learned there are political consequences to their action so they handed their job to agencies in the Executive Branch to write their own rules which acted like laws.
When SCOTUS struck down Chevron Doctrine last year, it boiled down to "No, Congress writes the laws."
The time window you indicate here is too narrow for the topic under discussion, and thinking in partisan terms about the dysfunction of this republic an error, in my opinion. At the foundational (practical not ideological) level, the complicity has been between the economic, political, and informational power centers in US. It is possible they did not foresee the black swan of Trumpism and now a faction of the ruling elite is being excised through mechanisms of their own making. But that would not absolve them of the responsibility for where we are today.
No, pjc50 is right. Republican politicians are scared of their leader because their primary elections are completely at his mercy. The reason for Congress's dysfunction today is 100% a partisan issue. No need to blame "elite power centers".
Eh, there's something in "complicity has been between the economic, political, and informational power centers in US": in that all of them backed an increasingly dysfunctional Republican party, as a means of avoiding problems they didn't want to have solved (post industrial areas, police violence, fake news, money politics and so on)
The reverse applies to Democrats, who are sufficiently unafraid of their leadership that they occasionally engage openly in collaboration with the enemy.
Even before Trump Congress was at a standstill because R would just say "no" to absolutely everything. Doesn't matter what it was, it was "no". They fight tooth and nail for any kind of solution to anything.
The only time Congress gets anything done is with a blue majority.
The core plank of the Repub strategy has been to eschew bi-partisanship. It is the home of the Tea party movement, because it kept feeding its base red meat, and then never actually delivering. Trump is lauded by his base, because he treats the political theater as reality.
Please remember, during Trump 1, liberals and centrists reached out constantly to the Republican rank and file, and never made progress. You cannot overcome a media and political machine built to prevent such progress and dialogue.
The executive branch has the authority execute citizens that pose a threat, unilaterally. Deeming someone as a public enemy clearly shows a measure of restraint from that power. Thus it must be legal. Otherwise the executive branch would find themselves in a position where they cannot point out when something has been done to harm the US, but could in fact just kill that person without comment.
Under the current administration, what the constitution does and doesn't say may be entirely immaterial. They are perfectly happy running ripshod over the due process provisions of the fifth amendment so may choose to ignore, or at least try to ignore, any other part too.
It could be writen on single-ply toilet paper, and the paper hold more value.
Of course a lot of this is up in the air and could be resolved before the end of this term, as there are numerous legal challenges on-going, but perhaps not and with people openly taking about a 3rd term by various tricks (not blatantly declaring that it is happening, but I'd not put it past them!) such as him running as vice to someone else's election campaign then the president elect stepping down, this sort of ignorance of current law could continue for two terms or more.
You see this in other areas too like academia being afraid they will get the ire of the administration and lose money. For a lot of firms they don't want to suddenly get their government contracts dropped by speaking out. This is how things slowly become more authoritarian, and freedom of speech dies. This is also why the gradual expansion of executive power was not good.
If the threat of financial loss stops people from criticizing actions, imagine what it would be like if you would be investigated and jailed on sham charges like in some other countries.
> imagine what it would be like if you would be investigated and jailed on sham charges like in some other countries
Some other countries? The US is renditioning people without due (any!) process ostensibly based on their tattoos. I'm not saying this to be pithy but to sound (or at least amplify) the alarm.
Did I infer that I did not see a problem with that as well? This is the token whataboutism that plagues us. People with this mindset do not have any ideals like free speech or democracy, they just use transgressions that "the other side" did to justify the gradually worse things they do ad-infinitum. If you are for freedom of speech, you would see a problem with both, not just what was done in the past, and portray what is being done now as "payback" That is just pure tribalism.
I can understand your position intellectually. Certainly, examples of right wing views being met with hostility can be found. But I hope you realise that whataboutism simply perpetuates the very behaviour that your are opposed to.
If you are opposed to conservative voices being suppressed, the surely you see the problem with the opposite kind of speech being specifically targeted by the president of the United States?
If, instead you would like to see right wing speech being free, but are ok with liberal voices being suppressed, then isn't your position hypocritical?
My feeds have been screaming about DOGE for months, until at some point it just turned into depressing cynicism. Nobody cared about the warnings from experts, and nobody cares now that their predictions are coming true. What's the point of speaking out now? Nobody will listen, anyway.
I suppose it makes sense: for most of the Americans who voted, this is what they voted for.
If people genuinely support what is happening then the only two possible conclusions are that they have no idea what is happening or they are extraordinarily stupid.
Because I am generous, I always assume it's the first. And, I can't fault them. They are under constant bombardment of propaganda and lies around what DOGE is doing. I mean, DOGE can't be honest to save their lives. So, of course constituents are misled.
The idea of DOGE, of course! But over and over anecdotal conversations about the huge difference between mental model of what one thinks DOGE would be doing vs all of the reporting about what is actually happening- Elon Musk's "approval" is bottoming out for a reason, the town halls are angry and nearing violence for a reason. Nobody wants what is actually happening.
> Yet in recent years, elitist leaders in Government have unlawfully censored speech and weaponized their undeserved influence to silence perceived political opponents and advance their preferred, and often erroneous, narrative about significant matters of public debate
Isn't the executive a branch of government? Physician, heal thyself.
It seems to be a feature of this type of brain dead odious politics to revel in the hypocrisy. Reminded also of the Harvard EO that simultaneously decried their DEI efforts and hiring/admissions not based on merit and then demanding that every department install a bunch of conservatives..
Please stop calling them "conservatives". The term is a dishonest cover that they shouldn't have been able to continue hiding behind after they openly put themselves at odds with our society's institutions during the first Trump term. As a libertarian who didn't particularly love the status quo, I held my nose and voted actually conservative in 2024 - that was Harris/Walz. The new radical Republican party is free to come up with a new label that accurately describes the goals of their movement. Until then I propose we just use maggots, fascists, or destructionists, which capture the only consistent values I've been able to discern.
Silence from companies in terms of press releases and official statements, maybe. But almost everyone I know in the industry is somewhere between concerned and outraged over this.
Another shining example in the first few months of this administration of how we should not defer leadership to private industry, because they will always be motivated by preserving their bottom line.
I've had the same experience about people in the industry being concerned. But private company heads are well aware of what's happening to the folks that have crossed Trump before or recently. Such as Harvard, state of Maine, the law firms strong armed to doing pro-bono.
Anyone surprised that the greedy executives at the top don't care if anything were to happen to Chris Krebs, Brian Krebs, Bruce Schneier, etc. under this admin is naive to this new dynamic. Nonetheless, it's disgusting to see.
It seems that the idea that someone could be motivated simply by having integrity, valuing honesty and pride in simply "doing their job" correctly is so alien to the current US administration that they see political motives everywhere and in everyone's actions.
The fact that people with such a cynical and amoral worldview wield so much power not only in US but globally and are willing to wield that power in capricious and petty ways is deeply upsetting.
But what is more horrifying for me is that apparently this administration remains representative of a large section of the US population - with seemingly unshakeable approval by between 40% and 50% of the US adult population according to polls.
I love the US, have friends and family there, have a first cousin in the marines, grandfather born there, etc., and have visited many many times and just find it difficult to reconcile my positive experiences with the place and people with the idea that more than 4 out of 10 US adults could approve of the cruel and vindictive actions of this administration. I'm not being over dramatic by stating that it has genuinely shaken my world-view and belief in the innate goodness of humanity.
A lot of people in the US, especially the Christian Trump supporters are nice but not kind. They will say hi, they will smile, they ask if you need anything, then they will happily defend the deportation of innocent people to secret prisons in foreign countries without any sort of due process. They will offer to bring you soup while your sick but will fight tooth and nail to make sure you don't have affordable health care. The list goes on and on...
I think they are just nice and ignorant, honestly.
So many I interact with are just simply unaware and vote based on their discomfort with urban liberal culture. That's it. The blue hair and the pronouns made them feel weird, so they voted the other way.
On top of that, they lack the streets smarts that people living in high population density areas (that is, cities) develop for seeing through scammers and conmen. City people can tell that other city people are untrustworthy when they are hypocrites or caught in a lie. Rural folk seem to just distrust city folk vibes, and get tricked by lying, hypocritical politicians who use classic door-to-door salesman tactics like wearing a suit, appearing rich, and speaking confidently.
Edit: Street smarts isn't just about dealing with people on the streets. It's also recognizing which of your office coworkers in a competitive work environment are lying or misleading others to personally benefit via performance reviews and promotions. You contrast this with meeting other city people with tattoos, piercings, dark skin, or bending gender, and you figure out that red flags have nothing to do with superficial appearance.
My aunt is a conservative lobbyist and a drunk. She drinks a bunch of vodka and then texts me and my family about all of the violence that is going to be done to people she hates (including some groups that people in my family belong to). This isn't "blue hair makes me feel weird." This is "I want college professors to be shot." Those are the texts I receive.
The uncomfortable reality I've had to face is that a lot of these people really, genuinely, enjoy other people suffering.
I think it comes from a place of the American vision of work. This idea that things that are good don't come easy, and that it requires sacrifice. That if some people aren't getting hurt, then it's not working.
So they view these people getting hurt as a good thing. They use terms like "bleed" to describe the executive agencies getting gutted. They have a medieval view of it, like blood letting is a legitimate solution to problems. That, because there are tears and suffering, something of substance must be getting accomplished.
But sometimes bad things are just bad. And sometimes good things don't require suffering. They don't understand that.
That's been my experience as well. There is a large population of uneducated people (At least in terms of critical thinking) in the US that are not able to understand the impact of what is happening regarding what this administration is doing. And I think this is by design as the attacks on educational systems are increasing.
I’ve had many conversations that amount to “I’d agree that illegal citizens should not have entered the country and maybe deportation is the correct recourse” (even from immigrants) but if they saw how the inhumanity of how deportations happened they’d be appalled. The government could be nicer to humans, but it’s a government
I don't buy that. They have allowed their ignorance to be weaponised against the entire country, and if they refuse to acknowledge that, they are complicit in its destruction.
If you work two jobs to make ends meet, and get home at 11pm to fall asleep watching a low budget film on Netflix with ads, when are you going to have time to read non-partisan news and form an educated anger? Ignorance is a bigger driver than informed complicitness
Not enough time to read non-partisan news, but plenty of time to read facebook, watch tik tok, and soak / embrace up all the ridiculous "the trans immigrants are coming to eat your pets and fuck your kids" ads targeted at them.
Discomfort? Omg :) Yet it’s not taking anything to anyone, it’s not costing them anything and if they don’t feel the need to state pronouns nobody is going to force them to do so… so why refuse a little acceptance to the Other. A while back, some got crucified for having different ideas…
Happy Easter to those who celebrate and a happy weekend to all others :)
If they have that kind of attitude, then they are not "Christian" as Jesus very explicitly welcomed strangers and notably made a point of healing people without asking for payment.
I would say that the "system" of organised religion is very broken and goes against the teachings of Jesus. As far as I can tell, Trump is probably the closest figure to the anti-christ in terms of his greed and lack of charity.
Personally, I don't think that the organised Catholic church was about following Jesus' teachings, but more about consolidating wealth and power. It's disingenuous to call it "Christianity" if it just chooses convenient parts to follow. I mean, Jesus was very specific about not amassing wealth.
Jesus was a Jew preaching within a framework of Judaism which he clearly believed in and claimed authority from.
That framework rejected him, and I can sympathize with arguments that the system of "Christianity" that developed was not the system he intended, but I don't think it would be accurate to describe Jesus as anti-system per se.
Either way, any definition of Christianity that excludes Catholicism or any other organized sect doesn't seem useful.
It's like people defining Capitalism to require pure free markets, just so they can say the US or British Empires never really engaged in Capitalism. It just seems like an exercise in semantics.
> It's like people defining Capitalism to require pure free markets, just so they can say the US or British Empires never really engaged in Capitalism. It just seems like an exercise in semantics.
Not quite as real-world Capitalism has an approximation of free markets. I would say that's quite different from "Christians" going against welcoming strangers and feeding/healing the poor. In my view Jesus was against being judgemental, so sects that prioritise being judgemental cause me some cognitive dissonance when they are described as Christian.
As a Christian, I totally get your cognitive dissonance and agree with you, that Jesus was very much not racist or xenophobic, and instead preached love and compassion.
It's too early to see visible results of what has happened in less than 100 days. I am confident the approval will rise and fall as swiftly as the price of new iphones.
Approval ratings might fall, but they've installed a system of nearly unchecked power, and have shown a blatant disregard for law. It's probably too late for even the base to affect change without bloodshed.
The flipside of the "states' rights" movement is that the Federal Government is much weaker: so while it's easier to strip away rights and dismantle federal institutions, it's also easier for individuals to oppose the concrete harm that'd cause by working the levers of their local government. https://plush.city/@scarlet/114355949314782873 gives a few concrete things that individuals (not even groups) can do, which might make an outsized difference.
You're right in normal situations, but masked federal agents (HOURS FROM MY HOME) are kidnapping and sending US citizens to foreign gulags. As what point does "states rights" extend to the physical protection of its citizens? Will my local police protect me from the gestapo?
That's the topic of section 9 (quoted below, with minor formatting changes). I recommend reading the whole thing, since it also explains how to raise things, how to follow up in a way that gets them addressed…
---
If you're concerned about ICE, then you'll want to show up at your City or County council and hit the following points -
* Are local police cooperating with ICE?
* Are they following due process?
* What happens when due process isn't followed?
* If ICE isn't following due process, and local police are still coordinating, then how will they keep residents safe?
I know things feel dire, and things are certainly very bad for sure, but they have been bad before and things turned around.
The Gilded Age comes to mind. Hell, even Nazi Germany didn't last forever.
Don't despair. Do what you can to make the world you want to see, accept the things outside your control, turn off social media, and stay positive!
When I look back at my family tree there is a massive gaping hole where "killed by the Nazis" sits. "Don't worry we'll get through this" doesn't account for the tombstones of all the people who don't get through it.
> But what is more horrifying for me is that apparently this administration remains representative of a large section of the US population - with seemingly unshakeable approval by between 40% and 50% of the US adult population according to polls.
It’s possible that percentage counts dissatisfaction with the previous administration more than approval for the current one. That is, it might just count people wanting any change.
You should then be dissatisfied with both at the same time. When people wish 'any change' they actually wish a change into better, otherwise it's plain stupid.
It is difficult for people to be unhappy with two choices unless given a third that they can be happy with. When you are either with us or against us, there aren't much people who will be dissatisfied with both at the same time, since that isn't an option given to them.
It is disheartening to me to observe that the thing that broke the once proud USA, the final straw, the thing that disenfranchised hundreds of millions of people and made them rabid and reactionary (on both sides of the rage algorithm) was a black man in the white house and women on the presidential ballot. The retrograde prejudices so deeply ingrained in the country’s memome that we are still in the throes of an anaphylactic reaction to an acute melatonin allergy.
It doesn’t help that many of us (yes , I mean us, the technorati, the readers and contributors of this vaunted forum) actively and even knowingly participated in making poisonous systems, pocket prohistamines, amplifiers of fears and antagonists of rational thought.
We decry the world we have wrested from decency with our own tender, uncalloused hands, our minds sharpened to create beautiful weapons of mass confusion, elegant and brutal in their viral carapaces, eager to dissolve into the psyche of any unfortunate enough to fall into their dopamine sweetened viciousness.
We created this. Not the politicians, there have always been irrational, brutish, would be populists and morons in suits. That is not new. People with money willing to pay people to build or do malignant things, that is also an ancient malady that society has evolved to bear. We. We made the mind-killers. We, with our cleverness and desire for perfect symmetry manufactured social PCP, and now we are witnessing the fruits of our careless, avaricious labors, shocked and in denial of the damage we have done.
In our defense, we didn’t know. No one had built anything on our idea machines that hooked into the flesh of the human psyche like that before, and at first we didn’t even understand what we were building. But later in the fall, we knew better.
Our algorithms, nanowire sharp in their efficiency, honed to amplify fear and rage while suppressing rational thought, no, those were not made in ignorance, neither in malice, but more in a playful curiosity. The same playful curiosity that made the atom bomb, but at least the physicists could foresee and conceptualize the demon they would create. In contrast, we the technorati are still reeling with surprise and denial, not able to understand the beast that we have conjured from the depths of the human psyche.
We know there is a problem, we know that social media is not helping… so what do we do? We make lame attempts to make new social media platforms, lower in poison, filtered cigarettes. Precision strategic weapons of mass destruction. Low-fat butter.
We need to look in the mirror and get to work figuring how to fix what we broke. The future of humanity is at stake, and we are directly responsible for, knowingly or not, the situation our children are facing.
> a black man in the white house and women on the presidential ballot. The retrograde prejudices so deeply ingrained in the country’s memome that we are still in the throes of an anaphylactic reaction to an acute melatonin allergy.
This is the most obscenely wrong take I can imagine, and I'll gladly explain why I say that.
Your AI-generated response plainly ignores a country in love with Michael Jordan and Whitney Houston for decades, for example, and are choosing skin deep characteristics to fit _your_ narrative, while ignoring the things voters repeatedly emphasized as damning, all of which were color blind: a complete lack of policy by the "woman on the ticket", condescension from Hillary that people not following her directives "need to get over themselves", Obama chastising black men that they must vote as he says. It's a playbook on the alienation of voters.
It’s interesting that you suppose my writing is AI generated? I’ve not seen AI that writes that way, but I suppose you might set it up to emulate a certain style. I’ve also been accused of using AI because I used an em dash. In that case, I guess it’s almost true, because my spell check would have put it there in place of space-dash-space.
FWIW I am morally opposed to publishing AI slop where it might enter the public domain, and while I find my local models useful for organizing thoughts and prepping documents, I do not use AI to write.
But thank you, I guess, for assuming a properly written long form comment must be AI? lol.
On the issue of pervasive racism…. Yes, we have become comfortable with people of color entertaining us, and most have multiple ethnicities both in their background and in their social circles these days… but when Obama took office, you could hear a pin drop in many, many corners of the USA. A black man running the country, representing the nation to the world, was a bridge too far for many, many people.
In my life I have a lot of intersectionality with maga and maga adjacent individuals. The vast majority are racist either openly, covertly, or accidentally, the “I have a black friend” so I can’t be racist types. Xenophobia is a huge driver of the political base… if you can’t see that, IDK what to tell you… but none of that negates the very real issues you spoke of. There were no good choices, really, only maybe less dangerous ones.
Anyway, I hope your day goes well, and be careful about assuming you can dismiss everything you don’t like to read as “AI generated ” and therefore irrelevant. That’s a very dangerous and sloppy cognitive shortcut to remaining ignorant of anything outside your echo chamber. Relatable though, I think we’re all a little traumatized ATM.
Well said, and apologies for assuming you’d phrased using ai. Looks like we’re describing near overlap, and i suspect i know more independently voting people than the maga sorts you have seen. The large number of independents i know voted against the race-baiting tactics shown by Obama in chastising minorities if not voting as he deemed appropriate, and similarly with Hillary. Anyway none ever mention race of candidates, but voted for the candidates not mentioning race at all. I hope you see the distinction because i found that interesting.
I think it's clear that the approval ratings Trump gets are more about disapproval of the rest of politics. When you have every politician getting rich somehow while your life gets worse and worse, a lot of people will want all politicians punished. Trump is that punishment, and many people are excited to see the political and professional classes suffer. That is the approval rating.
The irony being that Trump enriches himself and rewards politicians [mainstream or otherwise] for corruption to a greater extent than any previous politician, and doesn't even try to hide it. The people that are happy their savings and/or chances of making rent next week are being eroded to enrich Trump insiders because at least random mid level professionals and Hispanic people with autism awareness tattoos are suffering more deserve everything they get.
To a certain extent this is a result of living in a media ecosystem where most of the population doesn’t actually see an unbiased reporting of facts but whatever is shown to them by certain right wing news networks. But I do agree at some point people need to take responsibility for their information diet.
Fwiw media manipulation of American opinion isn’t new, its been a huge part of how America works since at least the Spanish American war of 1896.
Monopoly and capture is what happened to the right. Theres a reason republicans march and Dems debate.
The republican strategists build this advantage over decades, it’s not the work of a single term. It’s a captured market of ideas, tariffs if you will. No competition from actual debates.
That’s why you can sell contradictory ideas within hours of each other, and never be called out for it. It’s why you can sell debates on Tan suits or prop up bogeymen, and never deal with debate.
This is news media. Eventually Fox wasn’t the sole juggernaut, and the techniques got adopted for online debates.
It’s been so wildly successful in building a reliable political voting bloc, that every political party in the world took notes.
There is no such thing as unbiased reporting of facts. People not understanding that, and the fact that there is nothing inherently wrong with bias, is a big part of the problem.
You can be biased but adopt a systematic methodology and a deontology system, both of which help journalists mitigate their bias and produce quality reporting.
The big issue with the current news ecosystem and social media is their complete disregard for this methodology. By discarding the journalistic methodology, they make themselves propagandists, not journalists.
Telling your audience obviously false / anti-factual lies, without any regard for fact checking, is not just "biased reporting". And it is inherently wrong, malevolent, evil.
Anyway, I'm amazed each time I hear right wingers who did not get the joke seemingly complaining about how Reality has a left leaning political bias...
What if there is something inherently wrong with bias, but there is also no possibility to solve it. I see people operating under the idea that if there is something inherently wrong, then there must exist some solution to that inherent wrongness. What if the underlying issue is that there are flaws in humans that cannot be fixed and any attempt to manage is going to still leave some victims of the issue unprotected?
Fox and MSNBC are relentlessly partisan, but CNN aims for the center and misses. There's a big difference, and it's wild that Republicans got away with pretending that CNN was in the Fox/MSNBC tier just by repeating it as dogma until in their own minds it became true.
Fox's main approach - repeating anything that's a lie as dogma until its parroted as core truth by their audience, then saying they are opinion and not news so everyone knows not to take them seriously.
Bear in mind that a lot of people took pains to not look at their candidate too closely, to the point where a (slim) voting majority wasn't showing up to rallies etc. during the campaign. One might see this as signs of their being fake, but it could also be suggestive that they didn't want to come out and see where their guy was really at. They voted for the IDEA of him and what they figured he represented, and were indulged in those beliefs as hard as possible.
So this 'approval' is sort of phantom approval. It's approval of a fantasy man who doesn't track too closely with the reality of what's actually happening.
The point where people pay heavily for their erroneous beliefs, for instance by losing their retirements and savings, is a point where people re-evaluate.
Now, someone has to act to deal with reality. This is pretty much the job of every adult in america.
I suspect this is why Vance has been so over the top as well. I think he expects Trump to get impeached, and take over the party faithful. This is an idle musings though.
Everyone who voted for Trump knew exactly what they were getting or should have known. He was in office for four years. 40% of the people know what he is doing and approve of it.
Something interesting to watch about the current executive is he never talks about the future concretely.
Keep an eye on his rhetoric. He'll talk in broad strokes, bright-shining-future abstracts... But he never talks about anything specific. Never about how any specific policy will create a specific good outcome. No concrete ideation.
An idea that has been floated on this topic is that he's not actually capable of imagining such a future because he won't be in it (one way or the other; dude's 78).
It makes him dangerous. He can accidentally destroy something he can't even conceive of existing.
He'll likely live another 15 years or so. I'm pretty sure he's imagining a future for himself. He's talking about a third term, which means at least eight years of "future". He also has children whose continued success he probably cares about. That said, I agree that he doesn't seem interested in building anything but his personal kingdom (including walls to protect it).
> But what is more horrifying for me is that apparently this administration remains representative of a large section of the US population - with seemingly unshakeable approval by between 40% and 50% of the US adult population according to polls
I feel this is largely a consequence of decades of overwrought hyperventilating about all things politics and a lot of crying wolf. Every republican candidate has been the next Hitler, every democratic candidate has been the next anti-christ. Every 4 years we go through this song and dance predicting the end of the world and untold human suffering and every 4 years life went on with barely a change. Why would people expect this time to actually be different? Why would they expect that this time the stories of corruption and abuse of power are actually true and being reported without ridiculous embellishment? Why would anyone who voted for Trump in the first place think that reports of abuse of power from the side of American politics that coined “chimpler” as a nickname for W. Bush would be sincere about Trump?
I agree with you that I think more people should be more concerned than they are. I just don’t think it’s all that surprising either. The lesson of the “Boy Who Cried Wolf” is that when the wolf finally comes, no one will believe you. Of course the other lesson is that eventually the wolf does come. It didn’t work out so well for the village, and it might not work out so well for us either.
The thing is, there has been a wolf. It's now eating us, and the time to stop it is gone. But sure, it's the fault of the people who correctly told you there was a wolf, and that it's been coming closer and looking hungrier and hungrier since the '70s.
You seem to have missed the point. For one, I’m not telling you this is a good thing or that this is how it ought to be. For two, even in the fable the wolf was real in the end. The problem is, the wolf wasn’t real the last time, or the time before that. Or the time before that. Or the time before that. You can quibble over whether prior politicians were heralds of the wolf or not, but that wasn’t the message. The message was that the wolf was at the gates. And when no wolf materialized, people grew resistant to the idea of the cries ever having meaning. So now we have a wolf, and the problem we are facing is that the people who we need to convince that the wolf is real have no reason at all to believe us until their sheep are being eaten by a wolf in front of them. So how do you convince someone that has no incentive to believe you that this time you’re telling the truth? That’s the problem to be solved. Everything else is just a side show.
I think you misunderstood the prior poster. In the story the boy just made the wolf up the first couple of times, there were no signs beforehand. The prior poster seems to believe that the republicans were doing something bad beforehand, which is now escalating and thus a direct consequence of what came before. That would be more like if the boy found wolf droppings and pointed to those, which would not make him a liar anymore.
So then like I said, the sheep will be eaten. One then must hope they aren’t on the menu, and suddenly the “deafening silence” of various people makes a lot of sense. If the only answer is to wait until enough sheep are eaten for the village to finally get its act together, most people aren’t going to volunteer to be one of the sheep sacrificed.
The supreme court is stacked, they're blackmailing lawyers. They're generally ignoring judges already. The law is irrelevant to them unless convenient.
I think it was mentioned that state district courts cannot order the executive branch of the government to do a thing and that scotus ruled in favor of that? Will need to read more into this after work.
Or you know - find everyone congressperson who is not doing their job, figure out if they are breaking state, federal law, or even party law. Get special elections going and get a working congress.
This paralysis amongst Americans is very un American.
You have a decent poltical set up. Use it. You don’t need a magic wand like a civil war.
You need to do the boring dull work of reading, analyzing and then making executable plans and getting to it.
I’m not that old, and I remember people learning how to make satellites as undergrads in the states. For elective classes. And actually having the damn things go up into space.
It’s your life and your country.
edit: I was wrong in suggesting finding ways to get to special elections. There are very few ways for a congressperson to be removed.
For other ideas - just ask them to resign. Seriously - I doubt many republicans wanted to be part of THIS congress, and have already stated they are afraid of retribution.
Ask them to resign, and have people who can take the heat take their seats.
Either way, congress needs to work, and for this people need to find their spines, or make way for someone who has a spine.
Civil war is NOT a solution, its a failure state, and a failure of imagination and effort on the part of what I remember America to be about.
> Get special elections going and get a working congress
That's not actually legal in many (most?) states. Recall is not a universal feature.
What you're advocating for is civil war. In many states, the only way to get Congresspeople to leave would be "voluntarily" (i.e. "We threaten to burn down every piece of property you have if you don't give up your seat"). Which, actually, has worked deep in America's past; the post-Revolutionary era had a lot more "We don't like the governor, so we're going to take his house apart and throw it into the river" stories.
You're not wrong exactly, but I think you've underestimated how fundamentally anti-democratic American democracy is. It was a 1.0-template and had baked pretty deeply into it fear of mob rule (hence the President not being chosen by direct vote, for example).
I think you are conflating two concepts. Most states do not allow recall of state legislators as you mentioned, but recalling federal legislators is not allowed in any state—there is no constitutional mechanism enabling it.
If you’re not willing to pick up arms and fight, chances are no one else is, so it will never happen. Most likely nothing can be done and people will just live under a totalitarian fascist regime for the duration of their lives. Keep talking about civil war, you’ll be imprisoned and silenced. You should delete your post.
Civil war has a tendency to exponentiate. It doesn't take more than a few people to initiate it (assuming the rhetorical and attitude circumstances are favorable). The 1861 war started with one militia and one fort (really, depending on what historian you're talking to, it started with one religious fundamentalist family and a single raid on Harper's Ferry).
In 1861, people picnicked on a hillside to watch the first army-to-army fight of the war. By the end of the war, cities had been burned down.
My impression is that the first Trump presidency left everyone at a loss. If you react with outrage, you're labeled in some negative way. This is really an extension of online trolling, where any emotional reaction proves that you "lost." Everyone has a chance to speak up now, but this actually diminishes the power of everyone's voice. You're one drop in a few billion or a few hundred million now. And to the extent that you do speak up, it's fully partisan; the complaints of "the other side" are never heard nor granted legitimacy.
I imagine there are people who would call this cynical and defeatist, but I think often people speaking up is purely counter-productive these days. So many attempts to speak up are just yet another partisan volley which can be written off on partisan grounds alone. Worse, given the way that social media works, the worst and most extreme voices from your faction will be the ones which get the most attention. They will paint your entire faction, and from a public opinion perspective, people will view your side as being far more extreme than it might actually be.
I think people have a model in their head of the civil rights movement, and they think that protest alone will be successful just like it once was. It's not clear to me that protest, in and of itself, actually does much these days. Trump seems to enjoy seeing his ideological opponents outraged, and his supporters are either cowed towards him, if not far more vindictive than the man himself. Maybe it's just because I keep seeing the mindless noise from the internet, but real push-back here requires a centralized and most importantly, a focused movement. One that doesn't just incorporate the most extreme policy positions from its wings, and understands how to build a broad coalition. It's something people have forgotten how to do. It might be trite to blame social media, but no one seems to understand how to build a broad coalition in the way that Dr. King did during the civil rights movement. Movements these days tend to exclude, rather than include, and tend to be led by radicals and extremists, which defeat the cause they claim to fight for.
> I imagine there are people who would call this cynical and defeatist, but I think often people speaking up is purely counter-productive these days. So many attempts to speak up are just yet another partisan volley which can be written off on partisan grounds alone. Worse, given the way that social media works, the worst and most extreme voices from your faction will be the ones which get the most attention. They will paint your entire faction, and from a public opinion perspective, people will view your side as being far more extreme than it might actually be.
I think there's a way around this: pair attempts to speak up with base-broadening stuff that controversial within your faction and will alienate the "most extreme voices from your faction."
Basically: DEI is a goner (for instance), stop defending it and throw it in the fire, too. Advocate for literally building the wall. Support tariffs, but say you'll do them more competently and actually bring the jobs back. The focus and energy should be on protecting the basic constitutional order, everything else is a distraction. The people toward the extremes need to be the ones holding their noses to vote, not the guys on the fence.
For protests and movements to actually succeed, they will eventually need candidates in the polls. But the U.S. is a two-party system, and the other party has, with their many years in power, shown what they will do, i.e. not much.
Great comment, articulates something I've been feeling lately but didn't quite have the words for. (Not American, but similar situation in my country.)
Where do we go from here? What kind of action would be effective?
> All the cybersecurity companies saying "We don't have anything to say about this situation." is just them being true to their main in-group: for-profit companies that don't want to upset a big current or potential buyer. They are, first and foremost, part of that "community", and they happen to be involved in cybersecurity. Solidarity is happening there, just not to the people in cybersecurity.
This sucks and we should change it for sure. So many other industries have successfully become professionalized, unionized, and kicked the grifters to the curb. But it feels more and more like the cybersecurity grifters are the ones holding the reins.
We are not "silent", we're just not being heard. Those are not the
same things. You'll find plenty of critique and analysis,
anticipating and commenting on the unfolding cybsersecurity calamity
[0,1,2] ...
Another one [0] SpyCast - DOGE Layoffs and the Counterintelligence Threats They Pose
Also on their podcast RSS, but it seems they haven't added a webpage to link to for that individual show
Per yesterday's whistleblower, DOGE is apparently exfiltrating confidential NLRB data en masse while explicitly seeking to leave no logs of them doing so, followed immediately by login attempts to those systems using the same freshly created credentials from Russian IPs.
I think we can presume the same pattern with IRS, Census, GSA, OPM, etc that just have not had whistleblower-inclined people in the right place to observe.
Looks like we all have to start believing unbelievable: agent Krasnov is real and the tip of an iceberg. Honestly I can't see any other rational explanation of what's happening.
These days it does not matter anymore if something is legal or not. Which may be bad news for the tech industry actually, because it's all about valuations, and valuations suffer if property rights are not guaranteed.
There's two options, either they are fools to believe it is a good thing (and they should not be in security) or they are cowards because they think the same fate will befall them.
Trump's entire 2nd term is about settling scores. He's set up his entire administration to get back at everyone who slighted him in some way over the past few decades, but especially in 2020.
This is what happens when a felon gets to be the president.
The dude is being retaliated against for doing his job and reporting facts that contradict an authoritarian conspiracy; regardless of your personal opinion of the man - this is, like so many other egregious abuses of power this admin has done, an illegal and flagrant abuse of power.
If I have not seen evidence for or against something, then I would not offer an opinion either. Sometimes, people speak confidently when they are ignorant of the context and the facts. That's not the right thing to do.
It's better not to say anything when you don't actually know what you are talking about.
This is interesting when you run it up the abstraction ladder.
What if we take this perspective from “knowledge of news topic of the day” and apply it to “knowledge of the virtue of commenting on a topic”. Are you qualified to actually speak on that subject? Am I? Maybe best not to say anything, since I’m not sure.
Did you watch the TV on Jan 6?
Did you hear Trump repeatedly lie about the election?
Are you saying your eyes and ears were lying to you?
What are you saying here - that unless you walk around the barn all four sides might not be red? You are not a perfect witness, you are reporting on the most obvious fact of the matter.
No, the article sums it up correctly. He refused to go along with the "stolen election" narrative Trump was trying to build (and a few others) and is now being punished for it.
> Krebs, through CISA, falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen, including by inappropriately and categorically dismissing widespread election malfeasance and serious vulnerabilities with voting machines
Here's an article supposedly of Krebs provenance, which implicitly lumps Trump himself in as a "malicious actor".
> can lead to uncertainty in the minds of voters; uncertainty that can be exploited by malicious actors
Maybe not something I would want said or repeated by my administration either, disregarding the veracity.
There's no date or byline either, so according to the authoritative FAQ, if this were to stand, it would be an admission of acting in bad faith.
Given federal government communications sprawl, it's quite a needle, pretty good performance in my opinion to root this out, disregarding sowing doubt about a federated election and who's will specifically it should / will service.
Voter inclusion (who should / may vote) is itself at issue, but even in the assessment here given DOGE findings unveils possible oversights, FWAB in the FAQ is cited to depend in part on SSNs and in light of the DOGE findings regarding 150+ year olds collecting social security, the security assessment itself does not describe a system that is definitively air-tight, or even terribly reassuring, if there's doubt in your mind about who voted, and how.
A downvote seems insufficient but I'm really lost for words at how to even reply to this. The tone of reasonableness while posting absolute bonkers insanity is alarming.
Sartre’s quote in anti-semites applies to many of these:
> Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
Musk could also have simply looked up the SSA’s own website, which explains that since September 2015 the agency has automatically stopped benefit payments when anyone reaches the age of 115.
> Trump is a malicious actor. He literally tried to overthrow democracy on January 6!
> Congratulations on empathizing with an authoritarian.
It speaks to the strength of different agency administrators if they can walk into the next oval office, grab the duly elected President by the arm, and say "stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself" over and over again. Putting a stop to that wouldn't be so controversial, I think.
> Stop being so gullible.
You are disregarding the election angle and instead misdirecting, the system of validating votes (according to Krebs' own assessment) is dependent on a system with publicly-known flaws.
I understand that the aim can be to enfranchise and enable more voters, but to that aim my statements are agnostic, except for revealing more facts about the case.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/addr...
https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-pr...
>Krebs ... falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen
This quote coming from "whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets" is pretty wild. This seems to be retribution, plain and simple.
> This seems to be retribution, plain and simple.
It's hardly surprising as it's almost the defining feature of Trump - pettiness and revenge minded.
(though strangely, he hasn't publicly insulted his Pennsylvania would-be-assassin, but luckily his ear has healed remarkably well and so maybe he feels no need to do so)
When someone demonstrates actual power, he backs down and cowers. It's why he always ends up doing awkward submissive gestures when interacting with foreign autocrats. No real confidence, all bluster.
Please, some reasonable Trump voter explain how this is acceptable. How can the sitting president still be openly claiming that a previous election was fraudulent after all this time?
I mean, this is very obviously retribution. But nobody's going to reply to you saying "yes, I want those who have wronged my beloved president to be annihilated." So I'm not sure what you're expecting here. There's no good faith explanation for these events save for whatever vague spin Fox News can come up with.
> reasonable
...
Not a trump voter or supporter by any means, but you can reflect on what made this action possible from the pr perspective (even considering the above quoted unnecessary own goal - they could have done the same thing with even more plausible deniability)
There was indeed a campaign to fight "misinformation", with active cooperation between the previous administration and social media companies. There was an official effort to establish a disinformation fighting team within the government. Some of the stories like Hunter biden's laptop and COVID origin stuff blew up as what looks like potential partisan censorship cases. And frankly while I'd attribute the latter, and most of these efforts, to stupidity, the former looks like malice even to me. So now one sides idiotic authoritarian self own can be used by the other side to justify even more idiotic even more authoritarian "corrective" action.
First of all, I don't especially like Trump. He has many faults. But I truly believe, after all this time, that he wants to be a good president. He is a self-made multi-billionaire who does not need to put up with all the shit he has taken just for some title. All of his problems would have went away, at any time, if he would have dropped out of politics. He was a very popular celebrity until he became a serious contender. Then many of his Hollywood friends and political allies (mostly Democrats) suddenly turned on him.
The margins were extremely thin in 2020, and there were many sketchy things going on around mail-in ballots and stuff. Sure, you can point to partisan experts who assert that there was nothing fishy going on, but they are just covering for their team. (Before you say "bipartisan" I want to remind you that many Republicans don't like Trump, and are essentially Democrats under a red banner.) There has been evidence of fraud. One could argue that there is always fraud. But ask yourself: "Which party supports actual election integrity more? The one that insists on US citizens voting in person with valid id (nothing special, just the id that we all need to get by in society), or the one that made a huge deal out of allowing votes with no id and in some cases no US citizenship, voting by mail, an open border, etc.?" I don't think any serious person can look at Democrats and say that what they have advocated for speaks to their competency and sincerity about having legitimate elections.
By the way, Hillary and her cronies never accepted the 2016 election. We actually had a farcical situation on many social media platforms where questioning the 2020 election was banned, and questioning the 2016 election or any other election never was banned or interfered with. If you don't see the media lies, cult mentality, and rank hypocrisy around the Trump pearl clutching, it is unlikely that anyone can convince you with a few HN comments.
> But ask yourself: "Which party supports actual election integrity more? The one that insists on US citizens voting in person with valid id (nothing special, just the id that we all need to get by in society),
You mean the ID that around 21 million US citizens who are eligible to vote do not have and don't have the time and/or money to get that ID? Here's a comment that contains links to a whole bunch of articles covering this, many of which contain extensive links to sources [1].
It is cute how some people can simultaneously believe that (1) you need the type of ID that Republican voter ID laws require for voting in order to get by in society (and so everyone already has the ID they need), and (2) there are tens of millions of illegal aliens who have been living in this country long term (and hence are obviously getting by).
This implies either that you don't actually need such ID to get by or that illegal aliens can easily obtain such ID (which makes the ID law ineffective at preventing fraud).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42116609
>You mean the ID that around 21 million US citizens who are eligible to vote do not have and don't have the time and/or money to get that ID? Here's a comment that contains links to a whole bunch of articles covering this, many of which contain extensive links to sources [1].
That is all a bunch of hogwash. Most people can get ID for like $20 from their state. Even if I accept it, the answer is not to lower standards. It is to actually help these people get the ID that they need. Anything else permits rampant fraud. This is so obvious that I have to assume people like you are malicious actors, with all due respect.
>you need the type of ID that Republican voter ID laws require for voting in order to get by in society (and so everyone already has the ID they need),
Is there any case where a state ID such as a driver's license is not adequate? I don't even care. Go try to open a bank account or cash a check without ID. Everyone will tell you GTFO if you don't have the same type of ID needed to vote.
>there are tens of millions of illegal aliens who have been living in this country long term (and hence are obviously getting by)
These people are issued ID, and besides that they often work for cash or in other ways that dodge the law.
>This implies either that you don't actually need such ID to get by or that illegal aliens can easily obtain such ID (which makes the ID law ineffective at preventing fraud).
If there is simply a field on your ID that says if you are a citizen, and that shit is verified at the time you register to vote or at the time you actually vote, it would be as effective as the enforcement. We have Democrat precincts where poll workers have been forbidden from asking for ID. It is pure insanity, so egregious that it seems engineered to outrage everyone with a shred of common sense. I keep having to mention all of these things on this site amid a flurry of downvotes because too many "hackers" have drank the Kool-Aid.
> That is all a bunch of hogwash. Most people can get ID for like $20 from their state
There's also the cost of finding and getting copies of supporting documents, which are often in another state (e.g., the state you were born in, not the state you now live in). Records for many older Americans have not been digitized or even centralized so if your family moved when you were very young you may have to search the physical records in multiple counties to find yours.
> Even if I accept it, the answer is not to lower standards. It is to actually help these people get the ID that they need.
Obviously, but the same people passing voter ID laws are also making it harder for people to get ID. They reduce the number of offices that issue IDs, with the reductions disproportionately being in districts that tend to not vote for the people who are passing those laws. They say it is because those districts have much lower drivers per capita so don't need as many DMVs (which are usually the offices that deal with ID).
In the offices that remain they'll reduce the hours in which IDs are issued, getting rid of evening and weekend hours. For many poor people that can mean a full day of lost work to go try to get an ID, and many cannot afford that. Besides the loss of a day's pay these places often have terrible public transit so they are looking at an expensive ride on commercial transportation.
For people in low income jobs these barriers can be huge.
> Anything else permits rampant fraud
Then how come no one has been able to actually find evidence of such fraud? No matter how well funded the search they all come up empty.
> Go try to open a bank account or cash a check without ID. Everyone will tell you GTFO if you don't have the same type of ID needed to vote
23% of people earning under $25k/year do not have bank accounts but manage just fine. On that comment I gave you early with all the links to research that you ignored, someone asked how people live without ID and I posted a response there covering some of the ways they get buy.
Look, I don't like waiting at the DMV either but doing it for a few hours every four to eight years is part of life. I don't believe anyone with a job is actually disenfranchised by this requirement. If they won't do that, then they won't register to vote either. In many cases, you can simultaneously get ID and register to vote too. By the way you can't get a job legally without providing ID, unless you are working gig jobs for cash. The elderly are often given IDs that don't expire.
I might be biased but I don't want people who can't manage to get or keep an ID telling us how to run the country. If you can't manage such a basic task, then you can't run your own life and have no business having a say in how other people live or die. That said, the real solution that would make everyone happy is to subsidize the issuance of ID somehow and to make employers accommodate the required absences. We do that for jury duty, more or less, so we can do it for ID and voting too. The solution is definitely never going to be to get stupid and have zero requirements for ID at the polls.
> don't believe anyone with a job is actually disenfranchised by this requirement.
You are betraying your own ignorance. You clearly have never associated with people from a ghetto if you are saying that.
> If you can't manage such a basic task, then you can't run your own life and have no business having a say in how other people live or die.
There's probably some merit to that but I think it would really depend on why. If you can't in the sense that you just don't follow through that's one thing. Whereas working the same hours that the ID office is open, not having PTO, being unable to afford taking unpaid time off, not being able to afford a personal vehicle; if you can't simply because you are poor that hardly seems a reasonable basis to disenfranchise someone.
If nothing else, it certainly isn't consistent with either the word or the spirit of the current law. If you want to change that then the appropriate course of action is to lobby the general public for it. If you believe you won't manage to convince them then I would like to suggest that it is your views that have no business being imposed on others.
Oh and the kicker? It's a poor filter anyway, at least for the purpose that you stated. Someone who doesn't work will have little issue passing it since he has no scheduling conflict with office hours and what's a multi-hour trip on public transit to him?
> The margins were extremely thin in 2020, and there were many sketchy things going on around mail-in ballots and stuff.
These allegations from Trump supporters have been disproved in court many times. What will iy take for you to admit that he's misusing his power to target people who disagree with his election lies?
Considering how ill-treated Trump and his supporters have been and still are by courts, it is no wonder that they don't trust the courts. Regardless of what you or I think, he is going after people he believes are corrupt. The exact same people who targetted him unfairly for years, in some cases. I'm not losing sleep over this.
It's not ill treatment. In many of those cases they openly said they didn't have any "specific evidence", but "belief".
That's not how courts work, and it's not unfair of them to hold you to an evidentiary standard.
It's not ill treatment, they're being targeted by courts because they're doing illegal shit.
It's not that libs are avoiding courts because they're favored, it's just that there's nothing to, you know, try them with. They didn't pull an insurrection. They don't constantly make up lies about everything. So...
Will you trust the courts that have Republican-appointed judges? Trump lost in those, too.
> there were many sketchy things going on around mail-in ballots and stuff.
Just because Fox News repeats false claims over and over doesn't make them true. Do you have sources? 2000 mules was debunked. Fox News settled for their false claims against Dominion. Court awarded damages to that one victim who was accused of smuggling a flash drive of "fraudulent votes" or whatever. Don't fall for the firehose of bullshit. Please share what specifically convinced you of this.
>By the way, Hillary and her cronies never accepted the 2016 election.
She conceded. Trump did not concede when he lost the 2020 election. These are facts. Get real.
>She conceded. Trump did not concede when he lost the 2020 election. These are facts. Get real.
She "conceded" then continued smearing Trump for years and literally called him illegitimate. Not just her but the entire Democrat media machine that backed Hillary over other plausible candidates. The smearing and denial cancel out any good will she gained by "conceding". Shall we talk about the Russiagate hoax that went on for years, that Hillary herself started by commissioning the Steele Dossier? I suggest you go educate yourself on all of that and how she paid a fine for election interference (and how Trump did not).
Given up being a debunked 2020 election conspiracy apologist?
The Steele Dossier was commissioned in 2016, before the election. Trump is claiming the 2020 election was "stolen" well after. Both bad. But not the same.
Trump's allies challenged the election results after losing, 60 times. (edit to add: Challenging, and getting their day in court, is fine! However,) No credible, election-result-changing fraud found. (edit to add: Despite losing in court, they continued to spread debunked conspiracies, and still claimed it was "stolen" without evidence. And still tried to hold on to power, Trump asked Pence to "do the right thing", and declare Trump the winner despite losing. This is the bad part.) Clinton did not challenge the election results after losing. Not the same. Not even close.
Well this is what I'm talking about: https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/30/politics/clinton-dnc-steele-d... Hillary paid a fine for her 2016 antics during the Biden administration.
>Trump's allies challenged the election results after losing, 60 times. No credible, election-result-changing fraud found. Clinton did not challenge the election results after losing. Not the same. Not even close.
I think the key here is that not enough was proven to change any results. But the margins were close. Candidates routinely challenge elections (even Kamala was fundraising to challenge her clear defeat), and some (like Hillary and Trump) never accept it all the way. These things are all similar. The media pretends that everything is uniquely bad when Trump happens to do it and they turn a blind eye to Democrats doing the exact same stuff. It is exhausting to argue with people who refuse to understand this hypocrisy happening right before their eyes.
> The media pretends that everything is uniquely bad when Trump happens to do it and they turn a blind eye to Democrats doing the exact same stuff. It is exhausting to argue with people who refuse to understand this hypocrisy happening right before their eyes.
Got it. Did Clinton try to gain the presidency despite losing? Did she ask the vice president to "do the right thing" and throw out electoral votes?
That's what Trump did.
They did not do the "exact same stuff".
Ok it is not exactly the same but it is quite similar. Clinton and fellow Democrats initiated a years-long legal campaign against Trump using her connections in 2015. They even had his whole campaign wiretapped. Trump did not even prosecute her for her mishandling of classified data. Now that the political persecution chickens are coming home to roost, these people have no actual answer besides to fearmonger about Trump even more.
>>> By the way, Hillary and her cronies never accepted the 2016 election.
>> She conceded. Trump did not concede when he lost the 2020 election. These are facts. Get real.
> She "conceded" then continued smearing Trump for years and literally called him illegitimate.
It's like the goalposts keep moving to try and get away from the bullshit, but there's always more up ahead...
Acceptance and formal concession are two different things, just like clarification versus moving the goalposts. The real bullshit here is trying to avoid the actual issue at hand by attacking my choice of words when you know damn well what I mean.
> He is a self-made multi-billionaire
HAHAHA! No he's not. He inherited his dad's empire. Tanked it and the Russians bailed him out.
He's a charlatan, fraudster and a con artist.
Prove that Russians bailed him out, please. I've got to hear this.
He did inherit money, like $10M if I recall correctly. But he made the rest of his money. Even if not literally a rags-to-riches case (I never said he was, either), he does not need money. Compare that to, say, AOC who is suddenly worth millions of dollars after a few years on a salary of $180k. Who is more suspicious?
He inherited money, ran through it, went back and fleeced his dad and siblings of their money. Ran through that. Racked up hundreds of millions of debt, then ran for president. Now he bastardizes public office and exploits his position to generate wealth.
He inherited a lot more than $10M from his father's death. He got given a $10M ($85M in 2025 dollars) "loan" to start his first solo enterprise.
> He did inherit money, like $10M if I recall correctly.
Trump "received at least $413 million in today's dollars from his father's real estate empire".[1]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/02/us/politics/d...
Why do you speak so confidently around something you clearly know nothing about?
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/12/21/how-russian-money-helpe...
> But Trump eventually made a comeback, and according to several sources with knowledge of Trump’s business, foreign money played a large role in reviving his fortunes, in particular investment by wealthy people from Russia and the former Soviet republics. This conclusion is buttressed by a growing body of evidence amassed by news organizations, as well as what is reportedly being investigated by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the Southern District of New York. It is a conclusion that even Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., has appeared to confirm, saying in 2008—after the Trump Organization was prospering again—that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.”
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/aoc-is-multi-millionaire/
> According to the most recent disclosure from 2023, Ocasio-Cortez had documented that she had no more than between $1,001 and $15,000 in each of three different bank accounts. The total for these three accounts would land somewhere between $3,003 and $45,000. She also recorded in the disclosure having between $1,001 and $15,000 in additional funds in a fourth account for a 401k plan. Further, she noted in the disclosure that she was still paying off student loans, with an "amount of liability" landing somewhere between $15,001 and $50,000. In other words, Ocasio-Cortez was at least $940,000 short of being a millionaire, with the maximum possible amount of the four accounts totaling $60,000, and that's before even factoring in her student loan debt.
Do you get your information from anywhere other than random twitter posts?
>Why do you speak so confidently around something you clearly know nothing about?
I know about as much as you my man. I could sit here and throw links at you, and neither of us would leave thinking any different.
I am not gonna argue about AOC. I think you might be right as it seems like the top stories now support the theory that she is not rich (despite ostentatious things like showing up in a $12k dress to a charity event) and I don't have time to research it now. But there are many members of congress that are far sketchier than her. Such as the queen of insider trading, Nancy Pelosi.
Trump is definitely rich, and has been at least since the 80s. He has done some sketchy stuff, but it's not even close to what happens routinely in Congress. He is not accepting his salary as POTUS either. Has that ever happened before? But here you are trying to spin it like he has no money, or else he owes it all to Russians who somehow have him on a leash.
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This guy?
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/michael-benz-rising-vo...
So, I saw evanjrowley's post before it was flagged, and did my own research, following what his links said, to the sources they linked.
Simply put, evanjrowley's links are lies. The Kreb's specific claims are lies. They link to sources that are carefully edited, and even then, it's clear that is being presented by evanjrowley's sites is not what is being said.
Simply put, evanjrowley is trying to spread disinformation.
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My experience is that everyone who's not close to any of these impacts is apathetic or treating events like they're reality TV, and even light attempts at convincing that there's more going on and that we might be in a historic and bad situation is met with hostility as if you just told someone's small kid that Santa isn't real.
At best they care about the financial parts of the news.
People only caring about immediate financial impacts is so deeply disheartening
I see that as a broad trend. Very very few people have guiding principles these days.
The "problem" with principles is that living by them sometimes means going against something we want right now. People don't want to concede anything, even for their own ideals.
>People don't want to concede anything, even for their own ideals.
People cannot concede anything anymore. We are all trapped in survival mode at this point.
In true survival mode, you likely would not hang out around here.
The people who hang out here are the lucky 90th percentile of our society that are just barely able to tread water at this point. Everyone else is drowning.
Try to imagine living on $60k, then think about the fact that that’s a good salary to a majority of US workers.
If everyone was truly drowning, there would be massive civil unrest. As usual, people in general seem to be finding a way.
People want to be able to eat, not be homeless, and provide for their families.
The safety net in America is tattered and torn, with the current administration working to remove it.
Welcome to America where the only God is the greenback
"..and I'll spend it as fast as I can." --Kingston Trio
- https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=YvGxZD-HNCM
Named after the capitol of Jamaica I recently learned.
It makes sense for our industry, a bad economy means vast layoffs and a terrible job market in tech.
A tech worker who graduated and entered the market in 2012 could easily retire in their 40s with millions. One who graduated in 2022 is going to struggle to stay afloat and employed, and you are surprised people care about that?
Some of us are scared shitless but have been called hysterical for years. Some of us emigrated.
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Like using a throwaway account to accuse someone of cowardice.
And Congress is full of cowards afraid to offend their god-king.
It might be wiser to emigrate if you cannot trust your fellow citizens and neighbours to care about your country becoming fascist. If you've got brown skin, then you'd be better off leaving on your own terms rather than being exported to a concentration camp in El Salvador.
Having light skin will not save you. It just gets you further back in line.
Even if you’re pale you won’t get shit done if you’re locked up
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You mean the guy with the federal dismantlement and looting agency that sends credentials to federal IT systems to Russia, openly talks about a third term where people "wouldn't have to vote anymore", crashes the world economy based on some dubious theory about the US dollar being overvalued being the root of crumbling US power and is currently testing the waters to deport US citizens into an overseas prison nobody ever leaves after ignoring a supreme court order for doing the same to a legal resident (the most legal residents, since they targeted those going through the proper naturalization route) is business as usual?
Are you for real?
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As bad as W was (and I started considering leaving after the 2000 election, but I was a minor) it didn’t seem likely that there would no longer be reasonably fair, even if flawed (with minorities disenfranchised), elections. I am no longer confident there will be a fair election, even in the midterms. And even W respected when the courts forced respect for habeas corpus for Guantanamo detainees.
There is nothing routine about what is going on right now.
When events aren't taken seriously, eventually
"Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me"
There is still time to react, in a year from now it will be like something like McCarthy, only worse.
Politics and media has for the last two decades been operated on generating engagement through outrage, and it seems that we have arrived at the peak of what that model was able to do, with a very sharp decline into apathy. More outrage will not convince people to care. Even the financial parts had very limited impact towards political engagement.
A related change on the people's part has been decreased understanding of how to leverage their own political power.
Congress-critters are concerned about losing reelection. (And of being primaried even in safe districts)
Yet the minification of attention spans has confused the average American voter that they're impotent, when really they're just lazy, ignorant, and unwilling to muster real-world action.
When's the last time you saw someone pepper a House district with self-made signs?
There are things every single person can do, but just doesn't. And because of this, media has been able to turn political engagement into profitable passive consumption.
> When's the last time you saw someone pepper a House district with self-made signs?
Never, because it would be totally ineffective. Incumbents in Congress have about a 95% win rate[1]. For almost everywhere in the country, districts are what they are and no amount of hand drawn signs are going to change it.
1: https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2024:_Incumbent_wi...
I'm not necessarily disagreeing, but I think it's worth pointing out that you don't have to win in order to have an impact. It could well be that the incumbent retains his position because he made moves to address your concerns.
"The Constitution explicitly forbids Congress from issuing bills of attainder—laws that single out individuals for punishment without trial. While that restriction technically applies to the Legislative branch, the spirit of it clearly applies here. A president cannot simply declare someone an enemy of the state for contradicting a political narrative. That’s not national security—it’s authoritarianism, dressed up in executive language."
So the Constitution does not forbid it. All executive orders, it could be argued, are authoritarian, not just the ones that you happen to dislike. The moral? Be damned careful to whom you give this authority.
Well the way it should work is that executive orders are not laws and should not be treated as such. They’re supposed to be memos about how executive agencies should interpret the law. Somehow though, as congress has languished they’ve been accruing more and more power
Congress largely relinquished that power by creating bills that establish rule-making executive agencies rather than writing the rules themselves. That leaves congresspeople free to do things like trade stocks and raise money for their respective parties. They claim they would be too busy to read all the rules they would have to pass, but (1) that's the point and (2) they pass massive bills they don't read anyway. This version of America is fundamentally broken, but it seems to be the nash equilibrium of the system given greedy congrespeople and a greedy executive.
No, that's bullshit.
Requiring Congress to get involved every time a regulatory agency needs to adapt to new circumstances or new technology would leave us at the mercy of unscrupulous corporations who can and will "move fast and break things."
No; Congress relinquished their power when Congressional Republicans chose to become "the party of No" and just prevent anything from happening under Obama. That's when executive orders started to become much more common.
I think you need to read some history, because what I'm talking about happened in the 1930's-60's, when Obama wasn't even born yet. The regulatory agencies are ponderous and slow, too. They are just unelected so they can do unpopular things without it impacting their careers.
Executive orders are the latest extension of the trend of do-nothing congresses. They have been growing exponentially over time.
> They are just unelected so they can do unpopular things without it impacting their careers.
Yes, this (to an extent), but more importantly, they're also experts. The people hired at these agencies aren't politicians, they're professionals.
Seems to me most congress people can barely tell their ass from a hole in the ground these days. Do we really need them chiming in on what medicine is okay and what isn't?
Do you think they are the ones writing the 1000-page bills they pass on a weekly basis? Laws are also generally written by experts.
There's a reason "it would take an act of Congress" is a saying.
I'd call that the rule of law. If Congress is unable to perform that duty, it falls upon themselves to resign their position in favor of an fairly elected candidate who will.
It sounded like you were going to disagree, but then I think you arrived at the same place more or less. Congress, on net, isn’t doing what it needs to be doing. Is that not a critical problem? If the executive who takes up that slack is Trump, suddenly people notice what a problem it is. But, it is not about Trump specifically, but rather an ongoing and systemic issue with our two party system, and it will predictably escalate due to partisans in Washington and their unwavering supporters.
I was emphatically disagreeing with their first sentence. The idea that Congress shouldn't be delegating its power to regulatory agencies was a fringe one until very recently, with the obviously-corrupt SCOTUS ruling ending Chevron deference.
Delegating power to regulatory agencies also has nearly nothing to do with Congress's recent gridlock and ineffectiveness, or the spate of executive orders that has prompted.
> The idea that Congress shouldn't be delegating its power to regulatory agencies was a fringe one until very recently
Between about 1985 (Chevron) and 2010 (the populist movements in both parties), this idea was at its nadir of popularity. For the entire rest of US history from 1776-1980 and 2010-2025, a distrust of a large executive branch was very popular, and pretty much bipartisan most of the time. Just because you do not remember a time when this idea was popular, it does not mean that it was a fringe one only until very recently.
Congress is designed to be gridlocked. That's its natural state. We are now learning why it's a good idea to have a relatively ineffective government.
No in fact I'd say we are learning why its bad to have ineffective goverment. It lets people believe any blowhard thats claiming to be able to get things done. And its easy to do stuff when you don't care about destroying things or making things worse or following the law
I think my mileage varies a bit. I was an Obama/Clinton supporter, and I have always felt strongly that the legislative branch was… less than efficient. Delegating away the hard non-glamorous stuff is incentivized and nothing changes because the DC system as a whole just works that way. Both parties want less accountability and more power, but citizens need the opposite. There has to be some reasonable amount of legislation coming from the legislature or what are they there for other than grandstanding, fundraising and performative outrage?
When a law is passed that says "Do what the executive agency says.", then it makes executive orders that control that executive agency on the level of laws. Even with some limits in the original law, the executive order becomes like a law at least within those limits. But it isn't a law, meaning that some protections based on laws aren't offered. So now we run into an issue where we have things that aren't laws that effectively work as a law as far as the common man cares. The only simple fix I see for this is to require that all laws must clearly define what is and isn't illegal without any regard to another system's interpretation of the matter (but as with any simple fix, it is never that simple).
All executive orders, it can be shown - expected a functioning set of co-equal branches of government.
Congress is broken - intentionally.
Congress abdicated their role quite a while ago.
They don't even pass a budget anymore.. which they're explicitly required to do. They learned there are political consequences to their action so they handed their job to agencies in the Executive Branch to write their own rules which acted like laws.
When SCOTUS struck down Chevron Doctrine last year, it boiled down to "No, Congress writes the laws."
The fix is Congress doing their job.
It's not broken, it's complicit. As I understand it Congress has a R majority, which is why all this is happening.
The time window you indicate here is too narrow for the topic under discussion, and thinking in partisan terms about the dysfunction of this republic an error, in my opinion. At the foundational (practical not ideological) level, the complicity has been between the economic, political, and informational power centers in US. It is possible they did not foresee the black swan of Trumpism and now a faction of the ruling elite is being excised through mechanisms of their own making. But that would not absolve them of the responsibility for where we are today.
No, pjc50 is right. Republican politicians are scared of their leader because their primary elections are completely at his mercy. The reason for Congress's dysfunction today is 100% a partisan issue. No need to blame "elite power centers".
Eh, there's something in "complicity has been between the economic, political, and informational power centers in US": in that all of them backed an increasingly dysfunctional Republican party, as a means of avoiding problems they didn't want to have solved (post industrial areas, police violence, fake news, money politics and so on)
The reverse applies to Democrats, who are sufficiently unafraid of their leadership that they occasionally engage openly in collaboration with the enemy.
Even before Trump Congress was at a standstill because R would just say "no" to absolutely everything. Doesn't matter what it was, it was "no". They fight tooth and nail for any kind of solution to anything.
The only time Congress gets anything done is with a blue majority.
Trumpism is simply the cherry on top of a dedicated plan that favored partisanship.
This is not news, it is well known, and public facts (60 years) https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/03/10/the-polar...
The core plank of the Repub strategy has been to eschew bi-partisanship. It is the home of the Tea party movement, because it kept feeding its base red meat, and then never actually delivering. Trump is lauded by his base, because he treats the political theater as reality.
Please remember, during Trump 1, liberals and centrists reached out constantly to the Republican rank and file, and never made progress. You cannot overcome a media and political machine built to prevent such progress and dialogue.
The executive branch has the authority execute citizens that pose a threat, unilaterally. Deeming someone as a public enemy clearly shows a measure of restraint from that power. Thus it must be legal. Otherwise the executive branch would find themselves in a position where they cannot point out when something has been done to harm the US, but could in fact just kill that person without comment.
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/obama-administration-cla...
Under the current administration, what the constitution does and doesn't say may be entirely immaterial. They are perfectly happy running ripshod over the due process provisions of the fifth amendment so may choose to ignore, or at least try to ignore, any other part too.
It could be writen on single-ply toilet paper, and the paper hold more value.
Of course a lot of this is up in the air and could be resolved before the end of this term, as there are numerous legal challenges on-going, but perhaps not and with people openly taking about a 3rd term by various tricks (not blatantly declaring that it is happening, but I'd not put it past them!) such as him running as vice to someone else's election campaign then the president elect stepping down, this sort of ignorance of current law could continue for two terms or more.
The silence from cybersec, with a couple of exceptions, about DOGE is stunning to me. Not this story but what I thought the headline referred to.
You see this in other areas too like academia being afraid they will get the ire of the administration and lose money. For a lot of firms they don't want to suddenly get their government contracts dropped by speaking out. This is how things slowly become more authoritarian, and freedom of speech dies. This is also why the gradual expansion of executive power was not good.
If the threat of financial loss stops people from criticizing actions, imagine what it would be like if you would be investigated and jailed on sham charges like in some other countries.
> imagine what it would be like if you would be investigated and jailed on sham charges like in some other countries
Some other countries? The US is renditioning people without due (any!) process ostensibly based on their tattoos. I'm not saying this to be pithy but to sound (or at least amplify) the alarm.
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Did I infer that I did not see a problem with that as well? This is the token whataboutism that plagues us. People with this mindset do not have any ideals like free speech or democracy, they just use transgressions that "the other side" did to justify the gradually worse things they do ad-infinitum. If you are for freedom of speech, you would see a problem with both, not just what was done in the past, and portray what is being done now as "payback" That is just pure tribalism.
I can understand your position intellectually. Certainly, examples of right wing views being met with hostility can be found. But I hope you realise that whataboutism simply perpetuates the very behaviour that your are opposed to.
If you are opposed to conservative voices being suppressed, the surely you see the problem with the opposite kind of speech being specifically targeted by the president of the United States?
If, instead you would like to see right wing speech being free, but are ok with liberal voices being suppressed, then isn't your position hypocritical?
When did the Obama or Biden administrations cut university funding due to their speech policies?
>what I thought the headline referred to.
I thought the same.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1913023007263543565.html
Is this discussed on HN ? Edit: Yep, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43691142
My feeds have been screaming about DOGE for months, until at some point it just turned into depressing cynicism. Nobody cared about the warnings from experts, and nobody cares now that their predictions are coming true. What's the point of speaking out now? Nobody will listen, anyway.
I suppose it makes sense: for most of the Americans who voted, this is what they voted for.
Have you considered that almost every worker in tech, indeed almost every American, supports what's happening?
If people genuinely support what is happening then the only two possible conclusions are that they have no idea what is happening or they are extraordinarily stupid.
Because I am generous, I always assume it's the first. And, I can't fault them. They are under constant bombardment of propaganda and lies around what DOGE is doing. I mean, DOGE can't be honest to save their lives. So, of course constituents are misled.
The idea of DOGE, of course! But over and over anecdotal conversations about the huge difference between mental model of what one thinks DOGE would be doing vs all of the reporting about what is actually happening- Elon Musk's "approval" is bottoming out for a reason, the town halls are angry and nearing violence for a reason. Nobody wants what is actually happening.
The second line of the EO.
> Yet in recent years, elitist leaders in Government have unlawfully censored speech and weaponized their undeserved influence to silence perceived political opponents and advance their preferred, and often erroneous, narrative about significant matters of public debate
Isn't the executive a branch of government? Physician, heal thyself.
It seems to be a feature of this type of brain dead odious politics to revel in the hypocrisy. Reminded also of the Harvard EO that simultaneously decried their DEI efforts and hiring/admissions not based on merit and then demanding that every department install a bunch of conservatives..
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/4/15/agencies-demand...
Please stop calling them "conservatives". The term is a dishonest cover that they shouldn't have been able to continue hiding behind after they openly put themselves at odds with our society's institutions during the first Trump term. As a libertarian who didn't particularly love the status quo, I held my nose and voted actually conservative in 2024 - that was Harris/Walz. The new radical Republican party is free to come up with a new label that accurately describes the goals of their movement. Until then I propose we just use maggots, fascists, or destructionists, which capture the only consistent values I've been able to discern.
Silence from companies in terms of press releases and official statements, maybe. But almost everyone I know in the industry is somewhere between concerned and outraged over this.
Another shining example in the first few months of this administration of how we should not defer leadership to private industry, because they will always be motivated by preserving their bottom line.
I've had the same experience about people in the industry being concerned. But private company heads are well aware of what's happening to the folks that have crossed Trump before or recently. Such as Harvard, state of Maine, the law firms strong armed to doing pro-bono.
Anyone surprised that the greedy executives at the top don't care if anything were to happen to Chris Krebs, Brian Krebs, Bruce Schneier, etc. under this admin is naive to this new dynamic. Nonetheless, it's disgusting to see.
It seems that the idea that someone could be motivated simply by having integrity, valuing honesty and pride in simply "doing their job" correctly is so alien to the current US administration that they see political motives everywhere and in everyone's actions.
The fact that people with such a cynical and amoral worldview wield so much power not only in US but globally and are willing to wield that power in capricious and petty ways is deeply upsetting.
But what is more horrifying for me is that apparently this administration remains representative of a large section of the US population - with seemingly unshakeable approval by between 40% and 50% of the US adult population according to polls.
I love the US, have friends and family there, have a first cousin in the marines, grandfather born there, etc., and have visited many many times and just find it difficult to reconcile my positive experiences with the place and people with the idea that more than 4 out of 10 US adults could approve of the cruel and vindictive actions of this administration. I'm not being over dramatic by stating that it has genuinely shaken my world-view and belief in the innate goodness of humanity.
A lot of people in the US, especially the Christian Trump supporters are nice but not kind. They will say hi, they will smile, they ask if you need anything, then they will happily defend the deportation of innocent people to secret prisons in foreign countries without any sort of due process. They will offer to bring you soup while your sick but will fight tooth and nail to make sure you don't have affordable health care. The list goes on and on...
I think they are just nice and ignorant, honestly.
So many I interact with are just simply unaware and vote based on their discomfort with urban liberal culture. That's it. The blue hair and the pronouns made them feel weird, so they voted the other way.
On top of that, they lack the streets smarts that people living in high population density areas (that is, cities) develop for seeing through scammers and conmen. City people can tell that other city people are untrustworthy when they are hypocrites or caught in a lie. Rural folk seem to just distrust city folk vibes, and get tricked by lying, hypocritical politicians who use classic door-to-door salesman tactics like wearing a suit, appearing rich, and speaking confidently.
Edit: Street smarts isn't just about dealing with people on the streets. It's also recognizing which of your office coworkers in a competitive work environment are lying or misleading others to personally benefit via performance reviews and promotions. You contrast this with meeting other city people with tattoos, piercings, dark skin, or bending gender, and you figure out that red flags have nothing to do with superficial appearance.
Some, sure.
My aunt is a conservative lobbyist and a drunk. She drinks a bunch of vodka and then texts me and my family about all of the violence that is going to be done to people she hates (including some groups that people in my family belong to). This isn't "blue hair makes me feel weird." This is "I want college professors to be shot." Those are the texts I receive.
The uncomfortable reality I've had to face is that a lot of these people really, genuinely, enjoy other people suffering.
I think it comes from a place of the American vision of work. This idea that things that are good don't come easy, and that it requires sacrifice. That if some people aren't getting hurt, then it's not working.
So they view these people getting hurt as a good thing. They use terms like "bleed" to describe the executive agencies getting gutted. They have a medieval view of it, like blood letting is a legitimate solution to problems. That, because there are tears and suffering, something of substance must be getting accomplished.
But sometimes bad things are just bad. And sometimes good things don't require suffering. They don't understand that.
That's been my experience as well. There is a large population of uneducated people (At least in terms of critical thinking) in the US that are not able to understand the impact of what is happening regarding what this administration is doing. And I think this is by design as the attacks on educational systems are increasing.
I’ve had many conversations that amount to “I’d agree that illegal citizens should not have entered the country and maybe deportation is the correct recourse” (even from immigrants) but if they saw how the inhumanity of how deportations happened they’d be appalled. The government could be nicer to humans, but it’s a government
I don't buy that. They have allowed their ignorance to be weaponised against the entire country, and if they refuse to acknowledge that, they are complicit in its destruction.
If you work two jobs to make ends meet, and get home at 11pm to fall asleep watching a low budget film on Netflix with ads, when are you going to have time to read non-partisan news and form an educated anger? Ignorance is a bigger driver than informed complicitness
Huxley was right
Not enough time to read non-partisan news, but plenty of time to read facebook, watch tik tok, and soak / embrace up all the ridiculous "the trans immigrants are coming to eat your pets and fuck your kids" ads targeted at them.
You're completing brushing over the rampant racism and xenophobia in white conservative America.
That's the "urban" part.
Discomfort? Omg :) Yet it’s not taking anything to anyone, it’s not costing them anything and if they don’t feel the need to state pronouns nobody is going to force them to do so… so why refuse a little acceptance to the Other. A while back, some got crucified for having different ideas… Happy Easter to those who celebrate and a happy weekend to all others :)
If they have that kind of attitude, then they are not "Christian" as Jesus very explicitly welcomed strangers and notably made a point of healing people without asking for payment.
A system is what it does, not what the spec says it should do, and "Christianity" is what Christians do.
American Evangelicals and Trump supporters are no less Christian than Catholics during the Crusades and Inquisition. That is the system.
I would say that the "system" of organised religion is very broken and goes against the teachings of Jesus. As far as I can tell, Trump is probably the closest figure to the anti-christ in terms of his greed and lack of charity.
Personally, I don't think that the organised Catholic church was about following Jesus' teachings, but more about consolidating wealth and power. It's disingenuous to call it "Christianity" if it just chooses convenient parts to follow. I mean, Jesus was very specific about not amassing wealth.
Jesus was a Jew preaching within a framework of Judaism which he clearly believed in and claimed authority from.
That framework rejected him, and I can sympathize with arguments that the system of "Christianity" that developed was not the system he intended, but I don't think it would be accurate to describe Jesus as anti-system per se.
Either way, any definition of Christianity that excludes Catholicism or any other organized sect doesn't seem useful.
It's like people defining Capitalism to require pure free markets, just so they can say the US or British Empires never really engaged in Capitalism. It just seems like an exercise in semantics.
> It's like people defining Capitalism to require pure free markets, just so they can say the US or British Empires never really engaged in Capitalism. It just seems like an exercise in semantics.
Not quite as real-world Capitalism has an approximation of free markets. I would say that's quite different from "Christians" going against welcoming strangers and feeding/healing the poor. In my view Jesus was against being judgemental, so sects that prioritise being judgemental cause me some cognitive dissonance when they are described as Christian.
As a Christian, I totally get your cognitive dissonance and agree with you, that Jesus was very much not racist or xenophobic, and instead preached love and compassion.
It's too early to see visible results of what has happened in less than 100 days. I am confident the approval will rise and fall as swiftly as the price of new iphones.
Approval ratings might fall, but they've installed a system of nearly unchecked power, and have shown a blatant disregard for law. It's probably too late for even the base to affect change without bloodshed.
The flipside of the "states' rights" movement is that the Federal Government is much weaker: so while it's easier to strip away rights and dismantle federal institutions, it's also easier for individuals to oppose the concrete harm that'd cause by working the levers of their local government. https://plush.city/@scarlet/114355949314782873 gives a few concrete things that individuals (not even groups) can do, which might make an outsized difference.
You're right in normal situations, but masked federal agents (HOURS FROM MY HOME) are kidnapping and sending US citizens to foreign gulags. As what point does "states rights" extend to the physical protection of its citizens? Will my local police protect me from the gestapo?
That's the topic of section 9 (quoted below, with minor formatting changes). I recommend reading the whole thing, since it also explains how to raise things, how to follow up in a way that gets them addressed…
---
If you're concerned about ICE, then you'll want to show up at your City or County council and hit the following points -
* Are local police cooperating with ICE?
* Are they following due process?
* What happens when due process isn't followed?
* If ICE isn't following due process, and local police are still coordinating, then how will they keep residents safe?
US citizens? Plural? Please provide at least two examples. So far I've heard of one legal resident, and zero citizens.
If you have an example, I have people to yell at about it. But I don't think you're correct.
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I know things feel dire, and things are certainly very bad for sure, but they have been bad before and things turned around. The Gilded Age comes to mind. Hell, even Nazi Germany didn't last forever.
Don't despair. Do what you can to make the world you want to see, accept the things outside your control, turn off social media, and stay positive!
>Hell, even Nazi Germany didn't last forever.
But they did cause the death of some 70+ million people. And they didn't have nukes.
...or social media.
When I look back at my family tree there is a massive gaping hole where "killed by the Nazis" sits. "Don't worry we'll get through this" doesn't account for the tombstones of all the people who don't get through it.
The Gilded Age was followed by the Great Depression.
> accept the things outside your control, turn off social media, and stay positive!
Is a crazy statement to see next to
> even Nazi Germany didn't last forever.
> Hell, even Nazi Germany didn't last forever.
How'd that work out for the millions slaughtered while the vast majority of the German population (who knew about the death camps) did nothing?
I'm getting pretty sick of this twee bullshit about how "we've come back from worse!". No. Not all of us did. Stop it
> But what is more horrifying for me is that apparently this administration remains representative of a large section of the US population - with seemingly unshakeable approval by between 40% and 50% of the US adult population according to polls.
It’s possible that percentage counts dissatisfaction with the previous administration more than approval for the current one. That is, it might just count people wanting any change.
You should then be dissatisfied with both at the same time. When people wish 'any change' they actually wish a change into better, otherwise it's plain stupid.
It is difficult for people to be unhappy with two choices unless given a third that they can be happy with. When you are either with us or against us, there aren't much people who will be dissatisfied with both at the same time, since that isn't an option given to them.
I agree: it’s strange and misleading statistics seemingly.
It is disheartening to me to observe that the thing that broke the once proud USA, the final straw, the thing that disenfranchised hundreds of millions of people and made them rabid and reactionary (on both sides of the rage algorithm) was a black man in the white house and women on the presidential ballot. The retrograde prejudices so deeply ingrained in the country’s memome that we are still in the throes of an anaphylactic reaction to an acute melatonin allergy.
It doesn’t help that many of us (yes , I mean us, the technorati, the readers and contributors of this vaunted forum) actively and even knowingly participated in making poisonous systems, pocket prohistamines, amplifiers of fears and antagonists of rational thought.
We decry the world we have wrested from decency with our own tender, uncalloused hands, our minds sharpened to create beautiful weapons of mass confusion, elegant and brutal in their viral carapaces, eager to dissolve into the psyche of any unfortunate enough to fall into their dopamine sweetened viciousness.
We created this. Not the politicians, there have always been irrational, brutish, would be populists and morons in suits. That is not new. People with money willing to pay people to build or do malignant things, that is also an ancient malady that society has evolved to bear. We. We made the mind-killers. We, with our cleverness and desire for perfect symmetry manufactured social PCP, and now we are witnessing the fruits of our careless, avaricious labors, shocked and in denial of the damage we have done.
In our defense, we didn’t know. No one had built anything on our idea machines that hooked into the flesh of the human psyche like that before, and at first we didn’t even understand what we were building. But later in the fall, we knew better.
Our algorithms, nanowire sharp in their efficiency, honed to amplify fear and rage while suppressing rational thought, no, those were not made in ignorance, neither in malice, but more in a playful curiosity. The same playful curiosity that made the atom bomb, but at least the physicists could foresee and conceptualize the demon they would create. In contrast, we the technorati are still reeling with surprise and denial, not able to understand the beast that we have conjured from the depths of the human psyche.
We know there is a problem, we know that social media is not helping… so what do we do? We make lame attempts to make new social media platforms, lower in poison, filtered cigarettes. Precision strategic weapons of mass destruction. Low-fat butter.
We need to look in the mirror and get to work figuring how to fix what we broke. The future of humanity is at stake, and we are directly responsible for, knowingly or not, the situation our children are facing.
> a black man in the white house and women on the presidential ballot. The retrograde prejudices so deeply ingrained in the country’s memome that we are still in the throes of an anaphylactic reaction to an acute melatonin allergy.
This is the most obscenely wrong take I can imagine, and I'll gladly explain why I say that.
Your AI-generated response plainly ignores a country in love with Michael Jordan and Whitney Houston for decades, for example, and are choosing skin deep characteristics to fit _your_ narrative, while ignoring the things voters repeatedly emphasized as damning, all of which were color blind: a complete lack of policy by the "woman on the ticket", condescension from Hillary that people not following her directives "need to get over themselves", Obama chastising black men that they must vote as he says. It's a playbook on the alienation of voters.
It’s interesting that you suppose my writing is AI generated? I’ve not seen AI that writes that way, but I suppose you might set it up to emulate a certain style. I’ve also been accused of using AI because I used an em dash. In that case, I guess it’s almost true, because my spell check would have put it there in place of space-dash-space.
FWIW I am morally opposed to publishing AI slop where it might enter the public domain, and while I find my local models useful for organizing thoughts and prepping documents, I do not use AI to write.
But thank you, I guess, for assuming a properly written long form comment must be AI? lol.
On the issue of pervasive racism…. Yes, we have become comfortable with people of color entertaining us, and most have multiple ethnicities both in their background and in their social circles these days… but when Obama took office, you could hear a pin drop in many, many corners of the USA. A black man running the country, representing the nation to the world, was a bridge too far for many, many people.
In my life I have a lot of intersectionality with maga and maga adjacent individuals. The vast majority are racist either openly, covertly, or accidentally, the “I have a black friend” so I can’t be racist types. Xenophobia is a huge driver of the political base… if you can’t see that, IDK what to tell you… but none of that negates the very real issues you spoke of. There were no good choices, really, only maybe less dangerous ones.
Anyway, I hope your day goes well, and be careful about assuming you can dismiss everything you don’t like to read as “AI generated ” and therefore irrelevant. That’s a very dangerous and sloppy cognitive shortcut to remaining ignorant of anything outside your echo chamber. Relatable though, I think we’re all a little traumatized ATM.
Well said, and apologies for assuming you’d phrased using ai. Looks like we’re describing near overlap, and i suspect i know more independently voting people than the maga sorts you have seen. The large number of independents i know voted against the race-baiting tactics shown by Obama in chastising minorities if not voting as he deemed appropriate, and similarly with Hillary. Anyway none ever mention race of candidates, but voted for the candidates not mentioning race at all. I hope you see the distinction because i found that interesting.
I think it's clear that the approval ratings Trump gets are more about disapproval of the rest of politics. When you have every politician getting rich somehow while your life gets worse and worse, a lot of people will want all politicians punished. Trump is that punishment, and many people are excited to see the political and professional classes suffer. That is the approval rating.
The irony being that Trump enriches himself and rewards politicians [mainstream or otherwise] for corruption to a greater extent than any previous politician, and doesn't even try to hide it. The people that are happy their savings and/or chances of making rent next week are being eroded to enrich Trump insiders because at least random mid level professionals and Hispanic people with autism awareness tattoos are suffering more deserve everything they get.
To a certain extent this is a result of living in a media ecosystem where most of the population doesn’t actually see an unbiased reporting of facts but whatever is shown to them by certain right wing news networks. But I do agree at some point people need to take responsibility for their information diet.
Fwiw media manipulation of American opinion isn’t new, its been a huge part of how America works since at least the Spanish American war of 1896.
Bias is what exists on the left.
Monopoly and capture is what happened to the right. Theres a reason republicans march and Dems debate.
The republican strategists build this advantage over decades, it’s not the work of a single term. It’s a captured market of ideas, tariffs if you will. No competition from actual debates.
That’s why you can sell contradictory ideas within hours of each other, and never be called out for it. It’s why you can sell debates on Tan suits or prop up bogeymen, and never deal with debate.
This is news media. Eventually Fox wasn’t the sole juggernaut, and the techniques got adopted for online debates.
It’s been so wildly successful in building a reliable political voting bloc, that every political party in the world took notes.
There is no such thing as unbiased reporting of facts. People not understanding that, and the fact that there is nothing inherently wrong with bias, is a big part of the problem.
You can be biased but adopt a systematic methodology and a deontology system, both of which help journalists mitigate their bias and produce quality reporting.
The big issue with the current news ecosystem and social media is their complete disregard for this methodology. By discarding the journalistic methodology, they make themselves propagandists, not journalists.
Objective reality, it exists.
Telling your audience obviously false / anti-factual lies, without any regard for fact checking, is not just "biased reporting". And it is inherently wrong, malevolent, evil.
Anyway, I'm amazed each time I hear right wingers who did not get the joke seemingly complaining about how Reality has a left leaning political bias...
Lying is not the same as bias. That is the problem, people often conflate the two.
Is that a fact?
Presumably yes but subject to benign bias.
What if there is something inherently wrong with bias, but there is also no possibility to solve it. I see people operating under the idea that if there is something inherently wrong, then there must exist some solution to that inherent wrongness. What if the underlying issue is that there are flaws in humans that cannot be fixed and any attempt to manage is going to still leave some victims of the issue unprotected?
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Fox and MSNBC are relentlessly partisan, but CNN aims for the center and misses. There's a big difference, and it's wild that Republicans got away with pretending that CNN was in the Fox/MSNBC tier just by repeating it as dogma until in their own minds it became true.
CNN joined that tier around 2018 for the ratings, then tried to un-join that tier. It didn't work.
Fox's main approach - repeating anything that's a lie as dogma until its parroted as core truth by their audience, then saying they are opinion and not news so everyone knows not to take them seriously.
What about trying to be in the middle/upper part of this chart?
https://adfontesmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Media-B...
The adults are talking, shh.
What is their reply?
Where did you see any reference to any source or lean in what you replied to? You are projecting your viewpoint on which is good or bad.
Don’t be disingenuous. The phrase “certain right wing news networks” is pretty clear in an American context.
Bear in mind that a lot of people took pains to not look at their candidate too closely, to the point where a (slim) voting majority wasn't showing up to rallies etc. during the campaign. One might see this as signs of their being fake, but it could also be suggestive that they didn't want to come out and see where their guy was really at. They voted for the IDEA of him and what they figured he represented, and were indulged in those beliefs as hard as possible.
So this 'approval' is sort of phantom approval. It's approval of a fantasy man who doesn't track too closely with the reality of what's actually happening.
The point where people pay heavily for their erroneous beliefs, for instance by losing their retirements and savings, is a point where people re-evaluate.
Sure. There’s many reasons to vote for Trump.
Now, someone has to act to deal with reality. This is pretty much the job of every adult in america.
I suspect this is why Vance has been so over the top as well. I think he expects Trump to get impeached, and take over the party faithful. This is an idle musings though.
Everyone who voted for Trump knew exactly what they were getting or should have known. He was in office for four years. 40% of the people know what he is doing and approve of it.
Something interesting to watch about the current executive is he never talks about the future concretely.
Keep an eye on his rhetoric. He'll talk in broad strokes, bright-shining-future abstracts... But he never talks about anything specific. Never about how any specific policy will create a specific good outcome. No concrete ideation.
An idea that has been floated on this topic is that he's not actually capable of imagining such a future because he won't be in it (one way or the other; dude's 78).
It makes him dangerous. He can accidentally destroy something he can't even conceive of existing.
He'll likely live another 15 years or so. I'm pretty sure he's imagining a future for himself. He's talking about a third term, which means at least eight years of "future". He also has children whose continued success he probably cares about. That said, I agree that he doesn't seem interested in building anything but his personal kingdom (including walls to protect it).
> He also has children whose continued success he probably cares about.
Does he ever talk about them using anything other than abstract platitudes like "great?"
Well, "If she wasn't my daughter I'd probably be dating her" is a bit more on the specific side...
> But what is more horrifying for me is that apparently this administration remains representative of a large section of the US population - with seemingly unshakeable approval by between 40% and 50% of the US adult population according to polls
I feel this is largely a consequence of decades of overwrought hyperventilating about all things politics and a lot of crying wolf. Every republican candidate has been the next Hitler, every democratic candidate has been the next anti-christ. Every 4 years we go through this song and dance predicting the end of the world and untold human suffering and every 4 years life went on with barely a change. Why would people expect this time to actually be different? Why would they expect that this time the stories of corruption and abuse of power are actually true and being reported without ridiculous embellishment? Why would anyone who voted for Trump in the first place think that reports of abuse of power from the side of American politics that coined “chimpler” as a nickname for W. Bush would be sincere about Trump?
I agree with you that I think more people should be more concerned than they are. I just don’t think it’s all that surprising either. The lesson of the “Boy Who Cried Wolf” is that when the wolf finally comes, no one will believe you. Of course the other lesson is that eventually the wolf does come. It didn’t work out so well for the village, and it might not work out so well for us either.
The thing is, there has been a wolf. It's now eating us, and the time to stop it is gone. But sure, it's the fault of the people who correctly told you there was a wolf, and that it's been coming closer and looking hungrier and hungrier since the '70s.
You seem to have missed the point. For one, I’m not telling you this is a good thing or that this is how it ought to be. For two, even in the fable the wolf was real in the end. The problem is, the wolf wasn’t real the last time, or the time before that. Or the time before that. Or the time before that. You can quibble over whether prior politicians were heralds of the wolf or not, but that wasn’t the message. The message was that the wolf was at the gates. And when no wolf materialized, people grew resistant to the idea of the cries ever having meaning. So now we have a wolf, and the problem we are facing is that the people who we need to convince that the wolf is real have no reason at all to believe us until their sheep are being eaten by a wolf in front of them. So how do you convince someone that has no incentive to believe you that this time you’re telling the truth? That’s the problem to be solved. Everything else is just a side show.
I think you misunderstood the prior poster. In the story the boy just made the wolf up the first couple of times, there were no signs beforehand. The prior poster seems to believe that the republicans were doing something bad beforehand, which is now escalating and thus a direct consequence of what came before. That would be more like if the boy found wolf droppings and pointed to those, which would not make him a liar anymore.
> So how do you convince someone that has no incentive to believe you that this time you’re telling the truth?
Irrelevant, it's too late. We can only hope for enough economic turmoil, fast enough, that it triggers mass riots.
So then like I said, the sheep will be eaten. One then must hope they aren’t on the menu, and suddenly the “deafening silence” of various people makes a lot of sense. If the only answer is to wait until enough sheep are eaten for the village to finally get its act together, most people aren’t going to volunteer to be one of the sheep sacrificed.
Original article is removed?
https://archive.ph/aylYu
Why was original article removed?
It looks like the original article has been taken down. https://web.archive.org/web/20250418112529/https://www.forbe...
The administration needs to be sued in court. What else can be done? This is awful.
The supreme court is stacked, they're blackmailing lawyers. They're generally ignoring judges already. The law is irrelevant to them unless convenient.
I think it was mentioned that state district courts cannot order the executive branch of the government to do a thing and that scotus ruled in favor of that? Will need to read more into this after work.
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Would that still work? It seems the administration can safely ignore court orders.
> What else can be done?
Civil war. It will probably have to come to this, some day or other.
Or you know - find everyone congressperson who is not doing their job, figure out if they are breaking state, federal law, or even party law. Get special elections going and get a working congress.
This paralysis amongst Americans is very un American.
You have a decent poltical set up. Use it. You don’t need a magic wand like a civil war.
You need to do the boring dull work of reading, analyzing and then making executable plans and getting to it.
I’m not that old, and I remember people learning how to make satellites as undergrads in the states. For elective classes. And actually having the damn things go up into space.
It’s your life and your country.
edit: I was wrong in suggesting finding ways to get to special elections. There are very few ways for a congressperson to be removed.
For other ideas - just ask them to resign. Seriously - I doubt many republicans wanted to be part of THIS congress, and have already stated they are afraid of retribution.
Ask them to resign, and have people who can take the heat take their seats.
Either way, congress needs to work, and for this people need to find their spines, or make way for someone who has a spine.
Civil war is NOT a solution, its a failure state, and a failure of imagination and effort on the part of what I remember America to be about.
> Get special elections going and get a working congress.
There are no recall elections for Congressional seats.
You are correct, I was ignorant and my words reflected it. I have updated the comment.
> Get special elections going and get a working congress
That's not actually legal in many (most?) states. Recall is not a universal feature.
What you're advocating for is civil war. In many states, the only way to get Congresspeople to leave would be "voluntarily" (i.e. "We threaten to burn down every piece of property you have if you don't give up your seat"). Which, actually, has worked deep in America's past; the post-Revolutionary era had a lot more "We don't like the governor, so we're going to take his house apart and throw it into the river" stories.
You're not wrong exactly, but I think you've underestimated how fundamentally anti-democratic American democracy is. It was a 1.0-template and had baked pretty deeply into it fear of mob rule (hence the President not being chosen by direct vote, for example).
I think you are conflating two concepts. Most states do not allow recall of state legislators as you mentioned, but recalling federal legislators is not allowed in any state—there is no constitutional mechanism enabling it.
You are quite correct. Reinforcing the notion that the only way to get these people to leave off-season is "voluntarily."
If you’re not willing to pick up arms and fight, chances are no one else is, so it will never happen. Most likely nothing can be done and people will just live under a totalitarian fascist regime for the duration of their lives. Keep talking about civil war, you’ll be imprisoned and silenced. You should delete your post.
They should NOT delete their post.
Do not comply in advance.
Do NOT resist compliance unless you’re willing to go all the way with it. It’s not worth losing your comfortable life.
Does "Give me liberty or give me death" ring a bell?
But yeah, actually meaning that is harder than saying it.
Civil war has a tendency to exponentiate. It doesn't take more than a few people to initiate it (assuming the rhetorical and attitude circumstances are favorable). The 1861 war started with one militia and one fort (really, depending on what historian you're talking to, it started with one religious fundamentalist family and a single raid on Harper's Ferry).
In 1861, people picnicked on a hillside to watch the first army-to-army fight of the war. By the end of the war, cities had been burned down.
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Information not inflamation. Please.
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He's already ignoring Supreme Court rulings. What can the court do to enforce the laws if the military and police also ignore them.
And who is going to enforce any court outcome?
My impression is that the first Trump presidency left everyone at a loss. If you react with outrage, you're labeled in some negative way. This is really an extension of online trolling, where any emotional reaction proves that you "lost." Everyone has a chance to speak up now, but this actually diminishes the power of everyone's voice. You're one drop in a few billion or a few hundred million now. And to the extent that you do speak up, it's fully partisan; the complaints of "the other side" are never heard nor granted legitimacy.
I imagine there are people who would call this cynical and defeatist, but I think often people speaking up is purely counter-productive these days. So many attempts to speak up are just yet another partisan volley which can be written off on partisan grounds alone. Worse, given the way that social media works, the worst and most extreme voices from your faction will be the ones which get the most attention. They will paint your entire faction, and from a public opinion perspective, people will view your side as being far more extreme than it might actually be.
I think people have a model in their head of the civil rights movement, and they think that protest alone will be successful just like it once was. It's not clear to me that protest, in and of itself, actually does much these days. Trump seems to enjoy seeing his ideological opponents outraged, and his supporters are either cowed towards him, if not far more vindictive than the man himself. Maybe it's just because I keep seeing the mindless noise from the internet, but real push-back here requires a centralized and most importantly, a focused movement. One that doesn't just incorporate the most extreme policy positions from its wings, and understands how to build a broad coalition. It's something people have forgotten how to do. It might be trite to blame social media, but no one seems to understand how to build a broad coalition in the way that Dr. King did during the civil rights movement. Movements these days tend to exclude, rather than include, and tend to be led by radicals and extremists, which defeat the cause they claim to fight for.
> I imagine there are people who would call this cynical and defeatist, but I think often people speaking up is purely counter-productive these days. So many attempts to speak up are just yet another partisan volley which can be written off on partisan grounds alone. Worse, given the way that social media works, the worst and most extreme voices from your faction will be the ones which get the most attention. They will paint your entire faction, and from a public opinion perspective, people will view your side as being far more extreme than it might actually be.
I think there's a way around this: pair attempts to speak up with base-broadening stuff that controversial within your faction and will alienate the "most extreme voices from your faction."
Basically: DEI is a goner (for instance), stop defending it and throw it in the fire, too. Advocate for literally building the wall. Support tariffs, but say you'll do them more competently and actually bring the jobs back. The focus and energy should be on protecting the basic constitutional order, everything else is a distraction. The people toward the extremes need to be the ones holding their noses to vote, not the guys on the fence.
For protests and movements to actually succeed, they will eventually need candidates in the polls. But the U.S. is a two-party system, and the other party has, with their many years in power, shown what they will do, i.e. not much.
Great comment, articulates something I've been feeling lately but didn't quite have the words for. (Not American, but similar situation in my country.)
Where do we go from here? What kind of action would be effective?
this sums up the situation eloquently and perfectly
I think this article describes the issue well:
https://crankysec.com/blog/community/
> All the cybersecurity companies saying "We don't have anything to say about this situation." is just them being true to their main in-group: for-profit companies that don't want to upset a big current or potential buyer. They are, first and foremost, part of that "community", and they happen to be involved in cybersecurity. Solidarity is happening there, just not to the people in cybersecurity.
This sucks and we should change it for sure. So many other industries have successfully become professionalized, unionized, and kicked the grifters to the curb. But it feels more and more like the cybersecurity grifters are the ones holding the reins.
We are not "silent", we're just not being heard. Those are not the same things. You'll find plenty of critique and analysis, anticipating and commenting on the unfolding cybsersecurity calamity [0,1,2] ...
[0] https://www.schneier.com/
[1] https://cybershow.uk/blog/
[2]https://www.dataandpolitics.net/trump-is-a-critical-vulnerab...
When those who own and control the means of discourse are donors to, and so in collusion with the problem, don't expect to hear opposition.
Another one [0] SpyCast - DOGE Layoffs and the Counterintelligence Threats They Pose Also on their podcast RSS, but it seems they haven't added a webpage to link to for that individual show
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foLsTVQwBIg
Also Violet Blue's weekly cybersecurity roundups: the most recent is https://www.patreon.com/posts/cybersecurity-15-126689368 .
> [2]https://www.dataandpolitics.net/trump-is-a-critical-vulnerab...
Is CVE-47 taken?
> Many organizations seem to believe they can sidestep this conflict by remaining neutral.
you can't be neutral on a moving train.
if you think it is bad now, and this will 'blow over,' history is there to prove you wrong.
Per yesterday's whistleblower, DOGE is apparently exfiltrating confidential NLRB data en masse while explicitly seeking to leave no logs of them doing so, followed immediately by login attempts to those systems using the same freshly created credentials from Russian IPs.
I think we can presume the same pattern with IRS, Census, GSA, OPM, etc that just have not had whistleblower-inclined people in the right place to observe.
Espionage shit.
Looks like we all have to start believing unbelievable: agent Krasnov is real and the tip of an iceberg. Honestly I can't see any other rational explanation of what's happening.
These days it does not matter anymore if something is legal or not. Which may be bad news for the tech industry actually, because it's all about valuations, and valuations suffer if property rights are not guaranteed.
If they don't shout to defend you, they're happy about what happened to you (perhaps that's because you made lots of enemies)
There's two options, either they are fools to believe it is a good thing (and they should not be in security) or they are cowards because they think the same fate will befall them.
Duh. There’s cash to be grabbed.
Trump's entire 2nd term is about settling scores. He's set up his entire administration to get back at everyone who slighted him in some way over the past few decades, but especially in 2020.
This is what happens when a felon gets to be the president.
I don't even know the impact of that...but I agree this government is, how should I put it, not very stable.
First they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I fear they cannot be stopped
They will come for more
speaking out makes you their next target
Being their next target is inevitable. Their greed has no bounds.
Will you be a silent victim or will you resist?
Will you fight back now, when you have more potential allies, or later, when so many have already been erased?
It's not something that I necessarily agree with. Just a thought that came into my head when thinking about the "What would I have done?" scenario.
Perhaps an alternate form might be
---
First they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because they will be coming for people like me
If I speak out, they will find me.
---
The intuition that I think it expresses is that perhaps people stay silent more from fear than disinterest.
dead link, it's just a blank page in both chrome & firefox
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> When you can never ever win, when you will always be called a Nazi, why would you bother?
Why... would you bother not supporting fascists and not agreeing with fascist ideas?
Is this a real example of the "I wish you weren't making me do this..." comic?
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That's not the fucking point!
The dude is being retaliated against for doing his job and reporting facts that contradict an authoritarian conspiracy; regardless of your personal opinion of the man - this is, like so many other egregious abuses of power this admin has done, an illegal and flagrant abuse of power.
If I have not seen evidence for or against something, then I would not offer an opinion either. Sometimes, people speak confidently when they are ignorant of the context and the facts. That's not the right thing to do.
It's better not to say anything when you don't actually know what you are talking about.
This is interesting when you run it up the abstraction ladder.
What if we take this perspective from “knowledge of news topic of the day” and apply it to “knowledge of the virtue of commenting on a topic”. Are you qualified to actually speak on that subject? Am I? Maybe best not to say anything, since I’m not sure.
What does that have to do with anything? We're up to our neck in evidence.
Did you watch the TV on Jan 6? Did you hear Trump repeatedly lie about the election? Are you saying your eyes and ears were lying to you? What are you saying here - that unless you walk around the barn all four sides might not be red? You are not a perfect witness, you are reporting on the most obvious fact of the matter.
Deafening silence about what the executive order actually says or any facts about the case.
1. "It isn't really true, never really happened" <-- you are here
2. "It happened but it's not as serious as you make it out to be."
3. "It may be serious but it is legal and within the president's right."
4. "It may not be legal but when the president does it it is effectively legal because he has to be able to be president without being undermined."
5. "Fascism? What about cancel culture?!"
No, the article sums it up correctly. He refused to go along with the "stolen election" narrative Trump was trying to build (and a few others) and is now being punished for it.
> Krebs, through CISA, falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen, including by inappropriately and categorically dismissing widespread election malfeasance and serious vulnerabilities with voting machines
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/addr...
Thank you for posting the link. Should have been part of the article.
WTF? Black is white, and white is black.
Truth is what big brother says it is.
Also known as the Ministry of Truth, ironically and sarcastically.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250130231413/https://www.cisa....
Here's an article supposedly of Krebs provenance, which implicitly lumps Trump himself in as a "malicious actor".
> can lead to uncertainty in the minds of voters; uncertainty that can be exploited by malicious actors
Maybe not something I would want said or repeated by my administration either, disregarding the veracity.
There's no date or byline either, so according to the authoritative FAQ, if this were to stand, it would be an admission of acting in bad faith.
Given federal government communications sprawl, it's quite a needle, pretty good performance in my opinion to root this out, disregarding sowing doubt about a federated election and who's will specifically it should / will service.
Voter inclusion (who should / may vote) is itself at issue, but even in the assessment here given DOGE findings unveils possible oversights, FWAB in the FAQ is cited to depend in part on SSNs and in light of the DOGE findings regarding 150+ year olds collecting social security, the security assessment itself does not describe a system that is definitively air-tight, or even terribly reassuring, if there's doubt in your mind about who voted, and how.
> in light of the DOGE findings regarding 150+ year olds collecting social security...
The claims made by DOGE were highly misleading (i.e., lack of death date does not mean a 150 year old is receiving money).
Moreover, it wasn't a novel discovery. It had already been identified and published in a 2023 audit: https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf
A downvote seems insufficient but I'm really lost for words at how to even reply to this. The tone of reasonableness while posting absolute bonkers insanity is alarming.
Sartre’s quote in anti-semites applies to many of these:
> Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
implicitly lumps Trump himself in as a "malicious actor".
Trump is a malicious actor. He literally tried to overthrow democracy on January 6!
Maybe not something I would want said or repeated by my administration either, disregarding the veracity.
Congratulations on empathizing with an authoritarian.
in light of the DOGE findings regarding 150+ year olds collecting social security
Stop being so gullible.
https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-doge-social-security-1...
Musk could also have simply looked up the SSA’s own website, which explains that since September 2015 the agency has automatically stopped benefit payments when anyone reaches the age of 115.
> Trump is a malicious actor. He literally tried to overthrow democracy on January 6!
> Congratulations on empathizing with an authoritarian.
It speaks to the strength of different agency administrators if they can walk into the next oval office, grab the duly elected President by the arm, and say "stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself" over and over again. Putting a stop to that wouldn't be so controversial, I think.
> Stop being so gullible.
You are disregarding the election angle and instead misdirecting, the system of validating votes (according to Krebs' own assessment) is dependent on a system with publicly-known flaws.
I understand that the aim can be to enfranchise and enable more voters, but to that aim my statements are agnostic, except for revealing more facts about the case.
Most of this was written by an LLM, with the writer doing post-editing. Susprised not to see any other comments on this yet!
That doesn't mean it's a bad piece, I think it's a good writeup.