It's wild that a president can say, "I don't like Elon anymore, so out of retaliation, I'm canceling all his government contracts," and ~40% of the country doesn't see that as corruption in any way, shape, or form.
Government contracts should not be based on whether or not the president likes the CEO, and the CEO says enough good things about the president.
If you can cancel contacts not based on merit, then it should extend you're likely willing to grant contracts not based on merit and based on nepotism instead.
This is literally the path that led the USSR to ruin. If anyone says anything you don't like, their funding is gone, even if it shoots the country in the foot. If people kiss your ass enough, they get contracts, even if it's clear they're just spending the money on hookers and coke and yachts and not delivering on promises, and it shoots the country in the head.
It turns out that when elections are fought on the basis of identity (race, religion) etc corruption is actually considered a benefit! This is because the loyalists interpret this as "we" are winning and "they" are losing.
I witnessed this up close in India where parties openly exist to benefit certain constituencies based on caste, language, religion and so on.
It is horrifying to see this attitude take root in my adopted land.
It’s best to understand that fascists see hypocrisy as a virtue. It’s how they signal that the things they are doing to people were never meant to be equally applied.
It’s not an inconsistency. It’s very consistent to the only true fascist value, which is domination.
It’s very important to understand, fascists don’t just see hypocrisy as a necessary evil or an unintended side-effect.
It’s the purpose. The ability to enjoy yourself the thing you’re able to deny others, because you dominate, is the whole point.
For fascists, hypocrisy is a great virtue — the greatest.
>It’s best to understand that fascists see hypocrisy as a virtue. It’s how they signal that the things they are doing to people were never meant to be equally applied.
For my friends - everything, for my enemies - the law.
I used to love this pithy quote but reflecting on it more recently this doesn't seem like something limited to fascists or fascism. Indeed, this kind of thinking is used by those of any political leaning when ideology becomes more important than principles. An obvious example is the USSR.
Authoritarianism is the umbrella term describing the behaviour of both fascist states and various others. AFAIK all fascist states have been authoritarian - but it’s a common outcome anytime the people running the government are replaced en masse.
Good point, and much harder to challenge. If the majority is against an authoritarian there's protests and sabotage of social structures. If the majority oppresses a fringe group, it's often socially encouraged
For these reasons, I personally believe authoritarianism cannot be opposed without a solid foundation of individualism. The problem becomes that explaining ideological nuance is rarely politically expedient or even rhetorically effective. Appeals to collectivism are more easily digested by the masses.
that's kind of what the USA is going through right now but it's more aptly described as "tyranny of the plurality" because Trump didn't win either majority of of registered voters or majority of the actual vote.
Regardless of tiresome partisan hyperbole, I don't regard the substance of this administration's actions as any more authoritarian the previous or the status quo. In the specific instances where state power has been expanded, I regard it as part of the general trend of expansion. The trend is more indicative of the overall incentives and structure of governance, rather than specific political actors. Similarly, partisan recriminations fit with the same pattern.
IMO, Obama claiming the power to assassinate US citizens on US soil (by declaring them "foreign combatants") was primarily different in that he only used it a little bit.
This is a great example of the horseshoe theory of politics [0], which I believe in very strongly. I made a separate post if anyone cares to discuss it. [1]
It’s based on the flawed assumption that politics can or should be understood on a single axis. It can’t and shouldn’t be. That heuristic is wrong.
If viewed on a 2d axis, the “cohorts that appear similar” on the ends of the horseshoe are still on opposing ends of one of the axes, despite being near each other on another axis.
Horseshoe theory has always read like a Pythagorean epicycle to me, an attempt to redeem a broken model. For a reductive political model, I prefer the 2 dimensional Collectivist-Individualist, Authoritarian-Libertarian axes. No need to literally contort the outdated Left-Right spectrum.
An added benefit is you get to avoid annoying semantic battles such as whether Nazis or Fascists are Right wing or Left wing.
Plus you get to add other axes as needed. My favorite, perhaps relevant today, is principled vs. expedient: do we apply principles like this "Rights" stuff impartially, even to people with whom we disagree, or do we just git 'r done?
To me, the horshoe theory is just a step in the right direction. It shows the limits of a straight 1D line to describe politics, and is a stepping-off point for deeper exploration.
Ideally, maybe we would describe a person's politics with something like a tensor, where each value is the person's support of a specific policy.
Hmm. I guess I feel that "The Horseshoe Theory" is worse than useless. It implies that as someone gets "too much" Right or Left, they inevitably become authoritarian, as if centrists cannot be authoritarian. It equates "weirdness" with "bad". I'd argue that we should skip straight to identifying "authoritarianism" as the problem, and the not having weird or even extreme leftist or rightist ideas.
> I see it as the gateway to people realizing that the left/right 1D line, and even the political compass, are ridiculous.
When this theory is used in discourse, it is always a matter of suggesting that the left fringe and the right fringe are equally to be rejected. Stalin and Hitler, communism and fascism, class struggle and racial theory, Das Kapital and Hitler's Mein Kampf, dictatorship of the proletariat and Nazi dictatorship: the righteous liberal democrat must keep his distance from both extremes in equal measure. The golden path lies in the balanced middle. I am tired of criticizing this nonsense. It is an ideological lie.
The trident means that there is just as much ideology, corruption, political dysfunctionality and all kinds of drivers of suffering, misery and resentment in the supposed political center. But it is very well hidden because it wears a kind of ideological cloak: the horseshoe theory.
So to respond to your sentence I quoted above: the horseshoe theory IS the political compass that should be ridiculed.
Absolutely. See "the only moral abortion is my abortion".
Republicans can play all sorts of games because their mistresses will always be able to get an abortion on the DL without consequence, while "single black mom? 25 to life for murder!"
You "think" the end goal is domination? This is someone who incited an violent insurrection to try and override a presidential election and has called king, posted illustrations of himself wearing a crown, and has (again) openly talked of not leaving office.
This is a shameful false equivalency. In the puppet president scenario you outline, the blast radius is, at worst, 4 years? In the case of an insurrection to subvert the peaceful transfer of power, there is a generation or more of democratic order lost.
That depends entirely on your context and frame of reference.
You're describing the blast radius of what was possible in the past assuming that one president was willing to usurp power but only for one term.
In reality, we did go 4 years with a president who wasn't in charge, at least for part of that term, specifically because the public was lied to about his health and some small number of people his the truth. We did not go through 4 years of a presidency after one very much seemed to attempt to take the office despite having lost the election.
In both cases I take huge issue with the intent and the potential outcome. In one case, though, the outcome was real and I lived, for a time, in a presumably democraric society ruled by someone(s) who weren't elected while the one who was elected decreased mentally and physically beyond the ability to rule.
They’re different orders of magnitude. Biden was elected legitimately. Parties can nominate whoever they want, so shenanigans with primaries, while distasteful, are completely legitimate. Likewise, keeping Biden’s mental state from the public is ugly but legitimate. Voters can, and did, punish these actions.
Trump tried to cheat his way to keeping power. Even if you don’t blame him for the violent attempt, it’s well established that he made major efforts before that to change the outcome by more peaceful means that were just as illegitimate.
Playing stupid games within the system means you lose elections and either reform or get replaced. Playing stupid games subverting the system means you don’t have to worry about elections anymore if you succeed. I’m about a million times more concerned about the latter.
Do you not believe Trump was elected legitimately? I totally understand and share many of the concerns over the insurrection and what happened around it, but Trump didn't take office in 2020 and wasn't reelected until 2024.
I must have misread you last comment. I read this as a comparison implying that Biden wasn't legitimately elected but you just meant it to set up the point.
If it’s not an insurrection what it is? What is the organization of thousands of individuals to invade the capital building in protest of election results?
Just because it failed, doesn’t mean it wasn’t an insurrection.
Words like "protest" or "riot" leap to mind. It is more comparable to something like CHAZ in 2020 which could technically be called an insurrection or rebellion, but realistically was more of an unruly protest.
An insurrection would traditionally involve a little planning and a little more seriousness in the attempt. Maybe a plan that could conceivably lead to a change in government.
Obviously. All riots are technically insurrections. They're synonyms. And they are usually protests too; it'd be unusual to have a riot while agreeing with the current direction of the government.
> A riot or mob violence is a form of civil disorder commonly characterized by a group lashing out in a violent public disturbance against authority, property, or people.
> Uprisings which revolt, resisting and taking direct action against an authority, law or policy
See? Riots are by definition rebellions. They're both words for resisting legitimate authority. How do you expect there to be a riot that isn't an insurrection? That's why the lefties aren't getting much pushback on calling it an insurrection. Its a riot. Everyone agrees. Insisting that it use a specific word instead of the usual one is playing a bit of a game to pretend that it is some sort of special riot which is where the pushback starts; but there isn't any question that it is technically an insurrection - all riots are small insurrections.
Try as I might, I really can't understand this mindset. What drives some very reasonable and intelligent people to keep trying to deny and deflect that J6 was not an attempt to prevent a peaceful transfer of power?
Please stop. This is a topic that people have been saying the same things about for over four years. It's not a good topic for HN as people only bring it up for the purpose of ideological battle, which is against the guidelines.
Please stop. This is a topic that people have been saying the same things about for over four years. It's not a good topic for HN as people only bring it up for the purpose of ideological battle, which is against the guidelines.
So you're saying giving a speech with war-like symbolism ("if you don't fight like hell", "we will never give up. We will never concede" "we will stop the steal", "we are going to the capitol") to a crowd which he knew contained people ready for violence, is escalation? Where is the proof that there were federal agents inciting violence (I thought it was Antifa agents? The story changes all the time...).
Does similar Democrat language around BLM at the time of CHAZ/CHOP mean Democrats encouraged insurrection?
Unlike Jan 6th, the CHAZ rioters brought rifles, organized a standing militia, and murdered someone to assert control of the area they seized — which seems distinctly more violent.
Why is the president of the US trolling his own citizens that he will ignore the constitution and act as king a desirable thing, exactly? What is the desired outcome of doing this?
Trump is the one who started it by refusing to acknowledge Biden won a fair election. He whipped his supporters into a frenzy believing the election had been stolen. The reason he didn't use the military is he didn't think they would obey him. It's different now as loyalists have been put in charge.
I don't know whether Trump can accurately be described as a fascist, but its been clear to me since his first term that domination is the only thing that matters to him. The obscene wealth and the swaggering deceitfulness and the gold-plated bathrooms are just the secondary outcomes of his need to dominate.
Domineering father-figure; raised as a sociopath; given a lot of money. Kind of inevitable.
The Democratic Governor of California denounced them publicly and stopped the effort.
Despite Musk raising millions and campaigning viciously against the Democrats the administration kept all of SpaceX contracts and Tesla ev subsidies. In fact the IRA benefited Tesla disproportionately.
Both sides are NOT the same. One is fascist and the other is not
Joseph M. Arpaio – Former Sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, Trump Supporter
Ray Smith III – Trump Attorney
Cathy Latham – Fake Elector, Coffee County GOP Leader
Robert Cheeley – Trump Attorney
David Shafer – Fake Elector, Former Georgia GOP Chair
Mike Roman – Trump Campaign Staffer
Shawn Still – Fake Elector, Then-Georgia State Senator
Scott Hall – Atlanta Bail Bondsman
Misty Hampton – Former Coffee County Elections Supervisor
Steve Lee – Pastor from Illinois
Harrison Floyd – Black Voices for Trump Leader
Trevian Kutti – Publicist from Chicago
I'm sure this was just Democrats following the law, with no bias, right?
This kind of narrative that you're forwarding now where the Republican Party are fascists and Trump is a threat to democracy is exactly the kind of mentality that was used to elicit this enormous persecution of Trump and officials near him.
Meanwhile, the real elephant in the room is always ignored:
The Democrats shovel hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money to large unions in order to secure their support and win elections. This is textbook corruption.
The recipients of USAID grants? All Democrats. Same story all across DC. That's why 92.4% of DC voted for Harris. DC, meanwhile, has a per capita GDP of $250,000.
Policy difference not partisan squables or payback for supporting his opponents. Most Democrats feel Unions are important to help workers (union and nonunion) earn more.
To base the decision on what companies to invite to an EV summit on whether they support the Democrats' favorite constituents is pure politics. The only policy difference here is one which helps the Democrats win elections.
It doesn’t matter what Democrats think about unions. This wasn’t a union summit or a summit on party values—it was about EVs. Tesla is the world leader in EVs and the top American EV manufacturer. Excluding them because they don’t support unionization — an issue tied to massive political support for Democrats through campaign contributions and institutional backing—is indefensible. It undermines the purpose of the summit through rank politicization and partisanship.
As for the claim that Tesla has racial discrimination issues—that’s a distortion. Nearly every major company gets hit with discrimination lawsuits because civil rights law has been weaponized to make that outcome nearly inevitable:
> The recipients of USAID grants? All Democrats. Same story all across DC. That's why 92.4% of DC voted for Harris. DC, meanwhile, has a per capita GDP of $250,000.
Why shouldn’t the recipients receive these grants other than that they are Democrats? What about their projects makes them not meritorious?
If you can't see the opportunity for corruption and bias here, then there's nothing I can do to convince you. This is always a story when people call Republicans corrupt or fascists and say the Democrats are not. They have absolutely no impartiality in the way they look at the world.
There are hundreds of thousands of regulations carrying criminal penalties. If a political party is determined to imprison an opponent, it will find a law they’ve technically violated. In Trump’s case, they used an obscure accounting rule — one so trivial that even prominent Democratic supporters acknowledged it was an inappropriate basis for prosecution.
Hillary Clinton used a private email server while serving as Secretary of State, and in 2014, her staff deleted 31,000 emails they labeled personal to prevent them from being scrutinized in an impending investigation. You don't think that if Hillary had been a Republican and if the Democrats were determined to prosecute her, they couldn't have found some law that she broke and prosecuted her on it?
Wait. What do you think about Hegseth's signal and atlantic reporter issue? That is wildly worse and where is the court case that absolutely should be happening?
we are not banana republic (just yet, getting there though) so anyone that breaks a law under a given statute you file charges, run an investigation and punish if law(s) are broken. if memory serves me well there was one :) can’t say the same for Hegseth et al but night is young so-to-speak…
The prosecution record, where Trump and dozens of his allies were prosecuted, is the record of a banana republic.
Like I said there's hundreds of thousands of regulations which hold the potential for criminal sanction. They could have found her guilty of something when she deleted those emails. The SDNY DAG found a way to charge the developers of Tornado Cash with running an illegal money transmission service when they didn't even hold it in custody of any funds, they simply published code. They stretched the law to incredible lengths to get someone they wanted. And they couldn't find something to pin on Hillary Clinton? Ridiculous.
They didn't for political reasons and you're naive or dishonest for believing otherwise.
Yes it was them following the law and being unbiased.
Many of the people involved in prosecuting them are Republicans. Trump is the most corrupt president we've ever had and many of his allies are similarly corrupt.
These days they know they just have to follow the maga line to get out of jail free. The Attorney General of Texas was so ridiculously corrupt he was about to be impeached by Texas Republicans but then he just claimed it was a witchhunt against maga got Trump on his side and suddenly impeachment was cancelled and he's polling a win in the next Senate primary.
Also Trump supported an attempted violent coup in addition to things like telling the Georgia Secretary of State to find him votes after the voting.
Trump has been described as a threat to democracy by many leading conservatives and Republicans. Many of them have had their careers ended and been slandered by former associates despite being conservative who had dedicated decades to the party while Trump doesn't care about ideology or party or outcomes only himself.
> in a series of interviews published Tuesday, saying the former president fits “into the general definition of fascist” and that he spoke of the loyalty of Hitler’s Nazi generals.
> He also confirmed to The Atlantic that Trump had said he wished his military personnel showed him the same deference Adolf Hitler’s Nazi generals showed the German dictator during World War II, and recounted the moment.
> Do you mean Bismarck’s generals?’” Kelly told The Atlantic he’d asked Trump. He added, “I mean, I knew he didn’t know who Bismarck was, or about the Franco-Prussian War. I said, ‘Do you mean the kaiser’s generals? Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.’ I explained to him that Rommel had to commit suicide after taking part in a plot against Hitler
Copy-pasting my response to a similar partisan talking point:
--
There are hundreds of thousands of regulations carrying criminal penalties. If a political party is determined to imprison an opponent, it will find a law they’ve technically violated. In Trump’s case, they used an obscure accounting rule — one so trivial that even prominent Democratic supporters acknowledged it was an inappropriate basis for prosecution.
Hillary Clinton used a private email server while serving as Secretary of State, and in 2014, her staff deleted 31,000 emails they labeled personal to prevent them from being scrutinized in an impending investigation. You don't think that if Hillary had been a Republican and if the Democrats were determined to prosecute her, they couldn't have found some law that she broke and prosecuted her on it?
--
What you're claiming is absolutely absurd. This idea that Trump leads a criminal enterprise and everyone affiliated with him is corrupt and that's why so many were prosecuted and not that this is the same politicization of the justice system you see all over the world and Democrats, with the tacit support of establishment Republicans, trying to imprison their opponents.
I also want to make it absolutely clear that it is all about framing. From your beltway-manufactured frame, Trump instigated January 6th, and this amounted to insurrection. But a much more reasonable framing is that leading Democrats instigated over 500 riots in the summer of 2020, and are instigating the current riots too:
Kamala Harris even tweeted this out, to bail out rioters:
> “If you’re able to, chip in now to the @MNFreedomFund to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.”
Of course the mainstream news media journalists who are all unionized and thus economically aligned with the Democratic Party barely cover this or criticize it.
Yeah, only the issue here is that @realFascists are in opposition to Trump. And reading this text in that light - it check out and not really a news.
Also, frankly, you folks need to stop monopolizing these topics, based on highly polarized ideological filter, because even before Trump there was dissatisfaction about how Musk monopolized NASA contracts on the promise, that he would deliver more efficient and cheaper solution, while in reality the result is that NASA is currently paying more for Musks private solutions, than when it had to do it by itself. There are sure many other options to what Musk offers and if Trump is there to break up that monopoly and open up the market, then it is a win situation.
>there was dissatisfaction about how Musk monopolized NASA contracts on the promise, that he would deliver more efficient and cheaper solution, while in reality the result is that NASA is currently paying more for Musks private solutions, than when it had to do it by itself
SLS, NASA's rocket, costs $2.5 billion, PER LAUNCH.
That’s all very nice but according to Trump this only suddenly became a problem only a few weeks ago due to some reason. So whatever you are saying has absolutely no relevance to this decision making. If Musk continued licking his boots he’d be doing fine..
I think double standards would be a better term than hypocricy. Hypocricy would imply the pretense to be bound by certain rules, but the whole point of fascism is that those in power are not bound by any rules. They only make rules to bind others. I don't see any hypocricy in the openly advertised corruption of the current administration, it's just plain evil of the “we do it because we can” sort.
> It turns out that when elections are fought on the basis of identity (race, religion) etc corruption is actually considered a benefit! This is because the loyalists interpret this as "we" are winning and "they" are losing.
In history textbooks, it's known as the spoils system.
hopefully this time around it will go a little quicker, aka one term. project 2025 specifically pointed out all "disloyal" government employees should be kicked out and only those who bent a knee to trump should replace them, whatever their actual merit and ability to occupy the position
Vote banks and patronage politics has always been a thing in the US, especially at the local and state level. The main difference is a significant portion of governance was temporarily de-politicized in the 1960s-90s period as leadership on both sides of the aisle had formative unifying experiences during the World Wars and the Korean War, but has been re-politicized now that activism on both sides of the aisle has resurged and social polarization has taken root.
The expansion of executive powers also played a role in this erosion, as both the judicial and legislative branch increasingly devolved their prerogative to the executive, leaving it much more open to political tampering and reducing the power of checks and balances.
There's a reason LKY in SG, Yoshida Shigeru and Sato Eisaku in Japan, and François Mitterrand in France tried to decentralize power to a semi-independent civil service.
Low-level corruption at the local/state level is related but its effects are different though. In fact even today low level corruption in the US is extremely low by global standards - you can't bribe your way to a drivers license openly, for example. I'm sure it happens but it's not common or openly boasted about (parts of CA or DC could be an exception).
Here the corruption is openly displayed as a kind of peacock-tail to the beneficiaries.
I'd rather not have a whole discussion over this atm (I'm out rn - maybe later), but I recommend reading Yuen Yuen Ang's paper on "Unbundling Corruption" - there are different typographies of what "corruption" is, and some nations have always had a similar type of corruption compared to others.
In addition, low level corruption is orthogonal to grand corruption as can be seen in Singapore, Japan, South Korea, and the US.
Finally, Indian public discourse around corruption is non-targeted, and fails to contextualize significant institutional differences in how local, state, and federal governments operate in India compared to other states (be they democratic like the US or authoritarian like China).
[Feel free to add questions or points of contention, but I won't be able to reply quickly]
Fine, I don't disagree with anything you point out. However where we differ is that I believe identity politics is the trigger factor here, all the other changes you mention (loss of balance of power etc) are downstream of this.
Your causal diagram is backwards. Identity politics isn't the path to corruption. Corrupt politicians like Trump use identity politics to gain power to practice their corruption. Nobody who wanted to bring back Christian hegemony and re-oppress minority groups is cheering that Trump is threatening to take away contracts from Musk because "their side is winning."
But in the US, “minority” means “less poticial power”. By any reasonable measure straight white “Christian” men should be about 20% of the population, yet somehow they have 80% of political power.
> Identity politics isn't the path to corruption. Corrupt politicians like Trump use identity politics to gain power to practice their corruption.
These two sentences, taken together, lead me to exactly the opposite conclusion—exploitation of identity politics allows one to gain power to enact corruption. You play into what people want by being the savior they think they need and then once in power do whatever the hell you wanted in the first place.
Idpol can exacerbate corruption. There are strong feedback dynamics.
And to reply to the comment above yours, there are material factors upstream of idpol. It's not a coincidence that sort of thing is in renaissance across the world.
> you can't bribe your way to a drivers license openly
No but when it comes to local government contracts, building permits and similar stuff its quite different. Also a lot of (what sane people would consider) corruption is legal and institutionalized.
i.e. bribing politicians running for office is perfectly legal and entirely expected by all sides (that Americans are so open about this is quite unique).
The notion that this kind of politicization started in the 90s is fanciful revisionism. It wasn’t really a thing in the US until about 2017. The word it’s known by is Trumpism.
I'm familiar with the rise of talk radio, News Corp, Web propaganda, alt-right, etc., in politics and public sentiment.
What's new to me is that the last couple decades might be a reversion to a pre-war mode of US governance.
(I know WW2 was unifying in some ways, as we'd expect, but I don't recall much from school about how US politics was played before then, other than punctuated events like the Civil War, civil rights movement, etc.)
its revisionism to say that the US has been free of politicization this bad. for most of its history, not counting the civil war very minor (and very major) issues sparked massacres, revolts, and even minor wars between states.
First off, Trump skyrocketed to political fame with his nonsense claims about Obama's citizenship.
The slide started in the 80's when Reagan killed off the 'fairness doctrine' which meant news outlets could present completely one-sided coverage of an issue.
Couple that with massive consolidation of newspapers and TV news stations where all the programming is heavily coordinated and groups like Sinclair started pushing identically worded "false news" narratives across all their stations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo
9/11 was a big turning point in my experience. American conservatives that I considered online friends were simple impossible to reason with within days and completely alien beings after a few weeks.
Interesting. Things did change on 9/11 but it seemed incremental to me. Before that was the constant investigation of Clinton by Gingrich, the dog whistling of Reagan, Nixon's Southern Strategy, and before that to McCarthy and so on.
This is high level rather than your direct experience, so it's not a contradiction. Just a different perspective.
Yes. Almost everything about our current situation can be traced back to Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh. Things were much more civil and reasonable before that point.
I don’t know. Nixon had goons breaking into the DNC headquarters (and his whole southern strategy led to racially polarized politics up to this day), and there was that senator who got beaten by another senator just before the civil war. Eisenhower waited in the car rather than attend a meeting with Truman on his inauguration.
Nixon was forced to resign in disgrace to avoid impeachment when it came out. The dude in the White House now did much worse and he was rewarded with reelection.
It has actually been a gradual process for decades from the John Birch Society to Paul Harvey to Rush Limbaugh to Newt Gingrich to Dick Cheney to Citizens United to Donald Trump.
Edit: Forgot Pat Buchanan. He belongs in there somewhere.
It started before 2017. The right adopted identity politics as a response to the left doing so. Note that even NY Times word usage is a lagging indicator -- this is a case of prestige media picking up trends which originated on social media such as tumblr.
Vox even wrote a defense of the shift back in 2015, with an article called "All politics is identity politics":
Are you tracking actual identity politics or the term "identity politics"? Because the meaning of the term applies just as much to ending slavery, womens' suffrage and civil rights movements.
Otherwise, you might as well argue that fake news only existed from 2016 onwards, because that's when Google Trends says it did.
>the meaning of the term applies just as much to ending slavery, womens' suffrage and civil rights movements.
I'm not sure that's true. E.g. Martin Luther King Jr spoke of the "magnificent words" in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Modern activists would say: "Written by dead pale male slaveholders. We need more diversity! Where are the voices of women and POC?" For King, ideas took precedence over identities. For modern activists, it's the opposite.
The American Anti-Slavery Society was predominantly white. That's puzzling for a movement driven by identity politics. It does make sense for a movement driven by universal humanitarian ideals.
In any case, if you still think I'm wrong, and identity politics is an essential force behind trends such as the civil rights movement -- then I suppose you'll be happy that it's being adopted by the political right in the United States? Since it's got such a great historical track record, surely results will be good? ;-)
>Otherwise, you might as well argue that fake news only existed from 2016 onwards, because that's when Google Trends says it did.
This is a bad analogy, because fake news itself doesn't use the term "fake news". If "fake news" was an ideology which was characterized by particular terminology, we could graph the use of that terminology to document the rise of the ideology. That's what's being done here.
In any case, I do believe that "fake news" (in the narrow sense of websites which write completely bogus news, with no effort at reporting, to drive clicks) is a phenomenon which has, in fact, become more widespread relatively recently (due to the ease of internet publishing etc.) So that's another way in which your analogy is invalid. Fake news did increase in popularity when Trump was the GOP candidate, relative to when Romney was the GOP candidate. And Google Trends helps illuminate that!
I think our definitions of "identity politics" differ too much to have a useful discussion about it. I'm going off the most common definitions I can find (eg dictionaries, wikipedia), but perhaps I'm looking in the wrong place.
> It is horrifying to see this attitude take root in my adopted land.
Agreed, and I was born here. I was taught we expressly want to reject those things, and now it's all the fashion. It feels like a temper tantrum from a third of the electorate, a rejection of adulthood and reason.
It's because we tried to take down the 'no girls or brown people' sign.
All of this is a long temper tantrum about Obama and then Mrs Clinton, emphasis on the Mrs.
If I had a time machine I would take documentation back and convince someone that we need a few more Old White Guys to let the GOP's base unrustle their jimmies for a bit.
I predicted something like this coming back in the late 90's, not that anyone should have listened to me about civics. I say 'like this', but... not like this. And if I had someone would have requested "wellness checks" (which is American for 'check to see if we can have him involuntarily committed to a mental facility) on my behalf.
My notion back then was that the vibe of the country was such that a black man would need to be elected before a white woman was a serious contender. But that there would have to be a delay. When you rush progress you can spin out. And fuck if we haven't spun out.
Maybe they'll go for a whip-smart gay man next term? Who knows.
>It turns out that when elections are fought on the basis of identity (race, religion) etc corruption is actually considered a benefit! This is because the loyalists interpret this as "we" are winning and "they" are losing.
So how could one design a political system so this behavior doesn't emerge / is not incentivized?
In no way this is a good example of such a system, but I still find Bosnia and Herzegovina political system absolutely hilarious. After Dayton peace agreement the literally put ethnicity requirement for presidents to Constitution as a hard rule. One Bosnian, one Serb and one Croatian. And yes, the country is ran by 3 presidents at the same time. So there is no longer a competition whether the main guy in the country will be theirs or ours.
There were two guys: a Roma and a Jew in BiH who also wanted to take the president office. However according to Constitution they didn't have a chance. So they went to EU Human Rights Court to look for a justice. The court told the country it's kinda racist to have a rule like that and they should change it. This was like 15 years ago. Guess whether the rule has changed since then. (Sejdić and Finci v. Bosnia and Herzegovina for more details).
PS. If you find 3 presidents not fascinating enough, then google for High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Northern Ireland has a similar system, with an executive built on a forced coalition.
The executive is led by a First Minister and Deputy First Minister (despite the difference in title, they have exactly equal powers), who are selected from the largest party representing each of the two main communities.
Major decisions require cross-community support - at least 50% of all those voting AND 50% of the representatives of each of the two communities, OR 60% of all those voting AND 40% of the representatives of each of the two communities.
On paper, it seems slightly absurd... but in practice, it's a reasonable way to deal with deeply divided societies.
I like this term "forced coalition". How about a traditional parliamentary system where a supermajority is required to pass legislation?
I assume if you need 70% to pass legislation then you get a grand coalition pretty much every time?
I guess it could incentivize brinkmanship among coalition partners though, since the leader of the coalition has less leverage if a small party threatens to quit?
When I put my programmer hat on, there's something inelegant about this approach, because it involves hardcoding the words "Bosnian", "Serb", and "Croatian" into the constitution.
It seems like with a sufficiently clever electoral rule, you could generate a small "national steering committee" with an odd number of members, where each major faction is guaranteed representation. But that also sounds a lot like a parliament where there's one party for each ethnic group, and then we're back where we started?
What happens when the 3 presidents disagree? Maybe the trick is to incentivize consensus-driven decisionmaking?
>What happens when the 3 presidents disagree? Maybe the trick is to incentivize consensus-driven decisionmaking?
That's where High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina comes into play. This is external guy appointed by the EU (US also was participating in the appointment in the beginning, but they withdrew themselves from the process quite a few years ago). This guy has the power to fire any (like ANY) politician in the country. And the permission to overrule or enforce any law.
This guy is probably controlled by EU and can't turn into dictatorship mode, but you never know. At the very least two times presidents were fired due to political disagreement.
EU considered to discontinue this practice, but local people encouraged EU to leave things as is. Cause nobody trusts politicians and the systems is still pretty corrupt.
Anyway, whatever decision presidents have to make, all 3 must agree. That's why a lot of controversial topics are hanging for eternity (e.g. recognition of Kosovo).
When country was trying to choose a national flags, all the parts couldn't find the agreement for a long time. That's why High Representative just approved his own version nobody really liked. So today if you visit the country, you will find Serbian flag in the parts where Serbs live and Croatian flags in the part with Croats. Actual country flag normally is in the parts where majority is Bosnian.
having three is interesting because it gives a way to break ties. how do they handle candidates with mixed ethnicity, though? or the Serbians and Croatians converging, while the Bosnians move farther apart from both?
This has not emerged due to the political system, this has emerged due to the issues in the information economy.
The core issue is that news cannot compete with entertainment, and the firms that appeared after Murdoch on the right, insulate themselves and their politicians from the need to be accurate.
The cycle is essentially:
1) Fringe theory appears on the internet
2) Fringe theory is picked up by Notable Person (Someone who is able to come on Prime time Television)
3) Notable comes onto media network and repeats fringe theory
4) Reporting can now cover Fringe Theory as main stream
This economy of ideas shares little with the processes on the center and the left. People who come up with counter arguments don’t end up getting amplified.
This has demolished the exchange and debate of Ideas, and it has worked in all liberal democracies. Implacable Partisanship has been rewarded.
Get rid of FPTP and the Electoral College that enables a two-party stranglehold. If a vote for a third party wasn't a wasted vote, we could see nuanced parties and politicians emerge that don't have to tow a party line.
FPTP is what makes Reform so dangerous though. They have a real chance of having a lot of power. In a proportional representation system where parties have to share power in coalitions these extreme parties actually have to be involved in government, at which point they’re exposed as completely incompetent. See the Netherlands right now for example. I would rather have these extreme positions represented, because they will be represented poorly. It takes wind out of the populist sails, where they can no longer simply promise everything until they’re in power and completely destroy the country.
I think FPTP ends up working out a lot different in the parliamentary context. The US only has 2 parties in Congress, despite FPTP.
In terms of strength of 3rd parties, I'd say they are generally quite weak in the US system, somewhat stronger in a proportional representation parliamentary system, and potentially overpowered in a FPTP parliament like in the UK.
Historically I believe the 2-party system in the US was pretty good at tamping down on extremism, but recently the 2 major parties have acquired too many extremists.
Does it? Could you explain which mechanism you suggest using? Because the main results from social choice theory about ranked choice voting that come to mind seem to be all about impossibility of fair elections (eg Arrow) or even paradoxical situations such as cyclic preferences (eg Condorcet).
How about not creating a precarious underclass with lack of (higher) education that is ready to vote for whatever solution promising to take down the system that made them so desperate for radical change?
If the functioning of your nation's political system depends on the functioning of your nation's education system or your nation's economy, you've created a circular dependency. The education system and the economy are themselves downstream of the political system. Dysfunction in one tends to create dysfunction in the others. See https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2004/Caplanidea.htm...
A good political system is one which continues to work well even when education and the economy suck, so societal self-repair is possible. Ideally it would actually start working better when things suck, so society becomes antifragile.
"More college diplomas" is not a great solution when existing graduates are already working at Starbucks. This is the "elite overproduction" which creates instability.
Yet Americans are still dissatisfied. Part of the problem is that our political system incentivizes candidates and media outlets to stir up dissatisfaction so they can exploit it. There's also envy / the hedonic treadmill.
I don't really buy the education argument. How do you "educate" somebody who lived through the first Trump administration and voted for more of the same? Let's get specific: what exactly did they miss in school that would have driven them towards a different decision?
At some point it's necessary to confront the uncomfortable truth: stupid people are easy for smart, ill-intentioned people to herd, which gives the latter a leg up in any democratic election.
This bug in democracy was there in the beginning. But it's only now, 2500 years later, that it can be exploited effectively enough to invalidate the whole concept.
> At some point it's necessary to confront the uncomfortable truth
Sometimes the truth is even more uncomfortable than “lots of people are stupid.” A much more insidious scenario is when there’s two groups with no major differences in education or access to facts, but one has a cultural which is actively and explicitly hostile to truth. In such scenarios, ever-escalating hostilities between the two groups is inevitable.
>This bug in democracy was there in the beginning. But it's only now, 2500 years later, that it can be exploited effectively enough to invalidate the whole concept.
Not sure where the 2500 number came from. The US is about 250 years old, and the founders were extremely wary of democracy based on its history prior to the US. The US constitution was designed to mitigate issues with democracy, e.g. that is the purpose of "checks and balances". By democracy standards, the US has been very successful; the average constitution only lasts 17 years: https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/lifespan-written-constitut...
Nonetheless, you would think that the "technology" for writing constitutions would've evolved more in the past 250 years. And in fact, in the Federalist Papers, it is predicted that political technology will evolve, just like any other field of technology. Yet results there have been quite disappointing, if you ask me. There aren't that many interesting and innovative ideas in this area. Most people, even programmers, tend to get lost in the object level us-vs-them conflict instead of going meta with their creative algorithmic brain.
My comment is too old to edit, but I would like to issue a correction. I should not have written "This article estimates that the US is the #2 longest-lasting republic after the Roman Republic", since the caption for the figure in the article states something different ("Duration of Long-Lived Democracies", i.e. the word "democracy" is used rather than "republic", and also there wasn't a claim to "longest-lived")
I didn't get the impression that Athenian democracy was particularly successful. So it seemed weird to say that the flaws in democracy are only now becoming apparent.
In fact, I understand that CamperBob2's critique of democracy is quite similar to that of Socrates. So I'm puzzled by the claim that it's "only now" that the critique is being proven correct, given that US democracy is notably more stable and long-lived than Athenian democracy.
In general, I think times of turmoil are always much more salient when you yourself are living through them. We lack the historical perspective to understand how bad turmoil has been in the past.
The flaws in democracy were always apparent, and they've always been exploited by parties willing to do the dirty work. But they couldn't be exploited consistently and decisively. Now they can be.
Think of it this way: you can't reach people who don't read much by starting a newspaper, but you can reach them with Fox News and Twitter. Mix in a bit of that old-time religion -- Billy Graham with a side of sauce Bernays -- and the left-hand side of the bell curve is yours to do with as you please.
umm Switzerland disagrees with the assessment of the USA being the oldest democratic republic. If we are only speaking of republic, Portugal has been one since the 12th century, albeit there's been 10 or 11 iterations on the constitution, including Salazars so-called New State.
They missed that liberty and freedom is not a god-given right, but hard-earned privilege. They missed that liberty is not a personal property but a shared practice of pluralism. They missed that liberty is not absolute, but requires compromise and limitations so that we all can be free.
To be fair, those are not things that are taught in school. If they come up at all it is in some historical context, a battle someone else fought--and won. There is no mention that maintaining a liberal democracy requires effort and vigilance. Modern, ie. post-WW2, "fighting democracies" have built-in safeguards to oppose internal enemies of democracy, but if they are effective remains to be seen. The USA mostly does not even have such mechanisms and it shows.
>Modern, ie. post-WW2, "fighting democracies" have built-in safeguards to oppose internal enemies of democracy, but if they are effective remains to be seen.
Eh, "internal enemies of democracy" is way too vague. E.g. Trump supporters claim that "unelected bureaucrats" in the "deep state" are enemies of democracy. Anyone can call anyone an "enemy of democracy".
Those fighting democracies are very specific about what is and what is not irreconcilable. For example, in Germany you can murder the president--that's just homicide--but you cannot abolish the protection of minorities. That's a violation of the constitution. Germany's far-right party Alternative für Deutschland has been under suspicion of violating a few of those provisions for quite some time now.
The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (aka. Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz) completed a report a few weeks ago but is required by law to withhold it from the public due to due process. Of course it leaked, you can read the report here [1] (it's in German, obviously).
Now there is a discussion ongoing, if the Alternative für Deutschland has to been dissolved. That's a fighting democracy at work, following the rule of law.
Me neither, but as the discussers point out, the Weimar Republic totally failed to apply serious consquences, e.g. Hitler's very short arrest after the Munich coup. Besides, the safeguards include more than limiting free speech.
Of course, those safeguards were designed in the late 1940s, so it's interesting, to say the least, how they cope with modern demagoguery. In any case it is worth a try.
Tangentially, that's a great site! I hadn't heard of FIRE before, but I'm glad they exist. I hope they don't get suborned by one side or the other.
I see it as a continuation of the American Civil War in politics. There was always this attitude but now people are more redicalized, so it's more obvious.
Voila, we've ended up with a low trust society with "petty corruption", which is generally considered harmful as it establishes something about that society that cannot be easily corrected unlike "grand corruption."
>>I witnessed this up close in India where parties openly exist to benefit certain constituencies based on caste, language, religion and so on.
+1
As an Indian, classic definition of corruption here is something that other people do. When our own do it, its not really called corruption, its more intelligent work done to make our people win.
Similar term is appeasement. It kind of means if people I hate are winning, they must be doing bad things or cheating. It is impossible that people I hate should do well in life.
This is a very important rule stated by the War Nerd: 'Most people are not rational, they are TRIBAL: "my gang yay, your gang boo!" It really is that simple. The rest is cosmetics.'
A small human group is compatible with this tribal behavior because the bulk of actions (or at worst their effects) are quickly perceptible to everyone. The larger the group, the less each person understands what is happening, even the effects of what he does.
That's naive and you know it. A massive drive for him was electing the first black president. A less, but still not-insignificant drive was for Hillary as the first female president.
Thats your opinion, Obama could have been white, and he still would have been voted for by 99.9% of those who voted for him. Young Kennedy-like candidates are rare (eg Bill Clinton and Barack Obama) but are incredibly electable when they show up.
Towards the end of his presidency, most of us forgot he was even black. Just those white southerners and a certain old guy in New York who were fixated on his race from the beginning still thought he was a DEI elect.
There were hit songs about what a big moment it is that he was black. At least among minorities that was a massive deal. If you didn't see that, I think you're probably closer to those white southerners than you might think you are.
Can you imagine if mainstream entertainers made songs celebrating having a white president?
Given that all of them but one are white, what the point that would be? Songs are not because Obama is black, but because he was the first black on the role.
So you are opposed to fixating on people's race and yet there you are singling out white southerners. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Most people forgot Obama was black except them, they are also the ones constantly accusing Obama of being racially divisive, they should just own what they say. This is kind of like Trump calling people names but then being greatly offended when someone calls him a name, right?
I’d be shocked if Hilary had a net benefit being a female candidate. We’ve had 2 chances to elect a female president and they both lost the general election with not that great turnout.
John McCain’s VP was female during 08 and he lost by a huge margin.
In a way yes. Kamala lost because she was the ultimate DEI candidate (in how own words that the only reason he picked her to be VP). Regardless of her personal skills or qualities it’s very hard to move past that..
Had she had a chance to prove that she could win a primary things might have been different
In a way yes. Kamala lost because she was the ultimate DEI candidate (in how own words that the only reason he picked her to be VP). Regardless of her personal skills or qualities it’s very hard to move past that..
Biden fucked up in many ways, but he also got a lot of flack from bad timing and poor messaging. It’s easy to say COVID hurt Trump in 20 and Kamala in 24, but I think the details mattered.
The inflation rate fell significantly under his presidency, but during periods of high inflation prices soared. Coming back from that after generations of extremely low inflation would have been tough for someone without failing facilities. I think a great politician could have weathered that storm, Biden wasn’t up to the task and Kamala’s messaging didn’t help.
Republicans getting out ahead on that inflation messaging similarly did wonders for Trump and other Republicans. Planting the idea that America somehow didn’t do well when we did far better than the rest of the world was brilliantly executed IMO.
Kamala probably wins in 2016? I mean this in a very nice way but I think you may want research the politics and candidates in the US a little more before bold statements such as that. Kamala was unable to even register on a scale in the primary and what noise she did make was to play a false game on which she essentially accused Biden of being racist filth. I think it is not just that she had no qualifications for office, we could argue about what constitutes a qualification for a long time, but she had no reasoning or theory of why she would even be someone yo run for office. She tablet in such incomprehensible ways that one could not even discern a point from her utterances. You may say the current president rambles but she think the point is always present. Kamala on her best days just spoke in long winded tautologies: “we are always doing each day the things we do every day” or whenever nonsense she chose to present to the public. Further, he main qualification to place herself as one of the poor people was to constantly talk about being a “middle class kid.” The problem is in her generation, the middle class did quite well for themselves so it was such a false premise. Let’s not discuss the accents.
That was not at all the main reason Obama got elected. He was charismatic, likable and promised hope and change. Why is it that the people who don't want identity politics to be a focus make it a focus?
"To all those who supported our campaign, I'm humbled by the faith you've
placed in us. To all of those who did not support us, let me say this. Hear me
out as we move forward. Take a measure of me and my heart. If you still
disagree, so be it. That's democracy. That's America.
The right to dissent peaceably. Within the guardrails of our republic, it's
perhaps this nation's greatest strength. Yet hear me clearly: disagreement
must not lead to disunion. And I pledge this to you, I will be a president for all Americans, all Americans. And I promise you, I will fight as hard for those
who did not support me as for those who did."
Obama taught constitutional law and served in the state and US Senate before running for president. He was [not] some unqualified hack thrust into power because they needed a person of a different race in power.
Obama's campaign was far less about race than Trump's campaigns in 2016 and 2024. Unless you can't hear the dog whistles.
You can't claim that while claiming wanting to elect a black president wasn't a big driver in much of the turnout for Obama. There were multiple musicians literally making songs about finally being able to elect a black president.
Trump's initial popularity was due in no small part to the anger of American white supremacists and the alt-right, this was well documented even back in 2016[0,3]. That the President elected after Obama was the man who mainstreamed the birther conspiracies against Obama was not a coincidence. It wasn't entirely about Obama, but he was the straw that broke white America's back.
The social justice age wasn't a rejection of bigotry. It was a Mccarthy-esque movement of dividing everybody between sexual and racial lines into a hierarchy of who was and wasn't allowed to speak. Speaking against the party line meant exile.
The SJW/Wokeism movement had nothing to do with true equity and "rejection of bigotry". That's why there was such a revolt against it.
Of course, I didn't claim that the republicans aren't now doing everything they claimed to revolt against but worse. As it turns out "free speech" absolutism only applies to things that pwn the libz.
I call b*t. The reality is that the there is a outrage campaign in the right wing media trying to drive anger about some perceived victimhood in people who have largely been privaledged all their life. They would have found something else instead.
Obama was genuinely qualified to be president. Trump was clearly unfit in 2016 (having never held elected office and run nearly all his businesses into the ground), and constitutionally disqualified after Jan 6 2021.
Trump was also reluctant to denounce or criticize white nationalists. He repeated and reposted neo-Nazi content and phrases. He is the one ordering a zealous yet haphazard dismantling of anything that breathes the words racial equity, and without a hint of pushback from his voters.
So when Trump admitted on Howard Stern that he likes to walk in on naked teenage girls because his role of running the teen universe beauty pageant allows him to get away with that, that is ok because he wasn't running a campaign at the time?
>There are places in America that are among the most dangerous in the world. You go to places like Oakland. Or Ferguson. The crime numbers are worse. Seriously," and retweeted a false claim that 81% of white murder victims were killed by black people.
> "We've just seen many, many crimes getting worse all the time, and as Maine knows—a major destination for Somali refugees—right, am I right?"
Yeah I mean to be clear, I think Obama was a remarkable leader and it's hard to believe he once occupied the same seat DJT does today
He didn't explicitly use his race (the way Hillary often used her gender), but many who campaigned for him and large parts of his caucuses did. For better or for worse.
Everybody is turbo-infantilised via social media. I don't know if that's indeed the root cause or if it's a combination of factors, but the fact remains that people don't even feel the need to _pretend to care_ about honesty, character, seriousness, etc.
Human society is limited in the antidotes to human nature that it can code through law, institutions or culture. It’s the same species throughout 1930’s Germany and today.
We shouldn’t give up on law, institutions or culture, but accepting our failings instead of seeing humans as a perfectible project can at least give us solace in confusing times.
An entire cohort born between 1985~1995 reached their 30s in what they perceived as a far, far worse situation all around (financially foremost, but also almost every social aspect) than their parents.
For many reasons (including the ones above) it's difficult for any institution within reach of the US government to analyze how the alt-right took power but from what I can tell the US economy is in a slow burn. It's been receiving patches roughly once a presidency but it turns out you can't combine a lot of short term solutions to make a long term one. Fixing the economy would require bold decisions and the parties took two different directions. The Republican party realized that any bold policy would get votes regardless of any other factor including coherency. This is why Trump supporters, when asked about their logic usually give some form of "things are bad, and they didn't used to be".
To summarize, there are competing ideas for what got us here, but I think it was less of a real inciting event like WW1 and more of a breaking point that was eventually reached.
I have lived in Alberta my entire life and that used to be true here. It's different now. There's blatant corruption from our provincial government in the news every few months, but it seems like that's just accepted now. Things are not trending in a good direction in Canada.
The far right pretty much across the world is learning just how fragile and consensus-based the institutions of democracy are all at once. They're watching and learning from each other. Hence you have people like Bannon involved in similar tricks in multiple countries.
Obviously I can’t tell you what will happen in 10 years, but if the Prime Minister of Australia did even one days worth of Trumps actions he would be removed within a month or two.
Australia also doesn’t have an almost religious worship of politicians. Australians don’t identify as members of a particular party unless they literally are part of it.
There’s a huge difference between the US and Australia here that you slightly touch on - in Australia, the Prime Minister can be removed by the ruling party at any time vs the US where removing the sitting President can only be done via a handful of items from the Constitution
Don't play coy. If a small number of Republican representatives decided they would impeach Trump they would have absolutely no problem getting the votes they need and you know it. They don't do it because that's not what they want.
Republican representatives are lobbyists to the public for the 1%. It was clear that they hated Trump and wanted him out in his first run and what they want matters as much as what a car salesman wants for Ford.
I'm not sure America had that sort of cult thing pre Trump. JFK was pretty popular as was Regan but even they weren't the same. You guys do have a vote of no confidence which theoretically is easier to pull off then impeachment (majority vote)
Only with a lot of effort. I'm old enough to remember the ICAC in NSW and the CCC in Queensland (Joh Bjelke-Petersen was a bit before my time)... the widespread "travel expenses" fraud that permeated for YEARS.
Your government recently mandated technical capabilities for breaking encryption. Australians let that fly. There is nothing special about Australians, just as there is also nothing special about the British people who also did nothing when the UK mandated technical capabilities to break encryption.
One could even make the argument that the people of these two countries are even more pliant than Americans when they enable a key capability for totalitarian surveillance states without a blink.
There was nothing blatantly corrupt or illegal going on there, it went through the normal process and was unfortunately supported by both major parties. I’m not saying objectionable laws never get implemented. I’m saying the Prime Minister is not a dictator with limitless power.
I remember when certain social media networks argued that having a real name policy will lead to a more polite, kinder internet, because people won't be as rude with their real names attached to their posts. Turns out, people really don't care. I see the most vile, disgusting, racist, xenophobic shit on Facebook every single day, with real names and pictures showing smiling happy people hugging their kids on every one of them. Like you said - people don't feel any need to care about honesty, character, or even appearance of politeness or good manners.
I think they might have figured out that a lot of that honesty and character was a facade. Is the false appearance of morality better than just showing yourself as you really are?
You mean that people lie and cheat? That's always been the case. The point of honesty and character is precisely that they reflect a person's ability to value a higher good than their immediate self-interest. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The fact that reputation has been subjected to unprecedented arms race in the face of the internet and social media doesn't fundamentally change the game, it just makes it more exhausting and overwhelming to pay attention to.
> It's wild that a president can say, "I don't like Elon anymore, so out of retaliation, I'm canceling all his government contracts," and ~40% of the country doesn't see that as corruption in any way, shape, or form.
This is what a fascist dictatorship looks like. You have a leader who adheres to the persona of a strong man perpetually fighting against enemies who are both too weak and too strong, and at the drop of a hat their enemies change. Then of course rule of law doesn't apply anymore because the strong man in charge is the law, so he is supported in arbitrarily abusing and corrupting the state for his own personal benefit because his personal victories are sold as a show of stength.
The US needs to wake up to the fact that they are now living under a totalitarian dictatorship. The rest of the world is already well aware.
It's also wild that someone who was a major contributor to the election campaign and a major advisor to the president now declares "well, the president is a pedophile" and nobody bats an eye either. I mean, Musk supporters now have to believe Musk knowingly supported a pedophile but only turned against him after he had a falling out for unrelated reasons? In the eyes of his supporters, what does this say about Musk?
(Note: whether the accusation is true or not is irrelevant; what matters is that Musk supported someone whom he claims to know is a pedophile).
That's a great point about both the pettiness and corrupting influence of power.
Trump and Musk are trash human beings and the world would be better off if they were both 100% occupied with trying to destroy each other, with the hope being that then some adults could come in and run the country / companies.
I think Trump was probably always trash. Musk may have had redeemable qualities at one point, but, well, as per my first sentence.
Musk is a known pedophile-accusation-maker and affiliated with the Epstein child rape organization through his Kung-Fu lessons with Ghislaine Maxwell. Prior supporters will be less reactive for the first reason and more likely to perceive the situations as unfounded petty accusations for the latter (the dissonance of both Trump and Musk being connected to child rape is resolved this way).
Not only that but Musk was able to successfully argue in court that he's such a well known liar that a reasonable person wouldn't take his accusations of pedophillia seriously
Fox news attempted this defense in court "Fox persuasively argues, that given Mr. Carlson's reputation, any reasonable viewer 'arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism' about the statement he makes."
My memory is a bit fuzzy, but that was also Trump's family's response to the financial statements related to his businesses when it came up in court. But I don't remember which court case it was.
That was the one where he told the IRS the buildings he owned were worth $(x)M for tax purposes, but was simultaneously having them valued at $(10x)M for loan collateral purposes.
He was sued for that by the guy and won his trial by convincing the judge that "pedo" is actually common Afrikaner lingo, and it was a casual insult. This country is a joke.
Also doesn't remove the fact Trump was one of Epstein's closest friends, and everything points to him being involved in some way or the other in those affairs.
Musk's brother was introduced to his girlfriend by Epstein.
Epstein mentored a young model who went onto be a neurosurgeon and married Microsoft's Sinofsky.
Bill Gates had a meeting with Epstein during which an ex-girlfriend of Epstein's who was once Miss Sweden just happened to turn up with her 15 year old daughter.
I'd quite like someone to investigate if our billionaires are being honeypotted left, right and center because it appears you can control a big swathe of the world's wealth if you get old rich nerds laid.
It's still not clear if Epstein made his money by blackmailing yet another Billionaire.
Trump/Epstein connections have been reported on for years with photos and videos so anyone who cares probably was already on the anti-Trump side.
While Musk has a bigger megaphone than most media, he also has a credibility issue - and now especially for the Trump-true-believer crowd that is likely the only group whose bubble would be so shielded that they'd see it as news.
trump was one of the people that originally provided all they knew about epstein to the prosecutors, and once he realized what epstein was, he was banned from all trump venues. What did other do?
It's kind of his pointless go-to A-bomb insult, yet, this time, it's within the realm of possibility. I mean, I don't not believe it and I don't think I'm alone in that.
theoretically he might have discovered this after he had paid for Trump's win.
I despise the guy but it's entirely possible that he was blind to the publicly available evidence before seeing the secret evidence.
Also, he didn't say that, although he surely implied that. However, he only said that Trump is in the "files", which has actually been public information for a long time. It's known that Trump had some relations with Epstein, but there's no evidence he went to the island or did something wrong.
It's quite obvious that Elon knows that Trump is not on the actual "list", i.e. the list of Epstein's clients who went to the island. That's why the message reads like a silly insult, rather than a serious accusation.
When exactly? He was friends with Trump and working in his administration until a few weeks ago (they hugged in his going away ceremony), and he broke up for reasons explicitly not about any pedophile rings.
So to lob this accusation now doesn't seem like it's because he just learned of it.
I don't know what Musk really believes. The guy behaves like a mentally unstable person, but maybe it's an act? What is true is that accusing the president of the US of being linked to a pedophile ring is not the same as accusing some random scuba diver of being a pedophile.
The scuba diver cannot really fight back, but I think the president of the US might.
(Based on replies to my comments elsewhere, I feel compelled to clarify I'm in no way defending Trump. I think this is a fight between two nasty people).
>>>What is true is that accusing the president of the US of being linked to a pedophile ring is not the same as accusing some random scuba diver of being a pedophile.
I think you might have bigger issues here. Trump has links to mafia - and that is a fact. I'm more interested on what he was doing in regards to Ukraine, as post Soviet mafia(Georgian-Soviet Jewish mix in NY) via NY US Italian? mafia helped him a lot and gave him loans for his projects. Over the time Kremlins took over Soviet mafia and incorporated it - it might sound like a joke, but it is the truth - all the countries have mafia, but in Russia mafia is running country.
So, from the actions of Trump on how he is dealing with Ukraine, Trump is no better than Biden and Democrats that were frozen by fear because of the threats that Putin said. Which is good... if you want to see fireworks of nuclear weapons in action, because US actions(and inactions) are enabling that. Putin will use nukes on US - for many reasons - mainly because Putin is not at fault here and is misunderstanding American mindset, which is not completely decommissioned by Democrats.
From what I understand Musk simply has no leverage what Kremlin mafia has over Trump, also Musk is autistic who has no training on how to influence other people the way how Putin(could be slightly autistic, as he is mirroring what Russians want - just like Hitler did) does as he is blunt and uses brutal force, which people as social beings does not appreciate.
There is also significant difference between Trump and Musk - Trump can say things bluntly, but he also can operate on personal level and have different attitude to very important people - also he likes flattery.
Musk has only one of those qualities - he can say things bluntly(but without confidence and aura of power), but as autistic he is completely unaware of when he should really shut up when he is not in control of situation.
PS Trump, Musk, even the opposition to me are insects and entomology of humans is just a hobby to me.
Unlike most of people from US(and apparently people that can't understand that they are not part of US) I have my own thoughts, that I don't have a need to resonate and change in frequency according to some general line of one side or other.
Trump was Epstein's best friend according to the latter, in his conversations with the ghostwriter that would write his memoirs. There are videos of the two at 1990s parties, judging women and laughing together. Trump was also mentioned in Epstein's black book.
I feel like you downplay their relations with your "Trump had some relations with Epstein". There is definitely something fishy as to why they still haven't released the entirety of the files, and lie about having done so.
To be fair Elon claimed that Trump is mentioned in the remainder of files which have yet to be released. Presumably what evidence there is of wrongdoing, if it exists, exists there.
"Pedo guy" Musk being Musk, though, who knows? What is the likelihood Musk would even have access to those files if they were so damning to Trump and still sealed?
Nothing about this is "quite obvious." It could go either way. To be honest I wouldn't put it past either one of them to be on Epstein's "list."
I think the tone of the message would be way more serious if it was a serious accusation based on actual evidence. Now it reads like a kindergarten level conspiracy theory, which almost seems like a joke. The silly claim was that Trump being in the files is the reason why they aren't released.
It is also interesting, that many people here somehow have no issues with trump cancelling federal contracts with Harvard, prohibiting student visas for harvard, firing entire sections of NSF, NIH, NOAA, but when it comes to contracts with spacex, they react.
There's plenty of threads about all of those issues here on Hacker News - why do you think the people reacting to SpaceX didn't also react to the rest?
Some people do react to all, but the parent comment that I commented on just mentioned the spacex situation, like it's something new, while this is just the continuation of what's be going on for months.
And I've certainly seen people on HN trying to defend grant cancellations, Harvard attacks, NSF firings etc. I obviously can't be sure what those people's opinions are on the spacex threats, but I conjecture, that many of them don't like them, while they were ok with the attacks on universities, science agencies.
Cancelling contracts out of spite or for revenge without due process is wrong in all cases. Including SpaceX. Though I have to say it’s entertaining to see Musk’s own companies be effectively DOGE’d.
> I conjecture, that many of them don't like them, while they were ok with the attacks on universities, science agencies.
This is a good point. If you imagine something in your head in a particular way, it is not the same as if you imagine it differently in your head. For example, if I imagine that all dogs are boys and all cats are girls, it paints a different picture of the world than if I imagine that there are both male and females of both animals.
"Not commenting" does not necessarily translate into "having no issues".
Too much stuff is happening, not everyone comments on everything, and frankly your comment is only helpful to the administration by dividing its opponents.
If you want to see any efficient pushback at all, don't apply purity litmus tests to your potential allies.
6 of the people who think all this is completely fine are Supreme Court justices.
All of this is enabled by the completely illegitimate Supreme Court decision that made the president a god-king by inventing out of thin air the concept of "presidential immunity".
Not only is the scope of "official duties" so broad to make prosseuction next to impossible but the majority went out of its way to say you can't even examine the communications between the president and the DoJ.
This contract dispute has nothing to do with Presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts. Cancelling SpaceX contracts for political reasons would be wrong but not criminal.
The point is we won’t find out because presidential immunity also protects against discovery. Cases that previously could have been decided on the merits won’t even make it to adjudication.
It was not out of thin air. There's a reason why the impeachment process is in the Constitution -- and why it's perfectly normal for countries to have Parliamental Immunity and processes quite similar to the US impeachment for government ministers.
We have legislative immunity called the speech and debate clause. It doesn't shield lawmakers from other crimes, nor should it, and it certainly doesn't imply some sort of expansive executive immunity.
The founders were rebelling agaisnt an untouchable executive, remember?
If the founders thought it was so important the President not have immunity from all crimes they would have written it such rather than leaving it to interpretation.
> If the founders thought it was so important the President not have immunity from all crimes they would have written it such
They did; by writing in explicit immunities for some constitutional officers for certain activities, they implicitly rejected other immunities for those and other constitutional officers, by the legal principle “expressio unius est exclusio alterius”.
Well if the constitution does not explicitly grant a certain right it can’t just appear out of nowhere? At this point it’s about the “spirit” of the constitution not what is in the document itself since there is no mention of presidential immunity.
On the other hand it does grant the members of congress immunity under certain circumstances so it’s unlikely they just forgot about the president when writing it.
This sounds like an utopian take or a case of "the grass is greener on the other side".
Americans believe that Denmark or Switzerland has an educated and altruistic population. But if you talk to a Dane or a Swiss person about politics, they will laugh and tell you that their country is full of evil and stupid idiots, too.
I am inclined to agree with Acemoglu that good institutions are more important than virtues of the population.
>This sounds like an utopian take or a case of "the grass is greener on the other side".
Well, it wasn't. It's a take made by the 2nd president of the United States, John Adams:
"John Adams said, “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”[1] Morality and virtue are the foundation of our republic and necessary for a society to be free. Virtue is an inner commitment and voluntary outward obedience to principles of truth and moral law. Private virtue is the character to govern oneself according to moral law at all times. Public virtue is the character to voluntarily sacrifice or subjugate personal wants for the greater good of other individuals or the community. Specific moral virtues include charity, justice, courage, temperance, reverence, prudence, and honesty"
This is in a sense self evident because any self governing society can only function if its people are equipped with the reason, morality, and temperament to sustain it. Appealing to "good institutions" is tautological. The reason why some places have good institutions and others have bad institutions is precisely because of character of the people who build and maintain them.
> But if you talk to a Dane or a Swiss person about politics, they will laugh and tell you that their country is full of evil and stupid idiots, too.
They're right, but it's a significantly smaller percentage than the US, small enough to not do nearly as much damage as the US counter-part population does.
That Dane or Swiss person will also readily agree how shocking the average education level of the average American is.
> Americans believe that Denmark or Switzerland has an educated and altruistic population. But if you talk to a Dane or a Swiss person about politics, they will laugh and tell you that their country is full of evil and stupid idiots, too.
It seems like both of those can easily be true at the same time.
The delusional conspiracy theory Trump won the 2020 election, in order to justify January 6 violence and then pardoning those criminals as his first act as POTUS redux.
Trump sent a mob to assassinate the vice-president of the United States when he (Mike Pence) refused Trump’s order to overturn that election.
Trump’s longest serving chief of staff said Trump is, A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.
The bigotry of low expectations is thinking people are too stupid to know this, rather than understanding 1/3 are anti-American illiberal shitbirds.
Just because they failed to get it once before doesn’t mean they didn’t try and keep on trying.
A vote for a rapist, a felon, and vile insurrectionist is voting in support of abuse. And now we’re getting abused.
The new reality. Every corporate decision made today now must involve an analysis of the local and national government authority, thier political leanings and thier tendancy towards vindictivness.
Does anyone not think that every major corporation is not commissioning psychological reports on certain US leaders? They have public affairs and social media consultants to gauge public reactions. Now they need head shrinks to tell them if and how the guy in the big office might react, be that a state governor, the president, or any number of politically-minded media owners.
Why pay shrinks when you can pay baksheesh to political underlings who claim to be connected? Sure, most of them aren’t, but corruption is a statistics game. You spend $100k on that one guy who really does sleep with the masseuse of the astrologist for dear leader, and it can be a 10,000% return in days.
That said I think SpaceX is the only service even in the running for said contracts. Nasa doesnt have the capability, and Boeing is quite a way behind. There was already speculation that SpaceX would have to take on Boeings commitments for Artemis.
Likewise that Elon can say Trump is “ungrateful” that be received $150 million in campaign donations because he withdrew the nomination for Elon’s NASA administrator. It’s just open bribery.
American democracy died on the day the supreme court overturned campaign finance restrictions. Since then US politics is a mere playground for billionaires and corporations.
Nah, America was on this trajectory from watergate. The day the other party decided they wanted to give up on bipartisan efforts, and started primary-ing their own for bipartisan behavior, you took a step down this path.
With the advent of Murdoch’s papers and news efforts, the infinite money and credibility glitch allowed for these specific circumstances to occur.
The question is whether the information economy is downstream of the political economy, or vice versa.
That's a different problem. Toxic bipartisanship has been around for a long time with supporters and opponents. But a single billionaire outright buying a candidate to the point where he can claim that the president would not be in office without him is madness.
This is madness from the perspective of a general citizen point of view.
The mechanisms which were broken, that let these events come to pass - these began with the decision to end bipartisanship by republicans.
This isn’t about toxic bipartisanship, which isn’t even an issue. Unadulterated partisanship as a political strategy, is the start.
The enablement is the news ecosystem that was set up to defend these actions, and eventually launched the conversations entirely out of the gravitational well of facts and norms.
This is misleading (it is approximately correct if you look only at candidate committee spending, but it excludes outside spending—where the advantage went the other way, and the outside spending in 2024 exceeded campaign committee spending.)
Even if the figure itself weren't misleading, basing the argument around it is. The problematic dynamic isn't that the most money makes for a guaranteed win - rather it's that whomever does manage to win will be inclined to work for their major sponsors, especially if they will be up for reelection.
That figure does not include outside supporters spending campaigns. It's disingenuous to not include dark money spending.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/final-price-t...
It's closer to 1.8 billion for Harris supporters versus 1.4 billion for Trump supporters in 2024. That also does not include various media outlets bought in the past decades, including One America News/Fox/Sinclair sandbagging for Trump for the last eight years, at this point, shouldn't one include the budget for Fox News and OAN and Sinclair not to mention the spiking of negative news stories/opinions by LA Times/Washington Post? Even CNN was bought in past year by conservative and the leading story last month for a while was Jake Tapper's book about Biden.
Strong upvote. The Murdoch succession drama is one of the most important things affecting the future of US democracy. There are a lot of smaller and even more radical networks, but I don't think they have the reach and influence of Fox.
FOX is indeed all in for Trump. But on the other side of the ledger, there is the media that was all in for Biden - NPR, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, NYT, etc., during the same time period.
Oh heck no! This is the error in comparison that is allowing an unfair competition between the left + center vs the Right wing information economies.
The whole point of journalism and freedom of speech was to create a market place of ideas that allows for competition between ideas.
The right side of the information sphere insulates its viewers from the left and center. They do not get punished by their own for platforming inaccurate or fringe theories. Instead they compete on getting the more viral narrative platformed, while voices that counter the inaccuracies do not get platformed.
They are a demagoguery machine. The political party and news media are the same entity.
The left and center are largely stuck with the ideas of being relatively true to facts, getting punished by members for getting things wrong.
There are people on the left which are trying to recreate the success of the fringe right, which has become the core base on the right.
They are starting a decades long process, that began around watergate.
The counterpoint is that there is no rational or sane defense of Trump. The rest of the media criticized Biden plenty, arguably way too much in their attempts to be seen as neutral. Meanwhile there is almost nothing good about Trump. So if they write like 90% stories that seem to be against Trump it means they're biased towards Trump.
Almost regardless of political positions it's hard to argue Trump is fit or qualified to be president. He is openly corrupt, persuing an economic policy the vast majority of Conservative economists think is idiotic, and has called our veterans losers. Has never held any other government post has no knowledge of government policies and worse doesn't care to learn. Even though his ignorance is causing a lot of damage including to his voters he doesn't seem to care to learn about how any policy stuff works.
To counter that you need media like Fox or worse OAN/News Max to put out propaganda because it's impossible for even the most partisan person to defend him if they're an honest and thoughtful person
I invite you to spend an hour watching Fox News and then an hour listening to NPR and still claim those are just two sides of the same coin. The level of bias, propaganda, and active misinformation is so much greater on Fox News and it’s not even close. They’re not even pretending to factually report the news anymore. Every single piece is straight propaganda for the Republican Party. The best example of this difference is how mainstream media responded to Biden’s disastrous debate performance. The New York Times and CNN were covering it pretty blisteringly from the get go. There was no sugar coating it. Compare that to how Fox News spins the daily depravity of the Trump administration, and it speaks for itself
On the positive side, Trump is so unstable that he'll trash your business one day and then the next day he'll reverse course. So, "if people kiss your ass enough, they get contract" does not seem to be a long-term viable strategy. (Exhibit A: Musk.)
I'm 90% sure it will lead to America's ruin, but it might not quite be the same path that led the USSR to ruin. Hey, at least it looks more entertaining! :/
> but it might not quite be the same path that led the USSR to ruin.
The end of the Soviet Union as a political and geographic entity was not its ruin. What ruined it and opened the door for a strongman ruler was:
a) an inexperienced President (Yeltsin) who lacked a unifying vision for the newly formed republic and wasn't respected by its business elite or by foreign leaders
b) the 'free market liberalization' reforms passed overnight, with minuscule oversight that predictably led to the open looting of the nation's resources by well-connected elites who quickly absconded abroad with their riches, leaving the country at the mercy of international creditors looking for deals heavily tilted in their favour
c) multiple economics crises triggered by a loss of confidence in the country's currency and ability to service its foreign debt. The Russian bond default of 1998 famously led to the collapse of the American hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management.
Present circumstances in America aren't that different. All it's currently missing is a civil war to call its own, like Chechnya.
Yeltsin was the strongman ruler of the 90s. When parliament wouldn't kowtow to him, he launched a bloody coup and then rewrote the constitution to consolidate power in his office.
The only thing that he was truly unsuccessful at as a politician was failing to shrug off some bullshit credit card bribery scandal.
When you've deployed tanks and mortars against the lawful government, and everyone's fine with that I can't understand why you'd let a few thousands dollars that you put on a company credit card bring you down.
> Present circumstances in America aren't that different.
They are different, in the sense that all the damage happening right now is both unnecessary and self-inflicted. Russia needed to do something to transition from the USSR. Shock therapy was a terrible 'something', but it's at least possible to see how it got there.
> an inexperienced President (Yeltsin) who lacked a unifying vision for the newly formed republic and wasn't respected by its business elite or by foreign leaders
Probably can't mention Yeltsin in the context of strongmen without mentioning the shelling of the parliament building.
If you really want to find out the reasons why USSR failed I suggest reading “Collapse the fall of Soviet Union” by Zubok or “Collapse of an Empire” by Gaidar. They are easy to read books. Said reasons are quite different from what is going on in USA at the moment.
You are completely missing Gorbachev, the fall began with him. He was a good guy, but a bit naive within soviet situation. Everybody, and I mean EVERYBODY hated russians. That's where brutal oppression came from for rest of soviet republics, that's where eastern Europe satellites were invaded and controlled from via strong firm hand (and many military bases). I know this damn well as I was raised thre and saw first hand the continuous destruction of what we would call normal society that russians brought along with them everywhere they went.
When the soviet empire twitched a bit and seams became just slightly more loose, everybody run the fuck away from them. You can't be literally enslaved for 2 generations and ignore whats around you and whats happening to all your citizens, family, friends, yourself. Not when you clearly see how west has technological, moral and societal advantage in its approach and its getting bigger every year. The only exception is Belarus, and the only reason is that the dicktator there needs desperately strong continuous backing or he would be brought down in quick coup.
The fall didn't begin with Gorbachev, it began with the communist party being clueless at adapting to new situations, essentially what China managed to do after Mao, the Soviets didn't after Stalin and the rest. The regime ossified and fell apart, at first slowly and then rapidly.
Gorbachev just refused to spill even more blood.
Present circumstances in America are very different. When Putin took power, Russia's economy had been declining rapidly for a decade; then over his first decade, the GDP dectupled. If the US were to somehow achieve $600,000 GDP per capita by the end of Trump's current term, yeah, Americans would probably want to reevaluate their conventional wisdom about what good governance looks like. But I'm pretty confident that won't happen.
The GDP rise your talking about is to some extent an exchange rate phenonomena. Russia's currency collapsed in the early 90s, by the 00's it was able to strengthen and stabilize. Quality of life went down, but it was not proportionate to the collapse in GDP. Thinking about similar phenomenon occurring in the United States is kind of pointless, that would require a collapse in the dollars reserve currency status which would have dramatic ramifications world wide. The Dollar is the yardstick, if another currency became stronger, it would be the yardstick, and that's an entire regime change kind of for everybody. While Russia's currency can collapse in strength vis a vis the dollar, and then increase a great deal, but it was weaker than the dollar at every point. The collapse in its strength meant that it was difficult for the country to trade in that period. But Russia still had its domestic industry through the entire period, which wasn't affected to the degree that the collapse in trade and currency value would suggest,
Also the volatility of economic growth of smaller countries tends to be much higher than anything experienced by developed countries. When you start from a small scale, GDP jumps of 10x are hardly unheard of. While increases of such magnitude in an already developed country would be unprecedented.
Also, the Russian economy is just a series of frauds run by lawless oligarchs stacked on top of each other. The only limiting factor on them is when Putin randomly decides to throw one of them out of a window. It's a pure patrimonialist system, which is a system sustained by lawlessness, manipulation, and fraud. This is of course the truth of the fascist system itself, its simply an attempt to wrap the whole of society in one big patrimonialist network. There's a reason they had to invade Ukraine - the bills were coming due, and they knew the only way they could make good on promises they otherwise couldn't keep was a sustained program of national subjugation and exploitation. This was inevitable from the moment the system was set up. This system is inherently unstable.
The words of the participants in the system while it is ongoing are meaningless. They are wrapped in some kind of patrimonial network or another, supporting some kind of overhyped fraud or another that represents all their dreams and aspirations. They are censored, subject to constant manipulation, and deliberately manipulated with false flags and psy ops. Their whole society is designed as a giant cartwheel to shove people into various frauds. I can be sad for victims of fraud, yes, but that doesn't make them any easier to deal with before they give up on their expectations and stop believing the lies of the one who is defrauding them, who frequently sicks them on anyone who attempts to combat the fraud, telling them that "Actually that person is the one who's keeping you from getting your money!" Hitler arrayed millions of German youth upon fields of slaughter with such tactics once before, why would we expect any different outcome now? We should've known better.
You’re not wrong but those all happened _after_ the fall of the USSR. They weren’t the cause of its fall they were the cause of post-USSR Russia becoming an oligarchy.
By 1998 the shit had already hit the fan big time for the common people in Russia, all "thanks" to Shock Therapy (which you allude to at your point b)). That was the real tragedy, nothing a more "experienced" president could have fixed (other than doing what Putin ended up doing, which is trying to reverse some of the craziness of said Shock Therapy).
I write this from direct experience, as I grew up as a kid/adolescent in nearby Romania in the '90s, where we had our very own Shock Therapy. In fact my present political stance (a return to nationalism and a reversal of what globalisation has brought about) is heavily marked by that very traumatic period in my life (and the same thing is valid for many of my compatriots).
So you want to reverse the development in Romania over the last 3 decades [1] ? I agree that the way the transition from the Ceauşescu regime was handled was less than ideal to say the least. But let's not forget that rampant nationalism and isolism was what got Romania into the mess in the first ace. I would even argue that every time a government/regime is bringing out the nationalism card it is to cover up for rising inequality, decreasing quality of life and all sort of other issues. An appeal to the "nation" is just not necessary otherwise.
> So you want to reverse the development in Romania over the last 3 decades [1]
Not sure that "reverse" is the best word for it, but, yes, I want the huge societal inequalities that have been created during the last three decades to be "levelled" again. I know that this will probably suck (to use light language) for the winners of those last 3 decades, but that is life.
He's first and foremost a narcissist (strongly grandiose subtype, and all over the place on the communal/malignant axis).
That condition should make him ineligible for any position of power. This is what a society gets when it elects someone mentally ill (in the harmful-to-others rather than the typical harmful-to-ill-person sense).
I am continually astounded by how many people, even if you explain the symptoms to them, will be unable to see it - not just in this one case but in general. There is something in many people that makes them attracted to those who treat them awfully and consider them only slightly above things.
People can just listen to his biographer or many former aides, but they choose to believe what they want. Many religious supporters still think he's a Christian.
In order to see it, you must recognize the ways in which he fooled you. People would generally rather be fooled again than face the thought that they were fooled at some point in the past. And the more that they have been fooled, the stronger this bias is.
Trump is an absolute genius at fooling people in small ways, then over time ratcheting up the cognitive dissonance until he fools them in big ways. See https://specialto.thebulwark.com/ for a detailed explanation of how he did this with one of the many people that he has turned into puppets.
This is a good observation, but I think causality is reversed: narcissists by nature develop whatever skills will attract the most adoration.
Trump plays the strongman / oppressed white man card. If the populace valued different things he would happily parade around in negligé. He’s just playing to the audience, and it’s not narcissism so much as bullshit archetypes that they want.
Corporate politics doesn’t adequately punish the traits narcissists and sociopaths present. Quite the contrary, those traits can easily become assets in their careers.
Exactly. It's an evolutionarily beneficial trait. We're no longer competing with other species (why social traits developed), we're competing against each other (where the right amount of anti-social traits works best).
Unfortunately that is way outside too many people's Overton window. And, also unfortunately, I don't think the average human is sufficiently intelligent to understand why he should care.[note 1]
Throughout history, we see cycles of freedom and oppression, separated by either collapse or revolt.
- Collapse happens when anti-socials gain so much power in an organization (whether it's a corporation or state) that it starts to function so poorly that it's overtaken by competitors (or even destroys itself).
- Revolt happens when they gain/use that power too blatantly and people notice. Peaceful revolt is possible on the surface but ultimately, all true power is backed by violence - sometimes that violence is just thinly veiled behind multiple steps of action and reaction (unarmed protesters attacked by police will bring rocks and Molotovs next time which will cause even more attacks from the police which might escalate into civil war).
But right now we're at a point where oppressors have enough history to learn from. They don't care about collapse and revolt only happens when people are willing to act. So what they're doing right now is conditioning everyone that violence is wrong. This comes in many forms: bans on social media (every TOS forbids promoting violence these days), forced self-censorship (just watch a couple youtube shorts, good luck finding one where "kill" isn't spelled "k*ll" and bleeped out), zero-tolerance policies (school will punish both aggressor and target when they get into a fight), ...
Trump is a fascist (https://acoup.blog/2024/10/25/new-acquisitions-1933-and-the-...). Last time people like him got into power in the civilized world, one was shot and hung upside down from a gas station, the other killed himself in a bunker. But this time when people reached for the 4th box of liberty, they were almost universally shunned. So he got into power, elected by the stupid people, and to nobody's surprise immediately started dismantling the system which exists to keep him in check.
He will do it slowly enough that each time he takes a step towards his goal, he will only piss off a small portion of the people and there will never be enough organized opposition at once. At least this time the dictator-elect is so old he might snuff it from natural causes before he does too much damage.
But the average person will not learn from it. The idea that a group of people as large as tens or hundreds of millions needs one special individual at the top is the peak of human stupidity.
---
[note 1]: Some people see this as too arrogant to be said openly but them it becomes just an excuse for them to shut down their logical faculties and reject what I say based on primitive instincts, proving my point.
- Anyway, look at how many democracies use the plurality/FPTP voting system which is known to be pretty much the worst possible (https://rangevoting.org/).
- Look at how many people in the west will say that democracy is obviously good and dictatorship obviously bad but don't question why nearly all corporations have hierarchical (dictatorial) power structures.
- Look at how many people are OK with spending a third or half of their salary on rent, which is just free money that goes to people who contribute nothing to society.
- Look at how many people are unable to differentiate between morality (what is right) vs legality (what the state will penalize you for) and how even the language is warped to mix them (people saying "I did nothing wrong" when they are talking about breaking the rules, whether they are laws or whatever screed a subreddit mod came up with).
Like of the Nietzschan philosophy? So in the case of trump the idea is that his voters like him because he’s different from the “evil” aristocratic class that trump claimed to oppose (eg “drain the swamp”)?
I just think that most people (on both political sides) are not really better. If they would be given the position of power they would be corrupted and incompetent too.
So in a sense you got what you deserve - and your democracy is working.
That’s the key right? It’s world as content. Nothing means anything anymore as long as it gets spread on media platforms. The easiest way for the US to get out this downward spiral is to just ignore the medias coverage of ”politics”. But that’s not gonna happen is it? Gotta se what happens next!
If you truly believe that, the fix is the opposite of what the GOP is proposing. Freeze spending at today’s levels, raise taxes (uncap SS, add higher tax brackets, add a wealth tax, etc…), then let the economy grow naturally.
This wouldn’t be possible as the world’s reserve currency and provider of political stability. At incredibly low interest rates, most investments are positive ROI.
But by destroying the US’ position as reserve currency and establishing the country as too untrustworthy to do business with, Trump has made your statement true.
We can’t afford what we spend without those special economic benefits. And we just threw them away for no reason.
Trump and Republicans had a great hand in this (Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, Bush tax cuts, Trump tax cuts, PPP helicopter money for the rich), and are looking to double down with their current disaster of a bill. Hope you're opposing that.
> So, "if people kiss your ass enough, they get contract" does not seem to be a long-term viable strategy. (Exhibit A: Musk.)
But Musk initiated it, by going against Trump's bill. The new conclusion is "to get contract, you must kiss ass so much and you can't say anything bad, ever"
> It's wild that a president can say, "I don't like Elon anymore, so out of retaliation, I'm canceling all his government contracts," and ~40% of the country doesn't see that as corruption in any way, shape, or form.
They didn't see it that way when he was doing it to people he didn't like, why would they see it that way when he is doing it to a person he just decided that he didn't like?
Elon, of course, as usual, is responding to someone upsetting him with accusations of pedophilia.
* those who were concerned about it happening to others have seen it happen so many times now that they are jaded and it's a bit schaudenfreude. Those earlier cases (Harvard, law firms, etc.) have yet to actually finish going through the courts
* there is a subset that is just super cult of personality around the current president and will bend over backwards to justify actions
If Musk is engaging in corruption with respect to the US government, then what could be done to stop it. Whatever the answer, almost certainly Musk's ties to the government would need to be broken, including contracts and funding.
It's not like the previous party in charge didn't threaten the exact same thing. People still aren't seeing that both parties are descending into the sort of third world mindset while accusing the other of being the sole cause. This is a doom spiral in the making.
That's a hard argument to hold in the context of recent history. Maybe for the better, maybe for worse, merit has taken a back seat in many cases as we prioritized other factors.
What's interesting to me here is that the executive branch has authority to change these contracts. I do understand that's how it has worked for a while, and you could argue that these contracts are part of executing on congress's mandate, but I personally would prefer the executive branch not have this power.
If it were up to me congressional committees would be responsible for this as part of budgeting responsibilities, and the executive branch would be much weaker than it is today.
As with so many other things the executive branch is doing right now, it doesn’t have exclusive power to do this. Congress sets the rules for how procurement works.
I think you're getting to the distinction between power and authority. Congress may have the authority to decide procurement (I'm not 100% sure on this, going with the discussion), but functionally the president may have the power to force their will through the system.
And nobody listened to the people saying that this concentration of power would be a disaster if the office was ever held by a craven jerkwad. And guess what happened!
This is what Trump is doing to Harvard right now. He even is pushing legislation to tax their endowment and also has an executive order to deny them and on them foreign students.
...and to law firms before then, US government contractors (worldwide[1]). If OP thinks thinks this is a nee Trump play, they haven't been paying attention.
2. The US embassy tried to get a Swedish city to agree to some anti-DEI clause in a vendor agreement. Using government money to win ideological arguments is S.O.P. for the Trump II admin.
I remember when Obama threatened Fox Sports mergers due to how Fox News covered his first term in office, and trued to get the Saudis to sign a pro-choice vendor agreement with the embassy. Biden also threatened law firms that represented Trump and threatened to ban them from government buildings and revoke security clearance. It was the standard thing for dems to do when dealing with political opponents.
Both sides are totally the same thing, there's nothing to be done.
> Biden also threatened law firms that represented Trump and threatened to ban them from government buildings and revoke security clearance.
I did a few quick searches for more information about this claim of yours. I also asked Claude and ChatGPT to research it. I can not find any sources to back up this claim of yours. Can you source it for me?
It was a rhetorical device ascribing things Trump actually did to Democratic presidents to show parent's false equivalency. Everything I listed were things Trump did, though I changed the other parties involved to preserve the political dynamics as best as I could.
At this point I'm just happy these two are turning on each other - the more they hurt each other, the less time they have to focus on the rest of us. 6 months was a long time to wait, but I suppose dismantling the machinery of state that was trying to force his companies to follow the law wasn't going to be a quick job.
Everything about the current US government is wild. Yes, cancelling government contracts because of this stupid fight is corruption, but so is everything else. There's not much that either Trump or Musk do that's not corrupt.
I'd like to see both of them lose their power, because they only abuse it.
More like fascist brain, those who haven't bought into the decades of propaganda recognize this benefits no one. Fascism is not a natural state of mind.
On the contrary, I think it appeals to our baser instincts. Primates, from whom we evolved, settle their power disputes in EXACTLY the manner of "might makes right," and that isn't just about the individuals competing for power, but the dynamics of the crowd and how their allegiances and values shift according to who is in power.
That is true. But the dubiousness of the whole thing starts a long way before that. Why is Musk there at all? Because we are sliding into neo-feudalistic conditions in which a court of the richest people steer the affairs of state and shape them in their own favor. And we've known what Trump is like all along. We didn't have to deduce that from the fact that he is now quarrelling with Musk.
I'm not sure this is a new phenomenon. Graft has been a part of governance in every era. Typically, pandering to special interests is proportional to the government's slice of the economic pie. As the state interventions increase, so does the ability for bureaus to grant favors.
What is somewhat unique here, is the brazen and flippant nature of the funding cut. I'm sure if we looked, we could find similar cases in US history.
Author Patrick Newman has written on the topic of cronyism in US history. It is interesting to read the historical narrative framed from the perspective of who was lobbying and looting.
I think there has always been this type of corruption. The interesting thing this time is how open it is, and how clearly visible it is in the stock market, where who is president results in swings of hundreds of billions of dollars. This includes both Trumps corruption for (and now against Tesla/SpaceX) and Bidens lawfare against his them.
So far this is all talk, in effect non of the contracts got created because of that and so far non have been canceled because of that. This is all just media whoring around.
“President Trump said on Saturday that he believed his relationship with Elon Musk was over after the two sparred publicly on social media this week, and he warned there would be “serious consequences” if Mr. Musk financed candidates to run against Republicans who voted in favor of the president’s domestic policy bill.”
Higher education and research are already being affected. Those reputations aren't quickly rebuilt.
Same with trust on trade and reliability as a defence ally.
Even when Trump is replaced, he had accelerated the exposure of the fragility of the base US system of government. The fact one bad actor can upset many long established apple carts is not something really forgotten.
> by the time Trump is through America will lie in ruins
If you had to make that concrete, what would that look like?
GDP growth under 2% annually for >3 years?
Dollar losing >50% of its value against a basket of major currencies?
Credit rating downgrade below AA- by major agencies?
Loss of reserve currency status (measured by <40% of global reserves in USD)?
Interstate commerce disruption lasting >30 days?
Mass emigration of >2 million Americans annually?
I'd happily take the other side on any of those, name your price.
Funding is already falling ie NSF disbursements so I’d expect the h-index to fall off significantly. So sure patents will fall, journal pubs will fall, enrollment will fall, staff count will fall, total experiment count will fall, grant count will fall.
I think this was always true, it’s just that most presidents add a few extra clauses to the requirements instead of blatantly saying they’re going to cancel contracts.
This whole article is speculation about a war of words on social media from two days ago. You are further stretching the chain of inference and adding in some statistics without any citation.
>One industry source, speaking on background, dismissed the exchanges as “bluster” that neither Musk nor Trump would actually implement
> ~40% of the country doesn't see that as corruption in any way, shape, or form.
I'm definitely in agreement with the 60 percent. This should be unthinkable and political suicide. Openly speculating on if you can use the government as personal retaliation is absolutely undemocratic.
So why is it so hard for me to care in this case? Because Elon Musk has used the government in the exact same way. He just got done cancelling random contracts he didn't like. He just circumvented democracy to play his little doge game.
It is really hard to care about cheating when it happens to a cheater. Disgust at this move against SpaceX or Tesla has to start with consequences for Elon. If this is wrong, then Elon must be jailed.
Did this only become 'wild' when it applied to Elon? Also, this Elon that you speak of, isn't he the DOGE Elon? Isn't he the Nazi salute Elon? Or perhaps there's some other Elon that I'm unaware of.
This is literally the Department of Goes Around Comes Around. Elon is Trump's Berezovsky.
It's not ethics or morality, it's just "not being a child." A president not personally retaliating against a critic doesn't need to have anything to do with ethics, it's just requires a post-middle-school mentality of "I may not be happy with this person but I [my country] can still benefit from things they do."
Being an adult child has moral and ethical consequences.
Behaviours and emotions that are totally legit and tolerated in a child are no longer so in an adult.
An adult that has all the privileges and freedoms of adulthood over childhood, like the ability to vote, drink, drive and hold an office, also has to abide by the moral obligations of being an adult.
But if you're rich enough (or poor enough, hah) nobody's gonna hold you to "adult behavior" standards. Is there really a moral or ethical aspect to "don't get into a shouting match on Twitter"? Or is it simply childish?
In 2016, that would have been the case due to popular vote and electoral college vote not matching. However, 2024’s popular and electoral college match show the cracks are in the racist and sexist and apathetic voter base.
It’s not just the democratic process itself, but the institutions around it. The main reason Trump isn’t in jail is because the Republican Supreme Court repeatedly protected him, even to the point of inventing new ahistorical doctrines. Once one of the major parties is no longer committed to of law we’re in uncharted territory.
My point is Trump also won the popular vote, which means the people don’t want the traitor in jail either. Institutions are only as good as the people that compose them, in this case the institution is the country as a whole.
It's been going on a long time. Democrats and Republicans, especially in the Pentagon, have bought influence of politicians to get billions of tax dollars.
So you should change the comment to say "most Democrat and Republican voters in the primaries apparently wont vote out those who give or take bribes." That would be correct.
Jethro's advice to Moses in God's Word is still good advice for voters today. If a politician ever meets this criteria, then we'll see amazing things happen. That's below with verse 21 highlighted:
"19 Now obey my voice; I will give you advice, and God be with you! You shall represent the people before God and bring their cases to God, 20 and you shall warn them about the statutes and the laws, and make them know the way in which they must walk and what they must do. 21 Moreover, look for able men from all the people, men who fear God, who are trustworthy and hate a bribe, and place such men over the people as chiefs of thousands, of hundreds, of fifties, and of tens. 22 And let them judge the people at all times. Every great matter they shall bring to you, but any small matter they shall decide themselves. So it will be easier for you, and they will bear the burden with you. 23 If you do this, God will direct you, you will be able to endure, and all this people also will go to their place in peace.” (Exodus 18:19-23) (ESV)
Government contracts should not be based on whether or not the president likes the CEO, and the CEO says enough good things about the president.
If you can cancel contacts not based on merit, then it should extend you're likely willing to grant contracts not based on merit and based on nepotism instead.
This is literally the path that led the USSR to ruin. If anyone says anything you don't like, their funding is gone, even if it shoots the country in the foot. If people kiss your ass enough, they get contracts, even if it's clear they're just spending the money on hookers and coke and yachts and not delivering on promises, and it shoots the country in the head.