I find myself seeking out non-doomer people to read, since the doom and gloom doesn't really help, it's just demotivating. "Look for the helpers" and all that.
It's a particular and kind of peculiar attitude, because objectively "things ain't great" and it's really easy to dwell on that. But we also need some hope.
This is... just crazy. One of those mostly boring bits of plumbing that has been left to professionals throughout the entire 50 years of my life - and they're trying to wreck it.
> One of those mostly boring bits of plumbing that has been left to professionals throughout the entire 50 years of my life - and they're trying to wreck it.
There is even a more boring and obscure bit of plumbing, the Treasury payment system, that they/DOGE went after last year:
It's also completely in character with Trump's behaviour. He is a dictator who wants what he wants and can't abide anyone standing in his way. He wants absolute authority to do as he wishes. This extends to removing foreign heads of state so he can access their countries resources and also threatening 'allies' so he can take their territory. We're watching him systematically destroy any good will or moral authority that the USA held.
It goes back before Donald was in charge of the Trump real estate business. It started with a really really shitty father who desired a “killer” business instinct in his children (read: cruelty) above all else.
Reading some of Mary Trump’s books will give some insight on the family that Donald grew up in. No love, all cruelty.
Donald is just a rich kid who inherited a big business and learned nothing but cruelty from his daddy.
Remember back when he had a TV show and his catchphrase was the hilarious and creative "you're fired"? The entire concept of The Apprentice as it was pitched to him circled around Trump being the god of business. I wonder if having that kind of a personal brand, alongside the mountains of self-aggrandizing merch could in any way indicate a total unwillingness to exist alongside anyone but worshippers and yes-men...
I don’t think the main issue is that this type of person has been put in charge, it’s that the system can fail because of the will of one person. It kind of reveals that the guardrails were decorum and at its core Americans elects dictators that up until now chose to behave well.
More generally I think in an age of social media democracies will have to evolve to prevent leadership cults. Maybe something like the head of state being indirectly elected by local representatives.
“The system” includes the voting public. If a sufficient fraction of the population decides to override all common sense and vote a selfish conman into ultimate executive power then they can’t make the shocked Pikachu face when the rest of the political establishment fails to curtail his abuses.
There was an interview with an otherwise “intelligent” person in 2024 who admitted he knew Trump is corrupt and would mercilessly abuse the position of President but decided to vote for him anyway because he thought that checks and balances would be sufficient.
This is like putting a fox in charge of the chicken coop and hoping the neighbour’s dog will stop it eating your chickens!
It's also for very stupid reasons: The fed dropping rates to the degree that would satisfy Donald Trump would greatly accelerate inflation which in turn would further upset voters, who would in turn blame Donald Trump (just like they did Biden before).
Is it just a cynical view that enough voters can be convinced it's the other side at fault?
Someone who supports trump, please let me know the logic on this. Genuinely. I'm trying to read other places about these charges but they're just so slanted that they're not really trustworthy. Is there anything to this, or is it really just to pressure the federal reserve?
Exactly. He thinks he knows better than the experts. He thinks lower interest rates are good and people saying they should be higher are just trying to make him look bad. Nothing he does is a clever gambit.
This model makes the most sense to me. If you just model it as: Trump wants to do things that make Trump look good, everything he's done fits into it quite nicely. If you want to predict his next move, think to yourself, what does Trump think will make him look the best to his adoring supporters?
Logically, conquering Greenland makes zero sense and is only damaging to the United States. But to his supporters, it will make Trump look powerful and good. Which is why he's talking about it, and why I think there's a decent chance that he's going to do it. I just hope there are enough sensible people left in his idiocracy cabinet to stop him.
I don't support Trump but I see the reasoning him and Bessent have. They want to lower the interest rate so that they can also drop the rate at which they issue debt/treasuries. They seem to think they are too financially constrained but will bankrupt themselves even faster if they hold big treasury auctions at today's rates.
It'll also lead to the general public feeling inflationary impacts. I think the government would cut relief checks to mitigate this and stir public sentiment their way, but it probably wouldn't be enough to maintain current standards of living.
I implore you to stop being credulous before it's too late. Trump supporters deeply believe, and are not shy about saying, that anyone who stops Trump from achieving his political goals should be imprisoned or murdered.
I have a family member like this who I interact with almost every day. When Renee Good was fatally shot in the face three times this family member said that she deserved it for "getting in the way" and that if she just ignored them she wouldn't have been murdered. With all of the video recordings that have come out and been extensively disseminated, pretty much everyone knows that she moved out of the way and stopped, and it was Jonathan Ross who initiated the encounter. There is no way to "get out of the way" and "ignore them" when armed figures enact force on whims. But people like my family member believe that these armed figures direct violence towards those who are dangerous rather than simply directing violence to anybody who is close enough to hurt. You cannot reason with people like that because they retroactively justify any harm in order to protect their belief in the systems of enforcement. To them order and structure are more important and valuable than agency and safety or in some cases even life itself.
Conservatives all over have 1 disease. They are incapable of abstract empathy. Until it personally happens to them, or someone very very close to them, they are incapable of noticing injustices or hurts.
That isn't true -- they just prioritize a different set of hurts. To be similarly reductive, leftists seem to only be able to sympathize with criminals and poor decision makers -- not crime victims, or hard workers. The leftist perspective just ignores individual agency.
I know many. They’re good people. But they’re willing to be indifferent to violence if the perpetrators are not on their team. Everyone does this to some degree, but their tendency to align on messaging is much higher than e.g. folks going at each other about their pet war.
They put a great deal of effort into talking about political violence and implying that Democrats are a source of rioting and terrorism. The indifference is only to their own violence.
And right now many have posted “lock him up” on Twitter in response to this news. Many of these users probably couldn’t describe the federal reserve or share anything at all about Powell. Their cult zealotry continues.
If citing the behavior of the most rabbid supporters is allowed (because that's who shows up to campaign rallies), then it's not hard to find an equivalent on the left. /r/all is full of people wanting various people in the epstein files, including trump, to be locked up on spurious associations.
Locking people up for crimes is different from locking them up because they are your political opponents. I don't think I've seen people on the left yelling about locking Mitch McConnell up, for instance, even if he bears much responsibility for all of this.
I think that's the point. None could name a crime, and that didn't matter.
Meanwhile, 34 actual felony convictions, court finding misuse of millions in charity funds, an attempted coup, being found liable for sexual assault, SCOTUS having to formally place the president above the law to avoid prosecution... none of it even moved the needle for those same folks.
>I think that's the point. None could name a crime, and that didn't matter.
From a 10s skim on wikipedia:
>Some experts, officials, and members of Congress contended that Clinton's use of a private email system and a private server violated federal law, specifically 18 U.S. Code § 1924, regarding the unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or materials, as well as State Department protocols and procedures, and regulations governing recordkeeping.
I'm not saying those allegations are true, but to claim "none could name a crime" suggests you didn't even try.
>Meanwhile, 34 actual felony convictions, court finding misuse of millions in charity funds, an attempted coup, being found liable for sexual assault, SCOTUS having to formally place the president above the law to avoid prosecution... none of it even moved the needle for those same folks.
It's clearly a rationalisation. Nobody is rabidly averse to private email servers and calling for prison for every politician who used a private email server. It's Hillary specifically.
Whereas everyone thinks that all child rapists should be in prison!
> It's clearly a rationalisation. Nobody is rabidly averse to private email servers and calling for prison for every politician who used a private email server. It's Hillary specifically.
I think the world would be a better place if politicians with access to critical information were held to suitable security requirements under threats of punishment for laxity.
This would absolutely also include Hesgeth inviting a journalist to an airstrike planning meeting on Signal.
And likewise Trump putting boxes full of state secrets in a disused bathroom and on a stage.
The Trump administration are clearly hypocrites, clearly trying to throw the book at everyone else while bemoaning even the slightest consequences for themselves. I wouldn't call for Clinton's arrest, but I will say that anywhere that would arrest her should've given a much more severe punishment to Trump.
Then again, I'm not even American so I genuinely don't actually care if y'all leak state secrets like a basketball net leaks water.
Is there some well of non-rabid Trump supporters that I'm not aware of? I'm always open to the idea that I'm in a bubble, but my experience is that even the least rabid Trump supporters are completely unwilling to criticize him or oppose something he wants. Did any Trump supporters, for example, criticize the prosecution of James Comey?
>Is there some well of non-rabid Trump supporters that I'm not aware of? I'm always open to the idea that I'm in a bubble, but my experience is that even the least rabid Trump supporters are completely unwilling to criticize him or oppose something he wants.
In the context of the previous comment, the "non-rabbid" (and probably median) supporter would be someone voting Trump because they think they trust him more on the economy/immigration or whatever. They might be indifferent to his claims that he'll lock up his political opponents, or think that they're actually guilty of something, but that's not the same as being "rabbid" (ie. showing up to rallies and chanting "lock her up").
There's a difference between supporters and "the people who, in a single election, voted for him". The former tend to be pretty rabid and unmovable. Some portion of the voters are less firm in their support.
Right! With a non-fascist politician, what you're describing would be extremely abnormal; the median Biden supporter, Obama supporter, or Bush supporter would routinely take positions their guy didn't agree with even though they supported him overall. But the range of Trump supporter opinions stretches only from "politely support everything he wants to do" to "be performatively mean about everything he wants to do".
>But the range of Trump supporter opinions stretches only from "politely support everything he wants to do" to "be performatively mean about everything he wants to do".
You're basing this off... what? You're missing the options of "I'm indifferent about this", or "I don't agree with him on this but still think he's better as a whole than the alternative".
I'm missing "I don't agree with him on this" because I don't hear Trump supporters say that. Trump doesn't allow them to - he thinks it's wrong for anyone to disagree with him and illegal for anyone to try and stop him from doing something he wants to do. Again, the whole context here is that Trump is trying to jail one of his own appointees for failing to enact his preferred monetary policy.
> It is. What's more, such support is roughly the same across both parties, but both parties vastly overestimate the other side's support.
The difference between the two parties is that one elected a leader that agrees with that minority. This 2012 scene from The Newsroom outlines the difference:
I don't think this addresses the main point of my question, though. Do you know any prominent Democrats, e.g., representatives, senators, or presidents, who have called for a Republican to be killed?
> "SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!!" Trump went on. "LOCK THEM UP???" He also called for the lawmakers' arrest and trial, adding in a separate post that it was "SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH."
So more broadly, calling for any sort of capital punishment is also "political violence"? Even if you're against capital punishment, comparing it to something like Charlie Kirk getting shot is disingenuous. When people think of "political violence" they're thinking of the former, not capital punishment. Lumping the two together is like "do you support criminals? No? Why do you support Nelson Mandela, a convicted criminal?"
> calling for any sort of capital punishment is also "political violence"?
No, of course not, but I'm sure you knew that, hence constructing this straw man so you can knock it over and claim victory.
However, and more to the actual point, calling for capital punishment strictly because you disagree with the factual words someone chose to write might reasonably be considered "political violence". Especially when the words in question clearly call out your potential political intentions and remind people that said intentions can be battled in a particular way.
I consider January 6 to have falsified all research along these grounds. I acknowledge, sure, that virtually nobody wants to see gun battles in the street. But if you can talk yourself into believing that a mob sent to overturn the election and install the loser doesn't count as partisan violence, you can talk yourself into believing all kinds of catastrophes don't count.
>But if you can talk yourself into believing that a mob sent to overturn the election and install the loser doesn't count as partisan violence, you can talk yourself into believing all kinds of catastrophes don't count.
How's this different than say...
>polls show 99% (or whatever) of people are against crime
>voters elect a soft-on-crime politician, crime goes up
>"I consider the fact that the soft-on-crime politicians got elected to have falsified all research that people are against crime"
It's not different. If my city elected a mayor whose buddies committed a robbery 4 years ago, and his first act in office was to parole the robbers, I would be incandescently furious and definitely say that anyone who supports him is pro-crime.
On a purely pedantic point, whatever he's advocating for isn't "political violence" any more than calling for the death penalty isn't "political violence". Yes, the death penalty plausibly could count as "violence", and the process of instituting it is political, but if you look at the questions in the first source, it's clear they're talking about stuff like politicians/activists getting killed, not the state doling "violence" as some sort of punishment.
Moving on to the actual video, if the implication is that someone says [absurd thing] on national TV, it must mean that the party (or its electorate) as a whole must support [absurd thing], then:
The guy end up apologizing, so what's the issue? I guess the expectation is that he should be canceled/fired or whatever? What about similarly absurd stuff from the left? It's not hard to find stuff like "racism = power + oppression" that's casually mentioned on npr or whatever without major pushback, even though most democrats don't believe in this type of stuff. Or is talking about killing people a special case? If so, what does that mean about discussions on the death penalty?
This response is funny to me, because there’s been a massive drop in rightwing violence in the US since Trump was elected… but that’s because state-sponsored violence isn’t counted towards the statistics.
Pretty funny how there aren’t any more Proud Boy marches, yeah? Couldn’t be that they’re all getting paid six figure salaries to round up brown people at Kavanaugh stops…
But yes. Most left wing thought leaders count state-sponsored violence as political violence, and that often includes the death penalty.
>This response is funny to me, because there’s been a massive drop in rightwing violence in the US since Trump was elected… but that’s because state-sponsored violence isn’t counted towards the statistics.
>Pretty funny how there aren’t any more Proud Boy marches, yeah? Couldn’t be that they’re all getting paid six figure salaries to round up brown people at Kavanaugh stops…
Yes, that's how protests typically work. If things are going your way, you stop protesting. Nobody is protesting for gay marriage in California because they already won.
I don’t want to assume your politics, but saying that the group of people calling for racial purity and ethnic cleansing don’t find it necessary to protest anymore because things are going their way is very much not a good sign.
Fucking wild. You can't get more mainstream opinion than this guy. Trump regularly has phone calls on air with this person, he's isn't a random someone on TV. He is one of the administrations goto mouthpieces for communicating this administration's policy on the largest news station. They are workshoping/normalizing MURDERING UNDESIRABLES on their MAINSTREAM MEDIA by hosts that the president ROUTINELY USE TO BROADCAST HIS MESSAGE. My point is THEY ARE OK WITH KILLING PEOPLE THEY DON'T WANT. A meak 'my bad' doesn't mean shit.
And you waive it away. 'Bro said my bad dude, what more do you want? You think he shouldn't be an administration mouthpiece just because he wants extra-judicial killing? Cancel culture'. You are literally Martin Niemöller:
"First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist"
...
He was literally you. He justified their calls for 'only killing Communists and only because they are bad and want to do bad things....' just like you.
So for fun I looked up your comment history and you aren't this dumb.
You are smart enough to know that homelessness is a HUGE political issue in the USA, the calling for death of homeless people is EXTREMELY political.
You are smart enough to know that FOX News is mainstream for the Right, now a few randos.
You are smart enough to know that reporters that maintain direct lines of communication with the President and routinely have interviews with him on their shows are considered mouthpieces for an administration, even if not directly employed by the administration.
Why are you posting in such bad faith? Is your position just indefensible so you have to resort to propaganda style communication and pretending you are dumb?
If you genuinely believe that, then I have some hope that the very toxic messages I see daily in political social media, saying exactly what's being alleged here, aren't deeply held beliefs but a tiny fringe.
Fox News, a major American media company, had one of their main personalities say that homeless people should just be killed by lethal injection on air. The desire for killing for random reasons is so mainstream to them that their media is comfortable stating out loud people they don't want/are undesirable should just be killed. Their media organs are workshopping/normalizing killing undesirables.
I don’t know if you truly mean that or you’re just being glib. But if you’re serious, I’d strongly urge you to get help or just talk to someone you know and trust; even if you disagree on a lot of things.
All of the Trump supporters I knew in meatspace reassured me that he would never do his insane tariffs, and then when he did insisted that it was a good idea and they never thought otherwise. So I no longer trust that they're telling me the truth about what they want or what they would support.
Maybe eight years ago. But in my experience, Trump supporters today have no line he can cross which will cause them to stop supporting him. They might claim to, but time after time, they just find a way to justify and double down.
I continue to be surprised by people who have seen things unfold as they have over less than a year of this administration and still somehow believe we'll continue to have "free and fair" elections anytime in the near future.
We have over, and over again seeing virtually all of the "checks and balances" we learned about as kids being overridden without consequence.
This community of all other should be aware of how easy it is to exert total control of information (I'm still surprised this article is on the home page). Everyone consumes almost all of their information through digital, corporate controlled means. Even people getting together a organically socializing in bars, something that was common 30 years ago, has been replaced with online interactions. Trump does not need mandate from the people to continue to rule the country.
> Trump Regrets Not Seizing Voting Machines After 2020 Election: In an interview, the president said he should have ordered the National Guard to take the machines
We've had a number of free and fair elections in the past year, including some where the Trump-supported candidate lost. That doesn't mean we're out of the woods, but Trump has not historically been willing to go out of his way to protect the electoral fortunes of people who aren't himself, and at least some of his allies are well aware that the peace and security we presently enjoy is not guaranteed in a post-democratic US.
When it comes to harm on this scale, always expect the worst, because the harm will be generational. More importantly, Trump doesn't give a flying fuck about anything outside of the executive branch and below the federal level, because the federal level executive has control of the instruments of war. And he has already proven that nobody manning those instruments of war will disobey him. The Marines got recalled, but the National Guard didn't. This latest thing with Venezuela is just one more section of the window that's been wiped clear enough for him to see what he can do. The final bit that's still obscured is whether or not he can give direct orders to the military and security agencies to subjugate the state levels of government. I've got a large amount of certainty that within the next week or two even that bit of obscurity won't remain.
As I always tell people, if you're right there's no point in arguing about it, so the only thing I would say is that you owe it to yourself to check your predictions. Set a reminder for January 25 to confirm whether Trump has ordered the military and security agencies to invade any state capitols. I did this a few times last year, and immigration policy is really the only topic where the "expect the worst" heuristic has worked for me.
My personal belief is that he will try it and it will fail, but that will of course lead to the Coast Guard and the National Guard being rescinded from the DHS and governor's control by decree and being placed under the Navy and the Army respectively. Currently this power exists in theory, but it's never truly been implemented, even during World War II. This is something that Hegseth publicly considered when West Virginia's state Congress decided that the extended deployment of the state's National Guard troops to Washington D.C. was not within presidential power and ordered them back.
Im not convinced Trump cares anymore. For whatever reason that may be, he has decided there is nothing that can stop him at this point. There is no congress or court that will hold him accountable. His supporters are unwavering and drunk on unchecked power right now.
especially as if the risk premium for the US increases because of the methods used to challenge Fed independence, the rates that truly matter, treasury yields, will increase causing limiting how much consumers can actually benefit from lower headline rates
The MAGA crowd and their lickspittles/enablers are so far removed from reality that they only believe their leader.
And many others will vote for system-wreckers (broadly: conservatives) again, because the democrats cannot fix much of the damage done within the next legislative periods, let alone just one... even if the miracle of a trifecta happens and SCOTUS loses its majority on top of it. Rinse, repeat.
These are the very people who would help him rewrite history that yes he indeed did earn the Nobel Peace Prize as it is obviously and prominently displayed in his office, the words and records of the Nobel committee be damned.
blame Donald Trump (just like they did Biden before)
Respectfully disagree. Republican presidents get a lot more economic leeway than Dem presidents, especially from the media. This has puzzled me my entire adult life. Inflation will bother media and public, but not to the same extent it did 2021-22.
Big media works for the capital class, community newspapers and other forms of local news that are largely pro-public have been gutted. The remaining large-ish public media orgs (PBS, NPR) are currently under attack to consolidate corporate-friendly agenda-setting.
Case in point, you’d think by how things are reported that Trump brought down inflation. But inflation was down when Biden left office and Trump has done nothing to improve it.
There hasn't been a single point in my shorter life so far where things have been this out of control. The fed is supposed to be as non-political as possible. I know politics and the economy are intertwined, but tell me how this won't end up a disaster please. How do we get back to the USA we had even 10 years ago?
> but tell me how this won't end up a disaster please.
Unless you want to split hairs and argue that "disaster" is really only in the middle of the spectrum of plausible outcomes... then there is no outcome here that isn't a disaster.
At *best* this only moderately raises inflation in the short-term and somehow the rest of the world isn't shaken too much and the USD somehow still remains a reserve currency.
I'm in the "USD looses reserve currency status in 6-48 months" camp but there are some reasonable arguments against this.
This is the second or third comment I’ve seen online that says this. I’m curious how do you conclude the fed has “never been non-political?” Is this just a matter of using the right terminology? The term “non-political” (also “independent”) isn’t concerned with each board member’s individual party affiliation, or how they vote in elections. It just means that management of the fed and importantly its monetary policy I.e. the federal rate, be guided by data; not influenced by short term goals of politicians and especially not influenced by the President or his administration.
(Edit) all that to say, maybe that’s what you meant by “never at an individual level”?
I have looked at individual votes for far too many years, and they often are politically aligned as per the respective state of the voter. This is not a coincidence, and it's not something to overlook. If the votes were guided by data alone, this pattern would not exist, but it does.
And it's pitiful that he has to be a Republican for people to credit him with sincerity. I think as much as partisanship itself, poisoning discourse by labeling appeals to evidence or procedural integrity as "partisan" proves too much and gets rid of objective reality entirely, creating space for bad faith actors.
I always appreciate when people make comments like this. It helps identify the trolls or people so completely outside of reality you can mark them as untrustworthy and ignore whatever they say.
I'm sure a lot of Indian exporters thought they were amused outsiders too, until he randomly applied a 50% tariff to their country. Nearly everyone who imagines that Trump is a sideshow who couldn't possibly affect them is wrong.
Just posted on that same subject. That stupid touchpad... I'd be typing along and then I guess some portion of my thumb towards the palm would brush it and WOOSH, the mouse pointer would warp across the screen and I'd be typing in some other window.
I used XPS laptops with Ubuntu for years and thought they were great. The last one I got, though, at the last place I worked, had that weird, 'seamless trackpad' or whatever they call it. I couldn't stand the thing. I much prefer the basic trackpad on the $250 Chromebook I use for personal email/browsing these days.
It was a maddening guessing game, where occasionally - but not always - the edge of my lower thumb would touch the track pad and send the mouse pointer warping off to some other part of the screen while I was typing.
A lot of the Starlink and other contraband uplinks are using ipv6, allowing connectivity for people the regime doesn't want to have contact with the rest of the world. They don't want the revolution broadcast or popularized.
Since starlink supports v6, starlink users can p2p communicate with other v6 users.
Both starlink and local carriers don't provide proper legacy connectivity, they are encumbered by cgnat so p2p does not work. Without p2p communications, users are forced into a client-server model and it's much easier to block a small number of servers rather than millions of potential peers.
"drop" is doing a lot of work there; as these things are slow and take time, the "drop" is often a reduction in the rate of appreciation (which, everything else being the same, should roughly be equal inflation ± some fudge factor for desirability of the area).
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