I believe a big part of this phenomenon is the rise in public awareness of the efficacy of ADHD stimulants, specifically Adderall, Vyvanse, Ritalin, etc.
Eventually the genie left the bottle and people realized these medications make most (not all) people feel very good. Scott's written about this before, but they basically bump up your personal "productivity" metric. This effect is observed for those who suffer ADHD symptoms and those who don't.
Basically, these meds can allow a clinically unmotivated and lethargic person to clean their room and buy groceries and call the bank.
They can also allow a 'normal' person to work for 12h without a break then come home and continue writing their novel.
There are now online ADHD "clinics" which let you take an online assessment (!) before a 30min meeting with a doctor who'll then prescribe you amphetamines. If you're someone who knows to say, the process has been incredibly streamlined.
There have been many books written on the subject, as in my previous comment, I suggested The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.
It's not antisemitic or even remotely conspiratorial to acknowledge that Israel and Israeli-Americans have been very successful in exerting influence on the federal government. I think it's bad-faith well-poisoning for you to bring up nonsense like the Protocols.
Correct. My understanding is that there's no individual lobby group in America with more influence on foreign policy than AIPAC.
The book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy is a great read which fairly and methodically outlines how this influence works and what effects it's had on American policy, spanning decades.
This book was incredibly hard for me to read. It was well written, well cited, and nothing it said was wrong. But it was like doomscrolling in book form. It left me feeling hopeless.
How would we know? If they're really successful about it, wouldn't it look something like, say, ~2 years of almost complete inaction while Israel flattens Gaza?
Israel is a solitary, functioning, modern liberal democracy surrounded by repressive, autocratic states. Until about a minute ago, supporting liberal democracy was important to all US administrations.
The people of the US are (until maybe(?) a minute ago) largely supportive of Israel. Partly because of a (relatively) large and visible Jewish population (THANK YOU EUROPE!), and partly because it has been a majority Protestant Christian nation with an affinity God's Chosen People.
You don't need to go all QAnon to figure this out.
> Israel is a solitary, functioning, modern liberal democracy surrounded by repressive, autocratic states. Until about a minute ago, supporting liberal democracy was important to all US administrations.
IDK about functioning or modern or liberal, but the rest seems about right.
I have never been to Israel. But for a small country that has always existed under a threat of the destruction, not just by the county of Gaza, but occupied Lebanon, Iran, and basically some large population of every surrounding Muslim nation, they've done quite well. I'd say very modern. And given the penchant of the polity to protest and a free and rambunctious press, I'd also say very liberal.
You may have different definitions of these words.
I don’t think an open apartheid state that regularly supports the illegal dispossession of homes from civilians for a project of religious conquest can be considered to be liberal or modern or functional. But I suppose if I didn’t think Palestinians existed or were deserving of human rights then I could arrive at your same conclusion.
Personally I’d rather visit Jordan or Lebanon than Israel any day of the week.
Did Lebanon declare war on Israel through the legislature or by Presidential decree? Did the the people demand that Hezbollah, under the control of democratically elected representatives, launch rockets every day across the border?
Jordan: "According to Freedom House, Jordan is ranked as the fifth-freest Arab country, but still regarded as "not free" in the 2021 report. It is also classified as having an authoritarian regime according to a 2020 democracy index."
I wonder how many Americans know about the night when Kissinger et al activated entire US military, incl nuclear forces, just so some soviet weapons wouldn't reach Egypt during Israel's Yum kippur war- all while Nixon slept. Soviet union was so taken aback, they immediately folded. Of course they would, they treated this thing like a minor regional conflict thousands miles away from home. Their mistake was believing American govt would do the same.
Or about the USS Liberty. A US navy ship that was destroyed by the Israelis. Israel said it was a case of mistaken identity and President Johnson accepted that explanation. Admiral Moorer, the 7th chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, accused President Lyndon B. Johnson of having covered up that the attack was a deliberate act.
Well, usually the story told to counter this is that he said that Israel wouldn’t get one bullet until Egypt blockaded Straits of Tiran. Kissinger didn’t exactly have a track record of saying philo-Semitic things.
That's very likely the case, though I don't think either of us have the details to make that assertion confidently. My comment was only in regards to lobby groups which operate freely on US soil staffed mostly by Americans.
Were there an analogous "ARPAC" which lobbied for Russian interests I imagine it would be under an immense amount of scrutiny.
It'd be hilarious if it were a passive listening device like The Thing, but Trump seems so attention-hungry and security-oblivious that you could probably just leave a big microphone on his desk like an old-timey chat show.
Every single poll during the Gaza war has shown majority support from Americans that "israel has a right to defend itself" and "the US should support israel until the hostages are returned".
I don't understand why people think it's a conspiracy theory that Americans are fine with Israel bombing innocent brown people in the desert, since we did that ourselves for 20 years on the back of actual lies and a general hatred of Islam that is still here today, where we have re-elected the guy who made a literal muslim ban, and still insist that islam is a threat through "migrants".
Americans have very little empathy for brown people in the middle east. Israel has a much more "westernized" vibe for Americans, so of course they can empathize with them more. Remember that any American over the age of 20 have seen MULTIPLE TIMES that there was "relative calm" and then Hamas started killing innocent jewish people. If you are older, you remember when all these countries openly called for the extermination of Israel as explicit foreign policy.
You can argue that the AIPAC influences american's opinion, but it is actual american reported opinion that we should support Israel in their extermination of "terrorists".
Biden passed more consequential legislation than almost any president since FDR. The chips act, the inflation reduction act, the infrastructure act. The list goes on and on. He even had a bipartisan immigration bill that was closer to being passed than any other bill. He was an incredibly effective legislative leader while in office.
> Trump's flights on the same plane were pre-Presidency. (As was their friendship, and their being close neighbors.)
Their friendship was over when Trump banned him from mar-a-lago 2007 and then worked with prosecutors and provided information against Epstein in 2008.
If you have any information or evidence of the claim that he did not in fact ban Epstein. I would love to read it. Without evidence I’ll just assume this is your opinion. It’s not hard to see your motive by the way you presented the information in your previous comment. Presenting opinions as fact is not necessary and doesn’t add to the conversation.
> Mohta wrote, “My family also runs several manufacturing plants in various industries, which has given me unrestricted access to assembly lines since I was 15.”
> Of the DOGE list's initial claim of $16 billion in savings, half came from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) listing that was entered into the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS) in 2022 with a whopping $8 billion maximum possible value.
> According to a DOGE post on X, that number was a typo that was corrected in the contract database to $8 million on Jan. 22 of this year before being terminated a week later, and DOGE "has always used the correct $8M in its calculations."
This was an online survey with 1134 respondents. Comparable to a medium-engagement Twitter poll. It's surprising to me that you think this is representative of the perspective of the of your country as a whole.
Perhaps I'm not that inteligent myself ;) Then again, I never said it's my country, I'm from Poland. I could give Polish-specific examples of extremy stupidity, but the flat earth example I find the least controversial.
I am pretty sure the US will have elections in 2028. But Trump was almost successful in overturning the 2020 election.
Now, with additional concentration of power, that increases the possibility of a successful overturning (in favor of a new conservative candidate), or simply a biased election.
Dictatorships often have elections and are supposedly democratic. The question is whether those elections reflect the genuine, informed self-interest of the people.
The difference is that in most dictatorships that have "elections", the elections are run by the central government. In the US, the states run the elections. Sure, the US federal government has some levers and influence, but I think our elections are less susceptible to presidential tampering due to their decentralized nature.
Being decentralized helps, but there's still only a few voting machine vendors, still nationalized media, and nobody is checking state ID of the protestors at state elections.
And US elections have been very tight, and the electoral college means that only a few states being controlled is enough.
We also lack an apparatus to overturn a fraudulent election. Even if a judge rules that an election was fraudulent, that's not the same as certifying another vote total nor can it physically remove someone from office.
I do remember, obviously. Those kind of tired jabs are better suited for /r/politics, I'm sure you'll be right at home there :)
That said, I also remember when Trump said he'd build a wall and that Mexico would pay for it. A remarkable amount of what Trump says isn't true, I think everyone's in agreement on that.
If the country is happy with the state of affairs in 2028 then I expect you'll have JD Vance as your president. If not, maybe Newsom, Buttigieg (my hope), or Shapiro. Either way, if you truly think that 2024 was the last election Americans will vote in, respectfully, I think you're a little bit deluded.
If your only insurance that Trump and his party will not attempt to illegally hold onto power one way or another is that they constantly lie and may have lied about doing that too, it provides me with little confidence.
You fall in the common liberal trap of putting too much faith in the strength of our institutions and democracy. The president is already quite literally above the law, Congress remains passive in the face of obvious unconstitutional acts and the supreme court is on board with it all. Why would they acknowledge the results of a losing election? If it wasn't for the (relative) moral integrity of Mike Pence last time, who knows what would have happened.
And if we do switch to democrats, then cool, I'll be happy to eat my hat and give you my five mea culpas. In the meantime, please don't shoot down any worry about the current distressing concentration of power :)
The first sentence begins with "Trump lies through his teeth with every word"
Love him or hate him, I would argue that there are indeed words Trump has spoken which are not lies made through his teeth. I would put that level of hyperbole within the realm of "dubious basis in truth".
Oh c'mon, that's just silly. That statement is so clearly rhetorical hyperbole that it doesn't need to pass any standard of truth. Trump lies. A lot. That is provably true. "Trump lies through his teeth with every word" is a reasonable hyperbolic expression of that truth.
Eventually the genie left the bottle and people realized these medications make most (not all) people feel very good. Scott's written about this before, but they basically bump up your personal "productivity" metric. This effect is observed for those who suffer ADHD symptoms and those who don't.
Basically, these meds can allow a clinically unmotivated and lethargic person to clean their room and buy groceries and call the bank.
They can also allow a 'normal' person to work for 12h without a break then come home and continue writing their novel.
There are now online ADHD "clinics" which let you take an online assessment (!) before a 30min meeting with a doctor who'll then prescribe you amphetamines. If you're someone who knows to say, the process has been incredibly streamlined.