111–120 of 167 posts
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This both sides thing is so naive. One side is far more corrupt than the other.
It's naive and dismissive of the corruption to think it's not both sides. You're literally only seeing half the picture.
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Can you give some examples of policies that were bad for ordinary, everyday Americans?
Many people disagree with the Covid response. Many people look at the Bidens’ relationship with Ukraine and wonder whether the war could have been avoided, and we wouldn’t have to hear stories about “we sent $X billions, but Zelenskyy says he received only $0.5X billions” which could have been spent here, not to mention millions of lives spared (the latter doesn’t affect ordinary Americans directly, but there you go)…
I think that's fair, Covid was completely insane. Personally the part of the US response I disliked the most was the closing of schools. Like, in Ireland the pubs were closed for basically 2 years, but we kept the schools open for most of it, which I think was the right call. Difficult situation though, and the vaccine mandates were crazy (particularly given how ineffective they were in preventing transmission).
> Many people look at the Bidens’ relationship with Ukraine and wonder whether the war could have been avoided,
I really don't see that. Like, Russia basically invaded as soon as (like that week) Nordstream 2 was finished (which unlike Nordstream 1 didn't pass through Ukraine). I think it's arguable that the US didn't need to be as involved (although if they hadn't been, then the EU-US break would have happened much, much sooner).
> which could have been spent here,
Like, for the avoidance of doubt, sending old weapons to Ukraine doesn't actually cost the US as much as they claimed. Ye'd have had to decommission them anyway. (This is a surprisingly large pattern in US aid to other countries).
> A big part of the problem is that many are only to see the other side’s corruption
Yeah, that's fair.
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Can you give some examples of policies that were bad for ordinary, everyday Americans?
Many people disagree with the Covid response. Many people look at the Bidens’ relationship with Ukraine and wonder whether the war could have been avoided, and we wouldn’t have to hear stories about “we sent $X billions, but Zelenskyy says he received only $0.5X billions” which could have been spent here, not to mention millions of lives spared (the latter doesn’t affect ordinary Americans directly, but there you go)…
The idea that Biden was taking food out of our mouths to send to Ukraine was pushed by the very people that approved that budget because it was easy to do. And Americans know this, they really do, they just forget it because they've had this narrative yelled at them so many times.
And even given that, we were very shrewd. We sent old weapons that were going to be decommissioned, so I would hardly say we sent a bunch of money to Ukraine. More like we goosed our weapon production.
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They're not getting ahead, so... they're burning it down.
You can’t see why average Americans would want a change from many of the Biden Administration’s policies? It has nothing to do with racism, xenophobia, or transphobia. A lot of the policies were just objectively bad for average everyday Americans.
It's a complex web of alienations.
I was a big enough believer in crypto to literally start a company in this space only to leave it completely disenchanted and deeply pessimistic about the direction of the industry. I felt that there were many real legal and regulatory challenges that governments just didn't want to deal with. No government wants to enable money laundering, black markets, corruption and terrorism; or so I thought! Now we're in a situ…
But after spending ~2y in the space, I realized another thing -- the people in this space right now are in it purely for speculation and monetary gains. There's a lot of talk about decade long horizons, but any app that achieves pmf in the short to medium term has to cater to the speculators or die.
We chose not to go down the path of launching a coin or doing speculative stuff, even though the demand for it was intense. We hit some PMF around creators, but didn't have the conviction that it would scale without speculation. A year down the line, I believe that was the right pov to have.
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How did you feel about the Biden family’s blatant corruption? Do you really think that Hunter Biden was an amazing artist and brilliant corporate energy sector lawyer that is just falling on hard times now like the rest of us? It’s a weird coincidence that he can’t sell his paintings anymore now that his Dad isn’t politically relevant anymore. Joe’s brother has also made a lot of money off of questionable government…
This is important, and most partisans will get caught up in a discussion about whose corruption was worse. The bigger issue in my mind is that no one wants to police their own side, which leads to absurd flip-flopping hypocrisy every time the other party gains power. "Less bad" corruption is still a very bad thing, whoever you believe to be the more corrupt. But our current political system doesn't seem to have a way…
Like, yes, please, investigate all of them.
Republicans sort-of tried with Hunter, but kept balking at public hearings because they knew a bunch of the stuff they were claiming when they went on Fox was made-up, so it better served their propaganda purposes to avoid pursuing it. If there was actually anything to it, I hope and assume they would have gone ahead.
Which brings up the credibility problem with these claims from Republicans: "There's fraud in government! We found tons of it!" cool, that's a crime, where are the indictments? Oh, there aren't any, because you're full of shit. "Massive election fraud!" cool, that's a serious crime, you're in power now, a bunch of your AGs launched high-profile investigations, where are the indictments? You snagged a half-dozen cases, all mundane shit like someone with two houses voting in both states in two different elections because they forgot about it or didn't realize it was illegal? Where is the massive, organized fraud? Oh, you were just lying. Again. (They've been fucking that particular chicken for nearly two damn decades and somehow still have nothing to show for it, the democracy-undermining pricks). Months and months and all those hours of interviews for the Benghazi "investigations", and what? Nothing again. It's tedious. Shit or get off the pot, go after crime but stop lying about it.
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This both sides thing is so naive. One side is far more corrupt than the other.
This just isn’t true, it is easy to find blatant corruption tied to politicians at all levels from both parties. Look at California, New York, Chicago, and Baltimore, look at the Biden family, the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, Letitia James, the Democrats are just as corrupt, the mainstream media just reports on it less.
hahaha
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How do you explain the majority of 18-25 yo who voted for Trump? Also from polling the ones who did not vote were also leaning towards Trump. So participation was not the issue.
Because if you look at the entire history of presidents with the notable exception of Barack Obama, every president has been a geriatric white dude. They've been conditioned to believe that geriatric white dudes are the only ones capable of holding the office. So, when compared with the younger black/indian woman, the natural choice was to select the old white (orange) guy.
That’s not even true within my lifetime, let alone historically. People freaked the fuck out because Reagan was going to be all of 70 when he took office in 1982. That’s nothing compared to the fossils that they’re propping up in front of a microphone these days. 70 year olds in Congress these days are nicknamed “The Kid”.
This article is soft peddling corruption, and it confirms that Trump takes bribes via his cryptocurrency operation.
The fact that Bitcoin (and kin) turbocharges corruption, and its success is a direct result of doing so on a wide scale (the whole point is to undermine state power by dwpriving it of control over currency) is proof to the armchair economist Bitcoin supporters that it is "sound money" and things like facilitating a market for circulation of child porn at one end and open political grift at the other, are welcomed as…
Neither will bans and prohibitions, unless you are willing to go full north korea with cameras everywhere and computers locked down. And you'll probably fail with that.
You're beating your fists against an ocean.
Touch some grass.
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No, the current system does not work for most of the people hence the "just nuke it" option sounds like a rational one. Canadian elections show that people can change their mind overnight, but unfortunately some of the changes that happened in the US institutions and the global relations will take decades to reverse (if ever).
> sounds like a rational one. But history has showed (with NSDAP and others) that it is not.
You see, you lost a good chunk of voters there.
Many are just voting for their candidate to hurt other people whom they don't like.