171–180 of 317 posts
And ... there we go - flagged by Musk's tech bros again. HN is starting to feel like X -- I've deleted my X account, and might have to do the same here. I've now switched my primary HN link from the home page to /active, where, thankfully, flagged posts still show up.
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We'll look back on it as we do all of the other times people got away with things they shouldn't have gotten away with while holding the power of the state. I'll also add that there are absolutely people in Europe who aspire to see this kind of thing happen there, and that in some cases, it already has. See: Orban, Brexit, Le Pen, AfD, etc... and that of course doesn't touch on what happens in less-Western European c…
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Rule #1 of dealing with these sorts:
The stated goals do not matter. They're sugar coating for the middle.
And even if they did matter, the fact is, we have a friend of the head of government rooting around in incredibly sensitive computer systems with a cadre of interns without any sort of statutory or constitutional authority to do so. What Musk is doing is a crime.
I'd argue it's actually very European. There's a guy with authority to do what he wants because reasons. Sounds like the justification used for monarchy. The only real difference is that there's a role for such a person already carved out in constitutional monarchies, as opposed to creation of it.
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The checks and balances assumed the entire country didn't vote the exact same people into majorities in all 3 branches
Trump won the popular vote with 49.8% of votes cast, let’s stop pretending the entire country gave him the mandate to do whatever he wants.
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It's not invisible, nor is it much of a secret. Nor does it "control" anything in particular. Much of the coordination against trump by NGOs funded through USAID, publicly, is just online -- you can just go watch recordings of the conferences. It's just an institutional consensus about Trump's style of populism which gave profound motivation to a large number of groups, to organise against his perceived threat. The i…
> Consider how egreious it would be for the US gov to lie about funding healthcare, but instead to use that as a guise for one of your "impossible, movie plot lines..." Sorry, what part of the CIA hatching hare-brained schemes is incredulous? (You should have linked to acoustakitty.)
I mean, even more relevant would be the leaked recording of state department officials discussing who to replace the elected president of ukraine with in 2013.
I just chose the HIV thing, since it's relevant how we interpret USAID's programmes -- in particular, ones which fund the NGOs that run censorship campaigns and kompromat collection (eg., the occrp).
None of this is very remarkable, of course. The more concerning thing is how this has become turned inward on the USA itself via the internet, mass media, and so on.
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No; of voters, 49.8% picked Trump. A plurality, but not a majority.
A no-vote is simply a lazy vote for the winner.
49.80% for Trump, 48.32% for Harris, 1.89% for others (Stein, Kennedy, etc.).
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Not to mention financial. Its all but inevitable this will have expensive financial fallout, likely for individuals and the government.
I am absolutely gobsmacked that the markets simply don't care about any of this.
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Rebooting the D party is unnecessary. Losing only by 1.5% in an election where globally nearly every _incumbent_ lost is pretty good. In the UK, the incumbents lost 20% of their seats [1]. The democrats lost 2 seats in the senate [2] and _gained_ 2 seats in the house [3]. Making drastic changes to a party because you narrowly lost an election with a candidate that never won a primary is dumb. [1]: https://en.wikipedi…
> Making drastic changes to a party because you narrowly lost an election with a candidate that never won a primary is dumb. That depends on who you lose to .
Like if Democrats decided to run Ron DeSantis how huge do you think Trump's lead would've been?
Is there anything we can do? I don’t mean to ask that and imply that there is nothing. I mean it as an honest question. Is there a process or organization to snap into right now to help?
There are already groups organizing protests across the land. Join one in your area. Or just show up when a demonstration is happening near you. Numbers are important.
I say this as a UKian with a constitutional monarch as head of state: These actions suggest that today the United States seems to have a de facto King with far greater powers than even those held by George III at the time the founders decided that America did not need a King. They might not be called that, but they have the ability to exert behaviours akin to an English monarch not seen much since Henry VIII. Arguabl…
The checks and balances assumed the entire country didn't vote the exact same people into majorities in all 3 branches
electing a bunch of pathetic apparatchiks to the legislature and letting the Heritage Foundation choose a bunch of lunatics for the courts is why there's no counterbalancing force. the Founders assumed the other branches of government would have some self-respect.