> Society is saved just as often as the circle of its rulers contracts, as a more exclusive interest is maintained against a wider one. Every demand of the simplest bourgeois financial reform, of the most ordinary liberalism, of the most formal republicanism, of the most shallow democracy, is simultaneously castigated as an “attempt on society” and stigmatized as “socialism.” And finally the high priests of “religion and order” themselves are driven with kicks from their Pythian tripods, hauled out of their beds in the darkness of night, put in prison vans, thrown into dungeons or sent into exile; their temple is razed to the ground, their mouths are sealed, their pens broken, their law torn to pieces in the name of religion, of property, of the family, of order. Bourgeois fanatics for order are shot down on their balconies by mobs of drunken soldiers, their domestic sanctuaries profaned, their houses bombarded for amusement – in the name of property, of the family, of religion, and of order.
Apple CEO Tim Cook made a personal $1 million "donation" to the Trump inauguration in January 2025:
> Cook, a proud Alabama native, believes the inauguration is a great American tradition, and is donating to the inauguration in the spirit of unity, the sources said.
Did you also call Obama's inaugural funding as corruption, when he was donated $53 million in 2009 and ~$43 in 2013 ?
Did you also call Biden's inaugural funding as corruption when he was donated ~$62 million ?
Donations included several billionaires - including the Gates family.
Is raising Presidential inaugural funds considered as
"corruption" only for one party ? Or only when it crosses ~$100 million like President Trump did ?
Was super disappointing to see him up there at the inauguration. E-mailed [email protected] and told him as much.
Would cancel my Apple family plan but like my family, instead, bought a refurbished second hand iPhone instead of buying a new one recently.
Will be speaking with my wallet in a variety of ways, along with calling, marching, etc. We start here... let's see where we end up. The moment is _now_.
Amazon and Meta did too. Then Bezos changed the Washington Post editorial page policy that they could only write about personal liberties and free markets (subtext: not Trump). I wonder what Meta got in return. It seems like this relatively cheap $1M payoff was a subtle “kiss the ring” of the emperor. Good business. Shareholders would approve.
Trump dropped his lawsuit against Meta for suspending him after the insurrection.[1] They want to avoid an antitrust trial.[2] They want Trump to pressure the EU into allowing surveillance capitalism.[3] They want influence in negotiations over Section 230.[4]
He was in a tough spot. I’m sure he doesn’t support the admin, but also he knows Apple needs tariff relief, and paying a “donation” to Trump is a good way to do that.
He basically paid $1M to try and save thousands of jobs at Apple (and of course increase Apple’s value)
Apple is the 8-th largest company in the world by revenue [1]. If they wanted to oppose the admin, they would be uniquely positioned to do so. That they choose not to tells me that either they support the admin or that they choose not to. That they chose the option that shows active support for the admin has a negative impact on my ability to empathize with their CEO.
It's most certainly not true. It's the ol' "fiduciary duty" canard. Because it's cheaper to make a product by shoving infants into a meat grinder, the company has no choice but to go buy a meat grinder and start stealing babies because they have a "fiduciary duty to shareholders".
Shareholders can sue, yes, but in the U. S. you can sue anyone for anything, and "suing" is not the same as "winning".
I was careful in how I worded my statement. Clearly, "shoving infants into a meat grinder" is to the detriment of shareholders, because shareholders will lose money if the company does that.
It is also entirely true that you cannot just do whatever you personally want with shareholder money.
The truth here is in the middle.
Apple (well, Cook) certainly did not have to donate to him. But the fact of the matter is that they will have to work with this administration to run their business over the next 4 years, and I am sure that $1m is a small investment to make Cook's life easier.
> But the fact of the matter is that they will have to work with this administration to run their business over the next 4 years, and I am sure that $1m is a small investment to make Cook's life easier.
This is true. But it has nothing to do with fiduciary duty.
It's not directly or criminally illegal. It's civilly illegal in the sense that Apple has a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders in their business decision making. In practice, there are quite broad interpretations of what might be considered "good for your shareholders", but someone's personal interests generally wouldn't qualify as that.
If, hypothetically, Cook said "fuck this administration, we don't like their politics, we're not going to work with them", their shareholders could and probably would sue them. Those shareholders could make a case that Cook was asking of his own political interests, point to other organizations that did make exemption deals, and sue for losses in their share value. The reason for this is not entirely wacky: when you borrow someone's money to do something, you can't do your own pet projects with it.
Now that, of course, doesn't mean that Cook had to donate. But Cook is businessman himself, runs Apple to make money, and doing that is his modus operandi.
How often is this actually enforced? Elon has been doing a lot of idiotic political stuff that has tanked Tesla's price in the last few weeks. Could someone sue him for that?
It is routine practice for shareholders to sue when their leadership makes questionable decisions. Usually if you search "shareholder lawsuit [stupid thing company leadership did]" you will find results more often than not.
> Under some interpretations, the case also affirmed that the business judgment rule that directors may exercise is expansive, leaving Ford and other businesses a wide latitude about how to run the company, if management decisions can point to any rational link to benefiting the corporation as a whole.
Yes, and the Wiki article goes into detail with some more quotes about the difference between the judicial understanding and the common understanding being different. The ruling didn't invent the idea of shareholder value maximization, but it did reinforce that there are legal limits to acting against it. They acknowledged as a practical matter policing it is probably unlikely to expect except in egregious cases for the reason you cited among others.
But fundamentally, shareholder maximization is the goal stated by both common business sense and legal rulings. I personally believe that long-term optimization rather than short term is a more successful strategy. But in the short term the board could remove him for going against the feds. Shareholders could sue if it caused a drop in value or impacted global operations. Caused by I don't know, tariffs that could have been avoided with a corrupt monetary contribution.
I'd love to actually see a CEO refuse to grease the palm and them get sued for not doing something corrupt. Would be a case to follow.
The point is, as I understand it, that CEOs of publicly traded corps are not afforded the freedom required to make an ideological stand and keep their job.
I agree completely, and I think it's disgusting and despicable. But honestly this sort of thing has been happening for many, many decades, maybe even centuries, it's just been done a lot more discreetly in the past. The big difference now is that it's so blatant.
While that might sound like an improvement (and kind of is as at least we're getting more honest), I also view it as a big regression. At least when there's perceived shame in being corrupt, people aspire to be better. When it just becomes routine, I fear it's the beginning of the end.
That, or these CEOs have no real opinions or principles of their own and simply do what they think will be advantageous for them and their company, and literally no other thought goes into this.
I don't think he "supports" or is "against" this administration, I think it's much simpler: he does not care. I know this is cynical, but if the last three years in the software world has taught us anything, it seems like these tech CEOs regard their employees as expendable, and they're willing to change their political allegiances when they feel like it.
Maybe all of us would do that if put into this position, I don't know, no one wants to give me billions of dollars to run this experiment. Regardless, I'm pretty sure I'm right about this.
Tim Cook is going to find out very soon what happens to anyone who makes a deal with Donald Trump: he gets what he wants, and they don't get paid.
> I’m sure he doesn’t support the admin
Why, are you a personal friend of his?
The billionaries are the only people who can actually apply a meaningful level of practical opposition to autocratic rulers. Instead they chose to bend the knee, because they think it better fits their self-interest. Which is what their Russian counterparts did with Putin 20 years ago, and where are they now? Either confined inside a pariah state, or dead.
Should we etch swastikas in all iPhones? Not sure how close we are to corporations working under government direction here (part of literal fascism iirc)
Well, this is hilarious timing. The EU certainly isn't going to retract their case, so now Apple products will be divided into "the ones with consumer regulations" and "the ones without".
I hope Americans still have the faith they used to regarding Apple. Looks like we'll be trusting their judgement quite a bit going forwards.
It's a $3T company. It got there by extracting the maximum possible from customers, app developers, and labor. They are well known for exploiting offshore workers [1] many times over. They force customers to upgrade off working hardware. They force customers to buy multiple devices when one could do the job. There are monopoly complaints world over. Customers who are happy with this have Stockholm Syndrome.
2) the suicide rate at the foxconn factory was, even before the nets, lower per capita than the province in which it is situated. using your logic, the foxconn factory simply existing prevents deaths that would have otherwise happened if it did not.
i’m all for calling apple on their shit when warranted, but the suicide nets meme needs to die.
If Foxconn workers had either average or worse-than-average mental health (in their country), this outcome appears to be positively impacted by their employer. This seems like a reasonable assumption, unless you have some countervailing information.
Calling out unspoken assumptions can be useful, but it's not a refutation unless the assumptions are unreasonable or demonstrably wrong.
> I hope Americans still have the faith they used to regarding Apple.
I hope the opposite. Faith is exploitable and leads to complacency and accepting excuses. I hope Americans do not have faith in Apple and that will either make them work harder to earn and keep that trust, or that it’ll lead to the mask coming down. Having trust in someone covertly deceiving you looks like the worst possible outcome.
> I hope Americans still have the faith they used to regarding Apple
Faith is a good word to use when discussing the true believers following the fruit factory. The company has been very successful in turning commercial transactions into quasi-religious ceremonies and managed to convince people that they can trust their judgement. Well, yes, you can certainly trust their judgement as long as you realise that their judgement revolves around profit maximisation. While this in itself does not need to be a problem is does become a problem when one half goes into the transaction based on faith with the other half being aware of this.
Don't be deluded, you can trust them just as much/little as you can trust other large vendors. If you like their products you can buy them but it does not make sense to 'trust their judgement' once supervision is lifted since it is not a question if they will abuse this trust but when and the answer is they already have, many times over. Every time they claim their products do not offer freedom of choice because of ${reasons} they abuse this trust because they fail to state that ${reasons} is a constant which is initialised as follows:
It's gotta be tough! When you've made that your entire personality, it's hard to drop it. You've made friends, and perhaps lost others, by being this person. To just admit "I was wrong" potentially means alienating all of their friends and family. I'd imagine it's why so many people are still so vehemently flat earthers.
It’s especially hard when those beliefs have lead you to justify treating other people horribly. If you’ve gone around accusing people of grooming children for abuse because they thought gay or trans people deserved basic human rights, if you’ve said supporting immigration means supporting rapists and murderers, etc. it’s much harder to come back from that than if it was more traditional policy differences like whether we should have a particular tax rate. I think that’s intentional in some cases, just as with cults where pushing extreme claims and breaking outside ties makes it harder to leave.
And admitting it would mean bursting the bubble of "I'm an intelligent person." (and even "a good person"). It's easier to construct a virtual reality where you're still the one with the clue and everyone else are just utter morons.
Also, with everything being written down nowadays (on your social media), changing your opinion means inviting mockery of past comments being dug up to be flung at you. Then again, the idiots in power seem to have developed a thick skin for this.
>"changing your opinion means inviting mockery of past comments being dug up to be flung at you."
This has to be one of the most damaging things about social media, in my opinion. I never really understood why changing your mind about something as you get new information is looked down on and mocked, but it is.
Seriously. I look at people who made big transitions in opinions with more respect than I do people who have never changed. What are the odds that you'll be correct with every opinion you form the first time? It's time people starting learning Socratic Wisdom again
The social issue go much beyond this. The country to a large degree has sorted itself along party lines. Changing your political opinion in either direction will likely lead to arguments with people you are close to and might get you ostracized from your friend group or even family. For most people this is much worse than being ridiculed online!
This is why you keep those friends, and instead of replacing your identity, you keep it and kick out the false profits. We need a Martin Luther moment in MAGA.
Can you say more about what a Martin Luther moment in MAGA would be? You mean like a MAGA person willing to rise up and (figuratively) nail theses to the door, aka call out the bad parts of the movement? Some people have tried and they get bounced out pretty quickly. Trump is the master at ending people for criticizing him, even lightly
My aunt shares AI-generated memes about hispanic and palestinian people crying as they are rounded up by ICE. Her key motivation above all others is making particular groups of people she hates suffer. Everything else is acceptable as long as she gets that.
Yeah it's unpopular to point this out right now but racism is a key political motivator for a lot of people, with varying degrees of awareness of that. He is working for them.
The people who threw rocks at the Little Rock Nine, the first black kids let into an alabama "White's only" school are barely retired. They still vote.
Damn, I never did the math on this. I have always been of the opinion that racism drives a lot of political behavior but this really drives home how close my US is to an even darker racist past.
The chief justice prior to our current chief justice (Rehnquist) wrote a memo as a clerk arguing against the holding in Brown v Board and bought a house in a neighborhood where it was illegal to sell homes to Jews while he was on the supreme court.
A huge amount of our current law was built by segregationists.
The south had plenty of politicians in open defiance of desegregation and integration, explicitly saying they would resist the tyranny of the federal government.
The tyranny of being forced to treat black people equally.
Countless communities across the US chose to destroy their infrastructure and amenities (specifically community pools) rather than allow their families to mingle with black people. There's an entire, well documented era of "white flight".
It's a common refrain by conservative voters that "The democrats abandoned the blue collar worker", but note they've been saying this for decades, so the ones that claim "identity politics" are the reason are wrong. Meanwhile they adored Reagan's fiscal policy, which was adopted wholesale by democrats after Reagan's landslide election proved any other fiscal policy was unacceptable to Americans. So nope, that also can't be what people mean by "abandon blue collar workers".
If you follow those claims back, they are from the civil rights era.
When people say "Democrats abandoned the blue collar worker", whether they realize it or not, they are saying "Democrats abandoned the WHITE blue collar worker by supporting black equality and integration".
This is evident if you look at the Democrat politicians who moved to the Republican party between the civil rights era and Reagan, and why they did so. They specify the civil rights act. Strom Thurmond openly switched to the republican party claiming that the Democrat's support and passing of the civil rights act and voting rights act meant they "no longer represented people like him"
This is also clear if you understand the history of black people in the south. It was a core part of southern "heritage" and history that white people were inherently superior to black people. It was a common topic of Sunday sermons during the civil war era for pastors to remind their congregation that it was God's Will that the black man be enslaved by the white, since they were barbarians and the White man was supposed to guide them. This is not an exaggeration.
"History not hate" is a contradiction, because the history WAS hate. Casual, institutional, systemic hate.
Republicans and conservative states have endeavored to not teach this, for decades. People in the south are genuinely taught that the North started the Civil War (outright false), that slavery wasn't the issue (False, several states explicitly submitted documents saying their reasoning for secession was to protect the institution of slavery), and that it was a "state's rights" issue (False, the slave states did not care about states rights, as they attempted to enforce Slave Catching laws in Free states by using federal authority, ie the exact thing they were critiquing the north for, and more importantly, the Confederate government openly talked about dropping the Facade of "states rights" now that they had their own government and could just install an authoritarian system that guaranteed slavery as an institution).
You can read all these Confederate government documents yourself. They were not shy about their intentions because it was a genuinely held belief that the white man was better than the black man.
The last confirmed klan-connected lynchings in the US happened in the early 1980s, so possibly within your lifetime depending on age. If not then almost certainly your parents'. We mostly stopped using the term around then, but they didn't stop happening then either.
Consider how many people never realized that Jim Jones didn't have their best interests at heart and now consider that we've fully automated the process that brought those people to that point.
They don’t care. I sent someone a link about NIH cutting funding for the place that created the cancer killing treatment that saved his Wife last year.
“They know what they’re doing.” Is all I get from this baloney.
I literally had a 90 year old woman approach me at the dentist yesterday, complementing my Model 3 and telling me "I just love Elon. I had a dream about him last night!" For these types, it's a cult of personality, not logic or policy.
I was also at the gun range last week and overheard a conversation between two Trump supporters. They were outraged by his behavior since taking office, and said outright "if we had to vote again right now, half of us wouldn't vote for him".
I've heard similar sentiments expressed as well, even from a person who was a vocal advocate for Trump in this last election. He is still hoping that this is 5D chess and just very temporary pain, but after the blanket tariffs from a couple days ago he's starting to openly admit that he isn't pleased. I guess time will really tell
"I was wrong" is really hard to say at the best of times. I sometimes struggle with it when I make a little mistake at work.
Trying to say "I was wrong" after years of making your whole life, social circle, etc. about whatever thing you were wrong about is incredibly hard. It takes a very strong mental to do that. And, I wager for some/most people who fall deep into any cult-like movement (whatever it may be: conspiracies, etc.), they didn't start with a super strong mental fortitude in the first place, making it even more difficult.
I agree completely but the thing I also find puzzling sometimes is how the public discourse seems to have forgotten about the rampant misinformation that's been going on for the last several years. Basically huge numbers of people have been lied to for a long time.
It's almost as if the scope of the corruption and incompetence is so extensive that there isn't enough time to reflect on the misinformation process that everyone was so focused on for so long.
Obviously not everyone succumbed to it but even today the coverage in major outlets is completely distorted. Media just accept what the administration is saying as if it still has some kind of verdicality by virtue of power, a historically unprecedented example of the fallacy of appeal to authority. People constantly arguing that the Trump administration won't actually do this or that, that it's all a bluff, and so forth, are similarly misleading.
The discussions about mandates is bizarre to me for this reason, not just because of the tiny magnitude and minority nature of the electoral win, but because Trump and his administration vehemently denied doing exactly what they are currently doing. They dismissed it as insane paranoid ramblings of a deficient left. It's not just that they are failing to keep an electoral promise, they are doing the exact things they denied that they would do, and criticized their opponents for claiming they would do.
I guess I bring this up because it seems to me a lot of people have basically been lied to. Being a victim has its own shame and reluctance but it seems like a more tractable — and accurate in many cases — way to engage with some people than them being wrong.
The excuses haven't lined up at any point really that's why they so heavily prioritized creating their own entire separate media ecosystem over the last few decades.
> Morgan Lewis, which specialises in representing management in labour disputes, has also acted for Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Amazon in their challenges against the agency.
Naked political corruption! Welcome to America in 2025.
And Hacker News gestalt generally thinks politics is off topic - guess what happens to "disruptors" in a crony capitalistic system?
Hacker News and YCombinator, more than anyone, should be at the vanguard of stopping this. It will set innovation back by a decade by the end of the current administration's term.
With tech and politics becoming more intermingled each day, it won't be long before we see articles like "[flagged]: The decline of Hacker News in the Era of Techno-Feudalism"
I did not expect this because of all the big tech companies, Apple has been the most antagonistic to Trump. I actually thought the FTC was going to come down hard on Apple this administration has a measure of revenge. Is Trump doing Apple a solid here hoping they return the favor?
I'm confused how you came to this conclusion. Tim Cook donated millions of dollars to Trump personally, and Republican policies are extremely pro-big-tech so it makes sense that they would support each other. Anti-worker policies like this are exactly what I would have expected from this admin.
I wouldn't call Republican policies pro-big-tech considering they are behind the Tiktok ban. The policies are more anti-regulation, which big-tech wants right now.
I'm confused, are you saying the TikTok ban is detrimental to US-based big tech? Seems like a forced sale is beneficial to them.
I was also under the impression we're also entering a regulatory climate where amount of regulation isn't so much decreasing (TikTok ban for example is heavy handed), but that big tech has much more involvement in forming that regulation, which is useful for moat-building.
I'm not too knowledgeable on these, it's just the general gist I've been picking up so far this year, looking for correction if I got the wrong idea.
>>>saying the TikTok ban is detrimental to US-based big tech?
Not op, but yes.
>>>Seems like a forced sale is beneficial to them.
Short term. Long term you are establishing a precedent that you can intervene and take away the power of any large tech player. If it can happen to tiktok it can happen to others.
Im not against tikton ban, but im against it in its current form , since its not for the right reason. (China plays unfair with us corps, we should reciprocate our treatment of their own in our borders. The law instead claims some US patriot act natsec prerogative bs)
The republicans have not been following the laws since they put Trump into the White House 8 years ago. Why do you think something like legality will stop them?
I can't really think of any? Like sure, there's not going to be 100% agreement on every possible thing, but by and large Republican policies mean more power for big companies, and less oversight and consumer and employee protections. This is probably the most big-tech-friendly political environment the country has ever seen.
Not meaning to be a dick or anything, but you and folks like you are too focused on the surface level culture war crap. Apple is not activist, it's a business. It's progressive by corporate standards I guess, in that it isn't outwardly rejecting its minority employees (yet) but they'll still circle the wagons for the actual holders of power.
Capital has always sided with populists and always will, because populists reinforce the status quo capital benefits from. You'll see the same thing with ostensibly liberal establishment media organizations. Like their presenters may hate Trump and his administration on the outside, but their owners love the fact that they have millions of viewers re-glued to their televisions for the latest stupid bullshit the White House is pulling, and no matter what they may ideologically disagree on, Ellen DeGeneres and Donald Trump have INFINITELY more in common with one another than either do with any working class person.
To put it short: It's the MONEY son, the MONEY. Oh they'll bicker and spat at one another in public, sure, but most of these folks are perfectly fine with one another when the cameras aren't rolling. They don't give a shit. Rightly or wrongly, wealthy minority folk think they don't need to worry about the reactionary Right, and honestly, they're probably correct given how fixated said reactionaries are on Drag Queens supposedly being a threat to children when it feels like we have daily news stories of cops, clergy, and teachers diddling kids.
The US has been corrupt for a long time with its revolving door but it's getting so blatant that frankly it's shocking. As a ruling class, you want to at least pretend to have some illusion of fairness. It's starting to looking some backwater Balkan nation or something.
Not trying to be hostile but while everywhere has corruption, and the US definitely has a history of things to be shameful of, it's been nowhere near the scope of what we're seeing now, at least in recent history.
I see arguments about "this is the way it always has been" as essentially normalizing rampant authoritarian corruption. To me, it's taking projection and accepting it as fact without evidence.
Also, regardless, it seems two wrongs don't make a right, and the appropriate response is to reject it when it it exists.
I've come to the conclusion though that I prefer that it is now out in the open. There's a better likelihood heads will eventually roll (as a figure of speech).
Why pretend any more? You go full mask off and half the country still cheers you. Trump could get on stage, say "there will be no more elections and I am now king" and half the country will be okay with it while the other half puts their hands in their pocket and feigns helplessness.
If Trump was really so unpopular, Republicans would throw their weight behind getting rid of him or blocking him in Congress. They still believe that is political suicide with their base which means either he is still popular with their base or they believe he is popular with their base which results in the same inaction.
the headline is perhaps unclear, so from the article:
> The US labour watchdog froze two cases against Apple days after Donald Trump nominated an attorney who represents the tech group to be the agency’s top legal official.
> Trump last week nominated Crystal Carey, a partner at Morgan Lewis & Bockius, to be the NLRB’s general counsel. She is listed in the agency’s records as an attorney acting in Apple’s defence in both cases against the Silicon Valley tech group.
the level of just complete capture of the regulatory state by random rich companies is amazing, even beyond trump's first time bullshit like "Appoint the CEO of Exxon to be Secretary of State"
At this point I'm practically begging for corrupt-but-competent assholes over the total clowns that are actually running the show this administration.
Steve Mnuchin (especially) and Rex Tillerson were two of the best appointments last time around. These guys have no redeeming value. And they're far more brazen about the corruption, too.
Increasingly it looks like there is a strata of the private-jet set that take care of one another, keep the rest of us under their thumb. I can't think this is going to end well for any of the parties.
Ugh, knowing you have a clearly malicious actor as top dog of the country -_- it can’t get more frustrating.
Except for the fact that a big part of the country supports it as well.
I do wonder if they even believe in him wholeheartedly or just put on an act cause they’re in too deep and don’t want to give the people who said they were making the wrong choice the “satisfaction” of admitting they were right.
It is no it an act it is "clean the swamp" that it is get rid of all the controls that the bureaucrats in Washington do.
The reason a lot of them exist is to protect the public is probably lost on the public but fully understood by the ones doing it.
Putting a bunch of foxes to guard the henhouse isn't cleaning the swamp. It's replacing the old swamp, which was nakedly self-interested, with a new swamp, which is also nakedly self-interested.
A bit off-topic, but I find it weird that they use "group" to refer to Apple, instead of, say, "Company". Is this an FT thing? I kept thinking that they were talking about some larger group of Silicon Valley companies (i.e. "the Silicon Valley group"), but no, they just meant Apple.
Yeah, it's a Briticism. The FT is basically the Wall Street Journal of London, for those not familiar. I've been reading this paper for decades and they often use "group" for "company," "sack" instead of "fire," and many other delightfully English locutions.
In British English there are specific meanings. “Firing” is a general term for getting rid of staff. “Sacking” is getting rid of staff because they have done something wrong.
“Group” can be used when talking about a large organisation as a whole, rather than a smaller component or subsidiary.
So the FT is explicitly drawing attention to the argument that the people were fired because of something they did (attempting to unionise) and that that decision was made or sanctioned by Apple at the top level (not some regional CEO or middle manager).
One might think that they're using "group" because Apple is a multinational with subsidiaries in various other countries. But the article is in fact about a dispute between the US company and some of its US employees.
It's a British thing -- another example is that Brits would use e.g. "Apple have decided to.." instead of "Apple has decided to.." (for every group of people including "the government", not just businesses).
I like this language quirk a lot. It almost feels subversive, pointing out through grammar that group entities are just people, responsible for their choices like everyone else.
This is how kleptocratic regimes work: in order to steal more effectively, you need to stuff the state full of personnel who ensure theft won't come under scrutiny (or under disapproving scrutiny -- bonus if the the people you hire actually enable it). Even better, hire people who would themselves face prosecution in a normal country, because they'll be beholden to you and too scared to have principles.
Edit: once your regime has achieved a certain level of internal cohesiveness and stability, you can begin the next step, which is to turn lower-level state actors against the population. You can do this partly by ordering them to perpetrate violence and outrage. This has a numerous benefits: first, it makes the state actors themselves afraid of the population, partly because they fear accountability, which makes them more inclined to violence and more protective of the regime; second, it stokes anger against them, which validates all the fears I listed under the first point; third, it distracts from the less shocking crimes of the regime (mere theft as opposed to bodily harm or murder -- but eventually that too!); fourth, as the regime gradually ratchets up the violence, the population becomes increasingly fearful and willing to collaborate and thus decreasingly capable of organizing and resisting.
Edit 2: I've noticed in my two or three decades of intellectual and political awareness that the right frequently seems to benefit from this kind of compounding effect and stacked benefit. No matter what happens, good or bad, it seems to redound to their benefit. I can't think of any cases where I've felt that the left enjoyed similar structural or inherent political advantages.
Russia has a lot of laws on the books that are meaningless. That's why they are Russia and not Switzerland or France. Minimum wage is worthless due to inflation from the ukraine invasion and sanction. Pension system that leaves people in perpetual poverty. Universal healthcare that covers very little and life expectancy is terrible.
The US has historically held the rule of law as an important idea. Social security has largely eliminated deep elderly poverty.
There is a major difference. In Russia no Oligarch would be able to direct Putin. In what the current US is transforming itself into, asking the President to do what is good for as a Billionaire, is a pure financial transaction.
That's just because Putin has been in power for long enough that he no longer needs the support of oligarchs. He came to power with their help and his relationship with them was initially transactional. Now he and his cronies no longer depend on them, so they either fall into line or fall out of favor and thus out of windows.
What you're describing is the first step, where the wealthy attempt to install a ruler friendly to their interests, someone they think they can control and reason with. Joke's on them -- and on everybody else, too, unfortunately.
Edit: this led me to realize that the advanced age of Fake Tan President is a saving grace. He simply won't live long enough to implement the kind of system Putin has been able to solidify over the past twenty or thirty years. And I'm not aware of anybody in the GOP who can replace him in the cult of personality that a stable dictatorship generally requires.
Because it is. Trump is hoping to surround himself with so much corruption that he insulates himself from it. He wants it normalized so people just become numb to it, as with every other messed up thing he does.
In other words, he wants everyone else in power to have just much to lose as him if the regime fails, so that they don't turn on him. It works like this in NK and Russia.
...or the mob, or street gangs whose initiation rituals usually involves committing a crime to bind you to the group, so you all have something to lose.
A psychological device of "blutkit" (blood cement). For example; young
Nazi SS officers were recruited via a ritual attrocity like
participation in a massacre. After that "we're all in this together"
sealed loyalty through a mix of guilt and fear.
The race is on for the Trump administration to elicit the most
unforgivable and insane actions in order to sinter those participants
into a "death pact".
EDIT: spotted recently posted [0] (Also of course C.R Browning's
Ordinary Men [1]) both underline the point that you don't need to
recruit intrinsically corrupted people - you can make them,
It's really shocking to me how quickly and transparently we've hit banana republic levels of corruption, and anyone with any smidgen of power to do anything about it has just rolled over - Profiles in Cowardice describes all of the remaining Republicans in Congress to me (all the courageous ones were either primaried or retired).
The examples are all just so disgustingly blatant now, like Eric Adams in NYC, or the founder of Nikola paying millions in bribes (err, sorry, "campaign donations") to get a pardon.
Our republic may survive the current administration (not sure, probably give it less than a 50% chance these days), but the facade of our righteousness is gone forever. Trump won the election fair and square, and both the electoral college and the popular vote. People knew exactly what they were getting, and they wanted this.
> People knew exactly what they were getting, and they wanted this.
once the world was willing to forgive, but twice is a pattern that can't be ignored
the 97% of the rest of the world now needs to de-risk itself from the US and its businesses
longer term, the self-inflicted loss of economic, military and cultural domination will hopefully result in the US electorate realising that "US exceptionalism" was only ever a set of lucky circumstances, which are unlikely to be repeated
at which point the forced humility should result in a return to long-term stability
the worse outcome is the US attempts to hang onto its dying empire with warfare, and it appears we're seeing the groundwork being laid for this already (canada, greenland, panama, ...)
This is not easily done. The withdrawal will be extreme and take a great deal of time.
I think most will not have the will once they steel the cost. I know this forum loves to prognosticate but the right thing is what one must do to survive.
I agree with your first paragraph, not so much the second.
I think the rest of the world is just dealing with the reality that the US is now an unreliable partner and cannot be trusted. In the face of that, yes, I agree that most of them won't dump the US immediately with big fanfare, but they will start to decouple in the background where it matters - making trade deals that exclude the US, building real incentives for the intelligentsia to stay away from the US (though the US is already doing a fairly decent job of that themselves), taking more responsibility for their own defense, etc.
I mean, look what happened to Vietnam and Israel. They capitulated in the face of the tariff threat and removed their tariffs on US imports, and they still got hit with some of the highest (or, it Vietnam's case, the highest) tariff rates. Europe has already realized (and this is a good thing and a long time coming IMO) that they need to rebuild their defense capacity because they can't depend on the US.
So no, I don't believe it will happen immediately, but I also believe that over the longer term (5-10-15 years) that decoupling from the US is inevitable solely because not doing that will be more difficult for other countries.
What's interesting with Eric Adams is that his charges were dismissed with prejudice by the judge handling the case specifically because the Trump admin made clear statements that they would use the prosecution as a stick to try and get him to do what they want.
Thanks for pointing this out. I dimly registered that there was a strangeness about the dismissal of charges, but I had no idea this was the reasoning:
> "Everything here smacks of a bargain: dismissal of the Indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions," he said.
> His decision to drop the case permanently, Judge Ho said, ensured that the administration could not use the indictment as "leverage" over Adams or the city of New York.
I really hope that NYC is smart enough to properly oust this corrupt asshole.
I live in NYC, and I have triple-checked to make sure that I will be able to vote in the primary to try and avoid him getting the democrat nomination, and this is the first time in my life that I've genuinely considered voting Republican if he does manage to get the nomination.
Good news! He's probably going to be running as an independent. Wait, I'm checking my notes again, it doesn't appear to be good news at all. Damn, sorry man.
You will see next, the removal of the Fed chairman. It is illegal but the Administration will say fight it off in the courts.
The Fed chairman is going to make a speech in 10 min, and the US President is currently live on his social platform accusing him of playing Politics. You will then achieve the same level of governance as Türkiye.
I see you as having been downvoted. I have no idea why - it is on topic, and correct. Further, it is not hard to deduce why he will remove Powell, or the impact on America vis a vis the US Dollar. The "Mar a Lago" accord spells this out, with all its faulty logic.
They have an agenda that is based on errors, ignorance, and being manipulated by parties that are adversaries to America and democracy. Soon this will be irrecoverable within this generation, at least.
People have the mistaken belief that things are bad right now. They can get drastically worse.
The Fed charmain just said inflation will pick up. When the economy starts to tank Trump will need somebody to blame, and will blame the high interest rates. The Fed might even have the need to raise rates.
[1] "...The relevant legislation holds that a member of the Federal Reserve board may be “removed for cause by the president”. But in this context, courts have interpreted “for cause” to refer to misconduct or impropriety. The president cannot remove the members of the board purely for policy or political reasons.
However, Trump could attempt to demote Powell from chair to an ordinary member of the Federal Reserve, and put another candidate in charge. Here, there is less of a legal precedent. Previous presidents have always assumed they did not have the power to do this..."
The inflation is a desired and intended side effect of the tariffs, the statement by Powell is part of a chess match and his removal will be part of an intended outcome.
Trump will try to replace Powell extra-constitutionally and at this point, I suspect he may succeed. It will be close to the lights going out at that point.
I agree with you- other than that they wanted Trump. In 2024, both candidates were historically unpopular, and polling continues to show that both parties approval ratings are at an all time low.
My read is the election was a rejection of globalist neoliberal capitalism and Trump was the closest choice to that. If the democrats had run someone who was even willing to lie about making changes for regular people they would have won easily.
"Trump won't be present today for the dignified transfer of four U.S. soldiers at Dover Air Force Base, Delaware.Instead, he'll be attending a LIV Golf dinner reception in Florida. The White House and the Defense Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment on which administration officials might be in attendance.
The soldiers died during a training exercise in Lithuania. They were honored during a dignified departure ceremony from Lithuania, with Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda and other dignitaries paying tribute.
Trump isn't attending dignified transfer of soldiers who died in Lithuania, continued The 3rd Infantry Division identified the soldiers as Sgt. Jose Duenez Jr., 25, of Joliet, Illinois; Sgt. Edvin F. Franco, 25, of Glendale, California; Pfc. Dante D. Taitano, 21, of Dededo, Guam; and Staff Sgt. Troy S. Knutson-Collins, 28, of Battle Creek, Michigan."
Yea, it's not like the people who voted for (or accept) this are just going to vanish in 4 years. This is all happening because a significant number of people affirmatively vote for this to happen, plus a similar-sized number of people who don't vote, and are therefore indicating they are OK with whatever happens. This roughly 66% of eligible voters are still going to be here in 4 years.
It's very easy to go from democracy to dictatorship, while the other way around is a lot harder. Dictatorship is self-sustaining, while democracy needs work to keep alive.
I have been told for many years that Americans needed their guns to protect them from a tyrranical government. Did they forget to rise up, or are they planning to do it later? Or did they in fact vote for him?
The people that scream the most about needing guns to protect them from a tyrannical government are the same that scream about backing the blue.
Those positions are diametrically opposed.
The 3rd Amendment exists for a reason. The police of colonial times _were_ the Redcoats. They _were_ soldiers working for the king. Modern police serve the same function and have basically the same powers. They are not peace officers - they are soldiers, and I hope one day the people living in this country wake up and say "no more".
But but but.. sir.. he went to Joe Rogan.. he had a live chat with Musk and 350m live watchers (I think _that_ was the day that Trump decided to make Musk his wing-man.. an audience of 350m live watchers is a staggering number!)
Keeping it impersonal (and only understanding/analyzing "how" the elections were won/lost), I think that "Trump didn't win". Instead "Democrats lost", took a risky bet and to quote the meme "the risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math". [0]
EDIT: I think it was Bill Burr that said on his (latest) SNL monologue "you would think that after the assassination attempt they would just give it to him" (because yes, that was a critical security failure, and so badly designed (the "security" of the event") that one could easily be tricked into thinking that it was purposeful)(a proper Hanlon's razor)
This was not a fair assumption that many commentators had warned against. It was clear from Project 2025 that he was going to remove career public servants who resisted his worst impulses in the first term, replacing them instead with loyalists.
Calling the longest government shutdown in US history, the Muller report, sympathetic comments towards white nationalists, deploying unmarked federal troops to arrest peaceful protestors, ethics lawsuits, family separation policy, all the Federalist society judge appointments, overturning Roe v Wade, multiple impeachments, etc., uneventful is anything but honest.
This doesn't even count the global pandemic.
Setting all that aside, everything he's done is something he campaigned on.
One of the first things he did upon taking office in 2017 was to block a bunch of legal residents from entering the country. One of the last things he did was try to illegally hang on to power after being voted out. He did plenty of bad stuff. He tried plenty more, and got blocked or talked out of it by some of his cabinet who were vaguely reasonable. It was clear that he was not going to appoint any vaguely reasonable people to his cabinet this time around, and so he'd be basically unchecked. How was this not obvious to you?
I think the bigger shift isn't that he wasn't this "bold" the first time, it's that there hadn't been 8 years of his form of politics not only winning but becoming the only viable form of conservatism across the government and electorate in the US.
He didn't have "his" people in place to help him the first time because much of the establishment at the time was still Romney/Bush/McCain/McConnell types and they kept a firm hand on the reigns of power and often undercut his ability to do things because they felt like he was an aberration.
This time around, there is no "primary opposition" (intraparty conflict) in any meaningful way. He wants, they do, it is truly Trump's party.
There is not much conservative about this reactionism. And the old guard did not have firm control in Trump's first term. But you're right almost all Republican opposition was eliminated. I would add Trump and his people were unprepared in 2016.
>I expected a repeat of his first term. Which honestly was quite uneventful. This is not.
They were quite candid with their intent. Aside from him casually/flippantly brushing off Project 2025 during his campaign (when it was clear that his campaign was deeply connected to it), it was tremendously obvious to anybody paying attention that things would be much different during round two, and in a more aggressive manner.
You had your head in the sand. If you voted for him, this is your fault. Damn you.
Just a simple acknowledgement that I am aware that my comment is unconstructive and goes against the desire/rules of this space. If I'm going to be an asshole, I usually try and acknowledge that I'm aware of it.
I understand. It's hard to be constructive when it was so blatantly clear a second term was going to be a disaster of epic proportions and here we are.
Isn't this term just an extension of the end of his last term?
He spent the majority of his term being blocked from doing completely problematic stuff by his staff who he increasingly fired or resigned.
He finally got the end of his term with many more yes-men and started doing things like impounding funds for Ukraine.
The first thing he does at the start of term 2 is more impoundment. Like sure, Day 1 Year 1 Trump doesn't bleed into Day 1 year 5 but Day 364 Year 4 bleeds into Day 1 Year 5 pretty well.
Trump sought to illegally install himself as president in 2021 by having fake electors deny the actual results of their state's presidential elections and just decide that Trump should win anyway. He was only prevented from doing this by a combination of organizational incompetence from his team and Mike Pence refusing to go along with the plan.
This was among the greatest threats to democratic self governance in well over a century.
I'd say that Trump 2.0 is more eventful than Trump 1.0, but I absolutely would not call Trump 1.0 uneventful.
Even when the candidate speaks of people not having to vote again in the future, if they just vote for him this last time?
I mean, I'm not even in the US and probably missed a lot of stuff that happened during the election. But no one around here is surprised about what's happening now, surely most of the US population was that aware too?
People are oblivious in this country. Totally clueless. A big part of that is the 'information ecosystem' where even the supposedly left-leaning outlets sanewashed everything that's happened and both-sidesed it, even if their reporting was factual. Then you move towards the outright propaganda like Fox and worse. And then there's social media...
I kind of feel like if you didn't vote for Kamala, you kind of signaled you're OK with Trump, since that's how the American two-party system forces people to act.
So all those that didn't vote, obviously didn't hate what Trump proposed enough to vote against him.
Things felt pretty tame by the end of the first term, almost like the structure of the existing system kept things at bay. It feels very much so like influence from abroad is heavily affecting the current course.
I'm not sure what your definition of "tame" is, but mine definitely does not include "A pandemic raging through the population with leadership calling it a hoax and proposing to fight it with bleach and horse dewormer, and encouraging the population to defy public health efforts to stop it." 2017 to 2020 was a steady increase in chaos and incompetence, coming to a crescendo with COVID. And after 4 years, voters said "Yea, we want that chaos again!"
I agree, I meant "tame" as in comparison to where we are now. The first term felt incompetent and maybe a bit malicious, but the current term feels outwardly malicious and extraordinarily corrupt.
I could put on a mask and stay at home for COVID, but I can't do much about shunning our allies, disrupting the world economy, disappearing people, electing a cabinet of highly unqualifed individuals, putting the SCOTUS in pocket, etc. I can advocate, stay informed, support my community, etc., but this feels on another level than the first term and that's what I meant by my comment.
The lack of repercussions from the first term all added together to give a sense of could do no wrong. Impeached twice, no convictions. Proposed the concept that a president cannot be held accountable except via conviction after impeachment. Pretty much proven true by SCOTUS.
Now, they've taken that cue and just turned the dial to an 11. There's currently very little resistance, and in the places where there is, they've just flat out ignored it. Of course the snowball is going to pick up speed
It's not just the sense of "could do no wrong" but "DID no wrong". Is he a Criminal who committed Crimes if he never went to jail or was he a "criminal" the same way "we all are" (this is to say, we all speed or disobey minor laws on a daily basis but that could have major repercussions if they were prosecuted to the maximum extent of the law, and doesn't it seem like The Deep State just weaponized edge cases and technicalities to entrap him?)
I don't personally buy into this framing, but it sure seems like millions of people do since points at results
I figure the people who want the US to withdraw from the global stage have been working on Trump ever since 1987 when he paid for that full page pro-tariff ad in the New York Times. Power hungry maniacs are a dime a dozen, but ones that are also hell bent on committing economic suicide are a scarce resource and need to be nurtured with care if you want them to actually do it.
It's what I'd do if the US was bullying me around. It's a well tested play (refined during the US interventions in South America in the 70's and 80's).
A headline from the times during that same year: TRUMP GIVES A VAGUE HINT OF CANDIDACY (https://archive.is/xF2pW)
As much as I dislike advertising in general, and specifically the opinions in that ad, I think that whether the New York Times was willing to publish it is not the important detail here.
This was at a time when the US and China were working together to keep the USSR in check while at the same time the US was sending weapons to Taiwan so that they could be used to keep China in check. So imagine being China in 1991. The USSR has just fallen, so they're no longer a threat, but US-sold weapons are still being pointed at you from Taiwan. You'd want the US to leave you alone and stop arming your enemies. And here's this candidate who wants the US to step off the world stage and focus instead on what it can build alone at home.
It seems pretty likely that they'd be in favor of getting Trump elected. Whether they ultimately did is an open question, but if so then it's not shame on the New York Times, but shame on us for not better protecting ourselves against foreign interference.
I think for many of us saying this out loud (or typing it out on sites like this) is a coping mechanism.
During Trump 1, there were some adults in the room -- congress seemed to be less complacent, the cabinet appointees had more independent (and more pragmatic) judgement, and the scale of purges across the government felt like nothing compared to what's currently going on.
There's none of that now. Congress is complacent and arguably complicit in an ongoing constitutional crisis, the admin is just breaking a number of laws without even putting in the work to have plausible deniability, and with every passing day the corruption's growing to levels that many of us who've been born and raised in the modern economic west just haven't seen in a few generations.
Even if I don't particularly like the individuals, it did feel like some people involved felt compelled to be there, even if they didn't really want to be... Rex Tillerson comes to mind. I can't imagine Trump's moral character sat well with a literal boy scout. John Kelly was another no-nonsense member who seemed steady & driven by a motivation that, agree with or not, was defensible vs. the current batch's motivations. Surprise - he didn't last long either.
If there are anyone on the (currently) winning side in this Congress who aren't a bunch of greedy, self-serving boot lickers they better step up soon. I can't imagine someone like John McCain would remain silent in this environment. Best case scenario: history will forget most of these assholes; if not, it will not be kind.
The libertarians in the Republican party, like Massie and Paul, still seem to vote [1] according to their ideology. I don't agree with their ideology but they do seem consistent. [2]
Collins, McConnell, and Murkowski have been voting against the administration for more traditional Republican policy, sometimes.[3]
Nine Republican Reps blocked H.Res 282[4] because it would have killed bipartisan H.Res 164[5] and that caused the House Republican leaders to cancel votes for the whole week.
if you have any scruples and a brain, you'll shut up until you have a chance to obstruct something really important. Its easy to replace you if you vocally oppose trump.
It's really surprising how few people seem to understand what working under a hostile regime actually means, and how civil disobedience can never be done publicly - because that would just mean you get replaced and can't help anymore.
Trump 1 also had no plan and most there were for their own gain in money or power, so they were ineffective and got barely nothing done. Trump 2 has the Project 2025/Curtis Yarvin plan and plenty of competent people to execute it. They prepared a shitload of executive orders and set up a system where sycophants can upload their CV to take government jobs when they fire people.
After he won I started reading more about who these people were and what they were planning to do and sold all my stocks after the inauguration, there was no way it was going to be a normal presidency, even compared to the last one.
Nothing, not a particularly active or savvy investor, had most in nvidia/amd (bought both around $15) and s&p 500 index. Gold and EU arms is obvious in hindsight. Just waiting for some of this to be over and I'll buy index funds again.
Probably. But I think its only the beginning of them fucking around like this, so far its just reactions on tariffs, we haven't seen the real impact yet. And unless congress stops them they're not going to stop.
I mean, genuinely, the problem here is not that Trump is a convicted criminal. There are many people who are "convicted felons" who are far more ethical, intelligent, and possessed of better leadership qualities than he is. In particular, a) anyone convicted of nonviolent drug offenses should not be considered suspect in anything like the same way, and b) more generally, if you base your determinations of people on what's legal, you put yourself at the mercy of whatever the current government decides is acceptable. This government should make very clear why that is not the best idea in the world.
No; the problem with Trump is the specific types of laws he broke. He broke laws around honesty, fair dealing, obstruction of justice, and, of course, the integrity of elections and our democratic process. He is, very plainly, opposed to democracy and the rule of law, preferring to replace it with cronyism and nepotism.
That's why he's bad for the country, not simply "because he's a convicted criminal."
I'm sorry, I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say here.
Are you saying it's normal or acceptable to have your expectations be that a "convicted criminal" is automatically a bad person?
If so, then particularly given the large and very-well-documented racial biases in arrest, prosecution, and conviction for crimes here in the US, perhaps you should consider adjusting those expectations?
If not, then please actually say what you mean clearly.
> Are you saying it's normal or acceptable to have your expectations be that a "convicted criminal" is automatically a bad person?
I believe what the parent comment is trying to say is: someone who committed crimes in the past has evinced a lack of respect for the law, and is therefore more likely to commit crimes in the future than someone with a history of law-abiding.
"Bad person" is a value judgement, which is besides the point.
I'm generally in favor of giving people a chance and not just judging them based on the law regardless of morality.
But there's only one POTUS. There are multiple people out there who could do a decent job of being POTUS. Many of them are not convicted felons. We wouldn't lose much if we filtered out the entire convicted-felon category from this particular job.
Consider the situation where Trump is President, and someone is running against him.
He gets the police to arrest this opposition candidate, let's say for marijuana possession with the intent to sell (a felony), and with procedural chicanery ensures that the court trying the case is run by a Trump-appointed judge.
The opposition candidate is convicted of this charge.
Under your suggestion, they would then become ineligible to be elected.
It gets even worse if the corrupt President has a compliant Congress (which it seemed like he did for a little while, but that's less sure now). If he can ram through a new law making "criticizing the sitting President" a felony, then basically anyone who would oppose him and his regime would clearly be guilty.
In general, the sitting government decides what is a crime and what is not. If you make a law that says that those convicted of crimes cannot run for public office—either "any public office" or "only this specific public office"—then the sitting government, if it is seeking to act in its own interests rather than those of the people, has a perverse incentive to preferentially criminalize things that those who disagree with them are more likely to do, and to encourage (or coerce) bias in policing and trials to ensure conviction.
I did not suggest making felons ineligible for office. I'm supporting the idea that it would generally be OK for voters to reject a convicted felon candidate on the basis that they are a convicted criminal, without thinking too hard about what crime they were convicted of. I don't expect that to apply in an environment where the things you describe happen, but it would apply perfectly fine now.
I suggest the simplest explanation of how Trump is different from other felons is right there in Wilhoit's observation on conservatism:
"In-groups who are protected by the law, but not bound by it, alongside out-groups who are bound by the law, but not protected by it."
He may have been convicted, but he faced no consequences. He was not bound by the law, so not only did his convictions and investigations not deter him, the lack of consequences emboldened him.
I mean, Florida, who does not allow convicted felons to vote, allowed him to vote by saying "well, he's been convicted but not sentenced or completed his sentence so he's not fullllly convicted yet".
This rationale doesn't apply to any other person in a similar state in Florida, it was just for Trump.
I think when people mention Trump and felon and other character issues, rapist, and so on ... it's really a reference to all of them adding up to who he is.
I agree. If you could somehow describe him to a 5-yr-old (without psychologically scaring them) they would accurately sum up the zeitgeist as "he's a bad person".
Yeah, there's some sense to the idea that one ideal kind of lawmaker is someone who has broken the laws but still remains a good person doing good things. I don't personally think that's the case with Trump, but apparently a lot of other people do.
> I mean, genuinely, the problem here is not that Trump is a convicted criminal. There are many people who are "convicted felons" who are far more ethical, intelligent, and possessed of better leadership qualities than he is.
Convicted criminal + blatant lies = disregard for society, disregard for people, disregard for rules/norms/laws. It all adds up to who he is and what he values and represents.
NOBODY should be surprised at this administration's disregard for society. You should be actually surprised if he does anything good/lawful.
> Liberals were promoting people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who has extreme views, they were "cancelling" anyone who dares to think differently about anything: from climate to abortion or covid vaccines.
That you think we should not be "cancelling" anti-vaxxers and your implication of we should listen to anti-vaxxers (because they "dare to think differently", as if this is about their dyed hair color or something) says a lot about you. And that you use "canceling" in quotes because you can't point to a real thing "liberals" did.
> As a result they kicked off from public discourse huge groups of electorate, polarizing society.
OHHHHH, the liberals are the one who polarized society? Not Trump from the start saying these people are my enemies? Your right-wing bias is showing
> There were topics that you just could not discussed, twitter (pre Musk) was looking to it, same Facebook or Youtube (still, good luck having a monetized film with the forbidden word like Gaza Strip), similarly mainstream media.
And there are now topics that can't be discussed on Twitter (post-Musk) like the word "cisgender". And Facebook and Youtube had TONS of anti-vax misinformation, anti-abortion groups, and general right-wing algorithmic boosting. That maybe "some" topics aren't allowed then but a ton of others still are is you trying to pick one spoon out of a pile of knives and saying its full of spoons.
What other topics could not be discussed? The value of white supremacy? How homosexuality is a choice? That the Jews run the world? Be specific please.
I don't agree with or support the overall position of the GP, but feel the parts their argument you attack are not the important parts. The Dems most certainly did sabotage their own campaign. Incredibly weak leaders and they kept telling people who are really hurting and falling farther behind that "everything's great; the last 4 years have improved dramatically!" when it just wasn't the case for the exact same people Trump told he would make everything so much better. He lied, won't help them and doesn't give a shit about the vast majority of citizens, but he told them exactly what they wanted to hear. The Democrats were incredibly tone-deaf, and massively discounted 1. how many people were mad and 2. how many were willing to plug their noses and vote for Trump.
I chalk that up as lame but kind of inevitable mild corruption that doesn't really go anywhere -- Hunter seems more like an embarrassing addict child that a caring parent has no choice but to put up with than somebody who can truly peddle influence over his father -- and feel that this administration is a vast difference in degree of corruption. Degrees matter!
I'll bite. Remind me what job Hunter held in the previous administration again.
This whataboutism is also ridiculous. Even if we assume Hunter did the worst of what MAGA says, Trump is personally orders of magnitude worse. He did a crypto rug pull the first few days of being POTUS again ffs. And people complain that Hunter traded on his name to get a cushy board spot?
Trump is actively working to get rid of the law against foreign bribery!
Nothing that Trump or Elon are doing is corruption. Money getting funneled through shell companies to Bidens’ is corruption. Your liberal bias is strong enough to not even realize that for 4 years.
And the massive weaponization of government against opponents is the worst.
Classical liberal and conservative ideologies have danced around between two poles for hundreds of years: force is right (might makes right) and one's ability to assert dominance in market/politics determines whether one is good/right/just... or.... principles determine justice, and the limits to power are key and important, constitutions, institutions, etc are there to enforce that.
Guess which pole is winning. Again. Predictably.
If you listen to his strongest supporters and those in his administration, they speak openly of it: the President is Right because the president is a Winner. Losers don't get to define what is Right. The President "won" not just the election, but "as a businessman" and an entertainer. So he is Right. Elon is Right because Elon is richest. America is Right because America is Most Powerful. Everyone else is a leech, a cuck, a sub, a beta, whatever. You either get on side, or you're a loser. And wrong.
It's pointless to argue with these people on abstract principles. American liberals are so caught off guard by this because they've been assured their whole life that constitutions and courts are the foundation of stability and that those guard rails protect society.
Again, it comes down to how you define "Right" doesn't it?
Clearly Christian theology and other strains of thought think otherwise... that there's an ethical/moral "rightness" which can be judged independent of what the powerful say.
To be clear, I'm not arguing for that position. I just am pointing out in part why the Democrats and liberals are so pathetically unable to confront this situation. They thought they were part of a gentleman's club, and they could all take turns ruling according to a set of rules.
The liberal philosophy is just the mirror opposite, isn't it? "This poor, marginalized group is suffering, that's wrong! We need regulation to stop it. Oh look, we found another over here, this is injustice! Let's all take action to rid this wrong from the world".
I mean, I'm personally a kind of Marxian. I won't defend liberalism, though I'd prefer not to live in an illberal society.
To me the present-day "left" liberal is not just profound hypocrisy but also a refusal to confront the reality of class conflict in capitalist society. The kind of liberal you're talking about will do "everything" to rectify injustice against every identifiable group except the largest group in society, the working class whose labour feeds the whole machine.
There was a slogan in the 20s and 30s when the socialist movement was confronted by (and lost to) the rise of the authoritarian right. "Socialism or barbarism" [and no, peanut gallery, the "left" in North America is not "socialism"]. Guess which part you're getting now.
Isn't Trump's treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, a Soros guy?
I just learned that he apparently want to impose a new economic order on the world where every country basically becomes subservient to the US, but first they need crazy tariffs to make them all beg for access to the US market. I don't think it will work, and instead the global economy will move on without the US.
It's going to cause fracturing at every level. Countries will question their interdependence on each other. Then US states will reconsider their dependence on the federal government. The end result is a hyper-local world with only the minimum necessary trade between enclaves.
The president as a title was meant as a diminutive relative to the Congress. The capitol building is at the precise center of Washington DC - literally and for a reason. The Supreme Court is across the street and for many years was inside the capitol.
The White House is in the middle of no where with a direct line of sight to Thomas Jefferson looking into the presidents bedroom. These are not accidents. Next time you’re there read what is written on the walls surrounding Jefferson and the architectural decisions made make a lot of sense and should be a warning to anyone sleeping in that bedroom.
Congress ceded power over time to the executive proactively as presidents subsequent to Washington emulated his integrity.
They have the ability to remove all of the power of the president, whose role, officially, is to merely preside. All you say? Crazy. But they’re the only body that can pass amendments to the constitution.
So, we don’t need to wait for the next presidential election if we don’t choose to. It’s up to we the people to choose.
That's all in theory. As long as Trump has the support from the Republicans in Congress, from the Supreme Court, from the police, and from the many loyalists he put into various offices, he can basically do whatever he likes. What's going to happen if he declares there will be no more elections for some fabricated reason? Who will actually stop him?
> The end result is a hyper-local world with only the minimum necessary trade between enclaves.
It has been always unclear to me how Roman Empire turned into that multitude of feudal states and microstates. And i lived through USSR collapse, and that dissolution of great central power is still hard to get a mental hold on - you live in one paradigm and somehow you find yourself living in completely different one, whatever was truth and crime yesterday, today became crime and truth, and i'm having kind of deja vu these days here :)
> he apparently want to impose a new economic order on the world where every country basically becomes subservient to the US
This sounds like some kind of right-wing conspiracy theory attributing everything to George Soros for some reason.
The US dollar is the reserve currency of the world. America has been calling the shots for the entire post-WWII period. The American Empire extends across the globe collecting natural resources and cheap labour. US citizens have been reaping the benefits of this neo-imperialism. What MAGA people are advocating is basically US isolationism where the US surrenders all it's soft-power influence and becomes a sort of hermit oligarchy.
I wonder if we soon hear EU (or some of them) wanting to join/associate with BRICS. The BRICS has been futilely trying to get rid of dollar, and Trump seems to have just done them a solid here.
If China, however it is hard for CCP, just tone down internal oppression a couple notches and, that is an easy part for China, guarantees to Europe non-invasion by Russia, the EU may turn East wholesale. Add to that China's hold on Africa and Iran.
Speaking about Trump's declared goal of weakening China - you don't weaken your opponent by isolating yourself from your allies and turning them into allies of your opponent, quite an opposite.
Absolutely. Trump is strengthening Russia and China, and weakening the US. Also weakening the EU for now, but if the EU gets its act together, they might well come out on top.
"Right is only a question among equals, for the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer as they must."
We shouldnt expect companies to be Moral. We shouldn't expect the government to be Just. The sooner we realize how politics actually work, the smarter we can make personal decisions that comply with realities.
There is no reason to waste time and effort. The only people who can topple Apple are going to be major players, not the multitude.
I wish more people took away the lesson of limiting their reliance on those with much more power because it leads to one sided relationships. However it seems like we are moving towards consolidation of power instead of towards inter-reliance of equals.
Completely agree. The past 15 years or so have really opened my eyes to how power really works.
The powerful are incentivized to use that power for their own benefit. Those without power do not even get to have a light shone on their poor treatment.
Couldn't disagree more. Our expectations tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies. Expect amoral companies and you get amoral companies. Expect an unjust government and you get an unjust government.
> you can't materialize good leadership by ignoring every issue and praying to a higher power.
Indeed. We must be vigilant to acquire and maintain our freedoms and good governance. People suffered and some died to build the parts worth saving now. Apathy isn't going to fix anything.
He’s right though - indifference to corruption or malfeasance begets corruption and malfeasance. Holding your government and companies to a higher standard of behavior is both possible and necessary for a functional, durable nation. Sure, you can enforce corporate morality via regulation or governmental morality via the courts or ethics committees, but that completely ignores the concept of soft power. Laws can be broken faster than they can be enforced.
Exactly. It's like saying culture and trust cannot exist and have never existed. And that anyone who believes otherwise is just a sucker. If you want to really see a low trust society, behold Russia.
> Cook, a proud Alabama native, believes the inauguration is a great American tradition, and is donating to the inauguration in the spirit of unity, the sources said.
https://www.axios.com/2025/01/03/tim-cook-apple-donate-1-mil...
Did you also call Biden's inaugural funding as corruption when he was donated ~$62 million ?
Donations included several billionaires - including the Gates family.
Is raising Presidential inaugural funds considered as "corruption" only for one party ? Or only when it crosses ~$100 million like President Trump did ?
Would cancel my Apple family plan but like my family, instead, bought a refurbished second hand iPhone instead of buying a new one recently.
Will be speaking with my wallet in a variety of ways, along with calling, marching, etc. We start here... let's see where we end up. The moment is _now_.
Trump dropped his lawsuit against Meta for suspending him after the insurrection.[1] They want to avoid an antitrust trial.[2] They want Trump to pressure the EU into allowing surveillance capitalism.[3] They want influence in negotiations over Section 230.[4]
[1] https://apnews.com/article/trump-meta-settlement-zuckerberg-...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/meta-ceo-zuckerberg-lobbies...
[3] https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit...
[4] https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/section_230_bipartisan_b...
He basically paid $1M to try and save thousands of jobs at Apple (and of course increase Apple’s value)
Apple is the 8-th largest company in the world by revenue [1]. If they wanted to oppose the admin, they would be uniquely positioned to do so. That they choose not to tells me that either they support the admin or that they choose not to. That they chose the option that shows active support for the admin has a negative impact on my ability to empathize with their CEO.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by...
Shareholders can sue, yes, but in the U. S. you can sue anyone for anything, and "suing" is not the same as "winning".
It is also entirely true that you cannot just do whatever you personally want with shareholder money.
The truth here is in the middle.
Apple (well, Cook) certainly did not have to donate to him. But the fact of the matter is that they will have to work with this administration to run their business over the next 4 years, and I am sure that $1m is a small investment to make Cook's life easier.
This is true. But it has nothing to do with fiduciary duty.
If, hypothetically, Cook said "fuck this administration, we don't like their politics, we're not going to work with them", their shareholders could and probably would sue them. Those shareholders could make a case that Cook was asking of his own political interests, point to other organizations that did make exemption deals, and sue for losses in their share value. The reason for this is not entirely wacky: when you borrow someone's money to do something, you can't do your own pet projects with it.
Now that, of course, doesn't mean that Cook had to donate. But Cook is businessman himself, runs Apple to make money, and doing that is his modus operandi.
In this case, it's already happening:
https://electrek.co/2025/04/02/nyc-sue-tesla-over-elon-musk-...
But fundamentally, shareholder maximization is the goal stated by both common business sense and legal rulings. I personally believe that long-term optimization rather than short term is a more successful strategy. But in the short term the board could remove him for going against the feds. Shareholders could sue if it caused a drop in value or impacted global operations. Caused by I don't know, tariffs that could have been avoided with a corrupt monetary contribution.
I'd love to actually see a CEO refuse to grease the palm and them get sued for not doing something corrupt. Would be a case to follow.
The point is, as I understand it, that CEOs of publicly traded corps are not afforded the freedom required to make an ideological stand and keep their job.
This is something that should be expected in an absolute monarchy, not a democracy.
While that might sound like an improvement (and kind of is as at least we're getting more honest), I also view it as a big regression. At least when there's perceived shame in being corrupt, people aspire to be better. When it just becomes routine, I fear it's the beginning of the end.
I don't think he "supports" or is "against" this administration, I think it's much simpler: he does not care. I know this is cynical, but if the last three years in the software world has taught us anything, it seems like these tech CEOs regard their employees as expendable, and they're willing to change their political allegiances when they feel like it.
Maybe all of us would do that if put into this position, I don't know, no one wants to give me billions of dollars to run this experiment. Regardless, I'm pretty sure I'm right about this.
No. Reject this.
Tim Cook is going to find out very soon what happens to anyone who makes a deal with Donald Trump: he gets what he wants, and they don't get paid.
> I’m sure he doesn’t support the admin
Why, are you a personal friend of his?
The billionaries are the only people who can actually apply a meaningful level of practical opposition to autocratic rulers. Instead they chose to bend the knee, because they think it better fits their self-interest. Which is what their Russian counterparts did with Putin 20 years ago, and where are they now? Either confined inside a pariah state, or dead.
If Tim Cook gave you a million dollars, would it be fair to say he doesn’t support you?
It’s silly the kind of gymnastics we engage in to preserve our mental models. The facts are the facts.
I hope Americans still have the faith they used to regarding Apple. Looks like we'll be trusting their judgement quite a bit going forwards.
It's a $3T company. It got there by extracting the maximum possible from customers, app developers, and labor. They are well known for exploiting offshore workers [1] many times over. They force customers to upgrade off working hardware. They force customers to buy multiple devices when one could do the job. There are monopoly complaints world over. Customers who are happy with this have Stockholm Syndrome.
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/china-ap...
The west should copy this, nets are known to prevent a lot of suicide, in general people don't immediately go and try again.
2) the suicide rate at the foxconn factory was, even before the nets, lower per capita than the province in which it is situated. using your logic, the foxconn factory simply existing prevents deaths that would have otherwise happened if it did not.
i’m all for calling apple on their shit when warranted, but the suicide nets meme needs to die.
That only holds if the foxconn employees were randomly selected from the general population.
Calling out unspoken assumptions can be useful, but it's not a refutation unless the assumptions are unreasonable or demonstrably wrong.
I hope the opposite. Faith is exploitable and leads to complacency and accepting excuses. I hope Americans do not have faith in Apple and that will either make them work harder to earn and keep that trust, or that it’ll lead to the mask coming down. Having trust in someone covertly deceiving you looks like the worst possible outcome.
With stuff like this, why should we extend them trust?
Faith is a good word to use when discussing the true believers following the fruit factory. The company has been very successful in turning commercial transactions into quasi-religious ceremonies and managed to convince people that they can trust their judgement. Well, yes, you can certainly trust their judgement as long as you realise that their judgement revolves around profit maximisation. While this in itself does not need to be a problem is does become a problem when one half goes into the transaction based on faith with the other half being aware of this.
Don't be deluded, you can trust them just as much/little as you can trust other large vendors. If you like their products you can buy them but it does not make sense to 'trust their judgement' once supervision is lifted since it is not a question if they will abuse this trust but when and the answer is they already have, many times over. Every time they claim their products do not offer freedom of choice because of ${reasons} they abuse this trust because they fail to state that ${reasons} is a constant which is initialised as follows:
At which point does the ordinary MAGA hat realize Trump isn't working for them?
Also, with everything being written down nowadays (on your social media), changing your opinion means inviting mockery of past comments being dug up to be flung at you. Then again, the idiots in power seem to have developed a thick skin for this.
A little over a month ago: https://www.npr.org/2025/02/26/g-s1-50605/conspiracy-theorie... / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43194910
This has to be one of the most damaging things about social media, in my opinion. I never really understood why changing your mind about something as you get new information is looked down on and mocked, but it is.
Or, "I do my own research".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther
It's a concerning vision for the country.
May I ask, how do you know this? Does she say that about her own motivation? If not, why would she say she does it?
I've spent decades having to deal with this person. I assure you that I am not misrepresenting her.
They never changed their mind.
A huge amount of our current law was built by segregationists.
The tyranny of being forced to treat black people equally.
Countless communities across the US chose to destroy their infrastructure and amenities (specifically community pools) rather than allow their families to mingle with black people. There's an entire, well documented era of "white flight".
It's a common refrain by conservative voters that "The democrats abandoned the blue collar worker", but note they've been saying this for decades, so the ones that claim "identity politics" are the reason are wrong. Meanwhile they adored Reagan's fiscal policy, which was adopted wholesale by democrats after Reagan's landslide election proved any other fiscal policy was unacceptable to Americans. So nope, that also can't be what people mean by "abandon blue collar workers".
If you follow those claims back, they are from the civil rights era.
When people say "Democrats abandoned the blue collar worker", whether they realize it or not, they are saying "Democrats abandoned the WHITE blue collar worker by supporting black equality and integration".
This is evident if you look at the Democrat politicians who moved to the Republican party between the civil rights era and Reagan, and why they did so. They specify the civil rights act. Strom Thurmond openly switched to the republican party claiming that the Democrat's support and passing of the civil rights act and voting rights act meant they "no longer represented people like him"
This is also clear if you understand the history of black people in the south. It was a core part of southern "heritage" and history that white people were inherently superior to black people. It was a common topic of Sunday sermons during the civil war era for pastors to remind their congregation that it was God's Will that the black man be enslaved by the white, since they were barbarians and the White man was supposed to guide them. This is not an exaggeration.
"History not hate" is a contradiction, because the history WAS hate. Casual, institutional, systemic hate.
Republicans and conservative states have endeavored to not teach this, for decades. People in the south are genuinely taught that the North started the Civil War (outright false), that slavery wasn't the issue (False, several states explicitly submitted documents saying their reasoning for secession was to protect the institution of slavery), and that it was a "state's rights" issue (False, the slave states did not care about states rights, as they attempted to enforce Slave Catching laws in Free states by using federal authority, ie the exact thing they were critiquing the north for, and more importantly, the Confederate government openly talked about dropping the Facade of "states rights" now that they had their own government and could just install an authoritarian system that guaranteed slavery as an institution).
You can read all these Confederate government documents yourself. They were not shy about their intentions because it was a genuinely held belief that the white man was better than the black man.
“They know what they’re doing.” Is all I get from this baloney.
With enough propaganda, it's easy to blame whatever self-inflicted problem on others.
I was also at the gun range last week and overheard a conversation between two Trump supporters. They were outraged by his behavior since taking office, and said outright "if we had to vote again right now, half of us wouldn't vote for him".
Trying to say "I was wrong" after years of making your whole life, social circle, etc. about whatever thing you were wrong about is incredibly hard. It takes a very strong mental to do that. And, I wager for some/most people who fall deep into any cult-like movement (whatever it may be: conspiracies, etc.), they didn't start with a super strong mental fortitude in the first place, making it even more difficult.
It's almost as if the scope of the corruption and incompetence is so extensive that there isn't enough time to reflect on the misinformation process that everyone was so focused on for so long.
Obviously not everyone succumbed to it but even today the coverage in major outlets is completely distorted. Media just accept what the administration is saying as if it still has some kind of verdicality by virtue of power, a historically unprecedented example of the fallacy of appeal to authority. People constantly arguing that the Trump administration won't actually do this or that, that it's all a bluff, and so forth, are similarly misleading.
The discussions about mandates is bizarre to me for this reason, not just because of the tiny magnitude and minority nature of the electoral win, but because Trump and his administration vehemently denied doing exactly what they are currently doing. They dismissed it as insane paranoid ramblings of a deficient left. It's not just that they are failing to keep an electoral promise, they are doing the exact things they denied that they would do, and criticized their opponents for claiming they would do.
I guess I bring this up because it seems to me a lot of people have basically been lied to. Being a victim has its own shame and reluctance but it seems like a more tractable — and accurate in many cases — way to engage with some people than them being wrong.
So, never.
Everything bad is blamed on the "others", and the solution is more Trump.
We can only hope enough of the rest of people who supported him will figure it out eventually.
Of course
And Hacker News gestalt generally thinks politics is off topic - guess what happens to "disruptors" in a crony capitalistic system?
Hacker News and YCombinator, more than anyone, should be at the vanguard of stopping this. It will set innovation back by a decade by the end of the current administration's term.
The most reluctant or the least vocal to comply, maybe, but far from antagonistic.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/20/apple-ceo-tim-cook-and-preid...
https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-ceo-tim-cook-meet-w...
https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/apple-ceo-tim-cook-don...
I was also under the impression we're also entering a regulatory climate where amount of regulation isn't so much decreasing (TikTok ban for example is heavy handed), but that big tech has much more involvement in forming that regulation, which is useful for moat-building.
I'm not too knowledgeable on these, it's just the general gist I've been picking up so far this year, looking for correction if I got the wrong idea.
Not op, but yes.
>>>Seems like a forced sale is beneficial to them.
Short term. Long term you are establishing a precedent that you can intervene and take away the power of any large tech player. If it can happen to tiktok it can happen to others.
Im not against tikton ban, but im against it in its current form , since its not for the right reason. (China plays unfair with us corps, we should reciprocate our treatment of their own in our borders. The law instead claims some US patriot act natsec prerogative bs)
The government stepping in and eliminating one of (American) big tech's biggest competitors is an extremely pro-(American)-big-tech move.
> The policies are more anti-regulation, which big-tech wants right now.
Well, yeah. Exactly. They're all on the same team. They want fewer barriers in the way of their quest for more personal power.
The USG forcing a sale of the 3rd largest social media platform to FAANG from China is extremely pro-big-tech.
Also, the most recent administration is seeped with VCs. The Vice President JD Vance is a Peter Thiel protege.
Capital has always sided with populists and always will, because populists reinforce the status quo capital benefits from. You'll see the same thing with ostensibly liberal establishment media organizations. Like their presenters may hate Trump and his administration on the outside, but their owners love the fact that they have millions of viewers re-glued to their televisions for the latest stupid bullshit the White House is pulling, and no matter what they may ideologically disagree on, Ellen DeGeneres and Donald Trump have INFINITELY more in common with one another than either do with any working class person.
To put it short: It's the MONEY son, the MONEY. Oh they'll bicker and spat at one another in public, sure, but most of these folks are perfectly fine with one another when the cameras aren't rolling. They don't give a shit. Rightly or wrongly, wealthy minority folk think they don't need to worry about the reactionary Right, and honestly, they're probably correct given how fixated said reactionaries are on Drag Queens supposedly being a threat to children when it feels like we have daily news stories of cops, clergy, and teachers diddling kids.
https://youtu.be/XI0MUoW28VE?feature=shared
As for apple, their serfdom labor practice during Covid was shockingly public
https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2025/04/04/trump-a...?
(I call it serfdom labor because people were not allowed freedom of movement without threat of imprisonment.)
I see arguments about "this is the way it always has been" as essentially normalizing rampant authoritarian corruption. To me, it's taking projection and accepting it as fact without evidence.
Also, regardless, it seems two wrongs don't make a right, and the appropriate response is to reject it when it it exists.
Because they will insist that "I don't like the guy" right before they participate in a "Trump vs generic democrat" poll where they vote for Trump.
> The US labour watchdog froze two cases against Apple days after Donald Trump nominated an attorney who represents the tech group to be the agency’s top legal official.
> Trump last week nominated Crystal Carey, a partner at Morgan Lewis & Bockius, to be the NLRB’s general counsel. She is listed in the agency’s records as an attorney acting in Apple’s defence in both cases against the Silicon Valley tech group.
the level of just complete capture of the regulatory state by random rich companies is amazing, even beyond trump's first time bullshit like "Appoint the CEO of Exxon to be Secretary of State"
Steve Mnuchin (especially) and Rex Tillerson were two of the best appointments last time around. These guys have no redeeming value. And they're far more brazen about the corruption, too.
Ugh, knowing you have a clearly malicious actor as top dog of the country -_- it can’t get more frustrating. Except for the fact that a big part of the country supports it as well.
I do wonder if they even believe in him wholeheartedly or just put on an act cause they’re in too deep and don’t want to give the people who said they were making the wrong choice the “satisfaction” of admitting they were right.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
“Group” can be used when talking about a large organisation as a whole, rather than a smaller component or subsidiary.
So the FT is explicitly drawing attention to the argument that the people were fired because of something they did (attempting to unionise) and that that decision was made or sanctioned by Apple at the top level (not some regional CEO or middle manager).
I like this language quirk a lot. It almost feels subversive, pointing out through grammar that group entities are just people, responsible for their choices like everyone else.
Edit: once your regime has achieved a certain level of internal cohesiveness and stability, you can begin the next step, which is to turn lower-level state actors against the population. You can do this partly by ordering them to perpetrate violence and outrage. This has a numerous benefits: first, it makes the state actors themselves afraid of the population, partly because they fear accountability, which makes them more inclined to violence and more protective of the regime; second, it stokes anger against them, which validates all the fears I listed under the first point; third, it distracts from the less shocking crimes of the regime (mere theft as opposed to bodily harm or murder -- but eventually that too!); fourth, as the regime gradually ratchets up the violence, the population becomes increasingly fearful and willing to collaborate and thus decreasingly capable of organizing and resisting.
Edit 2: I've noticed in my two or three decades of intellectual and political awareness that the right frequently seems to benefit from this kind of compounding effect and stacked benefit. No matter what happens, good or bad, it seems to redound to their benefit. I can't think of any cases where I've felt that the left enjoyed similar structural or inherent political advantages.
No America goes even lower...
The US has historically held the rule of law as an important idea. Social security has largely eliminated deep elderly poverty.
What you're describing is the first step, where the wealthy attempt to install a ruler friendly to their interests, someone they think they can control and reason with. Joke's on them -- and on everybody else, too, unfortunately.
Edit: this led me to realize that the advanced age of Fake Tan President is a saving grace. He simply won't live long enough to implement the kind of system Putin has been able to solidify over the past twenty or thirty years. And I'm not aware of anybody in the GOP who can replace him in the cult of personality that a stable dictatorship generally requires.
This is a long time in the making. Florida is Ground Zero, and if you care to look back in time to the late 1990s, there is much to find.
Epstein was cooking. Offshore Playboys were living large and public lives and making plans for the future.
St. Petersburg, FL in particular holds so many secrets.
A psychological device of "blutkit" (blood cement). For example; young Nazi SS officers were recruited via a ritual attrocity like participation in a massacre. After that "we're all in this together" sealed loyalty through a mix of guilt and fear.
The race is on for the Trump administration to elicit the most unforgivable and insane actions in order to sinter those participants into a "death pact".
EDIT: spotted recently posted [0] (Also of course C.R Browning's Ordinary Men [1]) both underline the point that you don't need to recruit intrinsically corrupted people - you can make them,
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43583425
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_R._Browning
The examples are all just so disgustingly blatant now, like Eric Adams in NYC, or the founder of Nikola paying millions in bribes (err, sorry, "campaign donations") to get a pardon.
Our republic may survive the current administration (not sure, probably give it less than a 50% chance these days), but the facade of our righteousness is gone forever. Trump won the election fair and square, and both the electoral college and the popular vote. People knew exactly what they were getting, and they wanted this.
once the world was willing to forgive, but twice is a pattern that can't be ignored
the 97% of the rest of the world now needs to de-risk itself from the US and its businesses
longer term, the self-inflicted loss of economic, military and cultural domination will hopefully result in the US electorate realising that "US exceptionalism" was only ever a set of lucky circumstances, which are unlikely to be repeated
at which point the forced humility should result in a return to long-term stability
the worse outcome is the US attempts to hang onto its dying empire with warfare, and it appears we're seeing the groundwork being laid for this already (canada, greenland, panama, ...)
I think most will not have the will once they steel the cost. I know this forum loves to prognosticate but the right thing is what one must do to survive.
if you're a government it's quite easy to "encourage" it to occur
example: "US cloud provider revenue levy", starting at 0%, increasing 1% each month until 40%
the aim being to add a large risk premium to all purchases of US cloud services, encouraging companies to switch to domestic suppliers
the EU is already publicly talking about retaliating in this manner
I think the rest of the world is just dealing with the reality that the US is now an unreliable partner and cannot be trusted. In the face of that, yes, I agree that most of them won't dump the US immediately with big fanfare, but they will start to decouple in the background where it matters - making trade deals that exclude the US, building real incentives for the intelligentsia to stay away from the US (though the US is already doing a fairly decent job of that themselves), taking more responsibility for their own defense, etc.
I mean, look what happened to Vietnam and Israel. They capitulated in the face of the tariff threat and removed their tariffs on US imports, and they still got hit with some of the highest (or, it Vietnam's case, the highest) tariff rates. Europe has already realized (and this is a good thing and a long time coming IMO) that they need to rebuild their defense capacity because they can't depend on the US.
So no, I don't believe it will happen immediately, but I also believe that over the longer term (5-10-15 years) that decoupling from the US is inevitable solely because not doing that will be more difficult for other countries.
> "Everything here smacks of a bargain: dismissal of the Indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions," he said.
> His decision to drop the case permanently, Judge Ho said, ensured that the administration could not use the indictment as "leverage" over Adams or the city of New York.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c74nl3120k4o
I live in NYC, and I have triple-checked to make sure that I will be able to vote in the primary to try and avoid him getting the democrat nomination, and this is the first time in my life that I've genuinely considered voting Republican if he does manage to get the nomination.
The Fed chairman is going to make a speech in 10 min, and the US President is currently live on his social platform accusing him of playing Politics. You will then achieve the same level of governance as Türkiye.
They have an agenda that is based on errors, ignorance, and being manipulated by parties that are adversaries to America and democracy. Soon this will be irrecoverable within this generation, at least.
People have the mistaken belief that things are bad right now. They can get drastically worse.
[1] "...The relevant legislation holds that a member of the Federal Reserve board may be “removed for cause by the president”. But in this context, courts have interpreted “for cause” to refer to misconduct or impropriety. The president cannot remove the members of the board purely for policy or political reasons.
However, Trump could attempt to demote Powell from chair to an ordinary member of the Federal Reserve, and put another candidate in charge. Here, there is less of a legal precedent. Previous presidents have always assumed they did not have the power to do this..."
[1] https://theconversation.com/trump-has-threatened-to-fire-the...
Trump will try to replace Powell extra-constitutionally and at this point, I suspect he may succeed. It will be close to the lights going out at that point.
My read is the election was a rejection of globalist neoliberal capitalism and Trump was the closest choice to that. If the democrats had run someone who was even willing to lie about making changes for regular people they would have won easily.
"Trump won't be present today for the dignified transfer of four U.S. soldiers at Dover Air Force Base, Delaware.Instead, he'll be attending a LIV Golf dinner reception in Florida. The White House and the Defense Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment on which administration officials might be in attendance.
The soldiers died during a training exercise in Lithuania. They were honored during a dignified departure ceremony from Lithuania, with Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda and other dignitaries paying tribute.
Trump isn't attending dignified transfer of soldiers who died in Lithuania, continued The 3rd Infantry Division identified the soldiers as Sgt. Jose Duenez Jr., 25, of Joliet, Illinois; Sgt. Edvin F. Franco, 25, of Glendale, California; Pfc. Dante D. Taitano, 21, of Dededo, Guam; and Staff Sgt. Troy S. Knutson-Collins, 28, of Battle Creek, Michigan."
Anyone that expects this will only last four years hasn't been paying attention on history books.
Those positions are diametrically opposed.
The 3rd Amendment exists for a reason. The police of colonial times _were_ the Redcoats. They _were_ soldiers working for the king. Modern police serve the same function and have basically the same powers. They are not peace officers - they are soldiers, and I hope one day the people living in this country wake up and say "no more".
Keeping it impersonal (and only understanding/analyzing "how" the elections were won/lost), I think that "Trump didn't win". Instead "Democrats lost", took a risky bet and to quote the meme "the risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math". [0]
[0]: https://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/963/073/e2...
EDIT: I think it was Bill Burr that said on his (latest) SNL monologue "you would think that after the assassination attempt they would just give it to him" (because yes, that was a critical security failure, and so badly designed (the "security" of the event") that one could easily be tricked into thinking that it was purposeful)(a proper Hanlon's razor)
I expected a repeat of his first term. Which honestly was quite uneventful. This is not.
This doesn't even count the global pandemic.
Setting all that aside, everything he's done is something he campaigned on.
I still can't believe we had an "alternative facts" moment and that somehow that pales compared to the rest.
He didn't have "his" people in place to help him the first time because much of the establishment at the time was still Romney/Bush/McCain/McConnell types and they kept a firm hand on the reigns of power and often undercut his ability to do things because they felt like he was an aberration.
This time around, there is no "primary opposition" (intraparty conflict) in any meaningful way. He wants, they do, it is truly Trump's party.
They were quite candid with their intent. Aside from him casually/flippantly brushing off Project 2025 during his campaign (when it was clear that his campaign was deeply connected to it), it was tremendously obvious to anybody paying attention that things would be much different during round two, and in a more aggressive manner.
You had your head in the sand. If you voted for him, this is your fault. Damn you.
Downvotes be damned.
What's the point of phrasing this as though you're off to the gallows for your beliefs? It's an internet forum.
I understand. It's hard to be constructive when it was so blatantly clear a second term was going to be a disaster of epic proportions and here we are.
He spent the majority of his term being blocked from doing completely problematic stuff by his staff who he increasingly fired or resigned.
He finally got the end of his term with many more yes-men and started doing things like impounding funds for Ukraine.
The first thing he does at the start of term 2 is more impoundment. Like sure, Day 1 Year 1 Trump doesn't bleed into Day 1 year 5 but Day 364 Year 4 bleeds into Day 1 Year 5 pretty well.
This was among the greatest threats to democratic self governance in well over a century.
I'd say that Trump 2.0 is more eventful than Trump 1.0, but I absolutely would not call Trump 1.0 uneventful.
Even when the candidate speaks of people not having to vote again in the future, if they just vote for him this last time?
I mean, I'm not even in the US and probably missed a lot of stuff that happened during the election. But no one around here is surprised about what's happening now, surely most of the US population was that aware too?
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:42jq5uvg6p2shi5gqifor22e/po...
Barely mentions the stock market crash.
So all those that didn't vote, obviously didn't hate what Trump proposed enough to vote against him.
I could put on a mask and stay at home for COVID, but I can't do much about shunning our allies, disrupting the world economy, disappearing people, electing a cabinet of highly unqualifed individuals, putting the SCOTUS in pocket, etc. I can advocate, stay informed, support my community, etc., but this feels on another level than the first term and that's what I meant by my comment.
Now, they've taken that cue and just turned the dial to an 11. There's currently very little resistance, and in the places where there is, they've just flat out ignored it. Of course the snowball is going to pick up speed
I don't personally buy into this framing, but it sure seems like millions of people do since points at results
I figure the people who want the US to withdraw from the global stage have been working on Trump ever since 1987 when he paid for that full page pro-tariff ad in the New York Times. Power hungry maniacs are a dime a dozen, but ones that are also hell bent on committing economic suicide are a scarce resource and need to be nurtured with care if you want them to actually do it.
It's what I'd do if the US was bullying me around. It's a well tested play (refined during the US interventions in South America in the 70's and 80's).
I didn't know this. So New York Times had no issue publishing lies for money. Everything is rotten these days
A headline from the times during that same year: TRUMP GIVES A VAGUE HINT OF CANDIDACY (https://archive.is/xF2pW)
As much as I dislike advertising in general, and specifically the opinions in that ad, I think that whether the New York Times was willing to publish it is not the important detail here.
This was at a time when the US and China were working together to keep the USSR in check while at the same time the US was sending weapons to Taiwan so that they could be used to keep China in check. So imagine being China in 1991. The USSR has just fallen, so they're no longer a threat, but US-sold weapons are still being pointed at you from Taiwan. You'd want the US to leave you alone and stop arming your enemies. And here's this candidate who wants the US to step off the world stage and focus instead on what it can build alone at home.
It seems pretty likely that they'd be in favor of getting Trump elected. Whether they ultimately did is an open question, but if so then it's not shame on the New York Times, but shame on us for not better protecting ourselves against foreign interference.
During Trump 1, there were some adults in the room -- congress seemed to be less complacent, the cabinet appointees had more independent (and more pragmatic) judgement, and the scale of purges across the government felt like nothing compared to what's currently going on.
There's none of that now. Congress is complacent and arguably complicit in an ongoing constitutional crisis, the admin is just breaking a number of laws without even putting in the work to have plausible deniability, and with every passing day the corruption's growing to levels that many of us who've been born and raised in the modern economic west just haven't seen in a few generations.
If there are anyone on the (currently) winning side in this Congress who aren't a bunch of greedy, self-serving boot lickers they better step up soon. I can't imagine someone like John McCain would remain silent in this environment. Best case scenario: history will forget most of these assholes; if not, it will not be kind.
Collins, McConnell, and Murkowski have been voting against the administration for more traditional Republican policy, sometimes.[3]
Nine Republican Reps blocked H.Res 282[4] because it would have killed bipartisan H.Res 164[5] and that caused the House Republican leaders to cancel votes for the whole week.
It's not all lockstep boot licking. Just mostly.
[1] https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/202550
[2] https://xcancel.com/RepThomasMassie/status/18995193281369747...
[3] https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1...
[4] https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/202587
[5] https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-resolutio...
After he won I started reading more about who these people were and what they were planning to do and sold all my stocks after the inauguration, there was no way it was going to be a normal presidency, even compared to the last one.
No; the problem with Trump is the specific types of laws he broke. He broke laws around honesty, fair dealing, obstruction of justice, and, of course, the integrity of elections and our democratic process. He is, very plainly, opposed to democracy and the rule of law, preferring to replace it with cronyism and nepotism.
That's why he's bad for the country, not simply "because he's a convicted criminal."
True, but we're talking about expectations here.
I'm sorry, I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say here.
Are you saying it's normal or acceptable to have your expectations be that a "convicted criminal" is automatically a bad person?
If so, then particularly given the large and very-well-documented racial biases in arrest, prosecution, and conviction for crimes here in the US, perhaps you should consider adjusting those expectations?
If not, then please actually say what you mean clearly.
I believe what the parent comment is trying to say is: someone who committed crimes in the past has evinced a lack of respect for the law, and is therefore more likely to commit crimes in the future than someone with a history of law-abiding.
"Bad person" is a value judgement, which is besides the point.
> Seriously, what does one really expect from an unethical convicted criminal?
and your subsequent comment on that.
Case in point:
https://sandersinstitute.org/event/bernie-sanders-arrest-at-...
Convicted of resisting arrest.
But there's only one POTUS. There are multiple people out there who could do a decent job of being POTUS. Many of them are not convicted felons. We wouldn't lose much if we filtered out the entire convicted-felon category from this particular job.
He gets the police to arrest this opposition candidate, let's say for marijuana possession with the intent to sell (a felony), and with procedural chicanery ensures that the court trying the case is run by a Trump-appointed judge.
The opposition candidate is convicted of this charge.
Under your suggestion, they would then become ineligible to be elected.
It gets even worse if the corrupt President has a compliant Congress (which it seemed like he did for a little while, but that's less sure now). If he can ram through a new law making "criticizing the sitting President" a felony, then basically anyone who would oppose him and his regime would clearly be guilty.
In general, the sitting government decides what is a crime and what is not. If you make a law that says that those convicted of crimes cannot run for public office—either "any public office" or "only this specific public office"—then the sitting government, if it is seeking to act in its own interests rather than those of the people, has a perverse incentive to preferentially criminalize things that those who disagree with them are more likely to do, and to encourage (or coerce) bias in policing and trials to ensure conviction.
"In-groups who are protected by the law, but not bound by it, alongside out-groups who are bound by the law, but not protected by it."
He may have been convicted, but he faced no consequences. He was not bound by the law, so not only did his convictions and investigations not deter him, the lack of consequences emboldened him.
This rationale doesn't apply to any other person in a similar state in Florida, it was just for Trump.
Less so a commentary on his list of problems.
Convicted criminal + blatant lies = disregard for society, disregard for people, disregard for rules/norms/laws. It all adds up to who he is and what he values and represents.
NOBODY should be surprised at this administration's disregard for society. You should be actually surprised if he does anything good/lawful.
That you think we should not be "cancelling" anti-vaxxers and your implication of we should listen to anti-vaxxers (because they "dare to think differently", as if this is about their dyed hair color or something) says a lot about you. And that you use "canceling" in quotes because you can't point to a real thing "liberals" did.
> As a result they kicked off from public discourse huge groups of electorate, polarizing society.
OHHHHH, the liberals are the one who polarized society? Not Trump from the start saying these people are my enemies? Your right-wing bias is showing
> There were topics that you just could not discussed, twitter (pre Musk) was looking to it, same Facebook or Youtube (still, good luck having a monetized film with the forbidden word like Gaza Strip), similarly mainstream media.
And there are now topics that can't be discussed on Twitter (post-Musk) like the word "cisgender". And Facebook and Youtube had TONS of anti-vax misinformation, anti-abortion groups, and general right-wing algorithmic boosting. That maybe "some" topics aren't allowed then but a ton of others still are is you trying to pick one spoon out of a pile of knives and saying its full of spoons.
What other topics could not be discussed? The value of white supremacy? How homosexuality is a choice? That the Jews run the world? Be specific please.
Does it make it ok because you try to equivocate?
Is it so hard to just say "corruption is bad all the time and we should not tolerate it from anyone" - it is not a controversial position at all.
This whataboutism is also ridiculous. Even if we assume Hunter did the worst of what MAGA says, Trump is personally orders of magnitude worse. He did a crypto rug pull the first few days of being POTUS again ffs. And people complain that Hunter traded on his name to get a cushy board spot?
Trump is actively working to get rid of the law against foreign bribery!
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-loosen-enforcement-us...
What are you going to bring up next, Hilary's emails?
There I fixed it.
Guess which pole is winning. Again. Predictably.
If you listen to his strongest supporters and those in his administration, they speak openly of it: the President is Right because the president is a Winner. Losers don't get to define what is Right. The President "won" not just the election, but "as a businessman" and an entertainer. So he is Right. Elon is Right because Elon is richest. America is Right because America is Most Powerful. Everyone else is a leech, a cuck, a sub, a beta, whatever. You either get on side, or you're a loser. And wrong.
It's pointless to argue with these people on abstract principles. American liberals are so caught off guard by this because they've been assured their whole life that constitutions and courts are the foundation of stability and that those guard rails protect society.
They don't. They're pieces of paper.
I mean, is this wrong? This is the literal reason we have elections, so the losers can’t tell us what to do.
Clearly Christian theology and other strains of thought think otherwise... that there's an ethical/moral "rightness" which can be judged independent of what the powerful say.
To be clear, I'm not arguing for that position. I just am pointing out in part why the Democrats and liberals are so pathetically unable to confront this situation. They thought they were part of a gentleman's club, and they could all take turns ruling according to a set of rules.
Honest conservative and progressive policy can also both value and seek to expand justice.
To me the present-day "left" liberal is not just profound hypocrisy but also a refusal to confront the reality of class conflict in capitalist society. The kind of liberal you're talking about will do "everything" to rectify injustice against every identifiable group except the largest group in society, the working class whose labour feeds the whole machine.
There was a slogan in the 20s and 30s when the socialist movement was confronted by (and lost to) the rise of the authoritarian right. "Socialism or barbarism" [and no, peanut gallery, the "left" in North America is not "socialism"]. Guess which part you're getting now.
I just learned that he apparently want to impose a new economic order on the world where every country basically becomes subservient to the US, but first they need crazy tariffs to make them all beg for access to the US market. I don't think it will work, and instead the global economy will move on without the US.
https://www.npr.org/2016/02/15/466848438/why-president-how-t...
The president as a title was meant as a diminutive relative to the Congress. The capitol building is at the precise center of Washington DC - literally and for a reason. The Supreme Court is across the street and for many years was inside the capitol.
The White House is in the middle of no where with a direct line of sight to Thomas Jefferson looking into the presidents bedroom. These are not accidents. Next time you’re there read what is written on the walls surrounding Jefferson and the architectural decisions made make a lot of sense and should be a warning to anyone sleeping in that bedroom.
Congress ceded power over time to the executive proactively as presidents subsequent to Washington emulated his integrity.
They have the ability to remove all of the power of the president, whose role, officially, is to merely preside. All you say? Crazy. But they’re the only body that can pass amendments to the constitution.
So, we don’t need to wait for the next presidential election if we don’t choose to. It’s up to we the people to choose.
It has been always unclear to me how Roman Empire turned into that multitude of feudal states and microstates. And i lived through USSR collapse, and that dissolution of great central power is still hard to get a mental hold on - you live in one paradigm and somehow you find yourself living in completely different one, whatever was truth and crime yesterday, today became crime and truth, and i'm having kind of deja vu these days here :)
This sounds like some kind of right-wing conspiracy theory attributing everything to George Soros for some reason.
The US dollar is the reserve currency of the world. America has been calling the shots for the entire post-WWII period. The American Empire extends across the globe collecting natural resources and cheap labour. US citizens have been reaping the benefits of this neo-imperialism. What MAGA people are advocating is basically US isolationism where the US surrenders all it's soft-power influence and becomes a sort of hermit oligarchy.
I wonder if we soon hear EU (or some of them) wanting to join/associate with BRICS. The BRICS has been futilely trying to get rid of dollar, and Trump seems to have just done them a solid here.
If China, however it is hard for CCP, just tone down internal oppression a couple notches and, that is an easy part for China, guarantees to Europe non-invasion by Russia, the EU may turn East wholesale. Add to that China's hold on Africa and Iran.
Speaking about Trump's declared goal of weakening China - you don't weaken your opponent by isolating yourself from your allies and turning them into allies of your opponent, quite an opposite.
We shouldnt expect companies to be Moral. We shouldn't expect the government to be Just. The sooner we realize how politics actually work, the smarter we can make personal decisions that comply with realities.
There is no reason to waste time and effort. The only people who can topple Apple are going to be major players, not the multitude.
The powerful are incentivized to use that power for their own benefit. Those without power do not even get to have a light shone on their poor treatment.
Separating an expected outcome from the factual evidence and artifacts of a situation is arguably why the justice system exists at all.
Politics isn't Byrne's The Secret, you can't materialize good leadership by ignoring every issue and praying to a higher power.
Indeed. We must be vigilant to acquire and maintain our freedoms and good governance. People suffered and some died to build the parts worth saving now. Apathy isn't going to fix anything.
I've got some tough news for you: Apple isn't anywhere near the main problem here.