How are they going to stop it? Republicans have been trying to stop elections since 2017, they’re not smart enough to figure out how. They couldn’t even figure out how to schedule a press conference about it at the four seasons.

Well Trump can say whatever he wants, whether he actually can do what he says is another matter. In this case for example, congestion pricing has simply continued as before because Trump doesn’t have power to change the laws of New York. When it comes to killing people, government employees are subject to the same rules as everyone else about unlawful killing, even if they were ordered by the president. Of course Trump can pardon his assassins for federal crimes, but states can still prosecute them and if nothing else the victims can still use deadly force to defend themselves without being guilty of a crime.

So legally speaking, Trump isn’t so much a king as just some fat, old, possibly mentally-challenged man who can’t be punished for things.

But in the technical sense, we’re all kings and can do whatever we want. We’ve just agreed as a society that if people do certain things we all unite to help put them in a cage or whatever.

Trumpism has significant control over large parts of the media from which millions of Americans get their information. Fox and Musk’s platform X, among others, are not normal media outlets. Their basic function is not to cover the “news” but to spread rightwing extremist ideology.

Trumpism is utilizing the concept of the “big lie” in a way that has never, in this country, been seen. Day after day, blatantly dishonest statements and conspiracy theories are propagated – and repeated over and over and over again.

What is the solution to this? Because from where I sit, it looks like the strategy of plutocrats buying media and using it to push dishonest narratives in their favor is extremely successful and does indeed make what Bernie’s asking for unachievable. And I don’t see anywhere in the article a way to solve that problem.

I don’t doubt the left can win on Lemmy. But the second Lemmy gets any actual power, watch out for the buyout.

Getting sick of all this observational humor.

modern Democrats are not an opposition party, ever. The news media is complicit as well.

The US political system is thoroughly broken but it’s not changed much leading up to the Trump era, it’s really the news media that made Trump happen right now.

It started in the 80s with cable news and continues today with toxic podcasts and social media. People are like your annoying ex-girlfriend - they don’t want to be told the truth, they just want to be validated. Billionaires and con artists (and billionaire con artists) have figured out how to use newer forms of media to exploit that tendency and I think it’s still getting worse. Eventually like all predators they’ll overconsume their prey but there’s a lot of suckers in the world for them to run through first.

To me I’m not really sure what his reply even means. I think it’s some attempt at a joke (because of course the government uses SQL), but I figure the joke can be broken down into two potential jokes that fail for different, embarrassing reasons:

Interpretation 1: The government is so advanced it doesn’t use SQL - This interpretation is unlikely given that Elon is trying to portray the government as in need of reform. But it would make more sense if coming from a NoSQL type who thinks SQL needs to be removed from everywhere. NoSQL Guy is someone many software devs are familiar with who takes the sometimes-good idea of avoiding SQL and takes it way too far. Elon being NoSQL Guy would be dumb, but not as dumb as the more likely interpretation #2.

Interpretation 2: The government is so backward it doesn’t use SQL - I think this is the more likely interpretation as it would be consistent with Elon’s ideology, but it really falls flat because SQL is far from being cutting-edge. There has kind of been a trend of moving away from SQL (with considerable controversy) over the last 10 years or so and it’s really surprising that Elon seems completely unaware of that.

It would be highly immoral to do any actual vandalism because that would give them sympathy and therefore would further the goals of Elon and others who want their bootlickers to be seen as some sort of rebels against wokeness.

But mocking them by writing dust or adding your own bumper stickers without doing any serious permanent damage is at least defensible.

There are definitely far left groups, primarily in Europe, that ally with Russia. All groups on the fringes have proven useful for spreading pro-Russian propaganda. In the US, Trump’s pro-Russian sympathies and general stupifaction of the GOP has led to the GOP becoming an ally to the Kremlin. But prior to that, both parties were anti-Russia with Republicans being moreso.

The most successful tactic of the right has been judging the left for their politics - “woke” etc. This works because it’s “othering” - makes the left part of the out group that people don’t want to be a part of. The left needs to be similarly unabashed, even though othering is kind of against the whole point of being on the left.

But it needs to be more fun and less serious than this post. Why is there no “screaming maga” meme? Surely there’s plenty of those images, and more.

What’s annoying is the US cable/social media incessantly jumps right to the Trump/Musk framing of things.

The US AID shutdown has led to food aid stuck at ports as populations that rely on it starve.

A report on Monday from Paul Martin, the USAid inspector general, found that close to half a billion dollars’ worth of food was rotting because of confusion surrounding Mr Trump’s freeze last month.

How many americans have heard about the consequences of Trump’s actions? 1%? How many have heard about Elon’s vague and baseless claims that US AID is a big fraud? It seems every Republican I know has heard that.

He did the exact same thing after taking over Twitter, talking about “poorly batched RPCs” in the timeline which makes zero sense because that’s obviously not how HTTP works.

The sad thing is Elon regularly shows how much of a very judgmental, “I’m so smart” idiot* he is, but somehow I keep meeting people who think he’s a genius. I guess the assumption that money=smart still holds true in the US, despite being disproven time and time again.

*Do we not have a single word for this concept? I come across this kind of person so frequently there really should be one.

If you were to try to drive someone else’s car, that would be illegal
If you were to try to command a bank teller to give you money, that’s also illegal
Vice Presidents aren’t allowed to fuck couches.

Historically, this is not usually the result of the military taking over a country. Usually the general who did the coup becomes the new rich person, thanks to all the political power.

Not yet. Trump saying something horrifying while it not being entirely clear he understands what he’s actually saying or how anything in government is supposed to work is what we call Monday around here.

That’s gonna be a big ask. Republicans don’t even get the blame for the things they do themselves. Oligarch propaganda is everywhere and pernicious, look at how the average working class American has accepted the notion that low level bureaucrats are the reason they’re poor.

Gustav Bauer had no religious affiliation and in any case he did not sign the Treaty of Versailles. It was signed for Germany by Matthias Erzberger, who was also not Jewish. But, those sorts of facts tended to make little difference to the German far right of that time which basically branded everyone they didn’t like as Jews.

There’s probably as many theories as there are people.

My own is that cognitive dissonance is a powerful force, especially for a narcissist. Hitler spent 4 of the best years of his life is the pure misery of the trenches of WWI, and even worse - running between the trenches to deliver messages. He was gassed so badly it put him in the hospital for the final month of the war. Hitler was probably also deluded about Germany’s failing position in the war, probably kept in the dark by German propaganda and made quite gullible by his fierce patriotism. So when Germany surrendered, that must have actually both shocking and enraging for him. And we know that because he frequently attacked the treaty of Versailles.

The “stab in the back” myth is the idea that Germany’s surrender was corruptly carried out by politicians, and due to common antisemitism across Germany and Europe generally it soon focused on Jews. In reality there was virtually no Jewish people significantly involved with the surrender and events leading up to it, but that didn’t matter because as is often the case today, emotional truth is more important than reality. Given that Hitler couldn’t possibly bring himself to believe that he incurred tremendous pain and suffering by voluntarily and stupidly buying into an imperialistic war that was doomed to failure from the start, the stab in the back myth would’ve been extremely appealing to him. He wanted to believe it, so he did.

So when he happened to be assigned to monitor the DAP - the predecessor to the Nazi Party - he was ready to wholeheartedly accept their antisemitic ideas. Even though he seemed to get along with Jewish officers during the war, by a year after the war he was already talking about “removing” the Jews.

The salute is just a symbol of much larger antisemitic moves by Elon. It’s not hard to find neo Nazis posting swastikas and the like on X and many Jewish users have indicated that reporting those images goes nowhere despite them being specifically enumerated as banned in the official terms of use. There’s plenty of evidence out there that Elon is in fact a far right racist if not outright Nazi.

This does appear to be the state department flag pole (on 21st street looking East from the state department). And it does appear to be winter, and there is construction in that area around the fed building. But that’s all I can say. The photo is weirdly blurry and grainy so be suspicious.

Your vote is the only power you have. That means you should use it as effectively as possible. Which means you shouldn’t only use it on the ideologically pure, you also use it for people who are more in that direction than the alternative.

The result of this last election is someone who supports a Palestinian state lost, and someone who supports total Israeli domination won. Your takeaway that something else happened is rare and is not the takeaway of the media, the voters, or the parties. Palestine is now dead in American politics and support for Palestine in any form will now be seen as a liability, that is if any Palestinians are left after this term. Don’t shoot the messenger.