“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
― Isaac Asimov, 1980
This relativism is encouraged, not because people genuinely believe all views are equal, but because it neutralizes inconvenient truths. If no one can claim authority, then no one can hold power accountable.
Perhaps part of the problem is that snooty intellectual elitists want everyone to be geopolitical geniuses and socially activist and fight for their hobby horses, when every nation, especially large ones, are in desperate need of people who mind their own business, keep their heads down, and contribute humbly to the common good.
Rather than being pushed through university and having technology shoved everywhere into their faces and bombarding them with messages from liars and hucksters at every step.
I honestly regret gaining knowledge about a lot of things that concern me because while “knowledge is power” it’s also known that “ignorance is bliss” because curiosity killed the cat.
If we’re a nation that stands and falls on the strength of social media disputes then perhaps it’s time to let the best bots win.
What do you even mean by this? Unless I'm misunderstanding, your comment sounds like you are advocating for a "let them eat cake" ideology.
Do you think our current administration exemplifies the three things you say we are in desperate need of?
And you’ve hit the nail on the head there, because rather than placing our family first, community and local concerns ahead of all else, or loving who we are and where we’re at,
we’re wrapped up in a self-inflicted TDS dystopia that surely consists of a 7-layer burrito of illusions and fantasy, because politics is a reality show that is often scripted.
This is a very common colloquial phrase assuming you are from the US - it refers to the President and their administration.
Can you answer the question now?
I'm tired of blaming people far away and quite distant from us for stuff. At a National Security Level, none [hopefully] of us know what's really going on and none of us can actually DO anything about it, except kvetch and moan and whine into our keyboards. Surely all you spycraft fans could admit that there may be a 7-layer burrito of fake-outs and misdirection and Fog of War involved with a fuckin' Signal chat that got a scoop for a single news outlet? We're literally on social media discussing a... single report... about a thread on social media that was seen by one too many people. Since MySpace was founded, the lamestream media reporters have made entire careers out of digging stuff out of someone's profile or their friends posts and splaying it out in a Film At Eleven. But is there anything new under the Sun?
I personally admire our President [although he's got some unattractive personal traits] and I love the administration's progress since his first election, but it's all such big-picture stuff that really affects you and me so little, in the here and now. What matters much more is what's going on next door, in my home parish, in my municipality, and then there's diocese and county and state all above that. What also matters is the Finger of God, his angels and his saints, and their participation in what's going on, when "spiritual autists" need to hold men accountable and attack and blame humans--your sisters and brothers--for events and occurrences which are surely beyond human power to control or even correctly perceive. You believe that "knowledge is power" so is your knowledge absolute? Does your knowledge confer absolute power to know and act? Is there no higher knowledge or wider justice than the knowledge wielded by your philosophy, Horatio?
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/27761/pg27761-images.ht...
Name-calling, finding fault, spreading rumors and exposing scandalous gossip. When you get involved the Politics Reality Show and the Lamestream Media, that is your currency in trade. The media rakes muck and the politicians wallow in it and fling it back at them in the same briefing room, but it sullies not their impeccable blonde tresses nor designer Prada soles that you picked up in the 90210.
"The statements by Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and Trump—combined with the assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying about the content of the Signal texts—have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions. There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared..."
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/signal-...
"Here are the Attack Plans That Trump's Advisers Shared on Signal" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43481521
And Europe is most certainly not an exception to this, especially in current times. For instance 65% of EU citizens do not believe that high level corruption is not sufficiently pursued. [1] And basically every EU country (outside of Scandiland) has a majority to vast majority who believe that corruption is widespread in their country.
That was once different, with Berlusconi at the helm in Italy while owning the major TV outlets.
IMO, this is more important.
Like most things in life, I suppose it is all relative? Diabetes sucks, but it sure sucks less than cancer.
Of course it would be lovely if there is zero corruption, zero pollution, zero nepotism etc. Which is highly unlikely to happen?
Which brings the question - what is the best country to live, relatively speaking?
I am European, and every time I open one of those stupid locked-on bottle caps, I feel pain for my country, for Europe (and for my face).
Sure, Europe has some red tape that should be removed but don't paint it as some kind of Kafka's universe because it's not that bad. I'm from east side of Iron Curtain and I remember how bad that was.
Also, most of the businesses will do what's needed to be done because the market is big.
Personally, I prefer to live a life in a slightly over regulated place that at least keeps common people in mind than whatever is US turning into.
Cookies stuff is indeed badly made and should be fixed. The should just mandate websites to accept a http header with relevant option (no-cookies, no-advertisment, no-tracking etc.).
Still, it's not the problem of regulator in itself. Rather, companies are taking advantage of the current version of the law because it's favorable to them - they know most people with quickly accept whatever to close the popup.
I am honestly curious. If you are willing to go as far as they have, why not go that relatively tiny extra step?
I think it is a problem with the regulator. The cookie agreement mandate has legitimately fucked up the web for everybody. It's also done it in a way that mostly neutralizes the intended benefit of the law (because everybody just clicks the "fine! stuff your cookies up my arse or whatever, just get on with it!" button).
But a competent regulator must both measure the impacts of their regulations, and take action based on that data. It seems a weird place to stop.
The problem is that every other company thinks they are Google or Meta. So they start overcollecting user data, in hope that one day they will be able to generate revenue from them. So they end up with overcomplicated compliance solutions and GDPR consulting fees, but without any actual use for the data they collect.
I need to record names and address across the European Union. What character encodings are illegal for such fields in a database?
Is life so bad in Europe that’s what you have to complain about? Sounds truly like a nightmare - caps attached to bottles? Barbaric.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/whatsapp-signal-eu-chat-contr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel...
So you replied about the UK specifically. I catered to that, and then reconnected it back to Europe as a whole, which I was originally discussing.
If someone here is derailing the conversation, it isn't me. Especially now that we're discussing the meta and not even the original subject.
You know that it is easy to remove the plastic locking the caps on? (Just twist them) And to me it is also easy to drink with them locked on, just have it side ways.
So I also do have lots of complaints about the EU, but this ain't it.
Yes, the bottle caps annoy me, but if the beverage companies stuck to the much more recyclable glass bottles we wouldn't be in this mess in the first place.
Yes, the GDPR popups annoy me, but the law also punishes companies for being creepy exploitative bastards. If they had any morals, we wouldn't have the popups either.
So yes, Europe is sometimes frustrating, but at least it does some government. The US simply doesn't. It's a free-for-all hellscape and I'd much rather be lightly scraped on the face by a little plastic cap that one time a month I need to drink from a disposable plastic bottle than live in...that...
The popups are there for companies that ignore basic data sovereignty of "don't use my personal data until I say you can"
Yes, plastic bottles (and caps) are likely a major environmental disaster.
The alternative to regulation is innovation: force bottle makers to invest x% of their profit or revenue into actual research on plastic recycling or capture.
That's a very easy but hand-wavy thing to say.
How exactly would your suggestion work? Are the companies supposed to share their findings from this forced research with the world? What happens if they happen to discover something that doesn't help with the plastic problem but does improve their bottom line somehow? I can't see this functioning in any way whatsoever.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-mat...
It will click no no no no no to all cookie prompts for you, and hide the popup. It's sad that we need to do this, the companies could just not track you at all. But I haven't had a need to manually click these popups for quite a some time now.
The internet is borderline unusable without extensions like "I don't care about cookies". And in situations where you care about them, you can not, because something has to record that I've seen the GDPR consent form. Recently, in the name of... who knows what, it's become a pain in the ass to access Google maps from Google search.
The idea that Europe can become a safe haven for entrepreneurs is beyond laughable. The vaunted "rule of law" has degraded into nothing more than fetishizing arbitrary and irrational rules.
Look here: https://gdpr.eu/cookies/ > Receive users’ consent before you use any cookies except strictly necessary cookies
If you don't use cookies or they're stricly necessary, no need for a banner.
Many websites work perfectly fine without a banner, for example, Hacker News.
https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/s/1Fn23uYVxK
The data depicts the exact opposite of what you are saying. As an entrepreneur, you can be “safe” knowing you will have far less chance to succeed in the EU.
Now compare companies by actual revenue:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_E...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_t...
I omitted the 50 years distinction because, unsurprisingly, the companies in the US are younger.
None of these are actually relevant for founders, however, as even in the US you only have a couple dozen large cap companies, but millions of founders.
What is relevant is the share of employers per capita, as that shows us how many founders actually exist.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.EMP.MPYR.ZS?most_rec...
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.EMP.MPYR.ZS?most_rec...
You can’t call a region a “safe haven for entrepreneurs” if all the globally relevant entrepreneurs from that region are dead from old age.
Remember, Europe has double the population of the US. To lag behind so dramatically in the last 50 years is absolutely something to be concerned about.
Having to move the goalposts to the 1850s to make a point about relevant European businesses should be alarming to you.
A big part of it is obviously the relative effects of twentieth century wars, both hot and cold. However, we also need to be aware that in recent decades, the US has just offered a better deal for entrepreneurs than Europe. By that I mean it has been a democratic, rule-of-law-based country with relatively easy access to capital and relatively low taxes.
It still has the last two things, of course. But the first two are also essential, long-term, and if they're eroded then the US might stop looking like a better deal.
On the one hand, studies have suggested that nearly half of highly successful entrepreneurs/founders in the US are immigrants or children of immigrants. As the US becomes more authoritarian and more corrupt, its easy to imagine people choosing to do their new startup from, say, Berlin.
On the other hand, lots of people choose Singapore, too; rule-of-law-based country with relatively easy access to capital and relatively low taxes — but without actual democracy.
I'm aware of my own inherent bias of wanting democracy to be important to people when making this kind of calculation, but I'm not sure that we have any real evidence of that.
I do agree on Singapore, though. It's an interesting case in that the benevolent dictatorship offers most of the advantages of Western democracies in terms of a law-based contract between rulers and the ruled, but with (arguably) a more solid promise of long-term social stability. There's definitely a chance that we all end up in that situation.
If we try to steer the ship back to the topic at hand...here's why we should be concerned that Europe's private sector isn't growing much or innovating much.
It turns out, Europeans entire way of life is funded by taxing the activity of the private sector and redistributing that money to things like healthcare, education, pensions, etc. Innovation (increased productivity) is the only way to reliably grow this pie, and innovation is exclusively the domain of the private sector due to the competitive pressures of markets.
If our private sector is entirely composed of aging industrial-age conglomerates waiting to be disrupted by more dynamic and innovative Chinese competitors (China is rapidly becoming better at the things European industrial companies used to dominate), our entire society is at risk. Militarily, we're sitting ducks, and economically, we are as well.
Modern Europe is economically heading the way of the Soviet Union, with an increasing share of GDP driven via centrally controlled government spending (we're now at over 50% on average in the EU, the Soviets were around 70-85% at peak).
Meanwhile, The Chinese Communist Party has ironically created one of the most dynamic, capitalist systems on the planet. The Chinese supposedly "communist" economy is in fact more market-driven than even the US economy (33% government-driven vs 36% government-driven), and you can see this in the numbers: https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/FRA/JPN/...
It doesn't take a Phd to understand that a much larger and more unified population in China, with a more unleashed private sector, is going to eat the lunch of the smaller, disjointed micro-economies in Europe. And this doesn't even factor in the rise of industrial investment in the US in recent years.
This is why the rule of law is so important. It's a Maslow's Hierarchy type situation, and if the choice is between creating value in a system which will tax a good proportion of it away (current EU) and creating value in a system which may capriciously confiscate it (current China) then I argue that people are more incentivised in the first case.
Hard to say for sure about Jack Ma, did anything actually happen to him, and if so, was what happened to him fair? He seems better off than me.
China still has many billionaire and millionaire entrepreneurs, so it does appear that they have the concept of markets and capitalism on a leash in such a way that wins for the people of the China, the central government, and the entrepreneurs. Even if some of that isn't perfect, they live in a country of rising prosperity, and I live in a country of 30 years of stagnation where billionaires just bought the government to turn us into an impoverished 3rd world feudal state.
Even if I'm completely wrong about about China and it's all a lie or bubble, my country isn't exactly offering a future.
I say "GDP doesn't matter that much" and you pivot back to how GDP isn't growing and that's a problem.
You say the future will be like the present except that China will replace the USA in the position the USA currently occupies. So what? The present is pretty good.
You say that the USSR is when the government does stuff and that's really bad. That's going to need more evidence.
Funding is a way of keeping track of the things that are done, not a way of doing things. Different economies put more or less importance on the accounting and more or less importance on the actual doing. Facts about funding cannot be conflated with facts about actual doing, especially in economies that are more likely to override the funding if they don't like the way the funding is causing doing. (That's something like what the "government fraction of GDP" is - it's the percentage of times the people didn't like the free market results and chose to override them)
You are able to read this very comment (and write your own) in large part specifically because of public-sector innovation.
But thank god for the US department of Y combinator for taking a risk on all those evil private startups so they'd be able to support this government website.
> Having to move the goalposts to the 1850s to make a point about relevant European businesses should be alarming to you.
Please actually have a look at the EU list and click through to the companies. They are all directly linked in Wikipedia. The majority is from the 1980s and younger.
* Volkswagen: Founded on May 28, 1937, as Gesellschaft zur Vorbereitung des Deutschen Volkswagens mbH, later renamed Volkswagenwerk.
* Shell: Formed in April 1907 through the merger of Royal Dutch Petroleum Company (established in 1890) and The "Shell" Transport and Trading Company (founded in 1897).
* TotalEnergies: Established in 1924 as Compagnie Française des Pétroles (CFP).
* Glencore: Originated as Marc Rich + Co AG in 1974.
* BP: Incorporated on April 14, 1909, as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company.
* Stellantis: Formed on January 17, 2021, from the merger of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and PSA Group. Fiat Chrysler Automobiles was established through the merger of Fiat S.p.A. (founded July 11, 1899) and Chrysler Group LLC (originally Chrysler Corporation, founded June 6, 1925). PSA Group was Established as Peugeot Société Anonyme in 1966, but its roots trace back to Peugeot's original founding in 1810 as a family industrial business.
* BMW: Traces its origins to Bayerische Flugzeugwerke AG, established on March 7, 1916.
* Mercedes-Benz Group: Resulted from the merger of Benz & Cie. (founded in 1883) and Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft (founded in 1890) in 1926.
* Électricité de France (EDF): Established in 1946 following the nationalization of France's electricity sector.
* Banco Santander: Founded on May 15, 1857, as Banco de Santander.
We could do the full list and then weight by revenue or something but broadly, I think the point that 'pembrook is making is proven.
As an aside, one feature of LLMs that I genuinely do enjoy is the ability to ask for intern-level research like this.
If this were true, 15 years would definitely be enough time to show up in some form of data you can cite about the death of American startup culture.
America has jut installed a corrupt autocratic government that has immediately become mired in corruption, graft and defiance of the rule of law.
That will have a negative effect going forward.
American media is just as innovative as the rest of their economy, meaning they are constantly finding ways to prey on your emotions and your eyeballs with stories and content.
In reality, the US government is one of the most static, unchanging organizations on the planet.
The US government has been trying to get Europe to invest in its own defense for 50+ years. It's been trying to solve immigration for 50+ years. It's been trying to come to a solution on healthcare for 50+ years. Nothing is going to happen in the next 4 decades let alone the next 4 years.
Blatantly untrue. America has spent 50 years ensuring europe is reliant on America for security, because America likes the economic benefits that brings.
Uh, Joe, it was a pretty bad scene the last time that happened.
https://www.ft.com/content/ad16ce08-763b-11e9-bbad-7c18c0ea0...
> The US has warned that greater military co-operation between EU countries would be a “dramatic reversal” of three decades of transatlantic defence integration, in the latest sign of the fraying relationship between Washington and Brussels.
That's 2019. When Trump was in power.
> It said that Washington was “deeply concerned” that approval of the rules for the European Defence Fund and the Permanent Structured Cooperation, or Pesco, launched in 2017 to plug gaps in Europe’s military power, would “produce duplication, non-interoperable military systems, diversion of scarce defence resources and unnecessary competition between Nato and the EU”.
At the same time, they complained about Europe not doing enough and shouldering enough of the burden, and I find it plausible that they legitimately did wish Europe would do that, the above paragraph notwithstanding.
Except whenever Europe did try to, America used its soft power to dissuade Europe from this course of action, and instead continue funneling money into American arms manufacturers.
How naive are you? I mean seriously.
Your post is one of the worst faux savvy takes I have seen. A true classic of the genre. The US Government is not an independent thing: it is made up of people. And if you haven't notice the current set of people are doing lots of gigantic, unprecedented things.
You either have a truly massive case of normalcy bias, or you approve of their lawlessnes and are running cover.
But I totally get it, this time is different! The US is in crisis! How could I not see the obvious signs?? It's all over the headlines!
https://reason.com/2025/03/17/allies-cancel-orders-of-f-35s-...
How do you not see that this time is different?
> In reality, the US government is one of the most static, unchanging organizations on the planet.
The changes in that past couple of months are, objectively, enormous disruptions to the previous status quo (of the last 50+ years).
NATO may still exist on paper, but not in the world. The US has estranged almost all of its closest allies that it's had for my entire lifetime — I'm 50 — and in ways that are offensive, threatening, and simultaneously weirdly petty, and which would take a decade or more to repair even in the unlikely event that somehow the current administration was somehow replaced today, and efforts began immediately.
The US president has also opened up avenues for corruption and out-in-the-open bribe-taking (meme coin, banks of hotel rooms, his wife's vanity projects, etc etc etc) that are absolutely unprecedented in US history, of the ilk historically seen more in places like Malaysia, Peru, or the Philippines under Marcos. (Even Silvio Berlusconi was substantially more tactful and less obvious about it.)
At the same time, the administration is performatively flouting the rule-of-law, in ways completely unprecedented in the past 50 years. Openly defying judicial orders. Disappearing people without due process (yes, like all fledgling autocracies, they are starting with the already marginalized; purported gang members, brown-skinned or Asian permanent residents).
The childhood parables like "The Emperor's New Clothes" never actually, like, literally occurred in the America I knew, until this guy. Last time it was just "my crowd was bigger than Obama's" but this time it's "Ukraine started the war" (somehow arranging to be invaded by a murderous dictatorship waging a campaign of rape, torture, and mass child abduction).
> Nothing is going to happen in the next 4 decades let alone the next 4 years.
Way more than "nothing" has already happened. More substantial, self-directed change has already happened in 2-3 months than in Trump's entire first term, or any term of any president, in 50-100 years. I strongly suspect this trend will continue.
As you can no doubt infer, I am not a huge fan of this administration. But neither am I a partisan; I would characterize this administration as worse than any administration, Republican or Democrat, of my lifetime — and by a lot. (I include Trump's first term in that, but only because that static, glacial-pace US government you think still exists did still exist then, so even though the graft and weird dictator-fetish/emulation was present then, too, it didn't have the impact that it's already had in this term.)
Whether you think it is worse or better, I mean, we all have different priorities but it is unarguably very different — and has already made the US government very different — than anything seen in the past 50+ years.
Washington is and always has been corrupt, and political battles no matter how hilariously trivial in context to history have always been "the most important of our lifetimes."
Everything is fine and going to be fine.
Sure, the TV and social media will tell you that every year's crisis is "the most important of our lifetimes", and that isn't true. But obviously, it sometimes has to be true, right? I mean, at least once, and probably several times, depending from when to when we are alive.
"Important" is a matter of perspective, and also desired outcome, so YMMV but in my 50+ years of life there have been 3 such events driven by or pertaining to the US government:
- the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War
- response to 9/11 and the aftermath
- 2025 US table-flip of the post-WW2 world order, pursuit of autocracy, and assault on the rule of law
Every government is corrupt; it's a matter of degree, and the reason you can't name a US government as corrupt as this one is because there hasn't been one. Watergate? Iran/Contra? B.J. Clinton? It's not close to the same degree.
Lesser disruptions have included the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2007 financial crisis, the internet, AIDS, maybe crack cocaine in the 80s, ... but those are more emergent side effects of human behavior than things done with intent. Things we deal with, not things we do.
Everything is fine? Disagree. Everything is going to be fine? Well, whew, good to know.
But I understood your point to be that everything is the same, and will be the same, broadly speaking, as it's been for the past 5 decades.
But it's not. It's wildly different, already. And even if, as you suggest, the 2026 elections somehow happened without egregious interference from the ruling administration (unlikely), and flipped control of congress to the opposition (maybe) — there's still no way to go back to the "before" times.
I think it's also important to say every public company is corrupt. It's a consequence of size.
Very unlikely, just based on the math. Even less likely now that Trump is overhauling the federal election system.
So in the US you have a corrupt, authoritarian takeover of a society – and in Europe you have well-meaning, but somewhat annoying, regulations that still need some work to function perfectly.
They could've just respected a browser's do-not-track header but chose not to. The EU legislators should've done that too, that is, dictate a standardized method for people to opt in.
Btw, I can dig up 3 dozen of other state institutions with cookie banners, if you so wish?
And she is just the tip of the iceberg of EU corruption. In general such politicians only get repercusions selectively, and usually only when the political direction changes and they're no longer useful to the establishment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizergate
https://www.politico.eu/article/5-things-to-know-about-ursul...
Grade school needs rank choice voting activities to help make it feel familiar.
An audit would be listing and flagging items for review. What DOGE is doing is actually taking the decision of cutting stuff, without review, as retribution, to fully capture the state for the GOP and Musk.
Trump immediatly fired every inspector general as soon as he could (in violation of federal law).
https://www.axios.com/2025/01/25/trump-fires-inspectors-gene...
This does not follow. Even in highly corrupt authoritarian countries entrepreneurship can flourish. Just consider Turkey or Russia. In such places one quickly learn whom to pay with corruption payouts becoming business expenses.
Just seems logical to me that if entrepreneurship was flourishing, we would see more economic growth as a result.
I do not know about entrepreneurship, but I do know that a Russian’s average purchase power is significantly higher than what you might expect from just looking at the GDP
GDP to US dollar is only works IF your export and import is only traded with US dollar which doesn't to be the case since Russia is trade with Brics partner that bypass all sanction and not using US dollar
And that's ignoring other externalities.
Or like building companies switched to Russian military contracts to build factories for drone, ammunition etc. to make weapons to kill Ukrainians.
If one has no moral compass, one can absolutely flourish as a businessman in Russia.
Scams and frauds are going to flourish under Trump because the guy himself is keen on running scams and frauds from the White House. Who is going to investigate crypto scams when POTUS is launching his own pump and dump shitcoin? It's going to be scams and frauds from the top all the way down.
Exactly also already happening in the US and with Law Firms.
"Trump rescinds executive order after law firm agrees to provide $40m in free services" - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/20/trump-rescin...
If you want to look at corruption in the US, I would look at the trading profits of senators and congress people (on both sides), or Hunter Biden getting $100k/month from a Ukranian energy company.
Or, you know, shooting a Tesla ad on the white house lawn, part of a large pattern of unmanaged and uncontrolled conflicts of interest surrounding the "first buddy".
Fuck off with this false equivalency nonsense. The Trump admin is doing its corruption in the open while saying "So what, what are you gonna do about it?"
That said, your examples are indeed corruption. But the parent did not make any equivalency. He gave purported examples of corruption. One can say that they're unsubstantiated, but that's a different argument.
And yes, saying "If you want to look at corruption in the US" and then avoiding mentioning the extremely large and very apparent corruption actively happening right now in the Trump admin - that is intentionally creating a false equivalency by implicitly saying "what's happening right now doesn't matter it's the same old same old."
So you're OK with the Trump admin's rampant corruption?
How is Trump using executive orders to punish law firms he doesn't like not corruption?
Open your eyes, man.
The law firms he's going after are the ones that knowingly lied and generated the whole "Russia Collusion" conspiracy theory. If they are willing to sell their integrity so cheaply, they deserve be barred.
It deserved to be charged, and it deserves to be prosecuted fully. I do not accept corruption from government officials regardless of the letter after their name on the ballot.
We have an adversarial legal system. Law firms take up a variety of positions for a variety of reasons. Even the most despicable criminal deserves a vigorous defense at trial. If they did something illegal, charge and prosecute them. Executive orders are entirely the wrong vehicle. It's wielding presidential authority like a mob boss.
Keep drinking that kool-aid.
Granted, but bad faith lying for political reasons should not be included in that.
If you think what they did should be illegal but isn't now, work with congress to pass legislation that makes it illegal.
The rule of law is critical to the American system. The EOs targeting law firms are extrajudicial nonsense, and frankly impeachment worthy.
Where's the lie? It's a fact Trump's 2016 campaign held a meeting in his home with a Russian spy to discuss an exchange of relaxed relations for dirt on Clinton. It's a fact Russia hacked the DNC and Trump helped disseminate the content of that hack. It's also a fact that Trump's campaign manager exchanged internal campaign data with a Russian intelligence officer, while the GRU was waging an influence campaign on social media targeting Americans to sway the election.
How is that not collusion?
https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-p...
There were actions that Russia took during the 2016 election season to support the election of Trump. This is a well documented fact.
There was a meeting between a Russian intelligence connected lawyer and Trump campaign personnel including Trump Jr, Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort. In this meeting, the Trump campaign was offered information to use against the Clinton campaign. This is a well documented fact.
After thorough investigation, it was concluded that there was not substantial explicit collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. But that same evidence showed they were extremely aligned in their goals. Trump was clearly Russia's preferred candidate and Russia was spending time, money, and effort to support his candidacy in a number of ways.
That investigation was impeded by Trump, as Mueller found in his report and testified to Congress.
Trump and his acolytes like to take "Trump did not explicitly collude with Russia" to mean "There is nothing whatsoever to the idea that Russia wanted Trump to win and took actions to support that outcome." And that's just not the case. That's putting some extreme interpretations on the actual facts of the matter.
And believe it or not, Trump can't control who Russia chooses as their candidate. The UK Labour Govt had Kamala as their chosen candidate and campaigned for her to win.
Foreign governments always have a view on preferred winners in elections. But just because Russia independently wanted Trump to win and tried to influence the election without his co-ordinating with him says nothing at all about Trump as a candidate. It more speaks to Russia's intelligence assessments.
Yes, it speaks to their assessment that Trump is the candidate that supports Putin's interests.
Russia is a dictatorship that is often working in opposition to US interests. The UK is a close ally with an elected government. I know which one I'd rather be endorsed and supported by, should I be a political candidate. If Russia was supporting me I would want to understand why, because I don't feel my interests and positions would align with Russia's. I'd want to understand why they think my election would be good for them. Maybe I like those reasons, maybe I don't, but it's an opportunity for reflection and evaluation.
Don Jr could have said "No, that seems like it would be potentially seen as inappropriate" when that Russian contact reached out. Instead, he replied, "if it's what you say I love it".
MI-6 wasn't hacking Republicans and laundering the material through Wikileaks so that Kamala could crow about it.
Kamala's campaign wasn't meeting James Bond in her home and making secret deals with him and lying about it when caught.
"In evaluating whether evidence about collective action of multiple individuals constituted a crime, we applied the framework of conspiracy law, not the concept of 'collusion.' In so doing, the Office recognized that the word 'collusion' was used in public reporting about the investigation, but collusion is not a specific offense or theory of liability found in the United States Code, nor is it a term of art in federal criminal law. For those reasons, the Office’s focus in analyzing questions of joint criminal liability was on conspiracy as defined in federal law." (Mueller Report, Volume I, p. 2)
So it's a sleight of hand:
- raise the bar from collusion to conspiracy
- say the bar for conspiracy is not met
- therefore Trump is exonerated of collusion
But the charge of collusion still stands. And as I laid out in my other post, the facts support the plain meaning of collusion - "secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy, especially in order to cheat or deceive others".
> After thorough investigation, it was concluded that there was not substantial explicit collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
The second reason this is important is that because the bar was raised to conspiracy, we cannot claim that the investigation that was performed was sufficient. It wasn't a thorough investigation of conspiracy, so we can't even say they didn't find enough evidence when they didn't look under the biggest rocks.
For starters, the investigators were essentially barred from investigating any financial links. In 2008 Trump's own son is quoted saying "In terms of high-end product influx into the US, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets", so any serious investigation of links between Trump and Russia should necessarily include financial links.
And of course now we have hindsight to know why financial links were verboten -- after the investigation concluded, it was revealed by none other than Michael Cohen, that Trump was actually brokering a "Trump Tower: Moscow" deal during the 2016 campaign. He had already signed a non-binding letter of intent with a Russian company, and the deal included a penthouse dedicated to Vladimir Putin. But Trump when asked about his dealings in Russia in 2016 had said this:
"I have nothing to do with Russia. I have nothing to do with Russia – for anything. I don’t have any deals there. I have no deals that could happen there because we’ve stayed away."
No, we know about this because Michael Cohen was arrested for campaign finance violations, for crimes he committed in 2016 on the behest of Trump, to buy the silence of a porn star Trump had an affair with.
And this doesn't even get into the second volume, which details the myriad ways Trump obstructed the investigation, which included firing investigators (Comey), witnesses tampering (dangling pardons in front of Manafort), lying to investigators (according to Mueller's testimony), etc. etc.
So it's safe to say the investigation was not thorough or complete.
This is just an infinite fractal mosaic of malfeasance, degeneracy, ineptitude, buffoonery, and all around disappointing behavior, from all parties.
The Mueller report did not clear Trump. Clearly you did not read it, it's damning. Only according to Trump is he cleared by that report.
The Mueller Report Vol I firmly establishes that the Russians sought to interfere in the 2016 election, they explicitly preferred Trump over Clinton and aimed to help him by 1) hacking her campaign and 2) spreading misinformation on social media. It further found that despite the Trump administration claiming they the campaign had 0 contacts with Russian nationals, in fact they had over 100 contacts.
One such contact was a Russian spy named Natalia Veselnitskaya. She met in Trump Tower with Don Jr, Jared Kushner, and Trump's campaign manager Paul Manafort. They discussed relaxing international relations with Russia, in exchange for providing dirt on the Clinton campaign. These facts were admitted to by the members of that meeting, after they first attempted to cover it up with a lie that the meeting was to discuss adoption of Russian orphans. Absurd.
It's also a fact that Donald Trump aided in the dissemination of the hacked materials, as he referenced them constantly and even implored Russia to find more. The Mueller reports found that GRU operatives actively responded to that public request from Trump. Again, this is all in Vol I of the report.
Then there's the smoking gun, the fact that Paul Manafort was caught funneling internal campaign data to Konstantin Kilimnik, a known Russian intelligence officer. This was not in the Mueller Report, but established later by the Senate Intel Committee in volume VI of their report on Russian active measures during the 2016 election, at a time it was chaired by none other than current Secretary of State, then Senator, Republican Marco Rubio. It was further confirmed by the Department of Treasury.
So I ask you again: where's the lie?
Because the facts found by investigators show collusion happened. Russia wanted Trump to win, and Trump wanted to win; the two coordinated publicly and in private; the campaign lied about it every step of the way; and they obstructed any investigation as much as they could, which included firing the FBI director, and lying about the contents of the Mueller report when it was finally released.
It's a stain of historical magnitude on the office of the presidency, and the fact it wasn't dealt with properly in 2016 is a direct cause of us being in this thread today, right now, discussing imbeciles in the highest echelons of government conducting themselves like people who can get away with anything. Because they already have.
The fact that Trump made jokes about emails that showed the DNC cheating the primaries to disfavor Sanders and give first sight of questions to Hillary doesn't prove he's a Russian agent.
"Because the facts found by investigators show collusion happened. Russia wanted Trump to win, and Trump wanted to win; the two coordinated publicly and in private; the campaign lied about it every step of the way; and they obstructed any investigation as much as they could, which included firing the FBI director, and lying about the contents of the Mueller report when it was finally released."
There is no evidence Trump campaign colluded with Russia. If there was, he would have been indicted.
That hasn't been the case since at least 2000[0]
[0] https://www.justice.gov/olc/opinion/sitting-president%E2%80%...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_report
Edit: And the Mueller report notes[1] that as the primary reason Trump wasn't indicted. You keep making false statements about what's in the report. Perhaps that's something you might think about doing if you're going to use it as a source.
It does because that's the reason Trump colluded with them.
> in fact backfired on them.
How do you figure?
Look around: the US is currently realigning itself diplomatically to favor Russia and turn against traditional allies like Canada/UK and Europe. NATO is hanging by a thread as Trump threatens to invade Greenland. US is capitulating on every demand Russia is making in Ukraine, lifting sanctions, dropping efforts to track kidnapped children, halting funding to Ukraine...
It could hardly be going any better for them! How do you think it backfired?
> doesn't prove he's a Russian agent.
I didn't claim he's a Russian agent, I claimed he colluded with Russia.
> There is no evidence Trump campaign colluded with Russia.
Yes there is and I already told you what that is, but I'll put it in bullet form:
- Lying about over 100 Russian contacts that happened.
- Lying about a hotel deal in Russia that was being put together while Trump was running for office.
- Talking to a Russian spy about hacking his opponent in secret and lying about it when caught.
- Handing campaign data to Russian intelligence officers while they were engaged in active measures to interfere in the election.
- Campaigning using materials from the DNC that Russians hacked specifically to help Trump.
etc. etc.
If that is not evidence, what kind of evidence would you say is evidence of collusion?
> If there was, he would have been indicted.
That he has not been indicted for this is not evidence collusion didn't happen, primarily because, as the Mueller report lays out (and you would know this if you had actually read it) "collusion" is not actually a crime for which one can be indicted under US code.
DeNiro says it about as succinctly as possible in Casino - https://youtu.be/-Dujc4xJ9gs?si=2cYzK8FSygQgunNt&t=57
"The investigation found no evidence that President Trump or any of his aides coordinated with the Russian government’s 2016 election interference."
"However, "the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities"."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_special_counsel_inve...
"Indeed, based on the evidence gathered in multiple exhaustive and costly federal investigations of these matters, including the instant investigation, neither U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion..."
Who's Robin? Like Batman?
> and the Columbian Journalism Review
Okay, surely you agree with them about the danger of Trump today?
"When the president attacks the First Amendment from the Oval Office, or makes sweeping and false statements about some of the most important news organizations in the world, you can hide from it and hope it goes away, or you can speak up, saying publicly, That’s not right, and it’s not what I believe. Quite frankly, too few of you have stood up as we’ve come under attack."
Is Trump a threat to our democracy - yes or no?
https://www.cjr.org/politics/cjr-editor-addresses-congress.p...
You sure as shit seem to hope so yourself there…
We just need liberals to embrace the 2nd with as much fervor as the right.
It's a combination of AI being owned from these mega corporations and corruption at the highest level that I'm losing sight of what is the purpose building my startup business in an authoritarian landscape.
Trump illegally promoting Elon's corporation with a yard sale, kissing his feet for donating millions to his campaign thanks to citizens united, allowing him to ransack the federal government as an unelected official, to making vandalism a domestic terrorist act for people fed up when him,and now putting Elon in charge of investigating Signalgate.
People need to stand up now before they cannot.
Independent of anything else, I do see the overton window shifting in the US, the most subtle of which are norms and expectations around acts of corruption.
Every nation has it's minor acts of corruption, small favours between friends, which I've always thought of as being functionally impossible to remove as they also allow for a flexible environment which allows things to get done.
However the norms seem to be shifting more towards the idea that those in power can act as they will, and in fact the expected thing is they will act to enrich themselves. I hope this does not happen, because this is death to entrepreneurship, this is one of those things that will poison the economy, when people no longer trust that what they make can be theirs, that others can look on in envy at the work they have built on their blood and sweat and can take it as their due because they have power.
That will create a chilling effect for anyone who wishes to create and will make them wonder as myself and many others have considered, whether it's better to create their life's work elsewhere.
I sincerely hope this doesn't happen here, once this mindset becomes a norm, it's incredibly hard thing to stamp out.