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Comment by swayvil | Hacker News Reader

I interact with wealthy retired elderly people every day. Yes, they are the #1 prey in our society. They are so harassed. Like wildebeests getting nibbled on by a pack of jackals.

Nibbled for their money, time, vote.

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There used to be a time when retired US politicians with decades of service were still respected in retirement. Granted, this was before Gingrich's hyperpoliticizing of every bit of minutiae in America.

Then Fred Thompson, not satisfied with his $250K an hour lobbying gig or his acting career, decided he also needed to start hawking reverse mortgages to the elderly, and that was a wrap. Before people were willing to look past the lobbying... stopped being a thing after ole Fred was caught on TV and radio right next to the gold bouillon sellers.

The Clarence Thomas nomination hearings are I think a better marker for the beginning of our modern era of "hyperpoliticization" of everything.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Thomas_Supreme_Court_...

I would opine it was Robert Bork a few years earlier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bork_Supreme_Court_nomi...

One of the pieces of history I didn’t appreciate at the time, because I was just a kid: Bork was Solicitor General in the Nixon administration. When Nixon ordered that his AG fire the Special Prosecutor investigating Watergate, Nixon’s appointed AG and deputy (very ethically) resigned instead. This left Bork as acting AG, and unlike his superiors, Bork was very happy to fire the Special Prosecutor at his boss’s request. In other words, almost everyone in the Nixon administration had more ethics than Bork.

What was so disgusting and surprising about the Bork nomination is that it was clearly a reward for that behavior, one that persisted across multiple presidential terms. It sent a message that “no matter how damaging your lack of ethics might seem in the short term, there is a reward for loyalty and willingness to short-circuit the criminal process” that would have felt at home in an organized crime family. The stuff we see today is just a further development of the metastasizing cancer that began right there.

>...there is a reward for loyalty and willingness to short-circuit the criminal process” that would have felt at home in an organized crime family.

"Do you know how naive you sound, Michael? Presidents and senators don't have men killed!"

I disagree. For one, Bork had already been refused a seat on the Supreme Court. Secondly, it's the first time that a mainstream political party ever succeeded in "othering" another group of straight white capitalists purely with propaganda.

Everyone forgets that the DNC forced out FDR's two-time VP for being too buddy-buddy with socialism, giving us Truman and a half century of the ultimate in hyperpartisanship (the kind with Nukes of Damocles hanging over everyone's heads).

they don't even need to be wealth just lonely. My father in law lives on the other side of the country far away from any family. He has been giving every spare dollar to a con artist that has got him convinced they are going to get millions of dollars from the government but inevitably something gets in the way and the con artist need a little more money for them to finally get it... He has bounced between menial jobs as long as i and my wife have been together, before we had kid we tried to get him to come live here but he refused because he was so convinced he was going to soon be a millionaire. he is otherwise able to take care of himself is emotionally/mentally stable but wont listen to any one that says he is being scammed because the only person that is near him who talks to him is the one conning him.

Governments seem very focused on protecting people from easy-to-address, low-harm activities like website tracking and spam, but wholly unconcerned with scams and theft (which I consider much more harmful).

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