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Comment by Cuuugi | Hacker News Reader

I do not like the Trump administration, but they don't exist in a vacuum.

It seems the most of their policies are bitter reactions to perceived misdeeds from "the left".

Corruption definitely crosses the aisle.

    > Corruption definitely crosses the aisle.

While I won't defend corruption, there are orders of magnitude of difference in the intensity and harm caused by the current US government's corruption vs the type most people have grown accustomed to. Both sidesing this is insane.

And all that aside -- in what world is the appropriate response to perceived misdeeds by a political opponent to crank the dial up to 11 on running the government as your combination personal slush fund, army, and all-encompassing bureaucratic warfare organization?

> in what world is the appropriate response to perceived misdeeds by a political opponent to crank the dial up to 11

A world in the throes of absolute war against an entirely dehumanized opponent. If the enemy is definitionally maximally evil, then absolutely any action is permissible as long as it hurts the Other.

I need to the left's version of starting your own memecoin and openly taking bribes from officials and foreign countries.

I also would like the left's version of pardoning people who they directly do business with.

Those legitimately parrot the "both sides" stuff are terribly naive. No one who actually pays attention to what's happening thinks these parties are remotely similar right now.

memecoin scams: I offer up a President wearing a tan suit in exchange, and depths of depravity

taking bribes (planes) from foreign countries: I offer in exchange, a former President who dared to use Dijon mustard instead of plain yellow mustard, the monster.

In all fairness it wasn't the greatest shade of tan

I find it interesting (in a dismaying sense) how many people are perfectly comfortable or even in favor of government oversteps by “their” team that are aligned with outcomes they like but act shocked and indignant when the “other” team does it.

IMO, the solution is to demand constitutional and law-following behavior from both/all teams, but to be particularly careful to do that with your preferred side, as you might be prone to overlook those excesses.

Russia perfected the ethics of "you don't need to be good, you just need everyone else to be bad", Americans are just bringing the state of the art home.

Well, it helps that Russia has captured and helped pump propaganda over well more than 50% of US information channels.

Yes, all political parties and organizations must be accountable to the Constitution and the law.

We also need to be honest with ourselves as a nation that Trumpism pushes far further into unconstitutional and law-disregarding behavior than what has come before. Pretending it is equivalent, as the starting comment does, is dangerous.

>the solution is to demand constitutional and law-following behavior from both/all teams

This is only a solution if you can reasonably anticipate the demands being obeyed. If instead you anticipate that they won't be obeyed (by one or both parties), then it only puts your team at a disadvantage. The other team knows this, so they tend to ignore or ridicule any such demands and to whip their team into ignoring and ridiculing those demands. At which point, your team suffers.

Cooperation strategies in an adversarial system only work in a limited set of highly unusual circumstances, and those circumstances aren't currently extant.

This is what the system of checks-and-balances was supposed to enforce. Turns out that system is not effective if you vote the same party into power in each aspect of the government.

Bad governance does not justify more bad governance. Even if it's true that previous admins have done all this before (it's not) it wouldn't justify a thing.

Here's the hilarious part: When you say "previous admins" you're almost certainly talking about previous Republican admins.

https://gigafact.org/fact-briefs/have-there-been-significant...

I don’t know if it falls into the strict definition of “corruption”, but definitely falls into the broader category of “shitty”, but democrat politicians don’t seem to be above abusing their power to enrich themselves with the stock market.

There’s an entire (successful) ETF exploiting it. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NANC/

I’m not a conservative, I’m pretty left-leaning by (American standards at least), but I am not going to act like my side is categorically better in this regard.

I'm sorry to break the news to you, but if you're using the phrase "democrat politicians", you're extremely conservative. This phrase does not exist and is never used outside of deeply partisan conservative circles. If this doesn't align with your understanding of who you are and what you believe, I'd urgently reevaluate your media consumption habits.

It’s actually not conservative at all, they run under the democrat sticker, this is the self-prescribed label.

We can argue that the American democrats aren’t very left-leaning and I would probably agree with you, but I reject the idea that I cannot use their own labels to describe them without being described as conservative.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_Party_(epithet)

You're wrong on both the history and modern usage.

Fair enough. I meant to type Democratic but I guess I typed Democrat by mistake and didn’t realize it had baggage. I was typing on a phone.

It does seem like a pretty easy mistake to make regardless and I don’t think it’s reasonable to call me “extremely conservative” for making it. It’s still pretty common to call these politicians “democrats”, so someone who isn’t terminally tuned into semantic games might not realize it.

> It’s still pretty common to call these politicians “democrats”

Yes, this was the Republicans being successful in their efforts.

I appreciate you acknowledging the term has baggage.

Sure, but at this point it just kind of feels like splitting hairs and just a means of getting offended on purpose.

Calling people “extremely conservative” because I used a term that is very commonly used pretty much everywhere but leftist circles is needlessly pedantic and very annoying. I think it’s reasonable to give people the benefit of the doubt.

Also I’m not fucking conservative. I think Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder and Donald Trump and Charlie Kirk and pretty much anyone on the internet who has ever challenged anyone to a debate is a fucking moron.

The commonality of the term is the result of intentional usage over a long span of time by right wing politicians, media, and personalities.

If you've ever disregarded or downplayed the power and reach of right wing media and propaganda, think on this conversation and how a derogatory term for members of the Democratic party entered common usage.

You don't have to actually watch or like right wing propaganda to be influenced by it because it is pervasive in the United States and has been for decades.

Lots of etymologies have depressing origins, I do not think it makes someone “extremely conservative” just because they’re not fully aware of all these etymologies.

For example, the term “grandfather clause” originates due to racist laws designed to prevent black people from voting, but I don’t go around calling people who say they were “grandfathered in” are huge supporters of slavery because that would be fucking stupid. They clearly are just using a colloquialism and pretending you are offended by something that you’re actually not offended by as some kind of bizarre justification of your terminally online persona is weird.

But that’s just my opinion; apparently I’m extremely conservative, which is news to me. Maybe I should hang out in leftist circle jerk discord servers.

To be clear, I never called you a conservative. That was someone else.

You appeared misinformed about the origin of the term and how it came to common usage, so I filled you in.

The reason it seems like an easy mistake to make is that you've been consuming conservative media that uses it routinely. Presumably this is the same media that told you about this ETF whose ticker is a joke about Nancy Pelosi, and suggested that it proves some fact comparable to the current administration's misconduct. Again, I'm not saying you personally consider yourself to be conservative - but if you don't, you've been tricked, and you need to urgently reevaluate how much you listen to the people who tricked you.

Which “conservative media” are you referring to? I don’t watch Fox News, I don’t watch Newsmax, I don’t listen to Alex Jones, I don’t watch CNN, I don’t watch MSNBC, I don’t listen to any political commentators.

The fact that the ETF is outperforming the regular market demonstrates that there’s some shiftiness going on. I am pretty sure that was the point.

I didn’t say it was comparable to the Trump admins misconduct, read my comment again. I said that democrats aren’t immune from shittiness.

Pretending to not understand what I was saying is extremely irritating.

ETA:

I reread my comment and I realize that I said “not categorically better”, which can easily be interpreted as an equivalence.

That wasn’t what I was trying to say. I was just trying to say like we shouldn’t act like there isn’t some level on shittiness on the democratic side.

Hard for me to know what you watch and listen to. Stereotypical "podcast bros" are one big thing I've seen - there's a lot of political content out there that gets cast as "apolitical" because the nominal topic is something else or the hosts are sympathetic to Bernie Sanders. (And this is something I'd absolutely is a both-sides thing, a lot of the content creators I follow do take broadly left-wing themes for granted.)

Well good news! I also don’t listen to podcasts! I think Joe Rogan is a big stupid idiot, and may have singularly caused more damage than nearly anyone currently alive. I used to listen to a lot of NPR podcasts but I haven’t in years.

I guess I do read The Onion so I am not divorced from politics, but I try to mostly avoid consuming much political shit.

Yeah yeah I know everything is political, I promise you that you don’t need to lecture me on that fact. I am just saying that most of the shit I consume now largely boils down to videos about how video games work or “documentaries” about lolcows on YouTube. I have tried to unplug from everything that gravitates around the political news sphere. The only place I get any “news” is HN nowadays, and I mostly try and read the tech shit.

I’m on the left and I use that phrase. It took me forever to figure out what was “wrong” with it. They’re democrats, democrat politicians.

Like the other person said, this usage is extremely common and not just on extremist conservative spaces, unless your definition of “extremist” includes 80% of the USA’s overton window

Yeah, that’s the thing.

I think a lot of people spend all day on leftist YouTube and live in leftist Discord servers and hang out with self-proclaimed Marxist friends, and that’s all completely fine, but as a result of people not being tuned into their specific vernacular they act like this shit is a dog whistle instead of the fact that i just don’t know (or care much about) this specific vocabulary.

I suppose I could be a useful idiot for this, but I don’t feel like saying “democrat” is really that bad as far as these things go.

To be fair, republicans are far worse with regards to “pretending to be offended”. You cannot convince me that anyone is actually offended by the term “happy holidays”, but every year I get to hear about a “war on Christmas”

I have personally known people to be offended by the term and the broader war on Christmas they feel it represents.

I know a bunch of people who say they’re offended by it. I don’t believe them, they’re lying to me or themselves, but I think the former.

I could be wrong, it’s likely even, but it’s just not something I am going to be convinced of. I think they’re pretending to be offended, because if they act offended then it’s easier for them to “both-sides” stuff, or they think it shows how good of Christians they are.

It's an explanation, not a justification.

You're letting past gov'ts away with a lot apparently but overall i agree.

The Overton window shifted too far and now an egomaniac is in charge of its reset.

> Corruption definitely crosses the aisle.

it isn't possible for you to be so poorly informed that you think "Joe Biden's son told people who his dad was so they'd let him do a business deal" is in the same scale as:

- taking direct bribes from Qatar - the president and his family launching multiple cryptocurrency firms to do infinite fraud and money laundering - demanding and accepting direct bribes from universities and using taxpayer money as the cudgel - directly taking cash from randoms for pardons

etc etc etc

Such is dialectics, but if you are going to apply relativism to comparatively very different movements you are in for a really bad time.

> It seems the most of their policies are bitter reactions to perceived misdeeds from "the left"

"Perceived" is a very important word in that sentence. The "misdeeds" don't actually exist, they are only "perceived" as part of right wing manufactured victimhood.

> It seems the most of their policies are bitter reactions to perceived misdeeds from "the left".

lolwhat? “I don’t like what I imagined the left is doing so I’m going to turn our cities into police states?” In what world is that a reasonable justification? Might as well say it’s a bitter reaction to the tooth fairy.

It's an explanation not a justification.

It's an excuse, not an explanation.

It's an explanation, as much as you wish it isn't.

It isn’t an explanation, because it has causality backwards. The Trump Administration wants to do some things, and so they come up with excuses to why they should be allowed to do them. Their actions aren’t the response, they’re the initial desire.

95% of the time they are talking about the vaccine mandate and lockdowns in response to a fkn pandemic that provable killed hundreds of thousands, easily shown with the dip in average lifetime length stats of Americans for a while there. I think we're observing false equivalency here to protect a felon who currently holds the office of the Presidency.

Destroying democracy has literally never been a goal of the democratic party, unlike the well laid out plan in project 2025, which is really just Stage 1 of their plan.

This is such utter BS. And also, btw, also doesn't exist in a vacuum.

The left isn't immune to feeling bitter disgust at titans of industry that openly pay bribes and tributes and lie on camera in service of political objectives in exchange for political and economic favors.

The left does not equal the democrat party. The right does not equate to the republican party.

My point is that there is open levels of collusion with the Biden admin (and Obama earlier) and media corps which have given the Trump admin cover to openly talk about their "favored companies"

Relax guy, politicians are not your friends.

> My point is that there is open levels of collusion with the Biden admin (and Obama earlier) and media corps

What do you mean?

It's probably a reference to the twitter files which showed coordinated efforts between Trump term1 and Twitter.

The “Twitter files” showed almost nothing of substance, to my knowledge. What are these coordinated efforts you’re talking about?

The Twitter Files, much like the Mueller Report is useful to determine who the disingenuous or ignorant are. The people most likely to bring them up make claims completely opposite to what is actually contained within the documents because that's what they were told was in them. They can't ever be bothered to actually read the things they are using as "evidence". They just have to point to them ominously.

To them the Twitter files proves that Democrats and Twitter collaborated to suppress conservative voices and boost liberals despite showing nothing to that effect.

To them the Mueller Report fully exonerates Trump and proves it was nothing but a Democratic smear campaign. Despite it showing the opposite.

Reality doesn't matter anymore. These are "facts" to roughly 1/3rd of the US population.

Twitter Files, the FBI @ facebook

This case just doesnt sit right with me.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/06/26/biden-admin-cant-be...

Foreign operatives were legitimately engaging in information warfare against the American people, so it makes sense for FBI and others to let American companies know when their platforms are being used for these things.

This is especially true when such content is already against the policy of those services.

"Foreign operatives were legitimately engaging in information warfare against the American people" - says the government at the time, therein lies the concern.

No Government should regulate the internet.

That’s all well and good if you live in lala land where nothing bad is ever happening that isn’t the current government’s fault, but here in the Real World, the impacts of foreign governments engaging in an information war need to be dealt with. Part of that begins with acknowledging the objective fact that foreign state actors are engaged in such an information war.

Covid was created in a lab funded by the Chinese and the NIH, that's accepted as fact at this stage.

I don't think I'm living in lala land if i say the US Gov't has any stake in avoiding blame.

Accepted by whom?

Telling a site that it has content on it that is against that site's own policy is not regulating the internet. Especially when there is no real or implied threat against the site if they do not remove that content.

You can believe that. But "FBI tells social media companies about an interference campaign" is not anything resembling "Trump demands direct payments in the form of settlements in exchange for favorable treatment in M&A regulation."

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