This is only a surprise to HN, because all the other threads about the corrupt US regime have been flagged before. I guess now is a good time as any to start paying attention. Who would've thought that attention is all you need?
"I was born in 1601. I’m a vampire. I’ve been around forever."
If you predict a corrupt cartel in "the US" will do a thing, then on a long enough timescale you'll eventually be right in general but wrong about every significant detail.
(also the people with this opinion don't seem to do anything with it - it doesn't appear to motivate them to vote, organize, think critically or come up with compromises - they simply turn out to belittle people on the internet while actually acting to normalize new excesses).
Yes.
> You learn to tune it out and then you never notice if they start being less wrong.
Speak for yourself. I have not tuned them out, I notice them a lot.
You were not around for the 2017-2021 preview? Thisis the second term! Everybody cpuld see exactly what the country would be getting into!
The second term is Elon dismantling the entire intelligence system, infiltrating every government agency and compromising every datacenter, piping all the data into a centralized database for stalking and mass deportation, etc.
While it was absolutely clear that Trump's bad news, I don't think anybody quite predicted the absolute fascism that would spring up, and just how quickly it would overwhelmingly FUCK everything.
His first term was relatively harmless but I guess it really rallied the goons, who proceeded to have four entire years to prepare the next dark ages.
There were plenty of people, we just didn't believe them.
An dpeople have short memories when it comes to this stuff. If the USA somehow manages to survive this and Trump and his allies are peacefully voted out and removed from power, I'd bet $250 that a lot of 2024 Trump voters would still happily vote for a platform consisting mostly of Trump's 2024 platform and Project 2025 plans. They're not learning the lesson that the core policy approach is designed to facilitate our decline into corporate feudalism; they're just learning the lesson that Trump himself and a few other specific individuals are bad, for them, personally. Trump Regret is not going to be enough to save us.
That is literally exactly what Leopards Eating People's Faces Party means.
> "'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party."
Like, it's just weird and creepy to see closeted fascists wearing Democrat skins who will try and convince you they still hate Trump.
Still fascist though, huh
Who cares about ethics and morality? Those aren't profitable!
That's not to say anyone should be excused but the system's fragility compounds the problem.
That does resonate to some extent, when I see people of actual merit (or at least, people who have done things with actual merit) like Jeff Bezos and Jensen Huang, lining up to suck meritless people like Trump off.
The problem is, once the rich people have secured their fortunes through self-abasement, they never seem to use those fortunes to redress the humiliation they've suffered. That makes your argument a hard sell. Would Bezos and Musk and Cook and Huang and Dell and Altman and Soon-Shiong and Zuckerberg and Mickey Mouse -- all the figures from the famous Ann Telnaes cartoon and more -- still be as supportive of Trump if they didn't have to be?
We have no evidence to the contrary.
It's because the government can print money. The government is the ultimate fallback, if interest rates increase and money becomes scarce, these big corporations need the government to provide big contracts to back them up to get through that tough period.
This is what I mean by all-or-nothing situation. These big corporations NEED huge, constant inflows of cash to stay solvent. The system is always full of debt; the liquidity is always under threat of being sucked out rapidly... So all these big companies are terrified of such event. They need to know that if money gets scarce, they've got a reliable stream they can draw from and the only reliable source of money in times of monetary scarcity is the government.
You may criticize and you may get downvoted, but it may not be the case that you are being downvoted just because you criticize, and it is certainly not the case that all criticism gets downvoted.
Those people also get down voted to oblivion. Their text is gray. I can't read it unless I click the timestamp.
Clearly, HN doesn't want us to listen to them.
Yes, sometimes they can be combative and inflammatory. But even the ones that are otherwise reasonable get down voted because how dare we insult capitalism and billionaires?
That is "HN". HN is the people who read and post here.
> Those people also get down voted to oblivion. Their text is gray. I can't read it unless I click the timestamp.
I'm sure some are but quite a few are not because I have been able to see them quite a lot without clicking.
> Yes, sometimes they can be combative and inflammatory. But even the ones that are otherwise reasonable get down voted because how dare we insult capitalism and billionaires?
I must say that I have never seen that happen, but I don't tend to trawl through a lot of hidden comments. There certainly seem to be some favored billionaires who might upset people to criticize here. Trump is obviously not among them.