Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

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The interesting bit to me is that everybody just plays along. Rather than that he gets thrown off his perch and replaced by someone sane. Trump is an idiot, no doubt about it. But all those that voted for him and that continue to enable him are the bigger idiots, and if they're not idiots they are probably hoping to profit from the chaos he's creating.

That's because chaos is a good time to do some grabbing. You could see this during the downfall of the former Soviet Union, which in spite of being dirt poor still made a handful of families obscenely wealthy. Now imagine being able to do a similar resource grab on the scale of the modern United States.

Trump 1, COVID, Trump 2, the Russian war on Ukraine, AI and a couple of more wars... It's a miracle things haven't gone further down - yet. But I'm really wondering how long our social constructs will be able to withstand this kind of concerted assault.

> Trump is an idiot, no doubt about it. But all those that voted for him and that continue to enable him are the bigger idiots, and if they're not idiots they are probably hoping to profit from the chaos he's creating.

For all the assurances that the US military is an army with the ultimate task to protect the Constitution and bound to democratic principles, they sure seem to view the Commander in Chief as the sole authority, even if his orders are evidently illegal or undermine the democratic system (because Congress was bypassed).

As the war is currently going, I'd have expected at least some generals or officers to refuse orders, not because they suddenly switched sides, but simply because the orders are not democratically legitimized anymore. But nothing like this seems to have happened so far.

(Not even starting with ICE...)

Oh, I think that has definitely happened. A lot of very high placed career military have been fired recently and even if they're not saying much the fact that it happened speaks volumes. These were people with decades of service. I think at least some fraction of those firings was because of refusal to carry out certain orders.

What they should do is speak out, but possibly their future income depends on not speaking out.

I think that there are stories but unreported for good reason. I heard from a pastor friend that he showed up to a house where one of his congregants was inside (with ICE outside), and basically asked them for mercy, and the supervisor was like “Actually, there is lightning in the area so we’ll need to go away but we will come back later.”

So not complete rebellion, but a little bit of humanity. Viktor Frankl talks about how there were some “good” guards at the concentration camp.

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