jhp123

There is an old documentary called "the Revolution will not be Televised" about the Chavez presidency in Venezuela. If you watch it you will come away feeling that Chavez was treated pretty unfairly by the rightist media and "deep state" who attempted to overthrow his Presidency.

But even if that is true, it is also true that Chavez took many actions to centralize power, erode democratic safeguards in the Constitution, control the media and destroy the opposition parties. Every step was justified by pointing to the horrible rightist conspiracy against Chavez. But the end result was a dictatorship and the absolute ruin of the Venezuelan state.

This is normal for dictators. Many cast themselves as victims. Stalin was pressed on all sides by Capitalists, Kulaks, and Trotskyists. Hitler, of course, by Jews and Communists. Whether the accusations are pure fantasy or rooted in some level of real persecution of the movement, it is very important not to allow them to be used to justify the establishment of tyranny.

A time traveller from 1945 would probably assume the side snapping off Sieg Heils to be fascist

A recent poll found that only 14% of Americans believe that the President should ignore court rulings that he disagrees with. But when the same poll asked if President Trump should ignore a specific court order that he disagrees with, on the topic of deportations, the numbers shot up to 40%.

Americans do not support going to war with Canada in the abstract, but many of us will find a way to support whatever specific casus belli Trump comes up with. It's what I like to call the "Trump Derangement Syndrome" - these people know right from wrong, but when Trump is involved they lose their sense of reality.

The US has insulated the economic decision makers from consequences in the same way as centrally-planned economies like the USSR. We're seeing the same poor performance now.

For example, the tech sector spend the 2010s chasing dumb ideas like metaverse/vr, crypto, voice assistants, and so on. But it didn't lead to any shakeup or consequences for the people in charge. The same firms, investors, and executives were in power in 2020 after a decade of stagnation and failure. They are insulated from any upstart competition by strong monopolization and increasingly, capture of the state itself.

The Anthropic guy also said one year recently. It sounds like they're feeling pressure from investors. AI bubble deflates in one year.

That's the best they can come up with? Floyd was already handcuffed.

No matter, I'm sure Chauvin's innocence will be an established fact within the right-wing canon soon enough. Poor, persecuted Saint Chauvin, railroaded just like the late, great Hannibal Lecter.

Is the right now truthing out over the murder of George Floyd, an event captured in its entirety on video from multiple angles?

Eisenhower was accused of being a communist. Look up John Birch Society.

This reminds me of Facebook's "M" assistant from 2017.

> Today, a few hundred Bay Area Facebook users will open their Messenger apps to discover M, a new virtual assistant. Facebook will prompt them to test it with examples of what M can do: Make restaurant reservations. Find a birthday gift for your spouse. Suggest---and then book---weekend getaways.

https://www.wired.com/2015/08/facebook-launches-m-new-kind-v...

I think the discussion of traditional masculinity is shoehorned into this topic. The facts are that Americans of both genders report having fewer friends since 30 years ago. The decline is more pronounced among men - in 1990 they had more friends than women, now they have fewer (but both genders have fewer friends than in 1990)[0].

I think it's obvious that traditional masculine attitude have declined since 1990, so men's worsening friendships relative to women can't be blamed on worsening masculine attitudes. And of course, that part of the decline shared by both genders can't be blamed on masculine attitudes, unless women have adopted "tough guy" machismo since 1990...

I'd love to see a more critical and open-minded analysis of these trends. To me it remains something of a mystery. One possibility is the rise of social media is actually eroding friendships. Or maybe the relative lack of single-gender spaces actually causes a problem for same-gender friendship formation?

[0] https://www.americansurveycenter.org/why-mens-social-circles...

If our government is so strapped for cash that it has to cancel food shipments for starving children[0], then surely we are in a deep enough fiscal crisis to stop spending money on space exploration?

[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/usaid-trump-funding-pause-500-m...

DACA repeal was blocked on APA grounds

if you take a dollar from government spending, then 60 or 70 cents of that is coming from the bank accounts of retirees, disabled people, and the poor. If you return that dollar as tax cuts, as Trump has proposed, then something like 80 cents go into the bank accounts of the rich.

The discourse of "wasteful government spending" is a smokescreen. It mystifies the basic operation of taking a dollar from a worker, retiree or poor person and giving it to a rich person.

let me ask you a question. Richard Nixon had a special team under his direct control, they're popularly known as the white house plumbers. He asked this team to engage in activities not directly authorized by congress including various wiretaps and break-ins. Eventually these activities were discovered, it became a scandal and ended his Presidency.

Do you think Nixon did something wrong by creating this team?

If not, then we have an answer for why most people see this whole thing differently from you — most people see the Nixon presidency as clear overreach and abuse of power.

If so, what is the significant difference between Nixon's plumbers and the DOGE team, in your view?

> Just as raw un restricted read/write access is constantly alleged, but we have in turn found out that isn't the case.

Marko "normalize Indian hate" Elez did have read/write access, as DOGE lawyers admitted in court after first claiming that he did not[0].

[0] https://thehill.com/business/5141149-former-doge-employee-ed...

Amazon has billions of dollars of business with the US government, which Musk has just demonstrated the ability and willingness to cancel without following any legal process ... it's just a simple bribe

> I don’t believe those who went into this past election taking pride in the unemployment numbers understood that the near-record low unemployment figures — the figure was a mere 4.2 percent in November — counted homeless people doing occasional work as “employed.” But the implications are powerful. If you filter the statistic to include as unemployed people who can’t find anything but part-time work or who make a poverty wage (roughly $25,000), the percentage is actually 23.7 percent. In other words, nearly one of every four workers is functionally unemployed in America today — hardly something to celebrate.

But U6 unemployment is also near a 20-year low[0], as is the poverty rate[1].

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U6RATE [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PPAAUS00000A156NCEN

Rome (the city) does still exist, as do the Roman Catholic church and Eastern Orthodox church which were integral institutions of the late Roman empire. Rome, the original capital, passed in to possession by the modern Italian state, which declared itself a "new Roman Empire" under Mussolini less than 100 years ago. The new Roman capital at Constantinople passed into the hands of the Ottoman Empire in the 1500s, whose leader took the moniker "Caesar of Rome". Other states like the Germanic "Holy Roman Empire" and even the Russian Empire with its "Tsars" (Caesars) have claimed to be successors to the Roman Empire.

it all mirrors the Twitter takeover (fetishizing "hardcore coders", micromanagement, randomly breaking or cancelling things), so this might just be how Elon Musk approaches things.

> $6 million to fund tourism in Egypt [link explains it is to fund economic development in North Sinai]

This sounds like an absolutely expected program for USAID, given that it is a soft power aid agency. Egypt is a regional partner to the US and this province has been a source of Islamist violence. It also borders the Gaza Strip.

what is this? it doesn't load for me

he did [0] [1]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_Count_Reform_and_P...

[1] https://democrats-cha.house.gov/media/press-releases/ranking...

so when Elon Musk stands at a podium and performs the Nazi salute, it is "intellectually lazy" to use labels like "Nazi" or "fascist"?

I think the messaging was intended to create a psychological effect rather than a budgetary one. By voluntarily giving up a benefit to stay with the federal government post-Musk takeover, employees may feel more committed to the new regime. IIRC Zappos used to offer people a payout to leave directly after hiring them, it was a similar signal of commitment.

If he gets away with shutting down USAID by fiat then it makes it clear that he can go outside the bounds of law and demand anything of the executive branch.

The next step might be going to the DOJ and telling them to detain, let's say, Ilhan Omar on suspicion of treason. This illegal demand will have much more force because anyone refusing it will know that they stand on their own and have no recourse through the courts or congressional oversight.

I do think that congress would impeach if he said "I declare martial law and cancel elections". He'll have to get there piecemeal without creating a single moment for opposition to coalesce.

At that point he can order his subordinates to ignore the ruling. If his subordinates claim that the court ruling overrides his orders then he can fire them. Court orders are purely advisory after the Trump v. United States decision.

the idea of national rejuvenation by concentrating political power in a "founder" is not a new one. Mussolini styled himself "Founder of the Empire".

I'm not a target of tech's fascist turn, but my head is still spinning from the change of direction. When I entered this industry it was for hackers, nonconformists, weirdos, nerds, people who don't care about titles or clothes or what your genitals are.

What particularly stings is that the vipers at the top tricked people into giving away an enormous amount of intellectual property. Zuck is removing tampons from the men's room—will he also remove open source code written by queer people from his company? Of course not.

A study of London[0] found that being bombed during the blitz was a net positive for the city, economically speaking, because the neighborhoods affected were rebuilt with more density.

This gave me the idea that we could improve long-term urban wealth by following an "urban Cheney's algorithm". A city could be divided into let's say 8 sectors, like pie slices extending from the center, and demolished on a schedule (e.g. one sector per decade). The orderly and predictable demolition would provide an even greater boon to the city than the Nazi bombing campaign provided to London, especially because the wide range of demolition would allow easier renovation of structures like roads, sewers, and transit lines and depots.

[0] https://academic.oup.com/joeg/article/21/6/869/6213370