Most times of state-created suffering do not feel abnormal to most people.

Milton Mayer interviewed a bunch of German civilians after World War 2, and most of them remembered the concentration camp years as good times and had a positive view of Hitler. Only the professor among them really even had much awareness that anything important had been happening during that time; most of the others were just concerned with issues of family, their work life, their economic situation, and so on.

“And trust me, I know tyranny.”

Yeah. That’s the way. Maybe one physical switch for “answer call and enable mic” and one for “enable camera and open camera app”. And, if for some reason you want to, you can exit the camera app with it still turned on, but the normal recommended process is to flip it back closed when you’re done which takes you back to the home screen. (And, if being in the “wrong” position when you want it, if you exited the “wrong” way the last time, serves as a gentle reminder to be better about your data security.) I like it.

I rememeber downloading a little 20-second audio clip of some interesting radio traffic, and I think it took about 15 minutes to download.

Phones need way more physical switches on them.

One for camera (maybe for mic, not sure how that would work out with the “phone” aspect for any of those deviants who still use their phones for voice calls), one for GPS. Maybe we could add one for USB data, next to the port. Actually even better for the camera would be a little slidey plastic cover like the old SGI webcams. One for a kill-switch that stops all battery power so it’s not pinging towers while it’s “off”.

IDK, it seems kind of silly that the solution to this particular problem is not hardened phones for defense personnel of which no ability to transfer data over the cable whatsoever would be a fairly good early step (one among many). There are lots more malicious chargers in the world other than Chinese vehicles. In general phones are just a nightmare.

What the fuck are you on about?

The USSR imploded because it was a corrupt and violent kakistocracy

I don’t know that the US had anything to do with the coup, but it didn’t work anyway, and they were much more friendly with the anti-coup people than with the coup. I could be wrong but I thought it was by hard-liners who were opposed to Gorbachev’s reforms and wanted to keep the USSR together back according to its old principles instead of liberal reforms.

Nobody sponsored ultranationalism in Russia except by accident. The IMF and BIll Clinton sponsored gangster capitalism, which took off like gangbusters and defined the gruesome arc of the next several decades of Russian government. It’s one of the great sadnesses of the late 20th century, the promise of what could have been for the Soviet people in the wake of mostly peaceful anti-communist revolution simply getting replaced by more misery.

Fuck the nato. Fuck putin.

Lol

Is that really so far off though?

Yes you fucking cretin

Notice that the one US president who actually has been building concentration camps and operating the Gestapo, shares with you a strong dislike of NATO.

yes, assuming Trump’s goal is to have more manufacturing in the US, tariffs will

Destroy domestic manufacturing by enacting insane tariffs on the raw materials it depends on, without any nontrivial increase in manufacturing to counterbalance the pain, even in the long run.

This type of command economy “might makes right” stuff can fail catastrophically. As recently as the 1990s, there were people starving in North Korea by the hundreds of thousands (at least) because someone decided that enforcing his will was more important than listening to people who even on the most rudimentary level knew what they were doing.

I mean, if I am more qualified at recognizing horseshit than The Guardian is, that’s a problem. It’s weird to me that you are classifying this view of how Trump operates with respect to things like tariffs and whether or not he is a total moron as a matter of opinion.

I’ve seen them get other things about him wrong before, too. They were super happy about how Trump was finally going to lay the hammer down on the Israelis and create peace in Gaza:

https://ponder.cat/post/1323549

There were a bunch of Lemmy commentators in there, too, saying more or less that it was super easy, Trump had made progress with his tough negotiating, and this was just evidence that Biden hadn’t been trying to do it. Since that happened, Isarel’s occupied roughly half of Gaza and resumed killing at scale, and also starting doing the same a little bit in the West Bank. They’re also not letting any food in.

For example, think about the sheer amount of executive orders he has put out in his first few days of his second term. This must have been planned and prepared.

Absolutely true.

It was not just some random sh*t.

Also true. They put together a detailed plan about it, it was published. Some of it was his own ideas but there was also a lot that was coordinated and coherent, put together by smarter people.

You may be underestimating him a lot if you only think of “insane” etc. It was for a purpose.

Now you’re switching back to talking about tariffs. Those were not for a purpose. He literally thinks (or thought, at one point, I don’t know if he still does) that the country doing the exporting pays the tariff. He put 50% tariffs on Lethoso. That’s not underestimating, that’s just facts.

Other more coherent people have written about his motivations, the source of his tariff ideas, all kinds of stuff. You can do analysis of any of his ideas and the goals (if any) behind them without agreeing with any of it. But this article’s thesis is more or less “he’s trying to devalue the dollar to set right the balance of trade, and it might work” and that is a bunch of sanewashing and horseshit with some additional fantasies about how well Reagan’s stuff worked out thrown in for good measure.

The world is much more than “pro or against trump”. They want diversity and they are doing well.

You don’t need to have diversity between horseshit and non-horseshit. I’m fine with many many points of view, including pro-Trump ones if they make sense (one random example from recently being that he seems genuinely surprised and angry that Russia broke the cease-fire instantly). My complaint with this article is not that it’s pro-Trump, it’s that it is horseshit.

This is one of the weirdest goddamned articles I have ever read.

The US dollar being devalued so people could accept our exports more readily would make some sense if we had manufacturing capacity to make some exports people will buy. We don’t. What will happen is we’ll lose the ability to buy everyone else’s stuff, and the history of where global capital chooses to site factories argues strongly against them moving them back to the US even with a cheaper dollar. It’s just suffering with no upside, short term or long term.

Other insane things he says, like that defaulting on T-bills would be sort of a good thing or that Reagan’s people made “the economy” boom in the 1980s, are sort of side notes. And the idea that Trump is competently executing on plans that can be laid out coherently is also laughable. The whole thing is just insane in multiple overlapping respects. Why are they putting this in the newspaper? This is not the first totally insane pro-Trump story I have seen in The Guardian.

Believe it or not, some people think that the press’s job is to tell the truth about what’s going on, and people can deal with it however they deal with it.

I actually am not sure that it’s as big a deal as that.

For decades and decades now, China’s leaders have gotten mileage as do a ton of various leaders around the world by rattling their sabers at the US. It’s just a popular thing to do, and it’s easy and usually pretty consequence-free. It’s like talking about abortion or immigrants for US Republicans. I think if they wanted to start a war with Taiwan, they would have been starting some kind of war about something in the area of the South China Sea, as opposed to just shooting water cannons and making stern statements. Maybe start with something lower-stakes but really commit to it. They have not been doing that.

For as much as US and Chinese leaders talk shit about one another, and their intelligence services like to spy / undermine each other, they both benefit so enormously from the mutual relationship and there’s so much at stake in terms of fucking it up if things really come to blows that I feel like it’s not a priority. Maybe I am wrong and China will see their chance to snatch Taiwan while it’s Trump, since Trump definitely will not do shit if they do. But I just feel like the upsides are a little limited and the potential downsides are massive.

Ah yes, those are some perfectly standard talking points.

I think I will do up a FAQ for the disinformation community or something, it is getting tiring repeatedly typing the same responses. But I do appreciate the extra effort to at least put together something which has some semblance of plausibility instead of just seeing “Gaza” and reaching for the “Kamala Harris” button without bothering to make it make sense or relate in literally any way at all. Big improvement. Good stuff.

The propaganda is getting lazy, this doesn’t even make sense.

Idk, maybe it is just feels-based. If we keep repeating over and over in various ways how bad and anti-Palestinian Kamala Harris was while she was in charge of the country and setting our Gaza policy, people will absorb it by pure groupthink, and won’t notice that the number of people deported or disappeared for being Gaza protestors has gone up infinity percent since the other person won the election and in fact this exact type of issue was a big part of why it was super important for him not to win.

Most of these are pretty shoddy, but this one is really good. It’s detailed and accurate about a lot of the idoiosyncrasies.

Like FlyingSquid I would have pushed “The South” a little further north into Western Pennsylvania, and up through Missouri into south Indiana. And what in the world is “The Northwoods,” that’s the YooPee and Wisconsin is upper midwest. But other than that it’s spot on as to a whole lot of the details. South Florida as part of the Caribbean, Washington/Oregon as part of the interior once you get away from the coast… it has a lot of little important details right.