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> > Carlson kept acting throughout the interview as though it’s just normal and reasonable for wealthy people who donate to politicians to expect corrupt favors

> > Carlson kept acting throughout the interview as though it’s just normal and reasonable for wealthy people who donate to politicians to expect corrupt favors from those same people in their time of need. > That's just being realistic, isn't it? For Carlson - a wealthy politically connected person who I would be unsurprised if he is the recipient of favor - I'm sure it's realistic. But there are more of us who don't have the wealth or political connections to get favors than there are those who do. So it's weird that people who claim to care about corruption keep voting for and snuggling up to extremely wealthy obviously-favor-trading conmen. The president doesn't even try to hide the games. So after that it's unsurprising that someone like Carlson is starting to drop the pretense too. Will the people he gets his power from - his audience - care, though?

generalizations 2y ago
Wouldn't 'acting surprised' at such things be merely performative? I don't think anyone in this thread is surprised either.
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
The general problem is that honest politicians are uncommon. If you have to choose between corrupt politician who is going to do X and corrupt politician who is going to do Y then you're going to choose on the basis of X and Y rather than corruption because "honest politician" isn't on the ballot. Go ahead and change that if you can figure out how.
- ccorcos 2y ago
  Hot take: I think it should be legal to offer a bribe and illegal to accept a bribe. For example, I don’t think it’s immoral to offer a crooked cop in Mexico $20 to walk away from a dangerous situation. In your example, it’s not your fault politicians are accepting bribes. So you can either do it or go out of business. Don’t hate the player, hate the game. I think it would do a good job of weeding out bribes too. Because people offering bribes also get a form of blackmail - they don’t go to jail if they come clean but the other side does! I really think it would actually end up net-positive. What do you think?
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    So here's how the corruption under the existing system works. Richard is a US Senator. It's illegal for him to accept bribes and illegal for anyone to offer them, and there may even be some laws prohibiting him and his immediate family from accepting "gifts" over a certain amount. But there is nothing illegal about, say, hiring the Senator's brother-in-law to be a director on some company's board in exchange for a salary with at least six or seven digits in it. After all, the brother-in-law has to work somewhere. So the company offers Richard's brother-in-law the job, and then goes to Richard and asks him to advance the company's position on some bill. If Richard votes the way the company wants, the brother-in-law gets the money. If not, the offer falls through. Nobody actually goes to the Senator and says "do what we want and you'll get the money", it's just understood that it's what will happen, and then the families of government officials become conspicuously wealthy. If you legalize the offer and then someone goes to Richard and offers him a bribe, he declines, because of course he wouldn't accept a bribe, are you crazy? It's a crime to accept a bribe. So then nobody does that even if it's legal for them, anybody who tries is immediately suspected of wearing a wire and any explicit offers of a bribe are emphatically declined. But they still offer his brother-in-law a job, not formally in exchange for anything, but still with the implied understanding that the job is contingent on the votes.
    - Paradigma11 2y ago
      Why bother: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/28/business/crypto-mogul-trump-coins-civil-fraud-charges/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/28/business/crypto-mogul-tru...
      - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        So this is a good example for a different reason than you think. Let's consider the short history of cryptocurrency. Bitcoin was invented and a lot of idealists had a lot of hope that it would bank the unbanked, wrest control of the payments system away from the incumbent oligopoly, solve microtransactions for decentralized systems, etc. It also generated a lot of hype, which attracts fraudsters. Fraud has been illegal for a long time and you can prosecute fraud without shutting the whole system down, but wait, what was that thing there on the list of things cryptocurrency was supposed to do? Disrupt the incumbents? Then somehow, for some reason, the rules around cryptocurrency ended up not being the ones narrowly tailored to stamp out fraud, but instead being the ones that swamp ordinary people with paperwork if they try to use it for any of the neat things it was supposed to be good for. Which killed those things before they could become too big to fail, which left only the crimes, which turned public opinion against the concept. Which allowed the government to start really smashing things up. Then you get a candidate who supports the now-hated thing that was once a hope. They put their money where their mouth is and get into the industry, and then once in office they start reforming the laws to not be so harsh and end some of the existing prosecutions, including of people who might have been involved with their previous ventures. Is that corruption or is that just what they're supposed to do when they're supportive of something? You can cast it either way, which is the problem, because then people will want to choose how to characterize it based on whether the target is in their preferred party.
- geysersam 2y ago
  > problem is that honest politicians are uncommon I don't think that's true at all. My impression is that there are honest and honorable politicians in both parties. But the crazy Machiavellians rise to the top, I don't know why.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    It's because of the two party system. Since there are only two parties, that allows special interests to capture the two party organizations, who control which candidate their party puts on the ballot. You can see this in what happened to Bernie Sanders in the run-up to the 2016 election, or Ron Paul a couple cycles before that. This is also what sets the stage for candidates like Trump, not because Trump doesn't trade favors but because voters get so sick of being force-fed establishment candidates that any opportunity to set the status quo on fire starts to look attractive. STAR voting might help with this, because then you get more than two viable parties/candidates and each one is a chance to put a non-corrupt candidate on the ballot.
verzali 2y ago
If you believe all politicians are by definition corrupt, then the ones who are openly corrupt are at least "honest" about it. But that's overall a problem because it means the political system just gets more corrupt over time. I wonder how long until wannabe presidents are paying off the Praetorian Guard.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  I believe all politicians are corrupt, but there is a spectrum of corruption and what they will do before a since of morality stops them. Just like a nonviolent petty their vs a mob hitman. It's one thing to steer a contract somewhere over top of a different company, it's another to try and shut down social security, end democracy, or end 70 years of allyship and become friends with the most corrupt dictators for a cool $200 million.
- majormajor 2y ago
  That's the interesting thing here, isn't it? The goalposts have moved. It was "government needs to be smaller, because corruption is inevitable [usually with convenient pointing at Bill Clinton or other Democrats]" This had it's own problem - handing over power to corrupt businesses has had plenty of issues in the past! But now it's "it is important for us to seize and centralize more power in the areas we want to because of what the other guys did, but ALSO we are openly corrupt." Even something like mass layoffs is generally not framed as "the government shouldn't do all these things" (some exceptions of course for favorite scapegoats like CFPB) but just "these are being done too expensively and inefficiently." The admin uses things like "free speech" as a cudgel where it thinks its in its benefit, but then turns around and wants to interfere more in how many places operate (see the lawsuits over media coverage of the election, or restrictions on research or educational curricula). So the central small-government-justifying framework has been entirely jettisoned, along with any executive restraint. Will four years of that being in-your-face obvious alienate enough of the people who thought the "conservative" part was important?

generalizations 2y ago

Wouldn't 'acting surprised' at such things be merely performative? I don't think anyone in this thread is surprised either.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago

The general problem is that honest politicians are uncommon. If you have to choose between corrupt politician who is going to do X and corrupt politician who is going to do Y then you're going to choose on the basis of X and Y rather than corruption because "honest politician" isn't on the ballot. Go ahead and change that if you can figure out how.

ccorcos 2y ago
Hot take: I think it should be legal to offer a bribe and illegal to accept a bribe. For example, I don’t think it’s immoral to offer a crooked cop in Mexico $20 to walk away from a dangerous situation. In your example, it’s not your fault politicians are accepting bribes. So you can either do it or go out of business. Don’t hate the player, hate the game. I think it would do a good job of weeding out bribes too. Because people offering bribes also get a form of blackmail - they don’t go to jail if they come clean but the other side does! I really think it would actually end up net-positive. What do you think?
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  So here's how the corruption under the existing system works. Richard is a US Senator. It's illegal for him to accept bribes and illegal for anyone to offer them, and there may even be some laws prohibiting him and his immediate family from accepting "gifts" over a certain amount. But there is nothing illegal about, say, hiring the Senator's brother-in-law to be a director on some company's board in exchange for a salary with at least six or seven digits in it. After all, the brother-in-law has to work somewhere. So the company offers Richard's brother-in-law the job, and then goes to Richard and asks him to advance the company's position on some bill. If Richard votes the way the company wants, the brother-in-law gets the money. If not, the offer falls through. Nobody actually goes to the Senator and says "do what we want and you'll get the money", it's just understood that it's what will happen, and then the families of government officials become conspicuously wealthy. If you legalize the offer and then someone goes to Richard and offers him a bribe, he declines, because of course he wouldn't accept a bribe, are you crazy? It's a crime to accept a bribe. So then nobody does that even if it's legal for them, anybody who tries is immediately suspected of wearing a wire and any explicit offers of a bribe are emphatically declined. But they still offer his brother-in-law a job, not formally in exchange for anything, but still with the implied understanding that the job is contingent on the votes.
  - Paradigma11 2y ago
    Why bother: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/28/business/crypto-mogul-trump-coins-civil-fraud-charges/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/28/business/crypto-mogul-tru...
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      So this is a good example for a different reason than you think. Let's consider the short history of cryptocurrency. Bitcoin was invented and a lot of idealists had a lot of hope that it would bank the unbanked, wrest control of the payments system away from the incumbent oligopoly, solve microtransactions for decentralized systems, etc. It also generated a lot of hype, which attracts fraudsters. Fraud has been illegal for a long time and you can prosecute fraud without shutting the whole system down, but wait, what was that thing there on the list of things cryptocurrency was supposed to do? Disrupt the incumbents? Then somehow, for some reason, the rules around cryptocurrency ended up not being the ones narrowly tailored to stamp out fraud, but instead being the ones that swamp ordinary people with paperwork if they try to use it for any of the neat things it was supposed to be good for. Which killed those things before they could become too big to fail, which left only the crimes, which turned public opinion against the concept. Which allowed the government to start really smashing things up. Then you get a candidate who supports the now-hated thing that was once a hope. They put their money where their mouth is and get into the industry, and then once in office they start reforming the laws to not be so harsh and end some of the existing prosecutions, including of people who might have been involved with their previous ventures. Is that corruption or is that just what they're supposed to do when they're supportive of something? You can cast it either way, which is the problem, because then people will want to choose how to characterize it based on whether the target is in their preferred party.
geysersam 2y ago
> problem is that honest politicians are uncommon I don't think that's true at all. My impression is that there are honest and honorable politicians in both parties. But the crazy Machiavellians rise to the top, I don't know why.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  It's because of the two party system. Since there are only two parties, that allows special interests to capture the two party organizations, who control which candidate their party puts on the ballot. You can see this in what happened to Bernie Sanders in the run-up to the 2016 election, or Ron Paul a couple cycles before that. This is also what sets the stage for candidates like Trump, not because Trump doesn't trade favors but because voters get so sick of being force-fed establishment candidates that any opportunity to set the status quo on fire starts to look attractive. STAR voting might help with this, because then you get more than two viable parties/candidates and each one is a chance to put a non-corrupt candidate on the ballot.

verzali 2y ago

If you believe all politicians are by definition corrupt, then the ones who are openly corrupt are at least "honest" about it. But that's overall a problem because it means the political system just gets more corrupt over time. I wonder how long until wannabe presidents are paying off the Praetorian Guard.

EasyMark 2y ago
I believe all politicians are corrupt, but there is a spectrum of corruption and what they will do before a since of morality stops them. Just like a nonviolent petty their vs a mob hitman. It's one thing to steer a contract somewhere over top of a different company, it's another to try and shut down social security, end democracy, or end 70 years of allyship and become friends with the most corrupt dictators for a cool $200 million.
majormajor 2y ago
That's the interesting thing here, isn't it? The goalposts have moved. It was "government needs to be smaller, because corruption is inevitable [usually with convenient pointing at Bill Clinton or other Democrats]" This had it's own problem - handing over power to corrupt businesses has had plenty of issues in the past! But now it's "it is important for us to seize and centralize more power in the areas we want to because of what the other guys did, but ALSO we are openly corrupt." Even something like mass layoffs is generally not framed as "the government shouldn't do all these things" (some exceptions of course for favorite scapegoats like CFPB) but just "these are being done too expensively and inefficiently." The admin uses things like "free speech" as a cudgel where it thinks its in its benefit, but then turns around and wants to interfere more in how many places operate (see the lawsuits over media coverage of the election, or restrictions on research or educational curricula). So the central small-government-justifying framework has been entirely jettisoned, along with any executive restraint. Will four years of that being in-your-face obvious alienate enough of the people who thought the "conservative" part was important?