4 ms·

Are they also changing the way America puts a new (wholly-owned) president in the white house in 2028 in order to approve these contracts?

micromacrofoot 6mo ago
they've got one in there right now, and have a successor lined up Peter Thiel is almost wholly responsible for JD Vance being in the White House
- smallmancontrov 6mo ago
  People underestimate how radical JD Vance is. He wrote an endorsement for the skull book, and not a "my buddy wrote a book that I totally read and you should too" endorsement, but one that restated the core argument: Democrats are secretly communists who want to communist genocide you and we should invoke the Iron Law of Reciprocity to preemptively ... them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unhumans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unhumans During the election I thought this was mostly rhetoric, but now that the administration has turned ICE fully paramilitary and tried to get its base excited about murdering their political opposition, I'm not so sure.
  - AnthonyMouse 6mo ago
    > Democrats are secretly communists who want to communist genocide you Isn't this just how politics looks now? The Republicans say that, the Democrats say the Republicans are secretly nazis who want to nazi genocide you, both parties contain millions of people so both can point to some extremists on the other side saying something shocking and then they both go back to trying to get 51% of the votes so they can be the ones picking your pocket this year. edit: It's beautiful how the two immediate replies to this post are, respectively, "it's not both sides because only the Democrats are actually Marxists" and "it's not both sides because only the Republicans are actually Fascists".
    - micromacrofoot 6mo ago
      a republican mob stormed the capitol in an attempt to overthrow the election the republicans have actually started arresting people they don't like and building camps to imprison them in via ICE earlier they deported people, without trial, to foreign prisons to be kept indefinitely how long are we going to hand wave this away as "both sides are extreme"? this is a little more than the typical insider cronyism isn't it? edit: your edit is also wrong, and kind of validates that you're only seeing what you want to be seeing
    - Zigurd 6mo ago
      All five actual Marxist-Leninists in the US appreciate your attention. Now let's list the actual fascists. Symmetry is beautiful but sometimes it's just not there.
      - smallmancontrov 6mo ago
        Exactly: the tear-down-the-system left barely exists outside twitch and college campuses, while the far right has the presidency and majority control of the Republican party. These are not the same.
    - smallmancontrov 6mo ago
      When things are this lopsided, both-sidesing is indistinguishable from sweeping for the bad one. Want to prove me wrong? Show me the last time Kamala Harris engaged in guillotine rhetoric (which is the left-coded equivalent). Point me to what you think the Democratic equivalent of the ICE killings are. Show me dead protestors and stifling of legal proceedings to hold them accountable. Show me Democratic fraud on the scale of the $40B swap line to Argentina, pumping and dumping the American economy by announcing on-again-off-again war, creating a board of peace / putting yourself in charge / giving it $10B, and shitcoin rugpulls.
      - cramsession 6mo ago
        The Democrats have a very similar platform to the Republicans (especially around ICE and Israel, both of which Harris vowed to continue supporting). Trump is uniquely incompetent though, which if you believe in accelerationism may or may not be a good thing. For instance Democrats have long yearned to go to war with Iran, now Trump did it, but he did it in such an incompetent and rushed manner that it's led to US bases throughout the Middle East being destroyed and abandoned. That's a good thing that came out of a bad situation.
- nancyminusone 6mo ago
  Trump is in it for himself, but can be bribed. Vance doesn't need to be bribed, he's in it for Thiel.
- panick21_ 6mo ago
  Yeah JD Vance is a questionable politician who has not won that many election and those he did win he had massive sport behind him that was ideological. Its not even remotely clear at all that JD Vance has anywhere near the 'skill' of Trump on unifying so many wildly different groups. And JD Vance is a bottom feeder who attached himself to Trump in the right moment and was put as Vice president because some of the Hardcore Trump people didn't want a non-100% Trump Vice President. He didn't win an election to be Vice president. Thiel and friends can dream up anything, just like they dreamed of Orban winning in Hungary. But just because they were lucky in the last couple years, with a bunch of things, doesn't mean all their plans will work. Vance's political instincts are highly questionable.
  - micromacrofoot 6mo ago
    It appears he's reached the first seat in the line of succession without demonstrating any particular skills at all, so I take little comfort in the idea that this is maybe the end of his puppeted rise to power. With an 80 year old in office with nearly 3 years left of presidency, he may very well find himself in the highest office without the need of unifying anyone.
beloch 6mo ago
This is what happens when you allow money to influence power without check. What can be done to curtail it? Ban corporate donations to political parties and PACs. Limit personal contributions. Implement campaign spending limits so parties can't spend hundreds of millions on an election if they somehow manage to get that much money. Other nations (e.g. Canada) do this. It's not perfect. Money is always looking for a way, and politicians are always looking for the kind of power that money buys. It's an eternal game of whack-a-mole, but it's a game worth playing. American politicians aren't going to propose this. Americans need to demand it.
- JohnMakin 6mo ago
  > Ban corporate donations to political parties and PACs Doubtful - the SC determined this was a 1st amendment right for corporations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC But it almost doesn't matter anymore - the bribing is being done so much in plain sight anymore, that these mechanisms are hardly needed anyway. It is a cultural rot that won't be fixed by "just make some rule," the people making the rules are the ones benefiting the most from the corruption.
  - beloch 6mo ago
    If every employee at a corporation has the right to free speech and to make political donations, why should the corporation itself have need of such rights? Just because big money won in 2010 doesn't mean the ruling should go unchallenged for all time. People, not capital, should have rights, because rights are there to protect people from power.
    - JohnMakin 6mo ago
      I'm not being supportive of it, I'm explaining how unlikely it is that this ruling will be overturned. It tends to be very rare, especially a scope of 1st amendment ruling. that's just how that court works, and if it does happen, is on decades time scales, not a matter of a year or two, which is sort of what is needed right now. I would say in this case it's essentially impossible, given that this same SC also ruled that it's acceptable for they themselves to get "gifts" from politically motivated persons, as long as the gift is received after the act done, and no explicit quid pro quo conversation happened. In other words, they literally legalized bribery. There is no universe this court or any future court overturns this, the levers of power have been seized, no one is coming to save anyone, "vote harder" isn't going to work. If that sounds fatalistic or hard to read, sorry, but people have been predicting this outcome for 20+ years and nothing has come close to being done about it, much the opposite. reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snyder_v._United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snyder_v._United_States

micromacrofoot 6mo ago

they've got one in there right now, and have a successor lined up Peter Thiel is almost wholly responsible for JD Vance being in the White House

smallmancontrov 6mo ago
People underestimate how radical JD Vance is. He wrote an endorsement for the skull book, and not a "my buddy wrote a book that I totally read and you should too" endorsement, but one that restated the core argument: Democrats are secretly communists who want to communist genocide you and we should invoke the Iron Law of Reciprocity to preemptively ... them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unhumans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unhumans During the election I thought this was mostly rhetoric, but now that the administration has turned ICE fully paramilitary and tried to get its base excited about murdering their political opposition, I'm not so sure.
- AnthonyMouse 6mo ago
  > Democrats are secretly communists who want to communist genocide you Isn't this just how politics looks now? The Republicans say that, the Democrats say the Republicans are secretly nazis who want to nazi genocide you, both parties contain millions of people so both can point to some extremists on the other side saying something shocking and then they both go back to trying to get 51% of the votes so they can be the ones picking your pocket this year. edit: It's beautiful how the two immediate replies to this post are, respectively, "it's not both sides because only the Democrats are actually Marxists" and "it's not both sides because only the Republicans are actually Fascists".
  - micromacrofoot 6mo ago
    a republican mob stormed the capitol in an attempt to overthrow the election the republicans have actually started arresting people they don't like and building camps to imprison them in via ICE earlier they deported people, without trial, to foreign prisons to be kept indefinitely how long are we going to hand wave this away as "both sides are extreme"? this is a little more than the typical insider cronyism isn't it? edit: your edit is also wrong, and kind of validates that you're only seeing what you want to be seeing
  - Zigurd 6mo ago
    All five actual Marxist-Leninists in the US appreciate your attention. Now let's list the actual fascists. Symmetry is beautiful but sometimes it's just not there.
    - smallmancontrov 6mo ago
      Exactly: the tear-down-the-system left barely exists outside twitch and college campuses, while the far right has the presidency and majority control of the Republican party. These are not the same.
  - smallmancontrov 6mo ago
    When things are this lopsided, both-sidesing is indistinguishable from sweeping for the bad one. Want to prove me wrong? Show me the last time Kamala Harris engaged in guillotine rhetoric (which is the left-coded equivalent). Point me to what you think the Democratic equivalent of the ICE killings are. Show me dead protestors and stifling of legal proceedings to hold them accountable. Show me Democratic fraud on the scale of the $40B swap line to Argentina, pumping and dumping the American economy by announcing on-again-off-again war, creating a board of peace / putting yourself in charge / giving it $10B, and shitcoin rugpulls.
    - cramsession 6mo ago
      The Democrats have a very similar platform to the Republicans (especially around ICE and Israel, both of which Harris vowed to continue supporting). Trump is uniquely incompetent though, which if you believe in accelerationism may or may not be a good thing. For instance Democrats have long yearned to go to war with Iran, now Trump did it, but he did it in such an incompetent and rushed manner that it's led to US bases throughout the Middle East being destroyed and abandoned. That's a good thing that came out of a bad situation.
nancyminusone 6mo ago
Trump is in it for himself, but can be bribed. Vance doesn't need to be bribed, he's in it for Thiel.
panick21_ 6mo ago
Yeah JD Vance is a questionable politician who has not won that many election and those he did win he had massive sport behind him that was ideological. Its not even remotely clear at all that JD Vance has anywhere near the 'skill' of Trump on unifying so many wildly different groups. And JD Vance is a bottom feeder who attached himself to Trump in the right moment and was put as Vice president because some of the Hardcore Trump people didn't want a non-100% Trump Vice President. He didn't win an election to be Vice president. Thiel and friends can dream up anything, just like they dreamed of Orban winning in Hungary. But just because they were lucky in the last couple years, with a bunch of things, doesn't mean all their plans will work. Vance's political instincts are highly questionable.
- micromacrofoot 6mo ago
  It appears he's reached the first seat in the line of succession without demonstrating any particular skills at all, so I take little comfort in the idea that this is maybe the end of his puppeted rise to power. With an 80 year old in office with nearly 3 years left of presidency, he may very well find himself in the highest office without the need of unifying anyone.

beloch 6mo ago

This is what happens when you allow money to influence power without check. What can be done to curtail it? Ban corporate donations to political parties and PACs. Limit personal contributions. Implement campaign spending limits so parties can't spend hundreds of millions on an election if they somehow manage to get that much money. Other nations (e.g. Canada) do this. It's not perfect. Money is always looking for a way, and politicians are always looking for the kind of power that money buys. It's an eternal game of whack-a-mole, but it's a game worth playing. American politicians aren't going to propose this. Americans need to demand it.

JohnMakin 6mo ago
> Ban corporate donations to political parties and PACs Doubtful - the SC determined this was a 1st amendment right for corporations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC But it almost doesn't matter anymore - the bribing is being done so much in plain sight anymore, that these mechanisms are hardly needed anyway. It is a cultural rot that won't be fixed by "just make some rule," the people making the rules are the ones benefiting the most from the corruption.
- beloch 6mo ago
  If every employee at a corporation has the right to free speech and to make political donations, why should the corporation itself have need of such rights? Just because big money won in 2010 doesn't mean the ruling should go unchallenged for all time. People, not capital, should have rights, because rights are there to protect people from power.
  - JohnMakin 6mo ago
    I'm not being supportive of it, I'm explaining how unlikely it is that this ruling will be overturned. It tends to be very rare, especially a scope of 1st amendment ruling. that's just how that court works, and if it does happen, is on decades time scales, not a matter of a year or two, which is sort of what is needed right now. I would say in this case it's essentially impossible, given that this same SC also ruled that it's acceptable for they themselves to get "gifts" from politically motivated persons, as long as the gift is received after the act done, and no explicit quid pro quo conversation happened. In other words, they literally legalized bribery. There is no universe this court or any future court overturns this, the levers of power have been seized, no one is coming to save anyone, "vote harder" isn't going to work. If that sounds fatalistic or hard to read, sorry, but people have been predicting this outcome for 20+ years and nothing has come close to being done about it, much the opposite. reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snyder_v._United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snyder_v._United_States