He did a huge amount of harm to our government. Not quite like this time, where most of what he is doing is outright illegal and is essentially a soft coup, but really bad nonetheless - just mostly aimed at making him money and getting/keeping political power instead of destryoying the country. Much of that was outright illegal, but a lot of it was just breaches of “norms” and “decorum”.

I literally can’t fit it all into one comment, its so much and such a convoluted web of schemes and lies and crimes and support from other politicians/lawyers/the media. And every day was something new. I followed all the legal cases relating to his admin back in the first term - it was hard to keep up with even while it was all happening. Much of the reason he was never charged or indicted for so much of what he did is that you can’t criminally indict a sitting president.

The Mueller investigation into the Trump administration’s conduct with Russian political operatives found that he more than likely illegally colluded with Russia to the detriment of the US and to defraud and disenfranchise voters, but literally couldn’t charge Trump since he was a sitting president - hoping instead that someone would pick up the investigation when he could be charged. It is notable that that investigation produced 37 indictments and 7 convictions/guilty pleas, referred 14 more cases to DoJ for prosecution, and recovered like $48M in misappropriated government funds (the investigation cost $32M, so it was actually profitable). So, this investigation couldn’t prosecute Trump, but 34 people in his administration were indicted and the findings of the report suggested they would have prosecuted Trump if they were legally allowed to. That says all you need to know, IMO.

This isn’t quite right. Trump didn’t really modify laws. That isn’t even something he can claim to do since he is the head of the Executive branch, not the Legislative one. He issued executive orders, many of which were illegal, and he had some cronies who enacted some of them anyway - others did not enact some of these, and others were not really actionable (like when he declared that no one has a gender). He did rescind many policies, but he can’t just make laws go away on his own. There are literally hundreds of court cases currently challenging these executive orders - seeing as how the judiciary is the primary check on the executive branch, that is the system working to check presidential power.

However, I am not a liberal, I am a socialist and do not think this is working well - there are many problems here. The highest levels of the judiciary have been largely captured by far-right judges, many of whom are specifically aligned with Trump’s goals and support the unitary executive theory. Also, this method of checking presidential power is extremely slow. For every illegal action Trump’s administration takes, a court case has to be crafted, filed, heard, and adjudicated. Every one. And invariably, some will not reach the correct outcome and others will never actually be taken to court - there are just too many.

Basically, the administration is using the fact that they control every branch of government to dismantle or capture core government agencies and to provide cover for various illegal actions - forcing them through if only temporarily for various political and structural ends. A soft coup, basically. So yeah, the fact that something like this is possible is proof of the flaws inherent in this system of government.

It isn’t daft. The Republicans since Reagan have pushed a fringe legal theory called the Unitary Executive Theory. Basically, they want the president to fully control the executive branch and military such that theirs is the only voice that matters for much of the government. Not unlike a king, but partially checked by congress and the courts. They have been taking (illegal) actions to try to get sued, and also have been suing others/other branches of government, to try to get the Supreme Court to hear cases that will support this fringe legal theory so that it becomes the law of the land.

I am not a lawyer, but this is possibly something Trump can legally do since he is Commander in Chief of the armed forces. However, this seems more like an apportionment thing, which is Congress’ responsibility. Congress has allocated funds to send military aid to Ukraine. So, even if Trump as Commander in Chief could say “no more weapons to ukraine”, it seems doubtful to me that he could (legally) stop weapons shipments currently en route.

But, by the time whatever government office sues the office of the president to get a judge to enjoin them to send the agreed upon weapons that were already apportioned, it will already have hurt Ukraine somewhat. Trump often weaponizes inefficiency. And these sort of illegal acts aren’t crimes per se - they’re just procedural breaches - the legal remedy is just to reverse the action.

So, probably not legal. But Trump gets to weaponize his administration’s incompetence (or feigned incompetence) to at least delay aid. More competent people may support these actions, knowing they’re illegal, to try and strengthen the president’s role even further.

I kinda like it. Brutalist console

It is not a thing. DEI is a corporate initiative to make sure non-white, non-male people are interviewed and hopefully hired. Has nothing to do with schools

This is how everyone should handle trump and his ilk at every opportunity. Talk over him, call him out on obvious lies, chuckle at him when he says idiotic things. Just generally treat him with disdain and derision. He has this hero status with his followers that could be chipped away at if he’s the subject of serious, casual ridicule. Not the stupid, desperate, “mango mussolini” “lord cheeto” junk, but the stuff that makes him feel self-conscious and lash out like a stupid, bumbling old man. This has been the most successful rhetorical/propaganda strategy whenever people have employed it.

Another point here, Amazon has really thin profit margins on their core business (not counting AWS, etc. Just the online shopping). If it weren’t absolutely gargantuan, it would fail. It’s only profitable because of the logistical efficiency it has achieved, exploitation (of workers, cheap goods from China, etc.), and absolutely massive economies of scale. Similar to Walmart.

Recommended reading: People’s Republic of Walmart. All for nationalizing - would be better for everyone.

(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_times - not chinese)

Not mutually exclusive. People need to see messages like that to understand the link between their actions and those actions indirectly helping to cause the thing they wanted to stop in the first place.

As a socialist, it is frustrating seeing people take a correct stance: the genocide in Gaza is bad and we should put pressure on the political establishment and turn it into “so we’ll become politically disengaged, serving the interests of fascism to teach the liberals a lesson while making no meaningful progress toward stopping genocide”.

Grab em by the vespussi

You can either use AI to just vomit dubious information at you or you can use it as a tool to do stuff. The more specific the task, the better LLMs work. When I use LLMs for highly specific coding tasks that I couldn’t do otherwise (I’m not a [good] coder), it does not make me worse at critical thinking.

I actually understand programming much better because of LLMs. I have to debug their code, do research so I know how to prompt it best to get what I want, do research into programming and software design principles, etc.

Wait but i thought a vote for kamala was a vote for genocide and trump was going to not do genocide

Musky youth brownshirt brigade

Oh of course I agree. That’s just what the nestle asshole said.

That’s good. Boycotts can be effective!

Nestle has an extremely safe, risk-averse marketing strategy. In part due to their various scandals, they try really hard to be family friendly and boring.

That said, they are not worse than other food and beverage conglomerates.

1. child labor: mars & others were also implicated. These companies were most likely unaware of the child labor being used to harvest cocoa. The way it works is there are wholesalers in Africa who buy cocoa from processing facilities who buy fresh cocoa pods from local farms. These wholesalers advertised themselves as being child-labor-free. The farms they buy from were using child labor. This is a problem with capitalism exploiting people in the global south, causing perverse incentives, and with companies having limited insight into the full depth of their supply chains.

2. water is not a human right: The nestle water exec said the quiet part out loud. But, no beverage company believes water is a human right - they just aren’t stupid enough to say that on camera. If they did think it was a human right, they’d be working to ensure universal access to clean water rather than bottling it and shipping it around the world while limiting water access at their extraction points and polluting the water near their factories. Look at what coca cola is doing in mexico - rampant water pollution such that in factory towns Coke is the only safe drink for folks because the water is contaminated. Nestle is bad, but no worse than coca cola.

3. infant formula scandal: this occurred in the 1970s and was obviously awful. Every major multinational food and beverage conglomerate has stories like this if you look hard enough - this just happens to be a fucked up series of events that got some major media play.

People online scapegoat Nestle, but continue to buy electronics and clothing made with child labor, tree nuts/soda/and other products known to be harmful to watersheds, and many other products from companies which harm people in the global south. This isn’t meant to defend nestle, but to remind everyone that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Nestle is not anywhere close to an uniquely evil company. Not even in its own industry.

Wow that’s a lot of murders

This was a money laundering scheme. Foreign governments and companies (foreign and domestic) who want favor with trump are the ones who bought in.

Trump launches meme coin money laundering scheme, apparently makes launders more than $25 billion overnight

Ftfy

Not surprised. Just impressed

Yeah fair. But this is like Fox level stuff. Usually they were somewhat better than Fox journalistically.