Comment by Cuuugi
18 hours ago
I do not like the Trump administration, but they don't exist in a vacuum.
It seems the most of their policies are bitter reactions to perceived misdeeds from "the left".
Corruption definitely crosses the aisle.
18 hours ago
I do not like the Trump administration, but they don't exist in a vacuum.
It seems the most of their policies are bitter reactions to perceived misdeeds from "the left".
Corruption definitely crosses the aisle.
While I won't defend corruption, there are orders of magnitude of difference in the intensity and harm caused by the current US government's corruption vs the type most people have grown accustomed to. Both sidesing this is insane.
And all that aside -- in what world is the appropriate response to perceived misdeeds by a political opponent to crank the dial up to 11 on running the government as your combination personal slush fund, army, and all-encompassing bureaucratic warfare organization?
> in what world is the appropriate response to perceived misdeeds by a political opponent to crank the dial up to 11
A world in the throes of absolute war against an entirely dehumanized opponent. If the enemy is definitionally maximally evil, then absolutely any action is permissible as long as it hurts the Other.
I find it interesting (in a dismaying sense) how many people are perfectly comfortable or even in favor of government oversteps by “their” team that are aligned with outcomes they like but act shocked and indignant when the “other” team does it.
IMO, the solution is to demand constitutional and law-following behavior from both/all teams, but to be particularly careful to do that with your preferred side, as you might be prone to overlook those excesses.
Russia perfected the ethics of "you don't need to be good, you just need everyone else to be bad", Americans are just bringing the state of the art home.
Well, it helps that Russia has captured and helped pump propaganda over well more than 50% of US information channels.
This is what the system of checks-and-balances was supposed to enforce. Turns out that system is not effective if you vote the same party into power in each aspect of the government.
>the solution is to demand constitutional and law-following behavior from both/all teams
This is only a solution if you can reasonably anticipate the demands being obeyed. If instead you anticipate that they won't be obeyed (by one or both parties), then it only puts your team at a disadvantage. The other team knows this, so they tend to ignore or ridicule any such demands and to whip their team into ignoring and ridiculing those demands. At which point, your team suffers.
Cooperation strategies in an adversarial system only work in a limited set of highly unusual circumstances, and those circumstances aren't currently extant.
Yes, all political parties and organizations must be accountable to the Constitution and the law.
We also need to be honest with ourselves as a nation that Trumpism pushes far further into unconstitutional and law-disregarding behavior than what has come before. Pretending it is equivalent, as the starting comment does, is dangerous.
Bad governance does not justify more bad governance. Even if it's true that previous admins have done all this before (it's not) it wouldn't justify a thing.
Here's the hilarious part: When you say "previous admins" you're almost certainly talking about previous Republican admins.
https://gigafact.org/fact-briefs/have-there-been-significant...
I don’t know if it falls into the strict definition of “corruption”, but definitely falls into the broader category of “shitty”, but democrat politicians don’t seem to be above abusing their power to enrich themselves with the stock market.
There’s an entire (successful) ETF exploiting it. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NANC/
I’m not a conservative, I’m pretty left-leaning by (American standards at least), but I am not going to act like my side is categorically better in this regard.
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It's an explanation, not a justification.
You're letting past gov'ts away with a lot apparently but overall i agree.
The Overton window shifted too far and now an egomaniac is in charge of its reset.
Such is dialectics, but if you are going to apply relativism to comparatively very different movements you are in for a really bad time.
I need to the left's version of starting your own memecoin and openly taking bribes from officials and foreign countries.
I also would like the left's version of pardoning people who they directly do business with.
Those legitimately parrot the "both sides" stuff are terribly naive. No one who actually pays attention to what's happening thinks these parties are remotely similar right now.
memecoin scams: I offer up a President wearing a tan suit in exchange, and depths of depravity
taking bribes (planes) from foreign countries: I offer in exchange, a former President who dared to use Dijon mustard instead of plain yellow mustard, the monster.
> Corruption definitely crosses the aisle.
it isn't possible for you to be so poorly informed that you think "Joe Biden's son told people who his dad was so they'd let him do a business deal" is in the same scale as:
- taking direct bribes from Qatar - the president and his family launching multiple cryptocurrency firms to do infinite fraud and money laundering - demanding and accepting direct bribes from universities and using taxpayer money as the cudgel - directly taking cash from randoms for pardons
etc etc etc
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Destroying democracy has literally never been a goal of the democratic party, unlike the well laid out plan in project 2025, which is really just Stage 1 of their plan.
> It seems the most of their policies are bitter reactions to perceived misdeeds from "the left"
"Perceived" is a very important word in that sentence. The "misdeeds" don't actually exist, they are only "perceived" as part of right wing manufactured victimhood.
> It seems the most of their policies are bitter reactions to perceived misdeeds from "the left".
lolwhat? “I don’t like what I imagined the left is doing so I’m going to turn our cities into police states?” In what world is that a reasonable justification? Might as well say it’s a bitter reaction to the tooth fairy.
95% of the time they are talking about the vaccine mandate and lockdowns in response to a fkn pandemic that provable killed hundreds of thousands, easily shown with the dip in average lifetime length stats of Americans for a while there. I think we're observing false equivalency here to protect a felon who currently holds the office of the Presidency.
It's an explanation not a justification.
It's an excuse, not an explanation.
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This is such utter BS. And also, btw, also doesn't exist in a vacuum.
The left isn't immune to feeling bitter disgust at titans of industry that openly pay bribes and tributes and lie on camera in service of political objectives in exchange for political and economic favors.
The left does not equal the democrat party. The right does not equate to the republican party.
My point is that there is open levels of collusion with the Biden admin (and Obama earlier) and media corps which have given the Trump admin cover to openly talk about their "favored companies"
Relax guy, politicians are not your friends.
> My point is that there is open levels of collusion with the Biden admin (and Obama earlier) and media corps
What do you mean?
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