Yeah, Trump’s ideology is that of whomever had a polite conversation with him last. The only thing he actually believes in is television ratings.

It’s why his first administration’s policies were tamer than this one; there were slightly more ‘moderate’ (or, in a normal country, ‘hard right’) Republicans. This go round, he’s only surrounded by deranged sycophants and dorky natzi-fetish staffers.

Nobody in US political leadership wants to set the precedent of facing legal consequences for their actions while in power.

Unless I misunderstand, in China it’s illegal to distribute VPNs, but simply using one and accessing the wider net is fine. That implementation isn’t great, but it could also be a lot worse. Effectively it means anyone who’s tech savvy enough can leave the walled garden whenever they like with practically no consequence. Though, it still requires some group of people assume the legal risk of setting up and hosting the VPN infrastructure.

I feel like there must be some means of achieving the same effect without criminalizing people just for providing a service. Like, defaulting to a garden of public and private webpages that meat the standard, but still with some means of leaving that garden provided you pass a minor techincal barrier to entry.

Also forcing every social media site and glorified-website-app to default to chronological sort every time you close the browser tab or leave the app. It’s a simple change, but it would do a lot.

How’s it work then?

I mean it’s someone’s job to approve and allocate the funds month to month. I doubt they’re getting payed right now, though…

That is how fiat currency works.

In Qatar’s defense, last time Trump was in office Jared Kushner went to the Qatar embassy, trying to get them to buy some real estate off him. They mistook it for a genuine business deal and declined, so Kushner complained to Trump, who sanctioned them for it. The sanctions lasted until Biden took office. Apparently, someone in Qatar’s government said if they had realized it was shakedown, they would have just payed.

Easier to run counterfactuals and re-litigate the past than to actually address the current strategy the Democrats are adopting, isn’t it?

If you want an answer: Kamala would have been better domestically, though like the Obama and Biden administrations before her, she likely would have further expanded ICE; still leaving its abuses available for whenever the next Republican administration took office.

And she wouldn’t break with the Republican-Democrat foreign policy consensus. Maybe she would have been better at forcing Israel into a ceasefire… though, Harris was already part of the Biden admin, so there is clearly some level of complicity in genocide she finds tolerable.

Well, the democrats enamored themselves to the public so hard, they lost every swing state and the popular vote went to a republican for the first time in the 21st century.

Don’t worry, though, I hear they have a bold new strategy! They’re gonna try chasing “moderate” republican voters and giving up on abortion rights.

“Unproven Track Record”

meanwhile the proven track record is full of stuff like voting to invade Afghanistan and renewing the PATRIOT act

After the fall of the Soviet Union, and almost all their internal documents became public, western intelligence was shocked to discover that their own operations far, far outpaced the KGB in both scope and budget.

I don’t really think we need “Kremlin assets” to explain this. Trust me, we have a more than sufficient asshat capacity.

Kinda nuts how institutions just keep going long after they’ve reached the point of historical irrelevancy. As much as I enjoy watching the decline of US empire, it’s kinda bleak to consider the momentum is behind keeping this stupid configuration of states and constitution, dragging this deadweight on into the next century in much the same way you Brits still have fuckin’ aristos.

The DOJ falls under the remit of the executive. If a former president were to be charged for their crimes, the sitting president would necessarily be involved.

I suppose a charge could come from UN court of justice and ha lol like our leaders would ever allow that precedent to get set

And Obama could have tried to prosecute Bush for that! He chose not to. He chose to double down in Afghanistan. His administration gave a shiny liberal seal of approval to all the authoritarian advances made by Bush, rather than dismantle it. And now we have Trump taking advantage of those very same policies!

And he renewed the PATRIOT act, continued to use GITMO for illegal detention, and posthumously decided any male civilians killed by his drone strikes were actually combatants for reasons of because we want them to be.

The real brain damage is pretending that a few differences completely negate the absolute mass of similarities and continuity between the two administrations.

Well, that’s clearly not the electoral environment we live in.

If you want to win office, you do actually have to communicate a positive idea of the future. Obama didn’t win by saying, “I’m gonna continue basically all of George W. Bush’s policies”. Even though that’s what he actually did, he still had to campaign on something a little more marketable than, “I’m not the other guy”.

Cus with the military you already have a readymade pool of labor to work from, with basicaly zero democratic civilian oversight. Plus, a lot of them live on base.

The reason why EU and US arent so blatant because they can’t just start a troll farm with publics approval.

Doesn’t reddit use heavily correspond to US military bases?

It’s not really much of an option anyway. The actual civil war was fought along a genuine difference - industrial wage-labor in the north vs. the south’s (primarily agrarian) owning people as property. The Culture Game may make it seem like there’s a huge divide, but compared against the history it is peanuts (especially if you ignore what people think and look only at what they do).

the definition of fascism that struck me as the most useful is

Fascism is when an empire takes the policies it uses for colonial holdings and concurred territory, and begins applying those policies to its core.

In that sense, yankee fascism hasn’t even begun yet. We’re still at the preamble.