True, it does not say the reason for the decline to indict. It could have as much to do with the overall decline in quality of the DoJ and its cases as a whole over the past year. Many nonsalient crimes will also go unprosecuted under this DoJ, but they will not generate headlines like this one.
Was the Union army complicit in the crimes of the Confederacy by simply allowing them to drop their arms and walk away as well? The world is complicated and full of nuanced takes depending on context. That said:
>If a rival political party takes power in 2029 and they decide to do nothing about this, are they complicit?
Like this really does read as: I still blame the Democrats for the crimes of the Republicans.
The ultimate authority here is the US voters and they have chosen poorly again and again. They are complicit for sure as they chose both to empower Republicans and tie the hands of the Democrats with impossible standards.
It's stuff like this that really makes me wonder about the great man theory of history.
Without JW Booth, maybe Lincoln would've broken the southern white aristocracy, and maybe Reconstruction would've succeeded. One man could've made the difference and finished the job.
Likewise, it's difficult to imagine any other con man so skilled and beloved (by a certain subset of the population) as Trump, and his singular abilities and predilections have potentially derailed the entire project of American empire - maybe permanently.
Reconstruction ended more than 10 years after Lincoln's assassination, he would not have remained in office forever. I think for most Unionists the war was not about abolition or racial equality and there simply was not the political will to make the changes necessary to prevent Jim Crow in the south.
>Was the Union army complicit in the crimes of the Confederacy by simply allowing them to drop their arms and walk away as well? The world is complicated and full of nuanced takes depending on context.
I think the irony here is you are presenting this like a complicated choice, when I would argue many people agree that the way the Union handled reconstruction was extremely poor.
We are still paying the price for that today, some of us a lot more than others. It was well-intentioned but with hindsight being what it is, historians pretty much agree that it was the cause of a lot of the problems we fight with today.
It’s funny you bring up Union vs Confederacy, because Reconstruction should be a blueprint of what not to do. We’re still paying today for the failures of our forefathers to not have the bravery to stamp out the worst cultural elements of the Confederacy, let alone the extended century-long suffering of formerly enslaved peoples in what ranged from “separate but equal” to outright apartheid.
So yes, it was very much the Union’s fault for not properly cutting the many heads of the hydra with great prejudice.
Edit: the Nuremberg trials are a fantastic blueprint for what to do, though. And that’s what was missing after the Civil War. The sentences handed out at Nuremberg aren’t necessarily relevant to the crimes committed by those in power today, but the cultural shift that materialized in Germany post-war is the type of cultural shift needed to counteract the damage of the current administration: against corruption, grift, and executive overreach.
> the Nuremberg trials are a fantastic blueprint for what to do, though.
Some would argue that the Nuremberg trials did not go nearly far enough, as there should also have been similar trials in all countries that collaborated with that regime during the course of the war.
That's why you see far-right parties nowadays spring up again and start to grain more influence. It could have been stomped out well enough.
I agree, much of the Balkan suffering from the latter half of the 20th century could have been curtailed by properly stamping out ultranationalist groups as a punishment for their ethnic cleansing. The Ustaše, for example.
Yes. That’s a great historical precedent — Reconstruction was a hotly debated topic and the more radical forms would have banned former Confederate soldiers for voting, for example. Many Southern states had military governors imposed by the Federal government.
Andrew Johnson pardoned almost all Confederate leaders, didn’t care about freeing slaves, and is one of the worst Presidents in history.
Doesn't that still feel shortsighted? The way you speak, you cannot even imagine a world without a political landscape that is Republican vs Democrats. I think both parties have shown time and time again that they cannot be trusted steering the country.
Yes, that probably means that the US has to utterly break in its political system before it can get any better, considering that the current election process favours a two-party stalemate (or one party controlling everything)
There’s no tool for them to do it with and I prefer that that remain the case. I would prefer that we take the pardon away from the President and certainly think the pre-emptive pardon is unacceptable but there is no mechanism to pursue the present government.
I’d prefer if the US doesn’t become like my native India where the previous government goes in jail when a new government takes power. Hopefully we just destroy the pardon and call the obvious self-enrichment here an abuse of government that we cannot fix with our devices and go forward.
Even if the rival party were to somehow control all 3 branches of government (which they will not), the voting records show a full 1/3 of American adults outright support this corruption (many of the cops themselves), and another 1/3 are willing to ignore it.
If you are in the 1/3 that does care about it, you are not going to have a good time trying to fight the other 1/3, many of whom make up the “law and order” department.
So the answer to both questions is a resounding no, because the world is more complicated than a comic book superhero movie.
This is such an amazing take because it is a constant in US politics. Like how in the world did you think it appropriate to pivot like this?
The standards for the Democrats are impossible perfection, regardless of the challenges.
The standards for the Republicans is...there are literally zero standards. Thieves, grifters, rapists, pedos, just the absolute worst human garbage imaginable, and somehow Americans convince themselves that if the Democrats don't (usually because they can't) do anything about it, clearly the Dems are the real problem, so it's time to vote Republicans. Just bizarre stuff.
I could give infinite examples where the slightest thing is a massive story about Democrat action or inaction, while every day is a new low in what the shit-pile that the modern Republican party gets away with. Benghazi is still constantly cited by the right, while Trump...Jesus Christ, every day is a thousand times worse. Astonishing levels of corruption and stupidity is just another Tuesday now.
It's amazing. Every framing somehow shifts like this.
Biden was speaking to the people who ended up bankrolling Trump when threatened with slightly increased taxes, and who are going to dump billions into the midterms. When you're in a country that wavers around 50/50 every election (even when the choice is between competent government or a spectacularly incompetent shitshow of grifters, pedos and thieves), yes, there are limits to what you can realistically do in one election cycle.
In any case, it's actually hilarious that rhetoric like this "oh well actually the Dems are to blame because they haven't stopped them yet" is precisely why Republicans are gung ho in fighting against ranked choice ballots. A secret they've learned is to field some fringe bullshit candidates like Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr, Kanye, and so on, and they need the sort of idiots that vote for idiots like that to be throwing away their votes because "it's a uniparty of capital". Ranked choice ballots -- real democracy -- would threaten that.
Trump has repeatedly claimed ranked choice ballots are "corrupt", and House Republicans have repeatedly tried to ban it. Do you want to know why? Protip - it's because they rely on incredibly stupid voters.
Is that why Dems elevated Trump originally from meme-tier gameshow host to serious contender with their pied piper "strategy"? The best they could do is be mad at wikileaks for making them look bad.
Or why they forced a widely unpopular Dem candidate instead of having an actual primary last time around (not that they've shown they can even run a fair primary)?
edit to add:
> Ranked choice ballots -- real democracy -- would threaten that.
This is not the magical fix you think it is, since other countries with >2 parties suffer from the same systemic rot of revolving door politics, monopolistic corporate media, etc.
100%. Clearly you've nailed it, and you should vote for Trump's third term.
Let's be real here - when people do the "both parties are the same", usually citing some chickenshit bullshit like you just did, they're almost always a terrible person who just loves Trump but won't just admit it.
Also, it's a strawman of your creation to say both parties are the same. They're two different facades for the same underlying monetary interests. Sorry you're so easily fooled by that, but it shows that it works.
> Uniparty is a political term referring to the idea that seemingly separate political parties, typically the two dominant parties in a liberal democracy, function in practice as a single entity. It is often applied to the Republican Party and the Democratic Party in the United States, or to the Conservative Party and the Labour Party in the United Kingdom.[1] The concept implies that despite their outward disagreements, the parties collaborate behind closed doors and share a unified set of political and economic interests, effectively creating a de facto one-party state. Proponents of this idea argue that such a "uniparty" suppresses genuine political alternatives and dissenting viewpoints by exercising control over the media, grassroots organisations, and ballot access regulations.[2]
Note that Repubs have a more solid group than Dems in the Senate, because Dems have to win states with more compromising candidates like Sinema/Manchin/Lieberman/Fetterman/etc, whereas the Repub states are solidly Republican.
Just see how Repubs were able to stymie Democrat Supreme Court Justices, and how many they were able to install.
> Thieves, grifters, rapists, pedos, just the absolute worst human garbage imaginable.
I would urge you strongly not to let yourself be this consumed by this kind of thinking. This is a distorted view of your fellow man - however accurate _some_ of it may be about _some_ people - regardless of their political affiliation. This kind of thinking is exactly how we got to where we are now and persisting in it will almost certainly get us more extreme reactions.
that said, the Republican establishment has proven itself unworthy of the office and should be shown the door in the next election cycle - in decimating fashion. So much so that it should cause a complete recalibration of that party.
>This kind of thinking is exactly how we got to where we are now and persisting in it will almost certainly get us more extreme reactions.
It was seeing a black guy, and then possibly a woman, and then possibly a black woman get to the top that got us where we are now. The message is clear, don’t disrupt up our image of the hierarchy, or else we will support the worst of the worst, as long as they maintain the order.
Firstly, the upvote please nonsense betrays that you really don't know HN. I post these comments knowing that they're going to get downvoted, and I'm perfectly fine with that given that I'm not a snowflake. HN abhors political discussions, which is why these sorts of submissions usually get flagged off the front page quickly.
Secondly, if by Republicans you're referring specifically to the Trump abomination that has completely perverted the Republican party into a grifting party of unbelievable stupidity, extraordinary levels of racism, and self-destruction while the country is being looted in the open, yes, that's true. Republicans bad. I mean, it used to be the party of sober competence and steadfast steering, now it's a fucking joke (and one where the only fans left are the really, really bad people). If this offends you, too bad, the observation is utterly true.
The irony is this will harm US manufacturing, not help it. Manufacturing is the sector that most depends on robotics. Companies will now have to sue the administration so they can continue operations without this new regulatory hindrance. I thought this president was supposed to eliminate regulations, not impose newer and stupider ones.
In the 80s Brazil went that same path. They made a law forbidding everyone from importing computers. The idea was to "develop a national computer industry".
They created a monstrosity. The Brazilian made computers were always one generation behind the foreign ones (AT 286 was a "new" thing when every country was going into 386) and would cost 3 times more. Computers smuggled from Paraguay were everywhere, even I smuggled some.
The IT industry in Brazil became a cartel dominated by few companies. They'd pirate everything from the Americans, even DOS and all BIOS and firmware. Their computers' mainboards were ugly, hacked and defect prone. But they would give buckets of money to the military controlling the government and the corrupt politicians in Congress. The 80s became known as the "lost decade" because of the low growth induced by this policy.
I though Brazil still has these weird tariffs on computers and high tech products in general - at least I've heard from some Brazilians that it's still making personal computing hardware far too expensive wioth little to no benefit to this day.
Yeah, they still have high tariffs. But back them it was just illegal to import computers. You'd need to request special authorization from the government to do so, and it would take months to get an authorization. And only a few reasons would be accepted (research, high-performance industrial automation, etc).
I read somebody point out that the cold war roles have reversed. Now the US is protectionist and isolationist, and the likely eventual outcome will be the same for the US as it was for the USSR.
> and the likely eventual outcome will be the same for the US as it was for the USSR.
Split into a bunch of states with only one of them getting the debt burden and the nukes? and they try to invade some other 'ex-US' states a couple decades later?
Oh, Intel is way ahead of the curve there, friend.
See: broken cablemodem chipsets, poor performing cellular modems, multiple generations of desktop ethernet adapters that don't work properly, uncompetitive processors in all but some very specific markets, CPUs that literally fry themselves to death because they couldn't keep up with AMD's advances so the just just kept cranking the voltage and clock speeds...Intel has been a bucket of Fail for a decade and a half.
And now the US government owns a not-too-shabby chunk of said Winning company thanks to a Very Stable Genius...
This is just a false-flag campaign planted by the UAW to ensure the slovenly can keep their jobs another couple years instead of actually be held to task for poor American manufacturing build quality. ;)
Yes, that is covered by Annex A titled "You have to sue". Which is interesting because longstanding law says the US cannot normally be sued. Surely you're not be hyperbolic.
There's no reason it can't. You could do the same thing on streaming as was done back in the radio days. I've been searching for it but haven't really found it yet.
So far the closest thing I found was when Huey Lewis did a radio show on Apple Music. You couldn't call in and there were no contests, but it's a bit of talking from someone likable, separated by a couple of songs they introduce which you also like. That's basically the format of radio, in its most basic form.
I've searched a bit for that type of format on streaming. Sure there's always TuneIn or MyTuner apps which are interesting but those shows are always tailored to a specific faraway city that you don't know much about, or they're in a different language, or they're sports talk related which I'm not interested in.
I'm specifically looking for music I like and a likeable person talking and introducing songs, just like the clips you have on your web site. I just don't understand how that can be so expensive that big tech companies with deep pockets like Apple Music don't want to produce it. What's up with that?
The thing I did not expect is when watching a Youtube video, I cannot tell if the voice narration is an AI-generated voice, but I know for a fact if the entire script was written by AI.
> 5. Surveillance can only be defeated by building software and hardware to defend ourselves.
Here's where it went off the rails. Once you've abandoned the idea of democracy and peaceful self-governance, you're just another technofascist. You are Palantir, just in an earlier stage.
I don't think you have to abandon the idea of democracy and peaceful self-governance to build software good for defending common values. Why do you think this?
Sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. Believes that there are, at times, technical solutions to both technical and non-technical problems does not make someone a "technofascist."
People no longer believe in the possibility of reforming institutions or good governance. Most people believe all politicians -- all of them -- are con men, liars, degenerates, or incompetents, and that nothing good can be achieved through political means.
I think it's a sign that we're further down the decay slope than we think.
I would say that all forms of incipient fascism and totalitarianism can really only be stopped by a motivated populace willing to step away from feelings of safety, from their endless entertainment, and embrace a bit of risk and stand up physically to their governments an yell at the top of their lungs: NO!
Sitting in your cozy home coding and thinking you are making a difference is bullshit. We are physical beings who ultimately fear physical violence from those who would oppress us. The response must be physical. Stand up, protest, make noise.
But I also got the feeling when reading this article that this guy loves motte-and-bailey. People don't intentionally set out to do motte-and-bailey arguments, but they often do it by accident. When people realize that they're arguing the losing side but can't admit it, they subtly shift their argument, and shift, and shift again until they're out of the bailey and inside the unassailable motte. Now they're the "winner" of the argument and can maintain their 100% argument success rate. Nice, and since nobody's recording the conversation, nobody can prove that they changed their argument in order to get on the winning side.
Motte-and-bailey is a common strategy for people who think they've won every argument they've ever been in. Nobody is so logically perfect that they actually win every argument without resorting to some kind of fallacy. I can't prove it. I just speak from experience. When I first learned about motte-and-bailey, I realized I had used it myself without realizing it. It's a natural tendency because it's so easy to do without really thinking.
Once we've learned all the fallacies and recognize them in ourselves, we finally realize that arguing is stupid and stop doing it so much. :)
It's already a massive grid of moving dots. You can see it from the ground in certain dark-enough areas, but in order to see it in space you have to get outside LEO, like Artemis did. They don't have lights but they are shiny and they catch the sun, making them easily visible from certain angles, which the Artemis photos illustrated.
If you continue in this industry of software creation in a corporate setting, and you put your name into the source code, eventually you will become known for products/features that you never expected to become known for. And the things you had actually worked the hardest on and hoped to become known for will be lost and forgotten to time.
The process of creating things is completely within your control but the process of becoming known for a thing is completely beyond your control.
I have often felt that software should have a "Credits screen", like movies and video games do. For developers, QA staff, support staff, etc. I opened a bug to create one for our end-user facing software at my last job, but we never actually did it.
Excel 97 had an easier egg where if you entered a certain formula into a certain cell, a flight simulator would be invoked. In the flight simulator, you could fly to see an obelisk that listed the developer credits.
