Reuters isn't owned by the US Govt, but AFP is a public body (although with a pretense of independence) built in the office of the former OFI in 1944, which was Vichy's propaganda ministry.

How do you call a country where public press is so much owned or subsidized by the govt that other press can't survive, where press has guidelines of things to say, where voting happens without the ability for voters to check their vote was counted (witnesses were removed from witnessing the vote counting in France, when it's not total electronic), where they import voters to sway elections, and where the FISC publishes lists of people with a house and account numbers and amoints so hostage takers can target the right house and ask the right thing? Where police or train conductors take no action against fraudsters unless they are white, preferrably grandmas? SNCF has always been the most participant to exactions, they're breaking no tradition here.

What's holding me in Europe is clearly not democracy. Candidate for US or AU visa here, I'm rich but AU has closed the wealth-based visa.

Fucking immigrants stealing our … corruption?

Is that amusing, or is it cherry-picking to create an imagined hypocrite that is easier to attack? You should decline the temptation to be smug (in general, but especially regarding people who haven't actually done anything hypocritical).

The administration is the thing to criticize here: Not all individual people who agree with some arbitrary other thing the administration did or said.

You should assign rationality to individuals, rather than assigning irrationality to groups, especially on HN. If you can't resist, I would earnestly ask you to vent in this way outside of HN, on the rest of the internet.

Dell was born in Houston.

He's a fascist, so obviously he might be good at enginerreing electrical meat grinder opression vehicles or cost cutting departments using AI.

> Clearly people's principles are contingent on the car sale discounts.

Okay, I'll bite. Do you routinely make your purchase decisions solely on a single factor? Especially big ones, probably second only in size to your home?

It is possible to loathe Elmo but also conclude that given all the various factors driving your decision making, a Tesla ends up being the best fit.

Sold mine after running it a few months covered with stickers saying what I thought of him. Drive another EV now and will not go back. No discount on the car. Stop generalizing.

Gosh darn goombas.

Hard to understand why anyone would buy a car from a company that has very publicly lost interest in making cars.

People at the time thought it would prevent war but it was irrelevant (neither hurt nor helped)

It's a loyalty test. And he's given his supporters permission to classify anyone who doesn't follow along as 'the enemy' aka 'the other'. It's a shortcut so his supporters know they don't have to give any credence to anything else they say, since now they assign all the other labels and insults he's hurled at 'his enemies' to the person they are talking to.

He doesn't really think, he reacts. And his every reaction is centered around "How can I make this about me?"

Terminology should not be underestimated, propaganda is a lot about terminology, and whoever designed this renaming campaign knows what he's doing. The politics behind this SI push is pretty transparent to those who really care about these issues.

It’s a dog whistle. Plenty of political zealots coin their own idiosyncratic terms to affirm loyalty.

Can someone PLEASE convince him to hold back the tides at beach somewhere?

i feel like it’s something Elon probably said and he ran with it

That would be a very original way if this is what finally pops the bubble. :)

Kind of annoying for all the people with .ai tlds

It's literally just a blatant favour to Mark Zuckerberg in exchange for ??????

Here, let me prove it: Meta is the only one that has used that term in the past, going back to the announcement that they were founding "Meta Superintelligence Labs" (end of June last year). Zuckerberg reinforced their plans to use that term back in August when that essay of his that was the talk of the town for like a few days, which used the term "superintelligence" 50+ times. Then, just this week, we found out about Meta's ICANN bid to own .superintelligence TLD. The deadline for those submissions was August 12th. Trump signed the EO on Sept 29th, and now Zuckerberg effectively "owns" that term.

Of course, if it ever caught on, I'm pretty sure Slovenia would benefit more from it (by owning .si).

Yes. Trump is not a rational actor, it is textbook narcissism, not as a critique of his personality but I think he meets the criteria for clinical diagnosis.

If you don't listen to him then it results in narcissistic injury and he will retaliate.

It's a loyalty test. He has done this repeatedly. Just like the hilariously dumb Lake America nonsense, where he stomped on 400 years of American history to think he's somehow punishing Canada -- only to us it was just incredibly pathetic, and yet another example why we need to move on from the fallen husk idiocracy the US has become -- and then celebrated that it was "ratified" because Apple and Google foolishly changed according to the government GIS changes.

Trump is an insanely stupid person. Like, this is beyond doubt at this point. But he is so utterly shameless and unaware of his own endless limitations that it somehow breaks the brains of tens of millions of Americans. It's astonishing.

He does not think, he simply has no filter and that appeals to the working class people who feel like they have been shunned by elitist democrats and their woke fluff (while maintaining the status quo on anything that actually matters). He would have not stood a chance against someone like Bernie Sanders, who cares deeply about working class people without the fluff.

They’re welcome to tune out reality all they want. The damage is done. It’s too late. Convincing people of that is a waste of time.

I replied to someone asking why multinational corporations aren't pushing back. Many US corporations make most of their revenue outside the US, and you would think these corporations would be more outspoken about the very dark, insular, war-criming path the US has gone down.

My comment directly addressed that. These aren't like incidental character comments, they directly address why the US is so completely broken right now. And this is damage that is permanent. This isn't just another lark that the US will recover from. The days of the US being the centre of the "free world", of commerce, and so on, is obliterated. Inertia is a hell of a thing and it might keep the illusion of maintenance going for a while, but the path is set now and there will be no recovery.

And when this disastrous government is ousted, successive governments are going to be so catastrophically crippled in every dimension that they'll look like failures, which surely will see the enlightened American public vote for the next foolish charlatan, rinse and repeat. I see no way out of this cycle now, and there's no way I can candy coat it.

That wouldn't let his cronies make a lot of money: https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/trump-super-int...

Surprised it did not choose "Super America".

I can't honestly even look at this.

SI (Stupid Idiocracy) has more punch.

But then the acronym is still “AI.” Now, whether Trump realized that in advance, is unknown.

How can we even be mentioning that.

What happens is (also) the typical: we work at some level (rational), abscesses work at another level (ventral). The two worlds do not meet.

I get the (somehow understandable) reasons for trying to "boost the spirits" towards RnD in face of campaigns against it (cpr. bernie sander's proposal "20 years of prison to those trying to implement intelligence"), but of course ventral discourse should not be acceptable to people given a right to vote - vote should be for adults.

The idiocy will continue until it hurts enough, then people might not change but they might make different choices. Until then, we can only hope we fall far enough to learn the lesson, but not break our legs

> more than they hate

It cannot be a choice.

By the way, speaking of "awakening" by people that intend to substantially refer to asses is blasphemy.

Americans never cared about any of these things. A shameless demagogue like Trump would have been elected long ago if the establishment in either party had allowed it. The current situation is the result of the demise of the much-maligned gatekeepers in politics and media who managed to save America from itself until now.

> … more than they hate "woke".

Or develop the cognitive powers to discern cause and effect.

I agree about that but I responded to a comment about US corporations reacting at all

I dont see why they should react

You are commenting about something else

Hyperbolic much? The current regime is untrustworthy. And they are pretty adept at dominating the headlines.

> Russia doesn't, Iraq doesn't

?? Not sure. Can you provide examples of condemning for war crimes those and other regimes in the current times? I may be wrong, but I am getting the vibe of "free for all until somebody bigger shouts that's enough" - more clearly, I am not seeing ethical stances defended.

--

Edit: thanks Newjazz for the reply. Did not notice, I thought they just decided "free for all". Yes, that makes it more appalling - shameless.

The 'international rules-based order' was established by the US at the end of WWII as the legal framework for rebuilding Europe after the war.

Honest question, what makes you think the US, China, or Russia need to abide by legal agreements made 80 years ago by people who aren't around anymore? Those three countries have since agreed amongst themselves that the 'international rules-based order' was a mistake, and nobody else has a big enough stick to do anything about it.

I'm not sure if I buy that argument. I understand what they mean, but the US has sovereignty over what happens within its borders. The ICC isn't entering the US and arresting anyone.

By your logic, every other country "impinges on US sovereignty" because they can arrest US citizens within their own borders.

and in what sense is it doing that at all? unlike the US, the signatories arent parachuting into other sovereign countries to effect their laws. they are enforcing their laws within their own borders.

for some reason that's offended the US, who then proceeds to extra-judiciously impose their will on citizens of other sovereign nations who aren't even in the US.

so who is coloring outside the lines here?

Not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, but the US govt has no power outside its territory. If some US citizen commits a crime abroad, he/she can be prosecuted outside the US. This does not interfere with US sovereignty.

Or strikes on Iranian schools killing hundreds of kids, later blamed on AI.

> effectively

of course it would not have this effect

on paper: yes

but do you think for example germany would really arrest the american president?

or even arrest trump after his term?

I don't think any Rome signatory attempting to arrest a former US head of state would go well for them. And I don't think they would try.

[flagged]

If the media you’re consuming paints Trump in a worse light than Putin and Jianping, you really need to rethink the sources you’re reading. The Western media is ridiculously partisan and polarised.

China - authoritarian communist dictatorship, killing its own protesting students, concentration camps imprisoning 1M+ Muslims, forced sterilisation, forced labour, organised re-education of its own population, every company an arm of the intelligence agencies (by law), social credit system, biological weapons production (Wuhan), institutionalised IP theft from other countries

https://www.ushmm.org/genocide-prevention/countries/china/ch...

Russia - the most corrupt major dictatorship in Europe, military invasions of its peaceful neighbours, hybrid warfare against European countries, nerve agent assassination of political rivals both within and outside Russia. Indiscriminate killing of civilians in Ukraine with no remorse.

US - a constitutional democracy that has alternated leadership in the last decade in the same familiar way it always has. Attacked Iranian regime assets because Iran threatened it with nuclear weapons and fired hundreds of ballistic missiles at US ally Israel (a pluralist democracy that should be defended IMO). Widespread support for the US intervention from ordinary Iranians who has been oppressed by their Islamist dictator for decades; Removed a ruthless dictator in Venezuela due to massive human rights abuses and state narco trafficking, widespread US support from ordinary Venezuelans who have been oppressed by their dictator.

Nobody is. Russia is repeatedly violating them despite being signers of the treaty, and nobody does anything.

I don't like it, but I'm not signing up to do anything about it, and I'm not going to sign my kids up for it either.

All signatories to the Geneva Conventions are responsible for enforcing it. The USA never ratified the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and thus has no responsibility to enforce it.

> Or are we finally admitting that the only "international law" we officially recognize is Might Makes Right?

People like Trump and Hegseth have been saying that very explicitly in at least the past couple years

It has always been might makes right, are you under the impression it wasn’t that way at some point? I’m not endorsing the actions of the current administration, simply stating how global geopolitics works. There’s no such thing as a supranational organization that can force a nuclear power to do anything of consequence.

The only people that get prosecuted by the ICC are people that lose wars (no winner has ever been prosecuted) and are also from nations that do not have nuclear weapons / nuclear protection.

I mean... just about every 'enforcement' of international norms has been by american hard and soft power. Might has always made right, it's just that the guy with the biggest gun happened to have western liberal values.

Seems like that changed a little in the last decade. Hopefully it's not forever, but who knows.

"Finally admitting"

Google League of Nations

We're repeating old social tropes the 50+ year old leadership lived through.

It's sad and pathetic. The youth reliance on old leadership and putting that on them is elder abuse. McConnell and Feinstein handlers should be prosecuted for such.

This is 100% on lazy, low-skilled, younger American public that doesn't need Depends expecting better from the generation glazing over live on TV and vanishing from office only to be found months later in an institution

The censored for TV era propped such olds up on screen for decades and refused to challenge their speculations and bullshit; everyone actually believes the elders are cogent and capable but they never were. Just puppets of a bygone era of televised circuses beamed to the Wonder Bread eating masses

> Which is why the ICC was established by several countries as part of an international agreement. It's literally other countries collaborating to punish bad actor countries.

What would you think of an agreement by ten guys that they'll work together to beat you up if they decide you're a "bad actor"? Is it somehow solemn and respectable merely because they came to an agreement? Even if you don't agree their self-declaration should give them power over you?

I think the way you've presented things is misleading. International relations is literally anarchy, and different groups have different points of view. Mere collaboration is only that.

Bad actor _people_. The court tries people.

USA sovereignty is not at issue, it's who now holds it as your democracy has failed, and will a future sovereign demos choose to apply this moral law to those within it's sovereign estate.

But it's largely the court of center-left European thinking. It's a political tool without teeth, and since none of US, China, Russia are signatories, it can only prosecute people without a great power sponsor.

How’s that going ?

That link doesn't make that argument, and I wouldn't find Marco Rubio convincing at steelmanning that point even if he tried.

Yes, the world's leading experts on what constitutes genocide have agreed with the use. Please google it before saying things behind a new account.

Words have meaning. Gaza qualifies. So does Ukraine.

The Nazis actually supported the Zionists, so this would have been the likely outcome regardless of who won the war unfortunately: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haavara_Agreement

It makes sense if you think about them wanting to ethnically cleanse Jewish people out of Germany.

There is zero mechanism by which the ICC can indict Trump. Its jurisdiction is only over signature countries and their territories; the US is not a signatory country.

Hasn't Israel repealed its signature at some point?

there are a few weird nerds who want that; but _most_ of America's ultra-rich aren't part of the network state bitcoin whatever nonsense, and would be better served by helping America thrive.

In no small part because oligarchs have spent the last 40 years shaping public perception, allowing increased concentration of media, etc.

A lot of labels are used in your observation. The problem is you only assigned them to one person and not the other subjects.

Turnout was 63.7% of eligible voters (lower than 2020, and even 100% would exclude certain felons, underage folks, mentally incapable folks, minors). And from that subgroup of a subgroup "only" 49.9% of voters selected Trump.

Still a crazy number, but not "half of the people of a country".

Nothing incongruent there. The campaign funds can of course be used on wedge issues that don't actually relate to Israel. Changing public perception towards scenes of destroyed homes and dead children is much more difficult.

> But the opposition had NOTHING to do with Trump being chosen for POTUS. The Right had a perfectly decent choice […]

So did the Democrats. They clung to the worst possible choice, and in the last minute replaced him with the second-worst possible choice. Absolving them of fault and putting 100% of the blame on Trump voters is the fantasy of the Left.

Kamala was pretty bad. I think she had the left most voting record in the senate when they needed a centralist?

Always someone else's fault.

The people most responsible for getting their candidate elected is the campaign team. If the plan is just for your opponents to do a bad job, you don't deserve to win.

> If half the voting population elects a vicious moron completely unsuitable for power, that's not the fault of the opposition.

Don't let the opposition off the hook: as you said they lost to "a vicious moron completely unsuitable for power." How does someone fuck up an election like that so badly? It should have been a slam dunk.

It's the fault of the opposition for not doing a better job (at all manner of political competencies). One thing I've noticed over the last ten or so years, is that Democrats/Liberals/Progressives are very averse to admitting to and learning from their own mistakes. They'd much rather focus on blaming someone else for their own incompetence.

There have been people that claimed they would have voted for the worst rulers registered in history before the dems; and at the same time John Bolton recurretly used the phrase "a cardboard cutout would be better than".

The question on whether they perceived (actually, whether they can perceive) what others like e.g. Bolton see is valid - nonetheless, you have to face that they explicitly, vocally refused to vote for the dems, "whatever it takes".

And the system in the USA is very broken - among the issues, there are only two options in the choice, with all the paradoxes it brings.

The alternative was a woman who spent over a year committing genocide, while also covering up the fact that the President had severe dementia

> That's like blaming a rape victim for being bad at fighting off her rapist.

WTF? The Democrats lost some important elections to a fool, that's nothing like getting raped.

> If you want the answer, look at Republicans. They nominated him twice, and the second time around the Republican base ignored all of the moral issues they knew about and voted for him anyway because they wanted the chaos and anger.

I'm not saying there are no problems with Republicans, but that the bigger, more important, and more tractable issue is that the Democrats could lose to someone like that, twice.

Complain about how bad Trump is all you want, but if you lose to him, it's pretty clear you are in some important sense worse than him. Focus on fixing that, because bitching about the other side is going to do no good.

Next thing is probably setting up a guillotine in front of the White Hose or the planned Arc de Trump.

"Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America."

Only the FIFA Peace Prize.

It takes some doing to behave even more despicably than Saudi Arabia (which stopped public executions in 2022).

You underestimate how powerless the American citizen feels.

> In Serbia, people protested for two years straight, giant protests, marches all over the country, until the government resigned and new elections were called.

We already reelect the entire Congress every two years, we don't have to do this.

Moreover, we also have set record protests in recent years larger than the ones you cite. Hands Off protest was a million+. No Kings I, II, and III (we protest so much we've started just numbering them) was like 20 million people across those protests.

Furthermore, we did do something about it and we got rid of all these people once already. The problem is about half the country wants this to happen, so they were invited back to do more.

Also genuine question, did the Serbian government execute anyone in the street and label them a terrorist, as the American government did last winter to multiple Americans who were protesting?

surprised by this.. the amount of steam rollering, wrecking balling, and pocket-lining is sad and shocking to me.

except for all the reposts on social media one cannot avoid?

sure, the why is to explain how it's happening and how to combat it - funding education, modernizing our systems, getting rid of unnecessary middlemen

a flat description is just an accusation that you can do nothing with except feel a kind of anti-social catharsis that doesn't net any progress in the other direction

As far as I can tell this is factually true. Do people care to refute rather downvote shooting the messenger?

Some US states seem to spend more per pupil than excellent independent ("private") schools in the UK. That is a lot of money.

I said nothing about non-voters. I voted. NOT for Trump and not for Spiderman or some fantastical shit. My point was, of those who voted, near 50% of us DID NOT VOTE for Trump. We, have been for a decade, fighting this monstrous trash fire.

AGREED - as a US citizen.

Also, anyone who voted 3rd-party, because that is literally refusing to keep him out of office.

those two thirds living in the wrong states for it to matter, wouldn’t have voted the way you wanted and would have resulted in the same distribution of votes we already have?

prefrontal cortex moment

No, no... among people who voted, less than 50% of votes were for Trump (49.81%). Harris got 48.34%. I think this is what GP is referring to.

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/elections/2024

Not caring about the outcome is not the same as wanting the outcome that ends up happening.

no you just didn't vote

2/3 of German voters(!) were not for Adolf Hitler[1]. Doesn't change the fact they got 1/3 of their country removed for that choice.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1933_German_federal_elec...

The US' problems won't end when Trump leaves office, and things wouldn't have been much different if he'd not been elected the second time: the wars and calamity have been on the table for a long time.

Nobody cares about Americans having prosperity and happiness when their nation has been dropping bombs on innocent human beings every 15 minutes on average, for the past 26 years.