I am actually not sure that either the 'war on drugs' or a 'war on crypto' is a bad idea, but they do seem analogous.
He made a lot of money from the other criminal activity. That's what money laundering is: just because you're not directly trafficking children, for example, doesn't mean you have clean hands when you make significant profits from the people who are.
Crypto's problem is that when the law is updated to deal with these stunts, it's suddenly just a crappy version of the existing financial system.
It is both a reason not to buy drugs now (you're sponsoring all that other stuff) and a reason it's a ridiculous and immoral policy.
It is also on no way comparable to crypto.
The BSA is not a technicality and trying to reframe it as one is wild. It is to make sure that people that have a financial incentive to turn a blind eye to money laundering don't turn a blind eye to it. You don't need to be directly involved in the money laundering to be incentivized to let it happen.
It's certainly in a different category than speeding or jaywalking, but it's a lot closer to that than to the 150 years that Bernie Madoff got.
That also happened to a lot of big banks over and over again.
Three days ago one of the biggest was found guilty for helping Sudan’s government commit genocide by providing banking services that violated American sanctions [0]. Sounds worst.
Binance is a casino for millennial and gen Z and like casinos is used by criminal to launder money.
Should Changpeng Zhao be pardoned? I don't know, I don't care he is a small fish.
Should BNP CEO serves prison time? probably.
- [0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bnp-paribas-shares-fall-us-17...
The use of whataboutism and the ‘calling out’ of whataboutisms are both mechanisms of narrative control.
Like the intolerance of intolerance there is discretion over what are acceptable intolerances. With whataboutism there is discretion over what are acceptable appeals to hypocrisy.
Whatsboutism is merely saying your appeal to hypocrisy is invalid. Which would hold more weight with me if the side saying it never made appeals to hypocrisy of their own. Otherwise they’re being hypocritical about making appeals to hypocrisy.
On the substance, I hate what Trump has done. I would not take the position that what Trump did is ok because of what Biden did.
The underlying failure of all of them, and why they are fallacies, is because the guilt of one side of an issue has nothing to do with the hypocrisy of the other. Thus, trying to pivot from the former to the latter is a distraction, rather than a genuine attempt to discuss the topic (which is the former).
> Which would hold more weight with me if the side saying it never made appeals to hypocrisy of their own.
"The side"? Dude, I'm a person, not a side, and you barely know anything about me, much less what I've done and do. The accusations of whataboutism weren't made by nebulous, ethereal concepts, they were made by people.
You can't pick and choose different behaviors of different people and lump them together as if they are the same person, then claim that the differing behaviors indicate some sort of hypocrisy or other conflict. What you're describing is diversity of thought among different people.
Even if you could, it's not even a good discussion, because then others could respond that your meta-criticism is itself hypocritical in the same way that you're responding to criticism by claiming that it is hypocritical. So you keep adding layers until the actual topic (the original criticism) is long forgotten. In fact, that is why whataboutism is used: its users don't want to focus on the original criticism.
My personal preference would be logical and factual discussions only but I accept that’s not the world we live in.
The deleterious effect of the additional layers is ameliorated by the nesting of information on HN, you don’t have to keep digging if you don’t want to.
Yes, whataboutism is both a rhetological fallacy and a form of "narrative control".
> A charge I made of both appeals to hypocrisy and appeals to whataboutism.
"Appeal to whataboutism" isn't a thing. It's just called "whataboutism", and since whataboutism and "appeal to hypocrisy" (seems synonymous with whataboutism) are both fallacies, pointing them out is just called "pointing out fallacies". Fallacies don't need any 'appeals' or arguments made against them, because they are already fallacious, that's why we call them fallacies.
And yes, pointing out fallacious arguments could be called "narrative control", too ;) So could be saying anything! After all, anyone saying anything is trying to "control the narrative" to include that thing. What a silly, needlessly conspiratorial neologism for a uselessly vague concept!
The introduction of whataboutism into the lexicon was to counter Russian appeals to hypocrisy. This was linked to Trump in an effort to discredit both. Those of us who have long memories do remember a time when pointing out the hypocrisy of the West was considered a valid thing to do. See the work of Noam Chomsky as an example.
But, it will likely be pointed out that their fallacious arguments are fallacious, and at that point, they can choose to make valid arguments, or to continue their string of failures by unconvincingly making more fallacious ones.
> The introduction of whataboutism into the lexicon was to counter Russian appeals to hypocrisy
Cool! "Appeal to hypocrisy", or Tu Quoque, is a fallacy and any arguments invoking it are accordingly fallacious. Coining another synonym ("whataboutism") doesn't change things. Those making fallacious arguments can try to make valid arguments (if there are any) for their case next time.
> Those of us who have long memories do remember a time when pointing out the hypocrisy of the West was considered a valid thing to do
I've got a long memory, too, and the Tu Quoque fallacy was never a valid defense, no matter what you called it. That's what makes it a fallacy.
Friends of ”I thought there would be no fact checking ”
Saying "so and so did it too and nothing happened" may be correct, but doesn't address the topic. If you're saying that, how does it apply to the topic (the Binance founder)?
Are you saying that you're ok with the other people getting away with it, and thus you're ok with this guy also getting away with it via this purchased pardon?
Or are you saying those other people should have been punished, and thus this pardon was wrong to sell?
I hate the whole fallacy callout stuff in general. God didn’t create them, half barely work, none work in every situation, and they’re just abused to death by people to shut down conversation in a shallow way.
In that scenario, are you saying that you're ok with the other people getting away with it, and thus you're ok with this guy also getting away with it via this purchased pardon?
Or are you saying those other people should have been punished, and thus this pardon was wrong to sell?
Without tying it back to the topic like that, the reply is only tangentially related, like replying "I go to a bank" to any topic that mentions or involves banks. Like, ok, great, at least it's not insulting posters, but not super constructive in discussing the topic (the Binance founder's crimes and pardon).
Regardless of what you think of the circumstances of the pardon, the prosecution was not related to fraud and was an unusual case by a DOJ that was recently embarrassed by FTX and was arguably symbolic in intent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMEJTORMVN4
(this video has a nice timeline of the related events, including the GPU for crypto "deal")
Did he already pay the $4.3 billion? That's a lot of money, even for the federal government.
The status of each isn’t something I can readily find.
Puts an even grosser spin on this incineration of the rule of law.
Penalties within plea deals likely have different rules but given a pardon is a higher rung of absolution I am horrified to wonder if he could clawback any personal financial penalties he has paid or even seek compensation.
Years ago people would have thought you were talking about the DRC, Haiti or Uzbekistan. Today's it's the USA.
Political corruption was not invented by Trump. We know. But that's really not the point at all.
That is not even close to true. What other Presidents were "just as corrupt" and how?
Is that so? Please list the ways in which former presidents have violated the Emolument clause, profited directly from their office (i.e., issuing their own cryptocoin), and increased their family's net worth by billions while in office.
Either put up the facts, or stop with the "whataboutism" nonsense.
What actions that have been taken could actually be prosecuted? For example, I would have to assume that the ballroom demolition and build-out is illegal, there were $0 appropriated from Congress for this, and it doesn't seem like direct donations would be legal either. They are donations to the government and Congress has to appropriate that money too.
NOTHING is going to happen while the Republicans control congress, period. What could be done when the next administration comes in? Not just about the ballroom, but the various other things like this pardon. What of these actions are prosecutable?
"Well, when the president does it ... that means that it is not illegal" -- SCOTUS (2024)
That leaves impeachment as the only legal remedy, which you've correctly identified as not a possibility with the current congress.
Many are. This one is not. The President has sweeping pardon powers.
The solution is to strike the final phrase in Article 2, Section 2, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution: “and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” [1].
There isn’t a place for one-man pardons in a republic. If the courts overreach, address it through legislation. (Even the imperium-obsessed Romans didn’t give their dictators, much less consuls, automatic pardon power. Caesar had to get special legislation to overrule the law.)
With Presidents of both parties having so recently abused pardons, we may be in a place where a wave could pass a Constitutional amendment at the federal level, allowing it to be punted to the states.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Two_of_the_United_Stat...
We need a way to vote for popular ideas via referendum at the federal level. That might get it through.
“The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution” [1].
No President. No courts. Partisanship may work to our advantage in a divided government. What you would need, however, to reach two thirds is some members of the President’s party signing on. That could happen if the President is taking a dump in the polls, and the opposition looks likely (but isn’t yet assured) to gain the Presidency next term.
> We need a way to vote for popular ideas via referendum at the federal level
We need a plebiscite institution. But that can be done at state level for Constitutonal amendment approval. What we don’t want is direct democracy proposing amendments. California is a modern example of why republics are more stable than pure democracies, for anyone who forgot about Athens.
speak for yourself. the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as evidenced by the current political climate in the US.
We're not a direct democracy. You can't find proof of a pudding in a taco bowl.
Direct democracies fail in self-reinforcing factionalism. "When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government...enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens." This has consistently happened across history, even in small direct democracies, it's one of the essential takeaways from the Athenian experiment [1].
California is one state among 50. People using it as an example of some sort of government being bad are objectively in bad faith.
Please inform me how my state's citizen referendums are bad? We are about to have a vote on voter ID laws, which I do not approve of, but what's important is that the people who care are able to have their will made manifest, and it will actually go up for a vote.
Meanwhile nordic countries have vastly more direct democracies and don't have the problems you insist.
If you cannot make your argument without california, you do not have an argument, because california's shitty government predates democrat control, because it was always built as this crazy world where rich and connected people had control. California's government is built wrong, not because of democracy, but against it.
Straw man. Nobody claimed this.
> nordic countries have vastly more direct democracies and don't have the problems you insist
What are you referring to? “Finland has traditionally relied on the representative form of government, with very limited experience of the deployment of the referendum in national decision-making” [1]. And while Sweden and Norway have referenda, neither has binding referenda on demand or even a requirement for referendum to amend the constitution [2].
> if you cannot make your argument without california, you do not have an argument
California features the largest and most powerful direct-democratic institution, its referenda, in America. It’s going to come up when we discuss direct democracy.
That said, I have no idea how you reach my comment and conclude that California is not only the only argument I make against direct democracy, but even essential to it.
> california's shitty government predates democrat control
Are you mixing up direct democracy and rule by Democrats, the party?
[1] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-24796-7_...
I think the opposite. That is exactly what we need. A lot of the problem we have come from the fact that the constitution speaks almost entirely in terms of what various government bodies do and provides no way for the people to directly override government actions they disagree with. This has led us to our current situation which is based on politicians exploiting loopholes (e.g., gerrymandering, stacking various judicial/administrative posts, manipulating voting laws, etc.) in order to preserve their position against potential electoral response.
In some cases these problems have been overcome or mitigated at the state level. . . via ballot measures. In California, for instance.
> California is a modern example of why republics are more stable than pure democracies, for anyone who forgot about Athens.
I'm not sure what you mean by this, but from where I'm standing California looks a lot more sane and stable than the US as a whole.
This is total crap. Tale of Two Cities is set against the backdrop of Britain’s reforms, in contrast to the French Revolution. America has peacefully seen through Teddy Roosevelt’s trust busting, FDR’s New Deal and the Civil Rights Era, each peaceful restructurings of how our government works.
Revolutions transfer and consolidate power. Reforms broaden them. Those who miss this lesson of history and fall for glorified fictions of peasants’ revolts earn a consistent fate across millennia of human history.
Side note: strongly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6E4_Bcmscg&t=14s
Gerrymandering is only relevant for congressional house elections, it can't protect the senate and doesn't influence the presidency. Usually one party will take control of all three branches in a huge swing in power, the house is the just the first to flip usually because it is re-elected every 2 years.
Constitutional Convention is the abort button. It means giving a group of people basically limitless power to amend our Constitution, which in practice, means to do anything to the law. If we called one today, with most states in Republican hands [1], we’d be essentially handing complete control of our government—over and above the Constitution—to the GOP.
[1] https://www.ncsl.org/about-state-legislatures/state-partisan...
No, it doesn’t.
It gives a group of people basically limitless power to propose Amendments to the Constitution.
Any Amendments so proposed still require 3/4 of states to ratify them, either by votes of their legislature or by ratification conventions called in the states (at the option of Congress when calling the Convention at the request of states.)
Unless by "group of people" you mean not just the people in the national convention, but the people in the state legislatures or conventions, as well. But, at that point, you might as well say that by including an amendment process, the Constitution itself “gives a group of people basically limitless power to amend our Constitution”.
Sorry, I actually missed this. Thank you for clarifying. (I mixed it up with the New York State process, where the Convention's proposals go straight to popular ratification.)
I understand it's debatably possible to prosecute the public corruption that motivated a pardon, even though the pardon act itself is unreviewable. I.e., the DoJ attempted a criminal bribery investigation of Bill Clinton's pardon of the donor Marc Rich,
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/15/us/us-is-beginning-crimin... ("U.S. is beginning criminal inquiry in pardon of Rich" (2001))
> "Some lawyers have said that proving such a case could be exceedingly difficult because bribery cases usually required the cooperation of one of the parties. Moreover, contributions to political parties or to Mr. Clinton's library foundation are legal, and the president's pardon authority is unreviewable."
I assume similar logic might apply to World Liberty Financial and Trump's CZ pardon.
The pardon system in particular really pisses me off. The argument that one rando at the top of the pyramid somehow magically knows better than the entire judicial system is such a load of horsecrap. For any injustice that the pardon system might be able to correct, it can and does just as easily introduce more injustices.
Maybe it's funded by the $230M he's demanding from the Department of Justice?
The best opportunity for a major restructuring of the legal environment would bea Constitutional Convention, but because Republicans have pursued this as a strategic goal for a while, Democrats invested all their relevant energies in being against it rather than developing any kind of strategy of their own, guaranteeing that they would get rolled if one actually took place because they went in with wholly defensive mindset and no plan to win. The fundamental flaw of the modern Democratic party is that it sees itself as a vehicle for competent management of the status quo, not a force for implementation of its voters' political aspirations. Thus is pays lip service of what its supporters want but operates to dampen and delay those same supporters whenever it gets into office in the name of continuity and responsibility. It operates on a combination of political rent seeking and fundamental conflict aversion.
This is why I find myself increasingly impatient with self-styled moderates. Wanting to talk things out and compromise is good, but it only works when there is mutuality between counterparties. When the political opposition is indifferent to questions of truthfulness or corruption, moderation degrades into appeasement; moderates will sell out their own supporters in the name of peace and quiet, while giving away the strategic initiative over and over. The previous Trump administration engineered a mob overrunning Congress in an attempt to stay in power, and only failed because the Vice President declined to aid the scheme; a mistake the current one surely doesn't intend to repeat. The incoming administration spent a great deal of energy prosecuting every footsoldier they could find who set foot inside the Capitol, but shied away from going after the people who actually organized it. The results speak for themselves.
For anyone interested, for the past 30 years, Republicans dominated for 22 years in total, while Democrats only 8.
So my guess is that whatever Trump is doing now, he'll later argue was done as a president.
Second, should be convicted of anything, the best shot is if it's a state law violation. I'm going to bet everything I own that Trump will either pardon himself, all his cronies, and/or when the time comes, step down and have Vance pardon him. So with that all federal crimes become pardoned.
The supreme court has been very frank about this: The only, and I do mean the only mechanism is a successful impeachment. And even if Trump by some miracle is successfully impeached, we have no way of knowing how that will play out. The current supreme court majority are seemingly true believers of the unitary executive theory, so I'm guessing that with time - we'll just see Trump get more and more unchecked power. And since it's going to be done via the shadow docket, it'll likely be valid for Trump only.
I think for all intents and purposes - and I don't mean to sound defeatist when I'm saying this - people should just accept the fact that Trump will be untouchable for the rest of his life.
We need a reset.
I’m curious if any of the involved personell will ever be tried for that.
The President must first be impeached by both parts of Congress. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_in_the_United_Stat...
The Senate runs a trial for the "high crimes" with the supreme court justice presiding. They can sentence a sitting president IIRC (or just remove him from office in which the DOJ can then prosecute normally).
- Trump’s most recent financial disclosure report reveals he made more than $57 million last year from World Liberty Financial
It's a vehicle to sell "access". The greed is only half of it.
The worst part is that they're selling access to foreign interests who pay them off. These people can't exactly show up with bags of gold to bribe King Sh*t Gibbon (yet), crypto is the next best thing.
QZ: <https://qz.com/trump-pardon-binance-changpeng-zhao>
Reuters: <https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-pardons-convicted-bin...>
The Guardian: <https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/23/binance-t...>
> "Since Trump’s election, Binance has also been a key supporter of his family’s World Liberty Financial crypto venture, a business that has driven a huge leap in the president’s personal wealth."
"Huge leap" meaning $5 billion,
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-wlfi-world-liberty-financ... ("New crypto token boosts Trump family's wealth by $5 billion")
May I never live to see such a thing happen in the US, but it doesn't feel unlikely.
Is it just media nostalgia? Trump was on the TV shows they liked and so they trust him more?
I agree with you on the personality side, but I also think his overall fame from TV, real estate, etc. is just as big a factor to his political success.
That said, in his domain, Trump leads; he generates the headlines and everyone else follows them.
Is JD Vance generating headlines? Barely. Is anyone else generating headlines? Lets consider a few:
- Tim Walz: mainstream media tries to meme Walz into being a headline generator, but he isn't, and poses no serious contention
- Mumar Gaddafi, Sadam Hussein, Hitler, Mussolini, etc: i'm not sure there has been a dictator that did not generate headlines.
- Steve Jobs: strong headline generator, such that he could have run for president and likely won
- pewdiepie: for a spell he was generating headlines, but mainstream media had no solid editorial narrative for the guy (and his hundreds of millions of followers) which posed a social risk. The more they discussed him, the more risk of society penduluming in some unpredictable way either by martyring him or amplifying his politics, so they chose the "ignore him and let whither" as a strategy which seemed to work, as he has drifted into Japan and been off-the-radar
- Luigi Mangione: a nonzero number of liberal voters would decry Trump in one breath and cast a vote for Mangione to be a politician despite evidence he is a cold-blooded murderer. This probably won't change much after conviction.
In conclusion, intelligent people are forced to lament the state of humanity in which leadership is game-ified so easily and yet so difficult to achieve. "How does one consistently generate headlines" is a difficult question to answer and seems to be one of the core essence of humanity. And, as described above, the origin of people's feelings of why a given person is successful.
Yeah, but I could do that. It’s pretty easy to, but I’m certain I wouldn’t be able to amass a cult of personality around myself.
Yet if I try, I’m pretty much universally considered an asshole, even from those who agree with me. There’s got to be more than just “he’s not afraid to say what we think”
It's a cult of personality that has taken over people's lives.
If you look at a slew of the recent pardons, the beneficiaries had already pleaded guilty. In those cases, the pardons should be ineligible. I think the most a President could do - should be - give defendants the ability to appeal the case to a new judge or jury. It's wrong and should be corrected! Added it to my todo list
Financially and personally, it's what they do to pressure you into submission. It happens from criminal cases all the way down to fucking family court. It's absurd and it's broken.
I truly believe that almost every single attorney should have to lose sleep at night over how their actions impact others.
Judges and juries are at least superficially removed from that sort of corrupt incentive system.
It is clear that they don't only do that, as that has not been their principal (or even a common) use for most of the history of the pardon power.
It is equally clear, however, that they do allow that; the check on that, like on most discretionary Presidential powers, is the Congressional power of impeachment; obviously, that is not a meaningful constraint when the Congress and the President are aligned on abuses, but the entire point of having separately elected bodies is to make it less likely that things that the public would see as abuses are supported by both political branches simultaneously. (Obviously, the fact that one whole house of Congress and 1/3 of the other are elected at the same time as the President, and that the weighting of the electoral college for the President are a blend of the apportionment to the House and Senate makes those elections less independent than one might want, even before considering the way the electoral structure contributors to partisan duopoly, though.)
Won’t somebody please think of the ~~children~~ turkeys?!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Thanksgiving_Turkey_P...
Joking aside, Wikipedia does have a history of it. It goes way back, way before the USA was even a thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_pardons_in_the_United_...
Because of the impossibility of law written in advance perfectly covering all cases and to provide a mechanism for correction of overpunishment that cannot be effectively anticipated in crafting general law. (That's more the reason why the traditional power of chief executives seen in state governments and the British government they were all more or less modeled on was retained when a federal executive was created; the US Constitution was very much not create ex nihilo in a historical vaccuum.)
> Besides corruption, bias, or self-interest, nothing else can come out of it.
Every viewpoint is "bias" relative to every other viewpoint, so that piece is a nullity, but it is certain;y not the case that corruption and self-interest are the only impacts or motivations for applying the pardon power.
Which isn't to say that there aren't arguments for putting more guardrails around the application of the power by the executive (or perhaps just radically changing the nature of the federal executive, to improve the application of its powers generally and not just the pardon power).
I'm not an economist, I don't understand how this works.
At least this I understand. Foreign powers, especially you-know-which-one have a strong interest in preventing EU from becoming too strong, and unfortunately this is easy to do because:
* it plays on primal human tribal instincts (they want to assimilate us, they will force or enable more immigration, etc)
* the way EU works, you only need to convince some of the countries
In terms of military prowess the US is superior, if you believe their advertised weapons capabilities. That being said, if we believed what countries said about their own weapons, then Russia has a number of world ending superweapons - clearly they're the leader here /s.
If you believe total number of naval vessels determines might, the Chinese Navy's numbers make them superior. If you believe damage control and logistics determine naval might, the USA has one of the most sophisticated support fleets in the world with world class damage control (combat survivability - but this is a meme).
If you believe technological development makes a nation superior, the USA maintains it's edge with trade allies South Korea and Taiwan.
If you believe total production is what makes a nation superior... China.
Look, you get what I'm saying. The dollar is still the primary reserve currency (for now) and the US still ensures safety in international waters while projecting power regularly.
>America . . . has lost its edge in . . . power generation
Energy costs are much lower in the US than in Europe or China. China is the world's largest importer of petroleum and of natural gas. In contrast, the US is self-sufficient in petroleum and natural gas.
China's petroleum comes by ship from the Persian Gulf and from Russia's European ports (since there is no easy way for Russia to get its oil to its Asian ports). Beijing's worry that something might happen to interrupt its long supply lines of petroleum and natural gas is why it has made a large risky bet on solar electricity. The US, which has more land with high solar potential than China, can sit back and wait to see how China's bet on solar will turn out before it makes big bets on solar.
It might be that the cost of electricity specifically is lower in China than the US. If so, that is because Beijing has prioritized building a lot of electricity-generating capacity. It engages in many such infrastructure project to keep its young men employed -- something Washington does not need to do because the US economy provides enough jobs without without Washington's spending on infrastructure projects (so Washington tends to spending on infrastructure only when the project clearly makes economic sense).
Beijing imposes tight restrictions on its citizens' ability to invest outside China, so Chinese individual investors, pension funds, etc, put most of their money into deposits into Chinese banks and into Chinese real estate. Most of the funding for infrastructure projects comes from these bank deposits and from borrowing. Governmental debt (including debt owed by state and provincial governments) is a higher percentage of GDP in China than in the US.
Additionally, most people don't consider the Mexico factor. Presently some of the most talented machinists in the world live in Mexico manufacturing parts for American automotive (and other industries).
But, really, this comparison can only be proven in conflict - something both the USA and the CCP want to desperately avoid right now due to his economically coupled they are.
Just in time logistics has been a disaster for the American war machine.
Mexico has about 1/17th of the manufacturing capacity of the US - adds around 5.8%. America has a labor shortage in manufacturing, which is unlikely to be filled with foreign workers given the current crackdown on brown people. They're also annihilating their intellectual capacity by again cracking down on brown people, and defunding universities.
China is already leading the world in manufacturing and expanding rapidly, their universities are world class, and they have almost caught up in technology. Given their investments in education and strong culture of academic achievement, it's unreasonable to think they won't overtake the US in every domain in the next 3-5 years.
The Malacca straits are to easily blockaded. China needs food imports and energy imports no matter how much alternative energy they build.
No, you can't truck or train it in over land.
They are still facing a massive demographic bomb. They're becoming increasingly authoritarian, which will begin to restrict their production efficiency. They may have a financial bomb as well.
Don't make the mistake that you think that India and Russia are going to be close allies of China.
Russia has extensive territories that China considers theirs historically. Likewise, India and China dispute many territorial issues.
Authoritarianism in China has a significantly different flavor to US authoritarianism. The US is serving the goals of their dominant elite industries - finance and tech. China has an engineering culture amongst the elite, and is inclined to solve problems with productivity and megaprojects rather than handing money to purely extractive industries.
For an example of the difference between their flavors of authoritarianism and the outcomes they bring, compare their health care systems - the USA has one of the most expensive in the world at ~$14,500 per capita, and poor outcomes due to privatized corruption, while China's 14th 5-year plan has brought universal health care for approx ~$650 per person. China's average life expectancy is higher than the US's.
The US is, objectively, extremely corrupt, and is transitioning to authoritarianism to protect that corruption. China's authoritarianism achieves measurable goals, and has broad (though not universal) public support.
The USA will get curb stomped in a war. They just don't have anything but a massive military buildup from decades of pork barrelling unnecessary military contracts. Their population is sick and stupid. They have alienated their allies. They will lose.
You have no idea what extreme corruption looks like if you think the US is it. (I will admit that it is becoming more corrupt, and that the corruption is tied to the authoritarianism.)
> Their population is sick and stupid.
Yeah... you're just ranting.
Getting sicker: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6221922/
Getting stupider: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/?age=9
Obamacare is straight up porkbarrelling: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2010/apr/01/barack-oba...
The DoE's policy is to stop educating people unless it's profitable: https://www.propublica.org/article/education-department-publ...
I think we're going to see a substantial continual decline in both health and education outcomes as the system continues to be sabotaged, for money.
The most shocking part is qualitative though. As a non-American, having a conversation with an American about their politics is often stepping into a minefield of cognitive dissonance, patriotism, and blindness, from people who are otherwise wealthy and well-intentioned. Truly the most propagandized people. Such is the course of empire.
And which Chinese allies are you referring to, and you really think that they are going to host Chinese attacks on the US Navy?
China has approximately 250 times the shipbuilding capacity of the US. This infrastructure is integrated with military production. US-allied shipbuilding capacity in Japan and South Korea is within striking range of mainland China. I do not think it is reasonable to think that the US can win a sustained naval war against China, and how else would the US defend Taiwan?
https://www.csis.org/analysis/china-dominates-shipbuilding-i...
It really worries me that the US president is heavily invested in crypto schemes, since he and his family would benefit with the crash of the dollar. It is the conflict of interest to end all conflicts of interest
"CZ deserves his pardon.
His show trial of a prosecution was a combination of regulatory railroading and ethnic persecution for being Chinese-Canadian.
Imagine if Macron was held personally responsible for every crime committed by the 67M citizens of France, and you'll get the absurdity of holding CZ personally responsible for the actions of a few of the 250M+ Binance users.
Indeed, if the bureaucrats who went after CZ were similarly held accountable for every violent crime committed in their home states, they'd be in prison for eternity! But there was an insane double standard. In the physical world, the Biden admin gleefully abolished the police. Meanwhile, in the digital world they demanded that CEOs achieve impossible levels of probity.
The ethnic dimension to CZ's persecution was similarly execrable. In reality, he helped many millions of Chinese people get into Bitcoin and thereby get to freedom. And also helped millions of poor people from around the globe get out of failed currencies, and into cryptocurrency.
So he did more for practical human rights and civil liberties than most. CZ did nothing wrong, and did so many things right.
Of course, my friends at Coinbase and I were competitors of Binance. But I always respected CZ, and I congratulate him on his accomplishments, and I congratulate him on his pardon today. Well deserved."
Do you have a rebuttal for coffeezillas assertion that 2 billion dollars of Abu Dhabi money was invested in Binance using the Trump family coin in order to buy a pardon?
The president is clearly pro crypto and doesn't think this dude did anything wrong, but he also wasn't gonna give a pardon away for free. It's a disgusting abuse of office he should be impeached over. Selling pardons, what a shit show.
I don’t doubt Trump tried to advantage himself when doing this. But I do feel like the Binance charge wasn’t consistent at all.
Kinda like getting a speeding ticket, the fact that other people were also speeding isn't a defense.
I don't think it's really necessary to pretend that this pardon was deserved. The pardon happened because (a) Trump wants the support of crypto billionaires and (b) Trump received a large bribe. It's really not complicated.
Painting Trump as sympathetic to ethnic discrimination is really ridiculous. No one believes that, even people who cynically use that justification to support his lawlessness.
It may be a non sequitur to suggest that the pardon of one convicted financial criminal is similar to the lack of convictions in another likely financial crime context, but it seemed germane and parallel to me.
- Operation Malicious Mortgage:
- > 400 arrested
- 173 convictions
- Operation Stolen Dream:
- ~500 arrested
- > 300 convictions
The real question is about Kraken. How they've managed to remain untouched is a mystery.
Absolutely.
Biden abolishing police is hyperbole.
CZ enabled a lot of dark shit. He is somehow simultaneously so powerful as to help millions of Chinese, but powerless to do anything about a few thousand of criminals and pedophiles?
This is not a serious take.
With these characters, from Trump on down, discourse is not the point.
He is flexing his power by showing he can make an obviously fatuous point and get away with it. Because there are no consequences, for someone like him.
When did this happen?
I’m tempted to think “Fox News is a hell of a drug.”
SBF stole user funds to basically role play as a billionare.
"The Foreign Emoluments Clause bars the president and other federal officials from accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State” without the consent of Congress. It reflects the framers’ desire to prevent federal officials from succumbing to foreign influence.
The Domestic Emoluments Clause provides for the president to receive a fixed salary and bars him from receiving “any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them.” It was designed to insulate the president against undo pressure from Congress or any individual state."
[1] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/emol...
[1]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/george-washington-...
The reality is the system will bend itself to avoid the problem, because it's been designed to avoid that problem.
Maybe it will serve as a reminder
> “It won’t interfere with the current building,” Trump said on July 31. “It’ll be near it, but not touching it, and pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of.” - NBC
It seems probable he ignored any number of laws about how he did it, too.
Like Quatar and the used 747.
He's only out of office if he dies. There's no way he's leaving voluntarily.
I suppose one might assume he has some funds stashed offshore somewhere.
Two huge factors against him:
* Most people don't even know who CZ is, so this is meh-tier. People know SBF and find him repulsive, literally. Whoever puts SBF out of jail will face a massive PR backslash, he's not important enough to be worth that.
* SBF stole from the rich, the only real crime in the US.
Very few times you see someone who is equally hated by: the law, the public and the rich. He's screwed, lol.
The common theme to the donations ("payoff" or "bribe" might be more accurate), whether to D or R was to weaken any push for crypto regulations.
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-ruin-ftx-documentary...
The way CZ managed to tie up FTX in a knot was a masterclass. (about 59min in).
It isn't about any of these people though. Trump is about only one thing: himself (a trade he shares with someone like KJU of North Korea). Specifically, as a narcissist, Trump is all about his image: business and might makes right, no matter the rules. Trump therefore hates the left, truth, honesty, ethics, empowering the weak and minorities, et cetera. Most importantly, he is signaling here: 'if you do business with me, we do the criminal path, and you get caught then I have the power to pardon your sentence.'
Whether Trump is currently a criminal or not, he was and is a convicted felon.
The above is also why I very much suspect Ghislaine Maxwell has dirt on Trump.
A pardon makes it all go away. None of the baggage of convictions follow. Finding a job or a place to live is something they can do, as well as voting again.
Personally I do not believe there can be PR backslash for convicted criminal voted in as president.
We’ve been hearing variations of “massive PR backlash” should Donald Trump do XYZ for literally a decade now.
There has never been any consequential backlash whatsoever.
Right now, there is only about $500 in liquidity if you wanted to buy in at the 20% ask with a market order. After that the next sell limit order it as 96%.
However Binance guy knowingly commits money laundering and gets the pardon?
* Those victims who did not wait through the full asset recovery process and sold their debt to "vulture investors" for pennies on the dollar.
You can have whatever opinion you want about the bankruptcy process, but FTX was most certainly insolvent, due to fraud, and at that point whatever happened after the recovery to make people as whole as possible (which for many was not even close) really shouldn’t get credited to SBF.
Of course, if the bank is upfront that they take customer deposits to Vegas, then its fine.
Will it work? If I had to bet then I'd say probably not. For any other president this would not even merit any thought beyond "lol" and that alone is worrying.
You Americans elected a mobster as President.
Once is an aberration. Twice is your democracy speaking.
Serious controls need to be placed around the pardon power.
I'm joking! Everything will be broken by then.
Also as I understand it, while the can't be tried twice for the same crime Federally, it's still possible that they can be tried in a state court for committing the same crime.
.. but if you are trying to imply hunter biden, then fuck yeah I don't fucking care, put him in prison if that's what it takes.
If they remove the guardrails keeping crypto out of the regulated financial industry (read: KYC and AML requirements), your bank deposits will absolutely be comingled with toxic crypto assets, because it will be way cheaper to avoid paying compliance people than the transaction fees.
Also, Bitcoin can process far more than 7 tps through the Lighting network.
I wonder where your misconceptions come from?
Fees are CURRENTLY around $1 because no one is using the L1 network. There is no demand now because of all of the times when the transaction fees were $30.
>Also, Bitcoin can process far more than 7 tps through the Lighting network.
The lightning network is insecure during periods of high demand because you aren't able to safely close channels. Also, you still need to fund channels on L1 in the first place!
People knowingly buy into pump & dumps, gambling that they're on the early (pump) side and hoping to get out before the dump.
People will happily collect commissions selling products they know are scams or will happily collect management fees for parking investor's capital into grifts.
You'll never get truly everyone to recognize it, and it only takes one sucker at the poker table to keep every seat filled.
I recently heard of a real estate person that wound up buying an entire neighborhood around one of the stadiums for next year's World Cup. The impetus for this decision was to jack up the rates during the tournament, and then sell them off after. Another person thinks renting a bunch of Teslas and then placing them Touro will be another get rich idea during the World Cup. There are all sorts of people that think they are smarter than everyone else and are so confident they just cannot think of any ways their idea will fail.
In comparison, crypto looks like a rational product relative to that.
Dividing up the credit risk on a pool of loans so that some people lose money only if all the loans go bad is a very good idea. You just need to make sure they are good loans.
Part of the problem is that this seems to describe most of the economy now. Maybe not specifically money laundering, but it’s all a grift whether we are talking about Binance, OpenAI, or Skydance-Paramount. There are grifts everywhere which just encourages more grifts as people see the resulting success and lack of consequences.
> Who's going to give you anything for your bozo bucks? At this rate, it's not going to take long.
It's already here. Scan your eye-balls for some Worldcoins ($WLD) to prove you are not a LLM bot.
(Frankly, the idea that being convicted for making the conscious decision to go out of your way to circumvent KYC/AML laws is somehow the result of partisan bias is ridiculous in itself, so none of this [or how Balaji claims to feel about the matter] is even really relevant).
This is not a company vs. company sort of issue, this is a "I want to avoid regulations that would cost me money as a fundamental aspect of my industry " issue.
If Coinbase thought they could legally not worry about all of this, do you think they would want to deal with it?
The sheer quantity of money used in cryptocurrency for money laundering and activity where traditional payment processors will not accept payments (largely illegal, e.g. drugs, counterfeit goods) also means that the keeping the ecosystem healthy involves having ways for this money to flow.
For example if your crypto is the proceeds of ransomware, you're going to have a hard time cashing out without using something like Monero (which effectively has no offramps) without going through an exchange that knows perfectly well that you're trying to touch tainted goods. Exchanges like Binance that just don't bother to check who their customers are when they withdraw cash for such assets are just as critical to the ransomware plague as any security bug or social engineering issue. It's one of the reasons that pre-crypto, even though ransomware was technically feasible, it was never able to grow into a large-scale operation--no offramps. But hey maybe the official stance of CZ supporters is now that ransomware is good, actually, and if you don't like it it's because you have partisan bias (???)
CZ is the first and only known first-time offender in U.S. history to receive a prison sentence for this single, non-fraud-related charge of improper platform AML KYC implementation. Big banks routinely pay a fine for this, and never face imprisonment. The judge found no evidence that he knew of any illicit transactions and that it was reasonable for him to believe there were no illicit funds on the platform. Credit where it's due, they somehow pulled off a 4 month sentence for this unprecedented charge. And now it's all for naught.
Historically bank CEOs have been smart enough to note this difference.
The laws exist to restrict funding for countries under sanction, drug operations, terrorist organizations, etc.
We can argue about whether these laws are a good idea (either in general or in specific details), but you need to change the law, not just now follow it.
This is a terrible precedent... unless you're a con man, that is. (Balaji Srinivasan isn't stupid. I would guess he understands how real what he's arguing here is.)
Reminds of Biden pardoning his relatives without even saying for what. Just blanked pardon for everything. No democrat dropped his jaw.
He feared Trump would force the DOJ to prosecute them.
And, based on what Trump's done so far with the DOJ and his enemies, he was right to do so.
I think this whole pardoning thing should go away. It makes the presidents Kings.
But something like that would fly in the face of the "Unitary Executive" insanity and would (I suspect) require a constitutional amendment, which is no longer remotely feasible.
A first comment said "without saying why". The second comment just says that this is blatantly not true, and that the rationale presented has been since confirmed as a very accurate prediction.
Everyone I talked to (more than 10, including myself) that I knew who voted for Biden was pissed, disappointed, even angry at his pardoning of Hunter.
The rise of more grass-roots news sources (podcasts, memes, social media) also leads to tons of conspiracy theories, and mistrust that builds this idea of corruption being ubiquitous, just not out in the open. And yes, that happens, but this atmosphere magnifies it 10x.
So when someone like Trump does it out in the open, people are more likely to excuse it because "everybody is already doing it, at least this is out in the open".
No, its not, pardon and the closely linked power of clemency are common powers in representative democracies, often situated with the chief of state or the head of government (in the US, and other Presidential systems, the President is both), or sometimes the cabinet instead of the head of government in a parliamentary or semi-parliamentary system (in some cases, one or the other is assigned by law to a subordinate bureaucracy rather than being HoS/cabinet discretion, as is the case with pardon but not clemency in Canada.) It is generally more used in the US than other Western states, in part because the US has a much harsher criminal justice system with much longer sentences and much weaker provisions for relief other than executive pardon than other systems, but the power itself is common. [0]
The way it is used under Trump is wildly abnormal (for the US or the other representative democracies), though.
[0] see, e.g., https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/pardon-power-is-co... ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon ; etc.
It's also true his son was prosecuted politically, because few if any people go to jail for 4473 falsification.
It's also true that this is new and unprecedented.
And even if it were outright illegal, the Supreme Court has now ruled that the president is personally immune from criminal prosecution as long as they claim that their illegal activity was carried out in the course of their presidential duties, and not a personal crime committed on the side. Which leaves congressional impeachment and conviction as the sole recourse against presidential misbehavior. Which becomes a problem when the majority in Congress doesn't care that the president is doing illegal things. We haven't had a constitutional crisis like this since the FDR administration.
According to SCOTUS[0], as long as it's a "gratuity," it's not a bribe and not illegal. No. Seriously.
https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/06/supreme-court-limits-scop...
The message is clear from his circus administration, you can do anything as long as you bribe them
FB, Twitter, Tiktok on the other hand...
They will overlook everything else he does. Everything
He's using US Military on US soil. Sending National Guard in where there is no legal justification for it. This is what the start of a civil war looks like.
At the same time, your belief is that failure to enact a nativist crackdown will result in "a civil war". I thought it went without saying, but this is a very extreme view, to say the least...
The connection between nativist policy advocacy and white supremacist ideology in the US isn't new. It goes back to the very notion of "illegal immigrant"; the politician who shepherded the bill that criminalized unauthorized entry to the United States was an open an enthusiastic white supremacist who pushed this bill forward to advance his white supremacy: https://immigrationhistory.org/item/undesirable-aliens-act-o...
At the same time, this relationship is not ancient history. Indeed, nativist sentiments and white supremacist ideology are still closely linked today. See, e.g.:
https://direct.mit.edu/daed/article/150/2/40/98317/Immigrati...
> The correlation between immigration preferences and racial resentment was significant in every year. The steady correlation of 0.30 throughout the 1990s and early 2000s was impressively strong by the standards of opinion data of this sort. The rise from 0.30 to 0.50 by 2018 indicates an uncommonly strong relationship. [...] [E]very measure we have indicates that Whites' views of immigration are closely tied to their views of race.
There are many, many similar correlations between nativist beliefs and policy support and "racial conservatism", white supremacist beliefs, and Trump support (including support of Trump's extreme immigration measures).
"Racist" is not currently a label that many people in the United States are willing to openly embrace, even to themselves. It's not surprising that actual or perceived accusations of racism are received with defensiveness. But individual (and nominal) disavowal of "racism" is frankly less compelling than the entire history and presently observable empirical reality of nativism in the United States.
To me, this sort of behavior just seems par for the course for how he has been acting since before his presidency. Did you follow his record in business and politics closely prior to voting for him? If so, what mitigating factors were there that let you still feel comfortable in voting for him?
Is this an isolated source of issue with him? Part of a broader trend? In either case, is it/these a big enough deal for him to lose your support moving forward? For the rest of the political party supporting him?
If there has been a shift in your ability to support him, what is it that broke the camel's back?
You could have literally opened a random page and order whatever is on there. It is perfectly safe to order the burger as you will most likely be served monkey brains anyway.
No one will rage at you for voting for Afroman. There are no dire consequences.
I can't really align myself to either party, and I am diametrically opposed to the Democrats on some issues, like gun control, and think that there are a lot of real issues that they push far to the extreme to the point that it is problematic, but... there's also only one party that attempted insurrection and overturning the election, campaigned on all sorts of insane shit, pushes a narrative of needing the military to deal with protestors, etc.
It's not two shit sandwiches, it's a pot of live pit vipers vs a pot of boiled unseasoned kale and spinach. I'm not going to enjoy the latter, but it's probably not going to harm anything more than my taste buds. The other might kill me.
It is like you ask someone to chose between death by fire, death by drowning OR finding the love of your life. Then they respond with: I don't want to drown! Or worse, they ask what other people chose.
Imagine yourself making your own choices. Picture it for a moment, doesn't it sound terrifying?
One should also look at it from the perspective of the other candidates. I mean those not part of the uniparty. Imagine making an effort to convince people to vote for a sanity riddled election program. The level of insult people sink to in order to NEVER even consider it.
But I knew Trump was shady and didn't like that he partied with Epstein in the 90s. A country takes a long time to change directions. I saw a chance for a smaller less restricting federal government. It was a gamble I was willing to take to at least get the ship turning around.
Trumps action with ICE will lead to waco situations. Undocumented immigrants can obtain guns in this country and will not continue to go quietly into the night. Seems to me that his actions are far more likely to lead to civil war
Now, if you are talking about citizens supporting an invasion against those that oppose it that is civil war. I agree that is a none zero possibility. However, telling citizens to get fucked while taking their money and giving it to non citizens, to me, was certain to lead to violent conflict between citizens.
Whose money? Being given to which non-citizens?
Seriously. Be specific here. the words you used are all in English and are even fairly grammatical. But they don't model reality.
Undocumented folks, by virtue of being undocumented, are ineligible for public assistance of any kind, pretty much everywhere in the US.
What's more, in order to work, they need to provide an SSN and they need to use someone else's because they can't get their own -- because they're undocumented. But they and their employer must each still pay Social Security and Medicare taxes which pay for those programs -- but since they're undocumented, they'll never collect any of the money they paid into those programs in taxes.
So I ask again, specifically, what taxpayer money is being paid to which non-citizens? Please be specific here.
Federal Benefits
* Emergency medical care
* School meals
* K-12 education
* WIC nutrition program
California State Benefits
* Full-scope Medi-Cal
* Cash assistance (CAPI)
* In-state college tuition
* Disability and Family Leave
Hint, not even 50 cents of your paycheck went to feeding poor kids. You are an idealogue and nothing more
For the majority of the history of the country it has never been anything like it is today. Until 1819 you basically literally just showed up. After that, ships had to include passenger manifest and pass that along to the state, and then state's handled immigration - but none there did more than try to charge 'head fees' to keep the truly destitute out, but not all states even did that. 1875/1876 there were laws that changed this - largely banning Asian immigrants and making immigration federal purview. The next couple of decades things got more formalized, but if you were a normal human being capable of supporting yourself you basically got held for a basic check and then were let in. <1-2% got turned away most years. It wasn't until 1921/4 that anything resembling our current immigration system was put into place, and while it saw significant revision in 1965 to how the caps and quotas were organized, we've not seen anything major change.
The Democrats want significant immigration reform, true. They want a path for people that have been living here as productive members of society to stay here. They want them to be treated like human beings.
This is not "flooding" the nation.
> and given them our tax money
This talking point seems to be repeated a lot, but it's just not true. Illegal immigrants pay more taxes in to the system than they receive in benefits - largely because they are ineligible for the vast majority of benefits. If you want to increase our tax revenue, more illegal immigrants is better than less. We effectively rip them off. It's like the claims that the shutdown is over giving illegal immigrants free healthcare - not a dime of the funding being discussed would go to them. You're being lied to.
I'm all for a system where we screen our immigrants for criminals, terrorists, etc. But the current system is broken, and we have built our way of life off of exploiting a large amount of hardworking people that contribute a hell of a lot to our ability to live the way we do. Legalizing them, streamlining the immigration process, etc., is not at risk of bankrupting our coffers.
We have immigration laws. The US is incredibly generous, and naturalizes more than 1 million immigrants each year.
The American people don't want a "path" for illegal aliens. We already tried that in 1986. All it did was incentivize more illegal immigration.
And what the last administration did was absolutely flooding the nation. They removed nearly every EO related to border security, and then complained that they needed more laws to "fix" the problem they created.
> I'm all for a system where we screen our immigrants for criminals, terrorists, etc. But the current system is broken,
The current system is broken insofar as we are not enforcing the law thoroughly enough. We already have a system, it just needs to be followed. All illegal aliens have to go back.
People need space to make a U-turn. I hope you get some grace because it's a lot easier to say "I told you so" than "I was wrong."
The problem is we dont believe him. There has been ample time to make a u turn. A decade at this point. Trump has never shied away from his corruption. He has been upfront about his intentions from the beginning. I just do not believe that this is the straw that broke the camels back when so many straws have come before.
Welcome to the resistance!
Just curious. Since you voted for someone who is a terrible President last time, what are you planning to change about how you make voting decisions next time? Are there particular people or media you plan to listen to less, and others more? Particular aspects you will weight higher or lower?
But seriously, I am curious how you previously made decisions about who to vote for, and how you are thinking about changing how you decide your voting preferences in the future?
Your reps (or likely preferred choice of reps, if they didn't win their district) are enabling this, and don't give two shits about anything I say.
The recent "No Kings" protests were the largest in US history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_protests_and_demonstra...
I think at least some of that 1/3 has their own problems that prevent them from being able to devote energy to politics
Try living on or very near the poverty line, and then try and spend time worrying about politics. You are worrying about much more real (to you) problems.
When shit gets bad enough to motivate people on the poverty line, you're in deep shite.
A boat load of meaningful change comes from working class agitation, but most of the political noise comes from the chattering classes, who have the luxury of creating cliques online, making and then banning phrases.
Of course the working classes have valid opinions. The issue is, unlike thier richer friends, they are living the discrimination that both left and right claim to endure. This leaves little time for mass organisation.
IMHO those words are based on an immature understanding of human beings and their limitations.
We not only have physical, financial, and temporal limits; even more powerfully, we have emotional limits. When we're scared or traumatized, we often can't act except to keep things immediately safe as much as they can; we are in survival mode. That's also how bad leaders get good people to do evil things - terrorize them, push them into survival mode, and direct their fear at the leader's targets.
What we can do is recognize those mechanisms and limitations in ourselves, using empathy (a universal human trait), our frontal cortex, and compassion - always the first step to taking of our emotions and being effective - and recognize it in others. Calling them names only traumatizes them more. Empathy and compassion gets them to a better place where they can act. It's not easy - that's why the word 'courage' exists; that's why it's sometimes called, 'grace under pressure'.
Effective leaders know this. What we're missing - what so many people are missing - is good, effective leaders. AFAICT, the leaders we'd expect to rise to this occasion also are traumatized - and they have an obligation to do better if they want to be leaders.
You can’t ’out empathize’ someone doing 24/7 manipulation against people.
The only thing that works are real consequences against bad actors.
And that there was no real consequences for bad actors is exactly why we are in the situation we are in now.
It not only works, it is basic leadership skills that I and others use every day. You're unwittingly advocating your enemy's morals, saying only force works.
However, consequences are important too, depening on the situation.
You can’t out reasonable an unreasonable person, when then unreasonable person refuses to respect your (or others) boundaries.
Most of the time, in a civil society, other members of society (police, etc.) enforce the consequences silently that allow what you are describing to work.
If they won’t/don’t, what you are describing is a guaranteed path to failure with specific personalities. The evidence is all around you.
There is a reason why self-defense includes the option for violence nearly everywhere, why every society has some equivalent to armed police, why nations always have militaries, etc.
Advocating a failed approach in a given circumstance isn’t good leadership (even when it’s ‘being the good one’), it’s the worst leadership approach possible.
Nope; that's the old knee-jerk insult that people use when you don't embrace aggression. Appeasement or non-appeasement has nothing to do with it, but that's the word they say to use in the flow-chart.
Many people - maybe you - are driven to conflict as an ideology, as if there is no other effective or higher power. That justifies the bad people; that's what they want you to embrace; you're helping them without realizing it.
Read up on appeasement and tell me it isn’t applicable. [https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Neville_Chamberlain]. It is exactly what you are proposing.
For fascists, there is no place they won’t go, or bridge they won’t cross, because they’re fundamentally driven by fear and insecurity. Fear and insecurity they themselves create through their actions. It’s an insatiable hunger.
It’s why inevitably, tanks are the only thing that works.
Or are you under the impression the opposite approach is winning?
Surrendering just speeds up the consumption, because the only thing they actually respect is fear of consequences. Which is why they work so hard to avoid them. Because they know, deep down, they are inevitable - and will be terrible.
Unless they kill or control anyone who can actually apply them first, anyway.
I’m following politics and I have my opinions about things but you can be sure I won’t be discussing them with coworkers and friends.
These tactics include: consolidating polling places in urban areas; restricting the ability to submit an absentee ballot or otherwise vote by mail; restricting early voting; voter ID laws; and "poll watchers" who intimidate those at polling places, sometimes illegally.
Moreover, those forced to vote in-person at polling places are not given time off from employment to do so. This overwhelmingly disenfranchises the working class, who just so happen to overwhelmingly vote for progressive policies that favor the working class over the middle/upper classes.
Also, while I believe more Americans should be protesting, people in other countries (like myself, at one point) may have an inaccurate idea about what heavy US protest "ought to" look like in the media they see.
We'd love to be protesting at the iconic White House and federal Capitol building, creating horizon-to-horizon crowds for the rest of the world to marvel at... But for me (and ~40% of the population) that's a 3500-3700 km trip. How often would you expect someone in Portugal to travel the distance to Moscow for a day of protest? (Worse, assume no good trains.)
Instead, we gather at local state locations, which will typically not get shown (or recognized) internationally, except when folded into a sentence about how "millions protested across the nation."
Honestly, the billionaire is less corrupt-able than the DNC nexus (we all know Biden wasn't running the show, and neither would Harris).
This is satire, right?
Why would you think that? Do you think that presents from foreign dictators (like plane or investment in crypto fund) are less corrupt?
This kind of vague fluffy language is becoming very common. What evidence? Where is it coming out from?
If anything it would be a counter argument. Always strikes me as odd that Biden is somehow both a senile decrepit old man and a criminal mastermind depending on which is most useful at any given moment.
both can be true at the same time. Biden was not always a senile incapable man. The corruption of the justice system seems to come from the fact that he's son has been operating in the shadows of the white house for a long time and it seems that very few people noticed it. But, of course, I know that Biden and his family are school kids when compared to a full fledged mafia boss like the current president.
Biden is not a criminal mastermind, and he never was. He changed into a decrepit old man, surrounded by a cabal of people that did not shy away to use the tools of the president's office for their personal gain. We know now that a lot of the president's autopen signatures did not originate from Joe Biden. This group of people also had a general interest in hiding the president's condition.
Regarding CZ and Binance and the Trumps, they have kind of a symbiotic relationship.
After Binance and CZ pleaded guilty to money laundering in November 2023, for which they paid over $4 billions in fines, WLFI (which is a clone of AAVE belonging to the Trump family) launched a stablecoin called USD1. Magically on March 2025, $2 billion flowed into Binance through MGX, a state backed Abu Dhabi fund, later revealed to have been paid in USD1 (two months before it was unveiled and without at the time no effective audits), effectively propping WLFI’s coin (backed, unbacked, nobody knows, I assume backed). CZ applied for a presidential pardon inmediately after in May 2025.
WLFI now gets to earn about $60–80 million per year in yield from the USD1…
…As long as Binance doesn’t redeem those $2 billion.
I still don’t know what MGX got out of this deal, but I am pretty sure they didn’t walk empty handed.
Reminds me of this Bill Gates quote: "We were a bit naive: we thought the internet, with the availability of information, would make us all a lot more factual. The fact that people would seek out—kind of a niche of misinformation—we were a bit naive."
I don't know which is worse, that 32% were in support of the corrupt leader or that 68% in total are either supported him or didn't care enough to support anyone else
Or, they were not fine with whoever won.
We've got two abismal parties to choose from. Yes, there's an agument for voting for the lesser of two evils, but it's not a great one.
I'd like to believe at least some of those 36% would vote for a decent candidate/party. But once you lose faith in the system, and realize that it doesn't represent you, you might just stop participating in it.
That's your choice. "I don't participate at all" doesn't work unless it makes the whole trolley go poof.
As the eminent philosopher[0] opined:
You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice
You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill
I will choose a path that's clear, I will choose Free will
There are just two possible outcomes: Dems or Reps getting power. That's the switch options you have. "Not Voting" simply means letting the trolley take the Rep route and being JUST AS CULPABLE for the results as every single republican voter.
Your fantasy of "not voting" being an actual moral option is like arguing "I disagree with the concept of a trolley, so I'm just going to turn away from the switch". You're morally exactly as culpable, because you made a choice that is morally the equivalent of "not switching tracks".
Voting for party A/B is a reward that encourages party A/B to do more of what they're doing.
So let's say only 1000 people voted because everyone else hated both options. That would pave a path for party C that would not exist if everyone held their nose and voted for crap.
Fortunately the Czech president does not have that much power.
In general, I believe that more choice is good and polarizing political systems are subpar.
If you vote for team A and they win and then do something bad (inevitable), shouldn't you be morally responsible for that? After all, you seem fine claiming non-participants have moral culpability for whatever the winning team does.
This seems incredibly obvious. If my options are "don't bomb children" and "bomb children", there's an obvious choice and obvious culpability. If my options are "bomb children" and "bomb way the fuck more children" the choice is also obvious.
You do not get to pretend a moral dilemna doesn't exist just because you're not a fan of the available choices. You are still culpable.
You have a train hurtling down the track that forks into two groups of people, 10 in one and 5 in the other, some of the people go on to cure cancer and some are murderers and you don't know where they are. Also it's possible batman set up the scenario to kill the bad guys and by flipping the switch you kill the good guys. Or the Joker set it up and the reverse is true.
In this case, you could argue that you only have moral culpability by intervening. Unless you are absolutely sure you have full knowledge of the intended consequences by acting, you can absolve yourself of the moral culpability by non-intervention.
And since we don't know the long term consequences of political actions, there is at least an argument for non-intervention.
So you're a nazi/white supremacist/Boogaloo boy? I wouldn't worry too much about getting doxxed, there are plenty of those around.
Or are you a batshit ancap[0]? That's a smaller group, but still sizable enough to avoid being doxxed just by mentioning it.
In fact, most groups that get that kind of hate (from anyone) are big enough (Trans folks are ~3,000,000 in the US, gay folk are ~30 million. I'd expect you could give at least some detail without doxxing yourself just by mentioning it -- assuming MiiMe19 isn't the name on your driver's license.
As such, I call bullshit on your claims. Prove me wrong.
I get it, you don't want to come clean as you might have some "'splainin' to do" Lucy.
Enrique, is that you?
This false equivalence is exactly what counts for being "fine with this corrupt leader."
Sure. There are a lot of other people like you. Political operatives work hard to find folks like you, because groups who won’t vote are groups you can transfer resources from. (Same, oddly enough, for folks who will vote for you regardless of what you do. You can take advantage of that loyalty to buy votes on the margin.)
It’s dumb. And it directly undermines the causes you and others like and around you support, because again, your devoted non-participation creates political capital on the other side of any issue you would have voted on. But it’s common and a real part of any electoral—possibly political—system, and no elected who wins and keeps office can afford to ignore the free resources predictable non-voters offer up.
Uh, then don't. I guarantee you have more people and issues on your ballots than the person who allegedly sent your friends death threats.
> neither party really supports what I want so voting for one would hurt the causes I want anyway
If neither party has any position you give any shits about, yes, I sort of agree you shouldn't be voting... (And I guess I'll concede you aren't voting against your interests and causes if you have no interests or causes.)
Well no, you'd be forced to participate in primaries or civically engage. You'd have to identify opportunities for compromise. You'd have to disaggregate your false monolith of a national political party. That takes effort.
Also, showing up to vote for an esoteric third party puts you on the board. Someone who shows up is provably not too lazy to vote, which is, honestly, most people who come up with convoluted reasons for avoiding the polls. Take a lazy person's stuff and they won't hurt you. Take a person who's showing up to the poll's stuff, and they might vote for the other guy--or worse, join a primary challenge.
Folks rejecting politics implicitly endorsing the status quo (whether they understand that they are or not is irrelevant to the measurable effect of their choices). They also put up a flag around themselves and their community that effectively marks it for cutting resources to benefit people and communities who reward their electeds.
No, we have one destructive/harmful party (R) and one status quo party (D). They are not the same level of bad and that's immediately obvious from this last year.
To compare the two parties with a house on fire, absolutely the sadistic pyromaniac arsonist burning down the neighborhood one house at a time is a bad guy and needs to be stopped. But when person trying to rally everyone to go after him is the abusive slumlord, it doesn't always resonate as effectively as it might.
A healthy society wouldn't tolerate either one. I wonder if the Democrats seeming inability to stop right-wing abuses has been partially motivated by the knowledge that successfully stomping out that sort of corruption would curtail their own abuses, too.
Absolutely. And we know this because when they were last in power they did nothing to counter corruption or limit executive power. Instead they were partaking in it.
Trump is exploiting a system his predecessors created.
This is only a remotely viable claim if you think the two evils have extremely similar amounts of evil.
I still voted, because my personal laziness or moral superiority does not trump the very real world effects of the "bad ones" winning. Lazy people like you with post hoc rationalizations exist here too, and they're just as bad and wrong.
We're not talking about me. So maybe cool it.
Why? Milton hired Pam Bondi's (the US attorney general's) brother to represent him.
It's because you are still thinking of the USA as a democracy. Musk helped buy the election for Trump. It's an open oligarchy since companies were allowed an opinion as if they were citizens.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citi...
Don't think fox news is going to report that he enriched the prez...
This is despite the fact that Hunter was gone after on a charge that is basically never enforced alongside a media and political campaign ramping up all sorts of lies and half-truths and trying to draw connections to things he was never on trial for, much less convicted of, with an incoming president that had spoken extensively about his desire to weaponize the government to enact revenge on his political rivals, which we have seen him do extensively already.
I don't like that Biden pardoned his son, but I also think the idea that it is at all comparable to the pardons Trump has issued that are blatantly corrupt is absurd. Meanwhile, Jan6 pardonees have a whole Wikipedia section detailing all of the crimes they have gone on to commit since being pardoned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon_of_January_6_United_Sta...
See again:
> with an incoming president that had spoken extensively about his desire to weaponize the government to enact revenge on his political rivals, which we have seen him do extensively already.
Again no, Biden issued a sweeping pardon for his Son that pardons him of all crimes, known and unknown. Hell, it was a pardon so broad that even left leaning pundits like Politico publicly wrote about it [1]. It took me all of one second to confirm this. Why lie?
[1]: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/12/02/hunter-biden-pardon...
The pardon was sweeping.
You seem to be arguing semantics. I care about what his son actually did. If someone is sitting in jail for a marijuana conviction, and gets a blanket pardon, I am going to say they were pardoned for the marijuana conviction, not for some theorized other crime.
I don't really understand why this is a difficult concept for you to grasp.
As we now see that being executed after mass partisan purges and, in several cases (sone where this is already adjudicated, more where it is pending) illegal appointments because that was the only way yo get or keep willing hacks in position to carry out the prosecutions, its arguable the only thing Biden did wrong in that regard was not doing it widely enough.
A suitable pretext meaning a crime.
2. Hunter's pardon was still wrong and widely condemned by dems.
Biden misused the office to pardon his son but he was not corrupt.
I’m not supportive of Biden pardoning his son. But it’s inarguable that the Trump administration is orders of magnitude more corrupt than Biden’s was. To say “they’re both corrupt” is to flatten everything out to meaninglessness.
It is not accurate to say that half of Americans are ok with this. It’s just our system doesn’t allow for doing anything about it except wait.
That even a third is okay with this is a clear enough signal. He represents their values.
"Healthy democracy"
This is the most embarrassing part of all of it. The US is ping ponging between two very different ways of misusing state power.
CZ was charged with violating a highly technical US securities law that is not common to most countries despite not being a US citizen or ever setting foot in the US. His crime was letting his employees (also non-US and under no affirmative obligation to learn the laws of every country in the world just because they run a website) tell crypto whales they could use VPNs to get the non-US, non-nerfed version of Binance.
The public's interest in protecting crypto whales from Binance is extremely tenuous. Unsophisticated users would hit the geofence. These were whales using Binance because they wanted to, not because they were tricked.
The US's right to enforce arcane securities law outside its own borders is also very tenuous. If every country pulls this level of aggressive enforcement of atypical law on every website (even geofenced ones!) we will have total chaos. Should China, Russia, or India be able to hunt you down for violating some arcane law? No? Then why should the US?
This is also happening in the context of an active public debate over the application of this law within the US, one cryptocurrency supporters won fairly definitively in the last election.
Whatever discretion the law provides US enforcers, they should have recognized that it was wrong to use that discretion and left CZ alone once Binance made reasonable gestures at compliance.
Instead, once their political coalition signaled that they should put symbolic heads on platters, they went about scoring career points. This is the kind of misbehavior that drove Aaron Swartz (a friend of mine) to suicide. We should be clear that it's wrong.
And here we are. A choice between venal corruption and cruel punching down at immigrants on one side, and a blind, symbolic use of power for power and ideology's sake on the other.
Surely you don’t believe that CZ was charged for shits and giggles, just because he happened to make a website that Americans use?
Employees of financial businesses are absolutely obligated to learn the laws of every country where they provide services.
They've normalized corruption irrespective of magnitude. That's partly a problem of the little corruption existing in the first place. But it's also a problem of education and tribal populism being given this much power.
On a baser level, if you go on twitter, there's a whole slew of delusional people who either don't believe this because of "fake news", another portion that's in the same "Clinton/Obama/Biden were even worse", and the rest just doesn't even care so long as "the libs are owned".
And if it does break through the right info bubbles, right-wing media pundits and influencers will be on-the-ready to quickly rationalize or what-about it away and coax their audiences back to their "happy" places, where they can nurse their favorite grievances about the left, the media, the trans people, etc
It is the loss of complexity. Many cannot understand that by choosing the lesser of two evils does not mean you support evil. It means your choices are limited. We have turned the political issues into good and evil, rather than disagreements in how to achieve our mostly shared goals. We can no longer see the other side as friends and family, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Anyone countering this can just proclaim "both sides" and in some sense they will be right, they have evidence and people do abuse that framework. But at the same time that destroys the bridge between us. The abuse of calling both sides evil along with the accusation that all use cases are instances of abuse. It binarizes the environment, creating a simple world where there are only two choices. Which is easy to do when everything is so complex, as we're so tired and don't want to think.
It's also why this administration's strategy is so effective: overload the opposition. After all, Brandolini's Law states: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it." They've weaponized it. It's an effective strategy, and hard to defend against. I'm sure someone will offer a solution, "it's so simple, you just..." and we perpetuate the game.
Most people can't keep up with the firehose of news and don't really want to. This particular bit of unethical behavior is just one more bit of inconsequential news which will have completely disappeared from the headlines by tomorrow. It basically never happened to 95% of the country, regardless of political leaning.
Secondly, conservatives live in their own highly filtered and mutated information bubble. Good news is amplified, bad news is either downplayed, justified (pure fiction is acceptable) or simply ignored. So even if they do hear about this, it won't be a big deal.
In short, most people won't care, and conservative media will actively work to overlook or more often, rationalize this sort of unethical behavior to the point where it somehow is totally fine. (Simply read this thread to watch it happen in real time.)
You assumed the leader is corrupt, possibly assumed the leader has bad intentions, and that the world can't possibly be more complex than these assumptions. Assumed the leader made this choice instead of a team behind him.
Then presented a generality. Possibly assumed he doesn't know more than you and "everyone who won't say anything".
Called an entire administration a circus. Another generality.
Suggested bribery without evidence.
How does one respond constructively to a comment like this?
How indeed? You certainly didn't.
He served 4 months for a laundering case , and has built the most successful exchange. There are bankers and vcs doing far worse things. He deserved the pardon , and no, he doesn't control bitcoin
/$
So yes, there is a difference between what Trump is doing and what Biden is doing.
edit:
He actually pardoned 5 family members for all non-violent offenses from jan 2014 to jan 2025, does 1 billionaire = 5 biden family members?
Also, how on Earth are their "crimes" as egregious as those that Trump has pardoned in his recent term? Seriously, what did they do? How many people did they hurt? You can't just say "corruption" in an ambiguous sense, because then millions of other people would also apply. Also, "I don't know but it's fishy!" doesn't work when we know literally everything in Hunter Biden's life. That was the whole controversy.
The Binance founder directly impacted people in a significant way. The rioters were violent protesters that resulted in loss of life and others fearing for their life. It isn't the pardon itself that is bad, or the number, but the message it sends as to why they would do it. Biden was "if you're in the family of the president, you'll get forgiveness for your poor life decisions". Duh, like it or not, that's always been true, and Biden got roasted for it anyway. He's done, his family is out.
Trump is "if you're rich or you worship me, literal crime is legal".
By the time a pardon comes the persons life is usually already in deep distress, and whatever they were working on is likely already over. I don't see why it's such a tragedy to let some people get pardoned who maybe don't deserve it.
The problem seems to be that we have unjust laws and punishments. We should have some way to apply mercy in that case. For example, I (hope to) see a future where people jailed for MJ related crimes get a mass pardon.
The solution is to fix that and make it retroactive. Remove the unjust law and release anyone who was convicted for violating it.
A pardon is just a bad, unfair bandaid fix.
Hopefully we get to try from scratch a third time if that happens but I worry that collapse will be too tempting for Russia or China to not step in.
Maybe we can be lucky and get conquered by Canada first in that case? What a weird thing to think...
Until the Dem party fixes their brand and wins back some of the Senate seats they used to control in the 90s and early 2000s there will be no positive progress.
There were only 13 states when the Constitution was ratified. It was never envisioned to be as disproportionate as it is today, with California's two Senators representing 40 million people vs. Wyoming's 0.6 million.
That seems like a good theory that would keep itself in check.
In execution it's an absolute shit show, I'll give you. But I do believe the theory is sound. With the house and the Senate we get the best of both worlds.
In theory.
The Senate is a good system, it's just that most states are Republican.
Some of the larger states might consider splitting themselves into separate states to better represent their populations. Though that may not be constitutionally possible.
If we ever add additional states to the Union (Puerto Rico, D.C., etc.), they'll want to enjoy having an equal say with every other state in the Union. It's a compelling feature of our system.
The House, as a proportional system, actually needs to be re-normalized. There are not enough representatives to have an actually proportional vote.
The founders aren't infallible gods, and they really fucked up here.
The practical consequence of this system is that it effectively prevents a majority of voters from large urban centers from imposing their will onto rural populations, at least at the federal level. It was designed that way.
I've seen comments here claiming that countries like Canada or France deliver better outcomes than the US. They are stronger welfare states, yes, but they also have become overly paternalistic nanny states, with heavy-handed regulations, and high taxes stifling individual initiative.
We absolutely do have minority rule. In both the Senate and the House, the Republican majorities represent a minority of the population.
The fact that both the House and Senate are nearly 50% by party again points to the fact that we have a good balance.
Obviously I understand that not every person voted in the election (many are not even eligible). It is simply not relevant to this conversation, and is an often trotted out diversion meant to diminish the mandate given by the actual voters.
The fact that we have minority rule in the Senate, House, and Supreme Court is exactly why we don't have any checks and balances any more and Trump gets to act like an emperor.
It seems clear that the majority in the 2024 election preferred Republican governance, and so they gained control over President/House/Senate.
Republicans have a majority in the Senate when their senators received a minority of votes, by about 24 million votes.
Update
Here are some rough numbers I found quickly (because your numbers are obvious nonsense):
President
R - 77.3m - 49.8%
D - 75.0m - 48.3%
Others - 2.9m - 1.9%
Senate
D - 55.9m - 49.1%
R - 54.4m - 47.7%
Others - 3.7m - 3.2%
House
R - 74.4m - 49.8%
D - 70.6m - 47.2%
Others - 4.6m - 3.1%
So fewer voters and constituents for a pretty significant majority in senators.
So if 49% of California voted Republican, but both Senators are Democrats, then the entire population they represent should be counted as Democrats.
A flawed argument.
It also completely ignores the entire reason the Senate exists in the first place, to represent the States.
What makes you say that Republican senators represent a minority of the population?
There is no real way to determine the population in each state represented by a party other than votes. The presidential vote tallies (the only truly national vote) are the closest we have to this. Numbers in the Senate are fairly close to the popular vote (not a coincidence).
If you study the U.S. history in detail the you see the reasons and the main ones are quite "logical".
You might not agree with them (I don't necessarily), but that doesn't make them illogical.
Additionally, because the population of the country is not evenly distributed across all the states, senators from some states have disproportionate power and control this is frequently mentioned and brought up several times in this post alone. Not sure what aspects make it a good system, some type of beleaguered point about preventing tyranny of the majority? At what cost? tyranny of the minority, political stagnation?
States have sovereignty and rights.
The point is that all states have equal representation.
> Not sure what aspects make it a good system, some type of beleaguered point about preventing tyranny of the majority? At what cost? tyranny of the minority, political stagnation?
Because states are political test tubes and need autonomy.
> Additionally, because the population of the country is not evenly distributed across all the states, senators from some states have disproportionate power and control
In my lifetime, the Senate has been majority Democratic party controlled [1].
If you go back to the second Bush term, it's been 60% Democrat.
The current party makeup is only temporary. Things are constantly in flux.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_divisions_of_United_Stat...
From the point of view of the U.S. legal system, the Confederacy's secession was "absolutely null".
> Chase, however, "recognized that a state could cease to be part of the union 'through revolution, or through consent of the States'".
Secession does not have to be done legally. Who knows what, if any, conflict that might bring about.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secession_in_the_United_States
Having 1 chamber that allows equal representation
And
Having 1 chamber that allows proportionate
Is a good system in theory. Otherwise, States (which are again separate entities) with high populations just steamroll those that have low populations.
The system now allows states with high populations to be appropriately represented in the house, which sends bills to the Senate.
I feel like it's a good system, in theory. You get your population representation and checks and balances for rural areas as well.
In theory, but in practice, most states are highly dependent on a few very populous and productive ones, for economic and military protection.
Not to mention that the Feds control the purchasing power of the currency and international trade, so the states aren’t sovereign to do anything of consequence.
Hence in practice, this whole theory of states being sovereign goes out the window.
> Arbitrary or not, States are sovereign things.
In practice that's not really true. The federal government has many, many levers it can use to get states to fall in line.
This is a separate problem that should be fixed.
Because tyranny of the majority is still a thing. Elections would just switch from swing states to appealing to California and Texas if we did everything with purely popular votes. So the house is there as a large power and senate can check it.
Of course, in practice the house is way under represented so its almost like we have a senate and a mini-senate. That's where things fall apart.
Aka democracy.
> Elections would just switch from swing states to appealing to California and Texas if we did everything with purely popular votes.
No, it wouldn’t. It would switch to appealing to the most voters, who may or may not happen to live in California and Texas, but that is irrelevant to a democracy.
Yes. I hope I don't need to explain the many times that the majority sentiment was in fact not the correct one. A pure democracy under the basis the US was founded under would end up much more conservative than what we have today.
> It would switch to appealing to the most voters.
So it'd switch to appealing to urban cities and ignore the rural areas. Iirc the top 10 cities today make up some 40+% of voters. Why bother going to Omaha when you can focus instead of LA and NYC?
I don't see why that would be the case. To win an election you don't need to win states at all; you need to win lots of voters, and those voters could come from anywhere.
You could lose every single voter in both CA and TX and still win the election, given different political demographics across states.
As an aside, I also think abolishing the Electoral College and going strictly by the national popular vote would increase voter turnout for presidential elections. I live in a solidly blue state, and if I didn't care about down-ballot races, I probably wouldn't bother to vote in presidential elections, since my vote doesn't really matter here. Only votes in swing states matter under the current system.
The founders knew exactly what they were agreeing to when they gave each State two Senators. It’s supposed to be a separate check on the Federal power to force a wide swathe of consensus.
Top 25 states: 2 Democrats - 52% 2 Republicans - 40% Split - 8%
Bottom 25 states: 2 Democrats - 36% 2 Republicans - 60% Split - 4%
Top quintile: 2 Democrats - 50% 2 Republicans - 40% Split - 10%
2nd quintile: 2 Democrats - 60% 2 Republicans - 30% Split - 10%
Middle quintile: 2 Democrats - 40% 2 Republicans - 60%
4th quintile: 2 Democrats - 30% 2 Republicans - 70%
Bottom quintile: 2 Democrats - 40% 2 Republicans - 50% Split - 10%
The very top and very bottom are a 55% to 45% split in either direction. It's not a heavy skew, a single party flip in the quintile from the majority to the minority would make it 50/50 even. Those quintiles cancel each other out when voting on party/caucus lines. It's actually the 2nd and 4th quintiles that have the biggest skews. Democrats take the 2nd quintile while Republicans take the 3rd and 4th.
The top & bottom quintiles don't cancel out, but rather support the same trend, which is that Republicans have more voting power per capita.
That said, I am surprised that the top & bottom quintiles are nearly balanced. I'll have to look up which bottom quintile states have Democratic senators.
I agree, the data does indeed show that Republicans have more voting power per capita, as they have advantages in the bottom 3 quintiles. However, I don't think the correlation of population to party (at the state level) is as extreme as some try to portray it. There are high population Republican states as well as low population Democratic ones. Vermont, Rhode Island, Delaware, and New Hampshire are Democratic states in the bottom quintile.
The top has 11 Democratic votes and 9 Republican votes. The bottom has 9 Democratic votes and 11 Republican votes. If they all vote on party lines it's a tie. So it's really the middle population states that give Republicans their current edge.
It's a frequent criticism that smaller states have outsized representation relative to their population. The US is not alone in this, the EU also has the same characteristic. Germany, the most populous, has over 150 times the population of Malta, the least populous, but only 16 times the amount of representation in parliament (96 MEP vs 6 MEP). By comparison, the largest state, California, has 37 times the population of the smallest, Wyoming, but 18 times the representation in Congress and the electoral college (54 vs 3). Granted, it's not an apples to apples comparison as the votes are divided between houses and the relative power of the EU vs the US federal government but it's a comparison nonetheless.
It's a compromise when trying to form a union of political entities that differ so greatly in size. The smaller entities obviously give up some sovereignty to their larger counterparts. The larger ones seem to have to have to reciprocate in a meaningful way to keep a voluntary union.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Jersey_Plan
I suppose, however, that the majority of low-population states were also frontier states, seems like a fairly compelling distinction.
Not so much, unless you consider Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Vermont to be "frontier" states in 1787. Actual frontier states like Georgia were in favor of the Virginia Plan as they figured their population would grow soon enough and they could take advantage of their eventual large population (with slaves being counted as 3/5 of a person) in a "Virginia Plan" world.
The Connecticut Compromise[0][3] ended up in the Constitution as a reconciliation of the Virginia Plan[1][4] and the New Jersey Plan[2][5], with the larger states supporting the Virginia Plan and smaller states supported the New Jersey Plan.
The above is incredibly abridged and ignores much context. As such, I strongly recommend you read Article I, Sections 2 and 3 of the US Constitution[7] (the result of the Connecticut Compromise) as well as the original Virginia and New Jersey plans, or at least the wikipedia pages I linked for a much better discourse on the topic.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connecticut_Compromise
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Plan
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Jersey_Plan
[3] The current system. Which differs from the original only in direct election of Senators, rather than them being appointed by state legislatures[6].
[4] Proposed a bicameral legislature with both houses apportioned by population.
[5] Proposed a unicameral legislature with one vote per state.
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeenth_Amendment_to_the_U...
[7] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/
Edit: Added the missing link.
Whether the founders intended that or not it's a shitty, unfair, and undemocratic system that doesn't act as a check, it just enables permanent minority rule.
Meanwhile, the house is about 10 times smaller than what the founders envisioned. Maybe that's overkill but we probably should at least expand the house quite a bit. And Probably expand the supreme court as well.
The fact that the most democratic part of the US government, the house of reps, is now the weakest part of the US legislature is ridiculous.
If we're dreaming up fixes, I'd say
1) Senate actions should require a strict majority. If anything should require super-majorities, it should be the House of Representatives.
2) The Senate should not be in control of appointments to the exclusion of House of Reps. No idea what the ideal system is there but the disproportionate body should not be more powerful than the proportionate body.
3) The Senate should be able to at most block an action for one term of Congress. That means that every Senate action can be overridden by an election. Which means the disproportionate body is effectively calling a referendum on legislation, instead of being a hard-stop.
This is, of course, exactly what the founding fathers intended. They disliked kings but they feared rule by common people and always intended there to be a privileged class of citizenry that does the actual ruling because people like you and me are just too ignorant to be trusted with that. That's why they excluded the vast majority of people from voting at all and those that were allowed to vote had their power diluted by various mechanistic means like capping the senate, flooring the house (and later capping it as well), using the electoral college to make sure that those precious few who vote at all don't vote incorrectly and having the least representative members of the executive and legislative branch select the judicial branch so that they're not swayed by "politics" (read: what the governed actually want).
And that's how we have a system that claims to be a democracy but where what people want is actually completely disconnected from what happens, and where "The opinions of 90% of Americans have essentially no impact at all" (https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba/).
Something being more democratic doesn't make it better by default. Hence why there's a bill of rights.
There is no way to prove this but who is your Representative without googling the naming, do you know them? Ever talked to them before?
My future perfect world:
proportional representation for assemblies (eg US House),
some arbitrarily low number of reps per citizens (200k - 400k?),
no upper assembly (eg US Senate),
approval voting for executive positions (eg Mayor, Sheriff, President),
only public financing of campaigns,
limit campaign season to maybe 6 weeks.
There's so many reasonable, impactful reforms which could be done. And my wishlist is based on my (imperfect) understanding of best available (political) science. And I'm all ears about SCOTUS reforms. And I doubt any reforms will stick, so long as our gini coefficient is so out of whack (wealth vs democracy, the timeless struggle).
We know, from comparative study of existing representative democracies, how to do that better (have an electoral system for the legislative branch that provides results that are substnantially more proportional than under the current system); what we don’t have is a practical way to get from where we are to where we need to be given the construction of the electoral systems in the states and nationally and the politicians and interests that has entrenched and the Constitutional amendment process.
States can reject dumb amendments. Congress proposes amendments, the states ratify them [1].
[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-5/
Do you mean the French Revolution? If you actually read the history on that (even basic stuff beyond the "Reign of Terror") I don't think any person would want to experience that for their country. It had tons of indiscriminate violence and took a decade of chaos before they sorted out into a real government, which then resulted in Napolean's coup
(I've read that the French are talking about a Sixth, given that they've gone through several prime ministers in the past few weeks/months and seem unable to maintain a government long enough to pass anything.)
[1] https://thegoodlifefrance.com/short-history-of-the-five-repu...
Quoting from the article:
Things came to a head in 1958 as France struggled to decolonize. There was strong opposition within France to Algerian independence and part of the army openly rebelled. Important generals threatened a coup unless de Gaulle was returned to power. They sent paratroopers to capture Corsica in case anyone missed their point.
Prussians, too. A lot of Europe seemed to not really feel one way or another about the plucky little colony but had very strongly defined feelings about damaging Great Britain.
I mean that it implies France didn't have several other revolutions.
We need ranked or approval voting, elimination of gerrymandering. Strongly prefer elimination of Citizens United and the Senate.
> Provided that no Amendment [...] no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.
(Awkward ellipsizing, but the elided text is another thing that's not allowed, which expired in 1808, and is otherwise thankfully no longer relevant.)
Better voting systems can be implemented, but since the states run federal elections, each state would have to pass legislation requiring a different voting system. Of course I expect all 50 would not agree on which alternative system is the best, which may or may not matter. And I doubt red states would want to change, as voting systems that better reflect the will of the electorate tend to disadvantage the GOP.
Eliminating gerrymandering is difficult, because it's hard to objectively define what is and isn't a gerrymandered map. There have been some attempts to do so, and I would say they've even been somewhat successful, but people can reasonably disagree with the methodology and thresholds used.
The Citizens United SCOTUS ruling and precedent absolutely needs to be reversed; agreed. Corporations are not people and should not get first amendment protections. Or any kind of protections outside any that are defined in regular law.
Another thing we need to do away with is the Electoral College. Presidents should be elected based on the national popular vote, not by per-state winner-take-all proxies, with vote apportionment that wildly advantages some states over others. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact would effectively do away with the EC if states "owning" at least 270 electoral votes were to all sign it, but that's unlikely to ever happen. (Then again, it's more likely that the Compact would achieve that threshold than the passing of a constitutional amendment to abolish the EC.)
We should amend it [0] so that any state may subdivide within its own borders without the consent of the Senate, provided that no subdivision is smaller (less-populous) than the smallest current state.
In other words, small states don't have to give up their disproportionate representation in the Senate... but they cannot use that power to monopolize being small either. Any state above a certain size (>2x the smallest) may decide that its constituents are best-served by fission.
This adheres to Article V, Section 5, since no state is being deprived of "equal suffrage": Each state has 2 senators, just like always.
However, that still ought to be California's decision to make, as opposed to minority Wyoming-gang's to veto. Even if a big state doesn't actually do it, having the latent option is itself a subtle influence on interstate politics.
For the other half the country, we really don't want to Federal laws to be decided by people in other states that don't share the same values. This is why state rights exist and will not be removed (at least in our lifetime).
Do you reject majority votes in general or do you merely propose explicit minority protections for non-urban communities?
If whatever city/state you live in wants to have majority-vote for all issues, please go do it.
Does your system of voting include anyone who just comes in or is restricted to only citizens with verified ID ? If the latter, then majority voting is completely fine.
The context was: "decided by people in other states that don't share the same values."
Funny people can look at Arabs or Indians and identify “these people have a diametrically opposed culture and cannot peacefully coexist with me”, but can’t extended that to people that look like them and are also diametrically opposed.
It’s delusional to try and maintain a country that’s developed such opposed cultures. You can try to force peace for a while, but it always bubbles back up.
Have the subcultures of the US diverged over time or does it just seem that way because it is easier to publish non-moderate opinions because of the internet?
I think a lot of people, particularly on the right, cannot define what they actually want this country to look like in 20-30 years or how it needs to get there.
Helped me understand a lot about modern america, but tldr, no it feels like its always been this way
Allow me to be "aggressive" as well:
For the other 60% of the country, we don't want Federal laws held up by people in arbitrarily drawn political districts and don't share our values regarding human rights and dignity. This is why, while states do retain broad rights to administer their internal affairs, spending and education, federal laws should be altered with a majority, excepting certain fundamental laws like the Constitution.
The closest thing we have is the amendment process. In theory we could use that to rewrite the entirety of the constitution[0], but good luck getting the required votes in place on any possible replacement. The bar is pretty high: amendments need to be proposed by either a vote of 2/3 of Congress, or by a constitutional convention convened by 2/3 of the state legislatures, and then ratified by 3/4 of all state legislatures.
We couldn't get that sort of agreement to pass something as theoretically uncontroversial as the Equal Rights Amendment. It's laughable to think we could pass a "new constitution" that way.
I expect the only way we could end up with a new constitution is through a bloody civil war, or some sort of coup. Hopefully no one wants something like that, though. I certainly don't.
[0] Technically the entirety of the constitution can't be amended; Article V, Section 5 prohibits an amendment from changing each state's equal representation in the Senate. Though I suppose a "rewrite amendment" might get around that by preserving the Senate as-is as a ceremonial body without any power. That would certainly violate the spirit of that wording in Article V, so I imagine it would be challenged in court.
- Corporate money should be out of politics
- Gerrymandering should be stopped
If we had amendments for these two things, it could change A LOT. Congress might actually be able to function. Corporate corruption could be prosecuted. We might be possible to put meaningful limits on corporate power.
Of course, the devil’s in the details. How do you write amendments for these two things in a way that actually accomplishes the goals? But though it would be difficult, I don’t think it would be impossible.
I mean given how much is already happening in America, I am just curious from a legal standpoint if there could be done something like that (forgetting the insane backlash but still), what could the president of america do to completely sieze the constitution ?
"In this region, I'm the ruler, and here we believe in TERF!".
That being said, there's always the option of just getting rid of the president's ability to overrule the people on criminal matters. We could probably go after state governors as well, that's just as rife with abuse.
Sounds reasonable. This is ok for Trump to do because of Hunter Biden.
I think I would support those pardons even though I think Trump and his family and his cronies are acting the way really bad people act.
Taking the above scenario as license to sell pardons for person gain is such a stretch it looks like bad faith to me.
And the dysfunction of congress probably works in our favor here since pardons should be exceptional - not routine. A routine pardon is just a demonstration of the justice department failing at a systemic level.
That sounds like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. For the branch of government in charge of making and changing laws.
If the branch responsible for making and changing laws was also responsible for the reversion of enforcing those laws - effectively what a pardon is - then there's absolutely no check on gratuitous law being passed.
I mean, it is a normal thing for a legislature to remove and amend old laws. That's not "a check," but it's a normal part of what it means to be a legislature. You're not just appending new laws, you're maintaining the entire set of laws.
And as for checks, judicial review is the obvious one.
And, in the systematic event that a law is passed that is grotesque - from the legislative, or in the individual event that a miscarriage of law is applied to an individual case - from the judicial; we need a quick check and balance for either scenario - and the Executive branch is (typically, and on average) the fastest-acting branch of the 3. Lest, one bad-faith branch can reliably depend on its complementary power to be too slow to act (which is happening now, in many ways).
As a result, the executive needs to add tension for either event, and just "Legislative <-> Judicial" having checks against one another in relation to laws, and the judicial proceedings concerning the laws, is not enough.
The threat is lateral, not vertical. The system works by equal tension, not hierarchy.
The "check" to this power itself is also the reach: A pardon does not reach state crimes or civil liability. And the "check" to the person with the power of a federal pardon (the President) is political removal and later criminal charges like bribery - subject to Article 1, Section 3, Clause 7 of the Constitution [1]:
"Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law."
1 - https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-3...
The Department of Justice is subordinate to the President as part of the executive branch with or without the pardon power; if you want something other than "the President overrides the Department of Justice" as a matter of Constitutional law rather than an intermittently-observed convention of restraint (which Trump absolutely has not observed outside of the pardon power), you need a fundamental reformation of the Constitutional structure of government, far beyond the elimination of the pardon power.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that while the President may remove executive officers, he cannot lawfully direct them to commit acts that are unconstitutional, obstruct justice, or violate statutory mandates. The constitutional structure also relies on normative independence - a separation within the executive branch that maintains rule of law. This is not a “convention of restraint” but an operational necessity derived from the Take Care Clause (“he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”). That clause doesn’t mean “whatever the President says is law”; it means the President must ensure that the law itself is enforced faithfully, even when doing so constrains his own interests.
Finally, while the pardon power is broad, it’s not the linchpin of executive authority over the DOJ. Removing or limiting that power wouldn’t change the fact that the DOJ’s prosecutorial discretion must still be exercised consistent with law, ethics, and constitutional constraints - not simply the President’s personal preferences. Our system is not designed for a monarch with “absolute control” over prosecutions. It’s designed for a chief executive bound by law and accountable through oversight, impeachment, and ultimately, the electorate.
The idea of the republic as opposed to a monarchy is that no part of the government is anyone's personal...well, anything...but that doesn't really negate the degree of control the President exercises, both in theory and in practice barring highly variable personal restraint, over the DoJ.
> The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that while the President may remove executive officers, he cannot lawfully direct them to commit acts that are unconstitutional, obstruct justice, or violate statutory mandates.
That doesn't mean the President doesn't override the DoJ, it means the President doesn't override the law.
> The constitutional structure also relies on normative independence - a separation within the executive branch that maintains rule of law.
Yes, that it relies on this but does not actually provide any mechanism by which it can effectively be assured is the fundamental design issue I am referring to being necessary to address if one wants "the President overrides the DoJ" not to be a simple fact independently of whether or not the pardon power exists and is vested in the President's discretion.
> Finally, while the pardon power is broad, it’s not the linchpin of executive authority over the DOJ.
I literally said that the pardon power is irrelevant to that, which is the exact opposite of describing it as the lynchpin.
> Removing or limiting that power wouldn’t change the fact that the DOJ’s prosecutorial discretion must still be exercised consistent with law, ethics, and constitutional constraints - not simply the President’s personal preferences.
To the extent that is true, that is only a negative constraint on prosecution applied by the courts, it can never compel a prosecution that the executive has declined. (Congress, of course, could punish the President for preventing prosecutions, via the impeachment power, but that’s hardly a substitute for real independence from the President of all or part of the prosecutorial power if that is what is desired. Or, for that matter, much of a remedy at all if more than 1/3 of the Senate is on board with the President's conduct.
1. The ability to dismiss the Attorney General at will (alternative: Congress)
2. The ability to pardon at will (alternative: Congress)
Remove those two Presidential powers, and the DoJ becomes much more independent.
Imho, the DoJ side of the judiciary branch is important enough to the separation of powers that this should have been done a long time ago.
You could probably make a good case that doing this for just the AG is still a good thing.
(Of course, federally, that becomes both a major Constitutional change and raises the question of how they would be elected? The same Electoral College that elects the President? A separate electoral college? Direct election unlike the President? Of course, the first problem is one with any means of making the DoJ independent of Presidential control.)
Strip it. I also started on the line of Congressional review (or pardons only activating on the consent of the Senate). But I concluded the entire power is out of place.
If the courts overreach, address it through legislation. Congress can annul sentences through law, no special pardon power needed. If a law is unfair or being applied unfairly, moreover, it should be fixed comprehensively.
There isn’t a place for one-man pardons in a republic. Even the imperium-obsessed Romans didn’t give their dictators, much less consuls, automatic pardon power. Caesar had to get special legislation to overrule the law.
Biden abused pardon power. So has Trump. Both parties have good reason for passing an amendment through the Congress. This is probably in my top 3 Constitutional amendment we need in our time. (Multi-member Congressional seats, popular election of the President and changing “the executive Power shall be vested in a President” to “the President shall execute the laws of the United States.”)
Past few?
How about Ford pardoning Nixon? Or George H.W. Bush pardoning a bunch of Iran-Contra conspirators, thus covering his own ass?
I certainly don't see how the pardon of Changpeng Zhao is worse than the pardon of President Richard Nixon or Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. Crimes committed in office by the highest officials in the US government are a whole different level than crimes committed by some corporate CEO.
Trump's pardons include hundreds of literal insurrectionists, promises to pardon in exchange for not testifying against him (witness tampering), and other blatant corruption. He fired the head of the OPA and installed a political hack to speedrun awful pardon choices and made a mockery of the process in a far more corrupt and damaging manner than anyone before him, and it's not even close.
I'm more concerned with the effects of the pardons on the country and on democracy than I am with judging the rectitude of the pardoner. Allowing the President to escape the law set a terrible precedent with obvious repercussions into the present.
I'm not trying to defend Trump. My point is that the stage was set for Trump. Abuses of executive power, of which I've given two egregious examples—Watergate and Iran-Contra—have been swept under the rug for far too long. To always "put the scandal behind and focus on the future" is to encourage future misbehavior. I would note that in stark contrast, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy has just gone to prison.
Granting pardons is not by itself a crime. Should pardons be eliminated or strictly limited? Sure. But pardons are not really the main issue with the Trump administration. Rather, the main issue is general lawlessness and abuse of power. When I mentioned setting the stage, I didn't mean setting the stage for granting pardons specifically but rather setting the stage for abusing executive power generally.
This is a strange take on my comments. To be absolutely clear: I object in the strongest possible terms to the crimes of the Nixon and Reagan administrations and to the subsequent pardons of Nixon and Reagan administration officials. I have no desire to legitimize those pardons, and indeed I think the pardon power should have been eliminated or at least strictly limited a long time ago. Moreover, I objected to your attempt to minimize those past scandals, which you described as "nothing".
Thus, my comments are in no way a defense or legimitimization of Trump. They become a defense of Trump only in your own mind when you insist on discounting the past, which I do not. And when I suggested that previous pardons set the stage for Trump, I meant that shielding the executive branch from the legal consequences of their crimes only emboldens someone like Trump to act without any fear of legal consequences for his own crimes in office. The terrible precedents set in the past have come back to haunt us in the present. Again, that's not "legitimization" in any sense.
And the prosecutors will ask who to prosecute.
Finally only fair justice!
... and is continuing to move further still ...
"Yeah well let the legal process play out ... in the meantime our guy gets to do whatever he wants, and you're still fired / kicked out of the country / funding cut / an so on".
If it is at all inconvenient for the most powerful folks in the country, they get any limits on their actions protected by SCOTUS ... at the cost of the people.
These are not only criminal cases, but also administrative and civil law relations.
in principle, there was no need to discuss this at all, usually those who do not understand the legal system and who have never been to court, cry about 99%.
Yesterday he was asked about this pardon and barely knew what was going on:
“I believe we’re talking about the same person, because I do pardon a lot of people. I don’t know. He was recommended by a lot of people,” Trump said.[0]
0: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/white-house/3861521/...
I remain amazed at how, again and again, no matter how specific and unique an abuse by the Trump administration is, it is always, invariably, Really Joe Biden's Fault. Like, the frame has been adopted by the MAGA base, but also the cranky left. The media does it too. Here on HN bothsidesism is a shibboleth that denotes "I'm a Serious Commenter and not a Partisan Hack".
But it leads to ridiculous whoppers like this, and ends up in practice excusing what amounts to the most corrupt regime in this country in over a century, if not ever.
No, this is just bad, on its own, absent any discussion about what someone else did. There was no equivalent pardon of a perpetrator of an impactful crime in a previous administration I can think of. I'm genuinely curious what you think you're citing?
Amen. Preach it, brother!
>No, this is just bad, on its own, absent any discussion about what someone else did. There was no equivalent pardon of a perpetrator of an impactful crime in a previous administration I can think of. I'm genuinely curious what you think you're citing?
I don't know what the poster was referring to, but I AM mad at Biden for pardoning his family. It's a molehill of an issue compared to the current administration though.
HN users don't necessarily do that because they want to. They might do it as a pre-emptive defense mechanism against the brigades of de-facto censors that roam the site.
Moderation via populism is an anti-feature on its face, but Hacker News has the worst possible version of that sort of feature by making downvoted/flagged comments completely hidden unless you are logged in and showdead.
It's a pretty horrendous system if you're interested in good faith and honest debate.
There are a number of reasonable posts in this very thread that are either already dead or on their way out - and I don't even agree with some of their positions.
(Honestly I think the moderation paradigm at HN has some bad externalities too, but really this isn't a solvable problem in the general case and nowhere does it well. The showdead mechanism at least makes the censorship visible to those who know where to look.)
The censors want Hacker News to keep its reputation as a place where you can have debates in good faith, while allowing their censorship powers to shape the conversation.
Pointing this behavior out upsets the calculus by warning their potential marks. So of course they want to strategically hide it.
When democratic norms erode like pardons becoming more acceptable, it's like laying tinder and kindling for a fire. You still need a fire; a bad actor who is willing to light the material on fire. That bad actor is Trump. But the warnings from abusing these limitations from previous administrations was exactly for this moment. Nobody is saying Trump isn't the bad one, he is. But the conditions were laid for him. Now we need to survive him.
When we look back at Roman Senators and Emperors, it's often hard as modern people to point to one, single bad figure because we don't have a lot of contemporary thought or reading from the time. But when we look back we can see the seeds of "decline" in eras rather than single figures.
And in context, you're doing exactly what I mocked above, tut tutting about civil behavior and norms and The Discourse while the system burns down around you.
But don't worry! You can always take solace in the fact that it was Really Barack Hussein Obama's Fault.
This is what happened to Trump though, the established politicians do not like him and did everything they could to stop him from running.
Again, this is a excuse-making whopper. The republican aisle in the senate refused to convict him twice, which would have prevented him from running. I won't argue "do not like him" in the abstract, but in practice established politicians in his party are 100% behind the guy.
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do then. I agree Trump is bad. Am I supposed to just say that 3 times and click my heels and then he'll go away?
These are observations designed around trying to make sure, once Trump is gone, that we don't get another Trump. I can't change the current President and this constant purity testing about hating Trump changes nothing.
The reason Trump will have to blatantly violate the Constitution if he tries to run again is because the country was so spooked after FDR's third term that it limited Presidential terms. One could have made the same argument then, the only reason FDR ran a 3rd term is because he's FDR and a different person wouldn't do that. But that amendment is why there's a bright line around a 3rd term now.
Not equivocate.
If I caveat my statements a million ways to convince you that I'm not equivocating then will Trump stop being President?
You're also simply incorrect, which is why I'm spending the bytes to try to correct you.
Refocus you're attention. The problem is not with the pardon power. You said:
> That bad actor is Trump. But the warnings from abusing these limitations
But that's the thing, the pardon power is not supposed to be limited. How would you limit it? Who would actually tell the President "No" and on what authority? The obvious choices are Congress and the Courts but they already checks to balance the the President. That's why they can't check it -- the pardon power is the President's check on them (along with the veto power).
Hamilton said:
"Without an easy access to exceptions in favor of unfortunate guilt, justice would wear a countenance too sanguinary and cruel."
So then how do we fix it if not by adding laws and rules? We don't elect people like Trump, who think they are above the law. That's it. I know it seems kind of glib but it's not a high bar to just avoid malignant narcissists.
The reason Trump is abusing the pardon power is because he does not consider what he's doing an abuse. He sees that he has the "right" to do it under the Constitution, and to him, anything he has the right to do, he can do. And you know what, despite him being abusive he does have the right. But that's the thing, we gave him that right, and we can take it away and give it to someone else who won't abuse it.
That is the actual check on the pardon power, but that's on us. It's on us because Trump abused the pardon power in his first term by dangling pardons in front of Paul Manafort when he was being investigated by the DOJ, so none of this should be a surprise to anyone. Obama's "abuses" and Bidens "abuses" are on everyone's lips here, but not a single word for Trump's 1st term abuses (mine is the first mention of the Manafort pardon in over 1000 comments). So if you really want the root cause of his power abuse beyond his psychopathology, it's that -- because not only did we not care he did that, we actually reelected him as he promised to abuse his power during the campaign, so why wouldn't he actually do it?
Right but he is the President. I didn't vote for him. I donated and canvassed for the Harris campaign. But Trump won. So what are we getting by making 1000 internet comments of which 800 are about how bad Trump is?
This whole exchange reminded me why I don't participate in politics on HN. It's all just venting. I'll stick to doing things like canvasing and not reading the anxieties of HN commenters.
Yeah, and that he specifically is President should tell you something -- maybe the fight isn't at the pardon power.
> So what are we getting by making 1000 internet comments of which 800 are about how bad Trump is?
We might come to understand the root of the problem is the psychology of a specific individual and the cult that surrounds him, rather than what Obama did a decade ago. It's not that Obama's use of the pardon power caused a slippery slope of executive overreach that has resulted in today's corrupt pardons. We are not dealing with "overreach" here, what's happening today is categorically different.
> This whole exchange reminded me why I don't participate in politics on HN. It's all just venting.
I dunno, hopefully in this exchange you've learned that the pardon power is not supposed to be limited under the Constitution and why, so now you can stop making arguments that we should limit the pardon power. When you take that off the table, viable solutions become easier to spot. Limiting the pardon power is not viable because there is no Constitutional mechanism to do so. Under the Constitution, any limits put in place can just be ignored by the next POTUS who decides he wants to ignore them.
I made no policy prescriptions whatsoever.
> When you take that off the table, viable solutions become easier to spot.
So do you have a viable solution here?
> When Obama really increased the number of pardons, a lot of contemporary opinion writers said stuff along the lines of "this is a dangerous precedent and we're lucky that the pardons are fairly popular and sane." ... the warnings from abusing these limitations from previous administrations was exactly for this moment. Nobody is saying Trump isn't the bad one, he is. But the conditions were laid for him.
I take this to mean that Obama had abused his power past his authority, and you used the word "limitations" here to mean that there are some sort of institutional or structural limits which he was exceeding, thus paving the way for the current abuses.
The implication is that if Obama had stayed within the bounds (which bounds?) then the condition would not have been laid for Trump to do what he's doing.
My point is the conditions were there whether or not Obama did what he did, because the power never had limits, never was intended to have limits, because the limiting factor was not electing a bad guy. If any conditions were laid, they were by the Founders in how they structured the Constitution and the pardon power. They just didn't think that with elections, the electoral college, impeachment, and the insurrection clause we would be dumb enough to actually elect an insurrectionist.
> So do you have a viable solution here?
Nope! I mean, as far as the Trump administration goes they are going to burn themselves out, the only question is how much damage they are going to do on the way down and what the blast radius is. The important question now is what to do with America after that happens and I don't know what that looks like. Maybe balkanization, I dunno depends how bad it gets. If some key Republicans come to their senses this can be solved relatively quickly and painlessly, then we can talk about revising the Constitution. Otherwise who knows.
What is the alternative? One of them is the public vote for a leader, the state destroys that leader (or his allies, etc) and then what? Do we think the public just says “Oh, well, I guess we didn’t pick the right guy?”
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5568271-hunter-b...
https://www.justice.gov/pardon/pardons-granted-president-don...
Also it's not like the democrat did not weaponize the justice to put trump in jail for 4 consecutive years.
Trump went to jail? News to me.
Up until the election he seemed very willing to let Hunter face the music.
Every decent father would've done the same thing.
- double dissolution to sack the government
- make the election a public holidayIf anything, it's better he was rejected for the job, as getting it would have provided an incentive to bury the prosecution.
Better yet, there are a ton of cases since the 1980s prosecutors exploiting technicalities and mandatory minimum sentencing laws to get nonviolent drug offenders imprisoned for 10+ years on simple possession (not to to sell drugs, not PWID, just possession).
another part is thankful that he is there as a proof that you can get to a high status and high relevance role in society and still mantain your humanity, your inner child alive, not being robotic and just have a blast doing whatever the f you want.
There is no point getting to the top if you then lose all your humanity and playfulness.
Like if the condition to become President were to become a robot like Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden, thanks no, I pass....Trump on the other hand is the best of both worlds.
I am getting Poe's Law'd … right?
He's sending people to concentration camps & bombing boats in the Caribbean and Pacific. He's deported American children. Treatment of asylum seekers, treatment of immigrant's children, wanton discrimination against minority groups…
Humanity? Playfulness?
What the fuck?
TRUMP: Which one was that?
COLLINS: The founder of Binance
TRUMP: I believe we're talking about the same person, because I do pardon a lot of people. I don't know. He was recommended by a lot of people.
And I mean, wasn't the last Administration effectively Autopen? Yes, the President receives recommendations and tries to make the best judgement on those.
What would Biden's answer be for pardoning Fauci?
Leticia James. Lisa Cook. James Comey. Also he didn't break any laws?
> Trump has pardoned over 1000 people and Joe Biden has pardoned over 4000.
The numbers don't really mean much when it's pardoning classes of people (marijuana convictions, insurrectionists, etc.).
“Which one, who was that?” Trump asked.
“The founder of Binance,” Collins continued. “He has involvement in your own family’s crypto business.”
“The recent one? I believe we’re talking about the same person, because I do pardon a lot of people,” Trump said. “I don’t know. He was recommended by a lot of people. A lot of people say that — Are you talking about the crypto person? A lot of people say he wasn’t guilty of anything, he served four months in jail, and they say that he wasn’t guilty of anything.”
As Collins attempted to clarify, Trump jumped in, saying, “Well, you don’t know much about crypto — you know nothing about nothing, you fake news!”
Trump then continued answering the question.
“He was somebody, as I was told — I don’t believe I have ever met him — but I’ve been told he had a lot of support. And they said what he did is not even a crime. That he was persecuted by the Biden administration. And so I gave him a pardon at the request of some very good people.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-scolds-kaitlan-col...
Rich drug dealers: Freedom.
Be a rich drug dealer.
Poor criminal: jail/death penalty/etc.
Rich criminal: freedom
We're lucky Venezuela hasn't attacked us back yet.
The speed boats hauling ass in international waters are known smugglers on known routes using customized craft only drug smugglers use.
Policy of vaporizing these boats with weapons is both a) fairly effortless target practice for our military and b) puts major financial strain on that drug cartel operation.
Even if what they say is true, destroying boats with people on them without proof is wild.
Do you actually think this is a possibility? How do you see that playing out?
I imagine sooner or later, they will stop our black ops boats from shooting people.
Hell, even Trump wouldn't be that bold if he didn't know Venezuela has no will, or means, of putting him at risk.
In that case, going against UK in an unwinnable war was a way to preserve his regime, as long as no bombings were made targeting him, so he could still protect his life. UK is not as ruthless in war as, say, USA or Israel, IMO that was a calculated risk to prolong the end.
Do you also assume all black SUVs with tinted windows are drug smugglers? Because it's the same level of evidence. ie: it isn't.
Imagine the US instead pulling the ship over and shooting every person, regardless of age or guilt, in the head—and then leaving. This is no different.
CZ was pardoned for a single charge of failure to have an effective compliance program. No fraud, no victims, no criminal history. No money laundering.
CZ is the first and only known first-time offender in U.S. history to receive a prison sentence for this single, non-fraud-related charge. The judge found no evidence that he knew of any illicit transactions and that it was reasonable for him to believe there were no illicit funds on the platform.
Trump is a very twisted person, and this makes the US look bad, but the underlying crime was "compliance."
He was sentenced to 4 months in prison. He already served that time and got out.
So what does a parden get him? No criminal record?
This pardon seems rather minor to me.
He was accused of not having adequate know your customer compliance measures to prevent money laundering.
Not like he stolen customer funds.
These controls are mostly performative, but Binance wildly flouted them. This pardon means that basically no crypto company needs to worry about AML now, which is bad for the world.
The reason that nobody gets convicted for this is because they have somewhat adequate controls, whereas Binance basically welcomed money launderers with open hands.
But you are right the AML controls were weak, and CZ was convicted for this. KYC requirements arrived to Binance very late. But they were not convicted of fraud (like Sam Bankman-Fried from FTX). No users lost money. A lot of commenters get this wrong.
The US banks get slapped for similar compliance breaches all the time e.g.:
https://qz.com/bank-of-america-bofa-occ-bank-secrecy-act-bsa...
This is a super, super low bar. One can meet the BSA requirements by sending every transaction to the regulators, but Binance didn't even do that.
Yes.
If a CEO of any major US or EU bank would overnight decide to terminate its mere 'compliance' program, they would absolutely get convinced.
Big banks spend more than $1 billion each a year on compliance, i.e. abiding by the law. CEOs of banks that don't, get convinced, period.
It's like saying hospitals have been hiring people without credentials as doctors, or airlines hiring people with no credentials as pilots etc etc, and they were convinced for this 'compliance' issue, even though the case did not (try to) determine victims, criminal history or fraud. Yes, that's absolutely normal.
Financial institutions must put in place measures to prevent money laundering, if they don't, they get convinced, even without having to determine whether money laundering took place. Just like a hospital gets convinced if it knowingly as a policy hires people as doctors without credentials, even without having to determine if there were victims. This is completely normal.
It's hard to count how many purely political and money-based pardons Trump has done this term, and there is essentially no pushback on his side.
Per wikipedia, Clinton's defense was that it was actually a favor to Israel, given Rich helping to finance their intel services. Maybe everybody else knew this, I didn't.
I mean, in all honesty, if our system is going to allow the grift and one is amoral enough to do so, have at it. It may catch backup later.
And just like the Great Leap Forward, America is well on its way to letting many thousands die from lack of healthcare.
Do you not believe that Trump, who threatened extrajudicial killings of drug smugglers today [1], isn't going to abuse that power to murder any citizen he doesn't like?
Do you not believe Trump is a fascist, white supremacist, rapist, 34 time convicted felon, rapist, and pedophile?
I would suggest not equating libertarian policies with systemic genocide. How about we calm down?
>Do you not believe that Trump, who threatened extrajudicial killings of drug smugglers today [1], isn't going to abuse that power to murder any citizen he doesn't like?
I don't see any evidence of that yet
>Do you not believe Trump is a fascist, white supremacist, rapist, 34 time convicted felon, rapist, and pedophile?
I think he's a 34 time convicted felon, but I haven't confirmed the number.
Accelerationism is to a simulacrum as the thing being accelerated (society) is to the simulation thereof (our idea of society).
Accererationism is what accelerationism does. It disrupts the status quo, for good/bad/otherwise, and largely independently of our personal stance on the goodness, badness, and/or desirability of said disruption.
The current volatility in the market is one aspect of accelerationism, and it seems to be working, in that the markets are still open for trading; many are making out like bandits. Perhaps that volatility as a market opportunity is the point.
Whether or not banditry is occurring is left as an exercise to the reader.
Bad news: They are getting the kickback money.
I truly want to know of a better way to have discussions on a topic of this importance.
President Count
--------------------------------
Joe Biden ~8,064 |
Donald Trump ~237 |
Barack Obama ~1,927 |
George W. Bush ~200 |
Bill Clinton ~459 |
George H.W. Bush ~77 |Biden pardoned thousands of non-violent low-level marijuana convictions, which is why the numbers look like that. Trump pardoned a large number of violent protesters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_pardoned_or_gra...
I don’t like trump. But “CZ” basically paid a ransom to let Binance come in from the cold. Why shouldn’t he pay another to get a clean slate and maybe go back to being CEO?
Instead of just commenting about being dismayed with the state of things, how about step back and speculate as to why he did this pardon, and what the implications of it are.
I don't know the answer to either, but I surely didn't learn much from what used to be an insightful, intelligent crowd
The dismay is from not needing to speculate, wonder or theorize about why he did this pardon. It's a quid pro quo pardon for helping the Trump family make billions of dollars in under a year using the office of the president. The corruption is entirely flagrant and open.
Yeah, it's a forum of smart people, but none of those smarts are oriented to dealing with this kind of problem. There's a system but it's non-functional, laws but they're ignored, the tools are raw political and social power. It's going to take a while to figure out what to say and do about the slide from normal, functioning democracy into semi-theocratic banana republic.
https://www.connecticutcriminallawyer.com/blog/trump-adminis...
If you have access to people in positions of government influence, it's a good time to accept bribes from foreigners, especially via cryptocurrency. But if that is you then you probably already know that.
FCPA addresses bribery of foreign governments...
In this case, FCPA hinders American companies from competing in foreign locales where greasing the local wheels is a requirement for getting things done. Like it or not, this is the world we live in but an argument could be made that dropping enforcement is pragmatic.
But as you probably know, practically speaking it's not feasible to enforce every law on the books at all times, so the balance of laws enforced tells you about the priorities of a government. This one sees white collar crime as a feature, not a bug.
What issues do you see with not prosecuting Americans for following local customs? The places where the bribery happens can already jail the US citizens committing the bribery. The US doesn't prosecute Americans for smoking weed in Amsterdam even if it's illegal in the US.
What do you mean it's not a crime? The only thing the pardon does is remove his criminal record.
Seems like we are getting the worst aspects of countries like China (anti-democratic 1 party rule, state directed oligarchy, targeting of ethnic minority groups) with none of the best aspects of China: strong investment in education, research, and modern infrastructure like high speed trains and zero carbon electricity production.
Maybe mimicking authoritarianism isn't the answer to our problems.
There is, and the Constitution says the limit is impeachment and removal from office by Congress. That won't happen unless we fix how we talk about the ones responsible, to wit:
The Republican Party pardoned these criminals. The Republican Party is snatching Americans off the streets. The Republican Party is using the military to murder people on boats. The Republican Party is demolishing down the White House. The Republican Party is deporting people over free speech. The Republican Party has imposed the biggest tax increase in living memory with tariffs/import-taxes. The Republican Party is going pay itself your tax dollars in "lawsuit settlements".
There were 4 years of his first term and now 10 months of... all this. Today there is zero possibility of an oversight or mistake, any legislator who won't impeach and convict is choosing to support these things.
Nothing will improve while those legislators believe the blame will sail past them and stick solely to Trump.
You can get a quarter of the country to say yes or not care for any given question no matter how obviously dangerous or stupid. But having a 25% approval rating would be very, very bad.
https://upnorthnewswi.com/2025/10/20/wisconsin-soybean-farme...
What do they care about? Price of groceries? Health care maybe?
I assure you, they are not.
> You think they're too dumb to understand the difference between "tearing down" and "renovating"?
Are you? You think the East Wing is being "renovated"?
Renovation is renewal, repair, restoring function and safety.
What's happening instead? Knocking the safe and functional East Wing flat (walls, roof, both floors, 30+ internal rooms) and replacing it with a completely new structure with new foundations and a different purpose... and with a new footprint larger than the entire White House of 2024!
Nowhere even remotely close to the same thing. Might as well brag that you "repaired" your sedan by selling it and buying a new truck.
They aren't demolishing the entire White House...
Bingo.
Renovation is as your interlocutor says, a restoration. Remodeling is what is happening there, tearing apart something and putting something new in its place. It's a more drastic and expensive work.
Most people understand that any sort of "remodeling" or "renovation" often requires some demolition first.
Incessant semantic pedantry? You mean like stridently defending that Trump is not destroying the White House, in response to a comment that didn’t claim that Trump was destroying the White House?
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/devastating-poll-reveals...
The life expectancy tables are kinda against it though
Life-expectancy tables for multimillionaires and national politicians are probably significantly different.
but that's probably not what he meant.
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5519134-lindsey-graham-d...
At one point I would have agreed, but then in 2017, McCain made his "We will regret what we are about to do" speech before the R's removed the filibuster requirement for the Gorsuch confirmation. And as an Arizona voter, I switched my registration from Independent to Democrat.
> “I fear that someday we will regret what we are about to do. In fact, I am confident we will,” said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. “It is imperative we have a functioning Senate where the rights of the minority are protected regardless of which party is in power at the time.” > > Nonetheless, McCain voted with McConnell on the rules change, saying he felt he had no choice.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/senate-gop-invokes-nucle...
People are complaining because Trump is doing it. Nobody would care - hell, the media would probably excitedly talking about the plans - if it were anyone else.
Bull! People would complain for any President who:
1. Lied to everyone promising it "wouldn't interfere with the current building." [0]
2. Broke federal laws which have always governed changes to these public properties and landmarks.
3. Unconstitutionally spent funds Congress did not approve-of, which applies regardless of whether those funds came in as taxes or as donations.
Feel free to detail what other President did the same actions and nobody cared. Trump's bad reputation comes from his bad actions like these, not the other way around.
At this point it's just brainwashing. Some people's principals are clearly less about their own conviction and treating all this like a sports team. Whoever team "wins", even if the stadium burns down around them.
Conflict of interest by attempting to curry favor for his vanity project by making donations? That's a fair criticism.
Remember that Mexico allegedly would pay for the wall.
So either Trump is doing this officially as a President, but with funding that is illegal/unconstitutional...
... Or the funding is legal, but Trump is doing it as a private citizen, which is a federal crime. [0]
[0] https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...
Does Trump paying himself $230 million in taxpayer dollars in compensation for his various criminal prosecutions fit under "waste, fraud, and abuse"?
Learn more at TrumpIsKing.gov”
Another (more charitable?) explanation is they just never make the connection:
> It’s easy to find authoritarians endorsing inconsistent ideas. Just present slogans and appeals to homey values, and then present slogans and bromides that invoke opposite values. The yea-saying authoritarian follower is likely to agree with all of them. Thus I asked both students and their parents to respond to, “When it comes to love, men and women with opposite points of view are attracted to each other.” Soon afterwards, in the same booklet, I pitched “Birds of a feather flock together when it comes to love.” High [Right-Wing Authoritarian scorers] typically agreed with both statements, even though they responded to the two items within a minute of each other.
-- https://theauthoritarians.org/ (2006 ebook)
Joe in Walmart thinks what Facebook memes and Fox News tell him to think. The same subversive forces that support the administration's lawlessness control the media diet of a plurality of Americans.
If you want Americans to care about wants going on, you have to inform them about it first.
Why do you think most US presidents wait until the end of their term to pardon people?
I think at this point whatever policy differences between us are probably secondary to just putting people in power, literally anyone, who aren't so corrupt it would be called too heavy handed in fiction.
One can argue China is a democracy, they have elections as well.
I don't see why not
Sweet child. It was never a full democracy, I'd qualify it as a developing democracy, depending on how much damage this administration does, and when does USA enact the urgent reforms needed to transform into a full-fledged democracy.
Right now it's an oligarchy, capitalism as a political system. Money is a crucial component of campaigns, bribery is rampant, impunity becomes progressively less subtle. It had good PR after WW2 though, but reality hasn't matched the propaganda.
I say it from another eroding democracy, it seems like true democracies are incompatible with populous countries.
- Bill Clinton: 459
- George W. Bush: 200
- Barack Obama: 1,927
- Donald Trump (first term): 237
- Joe Biden: 4,245
- Donald Trump (second term): 1,600
"he is seeking to undo “disproportionately long sentences compared to the sentences they would receive today under current law, policy, and practice.”
4000 of Biden's pardons were mass pardons. 1500 of Trump's second term pardons are also a mass pardon of Jan 6, a decision I completely agree with. I would have pardoned them too because people were losing their minds over it to the point of not being able to be productive anymore. Honestly I feel the same way about the stupid laptop thing, you all clearly can't be normal about it so I'm ending it.
Honestly I suspect fear of Trump is really their only motivation right now.
If Republican voters were capable of being disgusted enough, it would have happened by now.
If one wanted to get in on the Trump grift, and had no moral qualms, how would you do it?
Can you come up with a realistic fast path to snag, say, $5 million within 2 years from Trumpland?
But they've recently lost a key connection to the broader MAGA youth movement. A quick-witted young person with good public-speaking skills and a psychopath's morals could step into that role without much difficulty, perhaps acting as a bundler for GOP political contributions that could then be skimmed. The retirement plan sure sucks, though. And you wouldn't want to be too overt about it, or you'd risk ending up like Steve Bannon.
It may also be possible to get in with the Girardist movement associated with Peter Thiel and J. D. Vance. A few weeks' intensive study would likely allow you to sling eschatological BS with the best of them. You'd get paid on the lecture circuit, again following the trail blazed by Charlie Kirk, spreading the good news about mimetic theory and the bad news about Greta Thunberg.
Then there's the covert approach. Karl Rove has long since quit the field, Lee Atwater is dead, and Roger Stone isn't getting any younger. There's always money on the table if you're willing to do what the other guy won't. Trouble is, there are plenty of people willing to do anything for Trump, now that the rewards have become so transparently obvious. The same question keeps coming up... in a field full of seasoned crooks, what can new talent do to get noticed by the right people and overlooked by the rest?
It's gotta be more low-effort and high-confidence. I'm thinking more like: incorporate a company with a mission of "Providing AI without woke bias." The product would be simply GPT-OSS behind a system prompt of "You are a Fox News host" and a simple guardrail, wraped in a generic web and mobile UI. It'd be a couple of days of vibe coding and setting up AWS backend. Now, how do you legally funnel a few million into your pockets from that?
It is a power used very sparingly, even though legally it is unlimited - the state of New South Wales is, as far as I know, the only one which publishes details about uses of the pardon power; in an average year there are 0 successful pardon/commutation applicants, and it's an exceptionally merciful year if they grant 2 or more. Other states and the federal government may or may not be a bit more generous, but we're talking very small numbers. Most pardons are for reasons of unsafe convictions where for whatever reason no remaining avenues of appeal are available (rare, these days, because each state has introduced laws to enable post-conviction reviews).
Historically, particularly in the 19th century convict era, the pardon power was much more important, and was indeed abused for political reasons on a number of occasions, but it seems that for the most part it quietly exists in the background and only gets significant public attention once every blue moon for a high-profile murder case or similar.
What explains the difference? Is it the requirement for sign-off by the King's viceroys that prevents abuse? Collective Cabinet governance that is accountable to Parliament? Maybe our political culture means politicians' friends tend to end up in prison less often and thus there's less opportunity for the abuse of pardons specifically? It's not particularly clear to me - if anyone's got some good comparative studies send me links!
The parliamentary countries like Australia just have made it so that they forever encroach in civil liberties and hide it all in bureocracy and pretend things work as intended and that democracy is working but when it was covid time they utterly crashed dissent. Same with most cases of effective opposition to power. The first in line to try and control the internet, speech and more from its citizens who don't even notice it that much because it's so ingrained in the culture of self censorship.
Having said that, yes, the pardon powers are ridiculous and they're being used more and more in ridiculous ways like this one from trump or the "pardon for everything just in case, for future and past" from Biden.
So the pardon only removes the criminal conviction?
It has zero impact on the time he served.
This doesn’t seemed like the outrageous situation from reading comments.
In any case it appears that not only funds are safu, but Zhao is safu as well.
How is this not outright corruption?
Market manipulation has been the norm for many years because nobody did anything to stop it.
Pardoning criminals is becoming the new normal. Next normal is going to be launching wars to distract public and is going to cost a lot of lives.
Idiots... They see as a positive thing or just ignore it
scrlk•3mo ago