The outcome of that discussion should worry Americans.
Unless you mean it like, "countries have no friends", but that's not a very interesting observation.
American power today stems from its power, military and fiscally (which is also backed militarily).
Most countries in the world today are allied to the US out of economic, trade and defense necessity and co-dependence, because all other alternatives are worse for them due to the immense asimetric power disparity.
This might shock you but most countries in the world don't like the US government and its policies, especially after their illegal invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, but have no way to push back without negative repercussions to their economy, so they have to play along as allies whether they like it or not for their own good.
Feel free to down vote all you want, but I'm not revealing anything new or controversial here but it's the truth as all countries, kingdoms and empires throughout history have had alliances with others they didn't like, out of sheer necessity. Same how we in the liberal west have also been trading and having economic ties with the CCP, post-Crimean invasion Russia, Erdogan's Turkey and middle eastern countries that assassinate our journalists, as capitalism post-USSR collapse has prioritized monetary enrichment over fighting for upholding a western ideology.
Canada is making deals with China. That's an incredible own goal by the US.
Plus, I don't think replacing the US with China, a dictatorship that's running slave labor camps, has no human rights or freedom of speech, no freedom of religion, etc, as the main world superpower, is the best idea.
So, how people can promote cozying up to the CCP as some sort of win just to stick it to Trump, is beyond me. It's as narrow minded as the people who were promoting Russian gas dependency as some sort of political victory, until it bit them in the ass and is now costing us through the nose. Why don't people learn from history that cutting your nose to spite your face is not a wise long term strategy?
As bad as Trump is he's only got 3 more years in power until next elections while the CCP is a forever evil pretending to be your friend playing the Embrace Extend Extinguish long game.
And even in the "best case" scenario where trump does not win that next election, what are you left with then?
A new reality where potentially the office of the president has widely increased powers. Depending on what the supreme court says on wednesday the president will now be able to raise tarrifs at will, send the army into domestic cities at will, have the army kill foreign civil citizens we are not at war with at will and a massively expanded ICE agency which will be really hard to downsize for later administrations.
And everything you just said after that, China is 100x worse at those things. So this isn't the "US bad, China better partner" gotcha you were hoping to be.
Also, I wasn't comparing the US to anyone, I don't care what China is doing. I was just listing the direction that the US democracy is heading in under Trump. And that direction is a systemic extension of presidential powers that go largely unchecked. The Wednesday ruling of the Supreme Court will be a watershed moment in this case, if they will not check his overreach on tariffs, I doubt that they will check anything that Trump is doing.
Trying to gain independence from the USA is sorely needed. Smaller countries have no choice but to play both sides.
The US consumer base is driven by debt, which is unsustainable. So it just makes sense strategically: https://impaxam.com/insights-and-news/blog/us-consumer-healt...
The US also doesn't have freedom of speech anymore. Daily attacks on the free press, wrongful arrests, censorship of government agencies, extortion of Universities. Also, ICE has disappeared activists who were legally in the US. It's becoming Trump's gestapo real quick.
Don't close your eyes to the harsh reality. The US has had mass incarceration on the same footing as slave labor camps for decades now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
There might be freedom of religion, for now. But there's no freedom from religion: https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/the-terrible-10-church-...
Nobody believes the current trend will end with Trump. The corruption, internal divisions, feelings of grandeur and bullying will not end with this regime. And there are a lot reasons to believe Trump will not cede power.
Alliances form out of fear.
Fear of being crushed by the US military.
The largest Air Force in the world? US Air Force.
Second largest Air Force? US navy.
The last US military action widely regarded as a success was the first Gulf war but, I didn't know about you, but I like my successful military actions to come without a part II.
Afghanistan is extremely difficult to control and has been for thousands of years.
Alexander the Great's army was garbage. He managed barely by marrying a local noblewoman after a long and frustrating campaign. He had the benefit of not being on the opposite side of the planet. America had to fly over Iran to get there. Super easy.
The British were garbage. The first Anglo-Afghan war went .... poorly. They had the same experience as the US forces. The second Anglo-Afghan war went great! They defeated the Afghan army! A few months later they lost Kabul, their forces collapsed immediately, being slaughtered again by Afghanis. They reinvaded, failed, and retreated. They would have totally won if they had an air force.
The Soviet military was garbage. They struggled for a decade to prop up their own government there. (Sound familiar yet?)
There was a third Anglo-Afghan war. This time the British won handily. Just kidding, they failed yet again, like everyone else.
This is like me telling you: "If you're so smart, why aren't you a billionaire?" Well, that isn't how it works, is it?
Geography is the same reason Iran will never be invaded by a land army.
Which country do those Dutch people think is the better one?
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-countries-with-the-b...
this negative-space begs-the-question story-telling that is popular lately feels weird.
"And you know what he said Tommy?"
If you want to tell us about public sentiment towards Americans then just do it -- don't pawn the social liability off on your Dutch friends.
But let me take a guess : they really liked us and were in-tune with social policies and hopeful for the future. ...Right?
It's just that Americans act like they are the best country in the world, while they never top a single positive index. American life and culture are not attractive to Europeans and you have beautiful art all over the world.
And hey, I grew up in a culture that loved the USA. There are lots of countries where that's the opposite.
Remember, this deeply unserious regime wants us to trust them: https://www.whitehouse.gov/mysafespace/
It may be a "presidential" power to pardon on paper, but the reality is that unless the President (or in other countries with powers of clemency to the head of state, whoever wields that power) intervenes personally for whatever reason, petitions for clemency pass through layers of bureaucracy, reviews and meetings. And sometimes, that also includes that candidates get inserted into the process by influential aides - something that has been the case for a lot of Presidents on either side of the aisle.
Of course, the issue gets a bit more spicy given Trump's derogatory nickname of "Autopen" Biden, but leaving that aside it's no surprise to me that a US President isn't involved in dealing with clemency petitions all that much.
Zhao manages Binance upon which Trump's nefarious crypto operation - World Liberty Financial is hosted.
Zhao is guilty of wilfully ignoring a lot of very bad and illegal activity by all sorts of bad actors.
World Liberty Financial is receiving $100's of millions inbound, coincident with 'deals' made by US and Middle East actors etc..
WLF is co-managed by Steve Witkoff, the 'real estate magnate' who has been charged with Middle Easter nand Russia negotiations (who by the ay has absolutely no diplomatic background, historical context or understanding of this situations and is deeply unqualified) and who notably has been entering into negotiations and discussion with foreign parties without any US State Dept personnel. Sometimes not even translators.
Subsequent to those 'deals' with Qatar etc. which the Administration indicated there would be up to $1T invested in the US ... Qatar and other regimes have been flushing massive amounts of noney into WLF, hosted on Binance, overseen by Zhao.
The potentiality fore corruption is hard to overstate.
> this is possibly an extremely dangerous and corrupt action
Sadly it appears we live in that insane timeline where both sentences can be true.
_ the "most harmless" thing this admin did
/
+---------------------------------------------+-----+
\_ 100% harmless \_ 100% horrible
The thing is, in the corruption surrounding the President, that's still small fish. $TRUMP alone was worth 13 billion dollars, $MELANIA was at 1.7 billion dollars. And that's just these two meme coins, not going into all the other shenanigans - he and his family are expected to have made 3 billion dollars since the election [1] in personal wealth gain.
[1] https://qz.com/donald-trump-net-worth-presidency-business-co...
The Trump administration doesn't care any more if they get caught red handed. They don't need to. Most of the media has been bought off in Orban style and subsequently silenced (e.g. WaPo) or subjected to lawfare (see the recent broadcast TV scandals), and the hardcore voter base doesn't care about anything any more, as long as "their side" is perceived as "winning".
It would appear the these things are less an act of the President as a fully informed person making decisions and more of the final rubber stamp on something that staff that he's picked have decided on.
Given that, I wouldn't expect him to personally know what he is signing. If, as I suspect, these pardons are pay-to-play deals, it's someone else managing the operation under his guidance and he's just the guy with the pen so to speak.
I don't mean to be breaking any etiquette her by re-indicating this, but it's I think it's unreasonable to suggest that Trump could not know who this person is.
This is Trump's new 'personal banker' , who doesn't have to play be the constrained rules of $USD denominated financial regulations.
- Trump is lying so that he doesn't have to explain a quid-pro-quo pardon
- Trump is dement and already forgot about the pardon
- Trump wasn't the one actually pardoning him and his administration just did it
The last one would be particularly ironic given the obsession with Joe Biden's Autopen.
The President is dealing with hundreds of issues per day, including pardoning many people via recommendation. Someone came to him and said "we should pardon this guy who got a bum rap from Biden". Trump said, sure why not, and signed his pardon.
No ridiculous conspiracy necessary.
Like when he's unaware of certain bills or important procedings, maybe he legitimately doesn't know, but he should. It's part of his job to know.
Of course the ignorance could be a lie, which is worse, but neither option is good. So in some ways it doesn't really matter, it's already a bad outcome.
Why would it be worse?
If he knows, at least he has a plan, whether that plan is good or bad.
If he doesn’t know at all, then literally even more random shit can occur than what’s already happening.
In theory, you try to limit the influence of a persistently bad actor, but it seems the U.S. didn't get the memo.
I loathe Orange Man but the power to arbitrarily pardon any federal crimes for any reason is one of the powers of his office and Americans haven't ever seen fit to limit it. Trump is flagrantly corrupt and tries to flout the law at every turn, but he's also exposing the degree to which the American system has always just run on gentlemans' agreements and pinky swears.
You are 100% incorrect.
> The Department of Education Organization Act is a United States federal law enacted in 1979, which created the Department of Education.
> In the Senate, 69 voted in favor and 22 voted against separating education from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.[3] In the House of Representatives, 215 voted in favor and 201 voted against.[4] President Carter signed the bill on October 17, 1979.[1]
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Education_Organi...
Please list the departments and cite the executive orders creating each, because I think you will find that this is far less than half (and, unless you are using a non-standard definition of what constitutes a department in the US federal government, that the proportion is actually 0%.)
(A sibling commenter has demonstrated that the single example you provided is wrong, but its not just a poorly-chosen example.)
(Yes the 50% is assumes full voter participation and no third party candidate, also it can be slightly less than this if you have an incomptent state and friendly Supreme Court.)
A world in which we have to grant people arbitrary and unchecked power to overrule a justice system we can't trust, and can only hope they happen to be incorruptible, doesn't seem preferable.
Maybe they just want to see him playing in the asbestos dust
It doesn't make it better or worse, it just means the policies aren't his but the agenda of various puppetteers.
No, they don't "all do this". No, it's not normal.
ollie north was also lying on behalf of the establishment who wanted to fund anti-communist partisans (the contras, a term only known to most millennials as a nintendo game)
The only difference between this statement and "all politicians do this" is the politicians who are not confronted about bad behavior. It's a pretty big overlap and sufficient to assert you are coming across as normalizing this behavior.
So not "all" who are confronted, but "almost" all. Not a very big difference, but that's still not "all".
> The only difference between this statement and "all politicians do this" is the politicians who are not confronted about bad behavior.
That means that in your view, phito's comment was essentially saying that "all politicians do this" (your words), unless they're not confronted. My point was that it's incorrect, because of "they will almost always say" in phito's comment - so the correct reading of that comment would be that almost all politicians do this when confronted, not all.
Right. I arrived at "not all" and you arrived at "not all" for different reasons. The combination of our assessments is correct. Both of us are incorrect if you decide that we have to show all our work, correct in that they draw the correct conclusion.
This is HN-tier pedantry that is immaterial to the question of whether or not the above comment is normalizing something not normal.
Nothing is Normal when it comes down to it, reality is what you can get away with.
If that makes you uncomfortable, then buckle up because reality is what THEY can get away with.
He always knew, it's shameful how politicians behave like spoiled children instead of well-adjusted adults in a position of great responsibility. Why does this kind of people keep rising to the top?
Not that all of this matter, anyway, since trading now is moving to DEX where KYC is not really a thing. You still need to on/off-ramp crypto but it seems like the US is about to allow that no questions asked.
China is anti-crypto and has no interest being a leader in it. It's very painful reading any sort of interview with trump.
Or he's so dementia ridden that he did know who he was, but no longer, in which case why is he in office?
So doesn’t that mean he should know him now?
To be clear, I'm not "Just saying" – I'm actually saying.
Corruption is basically the operating principle of this administration, as on pretty clear display with the meeting with the president of Indonesia https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8nCxSBA4JsI
Main reason is that reality doesn't seem to concern the voter base of these people like Trump. If it did, we wouldn't be in this situation in the first place. And I'm not just meaning Trump here, but all the other populist leaders in the world as well.
I think if these kinds of articles were effective in that regard, we wouldn't be in this situation in the first place. So, if the goal is to change the minds of people for the better, instead of banging on about the trivial, we should be looking at how to communicate better. "Told you so" doesn't work.
Pardons are also particularly newsworthy because the Trump DoJ is exploring whether Biden's pardons can be invalidated via the claim that he wasn't aware of what he was doing (the autopen conspiracy).
I kind of agree, because it's quite likely to devolve into pot-stirring flame bait comment threads.
Every accusation is a confession. Exhibit #5871
> "No idea who he is"
And I also bet that relentless cancer coverage would affect a cancer patient more negatively than positively.
Can we say that China and human rights abuse has a big word count Wikipedia page so lets move on?
States and head of states need to be held to higher standard.
I agree completely. We don't see in the article what Xi has said about it though.
More guidelines available at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
close04•3mo ago
This sums up this administration quite well. Too often no idea what they're doing but doing it out of spite nonetheless.
sholain•3mo ago
... and is hosted by Binance which is the crypto platform owned by Zhao.
Zhao was found guilty of ignoring oversight regulations allowing nefarious actors (ISIS, Cartels, sex traffickers) to transact on his platform.
There's no way in high heaven that the President could be unaware of the fact that Zhao is the CEO who of the platform that hosts almost all of Trump's wealth.
Moreover, this man is convicted specifically for ignoring the lighter oversight regulations, with operations in parts of the world that are out of reach of US investigators and justice system.
rob74•3mo ago
> On March 13th, it was reported that representatives of President Trump’s family were in talks to acquire a financial stake in Binance. Soon after, on March 25th, the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company, World Liberty Financial (WLF), announced that it would launch a new stablecoin, USD1, and the former Binance CEO posted on X welcoming them to its platform.
(https://www.banking.senate.gov/newsroom/minority/forwarding-...)
actionfromafar•3mo ago
ejcho•3mo ago