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USA, the land of unlimited possibilities...of how to get detained without a process...for expressing opinions...by the government repating that we have finally

by mesk 1y ago

USA, the land of unlimited possibilities...of how to get detained without a process...for expressing opinions...by the government repating that we have finally free speach and the dark ages are gone...while revisiting history to avoid dangerous words such as a 'women'... And I've thought our wana-be-authorian politicians are greates idiots of all, but there seems to be running some kind of global world competion to find them and let them ruin their countries.

vkou 1y ago
The politicians aren't idiots, they don't actually believe anything they say. The idiots are the people whose support they politicians are courting.
- yapyap 1y ago
  whether you pretend to be an idiot and do idiotic things or are an idiot and do idiotic things doesn’t matter, the outcome is the same. Matter of fact pretending to be an idiot and doing idiotic things might be worse cause you know better, an idiot’s excuse would be that that’s all they know to do.
- atoav 1y ago
  This was true 8 years ago. Now I wouldn't be so sure about it anymore. I wouldn't make a bet that there isn't a single Republican out there who truly believes in some of the crazy stuff they are saying. But of course the survival of crazy policies hinges on people willing to elect politicians who will implement them. And that in turn hinges on how well you disinform them.
- hapticmonkey 1y ago
  The recent signal leak shows that they really do believe this stuff. insert american flag and prayer emojis
  - lotsofpulp 1y ago
    The vice president writing they were going to pray makes me think the editor of the Atlantic was intentionally added to the chat. I don’t see how it could be believable that Vance is actually religious and isn’t just using it as a way to get votes.
    - sofixa 1y ago
      For what purpose? And if it was just for that, why did they also share classified information?
      - lotsofpulp 1y ago
        Maybe publicity? The group in charge knows they can do no wrong, and I would bet their voters liked the rhetoric in the chat. Maybe they use controversy as a tool to keep people distracted (or even lead them to check out).
        sorcerer-mar 1y ago
        [flagged]
        KoolKat23 1y ago
        Agreed, absolutely everything done needs to be viewed through the lens of what will the ratings/viewership be. Everything makes more sense. Just think of the public spectacle, interviewing world leaders in the pulpit at the Whitehouse for example. It's a live TV show.
      - pastage 1y ago
        The question is what consequences will it have. I have only seen good outcomes for the administration from the chat debacle. It is worrying, this could have led to a VP resigning.
      - AlecSchueler 1y ago
        The "balling out Europe" stuff again. Their goal is to ultimately normalise the idea that the EU is an enemy in advance of the Greenland invasion. The leaking of clarified information doesn't matter because A) US service personal are expendable and B) the involvement in Yemen is now only to keep up appearances of being allied to Saudi Arabia who will in the long term also get the same treatment as the EU because their fuel output competes with US/Russia.
- sofixa 1y ago
  Some of them are. Have you ever heard anything said by the current US president? It's just incoherent rambling. Then we also have the Signal chat, and even biographies and books by some of the others that makes it clear done of these people are genuinely dumb as fuck.
  - matwood 1y ago
    > Have you ever heard anything said by the current US president? It's just incoherent rambling. Which is ironic considering all we heard from MAGA/Fox for the last 4 years is that Biden was incoherent and senile.
    - AlecSchueler 1y ago
      From the outside they both come across as incompetent and senile and it's hard to believe those are really the people at the top.
      - vkou 1y ago
        It doesn't really matter if Biden was a drooling vegetable, if his appointments were competent at doing their jobs. These guys are, sadly competent at... Well, a few things, but none of them include 'good governance'.
        tim333 1y ago
        It did matter in the election.
    - labster 1y ago
      It’s hard for me to consider a successful propaganda campaign as ironic. The word you’re looking for is either hypocritical or malicious.
johnisgood 1y ago
Most of what you said applies to the UK as well, for what it's worth.
- eterm 1y ago
  It really doesn't, that's Fox news level of propaganda. Does the UK have an issue with over-policing of twitter? Absolutely it does. Are the tightening of protest laws concerning? Yes, very much so. But it's nothing like the rhetoric and destruction of due process happening in the USA.
  - lucasRW 1y ago
    [flagged]
- sofixa 1y ago
  Does it now, dear whatabouter? People are getting arrested and deported with no due process for expressing opinions? The UK government is rewriting history to remove women and gays? No, you're just confusing the existence of hate crimes in UK law, and maybe the dumb migrant detention in Rwanda scheme (which has since been cancelled), both of which have due process, are public, and ridiculous to compare.
  - johnisgood 1y ago
    You missed the first word of my comment. Additionally, yeah there have been "social media offenses" in the recent years. Individuals have been arrested for comments made on social media platforms. Try it out. Communications Act 2003 come to mind. Are people not entitled to lawyers in the US? In any case, there is authority overreach in both countries (and more).
- marcuschong 1y ago
  While there is legitimate debate over how authoritarian some policies in Australia or the UK might be in the past few years, these measures operate within established legal frameworks, with judicial oversight and public scrutiny. Even if you view them as overly restrictive, they don't stem from a single "contrarian" movement with a coordinated political agenda. Moreover, neither government is rewriting history to erase specific groups. The fact that hate-speech or migration laws exist doesn’t equate to people being arrested or deported without due process, nor does it imply some monolithic campaign to censor or remove entire populations from the record.
darkwater 1y ago
> while revisiting history to avoid dangerous words such as a 'women'... What happened? I missed that (I'm not ironic, I would really like to know what else they did).
- fabian2k 1y ago
  I suspect this refers to the list of words that are used to filter out and likely cancel or block various grants. Those words are about what the current US government considers DEI, but they are ridiculously broad and include words like "woman".
  - acdha 1y ago
    I know people who have had to defend their grant-funded research using terms like “inclusion” (geology) or “diversity” (of samples). Growing up at the end of the Cold War with basically every major political figure decrying the USSR’s political apparatchiks monitoring everything, I never expected that to happen here but having watched the right’s embrace of Orban it wasn’t a surprise by the time it happened. The guys who brought us “freedom fries” crowded everyone else out of the party.
  - rurp 1y ago
    Projects are being killed across the government for exactly this reason. If anything it's even dumber than it sounds. If any word in a project or department title string matches a list of common terms it can get killed with zero investigation or recourse. Billions of dollars worth of research and work have already been destroyed in this way and it's only getting worse.
- brettermeier 1y ago
  https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/07/us/trump-federal-agencies-websites-words-dei.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/07/us/trump-fede...
- bko 1y ago
  [flagged]

by mesk 1y ago

vkou 1y ago

The politicians aren't idiots, they don't actually believe anything they say. The idiots are the people whose support they politicians are courting.

yapyap 1y ago
whether you pretend to be an idiot and do idiotic things or are an idiot and do idiotic things doesn’t matter, the outcome is the same. Matter of fact pretending to be an idiot and doing idiotic things might be worse cause you know better, an idiot’s excuse would be that that’s all they know to do.
atoav 1y ago
This was true 8 years ago. Now I wouldn't be so sure about it anymore. I wouldn't make a bet that there isn't a single Republican out there who truly believes in some of the crazy stuff they are saying. But of course the survival of crazy policies hinges on people willing to elect politicians who will implement them. And that in turn hinges on how well you disinform them.
hapticmonkey 1y ago
The recent signal leak shows that they really do believe this stuff. insert american flag and prayer emojis
- lotsofpulp 1y ago
  The vice president writing they were going to pray makes me think the editor of the Atlantic was intentionally added to the chat. I don’t see how it could be believable that Vance is actually religious and isn’t just using it as a way to get votes.
  - sofixa 1y ago
    For what purpose? And if it was just for that, why did they also share classified information?
    - lotsofpulp 1y ago
      Maybe publicity? The group in charge knows they can do no wrong, and I would bet their voters liked the rhetoric in the chat. Maybe they use controversy as a tool to keep people distracted (or even lead them to check out).
      - sorcerer-mar 1y ago
        [flagged]
      - KoolKat23 1y ago
        Agreed, absolutely everything done needs to be viewed through the lens of what will the ratings/viewership be. Everything makes more sense. Just think of the public spectacle, interviewing world leaders in the pulpit at the Whitehouse for example. It's a live TV show.
    - pastage 1y ago
      The question is what consequences will it have. I have only seen good outcomes for the administration from the chat debacle. It is worrying, this could have led to a VP resigning.
    - AlecSchueler 1y ago
      The "balling out Europe" stuff again. Their goal is to ultimately normalise the idea that the EU is an enemy in advance of the Greenland invasion. The leaking of clarified information doesn't matter because A) US service personal are expendable and B) the involvement in Yemen is now only to keep up appearances of being allied to Saudi Arabia who will in the long term also get the same treatment as the EU because their fuel output competes with US/Russia.
sofixa 1y ago
Some of them are. Have you ever heard anything said by the current US president? It's just incoherent rambling. Then we also have the Signal chat, and even biographies and books by some of the others that makes it clear done of these people are genuinely dumb as fuck.
- matwood 1y ago
  > Have you ever heard anything said by the current US president? It's just incoherent rambling. Which is ironic considering all we heard from MAGA/Fox for the last 4 years is that Biden was incoherent and senile.
  - AlecSchueler 1y ago
    From the outside they both come across as incompetent and senile and it's hard to believe those are really the people at the top.
    - vkou 1y ago
      It doesn't really matter if Biden was a drooling vegetable, if his appointments were competent at doing their jobs. These guys are, sadly competent at... Well, a few things, but none of them include 'good governance'.
      - tim333 1y ago
        It did matter in the election.
  - labster 1y ago
    It’s hard for me to consider a successful propaganda campaign as ironic. The word you’re looking for is either hypocritical or malicious.

johnisgood 1y ago

Most of what you said applies to the UK as well, for what it's worth.

eterm 1y ago
It really doesn't, that's Fox news level of propaganda. Does the UK have an issue with over-policing of twitter? Absolutely it does. Are the tightening of protest laws concerning? Yes, very much so. But it's nothing like the rhetoric and destruction of due process happening in the USA.
- lucasRW 1y ago
  [flagged]
sofixa 1y ago
Does it now, dear whatabouter? People are getting arrested and deported with no due process for expressing opinions? The UK government is rewriting history to remove women and gays? No, you're just confusing the existence of hate crimes in UK law, and maybe the dumb migrant detention in Rwanda scheme (which has since been cancelled), both of which have due process, are public, and ridiculous to compare.
- johnisgood 1y ago
  You missed the first word of my comment. Additionally, yeah there have been "social media offenses" in the recent years. Individuals have been arrested for comments made on social media platforms. Try it out. Communications Act 2003 come to mind. Are people not entitled to lawyers in the US? In any case, there is authority overreach in both countries (and more).
marcuschong 1y ago
While there is legitimate debate over how authoritarian some policies in Australia or the UK might be in the past few years, these measures operate within established legal frameworks, with judicial oversight and public scrutiny. Even if you view them as overly restrictive, they don't stem from a single "contrarian" movement with a coordinated political agenda. Moreover, neither government is rewriting history to erase specific groups. The fact that hate-speech or migration laws exist doesn’t equate to people being arrested or deported without due process, nor does it imply some monolithic campaign to censor or remove entire populations from the record.

darkwater 1y ago

> while revisiting history to avoid dangerous words such as a 'women'... What happened? I missed that (I'm not ironic, I would really like to know what else they did).

fabian2k 1y ago
I suspect this refers to the list of words that are used to filter out and likely cancel or block various grants. Those words are about what the current US government considers DEI, but they are ridiculously broad and include words like "woman".
- acdha 1y ago
  I know people who have had to defend their grant-funded research using terms like “inclusion” (geology) or “diversity” (of samples). Growing up at the end of the Cold War with basically every major political figure decrying the USSR’s political apparatchiks monitoring everything, I never expected that to happen here but having watched the right’s embrace of Orban it wasn’t a surprise by the time it happened. The guys who brought us “freedom fries” crowded everyone else out of the party.
- rurp 1y ago
  Projects are being killed across the government for exactly this reason. If anything it's even dumber than it sounds. If any word in a project or department title string matches a list of common terms it can get killed with zero investigation or recourse. Billions of dollars worth of research and work have already been destroyed in this way and it's only getting worse.
brettermeier 1y ago
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/07/us/trump-federal-agencies-websites-words-dei.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/07/us/trump-fede...
bko 1y ago
[flagged]