orcrist

Actually, we have research on the quality of his speeches that shows his brain is not functioning the way it used to. There's no doubt that old age is getting to him. Remember the scene when he was dancing? That's not a man who is 100%.

But as you said, it sure looks like he's trying to do a lot of the horrible things that he is successfully doing. Why are you giving him the benefit of the doubt and assuming it's only malice when it sure looks like both malice and incompetence?

I think you're misunderstanding the context. This is not criticizing voters who thought that candidate Trump was good. It's criticizing people who are not reacting strongly enough to Trump now.

Correlation is not causation. This is Statistics 101... I can point to other things that are correlated with the rise in the far right. For example, centralization, the increase in monopolies, the number of years since World War II, the average temperature of the earth, the number of years into the new millennium.

Anyway, when I read your comment on the whole what I actually see is that your concerned that social media is too centralized and therefore ripe for abuse. That's vastly different from saying that social media itself is inherently going to be abused.

No, it's not normal. Almost no internet companies around the world try to do anything similar to what Meta did and does. Even if you focus on social media companies, I believe that only a small minority try to do that kind of thing.

For example, here we are on social media. Do you see any targeted advertising? Is it being done by the Lemmy instance? And how many instances are there? Then we could look at Mastodon, or discussion forums, or comment boards, or you name it. Of course you would expect some targeted advertising, like you might find computer advertisements if you're on a computer tech forum, but that's different from targeting users who are in a weak state of mind, precisely because it's targeting their overtly expressed general interests and not their temporary vulnerabilities.

Finally, I think you should go back and read the article. You ranted about companies trying to shove things down your throats, but the article was about how to misuse targeted advertising.

This is a pretty nice article. Some of the others that came out yesterday were failing to point out these obvious points.

One thing that must be considered is that Trump did in fact place tariffs on the entire world, or at least most of it. And then he relaxed most of those, sure. But all of those businesses in all of those countries are wary about trying to reestablish large import export relationships with the US because the US is unpredictable. They would much rather work together with most other countries in the world, including China.

So it's not the US versus China, it's the US versus everyone. And there's no way the US can win against everyone. At best, or rather, at worst, it can drag others down for years or decades to come.

If he's not dead yet they sure hope he dies quickly, right? That's the objective. Export your executions.

It doesn't have to be the Secretary of State. It only has to be people with the authority to solve the problem. Preferably several of them.

What you said is true some of the time. In this particular situation I don't think it's accurate. I think the prosecution really does want to execute the guy, because they don't like the example set. They don't like the notion of random white American men taking out CEOs. The prosecution wants to protect their rich friends.

Also, prosecutors have an ethical responsibility to not bring charges or punishments that they don't think fit. In other words, if they want to try to get the death penalty, they have to actually believe that the evidence justifies asking for it. Ethically they are not allowed to throw every charge at the defendant and see what sticks. In reality, prosecutors ignore the ethical rules that they are sworn to uphold on a regular basis, and only rarely to judges regulate them for it.

I don't think the judge will agree with you on this, although of course it remains to be seen. Police and prosecutors often make some statements, but the reality is that many potential jurors aren't watching the news. For example, I didn't know about this particular statement until I read this article.

Of course almost everyone knows about Luigi himself. That's not what I'm saying. But if the claim is that a third party government statement has jeopardized the possibility of him getting a fair trial on a death penalty case, that seems to be factually dependent on who's on the jury and what they saw.

I think the title is simply incorrect. This isn't a game of chicken. In reality the Chinese government was ready for Trump's tariffs because he played the tariff card the last time he was in office. They have a lot of strong tools at their disposal, and they will use those as they need to.

It's somewhat ridiculous for Americans to say that China needs to make a deal when Trump is the one who created the recent problem. If you want to talk about trade imbalances, we can talk about trade imbalances, but massive tariffs that escalate overnight have nothing to do with reasonable international negotiation.

Actually the article has good information in it, but the title itself is meh.

I agree with what you said, but I don't trust New York Times articles. They're so bad on national politics. Even with that article, they were qualifying the claim, right? But they could have made it firm. There was no need to hedge, the reasoning with solid, but they were scared so they waffled.

Washington Dems who have tried to be pro-border security are part of the problem. A major part. Their support for racist xenophobic policies made it easier for the average American to lose sight of basic human equality.

In reality Trump wants all of these people to stay, and stay undocumented, so they can be used as borderline slave labor. The problem is that when Democrats talk about being tough on immigration, they may get easier for him to get away with evil policies like this. What worries me more is that I think many of those Democrats actually believed in their anti-immigrant racist xenophobic policies.