Foni

A really harsh tax increase, and worse yet, a hugely regressive one.

Oh yes, market concentration definitely improves the user experience in the long run.

This guy was going to put a man on Mars by 2015 and make the hyperloop the next big thing; with the latter, he prevented investment in trains in the USA. After hearing this, I can only recommend that you join a union; you’re going to need it.

I’ve never put the USA on a pedestal, but I think you imagine Tsarist Russia as a place full of human rights. Those who stormed the Bastille in France risked more than any American protesting, I assure you. If all your rights are respected, do you need to protest in the first place?

I’m still holding out hope that someone in the military or the FBI will turn around and say “this shit is not acceptable” and arrest him or get him out of there without making more of a fuss than necessary. I know it’s unlikely, but I don’t lose hope.

I think the midterm elections will be the real turning point. If nothing gives him an excuse before then, and nothing serious comes out against him, still—when the elections come, he’ll pull that same crap again about how opposing his will is illegal and will declare martial law to get Congress out of his way. By then, it’ll be too late.

Armed repression works, to a certain extent. All revolutions sooner or later encounter the violence of the system, I’m talking about revolutions, not more or less peaceful protests like those of “no king.” Ask the Romanovs if that works forever

I don’t know, I’m not that familiar with the American system or society, but if they think behaving like Samuel L. Jackson in the Django Unchained movie will save them from losing all that, they’re delusional.

Maybe never having had a real dictatorship in their country has made them think they can still get rid of these people by the book, but that’s not going to happen. Bannon said it the other day: they know that if they lose power they’ll end up in jail. They won’t get out of there except by force.

As a European, the fact that you don’t have serious riots (at the level of supermarkets being robbed and federal buildings burned to the ground) is still surprising.

In other words, they had a program to literally feed the poorest people, and they decided to leave it without funding despite clearly being able to maintain it, now a judge directly orders them to fund it again, and yet they protest and try to avoid it, or they do avoid it, or something.

Despite all of the above, his voting intentions haven’t dropped to zero. The world is sometimes perplexing.

The most civilized society is three meals away from barbarism.

Let’s put this classic phrase to the test

Well, I’m not there and my information only comes from the media that surely don’t give me a realistic and impartial view of the reality of the country, but oh my goodness.

Again, I’m European so I can’t be sure about this, but I think some of those issues are worse because of the scale, not the thing itself. The entire healthcare system is private—if all prisons were too, I think that would be much worse than the healthcare situation.

As for politicians, up until this election cycle, they at least had the decency to pretend. From now on, we’ll see what happens.

In the Southeast of America a judge was fairly recently convicted of sending underage boys to a private prison in exchange for kickbacks from that prison. He had been doing it for over a decade. And that’s just one that made the news.

It is obvious that something like this would happen. You cannot create a system with perverse incentives and expect the good faith of those who participate to keep it clean. It is exactly the opposite of the spirit of the American revolution (and the rest of democratic revolutions)

As a European, I wonder what kind of dystopia the concept of a “private prison” fits into. I don’t understand how anyone could have imagined that this would end well.

I would like to leave this here as a warning, because it seems relevant to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_fire