US Politics Mega-thread - Page 5612

On March 31 2026 01:56 KwarK wrote:
The entire argument is nonsensical. The problem with abuse of power isn’t the power component, it’s the abuse. Rather than tackle the abuse part they go after the power part.

These people propose that their fear of abuse of power is so great that the power cannot exist, for even any possibility of abuse is too great to risk. If abuse of power risk is probability of abuse multiplied by degree of power then they argue the only way to guarantee that the product is zero is to set the power variable at zero because humans are ultimately fallible.

But if that argument were made in good faith then it would be far more urgently relevant to judges, police, politicians, the damn army. You can’t guarantee against a military coup and so better not to have an army.

And yet these people never seem to argue that. For some reason that we have yet to identify the “even well meaning limits on speech are too dangerous because what if a future bad actor used the power maliciously” only ever seems to come out when Nazi speech is involved. To quote a prominent Nazi, “curious”.

The solution to abuse of power is social and cultural norms that prevent abuse, it isn’t to create a society in which there are no rules.

On March 31 2026 02:22 micronesia wrote:
I'm giving a lot of thought to whether or not an airstrike on FOX News headquarters makes sense.

On March 31 2026 02:39 Jankisa wrote:


I think that any incoming Democratic president could and would be immune from prosecution for it under the SC Presidential immunity.

Justifications on how this is very important to national security would be abundant, after all, without Fox news, there is no Trump presidency and Trump has been the biggest reason for world wide animosity towards Americans, so removing any future threats like that would be paramount to keep the country safe.

On March 31 2026 02:21 LightSpectra wrote:
On the discussion of "if you think censorship is unilaterally bad, why aren't you against the Trump administration flagrantly using the FCC to censor his critics," your position appears to be "it's OK for the FCC to censor the president's critics if they're about to get canceled anyway".

If that's not your position, then there's no reason to mention ratings or imminent cancellation for financial reasons, is there?

Imagine if Obama threatened to airstrike FOX News headquarters and I defended hypothetical-him by saying "well their profits were down this quarter," would that make sense?

On March 31 2026 02:22 micronesia wrote:
I'm giving a lot of thought to whether or not an airstrike on FOX News headquarters makes sense.

On March 31 2026 02:51 LightSpectra wrote:
I can't wait for that to be enforced against FOX and Newsmax. Any day now.

On March 31 2026 02:34 Vivax wrote:


The prerequisite is that you can detect the abuse. A 'hey, you're abusing power' by an otherwise powerless collective can work quickly to moderate it, but only if they are aware of it.

Transparency should begin at the top, not at the bottom. Unless the top has malicious intentions in the first place.

On March 31 2026 01:56 KwarK wrote:
The entire argument is nonsensical. The problem with abuse of power isn’t the power component, it’s the abuse. Rather than tackle the abuse part they go after the power part.

These people propose that their fear of abuse of power is so great that the power cannot exist, for even any possibility of abuse is too great to risk. If abuse of power risk is probability of abuse multiplied by degree of power then they argue the only way to guarantee that the product is zero is to set the power variable at zero because humans are ultimately fallible.

But if that argument were made in good faith then it would be far more urgently relevant to judges, police, politicians, the damn army. You can’t guarantee against a military coup and so better not to have an army.

And yet these people never seem to argue that. For some reason that we have yet to identify the “even well meaning limits on speech are too dangerous because what if a future bad actor used the power maliciously” only ever seems to come out when Nazi speech is involved. To quote a prominent Nazi, “curious”.

The solution to abuse of power is social and cultural norms that prevent abuse, it isn’t to create a society in which there are no rules.

On March 31 2026 03:09 WombaT wrote:

Musk isn’t a Nazi he’s just a big fan of K-Pop

Additionally, to generalise, it feels a lot of folks who make such arguments tend to be actively hostile to whistleblowers who em, reveal abuses of power.

Or are notably quiet when existing powers actually are levered against free speech by state institutions.

One has to wonder what the fear is in this specific domain, and why there’s seemingly such a scattershot approach to it versus similar ones.

I mean back in the day I’d basically never align with self-declared libertarians outside of things like drug policy, or on speech, where we’d somewhat sync. The modern variant often feels full of it and it’s more about the sacred right to call people slurs on the internet

I told them, if a country wants to send some oil into Cuba right now, I have no problem.

On March 31 2026 03:44 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:

Turns out it was oBlade this time. Good guess though!

On March 31 2026 03:42 KwarK wrote:
While skimming Trump's truth for new Iran content I found this.

But don't worry, I have it on good authority that he's only joking about not leaving power. Even though last time he was told to leave power he attempted a coup.

In other news, Russian oil tankers have breached the fuel "blockade" around Cuba by sailing through it in a move that Trump explained asThe effectiveness of the blockade is now in question.

Also the Times of Israel published an article 2 days ago with an explanation of what happened to the Kurdish proxy force plan in Iran. Essentially Israel came up with the plan of fragmenting Iran on ethnic lines as part of their goal of deconstructing it and ideally causing a civil war. The US started meeting with Iranian Kurdish leaders on March 3 but then decided to leak that they were doing it. This caused two immediate responses. The first was the Iranian army launching a preemptive strike against Iranian Kurdish groups. The second was that Turkey, the regional power with the largest and most capable army and a nation that directly borders the Kurdish regions of Iran, calling up Trump and saying that if that plan went ahead they'd be directly entering the war as a third side that was broadly Iran aligned. They would not tolerate the creation of a Kurdistan on their borders.

The clown show continues.