Bezos looks pretty good for a man his age.

Built to fail? The Constitution worked, more or less, for over 237 years and 44 different presidents. It hasn’t even failed yet now, although it is in a lot of danger.

It’s the job of Congress to stop the President from doing this, via impeachment. However, in a democracy the people get to choose their leaders and if the people elect not just a man like Trump to be President but also a majority in Congress to support him almost unconditionally, then the people get what they voted for.

Even now, Republicans in Congress fear that they will not be re-elected if they oppose Trump. Thus they’re still carrying out the will of the people.

That’s a good point, and I suppose that someone sympathetic to Trump might think that he was being unfairly prosecuted after other presidents hadn’t been.

I disagree with your implication that a former president should always be punished for having broken the law. The rules do need to be different for presidents than for ordinary people.

A prince, when by some urgent circumstance or some impetuous and unforeseen accident that very much concerns his state, compelled to forfeit his word and break his faith, or otherwise forced from his ordinary duty, ought to attribute this necessity to a lash of the divine rod: vice it is not, for he has given up his own reason to a more universal and more powerful reason; but certainly ’tis a misfortune: so that if any one should ask me what remedy? “None,” say I, “if he were really racked between these two extremes: ‘Let him see to it that it be not a loophole for perjury that he seeks.’ He must do it: but if he did it without regret, if it did not weigh on him to do it, ’tis a sign his conscience is in a sorry condition."

Montaigne’ Essays, book 3 chapter 1

It’s one thing to break a law with the belief (perhaps unjustified) that doing so is necessary for the good of the nation and quite another to do to because power protects you from deserved punishment, but how can the law itself make this distinction?

Even the Trump appointees seem like the sort of people who would want to defend the rule of law at least to preserve their own (and therefore the court’s) power, so I wonder how each of the six “conservative” judges was convinced to rule the way that he or she did. I don’t imagine all of them doing it for the same reason. Maybe some were rewarded for their votes and others wanted to see Trump wreck things (Alito and his flag come to mind) but did some actually think that it was a good idea or the correct legal decision?

since 2015-2016

Hah, I would be ecstatic if we had a Romney now instead of what we do have. Or even a McCain. Or hell, even a GWB as long as he wasn’t allowed to invade anywhere.

My apologies. Here’s CNN’s exit poll. The results are substantially similar. I added a note to my original post.

Note that CNN also has a chart of this data with the “less than $30k” and “$30k to $50k” categories merged, which conceals this phenomenon. I think that can give people the wrong idea.

Not only do I agree with you (the headlines are click-bait telling the audience what they want to hear) but I also love you for using the word “construed”.

I’m not at all convinced, because the poor aren’t the ones who elected Trump. Both the rich and the poor voted for Harris. Here’s the data:

Edit: This is not the most up-to date poll, although it is substantially correct. See my post below.

Ordinary people don’t keep track of billionaires. Almost no one even knows how many billionaires there are, or how many billions they have. I don’t know and I bet that even most people who blame billionaires for everything don’t know. If there are twice as many now as there were before and each one has twice as much money, the public won’t even notice.

IMO Trump support is due to envy and resentment, but it’s not the resentment of the rich by the poor. It’s the resentment of the middle class by the working class. Look at the results by college education:

(Note that while income and education are correlated, my first plot shows that the people without a college education who are voting for Trump aren’t voting for him simply because they’re poor.)

It used to be the case that mass media was controlled largely by people with middle class values. The people who opposed vaccination and supported renaming the Gulf of Mexico were called crackpots and they wouldn’t appear in most mainstream newspapers or TV news. Neither the Democrat nor the Republican candidate for President would agree with them.

Now, thanks to the internet, these people have been able to organize into a mass movement and they want to smash the institutions built by the middle class that looks down on them. They voted for Trump because he’s culturally one of them, despite the fact that he’s a college-educated billionaire.

Do experts say Trump is a fascist? Do experts say vaccination is essential for public health? Do experts say tariffs will wreck the economy? Now Trump will make those experts cry delicious liberal tears…

I don’t think that what K-to-12 schools are capable of teaching even in the best-case scenario can be sufficient to equip the average person with the knowledge and critical thinking skills necessary to, for example, evaluate complex economic policy on its merits. I have a STEM PhD but it isn’t in economics and I don’t think I can evaluate economic policy well - I go with the consensus of economists, but that’s easy for me because I think their best interests and mine are aligned. (I want to see the stock market go up.) I’m not sure what a person whose interests are not aligned with the economists’ is supposed to do… Listen to ignorant demagogues who promise everything, apparently.

Before the election, I saw a house flying a big flag with the words “Elect Trump King of the United States”. So, uh, maybe monarchy would turn out to be even worse…

With that said, I understand how you feel. I don’t know how democracy can work in a post-truth era.

I was also a very active user of traditional forums but, in my experience, small niche subreddits (when I was on Reddit) were a decent substitute in terms of content, since posts could stay on their front page for several days. Lemmy isn’t big enough to have those yet but I hope it will be. The thing I miss most about forums isn’t the format but rather the community. The forum I posted on the most had only a few dozen regulars and I knew them.

There was the guy with a kind, insightful take on controversial issues and a fetish for women with more than two arms. The active duty marine who reliably posted harsh truths. The feminist I didn’t get along with at all despite agreeing with her about most things. The dedicated father who bought real razor wire for his daughter when she wanted a UN-peacekeeper-base themed birthday party. The very determined conservative who defended his position no matter how outnumbered he was and once bragged that he had given his wife several dozen orgasms in a row…

I suppose I was the young man with strange views about what was or wasn’t fair and a great deal of anger over any perceived unfairness. (I don’t think I was particularly well-liked.) The internet is so much less personal now.

In my dream world, the courts respond to Trump’s claim that he cannot retrieve anyone from El Salvador by putting a stay on all deportations until the Trump administration demonstrates that it will not deport people to any place from which it cannot quickly retrieve them if they were deported in error.

(I don’t expect this to happen.)

I think that would be beyond the authority of the court, although exactly where the court’s authority ends is unclear. It doesn’t get to dictate foreign policy, so I expect that it can order the executive branch to do things consistent with the current foreign policy towards El Salvador (like asking for him back) but it cannot order the executive branch to dramatically change that foreign policy (by imposing tariffs).

The problem I foresee is that Trump can make an official request but also say that he would be happier if the request was not granted. (Something along the lines of “Please return this horrible criminal, who I never want to have in America again, because the court is ordering me to ask you against my will, and keep in mind that if you say no then I won’t force you to do anything and in fact I’ll like you better,” which I don’t think is much of an exaggeration given Trump’s lack of subtlety.) If El Salvador then does not grant the request, I’m not sure what the court could do.

I’d care. As H. L. Mencken said:

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

What exactly it means to facilitate is part of what the court is considering. From the Vox article:

The Supreme Court concludes that the lower court’s order “properly requires the Government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador…

But it adds that the “intended scope of the term ‘effectuate’ in the District Court’s order” — to “facilitate and effectuate his return — “is, however, unclear, and may exceed the District Court’s authority.” The word “facilitate” suggests that the government must take what steps it can to make something happen, while the word “effectuate” suggests that it needs to actually make it happen.

So, do I sell because he’ll keep wrecking the economy, or do I hold because he’ll keep backing down? What do the licensed financial advisors here, acting in their professional capacity and accepting full legal responsibility for the consequences, think?

Don’t we all want to hide how ugly we are?

Here’s the broader situation: 30 percent of American households are classified by Pew as low income, and 19 percent are upper income. And yet a 2024 Gallup survey found that only 12 percent of Americans identified themselves as “lower class” and just 2 percent as “upper class.” In short: No one wants to be perceived as poor, and no one rich ever feels rich enough.

This is just nonsense. Being in the upper class doesn’t mean being in the top 19% of earners. Those 19% are middle class and they probably have never even interacted with anyone in the upper class. An upper-class person isn’t someone who earns a $100k a year or even $1000k a year. In fact, he probably doesn’t even have a job. CBS has a headline right now that says “Trump headlining $1 million a person super PAC dinner as stocks sink over tariffs”. The people at his dinner (or the ones who could come but choose not to) are in the upper class.

Edit: As for the rest of the article, it makes a good point about the disconnect between the working class and the middle class, but I’m not sure that this disconnect is bigger now than it used to be.

Edit 2: Part of the disconnect is due to different values rather than different incomes, and this should be emphasized because Trump is popular with the working class (and unpopular with the middle class) not because he doesn’t have much money but because he rejects middle-class values.

online information siloes

I’m not sure that’s possible because the Democratic platform doesn’t have the sort of populist appeal that Trump’s Republican platform does. Moderation can’t compete with extremism in this domain. I suppose that the Democrats could try to pivot to their own (presumably class-based) form of populism but, at least from my point of view, one very strong reason to support the Democrats is because they aren’t populist. Having one populist party versus another would be a lose/lose situation.

I don’t have an alternate proposal. It may actually be the case that social media will eventually force every serious political movement to pivot towards populism and create its own truth in order to be competitive, but then who would make the policy decisions in a world of meme warfare?

Titled “The Perimeter” and published on Monday, the report said the stated purpose of the plan was to create a thick strip of land that provided a clear line of sight for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to identify and kill militants. “This space was to have no crops, structures, or people. Almost every object, infrastructure installation, and structure within the perimeter was demolished,” it said.

The article presents this as a new revelation, but wasn’t creating a wider buffer zone on the Gaza side of the border one of the explicitly stated war goals? (And visible from space.) I’m surprised that there isn’t signage and barbed wire to prevent civilians from wandering in accidentally, but the rest seems to be describing what a buffer zone (or “kill zone”) is almost by definition.