What’s a “Carrington” or a “Robinson” in the first place?

I wouldn’t presume to speak for anyone else, but I’m a human, and I thought the rest of us were too.

I don’t think whether or not they’re “good” people and the clients they end up representing have anything to do with each other.

It’s just a part of their job that they end up sometimes representing people who are charged with, and potentially even obviously guilty of, heinous crimes.

And their code of ethics specifically demands that they do their best to represent their client’s interests regardless of any and all other considerations.

So even just there, it could be the case that one defense attorney is a vile scumbag who gets off on the idea of freeing obvious criminals and it could just as easily be the case that another defense attorney is a veritable saint who sincerely believes that all people are fundamentally good and that it’s their purpose in life to help anyone who needs it, no matter who or what they’re deemed to be.

Both of those things undoubtedly exist, and pretty much any position one might imagine between the two, so I don’t think there’s any way to correlate who they represent and their own qualities.

Now all that said, I certainly couldn’t do what they do, and specifically because I couldn’t effectively represent someone who was certainly guilty. But that’s just me.

Funny how the Republicans, after four years of posing as the conscience of government, have gone completely silent on the subject of corruption.

Think it might be because their Republican president is already far and away the most corrupt president in US history, and likely at least in the running for the most corrupt national leader in human history?

IMO literally took his place.

My theory is that the DNC and the Dem establishment, in order to ensure that they can mouth leftist platitudes without the risk of actually advancing leftist interests and thereby alienating their big money donors, always have at least one or two ringers - people who, for one reason or another (most likely because they’re bribeable and bribed or extortable and extorted) can be counted on to, when necessary, cast the vote(s) that ensure that the Republicans don’t quite lose.

So Fetterman, just like Manchin (and Sinema) before him, is doing exactly what he’s supposed to do.

No.

My immediate reaction is that if it’s not genuinely sincere, it’s meaningless.

It doesn’t really matter if that’s true or not - the mere fact that that was my first reaction means that it’s a doubt that would continue to haunt me, and that’s more than enough of a problem all by itself.

Tyrants don’t come to power by mandating submission. They come to power by criminalizing dissent.

China doesn’t want to hand a pretext to a dangerously trigger-happy power - all the more when patience alone delivers what it wants.

This actually neatly sums up pretty much all of Chinese history.

Unfortunate that so many Americans, and even politicians, still haven’t grasped that.

Quite seriously, as someone caring for a parent with dementia, that’s entirely typical behavior.

Well… you know… except the scale is a bit different for someone who isn’t the fucking president.

Piefed by default auto-subscribes accounts to a curated set of communities, auto-hides downvoted content and downvoted posters, attaches icons to accounts to mark those that have beyond a particular threshold of downvotes and entirely blocks links to a curated set of sites because Rimu deemed them to be unacceptable.

The only saving grace is that at this point those (anti-)features are generally toggleable at least at the admin level, but that’s thanks to wjs018.

I dunno. I just noticed it as it was happening.

Try it and see.

It takes all of about a minute to sign up for an instance and it doesn’t cost anything, so there’s no reason not to do it. If you like it, great and if you don’t, you’re not out anything.

For the record I actually prefer KBin/MBin - they just have a better interface than Lemmy. But KBin was a one-man effort and when the guy running it burnt out, it soet of fell by the wayside. MBin is a fork that was meant to be a more open project, but the guy who was mostly responsible for it is a bit of a twat and mostly used it to pimp Monero, so it never quite caught on like it should have.

You might also sign up for an instance or two on piefed. The guy who’s mostly responsible for that is also a bit of a twat, but he’s had some good help and some people pushing back against his tyrannically censorious tendencies, so it’s pretty decent.

The only way you’re ever really going to know what you think about any of them is to try them out for yourself. And there’s literally no reason not to.

That’s about the weirdest part of this whole thing to me.

It really is just The Emperor’s New Clothes played out in real life, as a wide swath of people who certainly know better all studiously pretend that the President of the United States is not a petty, shallow, vindictive, willfully ignorant and delusional egomaniac with the emotional maturity of a toddler who’s slipping into dementia right before our eyes.

Slurp gobble.

Trump doesn’t have policies. He has whims, urges, compulsions, reflexes and tantrums.

pushing Democrats to the center

Because that worked out so well for them in 2024…

Anybody who’s surprised by this is part of the problem.

If an organization possesses influence or power that can be abused, then it inevitably will be abused. It doesn’t matter how conscientious people are or how many safeguards are put in place - loathsome, power-hungry pieces of shit will angle for position in the organization, and sooner or later some will get through, and they’ll immediately start shifting the organization to accommodate them, which is to say, to accommodate loathsome, power-hungry pieces of shit. And it’s all downhill from there.

I’m not an anarchist by accident.

That’s part of why I’ve generally been putting quotation marks around the word “corporation.”

It’s not meaningless though, because the underlying structure will likely remain essentially the same as it was when it was merely a corporation. And the relationship between the “government” and its “citizens” will have evolved from a relationship between a business and its customers/clients, and will undoubtedly retain some aspects of that. Most notably, the whole concept of public servants will vanish. Instead, the “government” will offer some specific services to potential citizens-as-customers, who can take them or leave them. Or, additionally or possibly even alternatively, the “government” will demand specific things of citizens-as-employees who will have the “choice” of following their demands or seeking employment-as-citizenship elsewhere.

In either event (or any other - this can’t possibly be an exhaustive list), the basic dynamic between “government” and “citizen” will be notably different from any of the ones we’ve seen before (though likely broadly most similar to feudalism).

Maintaining a large private army would be expensive and time consuming.

So is maintaining a large workforce and infrastructure, but they do that as a matter of course. And already, there are corporations with operating budgets larger than some countries. That’s only going to become more the case with time.

What stops another corporation with a private army from coming in and robbing them of everything they have?

The same things that generally stop countries from doing it to each other - insufficient forces and/or unacceptable losses and/or a preference for stability and/or established alliances and/or any of countless other considerations.

This isn’t rocket science. Realpolitik is a fairly straightforward thing.

Where is the corporation getting their funding from?

From the sale of goods and/or services.

Duh.

Someone’s got to be paying them.

Yes. Consumers of whatever goods and/or services they provide.

Duh.

So, they are using a sovereign currency created by a government using a central banking system chartered with the government.

Or more likely not.

Here’s just one quick idea - accept local currency with a handling fee sufficient to cover any potential losses on exchange (which are unlikely, since at that point their currency will likely be harder than about any government’s), and advertise a discount for the use of their private currency, accompanied by the offer of free and automatic currency exchange with an account at the corporate bank.

So you promote your currency, avoid the hassle of dealing with competing currencies and gain new bank accounts, all at the same time.

And that’s just one idea, off the top of my head.

I just don’t make u-turns at busy intersections, specifically because they’re problematic.

If I need to go back the way I just came, I make a left into a parking lot, turn around there, then pull back out onto the street, or if that’s not possible, I simply go around the block.

My view is that doing unnecessary things that interrupt the flow of traffic is always a bad idea.

All other considerations aside “Thiel-backed” guarantees all by itself that it’s technofascist bullshit explicitly intended to benefit the oligarchs at the expense of everyone else.