[dandanua]

The current administration has created a narrative that everything they do is good, while anything their opponents do is bad. Facts or meaning do not matter any more. I honestly don't understand how the USA has become this. This won't end well.

[yard2010]

Tbf living throughout the past 20 years never have I ever get this feeling that the US is gonna "end well"

[abustamam]

It'll end well, just not for the working class, if such a thing still exists at that time

[xnx]

> everything they do is good, while anything their opponents do is bad.

Even when it's the same thing! (e.g. "canceling" someone)

[LoganDark]

The USA became this through Trump being elected.

[bregma]

It started with Richard Nixon and his cynical manoevering.

It was reinforced with Ronald Reagan. Remember how he spun the Iranian revolution and the bad economy on his opposition? Remember how he rode the Moral Majority wave?

It was taken up a notch by G. W. Bush and his band of trigger-happy self-serving country club elitists.

No one in between those points tried to roll back the progress. They're just as guilty. It's been a monotonic increasing function towards the current apex (nadir?).

Fear what comes next. If there is a next.

[abustamam]

Yeah the democrats are at fault here too. Clinton had eight years to rollback any damage from Nixon and Reagan. Obama had eight years to rollback any damage from them + Bush. Biden had four years to rollback any damage from them + Trump.

One could argue that the courts or congress/senate may not have been favorable during their time, but that wasn't true during the entire combined 20 years they had.

(siddnote - I think "nadir" was the answer to a crossword clue I was stumped on. I'd never heard it before that. And I thought I'd never hear it again. Interesting coincidence!)

[yetihehe]

I think Trump being elected is a result of anti-thought, feudalism-seeking part of society coming to power, not a cause. Enough people were fed up with thinking elites stealing from them, so they elected thought-averse elites to steal from them because they naively thought that the stealing is because of intelligence.

[abustamam]

What? Trump is just a symptom. The US didn't suddenly become what it is now because of a vote. Like it or not (and I certainly don't), the people voted for this, twice. Whether they voted for it because they actually wanted it vs they voted for it because politicians convinced them they wanted it, it is what we wanted.

[LoganDark]

I don't deny that Republicans existed before Trump, but Trump being elected certainly fast-tracked this skyrocketing fascist disaster.

[abustamam]

Sure, absolutely. But again, the people voted for fascism. At his pre-election rallies he'd say shit like "I'm gonna be a dictator for a day!" and get cheers.

An America that didn't like fascism would have never even let this man win the primary.

[SmirkingRevenge]

I think it's like that old saying about bankruptcy - it happens very slowly, then all at once

The rise of right-wing propaganda mass media has been simmering brains for 3 decades in a populist, grievance and resentment stew and positioned things perfectly for right-wing propaganda to explode in the internet age - once social media came around, it was a renaissance for the paranoid-style radical right-wing demagogues, and they exploded in numbers and reach. In turn, that tilled the soil for a Trump figure to come along to disrupt things.

Trump basically took all the recurring themes of grievance from right-wing media to the extreme to turbo-charge the anxiety and fear of the right, including most things that were generally considered wrong for politicians to say/do.

It's almost hard to remember the before-times, but Trump was the first modern presidential ticket that outright attacks the media (calling them the enemy of the people, fake news, etc) to de-legitimize them - it used to be a point of pride in this country that politicians didn't do stuff like this, because it's a feature of authoritarian regimes, not democracies. Right-wing audiences were very used to hearing that sort of thing though, because it was a common feature of the right-wing propaganda media they had been boiling in for years.

[abustamam]

When I was in high school (or maybe even junior high), I remember learning the bill of rights and the freedom of speech and press and assembly. Our curricula and case studies always focused on freedom of speech because I guess it was absurd to think that the govt would ever attack the press. That was a thing "other" countries did.

I can look past some of the stupid shit he says. He gets freedom of speech too, even if it is stupid speech. But attacking the press is insane.

[thfuran]

>I can look past some of the stupid shit he says. He gets freedom of speech too

That just means it’s legally permissible, not reasonable, respectable, or conscionable. Do not look past the things he says.

[andreygrehov]

The apps have nothing to do with the current administration. All these permissions were already in place before the current administration. It’s easy to verify this by looking at previous versions of the apps. HN has created a narrative that everything the current administration does is bad.

[wodenokoto]

> HN has created a narrative that everything the current administration does is bad.

In all fairness, that narrative has been helped quite a bit by the current administration!

[andreygrehov]

No. That narrative is driven by mass media, which shapes the perception of opinions posted on HN.

[vanviegen]

Ah.. I'm glad it's just a narrative then, and that there are in fact just as many good things to report and that America is not rapidly becoming an authoritarian state.

[alsetmusic]

You're completely out of touch. If one thing the admin does is good for anyone but they and their cronies, even if only by accident, it is a total coincidence.

[Itoldmyselfso]

Fox news, the biggest mass media in US by far, doesn't seem to drive this narrative

[andreygrehov]

Fox News is not popular on HN.

[glitchdout]

For a good reason, don’t you think?

[abustamam]

When a coworker leaves the company and I inherit their work, I am given a little bit of time to acclimate and understand the projects they were working on.

If it turns out a secret was exposed in production, or we're exposing PII in logs, or storing CCs or passwords in plain text, there's a certain time frame in which the blame shifts from my coworker for introducing it, to me for not catching it.

That time frame is a lot less than one year.

[andreygrehov]

So where was that outrage before the current administration? The comments in this submission mostly blame the administration. I verified older versions of the apps and found that the wide permissions were there prior to Trump, and now suddenly it’s "hey, but he did not fix it!" This is hilarious, don't you think?

[abustamam]

"but Biden didn't fix it" isn't the defense you think it is.

Is there a double standard? Yes. This administration earned it through their, willful or not, incompetence and malice.

[andreygrehov]

Where in my comments did I say “but Biden didn't fix it”? What I say is the majority of commenters are wrong blaming the administration.

[abustamam]

> I verified older versions of the apps and found that the wide permissions were there prior to Trump

This pretty much insinuates Biden (and Trump v1, and Obama, and Bush) didn't fix it.

And the commenter aren't wrong when they blame the administration. They wouldn't be wrong to blame previous administrations either. But the previous administrations aren't in power right now.

[jrmg]

“The White House” app seems to be new, first published three days ago.

It’s easy to verify this by looking at the App Store listing for the app. And reading news coverage.

[andreygrehov]

Given that all other apps follow the same pattern, I insist that it has nothing to do with any sitting administration.

[DoingFedTime]

An app published March 27th has no prior-administration version history. The other 7 apps in the piece span back to Obama the article treats this as a bipartisan failure.

[dandanua]

As I've said, facts or meaning no longer matter. There are numerous cases where Trump blamed Democrats for something he did during his first term or took credit for something positive that the Biden administration did. HN does not create a narrative, people are free to post their opinions here.

[herbst]

To be fair that's the exact narrative European media seems to draw. Not sure how you could see anything else in this shitshow

[VorpalWay]

As an European, the political situation in US has never seemed reasonable to me, and been on a mostly downhill slope for a long time. It has certainly gotten way way worse with the current administration though.

[abustamam]

My relatives in Malaysia say it went from a slight downhill slope to a cliff and now we're in free fall.

The bottom has to be somewhere...