At this point insider trading issue has run away so hard I don't see how it can be tamed without revolutionary frameworks. If we look at crypto then I'm not sure we want to live in a world where insider trading is normalized either so we ought to start working on these new frameworks as soon as possible but nobody seems to care.
Rather than banning gambling I think you need to ban congress critters from trading. Polymarket is a quick and anonymize way of making long bets on your inside information.
But there are plenty of other stock-based bets they already do make to trade on confidential info.
They should be allowed to hold an ETF with fully locked contribution schedules. Anything more is corruptible.
(Also, if congress critters’ wealth was coupled to the index instead of specific interests, maybe we’d get less pork overall.)
Insider trading is already illegal (this case proves it). If the problem is under-enforcement, then I agree that better enforcement is the fix.
Banning gambling is a completely separate intervention addressing a different activity, and clearly wasn't required to bring charges in this case.
The tendency of governments to create new laws instead of enforcing existing ones is how we end up with absurdly complex legal systems and the loopholes that come with them.
That would require a functioning legislative branch that could pass laws. However a major political program of the past decades has been to gum up Congress and prevent its functioning. There's very limited bandwidth to accomplish legislation, and there's hundreds of good fixes that can't fit through, so I doubt the US will be able to fix this anytime soon, unless there's bigger scandal.
Until the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, Collateral Debt Obligations were regulated differently in different states. Some said it was insurance, and thus regulated it like insurance. Some said it was gambling and banned it outright. Instead, regulation was handed to a toothless new agency who got little funding for enforcement and the rest of the world got the 2008 financial crisis.
I think a good compromise there is to get rid of shorting.
And tax capital gains at a rate inversely proportional to how long the shares were held. E.g., 90% if held less than a second, 10% if held over 10 years.
what makes 'shorting' special? I understand what shorting is from a non-market-junkie point of view (essentially betting that a stock will go down).. is that just more 'gameable' than buying stock.. i guess i don't see the difference between 'i bet this will go up' and 'i bet this will go down' it's still a bet.
I assume it must be much easier to modify the market to make a stock price go down (e.g. hack the CEO account to say something silly/dangerous) vs trying to make the stock price go up.
I’d argue that the level of corruption we’re seeing, not just in the USA but all over the Western world, hasn’t risen to a level that warrants revolutionary action.
> nobody seems to care
And it would seem that the masses tend to agree.
We are much much better off tolerating this level of corruption than we would be attempting a revolution.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how fat the fat cats are so long as the general population’s standard of living doesn't go backwards too far too fast.
> hasn’t risen to a level that warrants revolutionary action.
A certain amount of corruption is normal - as Doctorow pointed out, all complex ecosystems evolve parasites. It's much better to have a democracy with some corruption than a police state that enforces its laws perfectly.
Now, when people realise the current state of their democracy and how it reflects the needs of the people, then they'll start considering bringing out the guillotines.
The general population's standard of living HAS gone backwards too fast.
Just look at something like Office Space. Just twenty seven years ago, it was a satire of the indignities and disrespect of work life. Today, the movie's work environment would be incredibly cushy.
>We are much much better off tolerating this level of corruption than we would be attempting a revolution.
There is no we to prevent any revolution occurring once corruption or "mere" wealth distribution unsustainable discrepancy are passing some thresholds, after which it simply will feedbackloop exponentially.
Pauperization that allows some party to have chip exploitable labour too frightened to have strong collective claims is also building the social structure of bloody revolution as masses feel like rushing into brutality is the only viable left option.
Thresholds by themselves dont auto trigger some state change because the state is aware of them too.
The police and intelligence are well paid to keep an eye on all kinds of signals. Unless the situation reaches a point they cant pay the cops any voilence will be shut down fast, because over time they have become quite good at it. Just like we have become good at running gigantic boilers without them exploding. Even poor states are good at it. Because anyone running a farm, factory, depending on banks, telcos, ports, power grid etc are all very dependent on the state to keep the lights on. More efficent they get the more dependent they are on external structures staying in tact to stay afloat.
The world today is a much more complicated place, full of interdependcies(as covid showed us), than what it was when revolutions were seen as the solution to anything.
So Organizing and Voting still remains the easier way to cause change as tempratures rise. Thats the control and feedback mech.
Protests have already been mitigated by tactics researched and documented among the most authoritarian think tanks.
Believe it or not, wealthy people plan ahead to protect their hoard and they have had several decades since Gandhi to figure out how to neuter peaceful protests that threaten their status.
> We are much much better off tolerating this level of corruption than we would be attempting a revolution.
We, today, are better not attempting revolution because revolutions are painful. But we are also on a downward slope which will eventually reach below a threshold where 2 things happen: their* life will be much worse off than any revolution, but also they will no longer be able to mount a revolution.
I've lived through a violent revolution. Not knowing what's happening, not knowing what tomorrow brings, while getting shot at are all terrifying. I can genuinely say that most of what came after was better. A few paid a high price for the several generations that came after to mostly have it better.
I am not advocating revolution, just doing what it takes to change course. Even voting appropriately could do it.
*I say they because it might not happen in our lifetime. But we are selling our kids' futures for our current comfort. They'll be the ones really paying our debt.
> I’d argue that the level of corruption we’re seeing, not just in the USA but all over the Western world, hasn’t risen to a level that warrants revolutionary action.
What level of corruption would warrant revolutionary action? How much more corrupt can you get than sending forces into combat in a war of choice that disrupts the global economy and kills thousands to win a bet on a crypto platform and shift the news cycle away from accusations of rampant pedophilia among the elite and the lack of prosecution thereof?
I doubt they did it for the purpose of crypto bets, that was just a side benefit. They did it because Israel owns our government, and this is the first time we've had a president far enough out of touch with reality to not push back.
Age limits (for Congress/Judiciary/Presidency) would be a much more targeted fix. Past ~75 you just don't have enough years left to be at risk of being affected by the things you're implementing. Dying in office of old age should be a deeply shameful way to go.
Yeah I don't really see how that is an argument that current corruption isn't too extreme.
> Age limits (for Congress/Judiciary/Presidency) would be a much more targeted fix.
Would it? There are plenty of corrupt people in office younger than 75, to say nothing of the countless unelected people in close proximity to power. Only 42 out of 535 members of congress are over 75. On the supreme court, Alito only turned 76 3 weeks ago, and the only other justice over that threshold is Thomas who is 77. Trump was under 75 for his entire first term. Biden, Trump, and Reagan are the only presidents who have ever been in office over the age of 75. Such an age limit would do basically nothing to change the composition of government. While there may be compelling reasons for such an age limit like ensuring mental acuity, it is not a remedy for corruption.
I wasn't saying that age limits would fix all, or even the most important problems. I'm just saying that we're only at war with Iran because Trump's dementia is leaving him disconnected from reality.
But, being more respectful to you and who i orignally replied to — yes actual revolution could/would be brutal and could/would create a much worse daily life for the non-elites.
Still, as I bet you could agree when not aguing semantics, its inexusable for people to declare we should accept corruption
Yes we should just calmly ignore private insurance death panels, propped up by politicians, killing treatable people at scale rather than put the fear in a few thousand rich people physics didn't see fit to spare from eventual biological death anyway (since they love to trot out that argument).
To say nothing of the processed food and automobile industries.
> Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how fat the fat cats are so long as the general population’s standard of living doesn't go backwards too far too fast.
Well, given that people are behaving more and more violently towards said fat cats I think it's clear we're starting to reach a breaking point and people are caring. It wasn't too long ago that I saw people cheering on LinkedIn when that healthcare CEO got got, so if people are willing to put their professional profiles at risk you have to imagine it's far worse behind closed doors.
Personally I really dislike living in interesting times and greatly prefer advocating against corruption rather than letting things slide until they get a lot worse.
That’s until food and energy price increases become unbearable for the masses. While the first test is already here with gas prices, we’ll have the second test soon in the form of 50% price increases on food in developed Western countries.
In some places, like the Philippines, gas/fuel prices are up 70-100% since the start of the Special Four Day Operation in Iran. It's easy to say "who cares doesn't affect me", which sounds nice. But the Philippines is a major manufacturing hub of stuff that keeps life artificially cheap in the west. The rest of SE Asia is undergoing similar rapid price increases. Thailand, Malaysia, etc make lots of electronic components which will be facing a huge squeeze very soon.
The reason for those price increases is those countries don't have massive fuel stockpiles. The west does have big stockpiles, and they're artificially suppressing the price of fuel by releasing those stockpiles and hoping the special operation is over before their stockpiles run out. Because if prices shoot up now, people will realize just how truly disastrous it all is and actual consequences for various governments may be had, so the only option is to kick the can down the road and hope it somehow resolves itself.
Asia is in a particularly bad situation, because even for countries that do have stockpiles, they get basically all of their oil from Iran, the UAE, east coast of Saudi Arabia, etc. Now they have no oil. America can pretend it's a 4D chess move and now those countries will buy American oil and make their economy great again. But the thing is America isn't selling any additional oil to Asia. But America is 100% dependent on cheap things made in Asia, things that are built with plastic made from middle eastern oil and powered by electricity generated from middle eastern oil and shipped on boats running on middle eastern oil. All these things take months to show any effects to Americans and Europeans, so until then, it's just a game of burying heads in the sand until the situation suddenly explodes.
For a lot of us this perturbation hurts portfolios, tightens the belt, and hurts business investments… But oil and food production are tied together in numerous ways.
We’re looking at fuel shocks, downstream the agricultural, fertilizer, and food shocks are gonna cost untold anguish and many lives. Farmer suicides and famines, as the start of a destabilizing wave.
1) for the second time in my adult life I have to ask aloud how shit Dick Cheney was saying on 60 minutes ca 1993 escaped the notice of the entire US military and its commander in chief
2) the obvious lack of a post-strike plan and confusion about how mountains and waterways work make it hard to pin down how elementary and remedial the eff-ups here really are, so incompetent and indifferent
It was slow for 30 years, the last couple of years have been insane.
I'd say that either way the population will not rebel. If the government is smart they'll just pay for the populations Netflix, burgers and beer. It's enough to keep people passive.
MAGA propaganda is so effective that it got those who never believed in the economic utility of the stock market to begin with to call for revolution to preserve the integrity of the market.
The cost of insider trading mostly get passed to the rich. The reason why insider trading is illegal isn't that it's particularly morally wrong as much as it disincentivizes participation in the markets.
> Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how fat the fat cats are so long as the general population’s standard of living doesn't go backwards too far too fast.
Worker's compensation in real terms has been almost flat for the last 50 years, 50 years which have seen the largest increase in productivity in recorded history by far. I'm surprised this is still not enough to you.
And that's using the fake, government approved definition of "real wages" where they pretend the existence of smartphones cancels out a 200% increase in rent, which it doesn't. Real real wages have declined.
Very few people feel impacted by that. If you consider bombing Iran was going to happen anyway because distractions are needed, the money made by the whale that consistently predicts the movements of the current administration is a relatively small thing compared to starting a war for no good reason.
One possible solution is to make all trades public and traceable to the person who made the decision and the people who benefit from that.
Interestingly enough, trading and gambling are things that a blockchain is a pretty good fit for. There is a public ledger and trace of ownership for the trades / lays. And depending on how it is set up, payout is autonomous, as long as no one party controls the network.
It can be solved by enforcing the laws already on the books. Insider trading is illegal.
If the laws are not enforced or selectively enforced you live in a nascent fascist state, not a democracy, what you need is a return to the rule of law, not the abolition of it.
I don't think anyone who has been paying attention over the last year could conclude that laws are not being selectively enforced. So I guess the next question is what options provide a realistic way of restoring justice.
It's just that the problem is not the trading or betting side, the problem is the information producing side.
E.g. imagine he placed a bet that Maduro would get shot in is left eye and die.
Same goes for the congress. Them making money is by far a smaller issue compared to the havoc they can cause trying to make a few bucks on their crazy bets.
I actually don’t know the details of the specific crimes. Eg if you’re a soldier and you post on Facebook that you’re about to go on a raid to depose a head of state, that’s presumably a secrecy violation you would be punished severely for. The insider trading can be like this too in that you’re improperly using the information you are privy to due to your being an insider. If you’re a congressperson and you tweet that the government is about to do such a raid, I don’t know what the legality of that is – perhaps you have some kind of privilege to reveal these things and any censure must happen politically (eg impeachment, losing elections, etc) rather than legally. I don’t know what the rules for insider trading would then be – legislators are not insiders in the way that soldiers are.
Ignoring the moral argument, it isn’t all that clear to me that this would actually be a crime for a legislator under US securities law. It may be that new laws would be required to be able to punish legislators for this kind of behaviour.
He was charged with "unlawful use of confidential government information for personal gain, theft of non-public government information, commodities fraud, wire fraud, and making an unlawful monetary transaction.". Supposedly, unlawful use of government confidential information could also be applied to legislative and other people in the government
Congress sometimes includes an exemption for themselves from some crimes. Others are excused by the Constitution:
> The Senators and Representatives shall receive a Compensation for their Services, to be ascertained by Law, and paid out of the Treasury of the United States. They shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.
> The law prohibits the use of non-public information for private profit, including insider trading, by members of Congress and other government employees.
Did congress do it with classified ops data, or with their voting stuff?
The main difference between the two is that betting on the date of a classified op indirectly reveals classified data that can tip off an adversary and cost lives.
I meant the separation of powers between the executive, legislative and judicial branches. Maybe this is more of a thing in Europe, even if not perfect here.
I like how when people talk about corruption they think about Nancy Pelosi or some other congressman/senator making couple million $ on the stock market over their entire careers due to insider trading. Just last week Trump made a bet of around $1B on the price of oil going down before doing a fake announcement.
I too wonder why "Nancy Pelosi" has become basically synonymous with Congress insider trading when she's not even close to the top of the list among congresspeople.
What other reason is there for an otherwise unremarkable character to become the public face of the issue for years?
Chuck Schumer is the whip of the party, as mentioned she isnt even top 10 in performance, her party didnt legalise the activity, other members are aggresive in their pursuit of insider trading information (MTG was part of the most committees during her tenure, but she skipped almost all votes after that, she just wanted the scoop adn then bolted) ...
So why her?
The most common excuse is "well people demand more of dems because everyone knows republicans are crooks", which doesnt explain why more senior leaders, ex presidents etc are the ones hounded instead of her.
how ever surveys by lobbys like the ones owned by the Koch brothers show which politicians people find unlikeable. Unsurprsingly many are unremarkable women, just like Nancy, which makes them easy targets for public campaigns in favour or against.
If you name the most talked about politicans of the past 20 years, outside of the pres (Obama, Biden, Trump) you get mostly women (Sarah Palin, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, AOC, MTG, Kristi Noem, Laurent Bobert) that is not a coincidence and it explains why no one could pick Schumer, who is senior leadership, in a police line up but can tell you the many dogs Kristi killed
Because of the Nvidia trade just before the CHIPS act passed.
Which is ridiculous because the entire thing was largely fabricated by the media for those juicy clicks. It was a "half truth" story that hinged on the public's general ignorance of derivatives trading.
While she acquired Nvdia shares days before the bill passed, it was entirely coincidental, because she had put in for those shares over a year prior. Craziest of all, which the media would never fucking say, is that she lost money on the trade.
Nancy Pelosi's most infamous insider trade is one she lost money on. It's one of the core stories I use as an example of how shamelessly misleading the media is. Destroying the country for ad views.
Sexism will play a role, but a big part of the reason why Pelosi gets so much flak is that she did nothing to stop it when the democrats were in charge, thus directly paving the way to the current shitshow.
> I like how when people talk about corruption they think about Nancy Pelosi or some other congressman/senator making couple million $ on the stock market over their entire careers due to insider trading
So, two things. First, she's made quite a bit more than a few million dollars. Second, she's been an example of being a "suspiciously good trader" for years and years and years. Has anything happened to her? Republicans talk about her and do nothing about it. Democrats say it's a conspiracy theory. The behavior has quite clearly been normalized.
I think corruption happens long ago before Trump. I’m thinking more on the inequality of wealth and how a smaller percentage of people takes a bigger share of the wealth since I don’t know when. Trump is in fact the symptom of that corruption and part of the reason people elected him. But he definitely makes it worse especially in his second presidency.
Nowadays super riches run the show and even the illusion of democracy is gone.
Another thought: many political elites are probably waiting and pushing for Trump to fail to take over. It is us who are going to suffer.
The only reason we know about the trades in Congress is because they're following the law and reporting them. I don't think there is any evidence that members of Congress: 1) have access to classified info like this, and 2) are betting on polymarket.
That's not to say the behavior isn't extremely slimey but they are acting within the law. Your comment doesn't mention the executive branch and the various crypto "ventures" going on, like the Whitehouse dinner for investors of $TRUMP coin of which we have no idea who invested or what they got from it.
If Nancy can get some stock for cheap prior to landing a big government contract, that's not the same as a solider possibly tipping the hand of a delicate military operation.
No one likes insider trading especially when it's done by politicians, but let's not pretend they're the same
Technically this is stealing from the people who bet against the Maduro raid happening; and it’s cheating because we assume those people taking that side of the bet weren’t privy to the planning.
He’s only stealing from the US military if the DoD is taking the other side of prop bets on US military operations on polymarket. Which… I mean maybe it’s a reasonable insurance strategy? US military bets that they’re gonna screw up a raid on Venezuela, then either everything goes well and they end up with a successful operation, or it all goes to hell and they wind up winning a consolation cash prize. Hedging operational success by taking the over on casualty estimates… dark.
You can already hear the pseudo-theories, justifying the differences for eternity. Blue blooded, of lazy blood, etc. Apply yourselfs and you will win.. adding insult to injury, when you can not win, you must in addition be lazy with only yourself to blame.
As I read through the distinctions between "class" and "caste" helpfully provided by search engine AI, a sensation that formal caste systems are more honest than inexplicit "class" systems grew in my mind.
The claims are that different outcomes in income, occupation, education, marriage, etc can result in changes in a person's "class." But even in the statistically insignificant number of Horatio Alger stories, did the person's class really change? Did Eliza from Pygmalion change classes or just learn how to "code switch?"
Except in the United States it is true. Something like 80% of new military recruits come from military families (parent, sibling, uncle/aunt, or grandparent).
Similarly over the last few decades the number of medical doctors who have immediate family who are also doctors has grown.
Social and economic class in the US is increasingly set in stone and hereditary.
Medical schools require a lot of volunteering and things like 'slinging hot dogs to pay tuition' don't count unless you grew up without clothes surviving on rabid dogs in the holler of W Virginia working the coal mines from age 8. We all know who has time to volunteer or do minimum wage healthcare instead of work the best paying shitty side job they can get: the rich.
It's set up heavily tilted so you have to be rich, or dirt poor enough for a sob story, or a desired minority. Even if you do volunteer a lot and are middle class, you probably didnt know anyone that could help you into the most prestigious positions. A middle class person of equal aptitude would likely go into something like engineering or law which have fewer class-signalling non-academic purity tests.
That gating on medical training has always been there (at least for 40 years, if not more). But the number of doctors from doctor families has increased.
And just generally, socioeconomic mobility has decreased in the US across the population.
Always been gated. But the slider has been dragged even further in the purity test direction. The intelligent un-pure now tend to become NP or PA, those programs still let you practice independently and slide more towards academics and less at whether a rich person set you up to be taken care of while you play mother Teresa until the switch flips the day you are accepted.
Because there are so many applicants that have good grades.
A more cynical view is that the governing boards want a way to pick and choose who they let in. So they create "holistic" application systems to get "360 degree view of the candidate".
I wonder how much of this has to do with seeing someone you are close to work as a doctor makes being a doctor (or military recruit, SWE, etc.) seem real and achievable to you. When I was little I wanted to be a firefighter purely because my father was a firefighter; it wouldn’t surprise me if the same goes for a lot of other people.
I can't prove it, but I've heard more than one story of those with relatives in the military managing to get someone to pull rank and put them on better and upwards promoting assignments.
Military academies are not upper class at all, mostly middle class folks. Officers are generally of the same stock as any other white collar job in engineering, law, business, etc.
Obv not a great sample, but within my peer group, none have parents or siblings. I have an uncle. Grandparent is a weird one - for anybody born in the 70s as I was, it’s almost a given to have a grandparent or four who served. Being European, all of mine served at the tail end of WWII or immediate aftermath.
In the United States i suspect some portion of this is due to "legacy" admissions whereby some child is admitted to a competitive program or given very advantageous scholarships not because of their hard work and displayed competence, but because of their parents. I know that it will be very possible for my children to end up at ivy league if they take the legacy advantage I've given them, even though ivy league has been completely off the table for me my entire life. They'll start _much, much_ higher on the ladder than I could.
They are synonyms as that includes "nearly the same."
The only difference I can detect is that "class" allows members to move between groups and "castes" do not; however, all the outcomes are identical. So they are absolutely synonymous in most peoples eyes.
It's the people with the guns (and muscles) that have the literal physical power. They could shoot the aristocrats dead if they wanted to.
The aristocrats' "power" is make-believe like the rest of their papers and numbers: The various psychological barriers which dissuade the gun-bearers from ever reaching the "want to" part.
Which is why power is much more complex than brute force. Sheer physical or military power is not the be-all and end-all, just a facet of the total picture (and in fact, social creatures that humans are, even just adversarial aspects of power are a subset of power).
> It's the people with the guns (and muscles) that have the literal physical power. They could shoot the aristocrats dead if they wanted to.
What matters is not raw power, it’s balance. The power of one guy with guns is kept in check by the power of other guys with guns who stand to benefit from the status quo. The aristocracy’s game is to play with this balance to make sure that no other rival force emerges. They do not need any actual physical power themselves to play it.
This is true up until it isn't. Their security is through obscurity. Being able to deflect the masses. Manipulating the balance, if you will. But they are not special. They are still unprotected sacks of flesh. And we've recently seen just how vulnerable they are. If that desire spread, you will see more.
Indeed. Then, there’s a revolution and heads start rolling. But again, this does not happen when power disappears; it happens when the balance changes, e.g. when a significant chunk of the army sides with a part of the people.
> Their security is through obscurity
Not at all. They can be very blatant about it. Look at Iran for example. Or Russia. Everyone knows who controls what, there is nothing obscure about it.
People with guns don't stand much of a chance against people with armies. Sure armies can turn on an individual, but that just means that particular individual has lost power, and that power has been transferred to whatever new individual commands the loyalty of the many. It's not imaginary, it's emergent.
And how are the people who shot these politicians doing now? How about the US and Japanese governments? Clearly shooting a politician doesn't mean either that you gain their power or that the power structure they led evaporates.
Reminds me of the riddle[1][2] from Game of Thrones / A Clash of Kings:
Lord Varys: Three great men sit in a room: a king, a priest, and a rich man. Between them stands a common sellsword. Each great man bids the sellsword kill the other two. Who lives, who dies?
Tyrion Lannister: Depends on the sellsword.
Lord Varys: Does it? He has neither crown, nor gold, nor favor with the gods.
Tyrion Lannister: He has a sword, the power of life and death.
Lord Varys: But if it's swordsmen who rule, why do we pretend kings hold all the power? When Ned Stark lost his head, who was truly responsible? Joffrey? The executioner? Or something else?
Tyrion Lannister: I've decided I don't like riddles.
[pause]
Lord Varys: Power resides where men believe it resides. It's a trick. A shadow on the wall. And a very small man can cast a very large shadow.
Historically aristocracy was the military class. Nowadays in authoritarian societies it looks like it's mostly matter of time before military takes the lead.
China dervies a ton of authority and Legitmacy from the PLA (peoples liberation army) and Russia is run by from Inteligence service members of the KGB low level ones to be sure but I don't see how China and Russia are counter examples. The US isn't their yet we will see if the backslide happens in the next two years but I think its of a different qualia than we see in the "typical" Authorithian State.
Ironically I was watching Nuremberg last not and is is schocking how close some of the leaders of this country are to characters like Hermann Göring, or Hitler himself in talking points. They are certainly populists but the language they used is MGGA (make german great again) so to speak. And factually that were not particular that good at it either most of Germans recovery is really due to the liberal government that pass laws that built the Autobahn were laws not by the Nazi party. They certain jumped on them and accelerate them but effective governence is not really for the populist
In fact, the current administration, not headed by someone from the military (and VP has military credibility but not leadership) is not at all aligned to the military except in that their base appreciates the imprimatur of honorable military service. In fact, Trump 1 was in many ways a huge refutation to Trump of the idea that the military guys were leaders he could count on. Their brain-trust positions had more left-alignment than he maybe imagined. His administration, in 2025, fired high-ranking officers in a way that suggested he entered with the reverse conclusion: not military leaders as high-competence straight-shooters, but as all being suspect for having risen unstoppably in a system pervaded by partisan platitudes and shibboleths. Fortunately, the administration didn't take the Soviet approach of purging all those under suspicion.
They just finally had to fire their SecNav because reality butted heads with their ideological conclusion was that business experience was more conducive to military success. Unfortunately for their very-much-not-military-led plan, SecNav probably needs a bit more user experience from time in Navy leadership to successfully work within that labrythine bureaucracy.
A military coup in the U.S. is imaginable, which probably explains some of the top brass purges (until recently, where it's probably an attempt to deflect blame for the massive Iran fuck up).
Putin did it better; he kept the military weak and aggressively managed the risk via the FSB.
I don't think it's plausible, but an authoritarian president invoking emergency powers and deploying military and paramilitary forces to exert control on the streets is, on the basis it's already going on at a limited scale. All it takes is for that scale to gradually dial up over time until the frog's cooked.
The problem you have is these elected kings. Not just any king, pretty specifically the majority of the powers enjoyed by George III in the 1790s. The fact that you still have this, unreformed over 200 years later and still think that somehow your constitutional system is modern, is a matter for despair. Get yourselves a proper parliamentary system, with maybe a head of state as a figurehead.
I think, despite all the furor whipped up and attempts by high-ranking officials to foment a coup, the military is actually very unlikely to disobey Presidential orders; this is based on my frequent interactions with military officers over the last ten years. Do you perceive some other, more likely, coup scenario?
That is exactly the type of pacificity that plays into their hand. Life is good and bad at the same time. It is important to hold those two at the same time.
The vast majority of people don't want to take the bet of a tiny chance of doubling their lot in life for the downside risk of literally being tortured and dying and probably ruining the life of any loved ones.
Most people aren't degenerate gamblers.
The workaround is organization. With sufficient organization, you can start to drag the tiny chance to a slightly bigger chance, and slightly reduce the downside risk maybe.
Some parts of American society are absurdly bad at organizing, and basically gave up 60 years ago.
Not at all. In a caste system a lower caste person will get attacked if he (or especially she) has any success at all. Whether or not what they did was legal or not does not factor into the equation. First priority is that the highest up dalit is lower than the worst drunkard brahmin, even if they have to kill them.
Tulsa once had what was known as Black Wall Street. There were too many successful black men, so 1921 in the whites massacred everybody. They even brought in planes and dropped bombs.
People died, yes. But there was no white supremacism. There was no Wall Street. It was just like any high street. It was triggered by an attempted rape.
Are we now not at all allowed to reference problems in other societies? We can complain about western society, and complaints from 100 years ago, when even my grandfather wasn't born yet, are valid criticism of America/Europe/... but things that happen today in India, Pakistan, Turkey are off limits?
No one did of course, but it's a common tactic of distraction to try to focus the attention on something else.
That way people don't have to experience the discomfort thinking about the negative thing going on in their own society.
I think an important distinction is not really the class matter, it’s really more a jealousy and spite that the political and bureaucratic betters could not profit from it, not that he did so much.
If he had had the means of letting all or maybe just a relevant and important enough cadre of aristocrats know the inside information, he would have surely not been prosecuted. I know this from first hand knowledge.
It may seem the same or like a distinction without a difference to some, but that is really how things work and why he was prosecuted, not because he profited, but because he did not let others in on it and they really want to discourage that behavior, hence his flogging and his public flogging at that. And yes, if you get the sense that it’s like organized crime, then yes, that is and long has been how the US government and many other governments have functioned for a long time now. It’s what also makes them so easily controlled by the US. It could have easily also been swept under the rug while still sending a signal within the system, but it wasn’t and we were all told about it.
And that is how the ruling parasites really get rich, none of that hard work and smarts stuff; those are the stories told to keep the peasant cattle voting for the slaughterhouse, dreaming of the wide open pastures of also becoming rich by working hard.
Fraud, cheating, lying, manipulation … that’s the name of the American dream game.
I again apologize to anyone who feels what and how I say things is “flame bait” or a personal attack, it’s simply just how I speak and like to challenge people’s comfortable assumptions. Feel free to dismiss what I say of you disagree with me. No offense intended and no flaming or whatever necessary, it’s just people speaking to each other or not. We’ll all be fine if we keep talking, even if you don’t like what others have to say or want to control how they say things.
Not so much class or caste, but a dual-state where an elite have a normative or lawless state, and specific or arbitrary others suffer a parallel prerogative or punitive state. This is the essence of corrupt authoritarianism.
Most Americans share a delusion of perpetual glory days like a former star high school football quarterback with the refusal to accept factual reality that their country isn't uniformly excellent and is terrible in many ways including being extremely superficial, corrupt, dangerous, unhealthy, unhappy, paranoid, over-reacting, immature, selfish, unfair, disinformed, and unequal.
More like three. One class where you can do whatever you can pay for, another with a set of annoying but almost reasonable rules and the last one for whom any actions and their mere existence is illegal, but whose presence is very much relied upon to do things.
It's a simplified model to expose unseen hypocrisy and injustice that originated with the persecution of jews in the German Nazi justice system. In reality, 2 or 3 is too simplistic as the US values people differently in different contexts with numerous attribute privilege points. Don't be old, brown, short, homeless, and unattractive in America except to be constantly harassed.
Frank Wilhoit: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
soldiers are disposable, they prolly threw him under the bus hoping that would be the end of the matter and they could walk away with the rest of the money.
America is fine with the rich and powerful doing that. Just not one of the normies. Just look who they elected to President. You cannot with a serious face suggest otherwise.
My first thought as well, but you can imagine how dangerous it would be if special forces started tanking their performance due to betting market considerations.
Don't become so cynical. Congress has an obligation to be consulted on wars and withhold consent/budget. (Even if they were merrily trading on events).
Perhaps one of the silver linings we eventually get from current happenings is meaningful anti-insider trading legislation, with criminal penalties, timely reporting, nonpartisan enforcement. In principle that legislation could happen as soon as 2/2027. Or perhaps not.
Between citizens united, gerrymandering, the electoral college, winner take all elections, and voter supression, I don't think we can say that "elections" in America reflect the will of the people.
But when's the last time you had $300 million in your personal budget to spend on advertising to a specific human being to improve your personal income?
When's the last time you got a call from an actual politician begging you for money and "support"?
US congress members spend the vast vast majority of their time on the phone begging a list of rich people for a piss of nickles to fund advertising for their next election. There's always a subtle threat of strings attached.
Both the prince and pauper are forbidden from sleeping under the bridge.
When the people feel everyone is corrupt without any evidence then the next step is getting actual corrupt leaders like Trump's government and soldiers like this that feel corruption is standard behavior