ReallyActuallyFrankenstein @ ReallyActuallyFrankenstein @lemmynsfw.com

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2 yr. ago

Imagine a couch. Comfortable. Soft. Now imagine it can move you around wherever you want to go. Imagine it is surrounded by bullet-proof glass to keep you safe, but also so you can enjoy adoration from millions of people without even having to get up.

Well, it exists, but it's one-of-a-kind, it can only have one owner, and it's currently spoken-for. What do you do?

Hey, you ever bribe animal control to get you stray dogs - the kind with no families to ask nosy questions - for cheap? $2998.50 isn't going to do it.

Yeah, the story should have been, "Trump comes up with another distraction to avoid admitting he's violating the Constitution," or at least, "Trump too stupid to understand a picture and says stupid thing."

But none of this gets to the most jaw-dropping part of this. Musk and Thiel propose making this network of hundreds of surveillance and attack satellites into a subscription service that the Musk/Thiel/Luckey consortium would own and the Pentagon would subscribe to. Not only is this crazy and absurd but it goes without saying that in no normal time would anyone at the Pentagon be okay with the US not owning the hardware at the center of national defense. We’ve seen how this goes with Starlink, where Musk routinely threatens to turn the system on or off based on his whims and opens up separate lines of communications and perhaps deals with adversary leaders like Vladimir Putin.

Of course Musk and Thiel and Palmer freaking Luckey would use this opportunity to not only get apparent no-bid contracts to build this unworkable mess, they'd get permanent parasitic access to government funds just to keep it going.

No part of this makes any strategic sense.

OpenAI recently updated ChatGPT to be able to reproduce images in a specific style, and a lot of people posted Ghibli-style versions of things. So all of a sudden, it's a big deal.

Yes, for sure. While everyone else was in realpolitik mode, it seemed clear to me you don't start a negotiation with a bad faith opponent by ceding your strongest position.

Obama governed as a centrist, and while I agree he probably escaped unscathed without any long-term ill will because of it, he squandered a ton of opportunities. Oh, and we got Trump as a reaction to the GOP's boogeyman propaganda anyway.

The criticism is valid but antiquated. It was Romney's healthcare framework for Massachusetts, and Obama (in typical fashion) led with a compromise to attempt to avoid a fight with conservatives and conservative democrats. By agreeing to private insurance mandates and not even fighting for a viable public option, I agree that Obama really missed a once-in-a-generation opportunity.

The reason why it doesn't make sense now to level the criticism that it's a "Republican healthcare plan" is that we've shifted several Overton windows to the right since then. A "Republican healthcare plan" in 2025 is an uninsured ER visit, where they are allowed to turn you away; you die in the street, after which your surviving family is billed for the corpse cleanup.

The CFPB people he cut were saving citizens - i.e. the very taxpayers Musk claims to represent without a mandate of any kind - $21 billion already.

He was selling our dollars for pennies.

To call this a monumentally unimpressive number doesn’t do it justice. Musk’s “savings” here — which are already error-ridden and inflated in the first place, created by totaling up spending that never actually existed or that was, alternately, either already cut or never actually was — represent just 15% of the trillion dollars he originally promised he would slash.

7.5%. He promised $2 trillion in cuts.

El Salvador is receiving $20,000 per year per prisoner.

From the letter:

The American Civil Liberties Union urges you to vote NO on H.R. 1526, the “No Rogue Rulings Act of 2025.” This bill would prohibit federal district courts from issuing injunctive relief that extends beyond the parties to a particular case. This means that federal district courts would no longer be allowed to issue nationwide injunctions when examining federal policies, even if those policies have a nationwide effect.

Text: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1526/text

Here I thought I was keeping up with the firehose, but this legislation is really insane. Only appellate courts could issue injunctions that apply beyond the parties and those represented by a party (e.g., class action).

This law would mean that every case is an individual determination. Every single wronged person would have to sue to enjoin a law that violates basic human rights.

This means that instead of Trump doing something blatantly illegal and unconstitutional and a court issuing an order immediately enjoining it, it may be months or years where he can act illegally before a higher court rules on it.

Yes, but they're just lawyers. If only they had applicable skills here that could help them challenge this in court.

Top Republicans in Congress are leaning hard on the tech giant to make its content policies friendlier to the GOP, after winning that fight with social media companies Meta and X.

Gather round, children, and hear tell of the legendary fight Meta and X put up against GOP-friendly policies.

You make it sound so broad. Really, it only works if they say the magic words "this is an official act," before, during or any time after what they are doing.

Instead, the agreement, signed on March 7 by top DHS and Pentagon officials, says the departments agreed to use the Guantanamo base to detain migrants with final deportation orders who have "a nexus to a transnational criminal organization (TCO) or criminal drug activity."

Officials defined "nexus" in broad terms. A nexus can be satisfied, the memo says, if migrants with final deportation orders are part of a transnational criminal group or if they paid one "to be smuggled into the United States." The latter condition could be used to describe many of the migrants and asylum-seekers who have illegally crossed the U.S. southern border, as criminal groups in Mexico largely control the illicit movement of people and drugs there.

See, this is why I'm cynical about whether we can escape fascism. Because Trump is an idiot, a fascist yes but even that aspect ruled by his malignant narcissism. But he's surrounded by people who know exactly how to manipulate the system in bad faith, and have a remarkably efficient plan to normalize and legalize fascism.

"A nexus to a transnational criminal organization" sounds good enough that 95% of the public will shrug. But under this definition, does my Wells Fargo account mean I have a nexus with a transnational criminal organization? Similarly, I've paid them money, which no doubt in part went to their criminal fake account scheme. It's coherent to say that I am just as culpable through this absurd game of sophistry. Who isn't captured by this?

The definitions of crime are becoming intentionally malleable and debatable, misused with malice and cunning, and capture all of us. This moment is what it looks like to dismantle the rule of law. Eventually, a terminal case is 100% selective enforcement, but it will always be "legitimized" enough that a coherent case can be made either way.

It's hard not to see this common thread the last few months. Whether its migrants, or students, or federal workers receiving arbitrary judgment, the rule of law is the only consistent enemy.

The future is great!

Yup, at one point he was just another republican institutionalist. I admit, I wrote him off.

But he worked really hard, he put in the effort. With his claim he can deport legal residents for future thought crime, and now just inviting in Russia propaganda, he is really becoming one of the most exemplary models of craven nihilistic power-worship in Trump's cabinet - and that's tough competition.

This is the kind of thing I mean when I say, we won't be able to fix the damage being done in our lifetime.

The fundamental mistrust of our country and government being created right now, in mere weeks, will not go away, even if we manage to weather four years of this. Trump is only doing one thing effectively, and that is destroy America's standing both inside and outside of the country, but the damage is so much deeper than we can process.

And Russia is the only country in the world benefiting from that right now. So I also am going to make a prediction. Once America is fully gutted, potentially in civil war, and a nightmarish dystopia, Putin will reveal he was manipulating Trump all along, probably by allowing a leak of some of the secret communications Trump has had with Putin, with Trump inevitably making outright treasonous statements. We'll all already know it was happening, but Putin will then gain one last trophy from Trump: confirming to the world he was able to manipulate and destroy the most powerful nation.

It's why Putin uses trademark assassination methods, like polonium tea. He wants everyone to know he did it, and he got away with it. It's why Trump is dropping the facade of democracy now that he has power, because he's mimicking Putin.

Yes, just pasting from the article for reference:

In addition, Bakaj told Tapper DOGE employees also made the mistake of using Elon Musks’ Starlink satellite connection to transfer data, which he believes is heavily compromised by Russian intelligence.

“From our understanding, Russia has a direct pipeline through Starlink, which means everything going through Starlink is going to Russia,” Bakaj said, adding this potentially includes nuclear regulatory material.