Trump's attacks on universities get darker, with shadows reaching our shores

USA, the land of unlimited possibilities...of how to get detained without a process...for expressing opinions...by the government repating that we have finally free speach and the dark ages are gone...while revisiting history to avoid dangerous words such as a 'women'...

And I've thought our wana-be-authorian politicians are greates idiots of all, but there seems to be running some kind of global world competion to find them and let them ruin their countries.

The politicians aren't idiots, they don't actually believe anything they say.

The idiots are the people whose support they politicians are courting.

whether you pretend to be an idiot and do idiotic things or are an idiot and do idiotic things doesn’t matter, the outcome is the same.

Matter of fact pretending to be an idiot and doing idiotic things might be worse cause you know better, an idiot’s excuse would be that that’s all they know to do.

This was true 8 years ago. Now I wouldn't be so sure about it anymore. I wouldn't make a bet that there isn't a single Republican out there who truly believes in some of the crazy stuff they are saying.

But of course the survival of crazy policies hinges on people willing to elect politicians who will implement them. And that in turn hinges on how well you disinform them.

Most of what you said applies to the UK as well, for what it's worth.

The recent signal leak shows that they really do believe this stuff. insert american flag and prayer emojis

It really doesn't, that's Fox news level of propaganda.

Does the UK have an issue with over-policing of twitter? Absolutely it does.

Are the tightening of protest laws concerning? Yes, very much so.

But it's nothing like the rhetoric and destruction of due process happening in the USA.

Does it now, dear whatabouter?

People are getting arrested and deported with no due process for expressing opinions? The UK government is rewriting history to remove women and gays?

No, you're just confusing the existence of hate crimes in UK law, and maybe the dumb migrant detention in Rwanda scheme (which has since been cancelled), both of which have due process, are public, and ridiculous to compare.

The vice president writing they were going to pray makes me think the editor of the Atlantic was intentionally added to the chat.

I don’t see how it could be believable that Vance is actually religious and isn’t just using it as a way to get votes.

Some of them are. Have you ever heard anything said by the current US president? It's just incoherent rambling.

Then we also have the Signal chat, and even biographies and books by some of the others that makes it clear done of these people are genuinely dumb as fuck.

For what purpose? And if it was just for that, why did they also share classified information?

Maybe publicity? The group in charge knows they can do no wrong, and I would bet their voters liked the rhetoric in the chat. Maybe they use controversy as a tool to keep people distracted (or even lead them to check out).

> while revisiting history to avoid dangerous words such as a 'women'...

What happened? I missed that (I'm not ironic, I would really like to know what else they did).

You missed the first word of my comment.

Additionally, yeah there have been "social media offenses" in the recent years. Individuals have been arrested for comments made on social media platforms. Try it out. Communications Act 2003 come to mind.

Are people not entitled to lawyers in the US?

In any case, there is authority overreach in both countries (and more).

I suspect this refers to the list of words that are used to filter out and likely cancel or block various grants. Those words are about what the current US government considers DEI, but they are ridiculously broad and include words like "woman".

The question is what consequences will it have. I have only seen good outcomes for the administration from the chat debacle. It is worrying, this could have led to a VP resigning.

I find it very believable that he became legitimately convinced of whatever odd sect Peter Thiel created that justifies extreme wealth hording, because it brought him into Peter Thiel's orbit which has clearly served him well.

People are really, really good at believing things that benefit themselves.

Well they have completely redefined what Christianity is, so in a way it doesn't surprise me that they need/use this redefined religion to provide "spiritual" comfort while performing these acts.

Yes the cynicism is there, but the "praying" is the means by which the subject performing the acts is able to feel authentic while performing them.

Also they're all performing for each other, too.

> Have you ever heard anything said by the current US president? It's just incoherent rambling.

Which is ironic considering all we heard from MAGA/Fox for the last 4 years is that Biden was incoherent and senile.

I know people who have had to defend their grant-funded research using terms like “inclusion” (geology) or “diversity” (of samples).

Growing up at the end of the Cold War with basically every major political figure decrying the USSR’s political apparatchiks monitoring everything, I never expected that to happen here but having watched the right’s embrace of Orban it wasn’t a surprise by the time it happened. The guys who brought us “freedom fries” crowded everyone else out of the party.

Agreed, absolutely everything done needs to be viewed through the lens of what will the ratings/viewership be. Everything makes more sense. Just think of the public spectacle, interviewing world leaders in the pulpit at the Whitehouse for example. It's a live TV show.

While there is legitimate debate over how authoritarian some policies in Australia or the UK might be in the past few years, these measures operate within established legal frameworks, with judicial oversight and public scrutiny. Even if you view them as overly restrictive, they don't stem from a single "contrarian" movement with a coordinated political agenda. Moreover, neither government is rewriting history to erase specific groups. The fact that hate-speech or migration laws exist doesn’t equate to people being arrested or deported without due process, nor does it imply some monolithic campaign to censor or remove entire populations from the record.

You are right, the UK adores mass migration, look around larger cities, such as London or Birmingham. :)

That was written in 2021 when progressives were erasing women to call everyone birthing persons. It’s not this administration

The "balling out Europe" stuff again. Their goal is to ultimately normalise the idea that the EU is an enemy in advance of the Greenland invasion. The leaking of clarified information doesn't matter because A) US service personal are expendable and B) the involvement in Yemen is now only to keep up appearances of being allied to Saudi Arabia who will in the long term also get the same treatment as the EU because their fuel output competes with US/Russia.

From the outside they both come across as incompetent and senile and it's hard to believe those are really the people at the top.

It doesn't really matter if Biden was a drooling vegetable, if his appointments were competent at doing their jobs.

These guys are, sadly competent at... Well, a few things, but none of them include 'good governance'.

It’s hard for me to consider a successful propaganda campaign as ironic. The word you’re looking for is either hypocritical or malicious.

If the UK didn’t want immigrants, they shouldn’t have colonized half the world and took their stuff

It did matter in the election.

It's complicated. Most traditional Brits don't want that but a lot of the asians are UK citizens and bring in brides / grooms from asia to marry so the numbers double roughly each generation.

Maybe as India gets richer and the UK economy flatlines they'll stop doing that.

Everybody is entitled to their opinion, whether they'd be Raku developers or not.

Hi Liz!

Looks like it’s time to update my profile, sadly I’m doing more PHP and Lua these days (wish it was Raku, it’s much better, but that’s how it goes)

Projects are being killed across the government for exactly this reason. If anything it's even dumber than it sounds. If any word in a project or department title string matches a list of common terms it can get killed with zero investigation or recourse. Billions of dollars worth of research and work have already been destroyed in this way and it's only getting worse.

They are, and I am entitled to not associate with them in any way, and tell others to do the same, for this specific comment alone. It says a lot about his views. Like seriously, because the UK a long time tried to conquer parts of the world, mass migration to the UK today is somehow OK? Slavery should be OK, too, according to him, then, since all races have been enslaved at some point in time of history. It is extremely poor reasoning, in poor taste. You should know better.

My comment made zero moral judgements. History has consequences. Spreading the English language to over a billion people while enriching Britain means a lot of people will want to live in a rich place where they can speak the language, for generations to come. Whether immigration is good or bad is kind of irrelevant to the argument.

Indians are definitely are issue, but so are the influx of people from Africa. It is worth looking at videos of these cities and how much they have changed over the course of years because of immigration. The city is trashed, quite literally. Trash everywhere you go.

You appealed to what "UK" did in the past, though.

Same thing applies to slavery, then, since every race has been enslaved before. Would you say slavery is OK, too, considering it has been common practice by then by race or nationality X?