The US is operated like a banana republic.
Trump is prosecuted for 34 felonies. His ICE regime is unlawful. Tariffs are deemed illegal. They siphon tax payer money to their own friends and family.
When will the people rise up against this?
Nobody is going to rise up against it, because "both sides." Biden pardoned his son.
For years there were corporate overlords lobbying and corruption. That was "both sides".
Now this "side" has been railing against corruption by the "other side" and how they are going to put every corrupt person in jail and most "transparent" government.
Turns out they are much worse. Don't even know how to be corrupt properly. Just blatantly corrupt. When corned keep doing whataboutism - forgetting that even if the "other side" was corrupt it doesn't mean they can be corrupt too. Worse yet they still get support from their base.
Make no mistake - this is making US a low trust society on par with a third world country.
Yes, that's bad.
It's not even remotely the same.
Biden pardoned his son to protect him from being hounded for the rest of his life by rabid Republicans that still can't shut up about Hillary's emails (despite Trump doing 10x worse with the top secret files in his toilet), Benghazi (with 4 deaths, far less than the current Iran boondogle), etc...
Trump has weaponised the pardon power, which was previously used by other presidents to pardon people who didn't deserve their punishment. Non-violent drug crimes like possession of a bit of weed, life imprisonment over a technicality, that kind of thing.
Trump instead enables rampant corruption coupled with blind obedience with the promise of a pardon as the get-out-of-jail-free card.
He's also made pardons pay-for-play, letting out crypto scammers, drug lords, and anyone else willing to pay him a few million each.
It's obscene. It's corrosive. It's destroying your democracy, so very very visibly that the rest of the world is staring with slack-jawed horror.
Seriously.
Over here on the other side of the little pond we call the Pacific, we're worried about you yanks.
It only makes corruption more efficient, as we can beautifully see in this case.
I’m here for it. Corruption is a problem worth solving, so I’m happy to bother the ycombinator readership with it.
And don’t get me wrong. I agree that corruption is horrible. I live in a country where corruption was and still is rampant. Political discussions related more closely to, let’s say, AI companies such as OpenAI or Anthropic when it comes to the Pentagon do spark interest, since they are somewhat more directly connected to decisions we can make as tech professionals in other countries, whether for moral, ethical, or practical reasons. That is not really the case for posts like these, however. To your point, I would love to see the tech/hacker community come up with ideas about solving corruption, even if it’s just philosophical discussion.
If my point still doesn’t make sense, imagine seeing posts about corruption cases from any other non-US country being posted on HN. What would you think about those?
What does this sentence mean?
