Everyone in the military takes an oath to defend the constitution and refuse unlawful orders. Trump may very well be headed toward fucking around and finding out if he pushes it.

Don’t be so quick to fold. One of the things we’ve seen over the past few days that it’s easy to overlook is that Trump doesn’t have the power to do whatever he wants with executive orders. Look at the spending freeze. They reversed the order already because it was clear that they don’t actually have the authority to turn off spending without legislative approval.

Trump and his team don’t really seem to know what they’re doing. One could argue that they’re testing the waters, but that doesn’t really hold up. It would make sense to slowly chip away at the changes they’re trying to make and erode the balance of power. Instead they’ve basically challenged the supreme court and the legislation to let go of their own relevance. Some Republican representatives seem willing to do this, but so far the supreme court seems less than willing to make themselves powerless.

Frankly, giving full power to the executive branch would be a stupid move for the Republicans. They’ve spent all this time gaining power in three branches and securing a hold. It makes much more sense to use that power now than to pull their own teeth out just to appease a single administration.

Trump is pushing his luck. Corporate media seems happy to overstate the inevitably of his efforts succeeding, whether they support them or not, but that’s just the money-fueled propaganda machine at work. We’re already seeing that he can’t actually just do whatever he wants, and the more he tries to the more we’re going to see the rest of the system’s resilience.

Don’t give up hope yet.

This should read “America to be hit by 25% tarrifs on Canadian and Mexican goods” because that’s how tariffs work.

He’s literally just threatening to take more money from American consumers. Yeah, that might change who different companies do business with, but we’re eating the ticket cost unless they lower prices by 25%.

Your estimation of what constitutes “objective reality” is in fact the opinion that you’re being asked about.

Kinda feels like civilization is winding down.

Nebula is a decent way to be bad at youtube. They don’t have too many people on it at the moment, but there are some decent ones. And at least they get a cut.

He wasn’t reelected when his approval rating was low. He was reelected four years later, after Biden’s approval rating fell.

That is an incredibly important distinction. People have terrible memories (on both sides of the aisle, as this thread demonstrates), but they do feel the present. This is the present.

This doesn’t reflect what we saw during his first administration. At all.

I’m curious how this approach is meant to achieve solidarity. Can you elaborate on your thinking?

It matters because conservatives having buyer’s remorse is a good thing. The same thing happened last time he was elected. He saw his support drop and the support for the Republican party drop like a stone. We gained 41 seats in the House at the midterm.

We need his approval rating to be low so that we can flip the house and Senate and have a better chance of taking the presidency in 2028. We might even be able to achieve impeachment in two years if it drops low enough.

Approval rating also corresponds to compliance with executive orders and with Republican cooperation as well as Democratic cooperation at the state level and in the legislative branch. They still want to get reelected, and if the party decides he’s a danger to them they will again distance themselves.

Does it mean our problems evaporate overnight? No. But it’s a requirement for improvement, so it’s good to see.

You know, like, targeting leftist solidarity and looking for anywhere and everywhere to drive wedges. Wedge-like.

Weird that you assume nobody who supports FOSS is helpful to any other leftist causes.

Kinda wedge-like.

I still can’t tell if this is sarcasm.

I wonder how many people have taken the time to make electronic go bags because of these comics.

What is this? Some kinda Oceans 31 Squad?

He already looks substantially worse than he did a week ago. I always forget how much that job ages people. Even Obama came out grey. He really doesn’t look well.

Not to say this necessarily isn’t the case, but are your drivers all up to date? I don’t know how often I’ve heard people complain about shitty performance or weird artifacts in a game only to hear that the player hasn’t updated their graphics card drivers in 8 months.

This is a sealion.

I definitely noticed a lot of these kinds of accounts leading up to the election and have noticed that they all seem to have evaporated once the job was done. It’s a shame more instances weren’t able to do something to be more effective about containing and shutting them down before it was too late.

One thing I’ve noticed about Lemmy, which I find incredibly naive, is that many of the people who use it seem to think it’s completely irrelevant. Like, I’ve seen people repeatedly saying that Lemmy or a particular Lemmy instance is just some tiny corner of the internet and let’s not pretend it has any significant impact. That, to me, reminds me of the way people used to talk about the internet, and later the way people used to talk about reddit.

Lemmy doesn’t have to be big to be influential. It’s a collection of extremely online and often very politically vocal people. Conversations that start here have a potential to carry further. In many ways it reminds me of the early days of reddit, which had a much greater influence than was really understood at the time as well.

This may not be a huge platform, but that may actually make it a better target for getting a message out, because the signal to noise ratio is better. You actually have a chance to get some eyeballs on your topic of conversation and have some folks run with it. That then spreads out to the rest of the internet and to flesh-and-blood communications. It doesn’t just stay isolated and contained here.

Lemmy is part of the world, a part that we’re all engaging with. Let’s not pretend it’s insignificant to our own detriment.

You say that, but I remember the internet before all this shit. Print media once used to actually produce a product, which it sold in an actual physical store and through subscription services. Meanwhile, some outlets had internet editions, but the vast majority of what was posted online was being posted by people. You’d see a lot of excerpts, a lot of people’s takes on things that were informed by articles they’d read, and a lot of websites and forums dedicated to particular subjects.

Then print media moved in and started begging us for their views, paying for them with ad revenue. They wanted our eyeballs. Then social media blew up and they got the visibility they wanted while contributing to the birth of the current terrible environment that is the internet today. Eventually, once they had the attention they’d sought from us, attention that we used to give each other, they started walling everything off.

Paywalls are part of enshittification. They’re part of the degradation of the internet. And, surprise surprise, look where the degradation of the internet has led us.

This is absolutely part of what’s failed us. It’s the commodification of information. They literally started this subscription model clickbait bullshit.