How can that be that during any single administration there always are bipartisan votes in favor of digital surveillance and censorship, oh, I mean online protection for kids and puppies? Pure coincidence I think.

Boden's good, Grump's bad, simple as that. Or Grump's good, Boden's bad doesn't matter.

One is clearly worse than the other on some issues — only one of them executed US citizens in the street for protesting, during both terms.

Choose your alignment wisely! You can only serve the Good or the Evil!

Both.

I'm not sure why the meme on the right is that the left wants to protect Biden or anyone else. Who cares, they all can come crashing down.

>I'm not sure why the meme on the right is that the left wants to protect Biden or anyone else.

No, the point isn't "protecting Biden", it's pure self interest. Tiktok is a social media platform that's very popular with Democrat's electorate and is already left leaning. Why risk it falling into the other party's control (especially near the end of Biden's term), just so you can maybe push more left leaning talking points?

The difference here is that unlike expanding the NSA or DHS, control of tiktok doesn't pass to the next administration, because it's held in private hands.

> Why risk [TikTok] falling into the other party's control

> control of tiktok doesn't pass to the next administration

Huh?

Because Biden signed the bill near the end of his term. If the other party wins control (roughly a coin toss), they get to dictate the terms of the sale.

I am not sure. I think we're talking about the one where Trump illegally and unilaterally ignored the sale or de-list deadline passed in said bipartisan bill so he could figure out which Trump loyalists would be taking over. I'm glad they finally got it sorted out a little over a year after the January 19, 2025 deadline in the bill.

I think you'll find that pro-privacy, anti-right-wing people often don't have the highest opinion of "their" guy

The current nonsense has been enabled by decades of overreach. A small minority kept saying, this stuff is going to be really bad if a bad guy takes power. Well, guess what happened.

The bad guys would have done it anyway. That's the important part. "Good guys shouldn't make tools because bad guys might (or will) use them" isn't how we should operate. No more should we say "the [internet|source code|pen testing tools|etc] could be used by bad guys so good guys shouldn't have it."

If by "tools" you mean technology or physical infrastructure, I largely agree.

But I'm talking about political tools. Breaking down the norms about how power is supposed to be wielded. Concentrating more and more power in the executive because Congress would rather be powerless and blameless than have responsibility.

For example, giving the President the power to set tariffs was done with the understanding that the President would use this power wisely in an actual national emergency. That created a political tool. Now we have a deeply unwise President who declared a nonsense national emergency and is playing havoc with trade using this tool. If the tool hadn't been created then I don't think we'd have that problem. I doubt Congress would be willing to pass sweeping emergency powers in an environment where there is no emergency and no need for those powers. And there was never a need for those powers. Tariffs don't need to be enacted so rapidly that they can't wait for Congress to convene and pass a law.

In this case, we've created a political tool giving the President broad power to interfere in a specific private business. It's no surprise if that tool gets abused, and it was completely unnecessary to begin with.

So I'd phrase it as: "Good guys shouldn't make political tools that are far more powerful than they need to be assuming that they'll be used wisely, because bad guys will happily use the full power of those tools."

Legal constructs are just nintendo level mario brothers obstacles for Trump to speed run lol, I remember specifically the turtle that you could jump on to get some sort of points or something.

It would be interesting to consider if there is a form of democracy such that voters themselves can't vote their way out of, I personally doubt it, rules themselves are chosen by votes. If you insist on voting for hostility for the current system of rules, there's a chance you'll win a majority and those rules can go away.

We in the US need to suck it up and accept the truth, voting Trump has consequences, doing it twice lol good luck with that.

Legal prohibitions are, but legal powers are different.

It's illegal for an insurrectionist to be President, and it's illegal for federal agents to shoot a subdued man ten times in the back, but that clearly doesn't stop it from happening.

On the other hand, consider an attempt to dictate to states how they should manage their voter rolls. Trump has tried this without success. The problem isn't that it's illegal to do this, although it obviously is. It didn't work because that power doesn't exist in the first place. He can declare that states must do this or that, but his words have no more effect than if I had said them.

Of course there are ways around this. He could cut off funding, send in goons to try to arrest officials, or send in the tanks. But this is much more difficult and makes it much more likely that he'll fail.

Imagine the situation if we didn't have a law that allowed the President to declare a national emergency and set tariffs at will. Right now, Trump can say "100% tariffs on Elbonia" and that automatically happens. Without that law, he could still say that, but it wouldn't do anything. The people who would actually enforce and collect those tariffs just wouldn't do it. We saw this happen with other tax changes like no taxes on tips. Trump couldn't just declare it and make it happen, he had to actually negotiate with Congress, and they could have blocked it if they wanted to.

Rules that say "You can't do X" are easily ignored. But structures that make it so that control is not granted in the first place are a lot harder to overcome. Not impossible, certainly, but much more difficult, and that's very much worthwhile.

I think Trump and his backers have enough financial and military muscle to get done what they want done. He'll surely have the occasional setback but the course seems pretty steady so far.

You might be right. I hope you're wrong. In any case, the more difficult it is the more likely he is to fail.

Why is it always a blame game? What dos that accomplish? There’s no “good guy” administrations. There’s just realpolitik. The current iteration of ICE is an outgrowth of the Obama admin, as is the problem with billionaires in politics. Biden put a target on Maduro's head before leaving office (continuing to fill a multi-administration powder keg re: Venezuela). Trump just had the panache to brazenly do the deed instead of waiting for the next guy to do it. Horrible? yes. Unprecedented? Hardly.

Now I’m not saying things are inevitable. Trump has a bull-in-china-shop mentality. But he is only being manipulated to set the same agenda, just faster than any president in living memory.

"The current iteration of ICE…"

Just murdered two protestors. A bit of a change there.

//

Maybe. I just find most “which administration really started XYZ” discussions are a way for people to feel better about their affiliations. Because ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ are continuous and not an inherent property of things, it is always possible to construct a causal chain that happens to start wherever convenient for your rhetorical purposes.

The Democrats always have been nothing but controlled opposition, designed to give you the illusion of choice.