A pigeon is strictly better than Trump because they don’t destroy the environment, societal and scientific progress, or other people. Now that I’ve thought about it 1 second more, it’s not even a fair comparison. Because Trump existing means active harm and destruction in many areas.
Yes, but that somehow doesn’t change anything ever. They do horrible thing A, world is shocked about A, then they do horrible thing B, world is shocked about A+B, then they do horrible thing C, world is shocked about B+C (A has already been forgotten by that point). And so on. We don’t really have proper checks & balances in place against malicious politicians with too much power and too many loyalists in key positions. So they can do whatever and get away with a ton. I mean I thought there should be checks and balances working to correct this in any modern democracy but then again checks & balances also fail regularly in other areas, e.g. in anti-corruption or in pro data protection. Everything’s conveniently broken in some way and can be exploited. The key people from the Trump administration and/or Heritage Foundation should already be behind bars for lifetime.
Yep. There’s always been spying from foreign governments’ intelligence services on allies (especially from the US and the UK because they have such vast surveillance capabilities and budgets), and there’s always been commercial spying (e.g. Google, Apple, MS, and others collecting vast amounts of data on everyone using their proprietary software), which then could also be bought by intelligence services to expand their data mountain. It’s really nothing new at all. Also, this was all basically part of the infrastructure already. Of course it’s going to keep running.
Also, there were these thin excuses of “data protection” agreements between US and EU like “Privacy Shield”, which were on incredibly shaky or non-existent legal grounds the whole time (some of them also got taken down already because they were such a joke to begin with), only to sort of “legitimize” and “make legal” the vast amounts of sensitive data that are flowing from EU to US when using US software and services, despite EU laws stating that many of those data transfers aren’t actually legal. Basically, to protect their own institutions as well as tons of EU businesses who are trapped in, for example, the Microsoft software ecosystem, so that they can continue to use these software products containing spyware and not feel too guilty about it because it sort of got defined as being lawful.
So all of this, including the hypocrisy behind it, is nothing new at all. In theory, we have all these fancy data protection laws, but in reality, almost everyone either ignores them or doesn’t get it.
What’s new is only that before Trumps’ 2nd term, this sort of stuff was “accepted” as either “necessary” (in regards to the intelligence services spying, because this always was excused with “national security” reasons, which has been the favorite universal wildcard excuse for any sort of mischief by government institutions) or simply as “irrelevant” (in regards to everything concerning data flowing somewhere where it shouldn’t be flowing to at all) by a majority of the population including politicians and other entities which could hit the brakes on this stuff. And it is only now when people realized that Trump’s 2nd term might turn the US into a fascist rogue country, that there is some kind of regret suddenly growing about the own previous mindset. But only now. As long as the US was interpreted as being our friendly ally, it was never officially considered to be any sort of problem, maybe even considered beneficial. Except of course by experts in the area, but who listens to experts, right?
There are really only 2 options I think: a) either Dump is a Russian asset, in which case he’s lying, or b) he’s not a Russian asset but simply doesn’t care about the war in Europe and wants the US not spending any money there, and to achieve that he’s also lying. Both cases kind of result in the same, so it doesn’t even matter whether a) or b) is true. He will in both cases just say whatever makes him look the least bad but so that he can still achieve his goal of not supporting Ukraine or Europa in its war against Putin. I’ve never seen such obvious lying, deflection and (in other contexts) corruption from any other administration. Sure, many politicians lie and are corrupt, but here it’s orders of magnitude more extreme.