Trump Just Pardoned ... a Corporation?
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Not a wild take at all. I'd bet money the guy you're replying to thinks America's evil is unique to it alone.
America’s evil is unique to it alone.
More American exceptionalism.
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If a corporation used self driving cars that’s exactly how an accident would be dealt with….
Since I wasn't clear at all in my first comment: I'm referring to the fact that people can also get away with murder, as long as they're driving a car at the time. Very rarely is it much more than a slap on the wrist, but it's always significantly less than any other form of negligent homicide.
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you mean the guy that his DOJ just said they wanted dead?
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This is some serious unprecedented bullshit. Especially when their charge was money laundering. Basically he is making money laundering legal. Go ahead and break the law. Trump will pardon you...
HDR Global Trading, parent company of BitMEX
You're welcome. Fuck paywalls, and fuck clickbait that buries the actual info behind the paywall.
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I don’t think evil is part of the human condition.
Humans have complex language, and are capable of learning, adjusting behaviour, and building culture over time.
Capitalism is a system that teaches and enforces greed and exploitation. It’s natural for endpoint is the destruction of our environment and the enslavement of humanity.
But if we lived under a different system that was not capitalism and instead fostered sustainable, egalitarianism, while also allowing us to cooperatively build technology to improve our lives, I believe this is something that we could build a culture around. It’s not that we’re pre-programmed a certain way and always destined to fall into the same trap…. Just when you create and enforce a system that expects infinite growth within a finite system, that forces people to compete over and hoard resources then of course you’re going to get greed, exploitation, and eventually collapse.
Another world and another way of being is possible if we build it over time.
Isn't it crazy that we learned the way to bypass nature's ambivalence and wildly exceeded its ability to control us through incredible feats of cooperation, yet we fall back into the same old atavistic selfishness and greed and laud it as "survival of the fittest"?
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Technically, you'd be right though.
But yes, I ignored nuance. Would you like to talk about nuance?
On social media?...
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Your democracy is falling apart because of it is an empire in late decadence. Its systems of checks and balances are collapsing.
The world is getting more war friendly because as dominant empires fall apart internally, nations want to do stuff they weren't allowed to when the big bad empire had more control.
This is all part of the natural life cycle of empires. Best case scenario is they fizzle out with protection from another empire, like Great Britain did. Worst case scenario is really bad.
Expect to see more of this kind of thing in the future. Might be a good time to consider going somewhere else, cause things could get really ugly. These problems are terminal and at this point it doesn't really matter who gets elected. It'll keep falling apart. I say this with sadness. My country also got screwed by the USA, but if it hadn't it would have been some other empire. Such is the life of the small poor nation.
I'm sorry, but I think it's important to see this for what it is and to adapt.
Meh we put ourselves at the center of globalization and trade by offering the Europeans access to our markets in exchange for being our meat shields if the Ruskies ever decided to get uppity.
Now globalization is starting to break down because we have no interest in maintaining it. Every president since Clinton has been more and more isolationist than the last. Even Biden had no interest in maintaining the order. The aid he offered to Ukraine was primarily military support, there was very little economic support for after the war.
Trump has moved the needle on populism in the US. Breaking global trade was always going to happen, but Trump is accelerating it. Yes he is a corrupt skum bag, but we’ve had skum bag presidents in the past.
America in the long term will be fine, our demographics are better than Europes or Chinas, we make our own energy and grow enough food to feed our population. We just need to restore manufacturing to North America (I.E. Canada, Mexico and USA).
America can exist quite happily as a regional hegemony and let Europe, India, Russia and China fight over the rest of the world.
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Not a wild take at all. I'd bet money the guy you're replying to thinks America's evil is unique to it alone.
I don't disagree. But I have a unique take on the fall of empires and the evil inherent in humans.
Imo, evil is a byproduct of human selfishness. Taking without empathy towards where it's coming from. Money, power, property, and even life itself.
There are people that do this because of their isolated environment. (Raised to think anyone that doesn't look like them isn't human, and therefore it's alright to exploited them for gain.)
And there are those that do it because they are sociopaths.
While Sociopathic diagnoses isn't an easy thing we can pin down. In a world where our social behaviors can be dramatically affected by our genetics (autism) it's not hard to assume sociopathy is just another manifestation of something like autism. Just a more extreme one - where a person literally is incapable of understanding others as human with emotions like them.
These people are born incapable of understanding that other people have feelings at all. So they don't contribute to communities, they don't help others, they just lie and pretend to be like others to exploit for their own gain. They lie to appear social and kind (towards some), as that attracts others in that group they can easily take from.
You know the uncanny valley? The unsettling feeling we get when we see CG that looks human, but doesn't quite move or act like a real human?
imo that's an evolutionary response to our habit of breeding sociopaths. They pretend VERY hard to be human, but lack the natural primate communal instinct everyone else is born with. They look human, but don't act like it compared to the rest of the community.
In smaller groups, like towns or families, these people can be kicked out and otherwise ostracized to protect the smaller community from being exploited.
But in larger communities, it's an all you can exploit buffet. In larger communities, sociopaths thrive because there is an endless amount of trusting people they can exploit. If they fail, they just move on to the next group of suckers.
If they manage to extract enough power, then all they have to do is keep lying to maintain it. But always, and eventually, at the cost of the larger community itself. There is a finite limit of exploitation that once reached, no longer serves to preserve the larger community, just the power of the sociopaths in it. The community collapses, as it's support mechanisms have been diverted to the sociopaths, and the sociopaths are then unable to lie any longer and usually blamed / killed / ostracized for their bullshit now that it's obvious.
So while sociopaths are thankfully not the norm when it comes to humans, just a few in a group can take down our largest efforts to civilize.
This is why smaller human cultural groups tend to have much longer histories than massive empires. (Bushido and martial arts still exist, but the Shogunate does not). We are always going to breed sociopaths, and in turn they will make sure we never get too big for our own good.
Problems arise when the world itself is now fairly united, and sociopaths have no where left to run and hide.
If we want our biggest countries and empires to persist longer than 250 years, then we needs laws that prevent sociopaths from doing their thing.
I'm a big fan of wealth caps. Because it's non intrusive on a person's genetics, and the only people that complain about having 800 mil to spend instead of 1 billion, are sociopaths.
Anyway. That's my way of saying:
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We are not all evil, mostly it's sociopaths (and the wealthy brought up inhumane bubbles.)
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Sociopaths are the reason every human empire has fallen.
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There's a lot of powerful sociopaths running the world because we spent decades collecting all our best resources together in large shiny empires that called the worst of us like a moth to flame for their exploitation.
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Meh we put ourselves at the center of globalization and trade by offering the Europeans access to our markets in exchange for being our meat shields if the Ruskies ever decided to get uppity.
Now globalization is starting to break down because we have no interest in maintaining it. Every president since Clinton has been more and more isolationist than the last. Even Biden had no interest in maintaining the order. The aid he offered to Ukraine was primarily military support, there was very little economic support for after the war.
Trump has moved the needle on populism in the US. Breaking global trade was always going to happen, but Trump is accelerating it. Yes he is a corrupt skum bag, but we’ve had skum bag presidents in the past.
America in the long term will be fine, our demographics are better than Europes or Chinas, we make our own energy and grow enough food to feed our population. We just need to restore manufacturing to North America (I.E. Canada, Mexico and USA).
America can exist quite happily as a regional hegemony and let Europe, India, Russia and China fight over the rest of the world.
Welcome to cold war. Now the bad news: you have been asleep for at least 25 years.
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On social media?...
haha why not?
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Meh we put ourselves at the center of globalization and trade by offering the Europeans access to our markets in exchange for being our meat shields if the Ruskies ever decided to get uppity.
Now globalization is starting to break down because we have no interest in maintaining it. Every president since Clinton has been more and more isolationist than the last. Even Biden had no interest in maintaining the order. The aid he offered to Ukraine was primarily military support, there was very little economic support for after the war.
Trump has moved the needle on populism in the US. Breaking global trade was always going to happen, but Trump is accelerating it. Yes he is a corrupt skum bag, but we’ve had skum bag presidents in the past.
America in the long term will be fine, our demographics are better than Europes or Chinas, we make our own energy and grow enough food to feed our population. We just need to restore manufacturing to North America (I.E. Canada, Mexico and USA).
America can exist quite happily as a regional hegemony and let Europe, India, Russia and China fight over the rest of the world.
I hope you're right.
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Welcome to cold war. Now the bad news: you have been asleep for at least 25 years.
You mean WOT, the Great Recession and Covid were just a dream?
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HDR Global Trading, parent company of BitMEX
You're welcome. Fuck paywalls, and fuck clickbait that buries the actual info behind the paywall.
Thank you! I immediately wondered if OP was a shill since s/he also didn't name the company in the title or summary.
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I don’t think evil is part of the human condition.
Humans have complex language, and are capable of learning, adjusting behaviour, and building culture over time.
Capitalism is a system that teaches and enforces greed and exploitation. It’s natural for endpoint is the destruction of our environment and the enslavement of humanity.
But if we lived under a different system that was not capitalism and instead fostered sustainable, egalitarianism, while also allowing us to cooperatively build technology to improve our lives, I believe this is something that we could build a culture around. It’s not that we’re pre-programmed a certain way and always destined to fall into the same trap…. Just when you create and enforce a system that expects infinite growth within a finite system, that forces people to compete over and hoard resources then of course you’re going to get greed, exploitation, and eventually collapse.
Another world and another way of being is possible if we build it over time.
Dolphins and killer whales are capable of all the things you describe. So are all great apes.
Chimpanzees are capable of genocide. It's not even human nature. It's just nature.Are you familiar with Dunbar's number? The problem isn't how people organize, it's how many people organize. You get groups too big, the human empathy module short circuits and starts ignoring other humans as such...
You know what other animals can organize in large collaborative groups and not fight each other? Ants, bees and mole rats. Eusocial animals.
The problem with eusocial animals is they divide into genetically determined castes... So nature has shown us it's either small packs or become a drone for the hive, and the problem with small pack is that larger packs destroy them.
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Kinda makes sense no? Corporations are people and are treated as such in courts.
If people have death penalty, corporations should also have one
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If people have death penalty, corporations should also have one
Businesses have been sued out of business before. Not QUITE what you mean, but the ends still the same.
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HDR Global Trading, parent company of BitMEX
You're welcome. Fuck paywalls, and fuck clickbait that buries the actual info behind the paywall.
And what was being pardoned:
"In what may have been a first, Trump pardoned a corporation. The company to earn that distinction was a cryptocurrency exchange sentenced to a $100 million fine for violating an anti-money laundering law."
Setting a precedent of excusing money laundering really does just feel like "I want to destroy the country" with not a whole lot else going on.
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haha why not?
Nuance is dead on social media.
It isn't that bad, yet, on Lemmy but it gets to the point where people just scream past each other and because of things like default ranking comments by vote instead of a timeline whoever can get/bot the most votes wins and the other person is cast into the oblivion of "Click here to see more comments".
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HDR Global Trading, parent company of BitMEX
You're welcome. Fuck paywalls, and fuck clickbait that buries the actual info behind the paywall.
i have never known the intercept to paywall stuff?
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This is some serious unprecedented bullshit. Especially when their charge was money laundering. Basically he is making money laundering legal. Go ahead and break the law. Trump will pardon you...
