I’m not saying Trump’s tariff proposal is a good idea (I don’t know enough relevant economics) but that article’s own chart shows that tariffs increased to Trump levels after the Great Depression started and then declined back to below Trump levels several years before the Great Depression ended. I don’t think the data in the article supports the article’s link of high tariffs and the Great Depression.

The Washington Free Beacon makes no attempt to present itself as non-partisan but does provide photos. I can’t verify that those photos are authentic but I assume that the NYT, CNN, etc. have verified them before publishing this story.

Edit: I also found this additional newspaper clipping, which appears to be the source for the following claim:

And a story published in another Nebraska paper on August 11 that year said he would “leave Sunday en route to China” after having “about given up participating [in WorldTeach] earlier this summer during the student revolts in parts of China.”

It’s pretty tame, and I wouldn’t even have been sure that it was meant to be critical of Trump rather than a misguided attempt to support him if the article hadn’t said so.

Doing things like this when you’re certainly being recorded is a great idea. Wait, hold on…

the size/capability of violence

That’s, uh, not a small difference. Even if you’re saying that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, neither the terrorist nor the freedom fighter are comparable to a large, powerful country.

Edit: One more interesting difference is that because a country has a much greater capability to wage war, it also has much more to lose in war: it can lose that very capability. A small group of irregular fighters does not depend much on infrastructure, but a country has population centers, factories, military bases, the seat of government, etc. which are all vulnerable in a way that a hidden cave or tunnel isn’t. We’re seeing the effects of this distinction between Iran and its proxies play out right now.

How do most people in Iran and among its allies perceive it? As a show of force or as a failure? (How did they perceive the similar April attack?)

It adds insult to injury, since it shows that they expect that some people will want to apply those filters, but then they don’t care enough to make the filters work. They just waste even more of my time by creating the false impression that they have made a tool that does what I want.

Steve Neavling is the author of the original article in the Detroit Metro Times which included Tlaib’s quote. He wrote

“We’ve had the right to dissent, the right to protest,” Tlaib says. “We’ve done it for climate, the immigrant rights movement, for Black lives, and even around issues of injustice among water shutoffs. But it seems that the attorney general decided if the issue was Palestine, she was going to treat it differently, and that alone speaks volumes about possible biases within the agency she runs.”

Nessel is the first Jewish person to be elected Attorney General of Michigan.

There’s a clear implication (by Neavling) that Tlaib’s statement about bias refers to Nessel’s Jewish identity. Ten days later, Neavling wrote a follow-up article titled “Fact-check: Tlaib did not say Nessel charged pro-Palestinian protesters because she’s Jewish” which says

Tlaib never once mentioned Nessel’s religion or Judaism. But Metro Times pointed out in the story that Nessel is Jewish, and that appears to be the spark that led to the false claims.

The funny thing is that there’s no mention in the follow-up article that he’s the same guy who wrote the original article. Neavling doesn’t come out of this looking like a good journalist.

Edit: Here’s what Tapper actually said. I’m transcribing the video available here.

First he correctly quotes Tlaib’s accusation of bias. The he correctly quotes Nessel’s claim that what Taib said is antisemitic. Then he asks the governor

Do you think Tlaib’s suggestion that Nessel’s office is biased was anti-semetic?

This is a valid question to ask the governor, but after she refuses to answer it Tapper says

Do you think attorney general Nessel is not doing her job because congresswoman Tlaib is suggesting that she shouldn’t be prosecuting these individuals that Nessel says broke the law and that she’s only doing it because she’s Jewish and protesters are not. That’s quite- quite an accusation. Do you think it’s true?

Note that he said “Tlaib is suggesting…” He didn’t say that Tlaib explicitly said this (and he presented the correct quote from Tlaib seconds earlier) so he didn’t technically lie but he should have known better than to mix together facts and his own (or Nessel’s) subjective interpretation of those facts. What he ended up saying is quite misleading.

The governor’s response was

Like I said, Jake, I’m not going to get in the middle of- of this argument that they’re having.

Then she changed the topic. I get why she didn’t want to get involved but I’m still not very impressed by her (lack of) leadership.

I do find myself shopping at corner stores a little more than I used to, specifically because they have plastic bags. I wonder if they’re exempt from the law or just ignore it.

According to the article, the use of plastic for bags has actually gone up despite the ban.

I’m not sure this is going to be any more effective than the original (ineffective) ban. Maybe I’m biased because I don’t like carrying bags around so I am accumulating more and more “reusable” bags that I never reuse.

Would even Californians put up with this?

I’m not saying that this was no big deal, but I stand by my assertion that this was not “manufacturing fake terrorists”. First, Antifa (the idea of it, not the dubious reality) does not match the common definition of “terrorists”. Second, the word “manufacture” in this context implies a deliberate intent to deceive the public which may have been present in the mind of the person ordering this investigation (or maybe he was simply deluding himself) but clearly wasn’t present throughout Homeland Security, where the analysts investigated as they were ordered to but truthfully reported their (lack of) findings.

The headline is overstating things quite a bit. From the article:

DHS analysts recounted orders to generate evidence of financial ties between protesters in custody

I wouldn’t call that manufacturing fake terrorists.

Your argument is reasonable, although I don’t think the fact that Google is aligned with the USA and Western Europe is a coincidence. This anti-trust action is itself a demonstration of the power that the US government does have over Google, and Google knows better than to provoke the use of that power. Anti-trust law is largely a matter of the government’s opinion rather than objective rules, so Google has no effective legal defense other than keeping the government’s opinion of it favorable.

I don’t think Google could get away with deliberately manipulating elections in the way that you propose. Even if it were to tilt the outcome from one established party to another, that party would not be beholden to it. (If the party that it helped knew that it helped, then unless that party controlled Google, it would rightly consider Google a threat rather than an ally.) Furthermore, manipulating elections would have a huge risk of being revealed and facing devastating blowback. Engineers rather than the board of directors are the ones who actually make Google function and those engineers would be neither oblivious to nor loyal to some plan for domination by the board of directors.

With that said, I disagree with you primarily because I’m very risk-averse when it comes to matters like this. Right now, the “juggernaut like Google that is The Internet” is working in our favor and if we break it up then we won’t have a juggernaut working in our favor anymore. We would be better off if we were able to accomplish what you propose while retaining dominance of the internet, but IMO the reward is not worth the risk of forfeiting that dominance. Those who are losing need to take risks but those who are winning should not, and right now the USA is winning.

Was the Green party ever alive? I don’t think so.

I don’t see how this is bootlicking. I don’t gain anything from saying it; it’s just my sincere opinion. The USA as it is now, with the tech billionaires, is very rich and very powerful, and this does benefit ordinary Americans and not just tech billionaires. My impression is that many people on Lemmy focus on the problems in the USA and lose perspective of how good it is here compared to pretty much everywhere else. There’s a reason why so many people are desperate to immigrate, and that’s because they will be better off here even as poor Americans.

I expect some people are going to think of countries like Sweden where the standard of living is claimed to be better than it is in the USA. I’m not convinced that it actually is; I’d rather live here than there. However, even if people in Sweden do enjoy a higher standard of living, it’s because they benefit from the world order established and maintained by the USA since the second world war. Their defense and their access to international trade is subsidized by the USA. (That’s one thing Trump is right about, although the way he went about saying so was foolish because it undermined the perception of NATO unity that is so important.) If they USA declines, Europe will decline with it.

And yet somehow I trust Google acting in its own self-interest to benefit Americans more than the government breaking up Google with the intent of benefiting Americans. American companies dominate the internet (outside of China), this is to America’s great advantage, and I don’t think the government should risk losing that advantage.

It’s funny to me that in the USA the people with the best access to healthcare are often either the richest or the poorest.

Nothing can fix things because teenagers will not cooperate. If Instagram could identify all its teenage users, those users would move to a platform that couldn’t. The only thing the restrictions achieve is a reduction in the market share of the platform with the restrictions.