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[Reelya]

Foreign financial connections when running for office can be very illegal however. So yeah, something like this is a big deal when you have links to overseas financial interests and want to be president.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-trumps-financial-ties-to-russia-and-his-unusual-flattery-of-vladimir-putin/2016/06/17/dbdcaac8-31a6-11e6-8ff7-7b6c1998b7a0_story.html

“Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Trump’s son, Donald Jr., told a real estate conference in 2008, according to an account posted on the website of eTurboNews, a trade publication. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

So, have the Trumps really disinvested everything from Russia since 2008 as Trump claimed recently? It kinda seems unlikely, unless all the investments are in his son's name or some such.

[LoSboccacc]

maybe, that said the other candidate has connections to Saudi Arabia so meh. But anyway where's some hard data from it proving is Trump's? Because I can register trump-mafia-secret-storage.com and point finger as well. and this server timing is quite suspicious.

[martinuzz]

There's only two letters difference between Putin and Trump. So clearly, they're connected.

[Reelya]

Well, his son was boasting about the sheer scope of their Russian investments not too many years ago. I think we're going to see a lot more detail in the future on this.

[Sergarr]

https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/11/01/019251/computer-scientists-believe-a-trump-server-was-communicating-with-a-russian-bank

In light of the Democratic National Committee hack by the Russians earlier this year, a "tightly knit community of computer scientists" working in a variety of fields came up with the hypothesis, "which they set out to rigorously test: If the Russians were worming their way into the DNC, they might very well be attacking other entities central to the presidential campaign, including Donald Trump's many servers." In late July, one of the scientists who asked to be referred to as Tea Leaves discovered possible malware emanating from Russia, with the destination domain having Trump in its name. What the researcher saw "was a bank in Moscow that kept irregularly pinging a server registered to the Trump Organization on Fifth Avenue".

Slate Magazine reports: More data was needed, so he began carefully keeping logs of the Trump server's DNS activity. As he collected the logs, he would circulate them in periodic batches to colleagues in the cybersecurity world. Six of them began scrutinizing them for clues. The researchers quickly dismissed their initial fear that the logs represented a malware attack. The communication wasn't the work of bots. The irregular pattern of server lookups actually resembled the pattern of human conversation -- conversations that began during office hours in New York and continued during office hours in Moscow. It dawned on the researchers that this wasn't an attack, but a sustained relationship between a server registered to the Trump Organization and two servers registered to an entity called Alfa Bank. The server was first registered to Trump's business in 2009 and was set up to run consumer marketing campaigns. It had a history of sending mass emails on behalf of Trump-branded properties and products. Researchers were ultimately convinced that the server indeed belonged to Trump. But now this capacious server handled a strangely small load of traffic, such a small load that it would be hard for a company to justify the expense and trouble it would take to maintain it. That wasn't the only oddity. When the researchers pinged the server, they received error messages. They concluded that the server was set to accept only incoming communication from a very small handful of IP addresses.

So, remember all the times before when I called Trump a Russian shill? I was tooootally right.

[eerr]

I got a number of things I want confirmation on:

Trump is a bit of an asshat.
Trump speaks to the voter with emotional appeals.
Trump has a vague similarity to Hitler.
Trump will probably lower taxes for businesses, and hasn't outlined literally any other policy that benefits American citizens in his plans for presidency.

Trump abused tax loopholes to avoid paying taxes on 'nullified' debt.

[Arx]

Trump is a bit of an asshat.

Yep. More than a bit, I'd say, but opinion.

Trump speaks to the voter with emotional appeals.

Yep.

Trump has a vague similarity to Hitler.

Vague, yeah. The most concrete comparison is the demagoguery.

Can't speak to the rest, having not studied Trump's campaign or history more than as it passes me by elsewhere.

[Frumple]

The hitler thing specifically is questionable. Nazi, on the other hand, is less so. Trump has been more or less quoting white supremacists and neo-nazis this election, among other things. Folks that care more about the comparison seem to hold he's closer to other authoritarian dictators. The exact sort of scumshit he resembles is arguably irrelevant, though. Guy's complete fucking scum all in his own.

As for the tax avoidance thing, that seems to actually still be breaking. Originally it was just noted he used his massive incompetence to get out of paying federal income taxes for a while, but the legal legitimacy of the action wasn't terribly questioned. Too early and too headachy to hunt down the links, but some more recent stuff has looked into the subject more and is now casting doubts on that front.

That said... fraud, bribery, abuse of charity funds -- those are things trump and his company have just flat bloody been caught doing at this point, though actual litigation may not happen in some cases until after the election, and in others he/his business settled to avoid admission of guilt. Similar for obstructing federal investigation, and probably some stuff I've forgotten or didn't notice. Guy may just be the most overtly corrupt person to ever run for POTUS for a major party, which is a hell of a thing.

Tax plan wise, last I paid attention (which, as said earlier in the thread, wasn't long ago, but trump lies goddamn constantly, and is as consistent as a weathervane in a waterspout when it comes to policy -- it may have changed) it was basically tax cuts for the richest americans (not necessarily businesses) and higher taxes for at least the middle class folks. Can't recall if/how it screwed poorer folks. Even conservative estimates had it costing the country well over a/multiple trillion dollars, though.

[Starver]

the democrats already had heaps of volunteers show up to clean up the manure, and even some requests by people if they could please come pick up the manure to fertilize their fields.

Obviously they were grass-roots supporters...

[Reelya]

I think Trump has a little bit of similarity to Hitler with the wall-building, people-evicting, muslim-banning stuff. You know "they're among us and we need to rid ourselves of them" is a pretty clear comparison.

If Trump implemented his deportation scheme, the end result would be a mega-surveillance state basically, and huge camps in which people are incarcerated for years on end: but women and children from every community in the USA would fill these camps, not terrorists. People would look back fondly on Guantanamo Bay as the quaint good old days.

Mexico is not actually a very big country, it would take decades for them to process deportation for 10 million people, and work out what to do with their kids, who are mostly American citizens, not Mexican citizens. There's basically no way to do what Trump says he will do without turning into Hitler and building huge concentration camps in the desert filled with women and children, taking about 5 million kids off their parents into foster care, or, to avoid the need for camps, truck entire families out to the desert then dumping them on the other side of the border.

But the bigger problem for ya'll is not what to do with those 16 million people, it's what police powers they'd need to get the 16 million people. I mean it's not like these people wear badges that say "I'm illegal". There are ~11 million undocumented immigrants, and about 5 million children to them who were born in the USA. That's about 5% of the entire country.

Trump needs a new agency with the power to dox everyone in the nation to find them. Who is going to man this agency. Probably guys who would like to be army or police or security guards but who aren't already hired for some reason (not a good sign). Then you're giving them excessive authority over a group of people which includes a large proportion of women and children. That's a recipe for abuse and corruption right there.

Of course, the new Immigration Gestapo won't just have authority over "illegals" they'll have authority over everyone. If you are stopped and don't have "papers" it's up to you to prove you're not an illegal immigrant, not up to them to prove that you are. 11% of the nation lack photo ID - twice as many as the illegals, and you could be stopped just walking to the shops and you forgot to bring ID. Your sister could be stopped by one of these guys, not have ID on her, then he's got the right to hold her in cells while he checks her immigration status. Just the threat of that is a recipe for intimidation and abuse.
 
So yeah, Trumps stated plan devolves into a Hitler-like mass surveillance system with rampant abuse where you're a suspect if you leave the house without your "papers" at any time - otherwise the plan just wouldn't work at all.

[Starver]

The hitler thing specifically is questionable.

Only history will tell, but if it turns out he's made a secret pact with the Russian leader to carve up bits of Europe, only to renege on the deal when he later thinks it will suit him to, creating a war in the east...

(Also, I've not examined this Russia 'pinging' issue at all, but I've long since thought that one form of low-volume steganographic information exchange, especially in a world currently awash with massive amounts of data of a more complicated kind, would be to employ things like ICMP packets, perhaps carefully (mal)formed, to convey simple messages largely invisible to most investigations.  They can even be fired off at various third-parties with the intended recipients being written in as the (spoofed) return address.  Given an assumption that between 'n' and 'm' steps might be needed to traverse the network between sender and recipient, TTLs of >2m+(m-n)x might be useful for both encoding values of 'x' (with redundancy for error-checking) once the n-to-m TTL decrementing has happened, and for outright rejecting 'out of bounds' packets arriving with fewer than m TTL 'lives' from places not officially part of this backchannel.  But there's also plenty of payload data space to be usurped, which could support a simple IM conversation with a little forethought and a specially written client/daemon pairing.)

[Reelya]

It's hard to know what people would consider as bad as Hitler.

Bush was no saint, several million people are dead because of his wars of aggression which seem to be for purely political and financial motives. He also oversaw torture camps and the like, and some of the US-aligned groups did genocide their enemies under US protection - in fact one of the units in Iraq was trained by a US officer who was linked to death squads in El Salvador: the Iraq unit also tortured and murdered a lot of people in similar ways to the El Salvador unit.

Sure, there were more limits on what Bush & Co could do, but were those moral limits from within or structural limits from outside? There's also the thing where someone keeps their own hands squeaky-clean while underlings oversee torture and genocide. As they say, Hitler didn't personally face-stab 6 million people, nor did Reagan go out and genocide Catholics in latin America. But American trained and back death squads did actually go out and do those things during the Reagan years.

I think the real question is, could Trump be worse than Bush, and how much worse exactly?

[Antioch]

It's hard to know what people would consider as bad as Hitler.

Bush was no saint, several million people are dead because of his wars of aggression which seem to be for purely political and financial motives. He also oversaw torture camps and the like, and some of the US-aligned groups did genocide their enemies under US protection - in fact one of the units in Iraq was trained by a US officer who was linked to death squads in El Salvador: the Iraq unit also tortured and murdered a lot of people in similar ways to the El Salvador unit.

Sure, there were more limits on what Bush & Co could do, but were those moral limits from within or structural limits from outside? There's also the thing where someone keeps their own hands squeaky-clean while underlings oversee torture and genocide. As they say, Hitler didn't personally face-stab 6 million people, nor did Reagan go out and genocide Catholics in latin America. But American trained and back death squads did actually go out and do those things during the Reagan years.

I think the real question is, could Trump be worse than Bush, and how much worse exactly?

Trump can be way worse, his foreign policy is determined by emotion. Going into a war because it "feels" right is probably the most stupid thing you can do.

Ironically that is of course also what Hitler did.

[Culise]

Trump can be way worse, his foreign policy is determined by emotion. Going into a war because it "feels" right is probably the most stupid thing you can do.

Ironically that is of course also what Hitler did.

I wonder.  Hitler's entry into war was more or less ideal, actually, and I suspect that was at least in part by design as well as coincidence.  The German economy was thoroughly overheating by 1939; by 1942, it would have likely risked collapse without the historical infusion of capital from the treasuries of Poland and France.  Moreover, the Western rearmament programs were only just beginning in 1939.  By 1942, it is probable that the UK and France would already have rearmed and posed a much greater threat to a Germany that had begun to cap out on what it could accomplish without, again, infusion of capital and shifting to a war footing.  This is even more true for the Soviet Union, which would have recovered from the Great Purges by this point.  I suspect that, in spite of what he claimed to his more cautious general staff in anticipating a 1941-1942 war with the West, he actually intended a war by 1939 or 1940 by the latest over Danzig or the Polish Corridor...which is not to say that he would have objected had he been allowed to eat not just these, but all of Poland without a single boo from the West.  If nothing else, it's very clear that he was operating by a very specific set of plans: the Rhineland is an early test of Western resolve.  Anschluss determines Italy's allegiances and outflanks the Czech Sudeten fortifications.  Czechoslovakia similarly puts pressure on the Polish southern border, as well as putting the final nail in the coffin of the Little Entente.

The fact that this could be spun into claiming that Trump is worse than Hitler has not been lost on me.

[sluissa]

Unless you're trying to make the case that Trump is some sort of time travelling inter-dimensional Hitler*, I think it's a bit silly to push that far into comparisons. There are comparisons to make. But at the moment we're still in the late 1920s. Trump completed the Beer Hall Putsch arc back during the conventions and is working his way into the government now. Anything beyond that would be speculation.

I'm very much a student of history and do believe that old saying about us being doomed to repeat it. But there is also the danger of looking too closely at history as a predictor. It's been 80 years since Hitler's rise to power. 80 years of tremendous change, technologically, politically, socially. 80 years of looking back at Hitler as this horrible bogeyman that embodies all evil. Thus we see evil and we naturally make comparisons to the ubiquitous "evil thing." Trying to stretch these too far though puts us in the dangerous position of believing we know what we're seeing to ridiculous detail. Tricks us into believing we can predict what will happen next because of that. And fools us into ignoring the faults of "the alternative" because of what we believe we must stop due to some tenuous historical parallels.


*I wouldn't mind if someone were to put effort into that study for pure entertainment value. And given what else this year has given us, maybe?