An unholy trinity or just a seedy threesome: Trump, Musk and Putin? - Trump thread #138

[Spandauer]

With a side order of Vance, Zuckerberg and Netanyahu.*
(*Other flavours are available)

Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.
George Orwell

Previous thread:
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/_chat/5258416-trumpmusk-folie-a-deux-trump-thread-137

Thank you @Igotjelly, I didn't know that. it sounds more straightforward then.

The Tates - that's this morning's snippet of delightful news from the hell realm that is Trump's sphere of activity then.

Do'you think he'll go as far as giving them a job? They could be in Kennedy's team, covering sexual education and sexual health, couldn't they? They'd do a fantastic job there and then maybe all the women of America could come and claim political asylum in Europe and the USA could rename itself the United States of Arseholery.

Then they could just all shoot each other and we - the marvellous Brits - could nip over and recollonise. Fresh start. As a matriarchy.
Hmm? 🤔

Thanks @SerendipityJane , that's a really important article about the high level of dependence of European companies and governments on US-based cloud services.

Microsoft has created a European cloud, but in fact it's very hard to stop European data ending up in the US and available for the US government to access.

Under Trump 2.0, Europe's dependence on US clouds back under the spotlight
Technologist Bert Hubert tells The Reg Microsoft Outlook is a huge source of geopolitical risk
https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/26/europe_has_second_thoughts_about

While concern about cloud data sovereignty became fashionable back in 2013 when former NSA contractor Edward Snowden disclosed secrets revealing the scope of US signals intelligence gathering and fled to Russia, data privacy worries have taken on new urgency in light of the Trump administration’s sudden policy shifts.
In the tech sphere, those moves include removing members of the US Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board that safeguards data under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, and the alleged flouting of federal data rules to advance policy goals. Europeans therefore have good reason to wonder how much they can trust data privacy assurances from US cloud providers amid their shows of obsequious deference to the new regime.
[...]
if you look at a modern Microsoft desktop, it is actually configured in such a way that it's very difficult to save a file on there that does not go to the cloud. It's actually sort of barely possible to prevent that from happening.
[...]
If you look at their formal statements, they're all like, yeah, well, it's highly unlikely that [data being transferred to the US and becoming subject to US government demands] will happen. But if you look at the legal situation... [...] the US legislative situation is very clear. If the NSA wants to get their hands on the French email or the Dutch email, they're going to get it.
And legally speaking, there's nothing Microsoft and Google and Amazon could do about that. And you can even wonder these days if there's anything they want to do about that.

FWIW I have always advised against putting anything in the US after the PATRIOT Act. Not that it counted for much. Again the masturbatory fascination with "price" rather than "value" meant that creating a non-US cloud infrastructure was never "commercially viable" despite providing more value than US providers.

All the "big data" bollocks of the past decade or so has done is reduce the value of previous data by swamping it with absolute rubbish. The nasty little secret behind "AI" is that it now our last hope of finding any data value in a haystack that is growing by the second. And right now, it is failing bigly.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/27/llm_emergent_misalignment_study/

TL;DR, if your "AI" is "learning" (it isn't) then it's "learning" will be the aggregate of the responses to it's generated output.

Or - in other words - garbage in: garbage out.

We are fucked. Everything of importance has been surrendered to the Internet- new technology, it's wonderful, burn those paper records - and we plebs will be returned to serfdom within 5 years. Unless his military turns on him, unlikely as yet, Bigly has everything in the palm of his hand.

Wow—Trump is firing and banning all trans people from the military, per DoD memo.

“Military service by members and applicants for military service who have a current diagnosis or history of, or exhibit symptoms consistent with, gender dysphoria is incompatible with military service.”

Part of memo in tweet:

https://bsky.app/profile/marisakabas.bsky.social/post/3lj5r7lb74s2o

That'll keep a few GOP women onside as he hoses down their rights.

Not so much banned, as an exception made in their case to begin with.
How would someone in battle/deployment find the cocktail of drugs needed to be taken daily?
What about the aftercare of surgery?

You do realize that this is a fascist trope? Marginalized groups, piece by piece they are othered, marginalized and dehumanized, robbed of their living, imprisoned, killed.

Trans, gays, BAME, disabled, women. On and on it goes and it’s already started.

This is fascism

Then don't send them into battle, just like any other military person who is on medication or recovering from surgery.

Who will be next to be marginalised, women, gay people?

Woah. Read that carefully (my bolding):

c. Military service by Service members and applicants for military service who have a current diagnosis or history of, or exhibit symptoms consistent with, gender dysphoria is incompatible with military service. Service by these individuals is not in the best interests of the Military Services and is not clearly consistent with the interests of national security.

So, if you've ever been an inadequately manly man or womanly woman (and we'll decide what that is), you can't be part of the armed forces of the USA – even in a non-combat role.

This isn't "if you're on long-term medication which might not be available in the field, then you cannot have a role which involves battlefield deployment". It's something else entirely.

It might accidently be badly written – which does happen – but that doesn't make it the less dangerous because others can still take such a regulation and run with it.

Or the wording might be deliberate.

Either way, it opens the door to purging the armed forces of The Wrong Sort of People.

So, if you've ever been an inadequately manly man or womanly woman (and we'll decide what that is), you can't be part of the armed forces of the USA – even in a non-combat role.

Un-egalitarian armed forces tend to be shit. Ask a Frenchman in 1764 ...

You know, I recently had to do some research concerning the Nazi Aktion T4/medical experiments. Not a fun read. In light of recent news, the overlaps give me the shivers.
'Asozial', a german term for the disabled and mentally ill, mixed race, translated to 'work shy', not anti-social, in it's intention. So much of this discourse had quietly crept it's way back into our media, both here in the UK and over the pond.

'Untermensch' (racially/socially inferior) is having something of a renaissance, too.

Now you know what those cyber trucks are for.

Dealing with the nonsense and grift of the trans phenomenon is probably the only positive outcome of Trump’s second term so far.

I appreciate that there are many on MN that feel strongly about trans rights but frankly on this instance it’s Trump going after the most marginalised and vulnerable in society. Right now it’s trans people, tomorrow it will be biological women or other LGBT groups. None of this is positive for anyone, none of it!

Republicans want to take away women's rights to abortion, contraception and ante natal care.

Democrats want to take away women's right to sport, single sex spaces and safety in prison.

The whole "trans are vulnerable" line ignores the reality of male rapists in female prisons etc.

BOTH US parties are riven with misogyny.

I doubt it will prove worth it in the long run.

None of this is positive for anyone, none of it!

It’s positive for women in sport, confused teenage girls who might have been offered damaging medication and surgery and women of all cultures and religions who want their spaces free from natal men so as to preserve their safety, privacy and dignity.

Trump is no feminist and cares not one jot women or people in general. Most of what he does is toxic. If only the Democrats hadn’t pushed the trans agenda. It’s so patently untrue and its effects on women so detrimental that their insistence on it destroyed many people’s confidence in them.

I feel strongly about women's rights, including in the context of trans rights.

I'm not amenable to arguments of the kind:

"Something needs to be done, this is Something, so let's do it,"
or
"Here's Team A and Team B. 'll define the entry criteria, and you must belong entirely to one or the other."

And in general, as I keep banging on about, I feel there's been a lot of very intentional herding of people into teams, to get them swallow things which in fact they don't agree with, under the guise of it being the team's position.

Just seen this screen cap on r/Trumpvirus :

Question: A young child just died of measles in Texas. Do you have a comment?

RFK Jr: It's not unusual, we have measles outbreaks all the time.

(This is the first measles death in the US in 10 years).

You know how many women I've known who have personally been assaulted, raped, harassed or pushed out of an educational/career opportunity by a trans person? Um, that would be zero, giving it the benefit of the doubt, maybe one.

You know how many women I've know who have personally been assaulted, raped, harassed or pushed out of an educational/career opportunity by a plain, old, regular, heterosexual male? Dozens and dozens. And that's not even getting into having legal control over their own bodies...

It's almost like we're looking in the wrong direction.

Absolutely!
I have seen posts on MN supporting Reform and Trump because of the trans issue.
But even a stopped clock is right once a day....

I have concerns about women's safety and (some) trans ideology, but allowing the world to go to hell over one single issue is terrifying. And these are probably decent, intelligent mumsnetters, it's just baffling.

It is basically shutting one's eyes to climate change, diversity and progress, democracy and a lot of potential harm just because you agree with ONE single point out of 5 trillion despicable ones.

I will also say that as far as I know, people aren't turning up in droves to enlist in the US military. Trump has a lot of military actions (allegedly) on the boil. Can they really afford to lose 15,000 serving soldiers?

People with diagnosed psychiatric illnesses and many medical issues (including diabetes) are not allowed to serve in the military.
According to DSM5, gender dysphoria is a psychiatric illness.
So the ruling is bringing consistency where it was previously lacking.