quiet_NaN
1d ago
While I can not speak for HR panels, I want to emphasize that I do not think that men enjoy any biological specialization which makes them relevantly better at STEM than their female colleagues. At my workplace, we have perhaps 40% women and for whatever weird subsubpopulation ends up in my field (a non-booming field of physics), I do not see gender being correlated with competence. (There are significant variances within specialties, FWIW. The small subset of colleagues who I consider to be good or great programmers are mostly male. On the other hand, women are more likely to actually ask for help. Just the other day, I chased a crash down the entirely wrong rabbit hole with a debugger and might have wasted hours which my female colleague in the end solved in five minutes with an email.)
While I think that there are certainly degrees and occupations which have more or less objective usefulness (e.g. medicine vs grievance studies), I do not believe there is much in the way of correlation between gender-codedness and objective usefulness.
I mean, I consider woke studies -- which are coded female -- to be net negative, but I also consider marginal contributions to the capabilities of the world's militaries to be net negative, with the security dilemma being a prime example of an inadequate equilibrium if there ever was one.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
I think the bad-tasteness of it depends on the group size. Three people can keep a secret (if two of them are dead) and all that. If three boys want to spend their time fantasizing about their classmates, that is very different than if three quarters of the class participate in the ranking, in my mind. (I don't know what the participation rate for that spreadsheet thing was, I am trying to make a general point.)
I don't think having rankings is necessarily bad taste. I am fine with men ranking porn stars (or participants of a dating show) by their hotness, or athletes by their speeds, or competitive eaters by how many burgers they can eat, or students by how well they did on their last math test (even though I would prefer to just tell everyone their outcome and the overall statistics in that case). In all these cases, the ranking is kind of relevant to the job. Don't want to be judged by your genitals? Then don't become a porn star.
I agree that not every inappropriate ranking implies bullying and victimization. If the bottom of the list gets rated a 4/10, the whole endeavor would still be slightly ill-advised, but victim-free. (Some feminists might disagree with me here, whatever.) If half the class coordinates to agree on an 1/10 rating for one classmate especially based on politics and this strongly influences how they subsequently treat them, that would be bullying.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
You can't DEI your way to being able to do math, physics, or chemistry that actually works. Other departments are perfectly safe to keep using these political statements though - sociology departments produces can net-negative knowledge, there is no requirement that they ever do anything that actually works, and nothing about their funding relies on that changing.
Sounds like you are saying that the STEM subjects are intrinsically white and racist, while the social sciences are sufficiently enlightened.
I kid, I kid.
In my model of reality, the STEM-powered industrial revolution did more to (ultimately and mostly inadvertetly) improve the lot of formerly non-free underclasses in two centuries than the humanities and social sciences did in two millennia.
For what it's worth, I share your ideal of being color-blind instead of putting one's hand on the scales to ensure equality of outcomes. The ultimate arbitrator of what constitutes good physics should be reality, not a HR panel.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
The degree to which a government decision is about budget exists on a sliding spectrum.
Consider two extremes:
- The government wants to provide better care for kittens, so they nationalize Facebook and pay animal shelters from the income. Equivalently, they make a law requiring Facebook to house a certain amount of kittens.
- The government allows or forbids abortions, gay sex or gun ownership.
ADA is somewhere in between these extremes. It is clearly has a direct monetary impact on businesses. And sometimes as with the free videos, the outcomes are clearly bad.
But I don't think it is 100% only about money.
Consider a community of 10k of people with 20 wheelchair users and a single non-wheelchair supermarket. Say the owner has done the math and building a wheelchair ramp would not be cost-effective. I see the following options:
A) The government shrugs. B) The government pays some allowance to the wheelchair users. They try to pool together to get that ramp. The owner agrees. Good outcome. C) Like B, but the owner still not want the ramp. The ramp would take one of the spots of the parking lot (in fact, the best spot!), and he wants rent for that. Eventually the government overpays severely for that ramp. D) Like B, but the government forces the owner to allow that ramp. The owner mumbles something about commies. E-G) Like B-D, but the money comes from the government directly based on general rules instead of the actual demand. This bypasses coordination problems, but risks being less cost-effective. H) The government forces the owner to pay for the ramp out of his own pocket. Again he grumbles something about land of the free. In the end, everyone pays through increased supermarket prices and the general costs of having to follow more laws. I) Some kind of technical solution. Exo-skeletons, shopping-as-a-service, whatever.
Most of these options are not great. Excluding wheelchair users whenever the market forces are not in their favor is not nice. Creating more regulations is also not nice. Having a bureaucracy which figures out how much the supermarket should be paid for allowing that wheelchair ramp also is not nice. Relying on technological solutions will not always work.
Making the supermarket owner pay for the ramp has at least the advantage that there is little bureaucratic overhead. You do not need to figure out a fair price for getting the owner to allow that ramp, or if the government should pay for a ramp in the primary color of the market, and how much the government should pay if the owner also uses that ramp to move carts of goods, or employ wheelchair ramp inspectors. Pay for the ramp or get sued is not the simplest law there could be, but it is not the most complicated either.
This does not mean that the pathologies you mentioned (e.g. that it is easier to sell hidden costs than visible costs) don't play a role, though.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
From my limited understanding, the president is the head of the executive, and any democratic legitimacy of the federal bureaucracy ultimately comes from the fact that the bureaucrats are enacting the will of a democratically (or however you call the electoral college system) elected president. While there are certainly mid-level bureaucrats who would do everything legal in their power to thwart his preferred policies (and some might even risk their job by going beyond that), I think the rest of DC pretending that Trump does not exist will not be an option. For one thing, do you really suppose the Supreme Court would play along with that? If they do not, should the rest of DC also pretend that the Supreme Court does not exist?
We already had four years of Trump. He was not my favorite president, but contrary to predictions from the left he turned out not to be the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. I don't think he would build death camps in his second presidency. It would not be the end of the world.
On the other hand, democracy in the US had (with one notable exception) been a great success in avoiding conflicts being resolved by force of arms. Even if Trump's supporters would idly stand by while the executive defected, the long term effects of establishing that the federal bureaucracy is independent of the president would likely be violent.
Trump's second term would not be about replacing the constitution with the Fuehrerprinzip. If he gets the EC votes, he may get out of legal troubles which may or may not have been politically motivated in the first place. This will not be the end of the world any more than Nixon getting pardoned about Watergate was the end of the world.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
It is bad taste for any group whose primary purpose is not a dating pool to systematically rate the hotness of that pool, no matter the gender.
These lists tend to become common knowledge, and some people will end up on the bottom part of the list or being rated an average of 1.3 out of ten (but people -- especially people going through puberty -- might also be uncomfortable being rated really high). If the victim had actually asked to be rated, this would be different, but in all likelihood, they do not prefer an supposedly objective (it's a number! numbers don't lie!) rating of their hotness to become common knowledge.
The outcome of these lists is not so different from writing "X is an ugly pig" on the blackboard. As that is bullying, I would classify creating such lists as at least likely to lead to bullying.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
From the article, it is clear that the rate of both men and women being murdered by intimate partners has decreased by a factor of about two since the 1990s.
To be sure, of the 0.45 Non-Indigenous women killed per 100k, 0.32 are killed by an intimate partner, who is very likely to be male. I am not sure what could be done about that, though. Encourage more women to join gangs so that they are more likely to be killed in gang warfare, like presumably the males (for whom the murder rate is twice as high, but only with a small fraction being perpetrated by intimate partners)?
In general, the price we pay for freedom is that sometimes people elect to do bad stuff with it. In theory, we could save a few women's lives by outlawing heterosexual relationships or locking up all men. In practice, that would not be worth it on a QALY basis.
If being murdered is among the ten leading causes of death, then we could consider talking about an epidemic. Traffic deaths are between four and five per 100k. We should roughly care five times as much about that than we care about murders (which should still not be a lot).
Also, Indigenous women are murdered at six times the rate of their non-Indigenous peers!!111 Should the intersectionist woke crowd be all over that fact?
quiet_NaN
4d ago
I think there is a world of a difference between camping illegally and detaining others.
Believing in the rule of the law does not imply believing that every law should be rigorously enforced all the time. Just like I don't think you should go after every kid's lemonade stand for lack of a business licence, I also think that universities should have some leeway in deciding which of their student groups they tolerate having protest camps on campus.
I think as long as it is not the government deciding that would not be unconstitutional.
For example, a university might tolerate a protest camp to Save The Whales (as long as they do not single out Japanese students or something) but might decide not to tolerate a protest camp about God Hates Fags.
So the amount of antisemitism and especially the attitude towards Jewish students might matter a lot to the universities -- who I imagine are doing damage control. The question for them is if it is worse PR to call the police to dissolve the camp or to continue to tolerate it and thus to some degree be endorsing the messages they spread.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Just cap the liability costs at 10x the costs of the device. This should be enough to get vendors to take security seriously without having to worry about black swan outcomes.
Also, a hospital getting attacked by ransomware should obviously not only be liable for the ransom they elected to pay, but be fined on top of that if it turned out that any patient files were accessible to attackers.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
I am not sure that government providing long detailed lists of how to do security is going to help anyone.
My solution would be to simply make vendors liable for damages caused by security flaws of their devices, up to say 10 times the sticker price. Or impose a fine per vulnerable unit per day. An authentication bypass for a cloud-enabled webcam might cost 10% per day it is known for an exploit which allows recording if the fact that the camera is recording is visible from an LED, or 30% if the camera-on LED can be bypassed.
In Germany, the BSI is a federal agency tasked with enhancing computer security (except for when they are tasked with breaking computer security). The gist I get from German IT blogger fefe is that most of their security recommendations serve more to cover the backside of the company than actually prevent incidents. 'We were running two different anti-virus programs plus a Cisco Firewall, and our Windows+ActiveDirectory network was still compromised by ransomware. This simply shows the immense criminal energy of our attackers, we are the victims here!"
Again, laws should not try to specify the process, they should specify the outcomes. In this case, minimizing the time a device is exploitable.
Ensure software integrity
In practice, this will mean Tivotization. Personally, I am following the philosophy of "if you did not install the operating system, it is not your device". Owning a mobile phone is a lot of hassle. First you pick a vendor which supports OEM unlocks at all, then you find out that their dreadful unlocking process does not actually work, send the phone back, order a phone from a different vendor, request the unlock code, wait a week and finally unlock it. Give me a PC with a legacy boot option or a RasPi any day instead.
On the other hand, if it is no longer possible to sell Rasbian in the UK, I will consider that a win. "Let us just put a default user+password usable via fucking ssh on the image, YOLO" is so far from any responsible security mindset that I can hardly fathom it.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
I think that the issue with "unrapeable" is that it is not a tag that was applied to all of the classmates, the implication being 'the primary thing that keeps us from raping people (apart from strategic concerns regarding law enforcement) is people being ugly'.
If the boys had rated their classmates on a scale of one to ten, this would still be in poor taste imho (as it would be if the genders were reversed, like in that South Park episode), but probably not make national news.
Also, the one-dimensional scale of female attractiveness is certainly an oversimplification. Looking at porn categories, I think it is safe to say that while there is a common axis of attractiveness, there is is also a lot of variation in preference among men.
Finally, your physical attractiveness should mostly matter in so far as your goal is to bang all your classmates or find a partner who prefers a high status mate to underline their own status among their peers, neither of which sound like very worthwhile goals.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
If the weather seemed especially treif/haram this weekend, it is probably due to all these flying pigs. The guardian published an article on antisemitism in the US student protests which actually tries to be somewhat balanced.
They acknowledge that there have been unambiguous incidents of antisemitism.
Then there are gems like this:
“There is a distinction between being unsafe and feeling uncomfortable. It’s very notable to see the discourse around this issue because the right in this country that’s been talking about woke culture, and how young people are snowflakes, are suddenly adopting this narrative around safety, which is really a narrative around comfort,” he said.
“People do not have a right to feel comfortable in their ideas. This is a university. This is a place to challenge people’s ideas. Discomfort is not the same thing as danger.”
Of course, if issue one is "a work of literature containing rape" and issue two is "an Israeli student encountering protesters who say stuff like 'Zionists don’t deserve to live', I have my own ideas which of these I would classify as "making one feel uncomfortable" versus "making one feel genuinely unsafe".
Even so, Norman Finkelstein, the Jewish American political scientist who is a strong critic of Israel, advised the protesters to reconsider the use of slogans that can be used against them. Finkelstein went to Columbia to praise the students for raising public consciousness about the Palestinian cause but he advised them “to adjust to the new political reality that there are large numbers of people, probably a majority, who are potentially receptive to your message”.
[...]
Once Finkelstein has finished speaking, a protester took the microphone and led a chant of “from the river to the sea”.
I think that this illustrates nicely how most of the protesters are in it for the signaling value. This is not uncommon, after all, many things we do are mostly for the signaling value. My own position that Israel should do more to minimize civilian casualties while they crush Hamas is probably something a majority of US voters could get behind, but boy is it lackluster from a signaling point of view. A student protester expressing this opinion would not get any respect for their bravery from their peers. On the other hand, calling for an intifada might be utterly devastating to the aims of the protests, but it will earn the one expressing it a lot of respect for being so brave and likely get them laid.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
crushedoranges wants to imply that men are mostly picking women for their physical characteristics.
I think that while physical attraction governs who men might want to have sex with, there might be other considerations for long term relationships. At least some men would prefer a spouse who shares their interests, views et cetera, and having a similar degree of education might serve as a proxy for those.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
The whole point of a queue is to facilitate quick embarking. Queuing on the wrong stop seems counter-productive in that regard.
Of course, betting that the queue is wrong about where the front door by a meter and starting a new queue on that spot is probably not very English. (Ideally, there would be marks on the floor where the queue ought to start.) But if there are two bus stops, it is reasonable to assume that the other queue wants to get on a different bus. In that case, starting a queue for your own bus stop seems ok.
Of course, we Germans don't queue for the bus. To get us to stand next to strangers, we would require greater rewards than simply slightly more efficiency when entering the bus.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
The issue with lithium ion batteries is that they contain rather a lot of energy. I would always prefer to use a prebuilt charging circuit rather than relying on building my own, just like I try to avoid building anything complicated which directly interfaces with mains power.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
The problem is that almost anything which would be widely useful can already be found for less than you would pay for the parts on aliexpress, and will likely offer better battery life and miniaturization. Especially the latter is a big deal for wearables -- while you can certainly use an ESP32, a EKG chip and some flash memory to build a two channel 24/7 Holter EKG, it will certainly not have the neat chest strap form factor but something much bulkier. Also, most of your students probably don't require an EKG in any case.
Home automation is one area where DIY can thrive, especially for cloud-skeptics like me who don't like to surrender control to Amazon or Google. Devices there can often be mains-powered and a bit larger. Commercial products often are not very great on generic interfaces and instead prefer for you to download the app and use their cloud.
All of the devices which I have build which ended up being useful are for very specific things in the lab. A tester to check if there are sixteen diodes connected to specific pins of a DSub25 connector is not exactly an item you require in every household.
I personally would not worry if student electronics projects end up in some drawer. It is the same with most smaller student software projects. Nobody would want to hang whatever pictures I was forced to draw in high school on their walls, and most student essays don't enter the canon either.
Regarding buying electronic components, I have found it really helpful to have the backing of a corporation or institution. Most of the electronics vendors like farnell, mouser, digikey, buerklin really don't like to do business with private individuals. This means that for plenty of chips there is not even a good way to buy them at all on your own. When purchasing through an institution, I can get the products from at least two of these vendors within a week or so. Of course, if you want really exotic sensors you might have to buy directly from the producer, but the palette they offer is rather large.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Personally, I did have parents who would would probably have talked me out of philosophy or medieval German. But with STEM, the assumption is that you find a job other than taxi driver. Physics is kind of good because it keeps your options open between software development, labwork and a zillion other occupations. If anything, I might have spent more time thinking about the if, why, what field and what school regarding a PhD. I am still okay with how it is likely to work out, though.
Regarding housing, I know of few tenants who spent more food/eating out than on rent. Typically, the rent is more than half of your paycheck. Again, in Germany, most of jobs (in, say, IT) and most of the infrastructure are in the big cities, where housing is crazy expensive. For people living in the big metropolitan areas the decision 'let us have three kids' would necessitate finding another job somewhere else where rents are cheaper, dropping out of their social circle and all that.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Regarding not having a plan for a career, I have to say this was always the case for me. I am finished school because it seemed the default thing to do, then studied physics because I thought it was interesting (and to keep my options open with regard to kinds of jobs), then went for a PhD. Me being in Europe, living a modest life-style and being supported by my parents meant that I came out without debt at least. I am not sure if I would have been more careful about my career choices if I felt that I was less employable.
--
Another thing which you touch is that it takes money to raise kids, especially if one wants more than one kid, at least by contemporary Western expectations (i.e. one room per teenager). Typically, there are places which have affordable rents and places which have jobs. In previous centuries, a husband in his twenties could start working and earn enough to feed his family and eventually even buy a house. Today, plenty of people feel they need two post-grad incomes to even consider kids, and few have delusions of being able to afford to own a house from the money they will ever make.
quiet_NaN
13d ago
Antisemitism has less to do with people not liking jews and more to do with people being annoyed with things jews do. Pogroms weren't caused by abstract hate of jews, it was caused by people being fed up with how the jews were behaving. The best thing jews could do would be to stop provoking people around them and stirring up conflicts.
So I take it that in your view, the Holocaust was because all these evil Polish Jews were meddling in German politics.
I hate to break it to you, but Jews do not act as a coherent group. If you find Jews on two sides of an issue, that is not because they decided to infiltrate both sides, but because they genuinely believe in different things. In any somewhat meritocratic system, some Jews will likely come out in the top 1%. Some Jews will be doctors, lawyers and so on. Some will be intellectuals all over the political spectrum, from the fringe left to conservatives (if the Nazis and their ilk were not rabidly antisemitic, I am sure that some Jews would have joined them as well). A lot of them will have perfectly normal middle class jobs. Of course, some of the rich ones will throw their money around trying to influence politics. Or commit sex crimes. Good thing gentile industrialists never do that!
For Germany 1933, antisemitism was the placebo therapy. Plenty of poor people found capitalism wanting and were disillusioned with democracy. Rather than waiting for a communist revolution (which would have been terrible for other reasons), gentile industrialists were funding Hitler. There were Jewish bankers and industrialists, and the Nazis managed to convince enough of the population that rather than the Jewish banker and the gentile banker being the problem (as the commies would see it), or unbridled capitalism being the problem, the Jewish banker and the Jewish barber were the problem.
host population
That phrase is Problematic.
Charitably, you want to suggest that the Jews are guests to the host population. This is wrong, Jews are members of their nation states as much as anyone. German and French Jews both did their share of foolish dying at Verdun, same as any other Germans and French did. Some US Jews lived there back before it was independent. The trope of the faithless, nationless Jew is from old European antisemitism. In reality, it was the other way round: whenever a monarch was feeling particularly Christian, they would banish all the Jews from their realm.
Of course, less charitably, you know exactly what phrasing you are using and the word opposite to the host is "parasite", which is also an old antisemitic trope.
quiet_NaN
13d ago
I think it is uncontroversial that societies at similar tech levels can have vastly different amounts of inequality.
There is inequality ("oppression" in modern parlance) both in ancient fucking Sparta and modern day Sweden, but the amount of inequality matters.
Despite coming from the traditional left, I believe some inequality is actually beneficial: if Elon Musk collected the same UBI as everyone, this would not make the world a worse place (except for Twitter, perhaps). On the flip side, taking the land away from aristocrats and redistributing it to the peasants may likewise stimulate the economy as well as lowering the Gini coefficient.
Who is on top and who on the bottom only matters to me as far as their economic policy might differ due to their background.
quiet_NaN
13d ago
Reality being that AI is not going to become superduper post-scarcity fairy godmother or paperclipper
While I do not think that ASI in this century is overly likely, I do not think that the present AI boom is over. It could be that we will look back on 2024 in a decade deep in the next AI winter and say "this was peak AI, we tried for a few years to throw more hardware at the LLMs had little to show for it with exponentially increasing costs"
But even then, the equilibrium with today's AI technology will transform our work lives at least as much as the digital revolution. Looking at security cameras and seeing if something bad is going on was a job, or at least a huge part of a job. Driving a truck for hours along the highway was a job. Converting a text to bullet points and back was a job. Making thematically appropriate illustrations to text-heavy articles was a job. Writing articles based on a press release was a job.
It used to be, human brains had cornered the market on general purpose neural networks. If it was to complicated to train a dog to do it (which would be another human job) you used a human.
AI does not have to become a better writer than Scott Alexander or a better narrator than Eneasz or a good programmer to put a good portion out of the population out of a job.
Perhaps we will find other niches because we have greater adaptability (i.e. require far less training) and have good manual dexterity and tend not to freak customers out. Or perhaps we will simply not return to the state where the vast majority of the adult population works. In which case governments may decide to pay people off to keep them from burning all the robots. Post-scarcity is a scale, and from the viewpoint of history we are already moving along that scale, even if we do not have a free Mars rocket for everyone and may never have.
And with regard to the paperclip maximizer, I feel it is premature to declare victory. If neural networks ever reach the same level of maturity as plumbing, where the pipes are generally the same way they were four decades ago, then you can tell us doomers that we should calm down because obviously nothing is going to happen any time soon.
quiet_NaN
14d ago
I would argue that being a serf was better than being a slave, but only marginally. Yes, you could not be sold away from the land, or be fed to the dogs without any pretense of justice, but mostly your lord captured all of the surplus and you survived on his whim.
So I would argue that your lord being your brother in Christ did gain you something as compared to your lord being a a warrior god who taught might makes right.
I concede that the Roman Empire was probably more unequal, though. For northern Europe, being a slave to some Germanic tribe was shittier than being a serf in the medieval age. But I would argue that the former societies were not very rich to begin with, so the from a Gini coefficient point of view the middle ages were probably worse.
quiet_NaN
15d ago
Many also claim that Christianity was created by Jews to control Whites.
How would that even work? The Jews (who back then would not have been under any genetic pressure to be cleverer than similar societies) develop Psychohistory a la Asimov around 100-30 BCE, see that they will eventually annoy their eventual Roman occupiers enough that they will destroy the Second Temple, and while they can not prevent that (e.g. by trying to rebel less against Roman rule) because reasons (???), they can at least sow the seeds of their revenge. They create Christianity as a memetic superweapon and task their Agent Jesus with spreading it. For three centuries Christianity survives in the underground before finally Constantine converts (exactly as planned!), leading (as per a straw-Gibbon) to the inevitable decline and fall. (Ok, East Rome managed to hang on a bit longer despite being 'handicapped' by Christianity. And the slave mindset of Christianity did not prevent Europe to colonize most of the world. Details, details.)
Of course, in this silly fantasy history the target of the memetic weapon would still be the Roman Empire, not the descendants of various Mediterranean and barbarian states who would eventually self-identify as Whites. To get to that point one would have to go totally batshit crazy with the plot. Like "Evil reptiloid aliens give the Jews time travel technology" or something.
quiet_NaN
15d ago
I can not help but notice that the first people who substantially increased the number of non-white, non-native humans in the US were the slave owners. Some flavors of Christianity played a substantial role in the abolition, but few people today would say "having a non-white population is fine as long as you don't treat them as human beings", so blaming the abolitionists is rightfully not done.
Christianity is not a religion tied to a specific ethnic group. Any human can become a Christian, and at least at that point hope to be treated by other Christians as a human being.
This is not to say that Christianity demands equality. Historically, Christianity presided over the most unequal period in European history. The serf and the lord might or might not be equal before God in some abstract way, but if God made the world so unequal then the serf should accept his lot. Given that Christianity is compatible with inequality in general, I think it is equally compatible with racial inequality specifically. I mean, the slave owners were Christians of some flavor.
I think the case is similar with Islam, which is also open to all humans. While it has certainly endorsed societies which were very unequal along racial and other lines, you can say that it is not intrinsically racist.
Judaism for example is designed as a religion for one ethnicity. The conversion process seems more like an add-on, fundamentally it is not about converting other humans.
I don't really know about Hinduism, but given that you are already stuck with your caste for life (afaik), I do not think that there is much emphasis on a process to adopt heathens into one of the castes.
The nice thing about democracies is that there is a peaceful path forward if you are unhappy with an administration. Canvas for your issue, change the mind of the voters, change the stance of politicians or get elected yourself. Not an easy path forward, but with some notable benefits over the alternative.
This Calvin and Hobbes comic illustrates the position the bureaucracy would find itself in if they decided to do their thing without the blessings of President, SC and Congress.
And while this is getting deep into silly "could Darth Vader take Superman in a fight?" hypotheticals territory, there is the fact that the federal police agencies are not the strongest kid on the block. The US military seems kind of big on following a chain of command which ultimately ends with the president. They obviously will be reluctant to interfere within the US, but if the constitutional organs of the US are in agreement that a part of the DC bureaucracy is in rebellion, I strongly expect them to intercede on the side of the constitution. And a battle of federal law enforcement vs the US army would be even more lopsided that a battle of Feds versus Trump militias.
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