LiberalRetvrn
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User ID: 1892
LiberalRetvrn
18hr ago
I'm not exactly saying that bureaucrats shouldn't be fired if they disobey the president. Just that the process of firing them and finding replacements would serve as a buffer against a totalitarian president implementing his agenda. If only a few bureaucrats object, it's obviously not much of an obstacle. But their act of civil disobedience can still raise awareness of what's going on.
LiberalRetvrn
19hr ago
There is actually a hidden veto by the bureaucracy and the deep state
I disagree that this is a "hidden" veto, I think it's an obvious feature of liberal democracy. A president can't govern without the lower level bureaucrats' cooperation. If they find his proposals so hideous that they're willing to blow up their careers by defying him, he'll have difficulty implementing anything. To become an actual totalitarian, the president would have to replace all the bureaucrats with yes-men, and that takes time. If he just fires them all immediately, he won't have the infrastructure to govern. I find this very comforting, and it makes me less scared of a Trump presidency than many of my family members and friends. But when a politician talks about "draining the swamp", that's a clear sign that he's not willing to work within the system. We need to protect the swamp.
LiberalRetvrn
1yr ago
I think the opposite is true. The current anti-woke movement has strayed too far into pushing a "positive vision," and that's why it's starting to falter. Wokism itself started as a counterculture, and it only became insufferable once it gained real power in the mid 2010s. Most people are against wokeness because it is illiberal, and America is still a liberal society at its core. Americans don't like being controlled, and they felt controlled by wokeness in the mid 2010s, just like they felt controlled by fundamentalism in the previous era. And now conservatives are making the same error that the wokes made, they are mistaking opposition to wokism as support for traditionalism.
LiberalRetvrn
1yr ago
41% memes aside, I haven't seen much evidence that the suicide rate is higher for trans people. And how do I know I won't take the drug and then eventually regret not transitioning when I had the chance? For suicide reduction to be a convincing argument, I would have to know that the drug reduces suicide longterm. But what if the drug just makes you happy enough not to kill yourself, but not really fulfilled either? A lot of people wouldn't take that choice. I would still be tempted to YOLO and transition anyway.
LiberalRetvrn
1yr ago
through painful, expensive, difficult treatments
Only some of the treatments are painful, expensive, and difficult. SRS certainly is, but very few trans people actually get that. HRT is dirt cheap and painless, and that's the core of what most people would consider trans healthcare. I think for many of us taking HRT nowadays, it's not really such an imposition that we would be willing to risk a lobotomy to get rid of the desire to do it.
LiberalRetvrn
1yr ago
But Elon never mismanaged his other companies to this degree, for whatever reason. I don't recall ever seeing him publicly squabbling with Tesla employees, issuing ultimatums, recklessly making huge changes, micromanaging things he doesn't understand, etc. It seems to me like either he is intentionally tanking twitter, or has suffered some kind of head injury recently causing him to lose all executive function.
It's interesting that Vance can see the parallels between pride parades and civil religion, but I wonder if he can see how christianity and wokeness fit in. Pride parades are positive rites - they celebrate the existence of LGBTs without demonizing straight people. Then wokeness came along, and its core thesis was original sin: you are born racist, sexist, and homophobic, and only through listening to marginalized voices, unpacking your racism, and de-toxifying your masculinity can you ever hope to be saved.
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