TheFooder
18d ago
I have this idea I call 'Mistake Theory' which posits that the only official acts that benefit the public are mistakes. US Politics exist solely as a way to screw the ninety-percenters and the POTUS is the perpetual enemy of the people. So a wildly chaotic moron is better than an effective genius because there's the teensy-tiniest chance something good might happen.
As far as I'm concerned, the collapse is well underway. The only thing Trump did was rip down the curtain. The 'national nightmare of prosperity' ended on 9-11-01 with every political and economic act afterward serving merely as a way of jamming the door open for looters. Better now than 5 years from now when we'd have even further to fall. Democracy has been nakedly exposed since...Obama? Bush v. Gore? earlier? The only question that remains in American politics is which flavor of authoritarianism is going to win--unless...someone makes a huge mistake!
America: I hate to see you go, but I love to watch you leave.
TheFooder
18d ago
Yeah, I had to delete my OP because I made it offhandedly while I was both working and exhausted. I agree that there are 'more-informed' vs. 'less-informed' people, but I don't think there are actually 'High-Information Voters.' I think that's a story some people like to tell themselves so they can look down on 'Low-Information Voters.' The biggest issue with information is the quality and usefulness. For the longest time anything /true/ seemed useless and everything /useful/ has seemed designed to mislead. Information is too loaded of a term for me these days.
TheFooder
18d ago
No Culture War articles today? Have we achieved Culture Peace?? No one wants this!
TheFooder
21d ago
Sure. If cocoa beans do not grow in a country, its citizens should go without chocolate. If they don't have oil, they shall go forgo petrochemicals and combustion engines. If they can not support a semiconductor production chain, they shall not have computers. The population shall acquire disease resistance the hard way until they can develop a vaccine, just as God intended.
Is it go without or 'only the wealthy and the black market?'
TheFooder
30d ago
Then I would ask what is your vision of the first amendment? What principle(s) underline how we enforce it? What limitations are acceptable and how do we determine when a line has been crossed?
TheFooder
1mo ago
I was speaking broadly. The criminality is what bothers people, not the speech.
TheFooder
1mo ago
Regarding Yemen, I believe it all started with the Saudis. Anyway, American interests there go deeper than Israel.
TheFooder
1mo ago
Why not just defund the schools, shut down students' access to loans and grants, tax the shit out of endowments and work to obliterate the university scene altogether? Why is speech the problem and not the schools?
TheFooder
1mo ago
Something I can't identify sticks in my craw. I think it's the "interests of Americans and the United States" bit.
Like, what even is that? Who could possibly agree on what it is? I think by your definition we'd be deporting (non-citizen) supporters of Israel too.
Frankly, I thought coming to the US and saying whatever hot garbage you wanted to say was part of the allure. I am finding it impossible to see this issue as something that we can somehow carve out from the broader mission of liberty. I think people are just mad they can't punch college students in the face for being wankers.
Why is speech the problem anyway? Isn't the actual problem that there is criminality--vandalism, attacks, things that clearly counter school policies. Why not focus on that?
TheFooder
1mo ago
But they kinda do have a stake, no?
If the green-card holders and legal residents (who have never needed to fear deportation for speech acts--to the best of my knowledge) knew Trump was going to go after them, then they would have a very real stake in the outcome of the political process.
TheFooder
1mo ago
Sorry, 'ops-sec' is not the correct term. the 'Ops-sec' was the failure. I think I meant something similar but specifically with the technology...Tech-sec or something.
Signal is the correct app to use if you're going to do these things--at least from what's on tap.
I think people are shocked that they didn't all assemble int he 'war room' to make the weighty decision to drop some bombs. The halcyon days of Dr. Strangelove are over, my friends.
I wonder if we'll even remember this happened in 3.75 years. Things are so whackadoodle, I can't tell if this is actually a scandal or not. Seems...not?
TheFooder
1mo ago
So they should have used email to decide to bomb Yemen and that would have been acceptable? Too slow, for starters.
I'm not really sure what the actual offense is here. I think it's accidentally adding an unrecognized phone number to a chat group, others think it's using the chat group in the first place.
TheFooder
1mo ago
Ooof two paragraphs in and I remember exactly why I stopped reading Meskhout's blog. All heat, no light.
So Trump says the government can't work with some firms and their security clearances are revoked. And...So what? Oh one of the firms sued and one caved. Ok...Some lawyers are only interested in money? Some guys who don't look cool also happen to be lawyers who don't roll over for Trump?
If this is supposed to tell me something bigger about how the government interfaces with civilian law firms I missed it. Is the problem that now the people in the government who hired the law firms to prosecute J6 (and Trump too?) have to work with what they got? That other law firms won't want to work with the USG because they might someday get hamstrung by not having security clearances? That uh....conservative lawyers, er...um, are going to be more in demand?
I honestly can't figure out what the claim is in the article, but I'm also too hung up on the shite writing to really try and dissect it. ELI5 please.
TheFooder
1mo ago
While agree there must be some level of incompetence or just a screw-up, I really don't see which of the various chat apps would be better than Signal. AFAIK, it's the most secure almost to the point of being a problem for things like FOIA, as once the app is deleted all the message history is gone.
Anyway, I"m not sure I agree with the 'bad ops-sec' here and tend toward 'if you message the wrong person, you can't claw it back.'
TheFooder
1mo ago
So what should they use? Slack? Google Messenger? Facebook messenger? AIM? Does the USG have its own private, secured messaging app? TBH, Signal actually seems like the best option if you need to have a group discussion with people all over the world and with conflicting schedules.
I mean...I'm open to alternatives, but what are they?
TheFooder
1mo ago
That's certainly how it reads to me as well. I might otherwise be sympathetic, but maybe she really did do some work for money.
TheFooder
1mo ago
I have been part of an RIF...a few times, in fact. The difference was they just said, "you're fired. Sign here." There wasn't any will-they/won't-they/when-they. I feel like the "shit-show" part of this is largely on purpose. Make everything so horrible no one will ever come back. Salting the Earth, as it were.
TheFooder
1mo ago
Yeah, I had to dig deep just to find the wrong people. I couldn't find anything about Burke's actual books until y'all posted it.
TheFooder
1mo ago
Yeah, this seems to be largely the case. As a fin-tech worker, the idea of job security is one I can hardly process, but I've been told that easy job and lifetime job security were top reasons for moving to DC. I think also, "there's not actually much work for a PhD in linguistics," is up there. I'm sympathetic to the claims of being terrorized--it seems like the firings are extra confusing and malicious--but I'm a little-shoulder shruggy in terms of losing one's job. It makes me seem like a demon around here. I have to keep up the pretense that I'm sorrowful for all the people. That said, I don't know who's getting fired, so I don't know who to call to make a big scene about how terrible it all is. I've been accused of not being 'curious enough.'
That seems about right to me. What has substantially changed?
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