anti_dan
22hr ago
For your typical government employee/Democrat activist you underestimate how much privilege they are used to. Even judicious prosecutions (think 1/10th of J6ers) would be considered incredibly oppressive compared to what they have received for stunts in the past. With the precedent of J6 hanging over their heads plus the new AG likely being quite happy to take up the good cases, such people are looking at the prospect of actual consequences for such an action.
For a class that has been exempt from consequences for most/all of their lives that must seem like an extremely daunting risk.
On top of that, would such a thing be effective? Unlikely. DOGE and associated efforts are working (kinda) largely because they are popular. Defending unpopular programs with unpopular tactics isn't usually that great of a political tactic. I can work for a while if the media is running cover, as with the BLM summer riots, but without control of Twitter, and the rest of social media somewhat freed from oppressive left wing pressure from inside the DOJ and IC, they cant guarantee anything like that sort of propaganda control.
anti_dan
1d ago
Just because there is fraud, it doesn't mean they can produce enough to always win. Evidence from the Chicago indictments shows a metro can falsify about 5-10% of its votes reliably without detection from outsiders.
anti_dan
2d ago
Things can always get worse, but Democrats have demonstrated they need no Republican precedent to take such steps. They Bork'd Bork; Reid eliminated the filibuster for judges; Biden stripped Trumps security clearance and tried to send him to federal prison. All that was without provocation.
anti_dan
2d ago
Probably I'm biased by the fact that I want to keep the neoliberal machine going... but do conservatives really not see the danger in giving leftists a chance to transform it into a vanguard-communist machine instead? The obama/biden wing of the party died with harris' loss. It's all berniecrats from here on out.
I'm sorry what? The neolib faction is still quite ascendant for Democrats. Berniecrats have no money and own little to no media. Money and media control are the only two things Democrats have in their favor at all. If the billionaires and neolibs disengaged from the Democrat party they'd become a permanent loser akin to Republicans in Chicago.
anti_dan
2d ago
Britain, the most famous parliamentary system, has a huge unelected bureaucracy wholly unanswerable to the populace.
anti_dan
2d ago
today the civil service is much more of a career
Such is the problem with the federal civil service. Other than the Patent Office, there is little footing for most of such career positions.
anti_dan
2d ago
Perhaps.
Perhaps people have heard many years of fearmongering about Trump breaking norms while observing his opposition actually break norms "because Trump."
Trumps EO on so called "independent agencies" rests on solid constitutional footing, as the constitution does not contemplate such a thing. Congress, if it is upset with his EO, can repeal the acts creating said agencies OR file suit and petition the courts to declare them unconstitutional (which they very likely are).
anti_dan
2d ago
Or, well, I guess now it does. Let's see how sanguine you are about all this the next time a non-republican president is in office.
It will be the same as ever under non-Republican presidents: Full compliance with the whims of the Democrat. The only change is that, potentially, some whims of the Republican president might get followed now.
anti_dan
2d ago
Conrgess has lost a portion of its power over the president, dramatically and permanently.
They have lost power over the president. But none of that has to do with Trump, Trump's most recent EO, and it is not either dramatic or permanent. Congress can always repeal a law and remove an agency from existence if they don't like how the President is managing the agency. The reason Congress has lost some of its power is that they did so intentionally by creating rulemaking agencies within the executive branch, which was a delegation of Congressional power to make laws. That they tried having some sort of end around this reality by falsely labeling some of them "independent" didn't actually make them so.
anti_dan
2d ago
They were correct in two ways:
- There is likely large scale election fraud in most elections;
- Covid "reforms" made said fraud easier, and also created large swathes of illegal, but not necessarily fraudulent, votes that were counted anyways.
anti_dan
2d ago
"Independent" agencies are not so, and the vast majority have been captured by their permanent bureaucrats who lean heavily left. Plus they are all arguably (and the argument against this argument is pretty weak) unconstitutional anyways.
Whether Republicans lose sometime in the future is irrelevant. This is ending the "heads I win, tails you lose" advantage Democrats have enjoyed at these agencies for the better part of half a century.
anti_dan
4d ago
How much of the unpopularness is Putin, and how much is the man on the TV told them they should find Putin unpopular?
There is no real reason for an American to like Putin, so like, not much? I know there is a significant amount of anti-Putin propaganda out there, but even absent that there's not really any reason to like him. He doesn't actually ride bears, and he does actually, at best, waste everyone's time and money clinging to power and saber rattling.
And he doesn't even do cool stuff with his aggression like nuke Tehran. Its all boring border squabbles with his weaker neighbors.
anti_dan
4d ago
One that was not unintentionally avoidable by someone 5 years outside the alleged core demographic.
anti_dan
4d ago
If you think people at large know any other MGMT song better than Little Dark Age, you're not paying attention to zoomer culture.
I doubt I qualify as such. Having heard this song before and refreshing on it today, it is resoundingly below mediocre. I mean, Dylan is also generally bad so I guess it appeals to a similar sort of person maybe. I've always heard boomers call Dylan a "poet" or something similar. This seems to be popular, to the extent it is, because it conveys a sort of sense of ennui.
I give it a mildly resounding "meh"
anti_dan
4d ago
American homeless aren't (generally) aspiring florists and coconut peddlers stymied by regulations, they are the people Thailand, at best, just lets die, and quite often executes.
anti_dan
4d ago
Helmut Kohl
He I think embraced some parts of it. Then again, that was all before I was even in middle school, and it was during the era where Germany was trying to re-unite.
anti_dan
4d ago
Literal hereditary monarchs (many such cases, some established within living memory)! Official state churches (many such cases)! States collecting taxes on behalf of churches! Blasphemy laws!
We basically have never had any of this in America so it doesn't map to our Left-Right spectrum at all. In the instances we have something similar to those things, they basically map to the left: Hollywood dynasties, political family dynasties, state sponsored religious-like nonprofits, education centers, etc. They have all been left wing for generations.
anti_dan
4d ago
Adopting a lower-tax, lower-welfare state system coupled with an emphasis on national defense.
anti_dan
4d ago
The first order of business is selling your allies on reforming themselves. I think, unfortunately, your politicians were quite unwise in their plunge into NATO as opposed to a negotiated entrance that required many of the constituent states to live up to obligations. NATO's Eastern front needed Finland more than you needed NATO at the time of entry.
anti_dan
4d ago
I mean, if you want to say Europe was easily colonized and seduced by the American left, I guess that is also accurate. But America has consistently presented Europe with the other option. From Reagan & Thatcher to Trump there has been another way prominently on display, and Europe shied away from those proposals.
anti_dan
4d ago
I had a longer post that got eaten. But here it is in short:
Americans aren't turning towards Russia, but some are turning away from Europe. The reason is simple, Europe has picked a side in the American culture war, and it is the far left side. That is not a good formula for maintaining good relations with America because even when we have a Democratic government, you guys are still to the left of it by a lot. There's the immigration piece, the welfare, the speech regulations, the climate alarm. And it doesn't help that Brussels and Berlin's default position is "never compromise".
So now we turn to military spending. Europe has failed at this from not only a monetary perspective, but from a readiness perspective to an even worse degree for decades. And what are you asking Americans to defend (while you certainly attempt to appear unwilling to do so yourselves)? An increasingly authoritarian Bureaucracy who are so intent on being authoritarian they'd rather cripple their own economy than let a little freedom spill out.
So, we are at a point similar to the point where we were around 1916 or so. Is it really wise for the US to jump in yet? I'd argue it was far too early for us in WWI. We should have let the sides bleed a bit more and come in and swept it all aside instead of what we did, which yielded the ineffectual Treaty of Versailles and more conflict just a generation later.
Why is it so unlikely? It seems that a large amount, perhaps even a majority, of the Democrats advocacy apparatus is at least partially funded by the US government. That plus donors still feeling the sting of dumping record breaking amounts of money into the Harris campaign debacle probably means the number of paid protestors is fairly low right now.
One thing I have been disappointment by is the lack of the "center left" pundits like MattY and @TracingWoodgrains writing long thinkpieces expressing outright embarrassment about how this whole apparatus of grifting off the feds is to them and their general movement.
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