Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
Disabled Alaskan Monarchist doomer
User ID: 2666
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
3hr ago
Well, I wasn't familiar with Gaetz before this, so I'm mostly going off the reactions of others to his appointment. There's two things I find interesting.
The first also holds for many of Trump's other appointments, it's just the most stark in the case of Gaetz and Justice. And that's the take that he'll be useless as AG because he's not an insider, he's going to try (and fail) to tell people at Justice to do things they don't want to do, and that he'll get nothing done as they refuse to obey him, since they'll only "obey" an insider who only "orders" them to do things they already want to do. Pretty much admitting to what I keep saying (as does Yarvin): that, regardless of what it says on some musty old bit of paper, the Permanent Bureaucracy doesn't actually answer to their appointed "heads," nor the elected politicians that appoint them; that they set their own policies, and maintain them regardless of how the votes go, and that Our Democracy™ is mostly a sham. (Again, my only hope for the second Trump term is that the utter uselessness of even a Republican "trifecta" finally convinces enough right-wing Americans that no amount of voting can halt the leftward slide, and thus the only things to do are either give up, accept defeat, and lie down to rot; or else grab their friends, grab their guns, and march on DC to put bullets into Swamp Creature heads.)
Second, that Thomas G. Moukawsher at Newsweek and the Dreaded Jim have both compared Gaetz to Caligula's horse Incitatus, albeit with opposite valences of approval, and very different predictions of outcome:
If Senate confirmation still matters, all is lost. I don’t think it matters any more, but to maintain the pretence of still mattering, the Senate will confirm him, so that they can continue to pretend to matter.
Matt Gaetz has been compared to Caligula’s horse, in that he is wildly unpalatable to the Senate. The difference being that Caligula’s horse was unpalatable because incapable of functioning as a Consul, while Matt Gaetz is unpalatable because far too capable of functioning as Attorney General.
Our Senate will confirm him, as the Roman Senate confirmed Caligula’s horse.
and?
Take a look at Matt’s many Youtube videos of his finest moments. When the senate votes “confirm” despite all that, it will be a lot more amusing than Caligula’s horse.
and:
FBI has to be removed permanently. They are dangerous. They have committed enormous crimes, which if unpunished, will be repeated sooner or later. They have to be eliminated, or we lose.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1d ago
East Asian fertility. Taiwan, the PRC, Monaco, Hong Kong, Singapore
Why is Monaco, a European state, in the middle of this list of East Asian locales?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1d ago
but the American legal system often assigns huge legal damages that are not warranted.
It sounds like that's the real problem here. Maybe instead of defending a specific carve-out patch for vaccines in particular, people should be pursuing tort reform instead.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1d ago
I mean, I live in a neighborhood where I won't have to go first, and I find that a very minor benefit towards expanding my house over moving.
And we were talking about "parents in the city" — if you lived in such a place, instead of where you do now, would you still take such a risk? If, in that scenario, a bunch of busybody Karens call CPS on you for "neglect" by insufficient helicopter parenting, what then?
mine own parents were among them, once upon a time, for letting me bike to 7/11 or the library on mine own far younger than the other children in the neighborhood.
That, of course, was a different time, when people — especially cat-lady "karens" — were less likely to report people to the government for being more permissive than the norm. This is the age of "see something, say something (caveat: unless "seeing" would be racist)."
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2d ago
I suspect that if all the parents in the city decided to send their kids on mile long walks into main street, something similar would happen, and no one would think about calling in to report it.
I think you'd be horribly, horribly disappointed. And do you want to be the one who goes first, and risks having CPS remove your kids because some childless cat lady keeps reporting you for "neglect"?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2d ago
And - two - the more you actually shun people, the smaller you make your circle of friends and the larger you make your circle of enemies. Cutting off family members or banning social media posters doesn't actually stop them from voting; out of sight is not out of existence.
Indeed, which is why I expect that some of these people, when they realize it doesn't stop people who disagree with them from voting, to start looking for mechanisms that will.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
3d ago
The problem with the values side is the values aren't really verifiable.
This, but there's also another problem: changes in values can go either way. If anyone can become American by adopting "American values"… what if they change their mind about said values? What about natural-born citizens who stop believing in those American values? Do they lose their citizenship?
Of course not, for several reasons, one of which is the difficulty of verification you note. But notice that this creates a ratchet — there are multiple ways to become an American, but far narrower paths to cease being one. (AIUI, renouncing American citizenship is actually very difficult.)
(One might draw a comparison here to how an atheist (ethnic) Jew and a gentile convert to Judaism are still both Jewish.)
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
3d ago
I think the best thing I've read so far on DOGE is this lengthy tweet from Devon Eriksen, on what DOGE will need to be effective (and thus why it probably won't be). Some highlights that stood out to me:
Currently, the fourth branch is in many ways the most powerful, and certainly the most destructive, arm of the government.
- It has the privilege of targeting individual citizens on its own initiative, which is forbidden to the three other branches.
- It can interfere their lives in any way it wishes by making a "ruling".
- The only recourse against a "ruling" is to take the bureaucracy in question to court.
- But the process is the punishment, because this takes months if not years and costs tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.
- Until recently, courts have deferred to bureaucrats as a matter of legal precedent. Now they merely do so as a matter of practice.
- But should the bureaucracy lose anyway, the only punishment the court inflicts is that they are told they have to stop doing that specific thing.
- Any fines or legal costs imposed on them punish the taxpayer, not the agent or even the agency.
- And the next, closely related, thing the bureaucracy thinks of to do is once again fair game, until the courts are once again brought in, at further cost, to tell it to stop.
…
But words mean things.
When you create a check on the bureaucracy and call it the department of government efficiency, you focus the attention, and the correction, on the fact that the bureaucracy is stomping on people's lives and businesses inefficiently, not on the fact that they are doing so at all.
…
2. DOGE must have direct oversight.
If it must take agencies to court, it is merely a proxy for the citizens whose money is being wasted, and whose rights are being trampled.
Imagine the level of inefficiency, waste, and delay, if your process for addressing bureaucratic abuse simply results in one part of the federal government pursuing an expensive court case against another.
Instead, DOGE must have the power to simply make a ruling, via its own investigation hearing process, which is binding on federal agencies.
Any appeals to the court system must be allowed to trigger their own DOGE investigation (for wasting taxpayer fighting a ruling).
3. DOGE must have the power to punish the agent, not just the agency.
"You have to stop that now" is not a deterrent. Neither is fining the agency, because such fines are paid by the American taxpayer.
…
Agencies do not act, they do not make decisions, they do not have incentives they respond to. Any appearance to the contrary is an emergent property created by the aggregate action of agents.
Every decision, whether we admit it or not, has a name attached to it, not a department. It is that person who responds to incentives.
Agents will favor their own incentives over those of their principal (the American people) unless a counter incentive is present for that specific person.
For this reason, DOGE should, must, have the power to discipline individual employees of the federal agencies it oversees.
This doesn't just mean insignificant letters of reprimand in a file. It means fines against personal assets, firing, or even filing criminal charges. No qualified immunity.
Yes, you read that right. DOGE must be able to fire other agencies' staff. I recommend that anyone fired by DOGE be permanently illegible for any federal government job, excluding only elected positions.
…
6. Bureaucrats must be held responsible for outcomes, not just for following procedure.
Often, procedure is the problem. The precedent must be established, and clearly enforced, that because agents have agency, agents are responsible for using their discretion to ensure efficient, just, and sane outcomes, not just for doing whatever departmental policy allows.
7. DOGE must have an adversarial relationship with the bureaucracies is oversees.
This eliminates the phenomenon of "we investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing".
Following the previous recommendation is almost sure to make this happen.
I would point out that much of this — treating bureaucrats as "agents with agency" and responsibility, rather than procedure-following human automatons with "bureaucratic diffusion of responsibility — runs counter to the basic Weberian character of bureaucracy (as well as the "machine mindset" and allergy to human authority characteristic of modernity). Eriksen does provide a number of likely failure modes, though.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
5d ago
Even if one journalist, multiple journalists or even a majority of them, are hardworking and try hard to report the truth, my observation is that as a group they are unwilling to push back against the large contingent of liars and frauds in their profession. And I don't mean "the evil and bad right wing journalists that write misinformation", I mean their own in-group.
I'd agree with this, but I'd also extend slightly more charity, in noting that part of journalism is taking a large amount of information and reducing it down to the most important parts, trimming out more irrelevant bits. And human beings being what we are, it's not unexpected to have some bias creep in — even if unconsciously, and even if one is trying to be even-handed — toward omitting "unflattering" elements for your side. Now, consider what happens when this is repeated as a story passes through multiple layers (see also the usual complaints about science journalism and what the nuanced conclusions of journal papers end up reduced to at the end of the journalistic "game of telephone"). You get something like the top portion of this infographic from our own @mitigatedchaos.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
5d ago
Isn't it ironic how Democrats are constantly singing the praises of the European (specifically Scandinavian) ways of doing things?
In my experience, that's often because they don't actually know that much about Europe, they just have a vague impression of it being more "enlightened" and left-wing than us. I've actually had fun bursting their bubbles on occasion by introducing them to things like European abortion laws, or how many still have established churches (or only just separated their "national church" from the government in the past couple of decades), or corporate tax rates, or how their unions differ from ours, or any number of cases where Europe differs from their idealized picture.
(The fallback position as to Europe's superiority over America usually ends up being socialized medicine, and fewer cars and guns — and don't bring up San Marino or Switzerland.)
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
5d ago
But that is so far outside the realm of probability that it isn't worth discussing.
See, I don't think it is. Particularly since I think people overestimate the ability of elected officials to control the permanent bureaucracy, and that many of the powers for doing so set in the Constitution — and civics textbooks — don't actually exist anymore, and that enforcement mechanisms against the various agencies are weak — particularly against the agencies used to do the enforcing. If the FBI stops following presidential orders, to whom does the president turn to compel their obedience? If Congress orders something "defunded," but the Treasury Department keeps issuing them funds anyway, what can they do about it?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
5d ago
I've been reading Beware of Chicken and Reach Heaven Via Feng Shui Engineering, Drug Trade, and Tax Evasion.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
5d ago
And since we live in a democratic society
That's fixable.
But that rhetoric is exactly why they lost this election, and why they will continue to lose elections (not every election to be sure, but enough) until they realize that politics is not a game of who is the most self righteous and preachy.
Or until they stop holding elections. If letting the American people vote means Orange Hitler, then you obviously can't let them vote anymore.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
5d ago
You can't just preach at people and demand they convert.
Why not? Consider parts of the spread of Christianity into "Pagan" Medieval Europe, or much of the early expansion of Islam. All you need is a sufficiently persuasive "or else"
But when it comes to elections, you can't berate people into voting for you.
But you can make electoral outcomes less relevant. If the people are going to vote wrong, then their votes don't get to matter anymore.
And unless they learn that lesson, they're going to have more Trump-style "how could America vote for these awful people" losses.
Or they can take a page from Bogleech about how …there aren’t people worth “winning over,” there’s just a country overwhelmingly clogged with trash to eliminate… They chose to be fash like the supporters of every other fash machine in history. Name a single time that problem was solved by kindly talking them out of it please. At minimum they have to be driven to leave."
Or from one "pizzmoe" on Twitter:
I am not going to blame the candidates. You can't get much better than Hillary or Kamala. They were not the problem, Dems are not the problem, the voters are the problem.
Or jbrillig on Threads:
You can not appeal to fascist voters, period. If they can't vote for a woman THAT IS THEIR BIGOTRY. YOU DO NOT APPEAL TO IT. THINKING THAT WAY WE WOULD NEVER HAVE NOMINATED OBAMA.
Or, for someone more notable, The View's Sunny Hostin:
I’d like to reframe the conversation…I think the more relevant question actually is: What is wrong with America?!
What is wrong with this country that they would choose a message of divisiveness of xenophobia, of racism, of misogyny over a message of inclusiveness, a message for the people, by the people, of the people?! That’s what the problem is!
If "the majority has spoken and they said they don’t care that much about democracy," as Stephen Colbert has claimed, then democracy has to be defended from the majority.
If the voters are going to make "the wholesale decision to go full in with electing as their leader a convicted felon, a rapist, a child molester and a treasonous insurrectionist," then it's incumbent on the "kind hearted, generous and moral people who love democracy and their liberty" to stop them from using Our Democracy against itself. If the Constitution is not a suicide pact, then neither are election outcomes.
Why compromise your possession of truth, facts, and high morals, on the Right Side of History, by playing Chamberlain and trying to appease a bunch of fascists? Why should the party change, when it is not them, but the voters who are wrong? Is not the better course to make the electorate change for the better, whatever it takes?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
5d ago
There seems to be a rapid shutdown mode where the body calls it quits and nothing can reverse this.
I remember reading a Scientific American article back in the 90s, on why aging is a very hard problem to "solve", which pointed out, using a tale about Henry Ford and the Model T as analogy, that this is what we should expect, based on Darwinian evolution. I recall another author on the subject using prostate issues as another example case.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6d ago
Well, just on current Tumblr-ites that also frequent this forum, there's at least me and@mitigatedchaos.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6d ago
The native woman also doesn’t shock me; people tend to take personal tragedies as so obviously unjust that they’re evidence of malice from whoever imposed them.
In that example, the thing that was so stupid not even white people could believe it? Well, she said things like "they'd been kissing," "she went into his bedroom," and that "everyone knows what happens after that" and that no human being on Earth could possibly believe a woman gets to "back out" once she's gone that far with a man, so charging him with sexual assault is just the White Man dunking on another innocent Native with a patently bogus "crime."
and everyone else is too.
That doesn't actually fit my experience. The times I've talked IRL to left-wingers of my acquaintance, they've been rather ignorant of the racial breakdown of abortion in America, and rather surprised when I've introduced them to the stats.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6d ago
If people truly believe Trump is an existential threat to democracy and is literally Hitler reborn and going to put them all into camps, then they should stop squawking on their social media and friend groups and buy weapons to assassinate him.
I've already seen a counterargument to this, which is that assassinating Trump — and Vance; you'd need to get him too — would buy a little time, it doesn't deal with the 70+ million unreasoning, murderous, hateful fascist Americans who voted for him. (One noted that Hitler only got about a third of voters, max, but this time it was a majority.) It took the Allies, and especially America, to defeat the pro-Nazi Germans last time, but now that it's America that has chosen Fascism — "wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross" as predicted — who is going to save us now?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6d ago
Mandatory nationwide e-verify and fines for employers (which will probably be blocked by liberal GOP senators + the filibuster anyway) aren’t going to lead to millions of illegal Central Americans self-deporting. By the way, many European countries already have their equivalents of this and still huge huge numbers of illegal migrants. American hospitals will still (under their own duties of care) treat these people for free when they walk in with an ailment, charities will still feed them, plenty of people will still hire them cash-in-hand or in less than scrupulous businesses.
What about the Tony Abbot method, as described by the Dreaded Jim here:
Everyone has interactions where you have to present your ID: Cops, welfare, hospitals, and so on and so forth. And they then run your ID through their computers. Which in Australia, if you are an illegal immigrant or have an expired visa, then automatically notifies the border control computers. Whereupon border control computer asks the cops to hold you around till the border patrol shows up, or border patrol shows up at the hospital or wherever.
Then, without bothering with lawyers and judges, the illegal is detained until he can arrange a plane out.
…
Tony Abbot did not introduce any new ID checks. He just leveraged existing ID checks. Every state and quasi state institution already routinely checks IDs. He just plugged in RPC calls between their computers, border control computers, and border patrol computers.
Illegal immigrants always show up in the hospital emergency room looking for free room, board, and medical care. The hospital always wants to see ID to figure out who they can bill. And what do you know? Turns out they can bill the Border Patrol. They apply for a driver’s license, they get caught. They drive without a license, and at a traffic stop, if no license, the cop wants their id.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6d ago
I do not know why there’s a progressive idea that pro-life laws exist to boost the white fertility rate by controlling women(no reasonable person thinks that they do this- pro-life advocates are well aware of the color of the women getting abortions). But it seems like they literally actually believe this?
I think some of this is a failure of theory of mind. I mean, I've seen plenty of examples, across both political and cultural divides, of people going "those people can't possibly believe what they say is their reason for doing this thing, so I need to figure out what their actual reason is." Nobody could actually believe a fetus is a human life, so therefore the pro-lifers must have some other, real reason for wanting to ban abortion, therefore…
Or an exchange about Hispanic votes in the election, which went something like:
L: how could so many Latinx voters vote for someone who wants to deport them
R: You know Hispanic voters are citizens, right? And it's illegal immigrants the Republicans want to deport?
L: Everyone knows that when the Republicans talk about "illegals," they don't actually mean undocumented migrants, they mean Latinx.
R: Really?
L: Yeah, nobody actually cares about immigrants' legal status, so when Republicans use the term "illegal immigrant," it's just a racist dogwhistle.
Or the Native woman I stood in line behind at the welfare office about a decade ago and the half of her cellphone conversation I overheard, about her brother's legal trouble and about how, even if white people believe plenty of stuff, not even they could actually believe the theory upon which her brother was being charged, and that clearly they're just pretending so as to add further humiliation when locking up innocent Native men.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6d ago
And of course there’s the trust issue with big swaths of the electorate.
I can't find it again in a cursory search of my browser history, but I know I saw a piece in a "legacy media" outlet asking how they deal with our situation wherein so much of the American public have turned against facts and truth and willfully chosen to be ignorant. To support this description of our current landscape, the author cited the well-surveyed decline of trust in the establishment media and increasing turn to alternate outlets; then immediately wondered how you fix people who have stopped trusting in Truth and have willfully turned to listening to liars instead.
It was pure Principal Skinner "Am I so out of touch? No. It's the children who are wrong" attitude. There's quite a lot of that these days. There's nothing wrong with the legacy media and its trustworthiness, it's the people who've stopped listening that need to change. There's nothing wrong with Democrat policies (except maybe compromising too much with the right), it's just that so many voters are driven by racial grievances and hate, and are beyond reasoning with. The Party and the Media did not fail the people, the people have failed the Party and Media. "[T]here aren’t people worth “winning over,” there’s just a country overwhelmingly clogged with trash to eliminate."
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6d ago
They
Who is "they" here? Are you claiming the attempted assassins were not random nutjobs, but agents of the Deep State?
I mean, maybe one can say that parts of the Secret Service seemed remarkably unconcerned should something happen to him under their "protection," but 'if someone should take him out for us, that would be good' ≠ 'we need to take this guy out'.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6d ago
Online, it's hard to tell to what degree all the cataclysmic tweets and videos from leftists melting down hysterically and screaming that we're going to enter an era of plantation slavery and the Handmaid's Tale are nutpicking (the reason LibsOfTikTok is so popular is that Millenials and Zoomers so freely provide so much content) and to what degree they reflect a genuine widespread sentiment.
I know that Tumblr is very far from a representative sample, but the histrionic posts coming across my dash thanks to the #politics tag have been plentiful enough to exceed mere "nutpicking."
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6d ago
It baffles me that no previous Republican government has done this. It's such an obvious low-hanging fruit.
And it always baffles me how people don't conclude that maybe Republicans haven't done this because they can't.
It doesn't matter how "competent" they are, the Justice Department will simply ignore them, along with Gaetz, and keep on as they are now. None of Trump's appointments will have any actual power over the agencies, whose personnel will prove impossible to fire. The only way the "Deep State" is getting removed is in body bags:
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