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I think it's even worse than that. It'd be one thing is this was just social media getting to a mechanic that thinks a 'clever' Dem-politician pencil-holder is funny, or a moron with a podcast that can't read.
This is the official GovTrack mastodon account, a site that people here use, myself included. Axios just revised a three-year-old story today to remove 'border czar' from Harris' list of accomplishments. Elon Musk put tens of billions of dollars into twitter to shitpost, and does it badly. I've worked on open-source code with someone who was really proud of having physically attacked Brandon Eich, and that's far from the worst I've seen there; my boss and a coworker have a conspiracy theory about the FBI and the Trump assassination that would be fascinating if they weren't doing it in a business meeting; a forum that once was a mainstay for me blocked discussion of the Trump assassination attempt as a thread the day of (literally as the second post) and never discovered one made the day after. KelseyTUoC spent the better part of a decade as part of the EA community, earned Scott Alexander's respect, and then got to work at Vox... except it was a problem before then, too.
These aren't astroturf, or rando nutjobs who have nothing to their name but politics, or AI, or rats following the Pied Piper, or nineteen-year-olds fresh-faced to the internet, or whatever. This is what they are under the mask.
Beneath that, Trace and Its_Not_Real have been having a twitter debate over The Machine and its output, and I think it's bad enough that Trace's defense is literally pointing to "Hanania/Karlin", but the more critical problem is that even were it true (which I'm far from sold on), The Machine has lost any capability to credibly present the truth, and very few people care.
I wrote, three and a half years ago, about how I didn't see a path back to trust in academia. But why would they care? In many ways, things have gotten worse for the academics, but academi_a_ has been doing fine. Even individual schools and journals with massive scandals have quite happily shaken them off and gone right back to it. Sometimes bad actors manage to get fired, but sometimes they get a TV show. In some cases, and I'll point to Wansink again, the policy proposals and even individual papers don't suffer much even after everyone discovers they were always made up from whole cloth.
Why would anyone expect that to stay to one poorly-demarcated field?
I'm truly surprised about Dan Ariely getting a TV show.
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I've been tapping the sign so vigorously lately that its starting to hurt my finger.
Literally I just want accountability from those who are nominally in charge of various important functions.
I think this was Trump's best moment at the debate, criticizing Biden for having fired not one person during his term.
Wild that a short while after the head of the Secret Service would be fired. Not for being the head of the organization that screwed the pooch and let Trump be shot, but for being a bad politician in the aftermath.
I have to assume its a LITTLE BIT because she let Trump get shot.
Politicians, ironically, ACTUALLY have some skin in the game when it comes to their protection details. They don't want potential bad actors to think they have a chance at successfully offing a politician because the USSS is incompetent. They definitely don't want such actors to be successful at offing politicians, they'd actually possibly suffer consequences in that case.
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Accountability is coup-complete. The entire system as it exists is designed to launder and diffuse responsibility. You'd have to change how things work in a fundamental sense that requires a circulation of elites. The current ones can't be accountable because they rule through unaccountability.
I think what tends to happen is that lack of accountability makes it almost impossible for the system to correct course even as the need for such course-correction becomes absolutely obvious. There's no mechanism for filtering out incompetents, there's no feedback for the leaders to judge which decisions are actually improving matters, so we get the iron star catastrophe.
Covid kinda showed many of the seams. It really seems like the elites are running very low on effective tactics for reigning in discontent. I don't see how they'll effectively resolve the Israel-Palestine divide without alienating some large portion of the population. It seems unlikely that they'll achieve true 'victory' in Ukraine. They can't even solve the problem of drug overdose deaths in the heart of the capital, let alone the outer reaches of the empire.
You can only run away from consequences for so long. I'd wager most of them are gambling that they'll be dead before the chickens actually come home to roost.
Why wouldn't "brute force" be effective tactic enough?
By the time you're resorting to pure brute force you've probably lost so much legitimacy that you're asking for revolution or coup.
Of course this doesn't mean it'll actually happen.
From where? I know I keep harping on the German Peasants' War, but I think it's a good analogy for the relative positions of ordinary citizens and professional militaries. Modern governments like that of the USA are effectively "rebellion-proof." It wouldn't matter if tens of millions of gun-owning Americans decided to rise up in revolution, because it would only take ten thousand or so regime-loyal troops to crush them utterly.
As for coups, the upper ranks have all been too politically captured to want to carry out a coup, and the lower ranks don't have the capacity to organize one.
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Plurality failing the Independence of clones criterion so badly might suggest the easiest step forward. Switch to approval voting, where sparking a competition between "President Mediocre" vs "President AlsoMediocreButWillFireTheIdiots" no longer risks splitting the vote and getting "President Bad" elected instead (all candidate evaluations in the mind of a partisan voter, not necessarily objective), and we might then see a lot more voter control over the worst bureaucrats.
Though ... I can't actually say that that's not "coup-complete" still. It's hard for me to picture the existing parties agreeing to a voting system that will take away their insiders' power, and it's easy for me to picture a world where voters have been granted a way to remove idiot bureaucrats but never exercise that control because the marginal voters are also idiots.
Much as my Liberal heart loves electoral design, changes to the election system not only basically impossible, they are also not enough. Trump is about as much of an outsider as you're ever going to get and even if we replaced him with a smooth operator who actually wants to clear-them-out he couldn't do a damn thing because generals would tell him to fuck off, Hawaiian judges would stall his every move and the actual power structure would continue to tick the boxes it wants to tick while throwing just enough Russia related nonsense at him to keep him occupied. I say this completely independently of a partisan agenda, a President Sanders would have had the exact same issues.
The only way out of this is for power to diffuse away from administrations and into new hands. The only new set of hands available being private businessmen (as opposed to public corporations) and left wing postmodern revolutionaries.
The former seem to actually be telegraphing an attack at the moment (we shall see if it manifests into anything if Trump wins), and the latter have apparently made their move over Palestine and been soundly beat (though not into submission yet) by Israeli interests.
The tools are available for those who want to fight the battle though, especially with Chevron gone. But I've seen nothing ever happen for too long to expect an actual realignment in my lifetime without collapse.
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