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Sounds like Trump is taking the best approach, then.
I don’t know how to put this politely, but I’m convinced that if Trump took a shit on the sidewalk, you would jump online to tell me it was the obvious way to revitalize struggling American neighborhoods.
Is there anything he’s done that you don’t actually like?
No, but I would ignore it, so you're directionally correct. I'm not interested in making problems for Trump, there are plenty of people perfectly willing to do that on their own.
It's especially funny that Biden was practically in diapers himself due to his physical and cognitive decline, and in fact it was the mainstream media telling me for years on end that he wasn't, and that he was doing fine.
Amy Barrett. Gorsuch was shockingly great, despite his ruling in Bostock, so I suppose I can't expect that level three times in a row. Kavanaugh seems like a squish, but he's not as bad as Barrett.
As for this term? Nothing yet. A+, keep up the great work.
In general, I dance with the girl that I came with, and fight with the sword in my hand. This is what I've wanted to have happen for years. I wanted an outsider in the white house. I wanted the deep state to be destroyed. I wanted an Andrew Jackson, slay-the-banks type figure. I'm not going to nitpick the details now. Slash the budget, burn the institutions, repeal the income tax, throw up huge tariffs.
You know, drain the swamp.
I didn't vote for Trump in 16 or 20 because I didn't trust him and he didn't deliver much, but after seeing the Biden administration I regret that. I learned my lesson, and so this first week has been exhilarating. Never in my wildest dreams did I expect Trump to hit the ground running like this.
By what metrics are Kavanaugh and Barrett bad?
How much I like their rulings, of course, and their willingness to stand on principle, bite bullets, and fix wrongs that are long-overdue rather than maintain status quo.
Basically, I think they're too much like Roberts, who I hold in contempt. Kavanaugh, especially, looks like he's in the mold of Roberts. Barrett simply looks like O'Connor, and in ten years she'll be siding with the D appointees more often than not.
Gorsuch gets my respect because he says, "but for sex," and, "the treaty says all of Oklahoma belongs to the Indians." He doesn't narrowly rule to avoid disruption, he rules on principle and the actual laws as they are written. His willingness to bite bullets is a sign of principle and courage, characteristics I do not perceive in Kavanaugh or Barrett.
Can you give some examples of "bad" opinions by Kavanaugh and Barrett and elaborate on how Barrett and O'Connor are worse than Kavanaugh and Roberts? Gorsuch seems to be generally respected by his ideological allies and loyal opposition, alike, for the reasons you cite and more, but opinions of Roberts and O'Connor are more complicated (I can't remember anyone saying O'Connor was outright bad...), and Kavanaugh and Barrett are relatively new and lacking in major decisions.
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I mean, I don't know? There's still a lot of really good stuff happening. It's just a fundamentally hard problem to separate the good from the bad. The past approach has been, "Since we can't tell, we'll just fund pretty broadly and hope that there are at least enough good people around that some quantity of it gets oriented well; yes, we know that this will have some waste."
Obviously, the completely opposite response is, "Since we can't tell, let's just not fund any of it." I have a feeling that such a strategy probably doesn't perform better.
Any other strategy mostly comes down to people trying to figure out, "So, uh, how can we tell the difference between the good and the bad?" We then get different funding models, folks studying "progress" or "metascience", and then mostly question marks?
Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.
It needs to perform substantially worse for the first system to be justified.
When you simply don't spend the money, you don't have to take the money from citizens in the first place. Simply doing nothing is far, far better than taking money from productive people to redistribute to sinecures for grifters, apparatchiks, and some, I presume, good people.
We haven't even gotten into the fact that what you think is good and bad isn't the same as what I think is good and bad. Another reason why doing nothing is superior to doing anything.
Well, for one example, the biggest funder of such research is the DoD, coming in around 40%. The potential downside of killing them all and letting god determine which are his is that your country's enemies may surpass you in strength and decide to kill all of you and let god determine which are his. This is a threat that may, indeed, be the house of many grifts, but it is entirely possible that those are the stakes. If one cuts everything and then wants to see how the performance of the new system differs from that of the old, how would one measure? You don't get to access the counterfactual.
This is the case for basically all DoD spending in general. You have very few observables to determine the "real" "quality" of the expenditures. They only get meaningfully tested and measured very rarely (hopefully). DoD grift in general is legendary (as it is in every military in the world). Knowing which large acquisition or force structure is going to be useful in future fights is probably just as impossible a task as knowing which research efforts will contribute to future acquisitions/force structures. There will be a plethora of "experts" who have their own opinions. Some top military folks in the early 1900s will think that airplanes are just toys, while others will tell you that they can change the nature of warfare; how do you know who to believe and where to put your money? Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius? Just stop taking that money from citizens and redistributing it to sinecures for grifters, apparatchiks, and some, I presume, good people?
Isn't carving out DOD science totally doable and doesn't leave us funding people studying third genders in treefrogs?
Like yes, the government will always be funding some number of stupid people doing stupid things, because they are trained in the proper mouth noises to pretend that some stupid and worthless fish is worth anything. But it seems like we can cut down on absolutely useless science substantially without impacting military projects.
If one wants to, absolutely. But yeah, my main point is that separating the wheat from the chaff in all of these areas is a near-impossible problem. It is plausible to say, "Some areas are important enough that we'll tolerate more graft," but of course, determining which areas are which is a political problem. You may want to preserve DoD research funding, but I don't know if KMC does. He's almost certainly right that there is graft there, too, so you probably have to convince him (or enough folks that have the ear of the President or whatever) to tolerate that graft, because you're probably not going to be able to really distinguish between the good and the bad at a low level.
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