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Happy Christmas to all of ye as well!
I should be surprised and shocked and appalled at this, but I'm not. I think most people have the same reaction; after the War on Terror and setting up Homeland Security and the NSA and all the rest of it, and then the Covid pandemic where every local government official could be a little tin god about where people could go or who they could see (while Our Betters flaunted and flouted the laws publicly), the public in general is jaded and has a cynical expectation that yeah, naturally the three letter agencies and the government will be involved in this kind of thing. Controlling the news and what the populace gets to see and gets to say.
Depending on your political inclinations - and this isn't a right/left thing or a Republican/Democrat thing because there are people on all sides like this - if you think that your outgroup or your enemies or the Bad People shouldn't be allowed to spread their hate speech, you will think this is a good thing. If you want to get that account which keeps claiming stuff you know in your bones is wrong (it needn't be factually wrong, but they shouldn't say it because it's bad) then if you can get them banned by anon tip-off snitching that they're pro-Russian (or whatever boogeyman), isn't it all in the service of the greater good?
Look at J.K. Rowling and all that is said about her being a TERF and actively helping to kill trans people. If the trans activists could swing it to get her banned for life from pretty much everything, they absolutely would.
Some people, and again it's not right/left, will think this is censorship and government over-reach and that freedom of speech means you can't do this kind of shit. But most people are so burned-out by it all, they'll shrug and go "yeah, well, what else did you expect?" (I'm in that camp myself).
I’m in the burned out camp as well. There’s just such a lack of seemingly good, un corrupted politicians. Also dismantling the 4th branch isn’t even brought up - Trump said he would drain the swamp but that wasn’t clearly targeted at administrative overreach of alphabet agencies.
Remember how he was nearly impeached for firing the director of the FBI? If he'd really started cleaning house, he'd have ended up with a Betti count somewhere between JFK and Caesar.
I’m too drunk to read that.
A teacup only has one hole all the way through it; so does a donut. Topologists categorize them the same: with a Betti count of one, named for Enrico Betti. A pretzel has three.
JFK had the back of his skull opened by a bullet traveling through his neck from the front. That’s one or two more holes, depending on how his esophagus interacted with them.
Caesar had his circulatory system, a series of tubes, opened to the outside air by several knifes.
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Nah, don't think so. They'd just sabotage all his efforts (as they effectively did). So, he fired the FBI director. The new one came from the same swamp. If he dared to appoint a non-swamp FBI director, all his subordinates would refuse to take orders from him, on the premise he is not qualified, and all the press, half of the courts and significant number of Republicans in Congress would support them. And they would use their mastery of the system to organize some embarrassing failure for him (or just frame him - like they did with Flynn) and leave Trump no choice but to choose a swamp-approved one.
Draining the swamp is not just coming out on the White House balcony and declaring "Swamp is being drained now!". It requires a complex long-term effort, by a team of very smart and very dedicated individuals - which team Trump did not have and had no idea how to compose. His individual efforts predictably were swallowed by the swamp with nothing substantial changing and him getting bored and moving onto the next thing. This system have been built for decades and is feeding thousands, if not millions. Dismantling it would require level of effort and competency to which Trump failed to raise - and thus there's no reason to increase his Betti count. His failure is assured anyway.
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Desantis is hard core not corrupt politician. He has a net worth of like 250k. Which is like 2 months salary of someone his age/education level.
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