> The U.S. is happy to screw themselves in the process of screwing you.
Don't forget that Trump also hates environmentalism in any form. Air quality metrics would acknowledge that pollution exists, which contradicts his opinions.
> It doesn't happen because the elected government doesn't want to.
You're skipping over the point of why they don't want to seize the billionaire his assets: because a billionaire is a valuable ally to a politician seeking to stay in power. In fact, a billionaire is more valuable to a politician than his actual constituents. And that's how we get oligarchs.
That's not the most severe things that can happen for ignoring politics. Some people are unfortunate enough to ignore it to the point they sit in a frozen trench while IR-enabled drone is looking for them
I know, what is it about shrill people insisting on looking up lately? Dial down on the fear factor, baby! It's like they say on Russian TV: what do you decide, anyway? The higher-ups aren't fools, they know what they're doing.
I understand not wanting to live in fear but if SHTF what are you gonna do? You’ll be less informed than the “scared” ones and you’ll be screwed. I wouldn’t say I live in fear. I still enjoy day to day life but I also stay informed and ready to scram if need be..
Drone warfare as we see in Ukraine is new default. Any poor schmuck ragtag group can muster hundreds of them, with basic grenades or 30/40mm AP grenades. Enough power to kill anything on wheels or tracks apart from modern main battle tank, that one would be just more or less crippled. Bigger drones can and do kill everything, some drop literal 152/155mm shells.
You may say - but we have good EW! Which is pointless for optic cable drones, can't affect them like that. Those are a bit more expensive and sophisticated but not that much.
If US decided to do their invasion to Iraq or Afghanistan these days things would be very different re US casualties and expensive material loss.
I know they are portrayed as a cabal of woke leftists, but a third of them are veterans and they probably broadly reflect American professional demographics.
You could argue that many of the people voting Trump are also simultaneously ignoring a big chunk of politics and reality more generally I suppose, but it's not the standard meaning of ignoring politics.
It is an option, just not the preference for most people. The guy had an alright life, married a woman from a nearby island in a different country, had a daughter and still tend to his garden. In a way, that’s how humans have lived for most of their existence except the last 100 years or so.
> In a way, that’s how humans have lived for most of their existence except the last 100 years or so.
Sure. They would also die whenever there was a famine, some disease ran rampant, Mongols or crusaders pillaged everything, some recent council decreed they were all heretics, etc.
>Or you can pay attention to it, in which case it will ignore you.
That doesn't make any sense. The small minority of people who are involved in politics affect politicians completely disproportionately to their number, and this is completely unrelated to whether they actually know what they're talking about or have reasonable concerns.
That's right! And on average, the impact of mass protests in recent years, towards the causes they support, is somewhere between "zero" and "massively negative". Care all you want and politics will just ignore you or get angry at you for caring.
See e.g. throwing oil on famous paintings, or everything re Palestine in the past couple of years.
Protesting effectively is a skill which the present generation lacks. They don't even realize it's a skill issue. "Surely if we just care harder somebody will do something..!", they think, over and over. Doesn't make it so.
France Yellow jackets, China anti-lockdown protests are well known failure with 0 impact.
I will also tell the friends I made/lived with in NDDL that our action had no impact and that the airport is being built (given that a couple of them bought a house where the airport was supposed to be, they might not all believe me).
they won't even say something, let alone do something. The only thing that could hurt Musk is the collapse of Tesla stock. Best thing you can do is not buy a Tesla and suggest to others not to buy on either. As the DOGE team like to say. starve the beast, where Leon is the beast.
There’s at least one, although as a governor he may not count.
> From the Department of Education, Medicaid, the CDC, and more - Trump and Elon Musk are gutting the agencies and programs that protect Americans every single day.
Everyone is responsible for their own behaviour but if the legislature doesn't function nothing else will either. And we know the legislature has progressively become less functional, less bipartisan, less legislation passed every decade.
18F was a business unit of the General Services Administration, which was created via 41 U.S.C. 251, the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act of 1949. The act transferred the function of the Federal Works Agency and the Treasury Bureau of Federal Supply to the GSA. The agency is directed and authorized to perform a variety of tasks, from real estate, to acquisition, to information technology and telecommunications.
31 USC 1535, The Economy Act, authorizes Federal agencies to purchase from each other in the interests of economy. Obvious application is that rather than have the Social Security Administration lease an office or build a building, they sublease or lease a facility owned by the GSA so Federal demand can be aggregated. 1 big lease is cheaper than 12 little ones.
In the case of 18F, having a consultive entity within the GSA maximizes the value of procurements made by GSA and other agencies. When congress appropriates money to say, the Department of Labor to perform a function, DOL may choose to engage 18F to deliver or assist, avoiding additional procurement and taking advantage of investments and capability already built.
Congress in 1949 recognized that basic concepts like shared services, aggregation and mission focus deliver value and promote efficient operations. The current regime's corrupt interest is obvious to anyone with a brain.
18F is not the only department that is being shut down.
The current iteration of USAID was created by an act of Congress. Unless the President's office has been given the power to create and pass legislature at some point in the past five weeks, only Congress can unmake it.
> My opinion is that "personal liberties and free markets" effectively steers the Post away from engaging with issues of immediate concern.
Why? I'd say those issues are of immediate concern to many, especially insofar as they are used as euphemisms to describe the goals of the American political right.
Exactly. It allows him to speak in tongues while the right wing carries on with its agenda.
Oops, I edited my post while you were responding. I'll let your quote represent what I originally wrote, which I think was in the same spirit. Sorry about that.
> Where does that definition come from, and where did Bezos embrace the definition and reject civil liberties?
Good question. This use of the term has become a popular dog whistle [0] in right-wing circles. It would take a bit of research to see how it was coined in its current form. They know that when you say "personal liberty," you really mean "my liberty is more important than your civil rights."
All you did was link to the wikipedia article on dog whistling. Do you have a source that actually substantiates your claim about the phrase "personal liberties"?
> Over the past few weeks, it's felt like this term has become a euphemism for "ban or severely curtail moderation (and the associated liability implications)".
"Personal liberty" is a euphemism for discrimination against "out groups," based on their ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, or political orientation. The Masterpiece Cake Shop debacle[0] was framed on the right as an issue of religious liberty.
"Free markets," the other "pillar" in the Bezos letter, is obviously a euphemism for opposing government regulation or oversight. In this case, I imagine it means in particular opposition to labor unions.
I'm not here to argue about the correctness or value of the cake case. I'm just using the case as an example of rhetoric, specifically the rhetoric of "personal liberty" to mean "freedom to discriminate." The cake case became a wedge issue, but we're already seeing similar rhetoric used to dismantle the separation of church and state and enshrine government-sanctioned oppression of protected classes. That is: "if the cake shop doesn't have to serve gay people, then why should my (publicly-funded) school?" [0]
It wasn't the freedom to discriminate. I think that's the point. You can't compel custom work, any more than a Neo Nazi can compel a Jewish baker to bake a custom swastika cake.
> You can't compel custom work, any more than a Neo Nazi can compel a Jewish baker to bake a custom swastika cake.
That is your opinion,but that was not the opinion of the Supreme Court. They found that the Colorado statute in question was based on religious hostility and therefore discriminatory against the cake shop. (That is, the "personal liberty" of the cake shop was more important than the civil rights of the customer.) Agree or disagree, I encourage you to read the full opinion.
Moreover, there is no law against "compelled custom work." Had the cake shop discriminated based on the customer's race, rather then their sexual orientation, the refusal would have been illegal.
That is not what the supreme court found at all. In the opinion of the supreme court, they found that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission acted in religious hostility in their evaluation of Masterpiece, and that the commission lacked consistency among similar cases. Kennedy's opinion noted that he may have been inclined to rule in favor of the Commission if it had remained religiously neutral in previous evaluations.
They did not evaluate if the ""personal liberty" of the cake shop was more important than the civil rights of the customer". The Court explicitly avoided ruling broadly on the intersection of anti-discrimination laws and rights to free exercise.
But I don't see how the logic is wrong in my equivalent example. You can't ban people from your shop based on protected characteristics - everyone should be able to buy the same things from you, but that doesn't mean you can enforce that people do custom work for you. Maybe that statement works really well here, but breaks down in other examples, but that was my interpretation of the validity of the case.
> They did not evaluate if the ""personal liberty" of the cake shop was more important than the civil rights of the customer".
But we're here to discuss the rhetoric in the right around "personal liberty." The cake case is an example of using that rhetoric to justify discrimination, which is exactly what happened. That is the effect of the SCOTUS decision, regardless of whether they used those words verbatim.
The rhetoric around "personal liberty" was not used in the cake case, and was not used to justify discrimination. If the commission had been more neutral then the case, using the same arguments, could had gone the exact opposite. The cake case was ruled based on the performance of the commission in their work as a government entity. The outcome was that Masterpiece won, but the victory was not based on the merit of Masterpiece.
It is similar to when a criminal case get thrown out because investigators messed up and mishandled evidence. It says nothing about the merit of the case.
You are literally saying that it is wrong to criticize and organize a boycott of a business for the moral choices it makes.
It's not wrong, it's literally the free market FFS. People are mad at the cake shop for denying business to gay people, and they do not care whether it's legal or not. If it is suddenly legal to employ literal children, I will boycott places that do it, regardless of the law, because the law is not the be all, end all of morality
"But but but it's legal" has never been an acceptable excuse for doing something morally wrong. If christians are upset that lots of people consider it morally wrong to treat gay people differently, they should consider that it's okay people do not agree with them, and that the US legally protects people who have different values than you do, and that's an important part of freedom. Banning me from boycotting the cake shop that doesn't serve gay people is literally against my freedom of association.
Christians have done the same thing for decades. Porn is protected speech, but that hasn't stopped them from literally advising the president, on both sides of the aisle, for decades, to ban it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_on_Sexual_Expl...
Funny how it's just good christian values when they do it, but "cancel culture" when they don't like the free market outcome.
Don't forget that Trump also hates environmentalism in any form. Air quality metrics would acknowledge that pollution exists, which contradicts his opinions.
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