Civil servants: tangle them up in procedure, practice malicious compliance, leak, and if necessary, undermine. Don't enable mob rule.
this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2025
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Amazing how the party of small government, who said Obama ruled by fiat like a despot, is immediately acting how they claimed Obama did.
What's amazing is that - once again - we've got a Republican President stepping in to drive out every moderate and liberal holding a position of authority in the administration. And Democrats are just shaking their heads saying "Well, but you can't do that" for the fourth time in as many decades, when you quite obviously can.
"Haha! Now we'll get Trump on being a hypocrite!" is the mating cry of a bunch of fucking losers.
And the next Democratic president will keep 75% of the partisan hacks Trump installs "because we don't want to be divisive".
See Louis DeJoy, who is still fucking there!
I wouldn't be surprised if Biden was OK with killing off the Post Office. He was certainly no friend of Social Security when he was a legislator.
Bold of you to assume there will be another democratic president.
"Oh but I couldn't do anything about it!" is the modern Democratic battle cry.
Just look at the fucking Gaza Genocide. Biden dithers for 13 months on a deal that's nearly identical to the one Trump inevitably prompted. Trump immediately gets what he wants by putting the slightest pressure on Netanyahu, because he recognizes that this conflict is holding up initiatives his party wants (namely Saudi recognition of Israel into the Middle Eastern trading cartels).
All those people screaming about how "Trump Will Be Worse! You stupid Palestinian Midwesterners deserve the genocide your families will get for not supporting Haris!" and the bombs stop the day Trump takes office. How are these people going to respond to the next Democrat who runs for office, I wonder?
Trump immediately gets what he wants by putting the slightest pressure on Netanyahu
It's been 13 months. Netanyahu has achieved his war aims. He's conceding nothing. Trump is just taking credit for nothing.
this conflict is holding up initiatives his party wants (namely Saudi recognition of Israel into the Middle Eastern trading cartels)
The Saudis and the Israelis are already in a de facto alliance, since both are opposed for their own reasons to the emergence of Arab democracy.
If Democrats don't pull the same shit in reverse (unless the GOP pulls their usual bullshit of changing the rules on their way out the door) then they literally don't give a fuck and are officially a pretend opposition party.
They won't because they're controlled opposition. A release valve for people to flock to when the GOP grows too difficult to render palatable to the public at-large. Dem Leadership simply waits to absorb discontent. They don't function as an organized party.
The only role they do fill is to cast dispersion on any kind of third-party coalition building.
They're the good cops.
If you want an opposition, organize one or join one. But if you think that'll be the Democrats, I'm sorry to tell you, that's not what they are. They'll still be trying to split the different right to the death camps.
It’s called projection, it’s all they know.
They also know gaslight and obstruct.
I don't even know if it was projection at that point. More likely they were just being obstinate. These guys only see one thing and that is power and ways to get it. It's no wonder everything they do looks like projection because the moment they figure something out the accuse others of it and start planning on doing it themselves.
If the system somehow checked itself when Obama was making EO's they certainly wouldn't be trying it now.
Tyranny = Gender is a spectrum
Freedom = You're male or female and that can never be changed!
He’s following Project 2025 to a T. It’s a shame most of the electorate can’t read.
Do not confuse their bigotry for illiteracy.
They want to control and punish "the other". They don't care that Project 2025 wrote this out. They don't care that it makes them racists or Nazis. They want to punish those different from them.
They want this.
He's not ... that literally incorrect.
The average American has the literacy ability of a 5th or 6th grader.
MAGAs are of course bigots as well, but the American electorate is also largely, functionally illiterate.
Well, let me give an example. When I'm driving, I sometimes turn on the radio and I find very often that what I'm listening to is a discussion of sports. These are telephone conversations. People call in and have long and intricate discussions, and it's plain that quite a high degree of thought and analysis is going into that. People know a tremendous amount. They know all sorts of complicated details and enter into far-reaching discussion about whether the coach made the right decision yesterday and so on. These are ordinary people, not professionals, who are applying their intelligence and analytic skills in these areas and accumulating quite a lot of knowledge and, for all I know, understanding. On the other hand, when I hear people talk about, say, international affairs or domestic problems, it's at a level of superficiality that's beyond belief.
In part, this reaction may be due to my own areas of interest, but I think it's quite accurate, basically. And I think that this concentration on such topics as sports makes a certain degree of sense. The way the system is set up, there is virtually nothing people can do anyway, without a degree of organization that's far beyond anything that exists now, to influence the real world. They might as well live in a fantasy world, and that's in fact what they do. I'm sure they are using their common sense and intellectual skills, but in an area which has no meaning and probably thrives because it has no meaning, as a displacement from the serious problems which one cannot influence and affect because the power happens to lie elsewhere. source
I so very much remember him making these comments. People so very much emotionally invested in something that literally has ZERO impact on their lives, but deeply ignorant of so many things that do...
I remember even as a kid being puzzled by supposed adults spending most of their time and nearly all their mental effort on game(s). Game(s) they themselves don't play. Or at least not anymore. It's watching OTHER people play games and having this emotional rollercoaster over it....I know many adult (males) that feel compelled to know about football, at least, just for work and getting ahead in the corporate world. Also baffling.
I think I've seen Chomsky say this on video/audio, as well.
a new memo obtained by CNN Wednesday told public health agencies to have all documents and communications — including regulations, guidance, notices, social media, websites and press releases — approved by a presidential appointee.
Very on brand for republicans to have lawmakers stand between health officials and those they are serving.
This is what people voted him in for and people who didn’t vote figured Harris would be the same.
America’s got to work on its education system and fix this problem but of course conservatives want to gut that too.
People figured Harris would be the same because that's how the media played it.
They really pushed the "both sides" bullshit to keep the race close and ratings up. Now they're about to lose their editorial freedom for it. There's gonna be some fat leopards soon.
But quarterly profits will be great.
The line went up.
And boards will just hire new CEOs to suck up to Trump and get by.
The media sells what we as the population want to buy.
It doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
Lol, the media sells what the billionaires tell them to sell.
It wouldn't matter if no one paid attention to it.
Yeah, people always say that, but advertising and propaganda work.
I think you mean, conservatives have already gutted education. They're currently attempting to make the final killing blow (defund public education to pay for christo-fascist private education).
Project 2025 is a lot of work.
I don't even think we've hit the Project 2025 stuff yet...
This is exactly what they defined for phase 1 of project 2025. Clear out the experts heading the regulatory departments, then start micromanaging the IC workers.
Next will be firing the ICs that aren’t producing stuff that’s good for Trump donors or isn’t good for republican propaganda.
So how long before something like a no confidence action or something can be taken to stop this? He's speedrunning turning the US into a madhouse and I know the VP would be next in line but... Something? Anything more legitimate than just fighting fire with fire by various groups being uncooperative?
The US doesn't have a mechanism for a no confidence vote, the only thing we have is impeachment, and that won't happen while the Republicans own the House and Senate.
You need a 218 vote majority to impeach in the House, Republicans hold a 220 vote majority there.
Then you need a 67 vote majority in the Senate to convict and remove him, Republicans hold 53/100 seats there.
It could happen if republican members of the house and senate weren't such cowards/ ghouls/ shills that would rather help a fascist stay in power than admit their party is wrong.
So, in other words it'll never happen.
It'll never happen through the formal system.
I’m more and more convinced by the day that this isn’t going to end without at least some level of political violence
It will. It's been inevitable for awhile now, because there are two different United States that cannot coexist with each other. When two groups of humans with radically different ideals are forced to share territory, violence is the inevitable outcome.
The U.S. is already at a low level of violence, and has been since Trump emboldened right-wing stochastic terrorism in 2016. It will only escalate now that Trump's brownshirts have been released from jail with a mandate to attack Trump's enemies.
They're not going to let it end without it. In fact, they want it so they can use it as an excuse to double down on the fascism.
That's historically the only way fascism ends.
Not always. In Spain, it fizzled out after Franco died and the king brokered a deal to return to democracy. The transition was difficult, the Spanish right was never really purged of its fascists, but Spanish civil society now is quite vibrant.
In Portugal, the rule of the fascist junta of generals ended with a non-violent people-power revolution.
General strike. All the money flows because we make it flow.
You're asking this as if the majority of congress isn't fully behind the Trumpist authoritarian agenda.
The time for that has passed. This is the end game.
Power and the money, money and the power
Minute after minute, hour after hour
Everybody's runnin', but half of them ain't lookin'
It's goin' on in the kitchen, but I don't know what's cookin'