this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2025
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We were still talking about Obama's birth certificate years after inauguration. So yeah, that's not really a thing.
We should all get behind the sitting president regardless of party, but I don't think that has ever happened...
I'm not honestly sure that we should. Sometimes supporting and wanting what's best for the country means earnestly hoping the president utterly fails.
I sincerely hope this trump administration accomplishes less than they did last time, ideally nothing.
The likelihood of a person correctly opining on the president is 50/50. Effectively, there’s no benefit to piling on to the mass of muted dissent or agreement.
There's a difference between screaming into the echo chamber and support.
And in any case, I would disagree that we should just not talk about politics. If nothing else, there doesn't have to be a greater benefit to calling the president a shitheel for it to be worth doing if you think that.
The value of political discourse and dissent is inherent to the act, with it being a nearly universal litmus test for oppression. But actions with effect are a better option, always. Organizing, organizing, organizing! Ambient dissent is a great base to build off of, but it’s just the building blocks set properly, and there’s plenty already. Stack higher!
https://econ.video/2017/10/15/corner-gas-a-riot-is-not-5050/
(I am annoyed at my inability to find a link to just the video clip)
If we really want to be pedantic, it varies moment to moment, but averages slightly below 50%
Why? The Trump administration will do good and bad things, and I hope they succeed at the good things (e.g. cutting waste) and fail at the bad things (e.g. cutting important services).
Show them the American people are more than partisan hacks, and maybe they'll start pretending they're not partisan hacks.
Horseshit. They are not being honest about clearing government waste. Any talk of reducing government spending without significant cuts to the military is a fable.
Any minor good things they do will be completely overshadowed by the pilfering of the country for a select few.
I'm going to be ready to applaud if they somehow do deliver on their promises in a way that doesn't screw over important services. I don't see any way for them to hit the $2T mark that Musk claims w/o very painful cuts to the military, Social Security, and Medicare (which they're not going to make), but I'll certainly applaud them for any waste cutting that doesn't screw over a large subset of the population.
I'm not saying we should stop calling out their BS, I'm saying we should applaud them if they actually do a good thing. How much applause vs boos they get is up to them.
Fuck that. Fascists don't deserve the benefit of political decency.
“Cutting waste”, for a conservative, is to reduce public services. They have spent a very long time putting out the idea that the government must turn a direct profit and pretty much none of them have the barest clue of what an indirect effect is. The more they crush public infrastructure the more space there is for private interests to come in and overcharge for services they don’t even really provide(health insurance, for example).
Nothing they do to streamline, especially with Elon must holding the lever, will be a benefit to the working class and the benefit to the owner class will be a few quarters of profits while they continue to descend into a place where there’s no money left for their customers to buy their products.
There is no good coming.
I hold out hope to be pleasantly surprised.
There's a lot of waste in the government, especially in the military. We need to audit how money is spent, reorient spending culture from "use it or lose it" to rolling over unused funds, and improve reporting so these kinds of waste are caught sooner. I don't think there's anywhere near $2T Musk claims there is, but I could believe up to $500B or so in unnecessary spending.
Whether they do that is up to them, but I'll be ready to applaud them if they somehow pull it off, and criticize when they make boneheaded decisions that screws people over for minimal fiscal benefit.
Is this your first election? Every cycle they shout about wasteful spending, and when they win they increase military spending, cut taxes on the wealthy, and cut important services to cover it, then when that doesn't cover it they quietly run up the debt just to shout about how high the debt is as soon as they're replaced.
There's holding out hope to be pleasantly surprised, and then there's pretending that there's even a whisper of a chance that they'll do the exact opposite of the thing they've done for decades.
Nope, I've been through a few. In fact, I was originally registered Republican when I was naive enough to think they actually cared about small government. I'm now registered third party to juice those numbers a bit in the hope someone cares about registration statistics, because neither major party actually seems to do what they promise. Sometimes I'll switch parties to the local dominant party (in my case, Republican), just so I can have a say in the primaries, but usually I don't particularly care.
Given my two options, hope and despair, I choose the former.
There's the option of acceptance, where you know what's going to happen but you don't waste energy crying about it. Hope in this scenario isn't hope that they actually do anything beneficial for average people, it's hope that they're too incompetent to actually accomplish the horrible things they plan to do.
Oh, my sweet summer child.
Waste, in this case, includes important services first and foremost. Medicare and social security are definitely waste. It's money wasted on people who aren't buying any of those expensive things that Musk and Trump are selling.
Trump has been consistent about few things, but one of those is not touching Social Security or Medicare. He seems to have drawn a pretty clear line in the sand there, which also significantly limits the options for cuts in the budget since those two are absolutely massive.
Well, he no longer needs to be consistent there. it's not like he's (legally) up for re-election or anything.
No, but he wants to be liked since he's a massive narcissist, and gutting SS and Medicare would piss off everyone.
I want what's best for the country, specifically the people in it, and the world as a whole.
I hope that trump fails because his stated objectives are abhorrent to common decency, fiscal prudence, and functional governance.
What he calls waste I don't believe for a second is actually waste. He has done nothing to earn my trust in that or any other regard, and so I don't. Certainly not enough to trust them with something as broad as "waste", if the fools who think that any scientific research they don't see the point of is "waste" like so many of the examples have been.
Listening and judging a politician based on their words and actions isn't being "partisan". The electorate can't even be "partisan hacks", they're the one's whose interests and opinions are supposed to be being represented.
It's not up to the American people to live up to the expectations of politicians. It's literally a politicians entire job to live up to ours, and do things that benefit us. If the politicians goal is contrary to that end, I hope they fail.
I'm not gonna wish someone who wants to harm me, my family and my friends luck just so that they might not want to in the future. They need to earn my trust, not the other way around.
If they do nothing for four years and things remain exactly the same as today, I'll count that as a win. If they yell "psych!" and actually do something good I'll eat a hat.
I don't know what he considers waste, but there's a ton of obvious waste, such as military suppliers (also goes for many government suppliers). I obviously haven't pored over government financials, but I wouldn't be surprised if we could find tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars of waste by looking for things like this.
That said, what will probably end up happening is that they'll use it to gut services that are politically inconvenient (e.g. CDC) instead of cutting actual waste. But I'll hold out hope, because I literally can't control it anyway and I prefer hope to despair.
I take it you haven't spent much time on social media then... So many people have knee-jerk reactions to things due to their party affiliation instead of the actual facts. Positive things about Biden/Harris get posted on Lemmy and Reddit, and negative things tend to get ignored (inverse is true for Trump).
People like slanting their view of events when it fits their own internal narrative, instead of objectively looking at the facts. That is what I mean by the electorate being "partisan hacks."
Sure, but it's also up to the American people to inform politicians when they are or are not living up to expectations. If they only get negative feedback from those outside their party and positive feedback from those within it, they'll continue doing things that benefit their party over society as a whole. If members of the opposition party actually applauded when they did something good, maybe they'd do more of that thing. But if all we get is negativity and obstructionism (and yes, that happens on both sides of the aisle), we'll just get more partisan hackery.
I'm calling for a shift in the public discourse on social media toward constructive feedback instead of partisan nonsense. We can't change what the big media orgs do, but we can choose what we do and who we support.
My eyes rolled so hard they literally flew out of my head and knocked a wall off the back of my house when I saw your example to justify "hundreds of billions of dollars of waste" was an opinion piece on the $500 toilet seat from 1986.
Spoiler alert: if you read the next few years of news it's revealed that those stories are almost uniformly exaggerations and misrepresentations driven by Reagan era people who wanted to starve the beast.
Political lies drummed up to justify cutting vital services under the pretenses of "fighting waste".
You can do whatever you want. I won't be caught dead cheering for a fascist who wants to rollback civil rights just to give him a fair shot in case he makes a prudent budget cut. Which he won't, because his platform has openly covered that they want to cut education, healthcare, and science.
But hey, at least you gave the fascists a fair shot despite their open plans for evil, right?
It's well known that government agencies spend way more than they need to in order to keep their funding the next year. Spending needs aren't consistent every year, so they try to smooth over the differences by purpurchasing things before EOY or retaining staff they don't technically need in case their spending needs are higher next year.
That's stupid and wasteful. I don't know how wasteful, but I do know there's an incentive for an agency to expand its budget. It may not come in the form of $500 toilets, but you don't have to look any further than the TSA to find excesses.
Trump is no more a fascist than Harris is a communist. I don't like rhetoric like this, and I urge you to stop with the name calling. I absolutely don't like Trump and I like his base even less, but I do not believe he's a fascist, but he is a populist nationalist, which is its own brand of dangerous.
Regardless, I already voted against him twice and can't do much to stop him, so the best thing is to discuss ways he can use his position for good.
Do you actually know what a fascist is or do you think it's just a synonym for Nazi?
Harris has never advocated for the communal ownership of the means of production.
People who worked with her don't describe her as a communist.
There isn't serious debate about if she's actually a communist or if she just gets really close to the definition.
Is that the definition of fascism, or trumps former chief of staff explaining why he thinks trump is a fascist?
I trust the former head of the joint chiefs of staff, Trump's former chief of staff, and any number of academics to know what fascism is than I trust you, a person who's worried about being uncivil to someone who wants to put people in camps.
Like, take a step back and think about what you're doing. You're saying it's insulting and wrong to call a far right populist leader who attempted a coup to stay in power, who has threatened to use the military to bring places that disagree with him into line, who calls his political opponents "the enemy from within" and who calls them evil and their criticism of him illegal a fascist. Even if you don't see how just that snippet of his behavior warrants the label, why on earth would you care if someone like that was insulted?
We were discussing how he could use his position for good. He could fucking fail at everything he tries to do and leave the country no better and no worse than it is today.
I'm not gonna sit here and jerk the guy off in the hope that he fails at fascism so hard that he somehow deports musk and enacts MAGA-care for all to spite Obama.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna175198
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/totally-illegal-trump-escalates-rhetoric-outlawing-political-dissent-c-rcna174280
https://www.durham.ac.uk/research/current/thought-leadership/2024/10/is-trump-a-fascist/
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/dispatches/what-does-it-mean-that-donald-trump-is-a-fascist
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_and_fascism
Yes, fascism is all about sacrificing individual rights for the benefit of the state, using the military to crush opposition and any "undesirables" along the way.
That doesn't describe Trump, yet that's what the left throws around to try to discredit him.
How Democracies Die (2018) looks at actual fascist regimes and compares them to Trump. I agree that there are significant concerns here, but I think there's an alternative explanation: Trump is merely a narcissist and has no agenda. Everything makes sense through that lens:
His actual policies have not been consistent with actual fascism though. He didn't attack abortion, gay/trans rights, or racial minorities despite a willing base, the most he did was some rhetoric about states rights and pushing for expansion of the southern wall/fence. He didn't increase aggression militarily toward any of our enemies, his tariffs were pretty mild, etc. He paid lip service to his base, but his main focus was tax cuts and deregulation, which are populist moves that don't benefit the state at all.
So no, I think the term "fascist" is being thrown around to try to discredit him, which failed because it's inaccurate. Trump is certainly dangerous, but not because he's fascist, but because he's narcissistic and his ideas suck.
Sure, but just know that they have an axe to grind as well, so they have a strong incentive to exaggerate. Again, what they say is troubling, but fits with Trump being a narcissist more than a fascist. He
Exactly, yet that's the term the right throws around to try to discredit her.
I'm not saying it's merely insulting, I'm saying it's inaccurate. If you step away from social media for a second and actually talk to some Trump supporters (not the crazies that paint their trucks or don Q anon nonsense) and read some quality journalism that's not just spinning the news against Trump, you might get a different perspective. I live in a very red state that's generally opposed to Trump (dead last in the 2016 primaries, MAGA candidates largely lost), and when I ask people, they say he's distasteful, but they want him to reduce illegal immigration, reduce drug trafficking (esp. Fentanyl), cut spending and taxes, and hurt China. They don't care about "culture war" nonsense, they support Ukraine and want the war to end, and they support Israel but think they've gone too far in Gaza and want the war to end.
The evidence I've seen is that the Jan 6 rioters arrived at the rally with a plan already, and left the rally early to prepare. I have seen no evidence of direct collusion between Trump and those groups. The clear evidence I've seen is Trump trying to abuse loopholes in the law to overturn what he thought was a stolen election (i.e. narcissism), but not doing anything outright illegal. That's sill not great, but I don't think it's an indicator of fascism.
Yeah, that's just saber rattling rhetoric. He has given zero info on what that means, nor has he (AFAIK) mentioned it after winning the election. I think it was just an outlandish statement to rally his base.
And the same happens in the other direction.
He can say things are illegal, but that doesn't make them illegal. He doesn't create the law, he merely enforces the law. We'll see how far the other branches of government let him take things, but I highly doubt he's actually interested in subverting democracy, he just wants to stay in the news cycle.
Neither will I. I think he's dangerous and do not support him whatsoever, but I'm also not going to make up lies to smear him. I'll applaud any good moves he makes to hopefully encourage more like it (he's a narcissist after all), and deride any bad moves he makes.
Where have Democrats called Republicans "evil", or "the enemy within", or made allusions to having them arrested for political disagreement?
Also, I like how you dismiss a five star general and people who have actually worked with the man as biased, while also ignoring the whole "historians and political scientists who agree with them".
I stopped reading when you started assuming that anyone who doesn't agree with you about trump must just be unfamiliar with his supporters and only reading biased news. Don't be an ass and assume you know the background of the person you're talking to.
As far as I can tell, you're a vocal centrist who won't believe someone has bad intentions just because they tell you what they are. Surrounding themselves with Christian nationalists and detailing their plan to do those things could just be for show, right?
Left-leaning libertarian, and no, Trump is in no way a libertarian (totally deserved the boos at the LP convention).
Neither major party really aligns with my priorities. Democrats consistently push top-down spending plans for businesses they like (union jobs, green energy, etc), and Republicans consistently push top-down spending plans for businesses they like (military contractors, large corporations w/ tax cuts). I align technically with Democrats on social issues (LGBT rights, drug legalization/decriminalization, etc) and Republicans technically on fiscal issues (balanced budget, lower taxes, etc), but neither deliver so I'm affiliated w/ neither. My priorities are:
If either party fielded a candidate with those as priorities, they'd get my vote. In fact, if they even did one or two, they'd probably get my vote. But no, Democrats love their social programs (probably for control) and Republicans love clutching their pearls.
I did vote for Biden last election due to Trump being so bad that I thought maybe he'd have a chance in my state (Utah), but besides that, I haven't voted for a major party candidate since my first election, when I was deluded into actually buying into their BS. That said, I don't think Trump is fascist, he's just a terrible narcissist, and I'll be surprised if he does anything productive outside of his tax cut proposal, messing w/ tariffs, and deporting some undocumented immigrants. He wants to make a show of being the big man in charge, but I don't think he actually wants to be in complete control.
That's likely an accounting quirk you linked: if they list 9 screws and a tank for $1M but don't specify individual prices, in some situations they just approximate it by assuming they cost the average - so they assume the tank costs $100k and each screw costs $100k each.
Perhaps.
I worked at a company that sold equipment to the military, and almost all of our military sales happened near the end of the year. They wanted their own SKU with guaranteed compatibility for their software, so we charged them extra for it (to be fair, maintaining compatibility did take extra dev work). They never seemed to push back on pricing, unlike our commercial customers who kept clamoring for lower SKUs with a lower cost.
Due to that experience, I highly doubt government agencies are getting anywhere near the best price. And why should they care? It's not like they get a bonus for spending less, but they do risk cuts if they spend less. With no reason beyond obligation to keep costs down, I could absolutely believe each agency could cut about 10% by just being more careful about expenses, some more, some less. With yearly spending of ~$7T, $500B is actually rounding down from that estimate.
It's not necessarily because of expensive toilets, but I do know companies overcharge the government because they can. We did it to an extent, and I think we were one of the better actors because my boss's (the CEO) dream has always been to supply our military, and that's basically the entire reason he created the company (we only sold commercially when military sales dried up due to spending cuts in that dept). We later hired a vet just to get our foot back in the door despite booming commercial sales.
Was Trump himself not one of the biggest pushers of that bullshit? I seem to remember him using it as part of his campaign when he wasn't even running against Obama.
You're absolutely correct. For the longest time, Trump was known as the birther guy because he was constantly making ludicrous, racist, nonsensical claims about it.
Because sitting presidents never stand behind the American people.
How can they, if they're sitting?
Maybe they would care more if approval ratings meant something.
Be vocal about good things the President does, regardless of party affiliation, instead of just pointing out bad things about the opposition party. Trump will do some good things (and surely plenty bad), and showing that the public is watching and cares is a good thing. The same should be true for Biden and whoever comes after Trump.
But no, that's not happening because partisan BS. That said, I will be pointing out good and bad things the President does, as I have done the last few elections.