Neither of them are physically capable of overwhelming my preschooler nephew let alone an air flight attendant.
So much theater for so little security.
Voters are not reasonable, and the media fans those flames.
Not exactly true, two important things intersect:
1. Running a country is much harder than it looks. The machinery they maintain is older, hoarier and covers more diverse topics than anything and they are constantly being lied to about whether it is working. It is a point I struggle to get across to people as a small-government proponent, but the people in power physically cannot understand the levers they are pulling and the effects the pulling achieves. Most of them aren't even numerate and the complexity at work here is beyond any human. They're flying blind and often setting up bad systems with bad incentives.
2. The goals of the polity are not your goals. The swing voter, in the moment that they vote, appears to be a different and much simpler creature from anything that turns up in normal conversation. The politicians have to deal with that swing voter rather than do what the politician may think is prudent (which, to be honest, is a good thing even if it sometimes throws up terrible results).
* Unlike a business, governments don't earn revenue from providing services that people want. They earn revenue through taxes, which they get to collect regardless of how well they govern.
* Unlike shareholders, politicians have zero skin in the game and are therefore incentivized to be as wasteful as reckless as possible. If a politician passes an overly generous pension plan that ends up bankrupting the state several decades in the future, the politician will suffer no consequences whatsoever.
* Unlike monarchs, politicians don't own the state, its land, or its resources. They merely get to control the state for a short period of time. That means they are incentivized to extract as much personal wealth out of the state as rapidly as possible during their short tenure.
> They earn revenue through taxes, which they get to collect regardless of how well they govern.
Who is the "they" earning revenue? What does "how well they govern" mean, and who is the "they" doing the governing? These definitions are important. What are you actually complaining about here?
> If a politician passes an overly generous pension plan that ends up bankrupting the state several decades in the future, the politician will suffer no consequences whatsoever
Really. Gosh, that sounds very different from every corporate executive ever.
> That means they are incentivized to extract as much personal wealth out of the state as rapidly as possible during their short tenure.
Really. Gosh, that also sounds very different from every corporate executive ever.
Not at all, I was just juxtaposing the incentives at play between the two systems.
> Who is the "they" earning revenue? What does "how well they govern" mean, and who is the "they" doing the governing? These definitions are important. What are you actually complaining about here?
I thought the subject of the sentence was clear ("they" meaning the government). The government earns money by demanding it through force. Private businesses (and non-profit charities) earn revenue by providing services that people are willing to pay for. Businesses that sell stuff people don't want will earn $0 in revenue. Do you disagree?
> Really. Gosh, that sounds very different from every corporate executive ever. > Really. Gosh, that also sounds very different from every corporate executive ever.
I agree with you to some extent. However, a corporate executive is generally compensated with shares in the company, so they have a pretty large incentive to keep the company in tact at least. Politicians have no such incentive whatsoever.
Your list of failures, among others (homeless industrial complex), make much more sense through this light: they're all wealth transfers to political friends.
I blame voters for wanting easy answers, having a NIMBY attitude to anything, want scapegoats, won't raise taxes in good times, won't help their neighbors in bad times, blame everyone else for their problems, demand instant results, get bored waiting for long-term solutions, care more about style over substance...
Politicians exploit all of those things. And so do talking heads.
The FBI continually goads citizens into being terrorists or on occasion, convinces them to kidnap a governor, then arrests them and claims victory! We could look a little further back in time to the aftermath of 9/11, and the role the CIA played in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, or the even the FBI doing its best to destroy the civil rights movement.
The Iraq WMD lies were driven directly from the White House, it was not a rogue CIA. For J. Edgar Hoover's FBI you have a point, but it led to many reforms by the Church Committee in the 70s.
> High Confidence:
> - Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding, its chemical, biological, nuclear and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions.
> - We are not detecting portions of these weapons programs.
> - Iraq possesses proscribed chemical and biological weapons and missiles.
> - Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material.
https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Iraq_NIE_Excerpts_2003.p...
> On the other hand, senior CIA officials mentioned the uranium claim in congressional testimony at the same time, permitted it to be included in a December 2002 “fact sheet” on Iraq, and mounted only tepid opposition to inclusion of the charge in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union Address, where it would become notorious as the “16 Words.”
If they knew it was a lie, and repeated that lie to Congress, pawning it off as just 'Bush lied, people died' (which, not saying that was your position, but that's what your comment initially came off as, hence my reply) absolves the CIA of the blame they justly deserve for their part in Iraq. But you're right that they certainly were not a rogue agency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Allende
>> To think otherwise is just conspiracy theories with no basis.
Your certitude here is making you look quite ignorant of history.
In August 2013 the U.S. government formally acknowledged the U.S. role in the coup by releasing a bulk of previously classified government documents that show it was in charge of both the planning and the execution of the coup, including the bribing of Iranian politicians, security and army high-ranking officials, as well as pro-coup propaganda.[28][29] The CIA is quoted acknowledging the coup was carried out "under CIA direction" and "as an act of U.S. foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government".[30]
The intelligence services are rogue in the sense they violate our rights, lie to Congress without punishment, and have zero effective oversight. Common people don't control the intelligence services, the legislative branch doesn't, the executive branch doesn't (unless Trump's plan was to make himself look bad), and the intelligence services have their own secret courts. There is no sense in which they aren't rogue. They don't even explain how they spend their budgets
They also have the power to take out a democratically elected president. For instance, they could've published the information they had linking Trump to Putin. They could've convinced the House and the Senate to impeach or Trump's cabinet to remove him.
The intelligence services are a perfect example of the unbelievable malfunction of our government. They are evil, in the sense of being torturers and murders who violate American rights and ignore the law. They are incompetent in the sense that they fail in spectacular and embarrassing ways even against adversaries that they outmatch on paper.
It's not your fault it was poorly edited and paced.
Looking like there may be a sequel and probably a spin-off.
The fact is, he never had to be. He is a fool and it was easy to predict his behavior would be far better for Russia than that of Clinton, and so Russia did everything it could to support him and damage his opponents, no collaboration necessary.
US resolve is non existent that much is true. It has little to do with Trump or Biden for that matter. When Obama let Assad use gas Putin took notice, everything else comes from that.
About Afghanistan.. it was not the withdrawal it was the laughable way it was done. Abandoning Bagram.. what dumbfuck thought of that? We DO know what idiot approved it though.
You mean the outcome of the withdrawal plan that Trump agreed to? Biden was damned if he did and damned if he didn't:
- The US is weak for withdrawing
- The US doesn't stick to its agreements
Not droning innocent civilians and then fibbing on the way out would have been nice as well.
Maybe not left so much heavy equipment and arms?
For example, Afghanistan - decades of war, thousands of American lives, trillions of dollars - all for no clear purpose and whatever we did accomplish there seems to have been reversed in a weekend. The Taliban are still in charge of the country and there was never any accountability for the policy and military failures.
Trump is another example. I often feel like I've walked out of a theater after seeing a convoluted movie. I'm left asking things like "So, was Trump a Russian agent?" If our intelligence services thought he was, then their plan was just to run him down in the press for several years? If they didn't then the mainstream media was misrepresenting them for years?
Most major things fall into this category of "I can't believe our government could possibly be this bad." Climate change - we need green energy but also haven't approved a new nuclear reactor in decades. Infrastructure - it costs infinity billion dollars to build a train, and a new public restroom will take most of a decade. Economy - we're just going to create trillions and trillions of dollars at ever increasing rates and that will be fine somehow. Pandemic - almost too much to talk about stuff going wrong.
I could go on and on but the main thing is that the people in charge, the government and the media, seem incompetent to a degree that beggars belief. Why should I trust these people?