I can't really understand that as it seems obvious to me that they're just destroying parts of the government they don't like. And while there is certainly room for improvement in many areas, whatever they're doing is not going to improve anything, it's only destruction.
There's a reason the federal budget is several inches of very thin paper. The budget spells out how much money gets spent for various purposes, programs, projects, etc. Of course they don't specify the kind of paperclips the FAA buys. But they will approve or modify the FAA's budget plan which includes $X for office supplies, $Y for an upgrade to the FAA's network equipment in a branch office, $Z for upgrading some nav beacons, and so on.
The executive branch can't defund or "stop spending money on" anything. Nixon decided he just wouldn't spend money on programs he didn't like, and congress very rapidly passed a law that said that the president couldn't do it, because the "power of the purse" rests solely with congress.
It certainly can't stop issuing payments for existing obligations, and it especially can't take money back, which M did a day or two ago to NYC because he read a tweet that said NYC was spending money housing migrants in "luxury hotels", which shockingly turned out to be nonsense...
That's why all of this DOGE crap is such theatrical nonsense. Congress, representing their state's interests and the interests of those who live in their district, via two separate branches, approves all the budgets.
No matter what T and M say, no federal agency can just willy-nilly decide to spend money it's allocated by congress on other stuff.
That's all great in theory: in actual reality those laws are just words on paper, Congress has no interest in asserting its authority, and enforcement rests with the executive.
The goal should be messaging to everybody else. Especially those who might like the outcomes of Trump's crimes but would prefer not to have a president that just smashes through the law to get there. A way to help achieve this is to repeat, over and over and over, that Trump's actions are violating shitloads of laws.
Companies can declare bankruptcy and fold their hand: governments, notsomuch.
Jack Welch is the reason corporate America is a shit show, and GE is a joke.
So...Trump is breaking the law and getting away with it. What else is new?
Yes
He has immunity
BUT... even if the executive is under legal theory constitutionally unitary, it isn’t actually unitary, it consists of individual people who act based on their own perception of legitimacy, and when the President abandons the principle of government of law and not arbitrary individual will in dealing with the courts, well, that also threatens the theoretical infrastructure that binds the people carrying guns in various executive departments to his authority, and we can very quickly end up in one of those highly unpredictable periods of history that produces lots of really neat stories to read about afterwards but is somewhat less pleasant to live through.
Republicans who work on bipartisan platforms are punished and primaried.
They were even able to account for all their crayons! PT belts on the other hand...
And the President has more power around ending spending going to external contractors (which seems to be most of DOGE’s savings).
Like anything politics, it comes down if people agree with your definition, but if DOGE comes across external contracts for an agency that makes zero sense for their remit, then it makes sense to me they can kill it.
It’s starting to look like a lot of spending is falling into that category.
They're right now firing all probationary employees at multiple agencies. That is entirely indiscriminate, and almost certainly disruptive to the mission of those agencies.
The actions at NIH and NSF will likely kill a large portion of the scientific research they used to fund. So unless you consider science in general be a waste I think these broad cuts clearly don't target actual waste and abuse.
Compared to what? The Biden administration? Who never even held a press conference for months?
And what evidence? Did you want a downloadable pdf of justification for each cut?
The partisan nature of the criticism is obvious - Trump and Musk are bad, so nothing they do can be good. Produce evidence? Not good enough!
If you don't think foreign aid is important for the continued safety of the US then you don't understand soft power and have no business in modern politics.
Sadly the people in charge fit into this category, except for the ones like Marco Rubio who actually do understand this but have no spine and are willing to overlook this stupidity for a seat at the table.
Are you arguing that that CIA interference in foreign countries is a critical government service?
In that case I don’t know what to tell you.
You do know the polio vaccine program in Pakistan where DNA analysis to find Bin Laden was done through USAID? The one that set vaccination back decades?
And now you’re defending it. Amazing.
For example, today it was “167 cancellations with savings of ~$115M, including a $2.23M contract for HHS for “equity assessments of existing program policies”.”
Most of the contracts are related to DEI (which they consider waste) but you see a few building leases sprinkled it.
I haven’t seen anything so far that says “Agency will no longer do X”, but happy to be be corrected.
I think you can get the answer from what they post. Cutting $400M in external contracts for a $10B agencies isn’t cutting major functions of the agency.
To have the argument anyways, I looked back through their posts back to jan 20, and there’s really no information about most of the cuts. I presume that the few things they highlight, eg equity programs or whatever, are the worse of the worst that they could find, cause isn’t that what they’d show us? They could be cutting basically anything behind the scenes, and they themselves may not have a good idea what they’re cutting. As of jan 31st, they claimed to have cut 1-1.2 billion dollars overall. I assume that number is much higher now. Why would I trust that, while fumbling around looking at payment descriptions, one of Musk’s techbro zoomers didn’t hamper or cripple an important function of one of these departments? Where can I find the in-depth information on every cut?
That's $0.70 per taxpayer (assuming 166M US taxpayers).
Was it worth it?
Now do that 10,000 times and tell me what the total is per tax payer (noting that 40% of taxpayers don’t pay taxes).
I get $14,000 per tax payer, what do you get?
Can you put together an adult argument?
Perhaps because you yourself have none?
> but you see a few building leases sprinkled it.
You think agencies cannot lease buildings? And that it's a waste and fraud?
> I haven’t seen anything so far that says “Agency will no longer do X”, but happy to be be corrected.
They have literally unilaterally shut down several government agencies with bogus claims.
* They cut things blindly, eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43046466
It's a clown show.
You don’t need to write “the agency will no longer do X” you just need to fire the people doing X. Case in point the EPA and CFPB (which catch fraud among companies but were not worried about that anymore are we)
There aren’t any examples so far of stuff that is clearly waste and abuse.
I thought doge was about efficiency, why is he spending resources on the culture war?
Or unintended 2nd order effects.
Who knows if the final outcome will be an improvement but it resembles fixing a TV by dropping it from a height and hoping.
Where did you get this from in their comment?
Where did this come up?
The only example of waste are the 150 yr old SA recipients. Sure that happens (we’ve been hearing about “welfare queens” for decades) but certainly not something new the DOGE “uncovered “.
And why are we entrusting a bunch of young engineers to identify fraud? They might be qualified to refactor and streamline computer systems but are certainly not qualified to determine what is “legitimate “ spending and what is not.
>just destroying parts of the government they don't like
There is no inherent contradiction here. Both things are subjective.
The intent of my comment was not to claim that what Musk and co. are doing is good, or that it's bad. It was to point out precisely why the claims in the post I replied to will not convince anyone who is not already convinced.
If the poster I replied to just wanted to vent, fine. But if they wanted to persuade someone on the fence, they have provided nothing towards that.
Nothing, that is, besides the standard appeal to emotion that infests almost all such arguments (on both sides) and is effective on human brains for all the wrong reasons.
https://apnews.com/article/house-republicans-budget-blueprin...
Nothing is legitimate about this. Literally everything they are doing is both illegal and completely unconstitutional. They have thrown out the entire rule of law and it is a pure flex of power, a shock-and-awe meltdown that they hope to execute faster than the normal processes can react. They absolutely intend to abolish resistance and they know they can suffer no consequences for it.
Dark times ahead. We're aren't arguing government efficiency or saving money, they are smashing it all.
As far as I'm concerned, "medical debt" is effectively extortion.
If I have some sort of major medical issue, such as cancer, it's absolutely fucked that my choices are to either die or to rack up an extreme amount of medical debt that I might not ever recover from. In either case, my life is ruined.
Among many other reasons:
Subsidizing demand increases prices. When you subsidize university education, you increase the price of it. The metoric rise in inflation-adjusted cost of university education since the 70's or so is strong evidence of this.
If someone wants to major in feminist dance therapy, that should be on their own dime. Using my tax money to fund it is immoral.
>Why not also defund high school and middle school as well? After all, by the end of the 5th grade you should be able to read, write, and do simple arithmetic. Anything beyond that you can fund yourself, right?
I'm actually not entirely unsympathetic to drastically cutting down how much mandatory education we have for kids. There is very little (if any) correlation between the funding amount and actual results. See Abbott districts in Bew Jersey for a stark example of this.
And if they want to major in economics, chemistry, physics, engineering?
I don't necessarily disagree with what you're saying wholesale, but "I don't like this tiny corner so throw the whole thing in the trash" is immature, foolish, and self-destructive.
Those at least serve a practical purpose to society as a whole, but even then I still would question taking other people's money by force to fund it.
If you dig deep enough, subjective experience is what we’re often trying to improve. Both science and art contribute to that.
Why is that immoral?
"taking other people's money by threat of lethal force" in the form of taxes is seen as necessary for running society by most people, not a moral failing.
And we are not talking about "party vacations" we are talking about education. Maybe this is a commentary on the state of higher education today, but there are plenty of institutions that offer a quality educational experience here; America has the #1 university system in the world.
"a degree in something useless"
Who determines what is useless? You? Are arts degrees for instance useless? Artists don't think so. They are not typically profitable but that's a different conversation, your qualification was "useless". What makes a degree useless, who determines that, and how?
And even if we just assume a topic useless, how is giving people scholarships to study it immoral?
Presumably the people actually footing the bill
If someone is footing the bill, does that not imply a certain amount of "we don't think this is useless"?
That's a vanishingly small list
The government is doing that, not the dancer. If you consider general taxation immoral, fair enough, but then you're going to have to explain how a country can function without it.
> to pursue a 4 year party vacation
Boy, have I got bad news for you about a lot of students on what you'd consider more worthwhile courses.
> getting a degree in something [THAT I, PERSONALLY, CONSIDER] useless
Fixed that for you.
Subsidizing also increases creates more utilization. You seem to be of the mind that more education is a bad thing. I’m not sure we all agree.
Yes, you lose some. But not all. And that's how you start.
One manager asked, “What if we train them and they leave!?”
To which a more senior manager quipped, “What if we don’t train them and they stay?”
Y'all have the delulu American exceptionalism brain. People will leave if they don't like living here. A loan eill not stop them.
The amount of money and effort required to extradite a person far outweighs the average student loan. Not only that, it is not really a "crime" to not pay your debts. It is a civil violation. The court can seize your property, in limits. You can't seize someones house in some states, and some don't even allow you to seize cars. Even if they can, any given student loan holder may not have either.
"But Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former Republican director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), said the agencies Musk and Trump have targeted to date account for a tiny fraction of the overall federal budget ...
They are not going to go into agencies that are doing things they like. They are going into agencies they disagree with," Holtz-Eakin, who has participated in past tax and spending negotiations in Congress, told Reuters.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-cuts-based-more-politi...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/02/13/upshot/nih-tr...
Trump and Musk are poised to destroy science research in America. Actual scientists are all scrambling to save their jobs and research.
Also, plastic straws don't harm the environment. Oooh, science!
Every time the administration changes, the heads of all the departments change, and the incoming people are typically pretty ignorant of what the department does. How would a corporation work if every 4 years you rotated the C-suite and 2 levels down, with people from a completely different business sector?
Meanwhile, funding is shifted even more often. Or is just outright cut once every few years.
Meanwhile, every action they take is an official government action. Which means it is LEGALLY REQUIRED to happen in certain ways based on laws written by people who don't think about consequences or how they are enacted.
And it is 2.2 Million people. There are economies of scale here.
So I wonder how this compares to current Google, current Facebook. I've heard people here talking about how messed up those companies are, projects started/stopped at whim, massive investments that get abandoned 2 years later, etc.
Or to banks. Banks don't modernize their software because they can't, not because they don't want to. No wonder the US government has similar issues.
1) Headline is interesting, I follow the link to 404media, ah they want me to sign up and give over personal info to read this. Screw that let's go to doge.gov and see if it's hacked.
2) Doesn't appear to be, never checked out their website before, what is there?
3) Basically a list of Tweets, showing that the executive branch has cancelled one DEI expenditure after another. Basically all these expenditures are DEI. It's government grants and contracts that have things like Diversity, Equity, and/or Inclusion in the name. Which they claim the executive branch has just cancelled. (Are they lying?)
Now here I will confess to one bias, I don't think any public money whatsoever needs to go to DEI. Not a single penny. So as far as I can tell a lot of this is good, we can agree to disagree, if we debate it we'll probably never agree. But like a lot of Americans, I 100% support public money never going to DEI initiatives. If you are promoting race education or gender sensitivity or whatever, nope not with government funds. Find the money for it privately.
So all the claims in this thread include stuff like "The executive branch can't actually cancel contracts," which that website says they are doing now. And it says "the problem is such and such about bureaucracy and corruption," well yeah I don't like those either, and I'd agree this isn't obviously anti-corruption work being done here, but again, at face value:
A) It looks like these guys are eliminating public spending on DEI
B) Ergo it looks like they are doing exactly what the public elected Donald Trump to do
Flame away, downvote if you think the government should fund DEI, it's all good - but really what am I missing here?
It seems to me DOGE is an entity created to eliminate DEI funding, at the behest of a duly elected American public official who is doing what his constituents elected him to do, and they are succeeding. Is this wrong?
(Spare me any arguments in favor of DEI as they will fall on deaf ears.)
They're cutting a lot more than that, this has been all over the media. One example would be biomedical research via NIH/NSF. This is not just DEI (in whatever overly broad and vague definition they use), but a lot more.
What about this argument people are making in this thread that they're not actually doing any real cutting because they're not Congress? That seems like a stretch.
That preventing a repeat of the damage done to America cities by the national highway system[1], which was used mechanism to literally segregate American cities is also a waste of time and money.
Most of the US significant racial atrocities committed against its own citizens, where either committed by, or with the direct assistance of, the U.S. government (at both state and federal level).
There probably a good discussion to be had on how much should be spent on DEI efforts. But the idea that spending zero really doesn’t make much sense, we know what the consequences of allowing the U.S. government to become entirely occupied by white men. Ultimately a monoculture of people results in a monoculture of ideas, and monocultures never last, something comes along finding some critical weakness that common to every agent in the monoculture, and utterly destroys the organism (in the case of the U.S. government, that might be Trump and Musk). DEI is strategically important because diverse systems are more robust, produce better ideas, and are better capable of surviving extreme shocks. All attributes people should want in their government.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/04/07/984784455/a-brief-history-of-...
I would also still support the ADA and its enforcement.
These two ideas are not in conflict. No one is trying to strip the legal rights of deaf people, nor will it happen. That is a straw man/hyperbole.
“ Sec. 2. Implementation. (a) The Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), assisted by the Attorney General and the Director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), shall coordinate the termination of all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.”
So… not exactly a strawman.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/endi...
The reality is that DEI is a campaign to get people aware of implicit bias. It's been proven time and time again that resumes with a name like "Shaniqua" are more likely to be rejected over one with a "John" even when all the qualifications are the same.
But now, of course, with the current political climate, if you're a woman or PoC, you have to be a perfect worker. If you make any kind of mistake, you'll be accused of being a DEI hire.
I suspect we're gonna start seeing this XKCD linked more often over the next 4 years: https://xkcd.com/385/
So how about we start by purging the Senate.
This is an incredibly sweeping generalization. There are a lot of people who voted for Trump because of their perception of his merit/qualifications/plans vs Harris. Pretending they are all brainwashed simpletons not only alienates them but also sets up for future failures. There's a reason these people voted for him. What is that reason? Treating is as some temporary hysteria is just going to keep getting people like Trump (or worse) elected over and over.
These people are insane. Conservatism needs to be officially recognized as a mental disorder.
If saving money was the goal surely there's be discussion akin to "let's cut the military budget". That's how you'd know they're serious. But as it stands it is clearly just an ideological axe grinder.
(I should note I'm not American, just watching bemused from the sidelines)
No one is serious about “saving money”. It’s just to justify the corporate tax cut.
This is why DOGE is staffed with young people.
It's easy to convince inexperienced people there's a 2-step plan:
Step 1. Destroy the old.
Step 2. Build the new.
Yet people with experience know that Step 2 requires orders of magnitude more effort and time than Step 1.
So, you have ignorant people breaking things, congratulating themselves on how quickly they're making progress... and then hit Step 2. And realize it's hard. And get bored. And so just, not.
Thus in the end, you're left with a broken pile of what came before, and nothing new to replace it.
Unfortunately (for all of us, including for their base) this isn’t actually what people want or need, except the ideologues pushing it with a clear understanding of the expected outcomes. The base just infers that the ruin of these “inefficient” programs is a noble end in itself, because their supposed inefficiency is the problem with the programs themselves.
So at least we're not invading Iraq?
Step 1. Destroy the old
Step 2. ???
Step 3. Profit!
"Build the new" doesn't even seem to be on the table at this point. There's no proposals to replace any of this. At least not public anyway, we know they are replacing all of this with for-profit scams.
Step 2. See? The government doesn't work! Just like we said!
Step 3. "Fix" the problems created from Step 1
Step 4. MAGA eventually realizes the swamp was enlarged and made worse, not drained
Anyone doing this kind of work is not merely ignorant.
The experience of bricklaying will help you think about the future times when you'll have to lay the bricks. Without that experience you may not ever consider those times, especially in a scenario which has you excited about what you are currently doing.
I wonder if the DOGE kids will be also sent off to the countryside once they're not useful anymore...
> Step 1. Destroy the old.
> Step 2. Build the new.
Feels very 'cultural revolution'-y
And also that the steps here should be reversed. Sure if you are tearing down a building you destroy before creating, but systems aren't buildings. If you are going to create a new system to run the cash registers for your business you don't tear out the old one and worry about building the new one later. First you have the replacement ready THEN remove the old one.
You should be worried because the same guys who are resonsible for this web site are now in charge of much more vital systems and there are much bigger threats who just wait do get important data.
Mao killed tens of million of his own people because of his misconceptions about farming, economics, and ecology.
Hitler killed millions because of his misconceptions about jews.
9/11 was executed becuase of a small group that were very confused about the basic facts of reality ("god").
There is only delusion + power + conviction. There is no other evil.
I think the missing ingredient is simply not caring about the outcome. It could be because they don't have empathy (sociopaths), or that the society has trained them into normalising obedience to the cause (facsism / communism) or inhumanized their targets (consentration camps).
Acts can certainly be described as "evil", but I don't agree that "evil" is some type of force that affects people.
To go back to my original point, the simplistic equation falls apart if you spend a second looking for counter examples.
Sikhs give free food to any who asks, without expecting anything in return. They are deluded (they do to it please god), and need power and conviction to do so.
I was thinking of the human consequences. In my language they are almost synonyms.
They of course care about the outcome, but not the effect it has on the target group
It's strange how one can normalize cruelty. Just think of how prison rapes are joked about in media and movies, as if it is an accepted consequence of committing a crime. It is a cruel and evil act that many choose to simply ignore because it is so common
If you believe this, your beliefs are out of step with essentially every Western justice system, which hold murder to be a worse crime than manslaughter. The difference between them is solely the intention.
By "conviction", I understood them to mean a kind of blindness -- an unshakeable belief that what you are doing is right, regardless of what others may believe. That kind of conviction is orthogonal to intention to harm another person. I took the entire thrust of their argument to be that intention to harm another person is neither necessary nor morally important for evil. But that is not how most of the West sees it (as evidenced by the distinction between murder and manslaughter that I pointed out).
If, when they wrote "conviction", they in fact meant "intention to harm another person", then I agree with them. But in that case I'm not sure why they posted their comment at all, since that (namely, the thesis that intention to harm is morally important when actions cause harm) is already the accepted norm, at least in the West.
(I still think it's a bad example even presented like this, and I disagree with GP, but your example seemed wrong)
Manslaughter is when you kill someone without conviction and/or delusion. You can hit someone without the conviction that you need to kill them and they fall really badly and die.
Murder. You can hit someone in self defense where you have no conviction that the person must be killed (because for example they say you had sex with their wife, but you in fact know you didn't, it's a misunderstanding), and you don't have any delusion (you know the attacker is delusional in fact). And then you defend yourself and he dies because he hit his head badly on the way down.
Because that is the only way I can interpret your examples so that they correspond with the legal distinction, which is based on intent to harm and TTBOMK never mentions "conviction". If so, we're in full agreement, since that is already the accepted Western norm and my original comment was based on a misunderstanding, and unnecessary.
But also if so: I'm puzzled why you chose to swap the natural and original word "intent" for a different word ("conviction") that is easily misinterpreted as a quality orthogonal to intention to harm, and about which an interesting but fundamentally wrong argument is periodically made (namely, that it, plus power are sufficient for evil, without any need for intent). I'm also puzzled why you made the initial comment I replied to at all, since it's then a defence of the absolutely uncontroversial status quo. It's like posting that you believe in gravity.
No, I mean "the probability function you ascribe to your beliefs". A person who believes something very weakly doesn't put on a suicide vest to blow up civilians in order to further this belief. A person with a strong belief might.
They also were under the delusion that the US was a democracy, and hence the general population could be held responsible for the actions of its leaders. Understandable if they had mainly been exposed to US/Occidental state propaganda.
Today I don't think anyone would be inclined to hold such a belief.
Or maybe the Gelatin art crew?
Utopists who run into accumulating problems, closing resource windows and simple limitations of humans (tribal creatures) and the meta-machinery they built, are bound to just run around with their pants on fire.
I don't remember the quote, but something about them only learning from catastrophe.
Worse. 1.1 million people died in a deadly plague and there's no national mourning, just straight back to the culture war and polarization.
We're not united because they've goaded us into to fighting each other over two topics that really aren't, and there's only two teams to pick from. One was bad, and the other one worse.
Can you blame them? They've been toiling hard for decades while getting poorer and poorer, while the privileged class has lived lives of wealth and comfort from milking these government institutions. Did they care about the vast majority being comfortable or not?
The repubs lost their battles, and decided they wanted to win at all costs. They had people show up to vote, vote in a bloc, volunteer for lower level positions, join multiple different organizations and basically organized them to dismantle the country.
If people can be driven to do that, then its not much to assume that at least a few more people could have done the same thing.
This is, by every metric, completely wrong. We have never been wealthier.
Wilful ignorance equates to evil in this case.
The media are absolutely craven, too, constantly normalizing insanity and pretending like even idiotic things are legitimate proposals that should instead be laughed out of the room. Like, maybe the Earth is flat? Let's HAVE THAT DEBATE!!
The times are mature to rediscover where the word hacker came from. It never rhymed with billionaire but it seems this website tried hard to change that narrative.
Better people learn about their lack of experience fro a hacked doge site than a hacked paxment system. The ones who will hack that won't be as friendly.
Stop TRYING to lose this battle ffs.
Again: truth matters. In the small and in the large.
How about blaming the people who are actually acting like Nazis, and also the actual self described Nazis who are supporting them and cheering them on and recruiting off of Musk platforming and promoting them, of emptying the word of all meaning, among other much worse things.
The Nazis are pretty successful to have convinced you to debase yourself by sticking up for them and criticizing anti-fascists for simply calling a spade a spade.
So who do you consider worse: the actual Nazis, or people who you believe are emptying the word Nazi of all meaning (boo hoo hoo)? Because you're siding with and defending the actual Nazis from being called what they are. Is there a word for what that makes you?
If not yet, then at what point exactly would allow anyone to exercise their own free speech by calling Musk, a self described "free speech absolutist", transphobic? What more would he have to do, than to actually publicly attack and verbally abuse and humiliate and deadname and misgender and lie about his own child?
How about policing the actual Nazis and bigots and transphobes instead of the people like his daughter who rightfully call him what he obviously is by his very own words and deeds?
Elon Musk’s Transgender Daughter Says He Was ‘Cruel’ and ‘Uncaring’:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/26/business/media/elon-musk-...
Elon Musk's Daughter Attacks Trump's Order, Addresses 'Nazi Salute':
https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-daughter-attacks-trump-ex...
Elon Musk's trans daughter, Vivian Wilson, calls out his Nazi salute: 'Call a spade a spade':
https://www.yahoo.com/news/elon-musks-trans-daughter-vivian-...
Elon Musk’s Trans Daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson Calls Him a “Grubby Little Control Freak”:
https://www.them.us/story/vivian-jenna-wilson-elon-musk-grub...
Elon Musk’s transgender daughter, in first interview, says he berated her for being queer as a child:
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musk-transgender...
If that's the case, you have already lost anyway. Because if that's true you have so many nazis in the US now that the historical Nazis are a rounding error. Do you truly believe that?
> How about policing the actual Nazis and bigots and transphobes instead of the people like his daughter who rightfully call him what he obviously is by his very own words and deeds?
You can't police shit if you are the minority. That's absurd. You can't become the majority by being an ass to everyone on the fence. That's what the left has been doing and driving everyone away.
The left has to take responsibility for the failed tactic of going around screaming at people for wearing sombreros or whatever. After you do that enough, everyone who has been screamed at will want to vote for anyone who are against that crap. And yea, that was Trump.
Or maybe I'm wrong and you really do have 77,302,580 nazis in the US right now. I don't buy that. I have a much higher opinion of the American people.
You're just speaking for yourself, trying to justify your own bigoted beliefs, with the old "you forced me to become a Nazi/racist/transphobe to get revenge on you because you hurt my feelings" defense, not because you take any personal responsibility for what you believe, what you say, who you vote for, whose water you carry, or whose boots you lick.
I didn't force you to defend Elon Musk or claim it's not fair for me or even his own daughter to call him a transphobe. That's all on you. You decided to do that, not me. Before you defend his Nazi salute, post a photo of yourself doing the exact same thing, and put it in a picture frame on your desk at work.
So answer the question instead of dodging it: Exactly WHAT would Elon Musk have to do, that he hasn't already done to his own daughter, that crosses the line and justifies finally calling him a transphobe?
If only I'd stop calling Elon Musk a transphobe, he'd finally start treating his own daughter like a human being who has a right to exist and self autonomy and love and respect from her parents, huh?
You have cause and effect and the direction of time reversed if you believe it's all everyone else's fault that people unfairly call Elon Musk a transphobe, which forced him to act the way he does towards his own daughter.
Or is it your position that nobody should call anyone else transphobic or racist or Nazi, no matter how obviously true it is?
Nazis aren't going to stop Nazing and transphobes aren't going to stop abusing their own children, if only you just respect them and stop calling them names.
Nope. I would have voted against Trump if I had voting rights in the US. Again, you're interpreting my statement of "we shouldn't lie about our enemies" as me supporting those enemies.
Don't you see how absurd that is?
Gee I wonder who WOULD make you happy. Seems like you want more of a hippy commune style of government than anything realistic. 99% of people want to kill the other guy when they lose in sportsball, get real loser.
If you wait for unassailable academic applicability, when you finally deploy it your prison guards won't care.
A quick sampling off the top of my head: The First Consigliere throws double Nazi salutes on national TV and smirks in ambiguity when questioned whether he intended it, the President defends a Nazi march as "very fine people", violent private groups serving their political ends have been placed above any (federal) prosecution, and the administration is actively boasting that they will remove undesirables by creating the largest deportation in the entire history of the nation using the same laws abused for the WWII Japanese internment camps.
The label may be rude, but it's not unreasonable... and the more reasonable it is, the better it is to be rude!
You aren't having a debate, its a mental street fight, and you gain respect by proving you know how they think and meeting them there.
Its why I say the dems are always wrong. I know that the only converastion is from using their own facts and then their own values.
The dems are always wrong, they do corruption badly. Trump pardoned 1600 people, and made 2 billion or something from 2 meme coins right before he was inagurated.
What do the dems have to show for it? 6 pardons?
So the Repubs are up 1594 pardons and billions in meme coins?
Did Trump do anything illegal? no! He exercised his powers. See! the dems can't even be corrupt or serve their own self interests effectively.
https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJA_jUddXvY7v0VkYRbANnT...
I innately want to believe that a comprehensive refutation grounded and logic and citations will win the day, but that doesn't seem to be how it plays out.
If you don't believe in facts and truth, you are just as big of a problem as Trump is.
More like... Truth is important to convey, lies are not permitted, but meticulous and detailed truth simply doesn't work against lies with better marketing.
You shouldn't surround your truth with a bodyguard of lies, but just throwing on more Truth as a raw ingredient doesn't advance the cause of people actually adopting Truth.
I like to say that the US used to have "the marketplace of ideas" as a goal, but has now become "the cesspool of ideas", which isn't a good thing.
I don't know what the solution to that is, but I don't think lying is going to get us out of it.
I don’t believe in giving up on that ideal, but I think it’s a fiction in the sense that actually achieving any semblance of a “free marketplace of ideas” is a vastly complex problem we have no capacity to solve right now. Humans aren’t a collection of simple, isolated units, we’re a vast colonial fungus. We struggle to understand individual biological organisms, but we assume that all of humanity talking to itself will be a system transparent to study, that it operates on simple principles. Ask a skilled marketer if he or she believes in the free marketplace of ideas.
Solving the problem would involve building a completely different social system from the ground up. Since we can’t do that, and nobody knows how to start, what I’m suggesting is that people try to study the communication networks as they are now and the memetics people are responsive to and build, carefully and cleverly, narratives which will actually have the practical consequence of bettering people’s lives, and that they use the truth to figure out how to do that and what that narrative should be. It’s not really lies or the truth, I’m calling for a pragmatic attempt to use the extremely flawed communication channels at our disposal to do the best we can.
What’s that mean? In how cool and fun they are? In their capacity to win elections?
Hearsay about a single person. Is that your argument?
Also, neo-nazis. Not nazis. Nazis were a very real political group. Some are even still alive. None of these teenagers were even born. Their PARENTS weren't even born.
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/06/nx-s1-5289337/elon-musk-doge-...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93q625y04wo
Tell me you really want your personal data in the hands of those people.
Citation needed. Your links talks about "racism", not nazism. Those are different things.
> Tell me you really want your personal data in the hands of those people.
I do not. But I noticed that you now stretched the truth to suit your argument, AND insinuated things about me supporting Trump/Elon. I do not. I just think we're not winning this war of ideas by being lying pieces of shits.
But it's definitely malice from Musk, Trump and the rest of the oligarchs. They have for a long time been clear that their plan is to tear down everything and rebuild around themselves and everyone else is a pawn to be used to their benefit. These people are purely transactional, they don't believe in societal goods, just what benefits them must be best for everyone.
The US government can prop up the stock market for a very long time. Anyone who purchased Puts early on during COVID times found themselves on the opposite side of a suddenly generous Fed that poured hitherto unseen amounts of liquidity directly into the markets. The chickens only came to roost in the next administration, but ai suspect they could have kept at it for 10+ years and still kept inflation under 12-15%
> Trump-scandals kinda killed Hanlon's Razor for me: A miasma inseparably blurring the lines between malice and incompetence, lies and ignorance, culpability and insanity, condensing into a greasy alloy which is definitely some amount of evil yet not worth anybody's time to separate and assay.
I refuse to feed the algorithm more pathological input for another denial-of-service attack. For anything from that crowd of repeat-offenders, I declare the answer to be both. If they want to assert something was just incompetence or just malice, the onus is on them to provide the argument either way.
"Those guys walked on the grass. Therefore I'm entitled to demolish the building."
Completely - it's again propaganda vs reality. They keep showing exactly what they believe by their actions, but from.what I see people on the right keep believing their words/propaganda. There is such and echo chamber on the contermporary right it's incredible. No matter how much tangible, see-it-with-your-own-eyes evidence of something is presented, as long as there is a cover story given that denies it people seem to keep believing the story. And then afterwards when it becomes clear that reality was the case and not the story it all swaps over to rationalizations and the cycle begins again with a new topic.
I remember when it was "there is no way this candidate really will do the extreme things he claims. He's just saying them for effect." To "he doesn't really mean he'll work to be a dictator from day one when he says it" "he doesn't really mean vote for him and you'll never need to vote again".
Then when he starts doing it but gives a different cover story it: "Yah he's not really doing that, he's just cutting waste", to what will be "he's not really doing that he's just fixing unfair election procedures" and so on.
Then finally it will be again "yes he actually did those things but here's why its ok and it doesn't change my mind".
Extremely prominent SV backers in the VP side of the administration have said/implied multiple times if it's democracy or their world views, they choose instituting their world views - and somehow people are still making justifications saying "they don't really mean that, they won't really do that." Even with the clear evidence of what's happening now.
Why do people refuse to believe people when they are explicitly stating their intentions?
Sidestepping any specific political topic, this new view of "I'm against the other party's political touch point item that I'd rather throw out 250 years of democracy" is really wild to witness.
I hope DOGE will also look at the DoD, and do the same to them as it has to other departments. I hope they review all the money that has been sent to Ukraine, Israel and other nations and make sure it is all accounted for.
//edit// I wish they would also audit the H1B visa programme, but that is less likely to happen.
https://www.investopedia.com/us-debt-by-president-dollar-and...
Also it seems like you're confused by what a budget plan is for, it is what they want to do, not about the past.
But less than his predecessor.
And I didn't vote, I'm not a US citizen or resident.
Bush ran up a massive deficit from from '00 to '08, which Obama then inherited. The debt increasing under Obama is Bush's fault. The deficit LOWERED under Obama.
Congress asked for a debt increase because they plan to cut taxes. The debt hasn't been accrued yet, they plan to cut taxes and it will cost 4.3 trillion.
DOGE isn't trying to make the government better or more efficient. They want to cut programs and staff they're ideologically opposed to which is in theory all government, but in practice all government that doesn't enrich Trump or Musk.
I may be ignorant, but you're deluded. If you want to argue, please don't indulge in conspiracy theories you found on Reddit.
Most government spending is military. DOGE has targeted things like: Meals on Wheels, the Department of Education, National Institute of Health. The evidence I see suggests DOGE wants to implement Project 2025 with Elon's personal touch. An opportunity he paid for with his 270$ his campaign contribution.
I'm not sure what monetary advantage you thing Elon is personally getting for ending operas about transgenderism in Guatemala (or whatever the example was).
But, this is what people voted for. It sucks that you don't like it, but that's democracy.
Elon's companies are great beneficiaries of government funding. Yesterday the federal government decided to acquire $400 million in armored Teslas. I have no idea what opera in Guatemala you're describing. That sounds like something you would learn on social media. Not very concrete.
Trump was in debt prior to the 2016 election. Had hundreds of millions in debt that he could never pay. Now he's rich and still scamming because ??? I think it's because he's been so criminal he has no choice.
I don't consider it democracy. Democracy has been co-opted through mass manipulation and mind control with social media. Donald Trump and now Elon Musk have found a way to defeat reality.
Hahaha. I think that's called being in denial. "Everyone who doesn't vote the same as me has been manipulated. It's only me and all the people that agree with me that are too tough and intelligent to fall for it. It totally is not because of completely stupid policies or the fact that we lied about about the presidents alzheimers for 4 years."
I'm not a partisan or member of any party. I am American and concerned for our country. The guy who won tried to other throw democracy and hasn't ever admit defeat. I strongly believe there's a good chance Trump or JD Vance will be the last American president.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager
Well the elections weren't free and fair in 2020 either, with COVID being used as an excuse.
And let's not forget Hillary claiming she lost in 2016 due to Russia. Sounds like election denialism.
Did Trumps tax cuts put money if your pocket? They didn’t put money in mine (but Biden’s tax policies - child tax credits - did, ironically).
Yes, the standard deduction effectively doubled. That helped lower my federal income tax, and probably the taxes of anyone who didn't own multiple properties. I'm not a fan of Trump at all, but he did cut income taxes in his first term.
Here's a summary of the impact[0]
> The average tax refund was $90 higher in 2018 than 2017, according to 2019 IRS data. (This statistic covers tax filers who used a version of Form 1040.) However, more detailed IRS data, released February 2020, shows that the refunds were not equally distributed across the population.
> Taxpayers with an AGI of less than $10,000 received 11.5% fewer refunds in 2018 than 2017, and the total value of their refunds was 17% less. (A 2018 analysis from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found single filers who earned minimum wage and had no children were least likely to save on their income taxes in 2018.) Across tax returns with an AGI between $1 and $50,000, taxpayers received 4.5% fewer refunds in 2018 and their refunds were worth 2.7% less.
> Taxpayers with AGI between $50,000 and $100,000 received 2.5% more refunds but those refunds were worth 1.8% less than in 2017. Those with an AGI of more than $200,000 received 45% more refunds in 2018 and the value of those refunds was 203.4% higher. Taxpayers with an AGI of $1 million or more received 216% more refunds than in 2017 and those refunds were worth 394.3% more.
[0] https://www.policygenius.com/taxes/who-benefited-most-from-t...
This old video from rap news still ring very true. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpMPu5p_QXU
This has been the status quo for a long time, rather than pay taxes and get it all back in controversial and bloated government contracts (which is what gives the appearance of government spending working) it's better to stay lean and just have them not pay, as this removes the middlemen.
Let a company do it's job and you get people crying about them raping the planet and exploiting workers
Stick a company with red tape, tax them a billion, give them (and yourself) a billion to complete a political project that goes nowhere and it's labeled a great success with people cheering in the street and using it as an example of socialist success for the next 60 years.
The issue Americans have is that they can't really afford non-discretionary welfare spending.
I’d be happy if they actually saved real money by cutting the military budget in half, but that’s not going to happen because the US is an industrial-military based economy.
How much did Trump’s 2017 tax cuts lower your tax bills? They didn’t lower mine. I benefited more from Biden’s tax policies (child tax credits) than Trump’s. Even taking it from the point of view of “fuck the gov, fuck climate change and our future, I want what’s mine, now” Trump did nothing for me in his 4 years on power and is doing nothing for me now - gutting a bunch of gov agencies doesn’t put money in my pocket.
You're either so dumb you believe every piece of propaganda you are shown, and never notice the harm being done, or you are fully aware of what's happening and you're cheering on the chaos and suffering.
The toil and confusion and nastiness of everyday life under capitalism is not as fun and exciting as an imminent invasion at the southern border or the coming rise of the God Emperor or the final solution to groceries being expensive. Running a soup kitchen and washing clothes for the homeless just hasn't the same attraction as doing nothing by chasing the next Q-drop.
I thought that after 2016, I no longer do. It's the reverse. Maybe "evil" is a strong word but they are definitely what I would consider "bad people" based on their extreme selfishness. Most pretend to be ignorant, or "low information" in person but they follow news very closely.
As for 'juniors', it's not like we've seen this sort of thing before such as those here happy to propel the opinions of so-called 'climate expert / activist' (Greta Thunberg) who didn't finish school and was used by the media as the face of 'saving the planet' and throwing unfounded claims of disaster by 2023, despite a significant lack of understanding of climate change and what she was talking about.
But then again, I have not heard back from Netflix's elite team for a postmortem of that live-streaming disaster which there were no juniors to blame this time despite being inexperienced in delivering live-streaming on their platform reliably.
The odds of a junkie recognizing good or bad spending is very low.
Yes, in many respects. See this paper for a good model of the basic behavior: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451
You're surely being obtuse. I'm a progressive independent and even I understand why they are doing it, even if I'm not convinced this is the correct way to do it.
This is why they are doing it: https://www.usdebtclock.org/
It's just their idea of austerity.