Also among these so call "bureaucrats" are psychologists at the VA helping veterans with PTSD; search and rescue professionals working for forest service, park service, fema, etc; undercover FBI agents trying to stop organized crime; NOAA scientists predicting hurricanes, the list goes on.
The demonization of the civil servants of this country is a story that people who want power are telling the country in order to gain said power. It's a story as old as time.
A lot of people got away with saying a lot of BS for a while now. Bureaucrat, woke, etc. used as vague thought-terminating cliches, and we are observing one of these formless things decay, in real time, to the point they're outré.
The based to cringe pipeline, if you will
"Bureaucrat" is always a pejorative for a professional person who works in a bureaucracy. It doesn't mean anything.
It certainly means something in context, seeing as virtually everyone in the civil service has been painted with this same brush regardless of whether the term's use is correct or not.
> "bureaucrat" doesn't mean anything
These two sentences appear to be contradictory.
Language is everything. Are they a government workers or are they a bureaucrats? Deep state operatives or public servants? All of these words could describe someone who works for 18F.
18F workers are public servants, some of the best in the government, but by calling them bureaucrats, it makes their work seem inefficient and their removal seem logical.
Accepting the word chosen for the conversation determines what actions are acceptable. Protestors or rioters? Freedom fighter or terrorist? Peacekeeper or occupying force? Security or surveillance? Whistleblower or leaker? Regulation or Red Tape? Tax or Theft? Patriot or nationalist? Socialism, Marxism, or communism?
Peace (justice) or peace (submission)? Woke (generational injustice) or woke (any leftist idea I don’t like)?
It's precisely because these words have exact meanings, that they are so insidious. Many end up becoming shibboleths, dividing us vs them.
There are companies, PR firms, private intelligence, and think tanks that A/B test words and ideas in order to create the right metaphorical context to get people to submit to a certain framing.
A good read on the general topic of control via metaphorical framing:
https://commonslibrary.org/frame-the-debate-insights-from-do...
Russia currently is run by an ex-KGB dude. The KGB opposed Gorbachev's reforms. Putin is actively trying to rehabilitate the Stalin personality cult and revive a longing for Soviet era colonialism to legitimize his war of expansion.
The Russian people are amazing, but there's only so far you can go if you don't have a free press, if expressing certain facts about history is illegal and if people are murdered for being too open about their opinions.
I don't doubt there are people who are still unhappy that Russia lost its status from the imperial days, just as there are British people frustrated that they're no longer an important empire. But that was happening anyway and it was only a matter of time.
It's not really surprising that the average opinion in an authoritarian country aligns with the position actively promoted by the government of that country. Just like it's not surprising that the party wins by a landslide in a one party state.
LOL. I'll get right on that, after I ask the North Koreans for their opinion.
So Russia was effectively cargo culting the idea of capitalism and democracy. They did things that looked right, but because they didn't understand a core principle, Rule of Law, they did not get democracy or capitalism. Instead opportunists attained all of the once governmentally owned assets, and then used their levels of wealth gained to consolidate their own power, leaving Russia in the current mafia state/oligarchy it is in.
I wish I could find it for you, but it's kind of painful to search for videos based on semantic information.
Snyder's US centric video on rule of law, was not only prescient, but it builds some of the scaffolding needed to understand just how bad everything is right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6fpu_9S31c
But as you describe it that's fairly plausible to me. Russia under communism had no rule of law and was basically a mafia state. So it's not surprising that remnants of those institutions, the paranoia, the corruption, opportunism, etc carried over through the transition.
My point wasn't that Gorbachev was some sort of miracle worker, just that he helped end totalitarianism and is recognized for his efforts. And Trump will definitely not be remembered as that kind of figure. Putin is trying to bring back the state religion, and Trump is trying to do something similar in the US so if we're going to compare him to someone in Russia historically, it will be someone who tried to tear things down and impose a dictatorship for the supposed "betterment" of the people.
The sell is to individuals to get their votes, not corporations (who of course are on board, but cannot vote), and more amorphous for not being above board. About how people's hardship are being caused by "enemies" who must be punished. Thus the "cruelty is the point" observation.
Simply stating their goal, "the hyper rich feel too fettered, with respect to the rights/safety/wellbeing of individuals", would fail for being overly direct and honest.
(I have no doubt there is governmental waste. But their behavior is not consistent with doing the work of identifying and eliminating waste. Waste elmination here is a side effect (that can be pointed to) of mass elmination independent of waste.)
Dissolving agencies is easy. Push the legislation through congress. The republicans hold control of the legislature, have the ability to blackmail their caucus through the oligarchs, and have a supreme court that has dropped all pretense of legitimacy.
The budget bill devastates things like Medicaid, but doesn't dissolve the department of education.
Straight to ad hominem. Excellent.
You don’t get to hide behind high minded ideals.
I am hardly advocating for destruction of the USA simply because I disagree with that pithy quotable, "The cruelty is the point."
But cruelty to these employees is just the side benefit, the cherry on top. It's not the main objective driving these decisions.
I'm going with deceptive.
If there's a free and authoritative easy way to file taxes, then there's no reason for people to pay for unnecessary third party services who earn ALL their money by imposing themselves between the taxpayer and IRS. They will fight like bastards to preserve their privileged position.
https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-maker-of-turbotax...
The cruelty is the point.
Balances, on the other hand, were from old lost Balancing Empire. This was really just a stubborn remnant of the Roman Empire that didn't want to admit the party was over.
Together, the refrain "Checks and Balances" is normally to remind us of our ambiguous and ephemeral place in history. Are we hardy folk like the Checks who will remain even as the political landscape changes? Or are we Balances left twisting in the wind?
Then, I think the earlier poster was expressing his own sense of loss in proclaiming there aren't even Checks anymore. It's no longer ambiguous, we are un-Checked and out of Balance.
If you want, you can attempt to clarify why you're asking the person you're replying to if they know what checks and balances are. We can all ready social study books and read wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_powers_under_the...) and it seems unlikely the response to your question is going to differ much from the philosophy and practice described there.
Not sure where you got the "widespread misinformation about checks and balances in the executive branch", the C&B are across branches, nobody implied otherwise.
Saying “hey, don’t you know what checks and balances are” seems ruder.
EVs and all that stuff were nothing more than a toy to play the charged up games the barons / slavers play
oil > nuclear > some miraculous thing
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/01/03/russ-voug...
The media has been lying to us for decades and no, I don't take them at their word, especially when they share a clip that removes all context.
Wait until you see Twitter Files or whatever Elon is going to drop from DOGE.
If so, I would note that it’s curious that he’s declined to comment rather than clearing his record and the Trump campaign similarly reacted by pretending they wouldn’t have him setting policy again rather than by saying that’s not what he meant.
> https://youtu.be/oBH9TmeJN_M
This clip starts at the same point.
It may, again sadly, be the best of both worlds. The motivated ones will see a link in the description and start their research, the non-motivated ones (the majority) will accept or reject it right here.
The silver lining is that it's not too late for those people to get some upcoming elections to swing and push to a congress that will kick out Trump before it's too late.
We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBH9TmeJN_M
18F are the bureaucrats they want to traumatize.