I don’t think there is even a question. I think about this every day. And not just Trump, but all the people in power that he has appointed - particularly the lifetime appointments in the DOJ. If it is, and I think it surely is, not a fair election, we have no process to get all of these appointees out of office.
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Isn’t Trump trying to make it easier to fire feds? In which case, we’ll need a purge before changing it back.
We also need to find a way to prevent burrowing.
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I don’t entirely understand that ‘burrowing’ bit, think I’m misunderstanding something. It reads to me like some people are upset that people who’ve worked in government (via getting appointed) then choose to continue to do so afterward (via getting hired), and people are trying to force a non-compete agreement that anyone appointed can’t get hired in government for 2 years afterward?
I thought the big problem was people in government who ‘solve problems’ for private corporations and then just happen to get hired into lucrative positions at those corporations after their term is up.
In other words, we don’t want them to work for private corporations afterwards, because that might corrupt their time in government, but now we don’t want them to work for government either?
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Having candidates is nice, but having plans for what to do if the elections are cancelled or stolen or disputed is… important?
In 2000, Bush’s supporters used riots to shut down vote counting. And they succeeded. And they took the presidency for 8 years.
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Government service is supposed to be nonpartisan. What happens is that partisan political appointees manage to get high level permanent federal jobs after the people who appointed them leave office. Thus you get political hacks in upper management following a particular political agenda (long after the people who appointed them leave office) instead of experts who hopefully just want to do a good job.
I don’t know much about the bill to prevent it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it looks pretty useless. Such things usually are, like the Federal Election Commission.
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No constitutional process. Hence the need for revolution.
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Oh, I think I understand. So it’s not so much that they’re doing the thing but that they’re able to use their clout from having been appointed to bypass the normal progression and go straight to higher levels (without any experience/knowledge), blocking out the people who’ve been working their way up? That makes sense.
Private industry has a similar dilemma due to the Peter Principle. If you promote from within, reasonably picking your best workers, then you lose your best workers to management roles which may be totally unsuited to them, making it a double loss. But if you only hire for the higher levels from outside - those are people who have no knowledge of the company, maybe even the industry - of course that makes a mess too, and may decrease morale and increase turnover since everyone else knows they’ll never get promoted.
On the one hand, it makes sense to keep the good workers doing the work and aim for good managers to manage it, but on the other hand clueless managers tend to make a mess of things. I think eventually we’ll work out some sort of ‘management track’ system, to bring people up through the ranks who might not be good workers but could be good managers, so that by the time they get there they’ll have the skills and knowledge (even if they’re not particularly good at the work) to understand what they’re managing. That’ll probably end up getting applied to politics too. But I doubt it will be in my lifetime.
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I read that in the voice of The Monarch. A bit over the top.
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I thought the idea was to preserve the class character and identification of the management…? For that, the purchase system is ideal:
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Well, well, well…
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/california-election-hacking-711202/
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Multiply by 538.
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Definitely worth reading the whole rant, not least because it is hilarious in several parts. Big parts. Not like, practical joke big. But big.
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Fuck this pile of garbage with a rusty tire iron.
Fuck this piece of shit. He’s wrong on so many points through this threadpost or whatever… except when he points out how the most unabashedly blinkered people can’t help themselves on Twitter.
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That seems very unfair to me. Maybe it’s because he illustrates unicorn with a complaint about how Obama promised public healthcare, said it was necessary, and then put everything into a Republican plan even though he obviously didn’t need their support. That’s not demanding a magical creature! That’s fury at being assured you will finally get the surgery you need to walk, and instead getting handed a cane and told it’s unreasonable to expect more.
Look, I think voting is important for everyone who can. I think it’s telling how much work is being done to disenfranchise people, and agree that if it weren’t for so many people skipping it, we wouldn’t be in such a mess. But much more, we wouldn’t be in such a mess if the Democrats did their damn jobs, the jobs politicians elsewhere seem to manage, the jobs they promised, the jobs that are necessary for country.
Isn’t expecting people would swarm to vote without the politicians making any effort to deserve it itself magical thinking? How can you so forcefully condemn the public for not doing its job, and yet excuse politicians for not doing the jobs they were actually hired for as something childish to expect? Cui bono?
I am exhausted by the left fighting itself over this, what Wright calls out in some forms but still spends his whole editorial doing. Again, I think people ought to vote as much as possible, only as a starter, and I’ve personally argued for the value of both voting lesser evils when you must and greater goods when you can. But.
But let’s remember that in the end, the cause is not the people voting for third parties, or voting for the lesser evil. Both would be improving the country if they were on their own. And the cause is not even the people who would help if there were better choices, but are frustrated by the thin pretense of representation their votes earn and skip it, mistake though I think that is.
Because the only reason any of those things matter is that vast numbers of people keep voting for the greater evil. That’s the anchor pulling the ship down. Amplified by an incredibly corrupt electoral system, and enabled by an opposition too indifferent to bail. If you don’t like where we’re headed and don’t want to fight your own side, then point your fingers at that.
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Thank you.
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There is a literal Nazi in the White House. In 2016 it was a matter of some debate whether or not he was a Nazi, but it was well known he was an incredibly bad idea for the presidency.
So yes, yes I expect people to hold their nose and vote for the less shitty candidate. They can complain about the dearth of good candidates all they want, but they gotta vote so the shittiest one can’t get into office.
It is no longer an intellectual exercise when Trump is actually in the White House. Hell, it hasn’t been one since the Reagan days.
There are kids in cages. There wouldn’t be kids in cages if Trump hadn’t won the electoral college.
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Kids in cages predates Trump.
Note the date. 2014.
Are Trump’s policies worse? Yes. Is Trump an immediate existential threat to both the USA and the wider world? Yes.
But a return to the previous status quo is not an adequate response. You need the people on your side if you want to fight the Trumpists, and the people will not come out for just more of the same old bullshit.
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That’s the argument, but there has not been a line drawn that makes people come out to vote in America. As of right now all of us here know that voter turnout this year in 2018 is going to be about 20% lower than in 2016.
You can make excuses for people to a certain point, and there are some very good reasons why people couldn’t vote - but there is also a majority of the non-voting population that justifies their inaction with a wide variety of bullshit. So yeah, people were tricked by Obama who isn’t a unicorn - rather a slight variation from the normal candidate. But 2008 wasn’t a Golden year of voting either, we had the last four years of Bush and the world economy was on the brink due to (primarily) the American financial system and we saw less than 10% more people come out to vote?
The fact is that a lot of people use leftist causes (and people of color) as justification for not doing the bare minimum to make a difference at any level of government. Those people earned being called out, even by partisan hacks and people that like Brendon Fraiser movies.
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This has been immensely frustrating to me. I have a friend who runs a civic engagement organization for scientists. Getting scientists mobilized to vote, to meet with reps, and to do more voter engagement where their expertise is relevant.
Recently, she expressed frustration at the lack of turnout among scientist friends for an election, and immediately got shouted down with “Well, did you literally go pick up poor people and take them to vote???”
Watching other lefties sandbag her in that way for not giving up 100% of her leisure time to devote to some other population was just awful. That some people don’t have ID or rides to the polls doesn’t mean she shouldn’t get scientists to donate their time to civic engagement. That someone else can’t vote doesn’t make it OK for someone with the privilege needed not to do so. It’s not zero sum.
Circular fuckin’ firing squad.
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I mean, yes, and I was trying to make it clear I don’t disagree with that. But I think this is important too:
This means that many people don’t vote against threats of making things worse. And that may be a mistake, but for whatever reason, it doesn’t appear to be one corrected by louder threats. They only show up for the promise of making things better. But that means what can work, maybe all that can work, is to offer them candidates who stand for improvement. That would not be just the same corporatists who couldn’t be bothered to so much as try for the health care people really need, who were merely torturing fewer children with cages, and so on.
So what I’m saying is that we absolutely need to get more people voting, but this cause is inseparable from getting better for them to vote for. Calling out the first but deriding the second, as Wright does by substituting demanding unicorns for getting sick of indifferent liars, is still just shifting blame rather than admitting all that is being done wrong. It gets the response he describes because it’s on the other side of the same circular firing squad.
People need to vote. Politicians need to make themselves worth the votes. At this point the bike needs both wheels patched to roll.
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