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On February 20 2025 22:08 Uldridge wrote:
I think calling out someone is a Nazi makes no sense. You won't change anything about the situation.
I think understanding why society creates Nazis is way more productive and then you can tackle that problem head on.
Maybe a society needs a % of Nazis, so that we can stay on our toes? Maybe Nazism is something inherently (socio)biological for people with certain genetics. Who the fuck knows. Should there be a place for Nazis in our society? I sure don't want any, but Nazis seem to think they deserve to be here all the same and why not, they're humans after all.
I think this is a very difficult ethical question to tackle. It's basically the same like the integration problem with immigrants. It's needs such a careful way of setting up that, if you're not careful, you end up with segregated community after community that just doesn't work with you anymore (and vica versa) because they've entrenched themselves in their culture, basically importing their country into yours. That only causes friction for many people.
I don't think it's a very difficult ethical question at all, and I don't see any evidence that wanting to exterminate all the Jews or gay people and create a master race through genocide is a genetics issue. And also, if such a genetics factor were hypothetically established, we still shouldn't consider it to be a reasonable approach to our society.
No, society doesn't need Nazis. Society isn't going to go soft without Nazis. We have plenty of other problems to deal with, in our lives, without the additional frustration of American Hitler and Adolf Musk leading our country.
There should be no space for Nazi influence in our world. We ought to figure out what the best way is to stop them.
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On February 20 2025 22:08 Uldridge wrote:
I think calling out someone is a Nazi makes no sense. You won't change anything about the situation.
I think understanding why society creates Nazis is way more productive and then you can tackle that problem head on.
Maybe a society needs a % of Nazis, so that we can stay on our toes? Maybe Nazism is something inherently (socio)biological for people with certain genetics. Who the fuck knows. Should there be a place for Nazis in our society? I sure don't want any, but Nazis seem to think they deserve to be here all the same and why not, they're humans after all.
I think this is a very difficult ethical question to tackle. It's basically the same like the integration problem with immigrants. It's needs such a careful way of setting up that, if you're not careful, you end up with segregated community after community that just doesn't work with you anymore (and vica versa) because they've entrenched themselves in their culture, basically importing their country into yours. That only causes friction for many people.
Nazis are people, and have right, but they need to be held accountable. Once their world view is properly confronted, it tends to collapse, at least among the large majority of people.
One of my favourite anti-nazi moves was sending the whole groups to old concentration camps. After seeing what the original Nazis did with their own eyes, the whole group dissolved.
Has Musk ever had to properly answer questions about his Nazi dog whistles? Or any tough questions about his values, heroes and the consequences of what he appears to stand for?
Another know trick for extremists is to appear more numerous and powerful than they actually are. This one has to be solved by more moderate republicans and Trump voters.
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So if there's no genetic component to have extreme aversion to outgroups, which I might seriously delve into if needed, how do you tackle this social problem.
I'm with you in that we shouldn't want, not even a speck of, Nazism in our society, but there seems to always be slumbering racism. Racism can then in turn be weaponized and it always starts in small circles that you cannot police.
By the way, have you ever visited /pol/ on 4chan? I suggest you do, only to understand the state of the world right now. There's a metric fuck ton of humans that don't treat other humans as such at the moment, it's absolutely baffling.
I'm putting a lot of blame to seclusion from society and ease of access to radicalizing media, but that's just one component. Not all of this are social issues. You still must factor in genetics as well and to go against biology is a tough one. No amount of "education" or "inclusion" is going to make people less averted to people that have a different skin colour or sexual orientation than them.
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On February 20 2025 22:08 Uldridge wrote:
I think calling out someone is a Nazi makes no sense. You won't change anything about the situation.
I think understanding why society creates Nazis is way more productive and then you can tackle that problem head on.
Maybe a society needs a % of Nazis, so that we can stay on our toes? Maybe Nazism is something inherently (socio)biological for people with certain genetics. Who the fuck knows. Should there be a place for Nazis in our society? I sure don't want any, but Nazis seem to think they deserve to be here all the same and why not, they're humans after all.
I think this is a very difficult ethical question to tackle. It's basically the same like the integration problem with immigrants. It's needs such a careful way of setting up that, if you're not careful, you end up with segregated community after community that just doesn't work with you anymore (and vica versa) because they've entrenched themselves in their culture, basically importing their country into yours. That only causes friction for many people.
For some reason nature keeps giving us pedophiles as well. Identify them, treat them and for god's sake don't let them near our children. Nazis should be treated the same way.
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Northern Ireland23717 Posts
That’s not really what’s happening though IMO, if it were more innate in/out group biases, trends would remain much more static than they have historically been.
The culture/information pipeline has a huge amount to do with it.
There’s a reason that pipeline continually pushes the crime angle with certain migrant groups, or increasingly trans people or whatever. Any innate out-bias will eventually be overcome with exposure for most people, so you have to artificially maintain it with various scare tactics and misinformation.
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Norway28552 Posts
Call out the blatantly obvious ones but ignore the ones where the plausible deniability is strong. Call out patterns, ignore singular offenses. For Elon Musk it's becoming easier and easier every passing day to call him a nazi and harder and harder to deny it. I'm noticing it with my students - many have stated - looking at the nazi-greeting, that this was just an awkward autist gesturing. These students are overwhelmingly not nazis.
However presenting them with context of other tweets and the totality of musk's dogwhistling, they're like, oh, that's fucked up. It's kinda in line with 'call out the racism that is unquestionably racist, but avoid describing people who are a bit insensitive or ignorant as racist'- thought that I've also been a proponent of. Finding exactly where the balance is is tough of course but my experience is that even among trump supporters, racists and nazis are considered bad people.
So - don't entirely abandon terms and phrases like nazi, fascist and racist, but be careful not to hyperbole - that really pushes people away - and while pushing away the actual nazis isn't something I have much of an issue with, there are tons of people that can get behind some of the dog whistly language without believing in the actual ideology.
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On February 20 2025 23:06 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Call out the blatantly obvious ones but ignore the ones where the plausible deniability is strong. Call out patterns, ignore singular offenses. For Elon Musk it's becoming easier and easier every passing day to call him a nazi and harder and harder to deny it. I'm noticing it with my students - many have stated - looking at the nazi-greeting, that this was just an awkward autist gesturing. These students are overwhelmingly not nazis.
However presenting them with context of other tweets and the totality of musk's dogwhistling, they're like, oh, that's fucked up. It's kinda in line with 'call out the racism that is unquestionably racist, but avoid describing people who are a bit insensitive or ignorant as racist'- thought that I've also been a proponent of. Finding exactly where the balance is is tough of course but my experience is that even among trump supporters, racists and nazis are considered bad people.
So - don't entirely abandon terms and phrases like nazi, fascist and racist, but be careful not to hyperbole - that really pushes people away - and while pushing away the actual nazis isn't something I have much of an issue with, there are tons of people that can get behind some of the dog whistly language without believing in the actual ideology.
Does anyone besides white supremacists and the people that "coincidentally" support them get/deserve this sort of political coddling?
EDIT: Has anyone discovered some Trumpers around them in their personal lives that have been emboldened by Trump's first weeks in office? Meaning people that either have newly acknowledged themselves as Trump supporters or started saying/doing more fashy/offensive things than they would have done a few months ago?
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Norway28552 Posts
On February 20 2025 23:19 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On February 20 2025 23:06 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Call out the blatantly obvious ones but ignore the ones where the plausible deniability is strong. Call out patterns, ignore singular offenses. For Elon Musk it's becoming easier and easier every passing day to call him a nazi and harder and harder to deny it. I'm noticing it with my students - many have stated - looking at the nazi-greeting, that this was just an awkward autist gesturing. These students are overwhelmingly not nazis.
However presenting them with context of other tweets and the totality of musk's dogwhistling, they're like, oh, that's fucked up. It's kinda in line with 'call out the racism that is unquestionably racist, but avoid describing people who are a bit insensitive or ignorant as racist'- thought that I've also been a proponent of. Finding exactly where the balance is is tough of course but my experience is that even among trump supporters, racists and nazis are considered bad people.
So - don't entirely abandon terms and phrases like nazi, fascist and racist, but be careful not to hyperbole - that really pushes people away - and while pushing away the actual nazis isn't something I have much of an issue with, there are tons of people that can get behind some of the dog whistly language without believing in the actual ideology. Does anyone besides white supremacists and the people that "coincidentally" support them get/deserve this sort of political coddling?
I mean, sure? I think right wingers describing social democratic policies as communist is counter productive for their cause, too, and that if you saw this happen from moderate right wingers towards moderate left wingers, it'd be likely to push them away more than it'd convince them to join them. Similarly from left to right - if I'm arguing with a voter of the Norwegian conservative party and they're like hey, we need to reduce sick pay to make people less likely to stay home from work when they're not actually sick, then I do a piss-poor job convincing them if I start off by describing their preferred solution as an ayn randian hellscape.
Like picture these scales
communist -------social democrat -------centrist --------conservative/economically liberal------- ayn rand
I think people that are placed on various degrees of this axis can easily end up moving from one of these descriptions to the other. Centrists are potential social democrats and also potential conservatives/economically liberal, social democrats are potential communists but also potential centrists, the conservative/economically liberal can be swayed towards ayn rand or towards centrism - but not towards communism. I further think that if the conserative/economically liberal are conversing with the social democrats and they say 'you guys are communists', the social democrats will be less likely to move towards centrism from that interaction.
not racist ----------------------------- racist
While I don't have fitting terms to describe the potential positions on this scale, I can imagine a similar mechanic unfolding. Say there are 5 points of the not racist to racist scale (like above) - while a 1 (least racist) is less racist than a 3, describing the 3 as a racist does not move the 3 towards the 2 (where he can potentially be swayed), but rather towards the 4. Trying to reach the 5 is a hopeless endeavor, but if you're a 1, you'd rather have more 3s than 4s and you can predict that even if the 3 is guilty of some racist thoughts and actions, he could still be considerably more racist, and he himself will not consider himself racist (the racists are the 4s and 5s, obviously).
not nazi --------------------------- nazi
Same applies here - except while for racism you can argue that tons of people find themselves somewhere between 2 and 4, I think with nazism the gray area is significantly smaller, there aren't really any 'well I'm fine with genodicing half a million jews but 5-6 million is too many'-people.
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On February 20 2025 23:36 Liquid`Drone wrote:Show nested quote +On February 20 2025 23:19 GreenHorizons wrote:On February 20 2025 23:06 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Call out the blatantly obvious ones but ignore the ones where the plausible deniability is strong. Call out patterns, ignore singular offenses. For Elon Musk it's becoming easier and easier every passing day to call him a nazi and harder and harder to deny it. I'm noticing it with my students - many have stated - looking at the nazi-greeting, that this was just an awkward autist gesturing. These students are overwhelmingly not nazis.
However presenting them with context of other tweets and the totality of musk's dogwhistling, they're like, oh, that's fucked up. It's kinda in line with 'call out the racism that is unquestionably racist, but avoid describing people who are a bit insensitive or ignorant as racist'- thought that I've also been a proponent of. Finding exactly where the balance is is tough of course but my experience is that even among trump supporters, racists and nazis are considered bad people.
So - don't entirely abandon terms and phrases like nazi, fascist and racist, but be careful not to hyperbole - that really pushes people away - and while pushing away the actual nazis isn't something I have much of an issue with, there are tons of people that can get behind some of the dog whistly language without believing in the actual ideology. Does anyone besides white supremacists and the people that "coincidentally" support them get/deserve this sort of political coddling? I mean, sure? I think right wingers describing social democratic policies as communist is counter productive for their cause, too, and that if you saw this happen from moderate right wingers towards moderate left wingers, it'd be likely to push them away more than it'd convince them to join them. + Show Spoiler +Similarly from left to right - if I'm arguing with a voter of the Norwegian conservative party and they're like hey, we need to reduce sick pay to make people less likely to stay home from work when they're not actually sick, then I do a piss-poor job convincing them if I start off by describing their preferred solution as an ayn randian hellscape.
Like picture these scales
communist -------social democrat -------centrist --------conservative/economically liberal------- ayn rand
I think people that are placed on various degrees of this axis can easily end up moving from one of these descriptions to the other. Centrists are potential social democrats and also potential conservatives/economically liberal, social democrats are potential communists but also potential centrists, the conservative/economically liberal can be swayed towards ayn rand or towards centrism - but not towards communism. I further think that if the conserative/economically liberal are conversing with the social democrats and they say 'you guys are communists', the social democrats will be less likely to move towards centrism from that interaction.
not racist ----------------------------- racist
While I don't have fitting terms to describe the potential positions on this scale, I can imagine a similar mechanic unfolding. Say there are 5 points of the not racist to racist scale (like above) - while a 1 (least racist) is less racist than a 3, describing the 3 as a racist does not move the 3 towards the 2 (where he can potentially be swayed), but rather towards the 4. Trying to reach the 5 is a hopeless endeavor, but if you're a 1, you'd rather have more 3s than 4s and you can predict that even if the 3 is guilty of some racist thoughts and actions, he could still be considerably more racist, and he himself will not consider himself racist (the racists are the 4s and 5s, obviously).
not nazi --------------------------- nazi
Same applies here - except while for racism you can argue that tons of people find themselves somewhere between 2 and 4, I think with nazism the gray area is significantly smaller, there aren't really any 'well I'm fine with genodicing half a million jews but 5-6 million is too many'-people.
Except in the US we saw Trump and Republicans do the opposite. Put simply, they incessantly called basically anyone to the left of Liz Cheney a communist and won the popular vote.
Trump didn't go from polling behind Carly Fiorina at 1% to being King president by coddling centrist Clinton supporters.
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On February 20 2025 22:33 Slydie wrote:Show nested quote +On February 20 2025 22:08 Uldridge wrote:
I think calling out someone is a Nazi makes no sense. You won't change anything about the situation.
I think understanding why society creates Nazis is way more productive and then you can tackle that problem head on.
Maybe a society needs a % of Nazis, so that we can stay on our toes? Maybe Nazism is something inherently (socio)biological for people with certain genetics. Who the fuck knows. Should there be a place for Nazis in our society? I sure don't want any, but Nazis seem to think they deserve to be here all the same and why not, they're humans after all.
I think this is a very difficult ethical question to tackle. It's basically the same like the integration problem with immigrants. It's needs such a careful way of setting up that, if you're not careful, you end up with segregated community after community that just doesn't work with you anymore (and vica versa) because they've entrenched themselves in their culture, basically importing their country into yours. That only causes friction for many people. Nazis are people, and have right, but they need to be held accountable. Once their world view is properly confronted, it tends to collapse, at least among the large majority of people. One of my favourite anti-nazi moves was sending the whole groups to old concentration camps. After seeing what the original Nazis did with their own eyes, the whole group dissolved. Has Musk ever had to properly answer questions about his Nazi dog whistles? Or any tough questions about his values, heroes and the consequences of what he appears to stand for? Another know trick for extremists is to appear more numerous and powerful than they actually are. This one has to be solved by more moderate republicans and Trump voters.
Musk visited Auschwitz a year ago with Ben Shapiro as a publicity stunt because of controversy over anti semitic posts. It didn't have the same effect on him apparently.
+ Show Spoiler +https://www.facebook.com/JulieGray972/posts/10233364060096375 I see people posting that Elon was at Auschwitz this time last year - therefore, his recent "gesture" is not antisemitic. I was there, too. Last year. With Elon. I am embarrassed that I have photos of this on my phone. My love, Gidon Lev, was the "special guest" of this photo-op event. We thought, at the time, that it would be good publicity. But I would not share the photo today. I chatted with Elon Musk. I spent hours with him and walked with him through Auschwitz. I stood with him, looking at the nauseating heaps of hair, luggage, and shoes flooded with violet light meant to preserve it.
Is Musk an antisemite? People, actually, it's worse - he doesn't care whatsoever. Elon, father of "little X" as he described his freezing cold son to me, literally does not care. He was unmoved by the experience. For Gidon, to be in the place where his father, Ernst, died on a death march - whether shot by the side of the road or having simply collapsed - was a huge deal. Elon did not care. He was about his press junket and his bodyguards. I was ten feet from him as he posed for the cameras of his entourage. He was utterly detached. He cared about how he looked. When he placed a wreath at Auschwitz and Gidon was overlooked, he walked away with the cameras whirring. This is Elon Musk. A sociopath, if ever there was one. To deduce, from this visit, that he is a friend of the Jews is desperately naive.
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On February 20 2025 22:08 Uldridge wrote:
I think calling out someone is a Nazi makes no sense. You won't change anything about the situation.
I think understanding why society creates Nazis is way more productive and then you can tackle that problem head on.
Maybe a society needs a % of Nazis, so that we can stay on our toes? Maybe Nazism is something inherently (socio)biological for people with certain genetics. Who the fuck knows. Should there be a place for Nazis in our society? I sure don't want any, but Nazis seem to think they deserve to be here all the same and why not, they're humans after all.
I think this is a very difficult ethical question to tackle. It's basically the same like the integration problem with immigrants. It's needs such a careful way of setting up that, if you're not careful, you end up with segregated community after community that just doesn't work with you anymore (and vica versa) because they've entrenched themselves in their culture, basically importing their country into yours. That only causes friction for many people.
I was recently exposed to an interesting philosophical explanation of this that can essentially be boiled down to the following…
- Humans have an intrinsic need to be part of a social network with other humans, which is the basis for both groupthink and communal beliefs like religion (“being a part of something bigger than themselves”), which are in turn the basis for moral/ethical behavior towards others
- Post-modern liberalism/individualism paired with warped social interactions (“strangers online” vs “real” people you see/interact with every day in community) leads to individuals embracing subjective / rational moralities that rely on their own individual values/experiences, leading to discarding of old communal frameworks over time as “outdated” and “irrational”. Also leads to intense loneliness, removed inherent importance of ethical behavior towards others leads to fear and insecurity of others
- Cognitive dissonance occurs when people are confronted with the subjective nature of this individual morality/value system they’ve created for themselves and fear/insecurity of others with intrinsic need to be part of social network, which when paired with loneliness begin spiraling into nihilism and viewing as “pointless in the big scheme of things”, “don’t belong anywhere”, “no one gets me”
- Fascism becomes obvious solution; is “strong” and “self-assured” where postmodern individualism is “complicated” and and “scary”, removes the need to deal with forming a messy individual moral framework, fulfills need to be part of social network / “belong”, and provides never-ending supply of purpose in life (resist / defeat the “other”)
I’m probably butchering a LOT in that synopsis but I think that’s the gist of it. Stuff like Nishitani’s exploration of “shunyata” as a description of being as part of something “bigger”, and Doestoyevsky’s “Notes From An Underground Man” as an example of a postmodern individual grappling with the cognitive dissonance of postmodern individualism with need to belong.
EDIT - Solution is basically love, take all the time/mental effort you spend on shit like worrying about the world that doesn’t have a practical purpose and instead say “given that I am an integral part of the social network of those I care most about (probably immediate family first, then spread outward to friends/community members over time), how can I best use my place in those networks to enrich their lives?”
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On February 20 2025 23:57 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On February 20 2025 23:36 Liquid`Drone wrote:On February 20 2025 23:19 GreenHorizons wrote:On February 20 2025 23:06 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Call out the blatantly obvious ones but ignore the ones where the plausible deniability is strong. Call out patterns, ignore singular offenses. For Elon Musk it's becoming easier and easier every passing day to call him a nazi and harder and harder to deny it. I'm noticing it with my students - many have stated - looking at the nazi-greeting, that this was just an awkward autist gesturing. These students are overwhelmingly not nazis.
However presenting them with context of other tweets and the totality of musk's dogwhistling, they're like, oh, that's fucked up. It's kinda in line with 'call out the racism that is unquestionably racist, but avoid describing people who are a bit insensitive or ignorant as racist'- thought that I've also been a proponent of. Finding exactly where the balance is is tough of course but my experience is that even among trump supporters, racists and nazis are considered bad people.
So - don't entirely abandon terms and phrases like nazi, fascist and racist, but be careful not to hyperbole - that really pushes people away - and while pushing away the actual nazis isn't something I have much of an issue with, there are tons of people that can get behind some of the dog whistly language without believing in the actual ideology. Does anyone besides white supremacists and the people that "coincidentally" support them get/deserve this sort of political coddling? I mean, sure? I think right wingers describing social democratic policies as communist is counter productive for their cause, too, and that if you saw this happen from moderate right wingers towards moderate left wingers, it'd be likely to push them away more than it'd convince them to join them. + Show Spoiler +Similarly from left to right - if I'm arguing with a voter of the Norwegian conservative party and they're like hey, we need to reduce sick pay to make people less likely to stay home from work when they're not actually sick, then I do a piss-poor job convincing them if I start off by describing their preferred solution as an ayn randian hellscape.
Like picture these scales
communist -------social democrat -------centrist --------conservative/economically liberal------- ayn rand
I think people that are placed on various degrees of this axis can easily end up moving from one of these descriptions to the other. Centrists are potential social democrats and also potential conservatives/economically liberal, social democrats are potential communists but also potential centrists, the conservative/economically liberal can be swayed towards ayn rand or towards centrism - but not towards communism. I further think that if the conserative/economically liberal are conversing with the social democrats and they say 'you guys are communists', the social democrats will be less likely to move towards centrism from that interaction.
not racist ----------------------------- racist
While I don't have fitting terms to describe the potential positions on this scale, I can imagine a similar mechanic unfolding. Say there are 5 points of the not racist to racist scale (like above) - while a 1 (least racist) is less racist than a 3, describing the 3 as a racist does not move the 3 towards the 2 (where he can potentially be swayed), but rather towards the 4. Trying to reach the 5 is a hopeless endeavor, but if you're a 1, you'd rather have more 3s than 4s and you can predict that even if the 3 is guilty of some racist thoughts and actions, he could still be considerably more racist, and he himself will not consider himself racist (the racists are the 4s and 5s, obviously).
not nazi --------------------------- nazi
Same applies here - except while for racism you can argue that tons of people find themselves somewhere between 2 and 4, I think with nazism the gray area is significantly smaller, there aren't really any 'well I'm fine with genodicing half a million jews but 5-6 million is too many'-people. Except in the US we saw Trump and Republicans do the opposite. Put simply, they incessantly called basically anyone to the left of Liz Cheney a communist and won the popular vote. Trump didn't go from polling behind Carly Fiorina at 1% to being King president by coddling centrist Clinton supporters.
I think this is a good point, and potentially points to hypocrisy. The logic of "don't label Republicans as Nazis/fascists/sexists/racists, even if they are those things (or close to it), because voters are apathetic/antipathetic towards name-calling" immediately falls apart when you realize that Republicans have done just as much name calling (and to a far less accurate extent, as far as those labels go) to anyone in the center or on the "left". The only way it wouldn't be hypocritical, I guess, would be if name-calling (accurate or not) only resonates with conservatives for some political reason, whereas name-calling (even if it's completely accurate) turns off liberals for some political reason.
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United States41931 Posts
Musk floated the idea to Trump of using 20% of the DOGE savings to send a $5000 check to net taxpayers (households who pay more than $0 tax after net credits). About $400b so that'd require $2000b in savings. So far DOGE, per it's own records, assert $8b in current savings though they use a higher number for projected savings. That appears to actually include a $0.008b contract which was listed on the DOGE website as $8b in savings.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/upshot/doge-contracts-musk-trump.html
Trump seems very positive about the idea. Strong work. It won't be inflationary because borrowing huge amounts of money and giving it to taxpayers isn't inflationary. And also because they won't actually ever do it, they'll just keep floating the idea of doing it whenever they need to throw some meat to the base.
The stories on /r/accounting of people who left big accounting and took a big paycut to go to the IRS for job security/benefits/service only to get an email last night letting them know to come in today to return their badge and credentials are super fucking sad. It used to be that a career in public service was, while not the best paying job, at least reliable. Now thousands of people are being let go "for performance". It's not legal in as much as congress approves and authorizes spend, not Elon Musk, but that doesn't actually help you when they simply shut the doors.
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Humans are not alike at all it turns out and respond differently to different situations, which is one of the reasons why we can't get along on how to fix things. There's absolutely no hypocrisy.
By the way, as an aside, I'm truly starting to loathe exceptionalism that veils itself as meritocracism. It's like AI will make you more productive. Yeah fuck that I'm not doing 10x more work and reading 1000s more lines of excel sheet crap just to crank out more of whatever it is you need because that'll just fry my brain.
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On February 21 2025 00:37 KwarK wrote:Musk floated the idea to Trump of using 20% of the DOGE savings to send a $5000 check to net taxpayers (households who pay more than $0 tax after net credits). About $400b so that'd require $2000b in savings. So far DOGE, per it's own records, assert $8b in current savings though they use a higher number for projected savings. That appears to actually include a $0.008b contract which was listed on the DOGE website as $8b in savings. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/upshot/doge-contracts-musk-trump.htmlTrump seems very positive about the idea. Strong work. It won't be inflationary because borrowing huge amounts of money and giving it to taxpayers isn't inflationary. And also because they won't actually ever do it, they'll just keep floating the idea of doing it whenever they need to throw some meat to the base. The stories on /r/accounting of people who left big accounting and took a big paycut to go to the IRS for job security/benefits/service only to get an email last night letting them know to come in today to return their badge and credentials are super fucking sad. It used to be that a career in public service was, while not the best paying job, at least reliable. Now thousands of people are being let go "for performance". It's not legal in as much as congress approves and authorizes spend, not Elon Musk, but that doesn't actually help you when they simply shut the doors.
From some people I've been around, this is a big talking point to a lot of them. They think these job cuts and the like are rooting out the corruption and waste in government. They don't think about the human aspect of it or the legality of it. They want results and this is giving them what they want. Nevermind that Musk and DOGE don't have the authority to actually implement any of this legally, they don't even know what they're looking at. There may be some redundancy, but taking a sledgehammer to the issue isn't solving it, it's only exacerbating it by a large margin. Can't wait to see what the unemployment and inflation rates are for next quarter and see how the Rs try to spin it where "liberal cucks are filing unemployment at higher rates because they've been exposed blah blah blah"
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United States41931 Posts
On February 20 2025 19:49 GreenHorizons wrote:Leader of the FDA resigned. Show nested quote +Jim Jones, head of the food division at the Food and Drug Administration, has resigned, according to a source familiar with the matter. The division is tasked with ensuring that the country's food supply is safe, overseeing inspections and recalls.
Jones' resignation comes after the Trump administration last week cut thousands of federal workers, including some who worked at the FDA. The source didn’t provide a reason for Jones' resignation.
The resignation was reported earlier by Bloomberg News.
In an interview with Stat News later Tuesday confirming his resignation, Jones said the firing of 89 people in the food division effectively dismantled the group.
“I’m not sure if it’s a lack of understanding of how things get done, or it’s that there’s really no seriousness about what they want to get done,” he told Stat. “I don’t know. But I didn’t want to spend the next six months of my career on activities that are fundamentally about dismantling an organization, as opposed to working on the stated agenda.” www.nbcnews.comIs resigning helping anyone but the person resigning at this point? Would it not be better in basically every way for these people to get fired for impeding rather than willingly stepping out of the way for Trump? EDIT: Now that I think about it, seems like an excellent opportunity for weaponized incompetence. Hard for the Trump admin to tell the difference between someone that's sabotaging them and someone just doing a bad job of accomplishing their stated goals. Democrats are well practiced at this, so it should be second nature really.
When the hangings start every collaborator always claims that they were practicing harm mitigation by staying within the system and reducing the damage done. Resignation is unambiguous opposition, it's "I will not be any part of this". While I can understand the argument for staying I'd want to see proof of serious intentional sabotage to escape the noose.
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United States41931 Posts
On February 21 2025 00:42 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:Show nested quote +On February 21 2025 00:37 KwarK wrote:Musk floated the idea to Trump of using 20% of the DOGE savings to send a $5000 check to net taxpayers (households who pay more than $0 tax after net credits). About $400b so that'd require $2000b in savings. So far DOGE, per it's own records, assert $8b in current savings though they use a higher number for projected savings. That appears to actually include a $0.008b contract which was listed on the DOGE website as $8b in savings. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/upshot/doge-contracts-musk-trump.htmlTrump seems very positive about the idea. Strong work. It won't be inflationary because borrowing huge amounts of money and giving it to taxpayers isn't inflationary. And also because they won't actually ever do it, they'll just keep floating the idea of doing it whenever they need to throw some meat to the base. The stories on /r/accounting of people who left big accounting and took a big paycut to go to the IRS for job security/benefits/service only to get an email last night letting them know to come in today to return their badge and credentials are super fucking sad. It used to be that a career in public service was, while not the best paying job, at least reliable. Now thousands of people are being let go "for performance". It's not legal in as much as congress approves and authorizes spend, not Elon Musk, but that doesn't actually help you when they simply shut the doors. From some people I've been around, this is a big talking point to a lot of them. They think these job cuts and the like are rooting out the corruption and waste in government. They don't think about the human aspect of it or the legality of it. They want results and this is giving them what they want. Nevermind that Musk and DOGE don't have the authority to actually implement any of this legally, they don't even know what they're looking at. There may be some redundancy, but taking a sledgehammer to the issue isn't solving it, it's only exacerbating it by a large margin. Can't wait to see what the unemployment and inflation rates are for next quarter and see how the Rs try to spin it where "liberal cucks are filing unemployment at higher rates because they've been exposed blah blah blah"
It's like their repeated claim of people over 100 years old receiving social security. The SSA uses COBOL, an older coding language, that stores dates using an epoch system with 0 being an arbitrary point in time with dates counted forward from then.
If there is invalid or no data on the birth year of an individual then they're going to show up as hundreds of years old. That doesn't mean the SSA believes they literally are hundreds of years old, it's just if you calculate age by "current day sequential number minus sequential number on day of birth" then that's just what 2025 minus "" looks like.
Wired debunked this the second Musk claimed it because it was obvious to literally everyone with any programming experience what they'd done wrong. Literally the kind of stupid mistake that you make on day 1 when first experimenting with database queries and running into bad data and then fix on day 2. When I was teaching myself database queries I, like everyone else, ran into the "attempting math on a field that has a number 99% of the time but sometimes doesn't even though it should" problem, flagged it, and built in exception resolution because when your math starts yielding impossible results you just troubleshoot it, examine the input data for an example case, and the cause is super fucking obvious.
Musk, and his team, have a worse understanding of this basic shit than someone with zero understanding of it.
https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-doge-social-security-150-year-old-benefits/
And yet despite it being a humiliating example of Musk literally never having done any coding at all he just ploughs on ahead and repeats the claim.
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On February 21 2025 00:58 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On February 21 2025 00:42 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:On February 21 2025 00:37 KwarK wrote:Musk floated the idea to Trump of using 20% of the DOGE savings to send a $5000 check to net taxpayers (households who pay more than $0 tax after net credits). About $400b so that'd require $2000b in savings. So far DOGE, per it's own records, assert $8b in current savings though they use a higher number for projected savings. That appears to actually include a $0.008b contract which was listed on the DOGE website as $8b in savings. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/upshot/doge-contracts-musk-trump.htmlTrump seems very positive about the idea. Strong work. It won't be inflationary because borrowing huge amounts of money and giving it to taxpayers isn't inflationary. And also because they won't actually ever do it, they'll just keep floating the idea of doing it whenever they need to throw some meat to the base. The stories on /r/accounting of people who left big accounting and took a big paycut to go to the IRS for job security/benefits/service only to get an email last night letting them know to come in today to return their badge and credentials are super fucking sad. It used to be that a career in public service was, while not the best paying job, at least reliable. Now thousands of people are being let go "for performance". It's not legal in as much as congress approves and authorizes spend, not Elon Musk, but that doesn't actually help you when they simply shut the doors. From some people I've been around, this is a big talking point to a lot of them. They think these job cuts and the like are rooting out the corruption and waste in government. They don't think about the human aspect of it or the legality of it. They want results and this is giving them what they want. Nevermind that Musk and DOGE don't have the authority to actually implement any of this legally, they don't even know what they're looking at. There may be some redundancy, but taking a sledgehammer to the issue isn't solving it, it's only exacerbating it by a large margin. Can't wait to see what the unemployment and inflation rates are for next quarter and see how the Rs try to spin it where "liberal cucks are filing unemployment at higher rates because they've been exposed blah blah blah" It's like their repeated claim of people over 100 years old receiving social security. The SSA uses COBOL, an older coding language, that stores dates using an epoch system with 0 being an arbitrary point in time with dates counted forward from then. If there is invalid or no data on the birth year of an individual then they're going to show up as hundreds of years old. That doesn't mean the SSA believes they literally are hundreds of years old, it's just if you calculate age by "current day sequential number minus sequential number on day of birth" then that's just what 2025 minus "" looks like. Wired debunked this the second Musk claimed it because it was obvious to literally everyone with any programming experience what they'd done wrong. Literally the kind of stupid mistake that you make on day 1 when first experimenting with database queries and running into bad data and then fix on day 2. When I was teaching myself database queries I, like everyone else, ran into the "attempting math on a field that has a number 99% of the time but sometimes doesn't even though it should" problem, flagged it, and built in exception resolution because when your math starts yielding impossible results you just troubleshoot it, examine the input data for an example case, and the cause is super fucking obvious. Musk, and his team, have a worse understanding of this basic shit than someone with zero understanding of it. https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-doge-social-security-150-year-old-benefits/And yet despite it being a humiliating example of Musk literally never having done any coding at all he just ploughs on ahead and repeats the claim.
And then the simpletons run with it and it grows into this huge conspiracy that's harder to get them to understand because Musk said it and MTG and her idiocy propogated it. So it just doesn't die. Therefore, when even a miniscule amount of errors are found, that have no real impact on anything, people think there's widespread fraud going on. Rinse and repeat with everything. From the FDA, CDC, IRS, etc. Each agency was created for a reason. There are more delicate and easier solutions than just firing wholesale and trying to recover those people once they realize "oh shit, we need nuclear scientists and admins to monitor nukes. Who knew?!?!?!" or "Well, I guess we should have a sizeable amount of people overlooking the food that Americans eat and the drugs they take because who knew XYZ would cause ABC and death?!?!?"
It's a fucking nauseating headache to watch this go on.
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It's a huge relief to know the government might not actually be actively paying benefits to a bunch of people it literally believed are 150 years old, and it's just a simple case of the government not knowing the age associated with millions of SSNs or knowing whether they are alive or not. My confidence in government competence is no further shaken.
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oBlade the point is Musk and his team are lying.
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EPT
