Starker on 31/1/2025 at 15:26
I watched RFK jr's hearings and I've changed my mind about the most dangerous nominee -- while all of them are accomplished conspiracy theorists in their own right, more than Tulsi Gabbard or Kash Patel this man is likely to kill people in the US and possibly elsewhere with his anti-science ideas.
demagogue on 31/1/2025 at 16:05
That may be right in terms of the sheer body count, and all of the social wreckage that will cause, but we still have to keep an eye on their insistence on "deporting" (at this point we should know they mean indefinitely detaining) 20 million people and Trump's response if an actual war breaks out that he can't keep us out of and we get shoved in back-footed because Tulsi will be an open channel of US vulnerability.
But don't discount Kash weaponizing the FBI, and the DOJ getting weaponized as well. Of course my background for all of this has been deep research into what just happened in Hong Kong. The new National Security Law only arrested just over 100 people, but free journalism and civil society completely and instantly collapsed, and I mean total collapse, every independent media outlet and every organization from the big rights NGOs to little book clubs.
The bureaucracy there was also gutted, and that's one thing I'm also keeping an eye on in the US. People may not see it, but the civil society groups and agency staff are exactly the people that check government abuses at every level, but also are the ones ensuring government works for people, in ways big and small like public comment periods for new laws or just having enough staff to manage the paperwork or basic tasks.
The fact that an airliner crashed into a helicopter killing over 60 people not even a week after Trump gutted the air safety system and that exact air traffic control center was understaffed, and now he's doubling down on gutting it even more as the solution!, is such a perfect example of the hidden ways that his program is going to be one disaster after another.
Of course the right answer is the full body-count and social wreckage of the combination of all of Trump's picks and insane policies will be on Trump and be a stain on the US legacy for ages to come.
SD on 31/1/2025 at 16:25
I don't think it helps to speculate on what caused the crash; a proper investigation will establish that at a later date.
What I do think is that you shouldn't give Trump the wherewithal to place blame in the first place. If you hire people because they're the best person for the job and not because they tick some arbitrary box, you deprive him of the ammunition. As I keep saying: learn the lessons. Learn them, learn them, learn them.
Sulphur on 31/1/2025 at 17:56
Lol. 'Trump's wrong but he's also not wrong.' You can't deprive Trump of ammunition, because he'll simply make up something else to blame democrats for on his agenda du jour. Your 'lesson' sums up to 'give Trump what he wants so he won't have anything to complain about,' which is some very special reasoning.
While we're busy not speculating, we don't in fact know that there wasn't the best person on the job who didn't tick some arbitrary box to begin with. What we do know is that Elon pressured the previous FAA chief into resigning, and that certainly didn't help matters before the crash.
Nicker on 31/1/2025 at 18:48
Thank you, Sulphur. Saved me some typing.
SD on 31/1/2025 at 19:05
Saved you some thinking too.
Enjoy 8 years of President Vance.
Starker on 31/1/2025 at 21:12
Mindlessly buying into the rhetoric of reactionaries is not what I would call thinking.
lowenz on 31/1/2025 at 21:44
Quote Posted by Qooper
Duat didn't say anything along those lines. You injected all of that vague state control doom and gloom into the conversation as if it was somehow related to what was said.
It's not "doom", it's just normality and you can't percieve it otherwise. That's the problem, you can't see how "control" works and you call it "power".
It's amusing that a lot of "trump card" answers you can get from conservatives are just built around the same"empowering" narrative of the their ideological adversaries.
It's not a power to passively obey to nature's design (unless of course you're a believer) just like is not a power to be abused (unless you're a pornstar).
lowenz on 31/1/2025 at 21:59
Quote Posted by SD
If you hire people because they're the best person for the job and not because they tick some arbitrary box, you deprive him of the ammunition.
Post Truth attitude can spin every argument as someone needs (arbitrary box=being american) and you of course know this......
