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by footlose_3815 1y ago
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- sneak 1y agoThe concept of “projection” is really crazy once you get a good feel for it. I see it happening in so many places now. Shitty people seem to believe that everyone is like themselves; they assume that others would do the same shitty things they would do in a similar situation. They assign the emotional reactions and responses that they would have in a given set of circumstances to others, even if there is no evidence to support it. I suspect this is also where nuclear brinksmanship comes from. “We would conduct a sneak attack first strike on them, if we could, so they must be planning on doing it to us.” I think this is also why most cops don’t see anything wrong with breaking the law to carry out what they believe their duty to be. They see the world through the lens of criminal behavior. Corrupt politicians know that they would be availing themselves of every possible option to personally enrich themselves and push their agenda; they assume that every politician in power must also be doing this and are just getting away with it.
- krapp 1y agoWhat's crazy is that this is a well known and established strategy of the right, to the point that "every accusation is a confession" has become memetic, and yet it always works.
- perihelions 1y ago"The government is secretly controlled by an unaccountable, undemocratic Deep State", says the government secretly puppeteering civil finance regulators with CIA agents.
- theyinwhy 1y agoevery accusation is a confession
- azinman2 1y agoThis could not be more literally true
- 74B5 1y agoAnd the only logical conclusion is, no problem is solvable. Kind of the best thing the parasites could wish for, right? And only because people cant distinguish sincere politics anymore.
- troyvit 1y agoMan if that's true then what really freaks me out is all the accusations about vote rigging that happened in the last two elections.
- t0mas88 1y agoAnd now think about Elon Musk's pedo guy......
- giantg2 1y agoIt's not crazy, it's typical (sadly). Anytime either side is pushing something the other side disagrees with, they claim the opposition is being partisan. Then there are the flip flops, like claiming the debt ceiling is a big deal, then ignoring the issue once you're the one in power. Complain about heavy handed tactics when dealing with protests or "legal" pot, but not about guns. Have the IRS audit groups you don't like. Etcetera
- supplied_demand 1y ago[flagged]
- ETH_start 1y ago[flagged]
- supplied_demand 1y ago[flagged]
- mgkimsal 1y agoI can't reply to the previous post now, but the 'bailout' to Central States Pension Fund. $36b to deal with a pension fund serving 350k people. Yes, seems high. Yes, was an 'unusual' move, done during 2021 - height of covid. Why did CSPF need assistance? It never quite recovered from 2008 financial crisis - banks and other companies got 'bailouts' but not CSPF. Massive economic turmoil during 2020/2021 because of covid impacted the fund further. Might have been other or better ways of trying to address this (and many other covid issues). But we got what we got.
- ETH_start 1y ago[flagged]
- sorcerer-mar 1y ago
- supplied_demand 1y ago[flagged]
- dmix 1y agoTrump was never free trade, he campaigned on tariffs both times and loves welding the government over private industry. People always call out the lack of conservative laissez-faire values in their admin as a contradiction, because other GOP pushed those values particularly in the past. But this admin has been pretty honest about their agenda as a populist authoritarian right wing movement. People are probably just surprised to find out what that means in practice.
- supplied_demand 1y agoThe point is that the entire party did a complete 180 on one of their strongest bedrock principles. These people still call themselves conservatives while supporting an administration that holds almost zero "conservative" stances. They believe in power, period.
- dmix 1y agoWell that's my point. Those are libertarian/small government conservative values which are no longer in vogue. Nothing stops you from being conservative and supporting authoritarianism or believing a strong executive branch over other branches (including the courts). I would argue it makes them less of a traditional American conservative party though, as values like separation of powers are rooted in the US founding documents of the country. And a core part of being conservative is respecting your established institutions (cultural, legal, etc). On paper Trump is a centrist in many ways because he doesn't seem to have strong values either way.
- supplied_demand 1y ago== On paper Trump is a centrist in many ways because he doesn't seem to have strong values either way.== He has enacted much of the Project 2025 agenda, which is a right-wing, authoritarian playbook.
- baggachipz 1y agoI'll tell you what's crazy, is the fact that anybody is surprised by this. These stories can come out all day every day (and often do), but the corruption is so deep that there will be no consequence. Just business as usual.
- potato3732842 1y agoThis. They are the problem. Because whatever side they're on they lend political capitol to the stupidity when it's their team doing it. You'll never have enough people to care enough to change things so long as half the people who could care at any one time are actively making excuses or running cover when it's their guy. People need to have some goddamn principals. Corruption and backroom dealing is bad no matter who's doing it. Even if you like who's doing it you should still not like it because at the very least it de-legitimizes your cause.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- cobrabyte 1y agoThat's modern politics.
- throw0101c 1y ago> It's crazy seeing the people who cried "Political partisanship" and "Weaponization of government" are doing it all now, in a higher magnitude than anything they complained about. Every accusation is an admission. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusation_in_a_mirror https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusation_in_a_mirror * https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/every_accusation_is_a_confession https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/every_accusation_is_a_confess... * https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/karl-marx-enemy-quote/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/karl-marx-enemy-quote/
- hypeatei 1y agoIt's like the bullshit "hunter Biden laptop" story which, after years of investigations, found that he filled out a gun form incorrectly. That's called a political witch hunt. Not only that, but cries of censorship by Twitter were also bullshit seeing as Republicans (Trump specifically) submitted the same requests to take things down all the time.
- quickthrowman 1y agoThis is precisely what I expected from this administration, it kicked off with not one, but two crypto pump-n-dump/bribe vehicles from the President and First Lady. Anyone expecting less than nakedly open corruption and self-dealing is not paying attention.
- Yeul 1y agoA US president visiting his own golf course on a state visit! I think it's just too painful for people to admit how fast their country is going down the drain. I like to imagine how decent Germans must have felt in 1938. How did they keep themselves sane?
- mschuster91 1y ago> A US president visiting his own golf course on a state visit! Meh, I don't have too much of a problem with this one. A number of US Presidents, both modern and long-since dead, have been known to indulge in golfing [1]. There's so many truly bad things Trump has done, him visiting a golf course is hardly extraordinary in comparison. [1] https://www.scga.org/blog/13174/every-presidential-golfer-ranked-by-handicap/ https://www.scga.org/blog/13174/every-presidential-golfer-ra...
- Arainach 1y agoThey didn't pay themselves to golf or charge the government millions to house the secret service. It's among the most blatant bits of corruption.
- footlose_3815 1y agoAre you OK knowing how much it costs taxpayers for him to stay at his own golf course? It's corruption at its core. He's robbing taxpayers. It comes to around 10 million per trip of the taxpayer dollars. He gives smoke and mirrors with "I don't take salary" but it's in plain sight he's profiting from his seat, which no other president did at this magnitude in recent times. They made Jimmy sell his peanut farm.
- rayiner 1y ago[flagged]
- mrsilencedogood 1y ago"If you commit to institutional neutrality, the result is a one-way ratchet" Can you explain why this is the result? And why is it allegedly democrats that the ratchet pushed towards? There are well-known differences in political alignment both among more-educated workers (the federal government probably does not employ many people without at least a college degree of some sort?) and being employed in a public-services government job (e.g. what kinds of workers are more likely to want to work for the EPA? People who want to protect the environment or people who want to exploit it more? Remember, one party tried to sell off a large number of public forests and lands and is gutting the national parks). These seem like they would explain the majority of the effect you mention without any mention of some kind of ratchet mechanism.
- rayiner 1y agoThe one-way ratchet results from the very factors you mention. To your EPA example: the nation’s environmental laws all reflect compromises between protecting the environment and minimizing impact on businesses. They wouldn’t have gotten through Congress otherwise. If you have an EPA full of employees who, to use your words, think of one side of those compromises as “exploit[ing]” the environment, they are naturally going to push to effectively undo those compromises, in a direction that generally aligns with the party that federal workers overwhelmingly vote for. That’s the one-way ratchet. It’s a typical principal-agent problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble.... But that’s not how the system is supposed to work in a democracy. Ideally, executive branch policies would track the pattern of presidential elections, without any detectable aggregate influence from the political preferences of federal workers.
- mschuster91 1y ago> That’s the only rational action when 80-90% of federal civil servants belong to one party. That's an obvious result of the Republicans making an outright political point of being for a "small state". Like, why should anyone who is a Republican even apply for a job that their own party actively campaigns for to go away? > That’s how we ended up with a federal government that got so extremely out of sync with public opinion on issues like immigration: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi... Unfortunately paywalled so hard that archive(.)today can't index it. Anyway, just blaming a "Democrat-leaning federal civil service" is ignoring the elephant in the room: decades worth of anti-immigration propaganda being shilled by Fox "News" and other TV/radio stations, Murdoch's rags and, last but not least, Russian bot farms on social media.
- taeric 1y agoAn annoying part is that this is a bit causative. They were so indoctrinated in the fear of how much this was happening before, that they convinced themselves it was normal and required. That is, allowing it to become a normative conversation with no pushback that "government is bad" is a large part of how we got here.
- api 1y agoIt's been ratcheting up for decades.
- hearsathought 1y agoAccuse others of what you are doing or planning to do. It's standard politics. Both sides do it. It even applies internationally/geopolitically.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]