Turning On The Giant Faucet Of Bullshit - US Politics February 2025

I have a feeling we will soon be seeing looting on a massive scale.

xp Also it's not like you can just flip a "domestic manufacturing" switch. It takes years to open a factory.

So what Elon will do is misdirection. The DOGE probably will uncover waste, inefficiency, even fraud. He is going to emphasize *that* to pull attention away from what he is doing, the ways he benefits. He wants to maintain the image of someone “cleaning up” a bloated and corrupt government.

I think Trump likes this plan because it will “humiliate” the “deep state.”

The sign to tap reads "Trump Is A Stupid, Declining Asshole Who Wants To Stick It To Everyone & Everything That Told Him To Eat Shit In 2020"

Exactly jaymc. Whatever is going on now isn’t about creating better trade conditions for the american worker. I wish it was something like that — not that i’d necessarily support it as i think he jerking our allies around in nasty ways — but it would be a rational thing to understand and debate. What he is doing is using tariffs to threaten other states to cave to his demands, which seem expansionist and imperial.

Many intelligent canadians i have been talking to think the 51st state stuff is serious. Even though he called off the tariffs for now it might be. Greenland, Panama, now Gaza — this is a much more expansionist vision than we saw in 2017.

He is a madman.

Xp

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the CIA has offered buyouts to its entire workforce. Because if you're gonna purge people from the government for political reasons, you definitely want to start with the spies.

So there is all kinds of fucked up things the CIA does that I don’t support. However… it can’t just be evaporated like that without causing a massive threat to global security. I would think…

I’m not sure getting American troops killed so you can put trump hotels in Gaza is gonna go over well

“Let’s destroy America before our enemies do it”

I wouldn’t think he would go over well, especially after jan 6, but here we are

I've told the story before of the night I went to see GG Allin perform. He came out naked except for cowboy boots, sang about one verse of the first song, then started smashing the microphone into his forehead until he was bleeding down his face. Then he turned his back on the audience, squatted, and shit on the floor. Then he started rolling in the shit, rubbing it on himself, and charging toward the crowd. We all fled. But as we left the back room where the show was and came out into the main room of the bar, the bartender pointed and laughed at us, and I'll never forget his words: "What's the matter? Isn't this what you wanted? Get back in there and party with him!"

This is that, on a nationwide/global scale. People paid for what they thought they wanted, at least in part because they thought it would be entertaining, and now they don't want it anymore. (Also, people wanted the US to cease to be a hegemonic global force, and now they're getting exactly that. But not in the way they wanted, I don't think.)

i don't dare look but does fox news still love him and explain away everything he does?

Comparing Trump's party to GG Allin is *chefs kiss* tbrh

That’s an amazing post unperson

Seconded

I don’t think anyone has played themselves as hard as Rashida Tlaib.

Well the people of gaza didn’t buy a ticket to this show, neither did the undocumented people fleeing gangs and political persecution who are now totally unprotected

it can’t just be evaporated like that without causing a massive threat to global security. I would think…

Flood the world espionage market with disgruntled agents, fabulous idea.

xpost amen, real people who were already being hurt are being threatened even more. It's all depraved.

I don’t think anyone has played themselves as hard as Rashida Tlaib.

― Allen (etaeoe), Tuesday, February 4, 2025 10:40 PM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

oh?

I think "Boy, don't you feel stupid for not voting for just a little genocide as a treat" is the sick own you think it is, etaeoe

i keep seeing this commercial with a guy lying on the floor in pain and amazon sends him a huge bottle of oxy with three refills. they know how to sell doctors! but what if their oxy comes from china...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCYaYZhd1bo

Damn, Amazon's gonna start a chain of pill mills servicing their warehouse workers.

It's OK, it'll come out of their HSA.

(Also, people wanted the US to cease to be a hegemonic global force, and now they're getting exactly that.

Don't think that is true at all? Just because the hegemonic global force is flailing around and self destructing doesn't mean it suddenly loses its status, we're all still chained to the US for the foreseeable afaict.

The Gaza story would just be something to chuckle at if it wasn't coming from a hegemonic global force for instance.

People who would like to see a dialing back of American imperialism probably aren’t the same people who are deeply upset by Elon’s USAID fuckery in particular.

hey, it's a two-state solution.

Are we supposed to be pro-USAID now?

...

their wealth depends upon the global economic order that they seem hell-bent on destroying? ... even as a leftist crank, is that it really just doesn't seem like any of this makes any fucking sense?

...
So there is all kinds of fucked up things the CIA does that I don’t support. However… it can’t just be evaporated like that

...
People who would like to see a dialing back of American imperialism probably aren’t the same people who are deeply upset by Elon’s USAID fuckery in particular.

The last run of posts is amazing and suggests a theory.

Tru/sk has done something: turned burn-it-down radicals into fans of the prior status quo. Anarchists are defending the government.

If it weren't so bizarre and awful I would be, like, quipping with detached irony or casting - what was it? Loftily removed bons mots?

My home town is on fire, and people who were shaking their fists at it a few weeks ago are passing buckets.

Leftists preferring the current terrible system over outright fascism isn't exactly a novel development, there's plenty of historical precedent - I fear your detached irony would fall flat.

I think the prior liberal status quo has some things to recommend it over the new oligarchic one. John Ganz's analysis yesterday really hit home for me:

To save themselves, the tech-oligarchs must attack the very notion of universality as such—hence their abandonment of liberal universalism for racism, nationalism, masculine domination, etc., because they represent a conspiracy, a shrinking, exclusive interest against a larger one. They are attacking first and foremost the State and the Bureaucracy, the civil servants: everything that Hegel identified in The Philosophy of Right with the universal, general interest of the whole society against the particularity of “bourgeois society,” the chaotic mass of self-interested businessmen. They want the State to appear just as particularistic as they are and destroy its legitimacy.

https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/what-happened-here-c9f

I understand why ppl are critical of USAID and frankly international development as an enterprise all together but I am literally getting text from my wife I who is in Laos right now. Here’s what she just wrote:

I had a very powerful meeting with a woman leading the only effort around access to justice for women here, she gets all of her financing from USAId and she’s providing the only legal services to trafficking victims. The stories she told me would make your skin crawl. I need to find a way to get money to her work because otherwise she shuts down.

I love guided by voices and all but GBV means something totally different in my house

These kinds of departments are a mix of necessary humanitarian aid and sneaky ways for the US to exercise soft power and even disguise covert operations.

What Musk is doing is like if, in response to doctors getting kickbacks from pharma companies to prescribe opioids, the government shut off all funding to hospitals.

pretty sure that's next anyway

Musk is an anarcho-capitalist wrecker. He’s not trying to remove fraud and waste. If that was the case he would also address tax loopholes and corporate subsidies like the ones he receives. *He does not have a vision of the state that involves providing for the common good.* He is eventually going to go after Social Security and Medicaid because there is no other place except the Pentagon he could go to make the kinds of cuts he is talking about.

Trump’s rhetoric often had to do with getting a better deal for the American worker. *That is not what this is.* Nothing could be further from Musk’s mind than people’s wellbeing.

Trump voters probably won’t get it. It should be obvious with Musk even if they were charmed by Trump’s gruff New York manner, his personal vanity and other human foibles. Musk sounds like an android and he wants to put microchips in people’s brains.

the trump hardcore probably don’t care or even approve of all these seemingly “bold moves” but i do think that there is a substantial number of mild middle of the road people who will be radicalised by this, and i don’t think it’s wishful thinking. the instant you or a family member are hurt, stressed or traumatised and there’s a direct causal chain that’s it

Feel like they are overplaying their hand at record time

new wall street journal headline this morning:

Trump Campaigned on Ending Foreign Entanglements. Now He Wants to Own Gaza.

i mean the question is how do these people express their buyers' remorse, before 2026?

i can think of a few ways

They don't, it's "we'll see how it plays out," which might be an acceptable way to view it if it were an actual, y'know, _game_.

Not so gamelike when your life is the ball and your children are the blades of grass.

Trump has swindled his way into power, by swindling people who were very willing to be lied to if the lies were coated in delicious, delicious racism. When he starts doing what he said he wouldn't do, enabled by both houses of Republicans who were also happy to be swindled if those lies were coated in delicious, delicious cruelty and also corruption and bribery, where is that tension expressed? I saw Jamelle Bouie writing last night that one reason leaders should prefer democracy to autocracy is that a key component of democracy is the peaceful transition of power.

mulitple xps

As in his first term, but even much more now, the cumulative effect of it all is not even outrage but exhaustion. Having to hear and think about this guy and his latest crazy shit nonstop is so tiring. But we can't just not pay attention to him, because any given statement or whim has real-world effects for real people, often bad ones. We voted this guy into our lives and we're stuck with him.

Yup

We live with what we failed to prevent, not that any of us had the power to do so

The fucking asshole won’t even leave us alone for Superbowl Sunday because he’ll be there too

"when your life is the ball and your children are the blades of grass"

worst megadeth album title ever...

Here it comes... the Muskovites are into Medicare and Medicaid.

Megadeth Muskovites Medicare Medicaid

All dactyls!

I got in a FAFSA for kid A last week, we are in the middle of pursuing a Medicare waiver for kid B, meanwhile my wife's job revolves around FDA and mine around GSA. Fun!

Ugh I gotta fill out a FAFSA too. It's so dumb because we won't get any aid, but our state's program that pays tuition for community college (a rare piece of good government here) requires that you file it before they'll give the scholarships.