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

Re: the agriculture stuff last time he did this he just shoveled tons of tax money to corporate farms to buy their compliance

There's a definite push to get rid of small family farms and consolidate everything into large corporate ones which is a choice considering your base.

just like Russia in the 30s!

I'm working on a letter to my extremely maga congresspeople, but I have to confess — I'm worried they'll send dissenters' names to a "fuck up this person's life" list at DHS. Is that a stage of paranoia too far?

not too far. but be worried, and send it still. as if they don't have all our names and voting records and donations and facebook accounts and so forth sorted through some kind of inept AI into 'patriot' and 'loser' bins. we've posted for years on ILX. that alone.

https://scontent-bos5-1.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.75761-15/477055941_18393251152096400_2685505498200608245_n.jpg?stp=dst-jpg_e35_tt6&_nc_cat=111&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=18de74&_nc_ohc=mrEcYNxk3CUQ7kNvgH9cF5j&_nc_oc=AdgJj0n9WmJH9AH9bAYVZG3LSVTt-NKX9KCH11A207PysbHsizEo1fYPFNdevSPFVtRdGpOvKXdjdftun4w_fhtr&_nc_zt=23&_nc_ht=scontent-bos5-1.cdninstagram.com&_nc_gid=AzKORdxmt0WWg3OoZz1YRq_&oh=00_AYA7fRB7IAA2vmkdCuVZm83yVfeEtuxyh5jC1GjP3hL5nQ&oe=67AEE8D5

Increased security today at the Kennedy Center due to threats from Trupoids who just found out they had a drag show months ago.

Said drag show cited by Two-Scoops himself as the primary reason for his taking over and dismissing the staff.

xp to WmC's post - I've only ever once left a clue on ILX that would directly lead to my "government name". Apart from that one instance, it would take some very fancy sifting and drawing of inferences to arrive at my name, via much older traces dropped much earlier during my three decades on the internet and following them here. Not that I'm worried about the consequences if they somehow pulled it off. I'd rather not keep my beliefs secret. I don't intend to live underground.

it's easy to figure out who i am. also, due to previous employment my pii has been hacked/stolen at least 7 or 8 times. every year i get a new letter informing me that i get another 3 years of free bonus online fraud protection due to a new security breach where everything was compromised yet again.

but yeah, also you're right that trolls could come after you. the one time an online troll talked to me, it was actually a good conversation. some cryptoteens were picking on me online while other bad stuff was happening, so i posted my phone # and told these fucking kids to talk to me like a real person. one of them called! he seemed like a misguided but ignorant young person

Trump always liked Step It Up better I guess

to the right / to the (far) right

I’ve been writing and posting all kinds of things under my own name for 35 years or so, not gonna stop now. If we get down to local enemies lists and that kind of thing, I can think of a few people at least who will be happy to add my name. Whatever. I don’t really expect to lose my Social Security or passport, much less die at Gitmo or be targeted by some militia, but better people than me have gone out like that. You can’t control whatever currents of history you happen to live through. Just how you respond to them.

i am me. fuck trump. fuck musk. they can fucking go fuck their own shit the shitfuckers. love, scott seward greenfield mass, 01301

❤️

op ed by M. Gessen today is about this exact thing, all the ways in which people preemptively acquiesce to the new world order and in so doing bear responsibility for bringing it about. Not blaming them, but rather explaining all the extremely compelling reasons why ethical/moral/practical calculus can all work in favor of the rising fascism by steering us towards decisions that help rather than hurt it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/08/opinion/trump-power-surrender.html?unlocked_article_code=1.vk4.BBg-.n3IdGtEABOss&smid=url-share

(gift link)

here and elsewhere I have been very loud and opinionated about my beliefs. a few years back, i was a finalist for a queer writing award, and hopefully will be again. i’m not going anywhere.

otm. I'm all over the interwebs. And I'm in the middle of stirring up trouble at my public university, so I'm not going anywhere (yet).

I'm a writer, so my real name is all over the place. It would be very easy to hop from one thing to another. (There's another writer with the same name as me, which might provide slight misdirection, but probably not.)

I’m not worried even though I publish my writings in the New York Times under the pseudonym Brett Stephens .

you misspelt your pseudonym

lol

I write as Sue Donym.

I remain Ross Douchehat.

I’m not even American.

Unclear how many of us are at this point tbh

https://outlawvern.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/cards_coneheads.jpg

Like the Coneheads, I'm 50% American

I have a deeply unpleasant and traumatic memory associated with that movie, whew. (No worries, I've been to therapy for it, all good, just noting for my own sake).

Very sinister movie

Join us and Senator Elizabeth Warren tomorrow, February 10, outside the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau office beginning at 4:15pm and stop Elon’s billionaire grift!

Do they have any plans to go inside or what?

Probably will just be polite and stay outside

But that's no way to start a revolution.
At least go inside.

The revolution will not be televised, brother - the revolution will be inside.

I’m in the same boat Scott is (and also do not know how to make the account name changes necessary). There are too many other things to worry about already, you know?

I think this form of worry is either borrowing trouble or kind of narcissistic. Don’t talk yourselves into being intimidated or comply in advance!

Trump knows I don’t like him.

NASA told to delete all mentions on all websites of the following subjects:

DEIA
Diversity (in context of DEIA)
Equity
Inclusion
Accessibility
MSI
Minority Serving Institution
Indigenous People
EEJ
EJ
Environmental Justice
Underrepresented groups/people
Anything specifically targeting women (women in leadership, etc.)

so what message are they taking out to the galaxy.
Gene Rodenberry would turn in his grave.
Bye Bye U.S. Empire

On January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight, killing all seven crew members aboard, five men and two unmentionables.

explosion was the unmentionables fault

Every day just feels like waking up to fresh slap in the face or punch in the gut.

so what message are they taking out to the galaxy.
Gene Rodenberry would turn in his grave.
Bye Bye U.S. Empire

reciprocal tariffs (an equivalent tariff on any country that puts them on U.S., supposedly), and blanket 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum imports.

i don't know very much at all about how this affects international manufacturing, customs, etc, so this comment was really helpful:

LGM commenter MacK sent along the following helpful primer:

Has Trump ever actually run any sort of business of was he just a poseur? Because this isn’t simple at all…

I have to question whether Trump has ever even read a tariff schedule, which is the central document from each customs jurisdiction that US customs is now going to have to get its hands on and make sense of – not to mention US customs agents, who would only be familiar with the US tariff schedule but now have to get their hands on something like 130 different jurisdictions schedules.

And having worked with them, I can tell you that they are extremely complicated things. First of all it’s not just that countries don’t charge the same tariff on all imports, not even the United States does not or the EU. Rather there are different rates on different imported products, and often what would seem to be the same product attract a different rate depending on Its condition and level of processing. Then in more complex products there are water content rules, what percentage of the product comes from Country X which gets a low rate for whatever reason, and what percentage does it incorporate from Country Y which doesn’t…

So try and work work out how this is going to operate is hard. They’re about 130 custom jurisdictions in the world, that is to say they’re 166 members of the WTO, but the EU and EEA have a common external tariff, so that’s one set of rates. So, US customs and US customs agents (the private people that specialising clearing goods through customs and making sure the right amount of duty and tariff is paid) are going to be trying to work out on every single item important in the United States how much has to be paid? That is going to bring US ports to a screaming halt.

But it’s not just that. As the British discovered with Brexit manufacturing has changed over the last three decades to what is known as “just in time“ manufacturing, where components arrive just before they are incorporated in the next step of the production. This saves manufacturers an awful lot of money because they don’t have a huge inventory of input components to finance. The problem is the British discovered is that any delays in the port system causes absolute chaos at the manufacturing point. It’s entirely conceivable that this idea of reciprocal tariffs if applied to components coming into the United States will cause so many delays that people will actually be laid off or sent home from factories.

And now let me throw in a new wrinkle, the 25% tariff aluminium and steel is going to result in reciprocal retaliatory tariffs on the United States. [They] will not be initially published in the regular tariff schedule of countries shipping goods in the United States, which means they’ll be yet more delays while someone tries to work out what id actually the tariff rate right now on our equivalent going into country X or country Y.

hopefully Customs isn't gutted out by the doge (uuuuugh, this word becoming part of life now)! ironically, though, out of all possible applications of "replacing human workers with AI", making sense of 130+ extremely confusing tariff schedules and spitting out a recommendation (along with its source) actually sounds like something AI _would_ be able to accomplish, and probably with fewer errors and definitely way less complaining than the humans

Star Linking across the universe

(sorry to bring my ai bullshit off the ai thread - i think the status quo thought on ai is "there's no way ai can do anything humans can" - and unfortunately, i think that's wrong in some cases, and also that asking whether or not ai can do things as well as humans is the wrong question. for our courageous business and political leaders, the question is whether ai can even plausibly do it at all, not whether the quality is as good as a human. businessmen like to employ robots because they don't get benefits, they don't talk back, and they work 24/7. if there are complaints about the "quality", the answer is, first "good enough", and second, "if it's not good enough for some people, it will be later because ai will continue to get better and learn rapidly, while humans will continue to want days off and the beta work/life balance")

we need a big labor org to create an AI that outperforms C-suite execs and then gin up shareholder lawsuits against every corporation that doesn't use it for fiscal negligence

basically what we need is a giant robot humanoid form that does battle with monsters in our big cities

(dr. sbaitso could probably already do better than most c-suite execs)

what we need is a sentient fucking guillotine