I listen because he controls the most powerful army in history and can crush my country's economy if we don't allow his gang of oligarchs to mess with our democracy.
When the US sneezes, the whole world catches a cold.
Sure, you listen in the same way that you listen to the demands of an armed gunman in a store.
But you can't engage with trying to find any sense in it. His administration does not live in the same reality that anyone else does. Repeating the lies only gives them undeserved legitimacy.
I rather thought my original post was dripping with sarcasm, but I understand that it doesn't translate as well in text. I quote the orangeführer and his sidekick to bury them (in ridicule), not to praise them.
The way Trump works is that he's careless with details, entirely on purpose. Because it causes opponents to dispute the details he gets wrong, which in turn allows him to frame the debate. Compare this to someone who says something indisputably true, which no one can counter, and so then opponents ignore it and talk about something else instead.
It also allows him to exaggerate, because if you say "we got the best numbers ever achieved in history" but it's actually "just" the best numbers in a century, opponents who point out that was actually done by Teddy Roosevelt 120 years ago and not since are only underlining that it hasn't been done in a long time, while making themselves look like pedants.
But that doesn't mean that "Trump said it, therefore it's wrong" gets you out of the debate. For example:
> President Trump stated unambiguously that the recent crash and tragic loss of life is due to DEI hires, even though all the pilots and air traffic controllers involved were able-bodied white (presumably heterosexual and cis-gendered) men.
A plausible explanation for this is that because they were already all white men, new hires weren't allowed to be, so viable candidates were turned away, leading to under-staffing.
Is that what actually happened? Someone would have to investigate it, but until they do, you can't be sure that Trump is even wrong, or that he's necessarily wrong on the logic of it as might apply to other cases in general regardless of what turns out to be the case here in particular. And in the meantime he's got people talking about the possible dangers of doing the thing he doesn't like.
> because they were already all white men, new hires weren't allowed to be, so viable candidates were turned away, leading to under-staffing
Is there any evidence that this has ever happened in the history of the US? Not in this particular case as we wait for the details to emerge, but for any documented case?
> Is there any evidence that this has ever happened in the history of the US?
How would you even have a DEI program that didn't work this way?
You're currently understaffed and make efforts to hire someone to fill the position. The first qualified applicant you find doesn't meet the DEI goals. Your options are now a) hire them, stop being understaffed, but don't meet the DEI goals, or b) don't hire them and hold out for a candidate that can meet the DEI goals, but in the meantime you remain understaffed.
You don't always have the luxury of choosing between two concurrent applicants and this is a pretty unambiguous trade off whenever that doesn't happen.
In every place I worked in, qualifications are a show-stopper hard goal, DEI is a soft goal.
When someone doesn't have the qualifications you don't hire them on a micro level. When you don't meet the soft goal you look at your approach on a macro level. Is your pipeline bad? Are you missing qualified candidates? Are you biased?
You can work to improve all those things without any compromise on quality. And sometimes the soft goal is not reachable, or it's not reachable industry-wide, due to the pigeonhole principle. But that's doesn't feed into anecdotes and fairy tales about the boogieman.
What's actively repulsive and illogical is what he's doing - one or a group of people made a mistake, nobody yet knows what the mistake is, what contributed to it, and how it should be prevented in the future, but he spins a fairy tale that rests on assuming that they are unqualified. The only verifiably unqualified person in this story at the moment is him. Don't give that nonsense the time of day.
And look, here I am, not taking my own advice and engaging with that crap.
> In every place I worked in, qualifications are a show-stopper hard goal, DEI is a soft goal.
In this case the issue isn't qualifications, it's mean time to fill the position when you're understaffed.
Suppose you could find a qualified non-DEI candidate in one month and a qualified DEI candidate in six months. If you take the time to find the DEI candidate, the position is left unfilled for five months longer than it would have been. That's pretty bad if the result is a higher probability of a plane crash in the meantime, or any other important thing.
You don't seem to understand how these programs actually work in practice (One might even snark and say that you aren't sufficiently qualified.) DEI is measured as a statistical, after-the-fact, population-level macro mandate.
Any particular hiring decision is made on qualifications. It's illegal to not hire someone because their protected characteristics, and if you see someone doing it, you should whistleblow.
It's not illegal to look at your hiring efforts and decide to cast your hiring net in a different demographical area. But at the end of the day, you hire the candidate that meets the bar.
If you can't fill headcount, either your bar is too high, your firm sucks to work for, you aren't paying enough, or you need to work harder on hiring.
I have been involved in a lot of hiring over the years. I've never, ever been pressured, or even implied at that I should base any of my micro decisions (whether in rating or hiring) on someone's protected characteristics. I've likewise never seen them being used as justifications for my peers' decision-making. Oh, and everyone always bitches that hiring is too slow and it's too hard to find people. That's a universal constant, just like the universal constant of 'there's always more work to do than there is time to do it in'.
I have, however seen demographic-level statistics to be used as justification for "Maybe we should have a career booth at a work fair in the University of St. Louis. Does anyone want to go do that?"
> DEI is measured as a statistical, after-the-fact, population-level macro mandate.
For this to mean anything it has to be not just a metric but a target, and as soon as it's a target, you're not just measuring something after-the-fact.
> It's not illegal to look at your hiring efforts and decide to cast your hiring net in a different demographical area.
"Not illegal" isn't the issue when the debate is about what the law should be.
Suppose that you want to hit your numbers and that you further know that you can find more qualified candidates in a specific area which is predominantly white. If you advertise in the predominantly white area, you find a candidate in a month. If you advertise in that area and other areas, you find a candidate in a month, but it's the same candidate. Neither of these allow you to meet your numbers. Whereas if you advertise only in predominantly black areas, you eventually find a qualified candidate, and you meet your numbers, but it takes six months and in the meantime you're understaffed.
> If you can't fill headcount, either your bar is too high, your firm sucks to work for, you aren't paying enough, or you need to work harder on hiring.
Or you're hiring for a job with a limited number of qualified applicants while purposely reducing the number of applicants from a particular demographic because they would be qualified but mess up your numbers.
Why do you a-priori bias yourself to assume that looking somewhere else will reduce the number of qualified candidates that will make it through your pipeline?
How are you so confident that it won't increase it?
If it would increase it then you wouldn't need any DEI requirements to get the employer to do it because that would be their pre-existing incentive.
Also, sometimes the data is actually available. Demographic data is generally public. If you need to hire 100 people and you start off with broad-based advertising and then after a week have filled a quarter the positions from disproportionately one area, the normal incentive is not to stop advertising in that area, but if more candidates from that area are going to mess up your numbers, now that is your incentive even if it reduces the rate at which you fill the positions.
By that same logic, nobody should ever change anything about how they do business. We were doing it, clearly it was the thing that the business chose to do, if it weren't the best thing we ever did, we wouldn't have been doing it, ergo, we should not stop doing it.
Employers make mistakes all the time. But if they're doing something against their own self-interest by mistake, you could just show them the data demonstrating their error and they would have the incentive to change it of their own volition without forcing them to under penalty of law.
The situation in question is with respect to the government, which under the previous administration was imposing these requirements on government departments and contractors by executive order.
But there have also been attempts to interpret parts of the Civil Rights Act to prohibit "disparate impact" which would effectively require DEI because neutral hiring practices could otherwise result in disparities in outcome as a result of external factors.
> A plausible explanation for this is that because they were already all white men, new hires weren't allowed to be, so viable candidates were turned away, leading to under-staffing.
No, that's not even remotely plausible. Trump said it to deflect from having fired the head of the FAA because Musk didn't like him, among other things.
He could be right, but so could a stopped clock. You don't look at one to check the time, and you don't listen to a word said by someone whose favorite dish is the Gish Gallop.
If anything they are saying is right, someone who hasn't completely blown their credibility will eventually think of it. Or, they won't, and that's fine too, you're still better off on the net not trying to sift for candy in a large pile of shit.
Likewise, sometimes wearing a seatbelt does more harm than good, but you can't actually predict before-the-fact when that's going to happen, and you shouldn't use that as a reason to not wear one. Attention is limited, and you can't waste it on serial frauds.
The only thing he says that's often honest is what he intends to do. His words can teach you about him, but they won't teach you anything about the world.
> He could be right, but so could a stopped clock.
A stopped clock is right for two seconds a day out of 86400, i.e. 0.002% of the time. The problem with Trump is it's more like 30-50% of the time.
And then there are three things you can do when he says something.
You can ignore it, but that's not a great option when he's the President of the United States.
You can dispute the narrow ways he gets the details wrong, but that's just pedantry and you'll spend all day doing it to no avail because he can say stuff like that faster than you can fact check the details.
Or you can engage with the general shape of the argument he's trying to make and see if this is one of the times that there's actually something there. Which doesn't happen all the time, or even necessarily most of the time, but it's still often enough that universally assuming the opposite of anything he says isn't a valid heuristic.
As stopped clock is mostly right - within less than an hour of the truth - ~17% of the time.
If you're requiring five nines-level precision, he is right precisely zero percent of the time.
> but it's still often enough that universally assuming the opposite of anything he says isn't a valid heuristic.
He doesn't have the magic power where the truth is always the opposite of what he says. It's just that what he says is white noise. Its Shannon entropy is near-zero.
The response to that isn't to assume the opposite is correct. It's to just assume it's hallucinatory bullshit that's not worth listening to, or repeating, except to inform yourself on what he is going to do. His speech teaches us a lot about him, and nothing about anyone else.
Stopped clocks have more problems than precision. Their Shannon entropy is literally zero, because when you already know what time they say it is, the result will never change.
Whereas if Trump is talking about DEI stuff, regardless of the details, you can deduce that he's soliciting support for a policy change there, which means it's time to have the debate about that policy and see if we should support it or not.
You can't distinguish the things he says he's going to do from the things he says are happening, because the reason he says the latter is in support of the former.
> Whereas if Trump is talking about DEI stuff, regardless of the details, you can deduce that ...
... it's consistent with his lifelong racism, as well as the racism that permeates Project 2025. On day one he rescinded LBJ's executive order from 1964 barring federal contractors from discriminating.
Accusations of racism have been bandied about with such reckless abandon that they've lost all meaning without specifics and hard evidence of context.
Employers are prohibited from discriminating by statute which can't be amended by executive order. The executive order in question was regarding the use of affirmative action.
If a little Sieg Heil at the inauguration didn't convince you that this administration is pretty down with racism, I don't believe there's any evidence on Earth that will.
Specific, hard evidence, all in context, the man who gave it got an ovation and an office built in the White House, and a free hand in the agencies that are supposed to be regulating him.
You're referring to the thing the Anti-Defamation League called "not a Nazi salute" and the prime minister of Israel said he "is being falsely smeared". It's exactly what I mean by reckless abandon. It's a desperation to find something regardless of whether it's actually there.
It seems like we've gotten to the point that actual racists are so uncommon that people have forgotten what they look like:
> "We recognize the fact of the inferiority stamped upon that race of men by the Creator" -Jefferson Davis (referring to black people)
> "Anyone who has traveled in the Far East knows that the mingling of Asiatic blood with European or American blood produces, in nine cases out of ten, the most unfortunate results." -FDR
> "We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race." -Strom Thurmond
These quotes are not ambiguous or taken out of context. If you had asked these people if they were being misconstrued, they would have reiterated their positions, because they were actually racists who thought that other races were inferior and openly favored slavery or internment or segregation.
And it's sad that we're losing the ability to distinguish these things because of all the crying wolf.
I'm referring to the thing that anyone with eyes can see is a Nazi salute.
There's a beautiful side by side video clip of Elon actually throwing his heart out to the audience, and you'd have to be blind to think it's the same thing.
Who should I believe? My lying eyes? Or what the prime minister of a country that's courting US support in an internationally unpopular war says to curry favor?
The man's grandparents were registered Nazis, the man's rubbing elbows with the AFD, he's throwing out the 'roman salute' to thunderous applause at a political rally, and you're twisting yourself into a pretzel to explain how no, no, this is all a smear job against an innocent man.
How can you not see it? It's hard to tell if you're cynically taking the piss out of me, or if you can actually look at clip, and see something else.
There is a reason that doesn't make any sense: He did it in public, but then denies that's what it was.
If he was trying to be open about it then there would be no reason to deny it. If he wasn't trying to be open about it there would be no reason to purposely do it to begin with.
> There is a reason that doesn't make any sense: He did it in public, but then denies that's what it was.
Doing it then pretending that he doesn't do it carries two messages. For actual fascists, it's an indication that he's will support them, and that they should support him.
For people apologizing for fascists, the denial provides them the chance to spill gallons on ink on speculating about his state of mind and other plausible deniability for their insistence that he's not really courting fascists.
When someone does one thing, but says another, believe what they do, not what they say. Doubly so in politics.
There's no ambiguity in this symbol, or what it represents. Believe your eyes.
> For actual fascists, it's an indication that he's will support them, and that they should support him.
What actual fascists? That is not a large population segment in modern day. And support for what? He's not running for anything.
> the denial provides them the chance to spill gallons on ink on speculating about his state of mind
The theory is then that he made that hand gesture on purpose, intending to deny it.
Opponents would (as you do) disbelieve any denial and then try to use it against him, which is a significant cost. In exchange for this he would be trying to shore up support among the a) far smaller group of actual fascists who b) were previously on the fence and c) would not remain on the fence even though denying the gesture would be sending mixed signals.
There is no gain from doing that. It's why opponents are the ones talking about it. If doing that was actually to his benefit then opponents would want to be silent about it because publicizing it would be helping him to court the hypothetical large group of fascists who would look favorably on it.
> When someone does one thing, but says another, believe what they do, not what they say.
That's kind of the point. Hand gestures are in the category of saying something rather than doing something.
> There's no ambiguity in this symbol, or what it represents.
The obvious problem here is that the Nazis used "raising your hand" as a symbol.
The most plausible argument that he did it on purpose would be as a troll. Which isn't completely out of character for him, but it still has all of the same negative consequences above with the unambiguous implication of "not worth it".
What I have yet to see whatsoever is any evidence that he supports genocide, internment camps, incarceration without due process or the like. These are the things that make the bad guys the bad guys, not some kind of 5-D chess dog whistle rubbish.
has he actually denied it? or did he deflect with more Nazi "jokes"?
his neo Nazi supporters have enthusiastically welcomed the success of getting a fellow Nazi in the white house and he has continued to work with Nazi organisations across Europe.
> his neo Nazi supporters have enthusiastically welcomed the success of getting a fellow Nazi in the white house and he has continued to work with Nazi organisations across Europe.
Asking questions to neo Nazis is like asking questions to asylum inmates. Their brains are known to be broken so anything they say is presumed nonsense, and they're also very easy to manipulate into saying whatever you want to put into a story.
These right wing talking points have been repeatedly refuted. ADL contradicted their own definition of the salute. Both they and Bibi have vested political interests and citing them is grossly dishonest cherry picking.
