For some reason quite a number of people seem to believe the purpoted goals of DOGE, removing waste and increasing efficiency of the government.
I can't really understand that as it seems obvious to me that they're just destroying parts of the government they don't like. And while there is certainly room for improvement in many areas, whatever they're doing is not going to improve anything, it's only destruction.
> whatever they're doing is not going to improve anything, it's only destruction
This is why DOGE is staffed with young people.
It's easy to convince inexperienced people there's a 2-step plan:
Step 1. Destroy the old.
Step 2. Build the new.
Yet people with experience know that Step 2 requires orders of magnitude more effort and time than Step 1.
So, you have ignorant people breaking things, congratulating themselves on how quickly they're making progress... and then hit Step 2. And realize it's hard. And get bored. And so just, not.
Thus in the end, you're left with a broken pile of what came before, and nothing new to replace it.
You are being too kind to those young people. One doesn't need experience of bricklaying to see that building a house takes a lot longer than bulldozing it.
Anyone doing this kind of work is not merely ignorant.
> One doesn't need experience of bricklaying to see that building a house takes a lot longer than bulldozing it.
The experience of bricklaying will help you think about the future times when you'll have to lay the bricks. Without that experience you may not ever consider those times, especially in a scenario which has you excited about what you are currently doing.
This meshes well with the established policies of the Republican party, which is to campaign on how badly the Government runs, promise to fix it, get into office, then break the Government more, then run back to your constituency and say "I can't believe how bad the Government is, get me back in there so I can keep working on it."
They’ve long abandoned the pretense of fixing anything, and have gotten a lot of buy in from their base to just torch stuff and leave it in ruins.
Unfortunately (for all of us, including for their base) this isn’t actually what people want or need, except the ideologues pushing it with a clear understanding of the expected outcomes. The base just infers that the ruin of these “inefficient” programs is a noble end in itself, because their supposed inefficiency is the problem with the programs themselves.
To be fair, conservative ideologues over-shrinking the US government is an improvement on conservative ideologues invading foreign countries, which happened last conservative-populist time.
Depends why you objected to the Iraq war, I think. From a moral perspective, green lighting the permanent ethnic cleansing of Gaza sure seems worse to me.
"Build the new" doesn't even seem to be on the table at this point. There's no proposals to replace any of this. At least not public anyway, we know they are replacing all of this with for-profit scams.
Step 4. MAGA sees more government inefficiency and corruption than ever, but is reassured that it's just those terrible liberals sabotaging DOGE's good work and the NEXT round will really purge them
> Yet people with experience know that Step 2 requires orders of magnitude more effort and time than Step 1.
And also that the steps here should be reversed. Sure if you are tearing down a building you destroy before creating, but systems aren't buildings. If you are going to create a new system to run the cash registers for your business you don't tear out the old one and worry about building the new one later. First you have the replacement ready THEN remove the old one.
It befuddles me too. My understanding is that government spending is approved by congress and that all organizations except the Pentagon have passed their audits. This is not to say that there isn't _some_ waste, fraud and abuse in between the cracks, but any large expense is approved by Congress and the executive can't unilaterally override those spending choices.
There's a reason the federal budget is several inches of very thin paper. The budget spells out how much money gets spent for various purposes, programs, projects, etc. Of course they don't specify the kind of paperclips the FAA buys. But they will approve or modify the FAA's budget plan which includes $X for office supplies, $Y for an upgrade to the FAA's network equipment in a branch office, $Z for upgrading some nav beacons, and so on.
The executive branch can't defund or "stop spending money on" anything. Nixon decided he just wouldn't spend money on programs he didn't like, and congress very rapidly passed a law that said that the president couldn't do it, because the "power of the purse" rests solely with congress.
It certainly can't stop issuing payments for existing obligations, and it especially can't take money back, which M did a day or two ago to NYC because he read a tweet that said NYC was spending money housing migrants in "luxury hotels", which shockingly turned out to be nonsense...
That's why all of this DOGE crap is such theatrical nonsense. Congress, representing their state's interests and the interests of those who live in their district, via two separate branches, approves all the budgets.
No matter what T and M say, no federal agency can just willy-nilly decide to spend money it's allocated by congress on other stuff.
> The executive branch can't defund or "stop spending money on" anything. Nixon decided he just wouldn't spend money on programs he didn't like, and congress very rapidly passed a law that said that the president couldn't do it, because the "power of the purse" rests solely with congress.
That's all great in theory: in actual reality those laws are just words on paper, Congress has no interest in asserting its authority, and enforcement rests with the executive.
Sure. But then the continuous narrative must be that Trump is violating the law. Every single person who supports Trump should have to confront the fact that Trump is doing this in a way that declares the end of our constitutional order and his position as an autocrat.
I don't think they see a problem with this. My grandfather used to say we needed to get a couple leaders from GE or whatever company was huge and successful then, and let them have free reign for a year.
You end up driving up the share price in the short term and destroying the company in the long term but by then you’re gone as CEO with your golden parachute. Not unlike presidents who will be gone in 4 years time (if second term) and let someone else deal with the consequences of their actions.
There are definitely people who think that a president who just violates the law in order to achieve these outcomes is a fine thing. Those people are lost. Nothing I can say to those people will stop them from eventually putting a bullet in my brain.
The goal should be messaging to everybody else. Especially those who might like the outcomes of Trump's crimes but would prefer not to have a president that just smashes through the law to get there. A way to help achieve this is to repeat, over and over and over, that Trump's actions are violating shitloads of laws.
Trump is breaking the law, but Congress has no interest in holding him accountable - and they're the only institution Congress specifies for having the authority to hold the president accountable.
So...Trump is breaking the law and getting away with it. What else is new?
This is different from immunity. What’s supposed to happen is the action is stopped, as though the EOs never happened. It’s not illegal to issue illegal EOs, they just can’t be followed. The only real point sanctions come is when a judge says “stop” and the people involved don’t. This is violating a court order, which is contempt of court. But Trump wouldn’t be violating it, Musk would.
Yeah, but contempt of court still is enforced by the executive (the court can order enforcement, but it’s the DOJ [US Marshal’s Service] that does arrests and the DOJ [Bureau of Prisons] that holds those arrested.)
BUT... even if the executive is under legal theory constitutionally unitary, it isn’t actually unitary, it consists of individual people who act based on their own perception of legitimacy, and when the President abandons the principle of government of law and not arbitrary individual will in dealing with the courts, well, that also threatens the theoretical infrastructure that binds the people carrying guns in various executive departments to his authority, and we can very quickly end up in one of those highly unpredictable periods of history that produces lots of really neat stories to read about afterwards but is somewhat less pleasant to live through.
Absolutely, I didn’t want to give the impression any of this is good. I just wanted to correct the common misconception that issuing invalid EOs is, itself, a crime.
This is a good example of what I mean. There is no evidence that DOGE is acting on actual fraud and abuse, that is immediately obvious if you consider how broad most of their actions are. And unless you think that the federal government should essentially not exist at all I don't think you can declare all this just "waste".
DOGE should be able to make those arguments themselves. They're also not particularly transparent, so we have to assemble information from various sources.
They're right now firing all probationary employees at multiple agencies. That is entirely indiscriminate, and almost certainly disruptive to the mission of those agencies.
The actions at NIH and NSF will likely kill a large portion of the scientific research they used to fund. So unless you consider science in general be a waste I think these broad cuts clearly don't target actual waste and abuse.
The Twitter DOGE account posted a screenshot of where a 'Gender Identity Section' had been removed from a website.
Where is the efficiency saving and where was the waste?
This is really what has been on my mind. Simone tagged Elon showing him a screenshot of some veteran website allowing you to select more than two genders. Elon replies with a “On it. @DOGE”
I thought doge was about efficiency, why is he spending resources on the culture war?
USAID, CFPB, 18F (free tax filing), DOJ (lawyers who worked on Trump cases), EPA (halting alternative energy projects), NSF/NIH (funding by keyword search of anything remotely DEI related) etc
There aren’t any examples so far of stuff that is clearly waste and abuse.
If you don't think foreign aid is important for the continued safety of the US then you don't understand soft power and have no business in modern politics.
Sadly the people in charge fit into this category, except for the ones like Marco Rubio who actually do understand this but have no spine and are willing to overlook this stupidity for a seat at the table.
You have a child like nativity if you think foreign aid doesn’t come with strings attached.
You do know the polio vaccine program in Pakistan where DNA analysis to find Bin Laden was done through USAID? The one that set vaccination back decades?
I looked at the screenshot they posted about the 2.23M, which is all they posted. So we know, if I’m correct, absolutely and precisely nothing about this payment? Who was doing the equity assessment, how many people over what time period? What are the details of this, what was the purpose? I went digging briefly and found nothing. Why would I assume this is waste without any clue what it is?
The question is - are they fundamentally altering the function of government agencies.
I think you can get the answer from what they post. Cutting $400M in external contracts for a $10B agencies isn’t cutting major functions of the agency.
To be fair, the guy I was responding to got flagged so you probably can’t see it.
This wasn’t really our argument, and would look more like moving the goalposts.
To have the argument anyways, I looked back through their posts back to jan 20, and there’s really no information about most of the cuts. I presume that the few things they highlight, eg equity programs or whatever, are the worse of the worst that they could find, cause isn’t that what they’d show us? They could be cutting basically anything behind the scenes, and they themselves may not have a good idea what they’re cutting. As of jan 31st, they claimed to have cut 1-1.2 billion dollars overall. I assume that number is much higher now. Why would I trust that, while fumbling around looking at payment descriptions, one of Musk’s techbro zoomers didn’t hamper or cripple an important function of one of these departments? Where can I find the in-depth information on every cut?
Because the tech bros said it. Because that's how all tech bro gimmicks over the years went, be it crypto or investments or you name it - they claimed to "disrupt", "improve" and "revolutionize", and your guess how much of that actually happened.
Even if we decided that all of these were waste, that's still not even the bulk of their cuts. "Hey we got rid of some wasteful stuff because we closed 95% of the organization and some portion of that stuff was waste" is not sufficient.
the problem is labeling anything ideological as “waste”; one can get rid of anything under that cover, quite convenient.
You don’t need to write “the agency will no longer do X” you just need to fire the people doing X. Case in point the EPA and CFPB (which catch fraud among companies but were not worried about that anymore are we)
No – but why would you trust their Twitter feed and their Twitter feed only? Elon Musk himself has talked openly about dismantling the CFPB and USAID on his private account; in that case, it's a matter of "agency will no longer do anything".
Oh, they are posting a lot of cancellations, they rarely, if ever show what payments are for, exactly, and whether they are actual waste, or that it doesn't "neatly fits into the function the government agency is supposed to fill".
> but you see a few building leases sprinkled it.
You think agencies cannot lease buildings? And that it's a waste and fraud?
> I haven’t seen anything so far that says “Agency will no longer do X”, but happy to be be corrected.
They have literally unilaterally shut down several government agencies with bogus claims.
It's a damn shame the IRS funding is getting gutted and those billionaire 1% will be getting cuts anyways. Hard to go after those not paying when Daddy Trump and Daddy Musk cut the legs out from under the enforcement and audit folks.
Everything they’ve been cutting so far has been ideological (DEI USAID and other agencies that are“run by Marxists”) or retribution (DOJ lawyers getting sacked) or self-serving (EPA CFPB).
The only example of waste are the 150 yr old SA recipients. Sure that happens (we’ve been hearing about “welfare queens” for decades) but certainly not something new the DOGE “uncovered “.
And why are we entrusting a bunch of young engineers to identify fraud? They might be qualified to refactor and streamline computer systems but are certainly not qualified to determine what is “legitimate “ spending and what is not.
Most people consider anything they don't like to be a waste of public funds. After all, they pay for the government through taxes, so it should serve only their needs. People in America do not view the government as a source for public good, but merely a piggy bank from which they should be able to extract funds. Just look at the student loan forgiveness crowd. I'm perfectly happy paying my dues, but a lot of people have decided that they want the government to give them a load of free money instead of using it for something productive.
Many countries don't have this boat anchor named "student loan" at all, so maybe the lesson here is that indenturing your people who actually want to study shouldn't be a must?
Whether you're right or not is beside the argument he/she made, which I think is pretty strong: that many Americans think anything government does that doesn't directly benefit them is a waste. Personally I find this to be somewhat more true among folks who identify as conservatives but I also hear plenty of self-identified moderates and liberals complaining about the expenditure of tax dollars when it comes to the military and foreign influence or tax policy as it pertains to corporations and high earners.
Why not? Student loans are a good protection against brain drain. If you offer free university, there's a likelihood that people will take you up on it then move out of the country, thus wasting the money invested in educating that person. A student loan guarantees a good return on investment for people you educate. Admittedly, America solves this problem by charging income tax for citizens living abroad, but a loan is better in my view since you can't rescind it like you could a citizenship. I actually think the concept of student loans should be extended down to primary education. I also think it would be good to institute a similar system for medical debt.
As far as I'm concerned, "medical debt" is effectively extortion.
If I have some sort of major medical issue, such as cancer, it's absolutely fucked that my choices are to either die or to rack up an extreme amount of medical debt that I might not ever recover from. In either case, my life is ruined.
By "similar system", I am mainly considering one by which the debt doesn't actually have to be paid back by the individual. Generally my idea is that the debt is paid back by the country the person pays taxes in, though obviously this is not feasible at present.
And how do you make your country not crap? Well, it starts with educating people. But when you educate them, they leave. You've effectively been forced to subsidise the skilled workforce of another country and your own country is worse than it was to begin with. This is a stupid petty response that doesn't really make any sense and is also deeply and unnecessarily offensive to large parts of the world.
Most countries that are the recipients of skilled migrants won't allow entrance without a university degree. Education is a precondition for this migration. That's why it's called "brain drain". If people aren't educated, it doesn't matter if they leave or not.
Why stop funding at the university level? Why not also defund high school and middle school as well? After all, by the end of the 5th grade you should be able to read, write, and do simple arithmetic. Anything beyond that you can fund yourself, right?
Subsidizing demand increases prices. When you subsidize university education, you increase the price of it. The metoric rise in inflation-adjusted cost of university education since the 70's or so is strong evidence of this.
If someone wants to major in feminist dance therapy, that should be on their own dime. Using my tax money to fund it is immoral.
>Why not also defund high school and middle school as well? After all, by the end of the 5th grade you should be able to read, write, and do simple arithmetic. Anything beyond that you can fund yourself, right?
I'm actually not entirely unsympathetic to drastically cutting down how much mandatory education we have for kids. There is very little (if any) correlation between the funding amount and actual results. See Abbott districts in Bew Jersey for a stark example of this.
> If someone wants to major in feminist dance therapy, that should be on their own dime. Using my tax money to fund it is immoral.
And if they want to major in economics, chemistry, physics, engineering?
I don't necessarily disagree with what you're saying wholesale, but "I don't like this tiny corner so throw the whole thing in the trash" is immature, foolish, and self-destructive.
Because you're taking other people's money by threat of lethal force to pursue a 4 year party vacation and getting a degree in something useless while you're at it.
"taking other people's money by threat of lethal force" in the form of taxes is seen as necessary for running society by most people, not a moral failing.
And we are not talking about "party vacations" we are talking about education. Maybe this is a commentary on the state of higher education today, but there are plenty of institutions that offer a quality educational experience here; America has the #1 university system in the world.
"a degree in something useless"
Who determines what is useless? You? Are arts degrees for instance useless? Artists don't think so. They are not typically profitable but that's a different conversation, your qualification was "useless". What makes a degree useless, who determines that, and how?
And even if we just assume a topic useless, how is giving people scholarships to study it immoral?
> Because you're taking other people's money by threat of lethal force
The government is doing that, not the dancer. If you consider general taxation immoral, fair enough, but then you're going to have to explain how a country can function without it.
> to pursue a 4 year party vacation
Boy, have I got bad news for you about a lot of students on what you'd consider more worthwhile courses.
> getting a degree in something [THAT I, PERSONALLY, CONSIDER] useless
To have a country worth staying in, you need an educated population. Can't get money if you don't have money. And it's especially hard if all the money you invest goes down the toilet from other countries freeloading off your investment.
This reminds me of one of the propaganda points used in Soviet times to justify denying permission to emigrate to Soviet Jews in 1970-80s. Since they got free education courtesy of the state, they were supposed to stay and "work it off".
The international financial system makes it very hard to "run away" from a loan. Unless you are genuinely willing to become a wanted fugitive, you will end up having to pay.
The amount of money and effort required to extradite a person far outweighs the average student loan. Not only that, it is not really a "crime" to not pay your debts. It is a civil violation. The court can seize your property, in limits. You can't seize someones house in some states, and some don't even allow you to seize cars. Even if they can, any given student loan holder may not have either.
I have seen some people who are undeniably very smart get drawn into this line of thinking.
If saving money was the goal surely there's be discussion akin to "let's cut the military budget". That's how you'd know they're serious. But as it stands it is clearly just an ideological axe grinder.
(I should note I'm not American, just watching bemused from the sidelines)
On top of the $8 trillion in debt needed for the last round of billionaire tax cuts and unaccountable PPP helicopter money Trump spent last time around.
The way we know they're not serious is they're already planning to cut taxes taxes on the rich and corporations. There's no savings to be had, they plan to spend everything they cut on themselves, and another $3T beyond that.
And, currently, firing everyone without just-cause protections (probationary workers, as well the contractor workforce - nearly equal in size to federal employees.)
The great american problem is that American bureaucracy is broken. Whether it's lottery systems for hiking in national parks, fixing roads, healthcare, or hiring across federal employers, all of these require a functioning bureaucracy and there is not one. And so what do Americans do? The left complains the bureaucracy is broken and the right complains the bureaucracy exists. There is little room left for ever fixing the bureaucracy in this situation. It leaves lots of room for people to grab power and change things unilaterally to their own benefit.
American bureaucracy is not broken (but is in the process of being destroyed). Claiming that it is broken is easy rhetoric for charlatans and backed up by a few cherry picked examples.
yeah, the claim that the bureaucracy is the thing that is broken-- can we look at a few things?
Every time the administration changes, the heads of all the departments change, and the incoming people are typically pretty ignorant of what the department does. How would a corporation work if every 4 years you rotated the C-suite and 2 levels down, with people from a completely different business sector?
Meanwhile, funding is shifted even more often. Or is just outright cut once every few years.
Meanwhile, every action they take is an official government action. Which means it is LEGALLY REQUIRED to happen in certain ways based on laws written by people who don't think about consequences or how they are enacted.
And it is 2.2 Million people. There are economies of scale here.
So I wonder how this compares to current Google, current Facebook. I've heard people here talking about how messed up those companies are, projects started/stopped at whim, massive investments that get abandoned 2 years later, etc.
Or to banks. Banks don't modernize their software because they can't, not because they don't want to. No wonder the US government has similar issues.
This all sounds like examples of how the bureaucracy is broken. I suppose a better way to say it is the bureaucracy is unable to respond in any sort of effective way to the problems it is meant to solve because there are far too many people who have the option to change the rules whether it's the president, congressional committee, judges, etc.
The American problem, speaking as an American, is the Americans. Their brains are incredibly smooth, and therefore they fear almost nothing. Famine? War? Environmental catastrophe? Societal collapse? Nah. The only thing they fear at all is someone who sounds like they might have a wrinklier brain than them. That's the problem.
Efficiency-wise it is impossible for DOGE to move the needle. That line of reasoning is a smokescreen for destroying government agencies. Maybe they need to be folded, so petition the people. They have the Congress and Senate.
"But Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former Republican director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), said the agencies Musk and Trump have targeted to date account for a tiny fraction of the overall federal budget ...
They are not going to go into agencies that are doing things they like. They are going into agencies they disagree with," Holtz-Eakin, who has participated in past tax and spending negotiations in Congress, told Reuters.
They don't like the NIH, the CDC, or the Human Services part of HHS, that's for sure. Hell, they don't like the NIH so much that they're willing to overlook the fact that the basic biomedical research infrastructure in this country is essentially reliant on it.
They're trying pretty hard to kill a large part of the scientific research happening in the US right now. They're messing with NIH and NSF grants, the cap on indirect costs is likely going to decimate research at universities. And even if some or most of these drastic changes are reversed, the enormous uncertainty they're introducing will likely reduce future investments in scientific fields.
Or how injecting disinfectants like bleach might help get rid of COVID viruses. (Actually, he's right -- it would probably kill the virus; the only problem is that you'd be dead, so maybe not the best and brightest idea.)
Also, plastic straws don't harm the environment. Oooh, science!
They are they are shrinking the government to find ~4T$ for for corporate tax cuts. You can call it legitimate policy but calling it "efficiency" is bit misleading.
That's a good read on the budget proposals the House Republicans are bringing to the table – the aggravating part, though, is that the loss of $4.5T of revenue won't help with the deficit or debt, since the current target for cuts in annual spending are only $1.5T. (Give or take increased defense and national security spending over the next few years.)
Nothing is legitimate about this. Literally everything they are doing is both illegal and completely unconstitutional. They have thrown out the entire rule of law and it is a pure flex of power, a shock-and-awe meltdown that they hope to execute faster than the normal processes can react. They absolutely intend to abolish resistance and they know they can suffer no consequences for it.
Dark times ahead. We're aren't arguing government efficiency or saving money, they are smashing it all.
Yeah even on HN where I would expect above average observational and critical thinking skills, there are plenty of people who don’t see or refuse to see what’s going on. Pretty shocking really.
Because the parts they don't like align with the parts DOGE doesn't like. They agree with dear leader and so all that woke BS is wasteful. This way they will pay lower taxes now because we got rid of all this "waste".
So I guess you’re happy with the concept of Redlining[0] and believe that any government spending on either preventing the practice, or undoing the decades worth of damage caused by historical Redlining are simply a waste of government time and money?
That preventing a repeat of the damage done to America cities by the national highway system[1], which was used mechanism to literally segregate American cities is also a waste of time and money.
Most of the US significant racial atrocities committed against its own citizens, where either committed by, or with the direct assistance of, the U.S. government (at both state and federal level).
There probably a good discussion to be had on how much should be spent on DEI efforts. But the idea that spending zero really doesn’t make much sense, we know what the consequences of allowing the U.S. government to become entirely occupied by white men. Ultimately a monoculture of people results in a monoculture of ideas, and monocultures never last, something comes along finding some critical weakness that common to every agent in the monoculture, and utterly destroys the organism (in the case of the U.S. government, that might be Trump and Musk). DEI is strategically important because diverse systems are more robust, produce better ideas, and are better capable of surviving extreme shocks. All attributes people should want in their government.
Don’t say “I’m avoiding any biases” with one breath and “I don’t want the gov to spend a dollar on DEI and don’t try to convince me otherwise” with the other. Seems you don’t understand what “bias” means.
A disappointingly high number of people think "DEI" means "choosing unqualified women/PoC over qualified white men".
The reality is that DEI is a campaign to get people aware of implicit bias. It's been proven time and time again that resumes with a name like "Shaniqua" are more likely to be rejected over one with a "John" even when all the qualifications are the same.
But now, of course, with the current political climate, if you're a woman or PoC, you have to be a perfect worker. If you make any kind of mistake, you'll be accused of being a DEI hire.
I suspect we're gonna start seeing this XKCD linked more often over the next 4 years: https://xkcd.com/385/
One could argue that Senators from small states are DEI hires -- since the reason Wyoming and California both get 2 senators was to ensure that small states were not otherwise disadvantaged due to their population size. Correcting inherent disadvantages in the system is the whole point of "equity".
Cutting DEI is blatantly and explicitly political. They can do that, within the laws and regulation that apply (this part is arguably something they don't follow). But it's not fraud or abuse, this is just "stuff they don't like".
They're cutting a lot more than that, this has been all over the media. One example would be biomedical research via NIH/NSF. This is not just DEI (in whatever overly broad and vague definition they use), but a lot more.
So maybe they're cutting a lot of other things and just highlighting the DEI stuff in order to draw attention away from the non-DEI stuff? I could believe that though I doubt anyone has done an analysis of the proportions yet.
What about this argument people are making in this thread that they're not actually doing any real cutting because they're not Congress? That seems like a stretch.
No, if I was deaf my views on this would still be the same. I would still think that "DEI" as an idea is not something the federal government should spend money on.
I would also still support the ADA and its enforcement.
These two ideas are not in conflict. No one is trying to strip the legal rights of deaf people, nor will it happen. That is a straw man/hyperbole.
“ Sec. 2. Implementation. (a) The Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), assisted by the Attorney General and the Director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), shall coordinate the termination of all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.”
I’m no Trump supporter by any means but I think this kind of comment must alienate Trump supporters and contribute to polarization around the topic rather than reasoned exchange. If you really want to oppose Trump I think your purpose is better served with respectful speech. I realize the anger many people feel must make respectful speech a challenge. But I also think that the rise of polarization on social media is one of the reasons we have gotten to the place we are today.
Hahaha. The right says the same thing about the left. Being obstinate just increases polarization. What you are seeing happen right now is precisely because of the position you are taking. People have been pleading for decades to cut government spending. Trying to do it "the right way" hasn't worked. So now we are to "fuck it" if they won't work with us just tear it down and ask for forgiveness later.
This is not a reason to think that impassioned speech will have the impact you want. It may still be counter-productive. At any rate, those who are acting in good faith will recognize the well-reasoned arguments as such and perhaps start to wonder about the reasoning for their beliefs.
This is an incredibly sweeping generalization. There are a lot of people who voted for Trump because of their perception of his merit/qualifications/plans vs Harris. Pretending they are all brainwashed simpletons not only alienates them but also sets up for future failures. There's a reason these people voted for him. What is that reason? Treating is as some temporary hysteria is just going to keep getting people like Trump (or worse) elected over and over.
Strongly disagree. Respectful discourse requires reciprocity and from Trump himself down to his supporters, that's deliberately absent in MAGA. The whole project is about dominating and putting down other people - and has been since day one - and only appealing to comity as a defensive or deflection tactic. With such a long track record of bad faith, it's foolish to engage with other postures than suspicion.
Thank you for your reply. I understand wanting to approach these conversations with suspicion. But I also think that MAGA is a heterogeneous movement whose participants have a range of motivations. Respectful speech doesn’t mean ignoring bad actors but refusing to label everyone that way. Some conversations with Trump voters can still be constructive. Respectful speech allows those conversations to happen. Conversely disrespectful speech contributes to polarization, effectively helping domination ideology to spread. That is why I believe it is counterproductive.
While obviously true, I don't see what that has to do with anything.
The intent of my comment was not to claim that what Musk and co. are doing is good, or that it's bad. It was to point out precisely why the claims in the post I replied to will not convince anyone who is not already convinced.
If the poster I replied to just wanted to vent, fine. But if they wanted to persuade someone on the fence, they have provided nothing towards that.
Nothing, that is, besides the standard appeal to emotion that infests almost all such arguments (on both sides) and is effective on human brains for all the wrong reasons.
I can't really understand that as it seems obvious to me that they're just destroying parts of the government they don't like. And while there is certainly room for improvement in many areas, whatever they're doing is not going to improve anything, it's only destruction.