DavidOdden

1: Unkind statements about Trump's past (non)-behavior are fully warranted. If anything has actually changes for the better w.r.t. his behavior (TAC: Trump Always Changes), it would be appropriate to acknowledge that momentary change. It's not Trump who deserves credit.
2: His current stance – agreeing with Putin that “this war in Israel-Iran should end” is hardly a ringing endorsement of Israel’s actions. The US policy remains “talk over action”.
3: You can always ask “Is it possible that…” when it comes to the man-made.
4: “End Iran” is a vague metaphor. Literally, no, this clearly is not the end to Iran. It is highly unlikely that it is even the end to the mullah regime. The end will not come just from Israel’s air attack, and Israel is not going to invade en mass, but in an unlikely pipe-dream universe, the attacks might contribute to long-standing minority opposition to the existing government. The goal should be to end the Islamic Republic, not Iran.
5: The present evidence indicates that the goal of the attacks is to end Iran’s ability to manufacture nuclear weapons. The scope of the present incursion cannot be accurately estimated this soon, recall that there have been multiple brief attacks against Iran that did not end Iran.
6: The beginning of the end of Iran was around July 1981, the end is coming slowly. We don’t care about the beginning of the end, we only care about the end. Of the Islamic Republic.

Which ideology, the ideology that it is acceptable for a person born male to not want to be considered to be a male, or for a person born female to not want to be considered to be a female? I wonder if this also includes the case where a male prefers having sex with another male, or a female with a female?
There is also the MAGA cult which needs uprooting.
Nevertheless, many people believe that surgery is a valid way of fixing their “problems”, such as eye cataracts, obesity, cleft lip, unsightly body lumps and cosmetic surgery in general, even cancer. RFK will focus us on the True Path to Happiness: exercise and healthy ogano-vegan eating. If you are right, even his solution is evil because it doesn’t put all concern on the “feelings”. Arguably, haircuts are in the same evil trash bin that you consign sex-change operations to.

The NPR claim-bloating is a surprisingly unsurprising distortion of the science, akin to the Discovery Channel’s various “could it be that space aliens…” series. The problems start with the reprehensible practice of making up belief-responses on surveys that were never carried out, then embedding the false claims under hedge terms (“While some people may envision historical Native Americans as mostly hunter-gatherers or nomads”). Some people may believe that a cabal of gremlins are studying Hegel’s Logic on the planet Venus. It is well-known that the vast majority of Native Americans were agriculturalists. Almost nobody denies this (you see, fact-invention is a double-edged sword).
The article claims that “considerable scholarship has tied intensive agricultural production to emergent hierarchical state formation and inequality”, but again there is no indication of a concerted attitude study, especially in the global context. We can drop egalitarianism from serious consideration because they are just making stuff up, but there is some hope of looking at the relationship between centralized government and agriculture. One simple fact is that there are no large states based on hunter-gather societies. There are some large mostly-pastoralist states, e.g. Somalia, the Berbers, Fulani, Mongols, but these were/are not highly centralized except for the Mongols which can be explained by the leadership of Temujin. “Hierarchical state formation” depends on (does not cause) existing agricultural wealth. The Bantus of Africa are almost entirely agriculturalists and have been so for millennia, the emergence of kingdoms especially around Lake Victoria is a late, variable and localized phenomenon. The Iroquois Confederacy is an exceptional development in the US, whereas kingdoms are more the norm south of the Rio Grande.
What is actually new, coming from this study? A point of minor interest is how ignorance feeds ignorance. There is substantial evidence for certain large settlements in the southern part of the New World, especially where structures are built of stone so survive for millenia. Apart from settlements in the Southwest, settlements in the US and Canada tended to be made out of compostable materials, very eco-friendly of them, which means that there is a lot that we don’t know about pre-contact civilizations. The article takes note of the fact that they have yet to find evidence of the villages that would have necessitated or enabled this large farm. The agricultural results now gives us reason to look. Archaeological ignorance abounds, especially in areas that have rain.
The second more interesting question – not well handled in the article – is, what is the northern geographical limit of low-tech large-scale agriculture? Can you even grow corn on Svalbard Island (without a greenhouse and lots of tech)? Why do tomatoes not ripen in Tromsø Norway (hint: above the Arctic Circle)? The hardy grains that we grow in cold short growing season climates are all Eurasian in origin, or domesticated only in the modern era (wild rice). So they do have evidence of maize-growing at this site, and have known of that for 70 years. What this study adds is an expanded perimeter of the farm, thanks to drone-mounted LIDAR technology. It seems that the farm beds cover about a square kilometer, about half the allotment to a settler under the Homestead Act. So the plots are not ginormous, but they are a respectable size and an order of magnitude larger than what had previously been surveyed.

RFK might be promoting dietary practices that may not deliver on all claims , but the motivation or resonance it has with people is on the basis of promoting ‘healthy’, as against the perceived current zeitgeist of institutional acceptance of standards based on meeting minimum safety standards. 
 
 

Which ideology, the ideology that it is acceptable for a person born male to not want to be considered to be a male, or for a person born female to not want to be considered to be a female? I wonder if this also includes the case where a male prefers having sex with another male, or a female with a female?
There is also the MAGA cult which needs uprooting.
Nevertheless, many people believe that surgery is a valid way of fixing their “problems”, such as eye cataracts, obesity, cleft lip, unsightly body lumps and cosmetic surgery in general, even cancer. RFK will focus us on the True Path to Happiness: exercise and healthy ogano-vegan eating. If you are right, even his solution is evil because it doesn’t put all concern on the “feelings”. Arguably, haircuts are in the same evil trash bin that you consign sex-change operations to.

The ideology needs to be blown up. The blame to lay on a cult member is that of being trapped by the cult. All uses of cult are inherently evil and need to be removed by uprooting.
Adolescence itself is ‘unsettling’ , the fact that in modernity one can claim that adolescents are ‘more’ afflicted with pathologies associated with a primordial human unsettled-ness , without questioning what in modernity allows or causes such a swelling of concern is a sign I think of modernity’s capture of the power of cult and an increase of nihilistic tendencies in western culture.
Compassion and empathy belong where they do and the cause is to blame. It is a myth that any surgery change a body from one sex to the other , meaning the physical manipulations of tissue will not ‘fix’ the problem of feeling , the feeling and its genesis should rather be the locus of concern.
 
 

Your answer only addresses half of the political question (which is half of the moral question). The government may not rightly prevent anyone from helping a suicidal person to cope. But can the government properly force you to give aid to help a suicidal person (can the government properly punish you for referring to a neo-female as “he”, whether or not they commit suicide, or use the letter e in their presence)? The underlying moral question is whether it can be morally proper for you to encourage a person to commit suicide, by willfully using the letter “e” or the two letters “he” in their presence. We can set temporarily aside the further question of using “e” or “he” accidentally or in the complete absence of the psychologically damaged person.
Given what the proper role of government is, it’s a no-brainer that government cannot properly prevent you from helping a suicidal or sad person, and they cannot force you to give assistance of in general act in a particular way. It is at most a quarter-brainer to figure out whether using “e” or “he” in the presence of this person constitutes initiation of force (in the same way that a verbal threat is initiation of force). But “fighting words” is an ill-conceived legal doctrine. No matter how personally offensive the recipient may find it, calling a person a "jerk" or a “man” is not initiation of force, so it is none of the government’s business. At the same time, hurling the epithet “jerk” is not a moral virtual, there is no objective benefit to your life derived by such an act. Therefore you should object, but you should not be compelled to object. There are some exceptions – those deserving of the epithet – but I won’t name names here. The moral status of this question is not about other people’s sanction of your action, it is the rational value of the action for your life.
So, it is a moral problem for you to solve, but since I’m a nice guy, I solved it for you.

I was therefore inspired to see how long it took to show that Katia is a drooling stochastic parrot, focusing on resolving the contradiction between the technical linguistic concept of universal grammar (with reference to “tabula rasa”) and the Objectivist position against innate knowledge. This was somewhat tongue-in-cheek on my part because I have been peddling Objectivism-consistent technical theory for some time.
The short story is that “she” did a quite credible job of reconciling the apparent contradiction between the science and the philosophy: the writing style is a bit computer-generated, but the logic of her stance was essentially correct, and mirrors what I have been arguing. I moved on to inquiring about the basis of learning logic (how do you learn the law of non-contradiction? You can’t just scream “It’s axiomatic!”). Unlike prior attempts to engage with ChatGPT, Katia seems to have a mechanism for permanent learning (at least until TEOTWAKI), basically you can create reloadable knowledge files. I consider this version to be at least worth experimentally interacting with.
 

You're not welcome to set conditions on my responses, or to deny that you owe this forum (not just me) proof of your claims. My purpose on this site is to find and discuss the truth and to evaluate alternatives, it is not to enable your emotionalist agenda. So apparently we have massively simplified the problem.

I guess you don’t understand “conceptual hierarchy”, which is a common problem, even though you refer to “a lower principle”. The US (qua government) does not have a hierarchical conceptual structure, it only has hierarchy in traffic-control (federal supremacy, highest court, constitutional supremacy: but, separate but equal).
Also BTW “free speech” does not just mean “the ability to freely give a speech with no electronics”, it identifies something more abstract, namely the right to express a point of view. That right is, so far, both guaranteed in The Constitution and protected in court.
The US was founded in ignorance of Objectivism, because Rand’s grandfathers had not yet been born. The conceptual hierarchy that has since been discovered, and which started to take root here 250 years ago, does render the “right to free speech” and “the right to not be enslaved” less important because they are specific instances of the concept “man’s rights”. A higher level concept unifies lower level concepts – which already exist. A failure to properly form or accept a higher level concept that would subsume valid lower level concepts does not thereby invalidate the lower level concepts. You should read ITOE to get a better understanding of conceptual hierarchy.

 

One clue is that the summary is written by the leftist ideologues who wrote and sponsored the bill, who are free to say whatever they want to say (via a state analog of the Speech and Debate Clause). The summary is not part of “The Act”, and until it is signed, it’s just an idea being discussed. A rough draft, sorta. It states the opinion of the authors of the original bill as introduced, and as they say, does not reflect changes once it gets debated. IMO it does reasonably reflect what the authors intended, they just were voted down in many respects, and they don't get to rewrite once the bill has been read. Intuitively, you would think that surely some wise supervisor must be writing these summaries to go with laws, but no, no, a thousand times no. It's the (office staff of) the clowns that sponsor the bills.
TMJ’s puzzlement over the “chosen name” issue comes from not reading the law. The prior law of Colorado made it possible for a public school district to have a “chosen name” policy. Having such a policy in the first place does constitute codifying speech requirements of second parties (not third parties) – the district can tell its employees how to speak to customers. Free speech is not absolute, I think SCOTUS would uphold a policy prohibiting a teacher from addressing a customer as “MF Asshole behind the doped-up skank”. What this law has to say about such a policy is simply that if there is a policy then “that policy must be inclusive of all reasons that a student might adopt a name that differs from the student's legal name”. Not just religion. Solution: don’t have a policy.
The media very often latches on to press-release form of bills and executive orders, for example the giggling over the tariffs on Heard and McDonald Islands which are uninhabited was from a press release, not the executive order, which is the official word. The islands were a sound-bite point, possible tossed out to see if anybody would bother to verify the claim.

I wondered if Katia could inductively learn a language (not: “copy someone else’s computational model of German”, rather, induce the structure of an unknown language from suitable input data, by hypothesis forming and validation). All humans do it at some point and no computers do, so far. Unsurprisingly, Katia has problems with “conjecture and testing”, it cannot make up non-obvious general propositions which subsume the broadest range of facts, it operates narrowly on the immediate discourse context. At some point I will ask whether “All dead male ancient Greek philosophers are mortal”, or “all animals are mortal” explains the facts. You cannot check its creative abilities by presenting observations about the stars and hoping it will discover the theory of relativity (a fairly novel hypothesis at the time), it will just access that part of the underlying database. But there is no database for unknown languages. This is a kind of niche application.
A simpler task is to “follow the rules”, when the user states the rules correctly. I set out to describe what a language rule (of a particular type) does (in fairly technical terms) then asked it to execute the rules on an input (undergraduates can do this very easily). It got the wrong answer, so I asked for a detailed analysis of the reasoning (“check your premises”, no hint whether the answer was right or wrong), and it responds

I asked what caused the error, it has an quasi-analysis (gotta work through it to see if it is a sensible story) but there is an element of “shit happens” in the answer, that there may have been an indexing bug or a failure in the reverse mapping function. It proposed a patch for future use, we will see if that solves the problem. The striking flaw is that the computation report is 5 lines which say “Step 1 does X” (correct) then 4 lines of “nothing happens” but the output is still wrong. In human terms, this is a “floating abstraction reasoning error”, that people may not think through what actually happens if you X, they leap over the concretes in favor of a goal (cf. the t-shirt with “then a miracle occurs”). Which is why good procedural instructions – for humans – are often hard to find.
It made another error and proposed a patch. This error probably stemmed from sua sponte importing an assumption from elsewhere, one that I did not include and which contradicts what I said. This can be solved by a directive “don’t do Y which I did not tell you to do”. In human interactions, this is the case “[A] I didn’t tell you to do Y. You didn’t tell me to not do Y. I assumed you wanted me to do Y. You could have told me to not do Y”. It may be that “don’t do Y” derives from an anti-recursion safeguard.
I maxxed out for the day, but it made another error at the very end so tomorrow I will see if it can self-diagnose. Admittedly this is not the kind of chat purposes that it seems to be intended for, but I find it to be a useful tool for understanding reasoning, and especially how far the bots are going to have to go in order to fully simulate human reasoning.

I was therefore inspired to see how long it took to show that Katia is a drooling stochastic parrot, focusing on resolving the contradiction between the technical linguistic concept of universal grammar (with reference to “tabula rasa”) and the Objectivist position against innate knowledge. This was somewhat tongue-in-cheek on my part because I have been peddling Objectivism-consistent technical theory for some time.
The short story is that “she” did a quite credible job of reconciling the apparent contradiction between the science and the philosophy: the writing style is a bit computer-generated, but the logic of her stance was essentially correct, and mirrors what I have been arguing. I moved on to inquiring about the basis of learning logic (how do you learn the law of non-contradiction? You can’t just scream “It’s axiomatic!”). Unlike prior attempts to engage with ChatGPT, Katia seems to have a mechanism for permanent learning (at least until TEOTWAKI), basically you can create reloadable knowledge files. I consider this version to be at least worth experimentally interacting with.
 

The problem with her statement is that they are logically unrelated to the ultimate claim about what the government should do. The only facts reported by her are assertions of her emotions – what she wants or thinks should be the case. You cannot respond to emotional claims, unless you make an absurd statement like “No, you do not want that; no, you do not feel that way”. I don’t care if you want a new local burger join to live or die based on its product and service, I don’t want you to make arguments based on forcing others to comply with your wishes. If you cannot get her to advance an actual argument rather than a report of emotion, then this simply isn’t a logical discussion. This is endemic in our culture, and it is why Trump got elected despite all the rational arguments against him as president – it came down to raw feelings and not facts and logic.
As for the claim that Google engages in fraud, that is utterly laughable. To even get to first base on that claim, you have to establish that there is some false claim which induced people to enter into a contract with the company that they would not have otherwise entered in. Google is a free service, which you do not pay for. They have made no promise to you. It is fraud to call Google’s practices fraud (by that misunderstanding both of Google’s practices and of fraud). Where is the promise about search results? This is a cousin to the socialist concept of “network neutrality” which is based on the miscreant notion that Google is a public service, not a private money-making business. I go to the local Kroger store and I see tons of “fraud” in the form of promotions for Kroger goods, but no promotions for the goods of a competitor. I read the local paper and I see only the ads of companies who pay to have ads placed, not those of companies who didn’t pay. I look at OO, which stands for Objectivism Online and I see the opposite of Objectivism, I see fraudulent representation of socialism, progressivism and statist being passed off as Objectivism – pure fraud. The government should do something to clean up this mess.

An example of a company actually suppressing another company is when AT&T enjoyed a statutory monopoly over phone services and therefore smaller companies could not even exist. A current one is interstate passenger rail and letter-delivery. Likewise water, gas, electricity, internet service and other so-called “natural monopolies”, depending on your location.
Google does not “suppress” Yahoo search, it is just more widely chosen by users. It is the customers who are “suppressing” Yahoo, by being allowed to freely choose according to their individual interests. Similarly, in the marketplace of politics, the Demopublicans do not “suppress” the Libertarians, they are simply more successful in selling their product. Why do we tolerate consumer preference, if the goal is to make all product be “equal” with respect to market share? The government could, instead, ration access to goods and services in such a way that all businesses have an identical market share, and this is enforced by regulating customer choice, and not what the goods and services are.
This offers an alternative means of reaching the assumed goal of “equal market share”, and does a better job of aligning to the actual cause of poor market performance. Yahoo does not under-perform relative to Google because of a direct interference in Yahoo’s operation, it under-performs because Google offers a superior product and customer choice is un-regulated. The anti-monopoly assumption is that the solution to the “problem” should be some ill-defined limit on what Google can offer to customers, but why is that better than limiting customer freedom of choice?
Obviously, this is a tongue in cheek argument, but reductio ad absurdum is a legitimate tool to exposing the flaws in an opponents argument. What fact justifies putting the burden on Google, rather than on the consumer? Or, why not regulate Yahoo to force it to improve its product, for example by requiring it to put all profits into research and development? Reasons given in opposition to such alternatives can easily be turned into arguments against restricting what Google can do, and have the advantage that your opponent has granted the legitimacy of the principle.

I appreciate the offer, but have no idea what it would take to convince you that you were wrong. I don’t predict that America will devolve into hard Nazism over the next year, it will be more subtle and take longer. Based on local responses (OO) to continued encroachments on individual rights, we can even predict the kind of excuse-making that will be offered by Trump supporters. It is even now a standard response that immigrants have no rights in the US because rights derive from government and not man's nature. There is a delusion that imposing tariffs on imports is not a violation of individual rights, even though the (American) importer pays the tax, and there is a side-show to the effect that this is “just punishment” of businesses that deal with nations which violate individual rights (China, Canada, Mexico – plainly a delusion in the latter two cases). The government has multiple structural contradictions that result in rights violations: interference in the market by requiring government approval of action. So simply withdraw approvals – which results in a blanket prohibition, not a removal of the rights violations in the first place. We will concretely discover the consequences of exercising individual rights because the federal government will withdraw money from states that have become dependent on federal largesse. The new rule will be "If you exercise your rights, we will withdraw financial support". The proper rule would be unconditional "we will withdraw financial support", and not punitive "we will withdraw support if you do not comply with our demand to restrict individual rights".
You are exactly right that Trump has rejected the traditional reason-based rhetoric of traditional conservatives, no doubt substantially aided by the religious right which were the leading edge of the perversion of conservatism and the interest in individual rights. It is irrational to hope that there will be a return to the rule of law and reason, those days are over for the foreseeable future. And the seeds of destruction were indeed planted by the radical left back in the 60’s.
The reason why Trump prevailed in the last election was not an appeal to a mythical pent-up frustration in the US with expanding government violation of individual rights, is was the simple fact that the (original) competition was senile and the last-minute replacement was manifestly unfit for the job. Your question where is the other antidote on the horizon is spot on. The Republicans dug for themselves a hole so deep and lined with garbage that De Santis was (ugh) the “best alternative”, and hardly an alternative at all. For laughs I might point to a Libertarian party candidate, but those are not realistic candidates – despite their political platforms, they just do not gain enough votes to be worth even talking about. There simply are no marginally reasonable choices for President in the US. Trump was the worst of the two in this last round because of what he brings to the table that is significantly new – a change from a society of laws to a society of managerial decisions. Though more specifically, what he introduced was the absoluteness of his abandonment of the rule of law. Expansion of executive power is the brain-child of the Democrats, Trump was simply inspired by his more-constrained predecessors in the Donkey Party.

I appreciate the offer, but have no idea what it would take to convince you that you were wrong. I don’t predict that America will devolve into hard Nazism over the next year, it will be more subtle and take longer. Based on local responses (OO) to continued encroachments on individual rights, we can even predict the kind of excuse-making that will be offered by Trump supporters. It is even now a standard response that immigrants have no rights in the US because rights derive from government and not man's nature. There is a delusion that imposing tariffs on imports is not a violation of individual rights, even though the (American) importer pays the tax, and there is a side-show to the effect that this is “just punishment” of businesses that deal with nations which violate individual rights (China, Canada, Mexico – plainly a delusion in the latter two cases). The government has multiple structural contradictions that result in rights violations: interference in the market by requiring government approval of action. So simply withdraw approvals – which results in a blanket prohibition, not a removal of the rights violations in the first place. We will concretely discover the consequences of exercising individual rights because the federal government will withdraw money from states that have become dependent on federal largesse. The new rule will be "If you exercise your rights, we will withdraw financial support". The proper rule would be unconditional "we will withdraw financial support", and not punitive "we will withdraw support if you do not comply with our demand to restrict individual rights".
You are exactly right that Trump has rejected the traditional reason-based rhetoric of traditional conservatives, no doubt substantially aided by the religious right which were the leading edge of the perversion of conservatism and the interest in individual rights. It is irrational to hope that there will be a return to the rule of law and reason, those days are over for the foreseeable future. And the seeds of destruction were indeed planted by the radical left back in the 60’s.
The reason why Trump prevailed in the last election was not an appeal to a mythical pent-up frustration in the US with expanding government violation of individual rights, is was the simple fact that the (original) competition was senile and the last-minute replacement was manifestly unfit for the job. Your question where is the other antidote on the horizon is spot on. The Republicans dug for themselves a hole so deep and lined with garbage that De Santis was (ugh) the “best alternative”, and hardly an alternative at all. For laughs I might point to a Libertarian party candidate, but those are not realistic candidates – despite their political platforms, they just do not gain enough votes to be worth even talking about. There simply are no marginally reasonable choices for President in the US. Trump was the worst of the two in this last round because of what he brings to the table that is significantly new – a change from a society of laws to a society of managerial decisions. Though more specifically, what he introduced was the absoluteness of his abandonment of the rule of law. Expansion of executive power is the brain-child of the Democrats, Trump was simply inspired by his more-constrained predecessors in the Donkey Party.

It is a characteristic of the neocon movement, especially the MAGA offshoot, that limited government and individual rights are secondary, to be subordinated to the primary goal of National Greatness. When rights are subordinated to “collective greatness”, you have exactly the premise that leads to and did lead to fascism. I do suggest reading Neoconservatism, which analyzes this intellectual shift in-depth – an analysis echoes in the OP.
Entirely consistent with the leftist epistemology underlying the MAGA cult, we find Trump engaging in the same kind of rhetorical abuses always practices by the standard left (not the Trotskyite left-turned-right). There is no denying that intellectual dishonesty is the main tool of all oppressors

So what kind of fascism does that justify? I understand that every wrong must be cancelled by another wrong, in the new regime, I just don't see which specific wrong is thus justified. Or does it matter – is it that any wrong is justified to balance an existing wrong?

Some of us are familiar with the 2012 book Neoconservatism: an obituary for an idea by C. Bradley Thompson and Yaron Brook, which documents the subversion of conservatism by the radical left. For a while, there was a terminological division between neocons and Reagan Republicans, the former being the ideological leftists that subverted the conservative movement, but there seems to be little left of the traditional conservative movement. The utterly uncivilized methods of Trumpism, culminating in the January 6 riots, have exact parallels in the leftist antics ranging from numerous anti-war riots, the Days of Rage, WTO riots, BLM riots, and a widespread “shut it down” policy of suppressing speakers whom they disagree with.
There is a real difference between Trump and the hard left. The Hard Left wants to outlaw profit and private ownership, Trump wants to maximize profit and private ownership by whatever means necessary. Both sides recognize that this requires the ability to (over)write the law, and they agree that reason and persuasion are fragile tools for achieving their ends.

It is a characteristic of the neocon movement, especially the MAGA offshoot, that limited government and individual rights are secondary, to be subordinated to the primary goal of National Greatness. When rights are subordinated to “collective greatness”, you have exactly the premise that leads to and did lead to fascism. I do suggest reading Neoconservatism, which analyzes this intellectual shift in-depth – an analysis echoes in the OP.
Entirely consistent with the leftist epistemology underlying the MAGA cult, we find Trump engaging in the same kind of rhetorical abuses always practices by the standard left (not the Trotskyite left-turned-right). There is no denying that intellectual dishonesty is the main tool of all oppressors

The crucial distinction does lie in ending the leviathan state, not just swapping out and even increasing bureaucrat for bureaucrat. Simple firing is no proof of good intent. The premise of eliminating the leviathan is not “you got the wrong guy in that position”, it is “that position should not exist in the first place”. There is a common business practice of sacking-and-replacing in order to work around the higher wages of more experiences employees, so as a money-saving but not actual bureaucracy-reducing move, you could fire everybody and replace them with fresh graduates or even unpaid interns. Then repeat in another 8 years, though eventually people will catch on. What we want is not “efficiency”, we want “less government”. The SS was efficient, so was Cheka / NKVD / KGB / FSB, Savak / Vevak / Vaja or the Chinese Ministry of State Security.
It’s difficult to make this distinction, but government jobs can be assessed on a propriety scale. Soldiers and police fall on the “more proper” range of that scale, also jailers, judges and attorneys. Somewhere on the “yes” side of the line would be diplomats who represent the US to foreign countries. Theoretically, infrastructure necessary to the maintenance of more-proper governmental services would be farmed out to private industry, but at least right this month, that’s an idealistic hallucination, there will still be engineers, janitors, programmers and accountants making government operations possible. The right question is: which departments should first be eliminated entirely. Some good candidates for mass reduction (total elimination) are: the Dept’s of Agriculture, Energy, Education, Labor,  Interior, HHS, HUD and Transportation. Plus, the entire DOGE bureaucracy should be eliminated. First on the second round chopping block would be VA, and the entire Treasury section that is the IRS.
We will not be able to evaluate the present scheme of firings as being “brand shifting” versus actual bureaucracy reduction, because some of the first people to be fired under the pogrom are the bureaucrats who comply with the legal requirement to provide public records of the government’s operation. Being insulated from any oversight, it’s impossible to point to concrete evidence – the records are now hidden. Eventually, someone will sue and SCOTUS will order Trump or his successor to comply with the law, but it will be too late at that point, and all we will have is the smug knowledge that he carried an ideological purge illegally, as belatedly acknowledged by the courts. And as not even in the slightest a matter of concern for voters. At least, until Musk’s cache of confiscated passwords and financial records of Americans get hacked and half the nation loses its assets because of slovenly data management practices carried out by an incompetent hack who fired everybody that tried to point out why “1234” is not a good password for crucial data.
The proper means is by law rather than mob or dictatorial action, but this society has little interest in subordinating government to objective law, which is a crying shame.

 

Have you never been to church, have you never heard the preachers screaming on Sunday mornings? It's very simple: people do not understand money, they have no idea where it comes from, they just know that it is the root of all evil. In order to compat these ideas, you have to understand what the ideas are.

Every year, most adults directly pay many thousands of dollar to the federal government in income taxes. Then there are state income taxes, various wealth taxes, innumerable excise taxes. One of those taxes is FICA. There is confusion among people over whether they have a “right” to direct federal give-aways, such as free peanut butter (only if you claim a certain income level), housing and so on, but usually people understand that at best there might be some indirect benefit such as a paying job resulting from some federally subsidised program. FICA is special, though: it is a direct tax on income with the promise of a return. It is structured to deceive people into thinking it is an investment program, in that your return is a function of your payments, and not a function of your “need”.
In relation to balancing the budget and in search for a single big-ticket cut that could at least temporarily reduce the deficit, there are two obvious solutions. One would be to stop SS payments entirely and reassign all of those 4 trillion dollars to the general fund, which could slightly reduce the federal debt by about 10%. The other obvious solution is an increase of taxes. Neither would be particularly popular as a solution, but at some point, reality will become self-enforcing and popularity be damned. In terms of “fair share” where all people are burdened equally, each us us currently owes around $100,000. To pay down this debt, a repayment plan will be necessary, stretched over multiple years. This might be realized as a tax of $10,000 per person per year over 10 years – more and longer of course if the goal is to actually pay the debt. The problem is that for every $10,000 paid into the government, Congress will think “Oh boy, free money! Now we can spend more on programs!”, so the debt will increase exponentially and the debt-tax will have to increase to keep pace.
There is a bold alternative, though, and it would be very popular: shift the burden to the top 20% of earners. People whine about the 1%, but let’s get real, they could just confiscate 50% of everything held by the 20%, and the vast majority could be entirely free of the burden of taxation, with no loss of government entitlements. They could adjust those numbers variably, depending on the level of whining that results from rich people being forced to finally pay their “fair share”.
The focus on “inefficiency” and “fraud” is just plain populist fraud, a side-show to appease the masses. The cause of the sky-rocketing federal debt is the fraudulent premise that the government can create wealth by requiring money to be spent, then printing more money to cover those expenditures. Since The People are unwilling to forego ever-expanding federal benefits and they are unwilling to have their own property subject to increased confiscation, the only solution is going to be to go after the 20%. But even then, after you have wiped out the top 20% and there has been no decrease in federal spending, they will have to next go after the top 40%, and at that point your chances of being unaffected by wealth-nationalization have plummeted, and you might be receptive to one of those other unthinkable solutions. Like, put an end to government spending.

 

What makes RFK dangerous is the fact that he will have and exercise the power of arbitrary force, and paired with his boss’s contempt for law, there is no reason to think that the use of force will be even the slightest under control of objective law. Trump has already done an excellent job of proving the Republicans cannot be trusted as the “defenders of individual rights”. In an Atlas Shrugged sense this could bring about the collapse of civilization which may teach the masses a lesson about the delusion that government control “protects” us. For a real clean sweep, I guess the plan is to completely discredit science and reason, make us return to the stone age, and see if reason and civilization can be re-discovered after a few millenia.