Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Your description here of Joe Biden is so dead on that it's uncanny. I don't know how you do it.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

It's funny (or perhaps, more dryly, lamentably expected) that you'd take my comment as a shot at Biden.

I'm making a much broader statement about politics and society generally. It is quite simple: Somewhere along the line, not exactly sure where, politicians and policy wonks decided that they should tell others how to live, rather than merely maintain order.

Of course, this is needed sometimes. We probably shouldn't legalize heroin. And we shouldn't have countenanced segregation, or discrimination. But... we have passed laws - limited laws - to maintain the guardrails necessary.

Laws that impose restrictions on how people want to live ought to exist in the manner Clinton characterized abortion - safe, legal, and rare. These measures should be imposed only where there is dire necessity. In every instance, the govt should do all it can to avoid engaging in any form of social engineering.

Elective social engineering should be verboten, unconstitutional. Nobody in govt has any business, or any proper place, forcing social change that they think is best. This goes for pushing DEI through govt and seeking to preclude it through govt.

These things are overreaches. They are not w/in the purview of govt, which should be exceedingly limited.

And the reasons these problematic and damaging policy edicts exist stems from another problem - perhaps the biggest problem today, and the sourse of our division: People in power trying to reshape society as they think it ought to be.

These people are arrogant, and stupid, and none have ever considered the Law of Unintended Consequences. They are the rot at the core of this dysfunctional country. Until we get back to the notion that govt should be small, limited, and apply the most minimal of guardrails, allowing people to enjoy the freedom to live as they want, and allow their neighbor who lives differently to live how he/she wants, we're fucked.

You do your thing; I'll do mine. It isn't a fucking hard concept. It's the bedrock of liberty. And people in govt need to be reminded of that. But they won't be... Because they are sociopaths, egomaniacs, who think they should be able to craft society to look they way they think it ought to look.

If you want to control other people, you should never be allowed any position of power.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

It wasn't a shot at Biden, obviously. It was both-sidesism. You have a pathological need to say that both sides of the political spectrum are similar.

And your idea that we need to "get back to the notion that government should be small, limited, and apply the most minimal of guardrails" is a nostalgia for something we have never had. "Allowing people the freedom to live as they want" doesn't work, because the freedom many people want is to disadvantage other people. I would like to be free from worrying about someone shooting up my children's school, and you would like to be free to carry a semi-automatic rifle when you go out, and so on.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I've been increasingly concerned about the direction our country is going in, but it seems, maybe, our profession's ethical obligations may be what keeps us from totally falling apart.

See, eg, Danielle Sassoon's Letter to Pam Bondi

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

She is an example to the GOP Senators who don't like what Trump is doing but are scared to stand up to him.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

They are. Both are committed to compelling people they know do not want to live as they desire them to live to nevertheless do so. The only difference is form of coercion.

The hard left has sway over the cultural institutions and until recently, govt institutions. It compelled people who did not want to be part of something like, say, DEI, to nevertheless go along with it by emphasizing it in policies - "nudging" the private sector, as Sunstein would put it. Or compelling it where necessary. The woke folks force-fed their ideology on everyone the same way.

The hard right doesn't practice soft coercion. They engage in blunt attacks on what they don't like, and enact policies which make what they don't like unlawful, or subject to penalty from regulators, as Trump has done.

Both are trying to force roughly half the country that does not want to behave they way they would like them to behave to do so.

In simplest parlance, that's being a dick. An asshole. Not observing people's rights to live as they like.

To borrow your analogy, I don't like guns. And where I live, a lot of people agree with me. But also, a lot of people don't. They like their guns. They like to carry them. Seems strange to me, but they have that right. So we have gun laws that make it difficult to carry, and make it illegal to carry automatics of any kind, even to hunt. And We All Get Along.

May somebody shoot up a school? Sure. But is the solution to that me telling the 99.9% of people who don't shoot up schools that they can't have a carry permit? No. The solution is making it difficult to get one, and illegal to even own an automatic weapon.

Drugs is another one of these issues. We now know that legalizing weed was always a good idea. It's much safer than alcohol. But why was it illegal for so long? Because one group of people that didn't like it lobbied the govt to tell everyone else what to do. How many lives were ruined as a result?

Every policy that smells of social engineering or nannyism which is considered by the govt should be subject to this scrutiny (akin to the standard for a preliminary injunction): Is this absolutely positively necessary to prevent a severe, immediate, and irreparable harm? Is it anathema to a large number of people? And most importantly...

Is this policy rooted in the emotional/philosophical/pseudo-scientific positions of a group of people who think they know what's best for everyone else, a/k/a, Officious Arrogant Assholes?

If a policy fails those balancing tests, and both the govt's advocacy for DEI under Biden, and against it under Trump, fails them all, stunningly, the govt has no business pushing such a policy on society.

("Leave people the fuck alone unless it's a goddamn four alarm fire," is a good rule for the govt. Alas, in CA, it appears govt has little interest in meeting that test. But that's another conversation. Bill Maher has my proxy there.)

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

If lawyers ever become the exemplars for ethical/moral conduct, you'll know we've culturally reached not a nadir, but the event horizon of a black hole.

Wait for the whiplash. This sort of extreme shit, and disregard for those who've brought Trump to the dance (his trade policies are fucking working class voters) will backfire on him. And as someone agnostic about Trump but always looking for the economic advantage of whoever's in office, proudly part of the "Socially Liberal/Fiscally Moderate" majority, his steel tariffs validate every one of the three times I did not vote for this man.

There are no steel plants left. You can't bring jobs back to an industry that requires so much capital investment and time to rebuild that the first new plant would go online sometime around 2030 (if you permitted it today and started building tomorrow!).

His performative orders on social issues can largely be ignored and reversed. But not these trade wars. These are long term disaster-causing policies. Economically ruinous to the very people he claimed to be trying to help. By driving the cost of steel up 25%, he destroys countless projects where incalculable multiples of the steel workers he thinks he can reshore would have found work. He is destroying economic development. It's beyond idiotic.

And that's why I think you'll see the Chamber of Commerce Wing of the GOP unite with moderate Democrats and Progressives in the midterms and shut down this shit.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

With all that's happened in the last few weeks, I cannot believe you are wasting braincells and electrons suggesting that the hard left had a sway over cultural institutions and the government, or that the Biden Administration and Trump Administrations are fundamentally similar. Seriously, get a fucking grip. Can you find similarities? Sure, if you work hard enough. "Both Biden and Trump are multicellular organisms who tend to appear in public in business suits. Q.E.D." But the only point to saying what you're saying is to fatuously stake out a position above it all, which, to mix metaphors, is actually beneath you.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Is gutting NIH and the CDC a social issue? Some of the institutions that rely on NIH funding are the largest employers in their states.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Or DOJ? Once the rule of law is undermined, we'll just restore it in two years?

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I agree it will have bad economic impacts. But those are reversible, as those are domestic agencies which we control.

We don't control trading partners. If we disrupt supply chains and re-introduce mercantilism globally, undoing that mess will take decades. W/o hyperbole, it imperils our economic power in a manner more severe than any other policies.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

The rule of law we had was capricious, arbitrary, and corrupted in a number of ways (directives that people like Martha Stewart should be targeted for "deterrence value," a Byzantine criminal and civil code that slants everything in the govt's favor, an often in-the-govt's-pocket judiciary, politics w/in the offices that create careerist nihilist AUSAs who only care about wins vs. losses, political influence of exec branch so that DOJ focuses on their pet issues, etc.).

Trump will not improve this, of course. He'll just render it differently corrupt. More unapologetically bent is my guess.

I agree his politicization of the department is awful. But mostly because it's so overt. The prior subtle corruption was defensible, could be hidden, and wasn't extreme. He'll alter that minimized silk stocking corruption into something more like mafioso all-day-every-day in-your-face corruption.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

You do realize that pretty much everyone who wants more gun regulation would be happy with an automatic weapons ban, and everyone who doesn’t want gun regulation would consider you a proponent of the “nanny state?”

Yes it’s safe.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

That is complete nonsense, as there are no communists or anarchists or even Democratic Socialists with any national influence at all. And if you want to call Bernie "hard left" he is not big on DEI at all.

No, because it was a convenient excuse to use law enforcement to control Black people and anyone who publicly sympathized with civil rights (and the antiwar movement). We didn't lock up whole generations of young Black men because some people didn't like weed.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Yes.

The comparison of weed to alcohol and prescription drug abuse is skin to the difference between the Beatles and Slayer.