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.

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

Look up the percentages of progressives in academia, media, and govt. DC donated 84% to Harris last year.

The list of stats establishing that the left has held wildly disproportionate sway over almost every cultural institution for the past few decades would break this board.

That was an added bonus for the idiots who passed the anti-marijuana laws. Another was helping out the alcohol industry.

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

If you're counting Harris as "the left" there is probably nothing more to say here.

Even among academics, there are few actual communists or anarchists. Fuck, whatever Chmosky even is doesn't hold any sway with elected Dems or the voters.

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

I saw her say she wants the government to pay for sex change operations for inmates. I bet I saw her say it 1000 times. It was a big part of why she lost Michigan.*


*And Arabs reaction to what was happening in Gaza, which is pretty crazy if you think about it.

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

Do you think about what you type here, or do you outsource to a monkey at a typewriter? Your first claim was, "The hard left has sway over the cultural institutions and until recently, govt institutions." Which is ridiculous, unless you have been in a MAGA bubble and have become convinced that "the hard left" includes everyone to the left of Marco Rubio. I can't think of a single significant cultural institution where the hard left has sway.

So when you're challenged on this absurd statement, you point to "the percentages of progressives in academia, media, and government," as if an English professor at, say, the University of Iowa "holds sway" over it, or Ruth Marcus (not the hard left, but I don't think there is a single person recently on that editorial staff from the hard left) ran the WaPo instead of Jeff Bezos and the center-right morons he brought over from England, or you could name a single government institution anywhere outside of, maybe, Vermont under the control of the hard left. I live near Santa Cruz, and the hard left is on the outside looking at the city government there.

And then the idea that DC is Democratic is supposed to prove something? As if all Democrats are "the hard left," as if Kamala Harris herself was, or as if everybody here doesn't know that the people who live in DC are predominantly working- and middle-class blacks who do not have the right to run their own government. DC's residents are *not* "the hard left" -- please tell your monkey.

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

I was talking to one of my college roommates about this, and he's a former Senate staffer who has stayed involved in Democratic politics in a way that earns him money, and I think his take on this was right. I don't think you saw Harris say that, exactly. In 2019, her campaign answered a questionnaire (and based on what I know about how campaigns work, I assume that a staffer did this in a way that was approved by the campaign, if not her personally). See the facts recounted here. My roommate suggests that what happened here is not that Harris particularly cared one way or the other, but that -- and this is a recurring problem for Democrats -- the party is a coalition, and the campaign basically acceded to the demands on this position made by the people within the the Democratic coalition who really care about this stuff. At the time, Harris did not want to have a fight with them, so she took what seemed like the expedient way out. When the issue blew up during the campaign, she tried -- unsuccessfully -- to defuse it by saying she was just following the law, as Trump had during his first term.

Do you really think Harris wanted to expend political capital on this issue? No. And if she were a better politician, she wouldn't have put herself in this box. Am I defending her here? Not at all, but I am trying to put my finger the actual problem, which is not that Harris really wanted the government to pay for sex change operations for inmates, but more about the problems Democrats can have in trying to manage a coalition. My understanding, from my roommate, is that she got that questionnaire from an organization that was more committed to pushing the Overton Window on trans issues than on winning elections for Democrats, and the lesson he and others take from it is that the Democrats need to more resistant to that kind of hijacking.

(Note to Sebby: When the hard left actually holds sway, it doesn't to try to influence to discourse by sending people questionnaires -- it just sends dissenters to the gulags and re-education camps we don't have in this country.)

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

There was a commercial with film of her at something called Transnation speaking to a trans woman and promising the payments. I assume while she held some office in Cali?

The commercial then went to a radio show with two young black men complaining about government money being for that. Then an image of a girls middle school school basketball team with you or me on it.

Just saying whatever she meant when she said the gov would pay, and it was film, ain’t no way back from that.


EDIT This has the film of her saying it. I can't find the commercial that played in Michigan but it was pretty devastating, worse than this one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xzybGKwIGk

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

It's hard to tell what she was saying in the interview in that YouTube because it has been edited down so much. I kinda doubt that she was actually saying what the ad said she said, because they would have run more of it. But it doesn't really matter, because she was stuck with the response to the questionnaire.

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

Then you're in fucking fantasyland. I'm not going to dignify this comment, as its delusional.

Do you know anyone in the media? In academia? In most of the influential think tanks?

How do you think we wound up with absurd cultural fixations on things like gender theory, "intersectionality," wokeness, etc. All this bullshit starts among hard left screwballs in cultural and academic institutions, migrates outward into govt and society more broadly, gets picked up by MAGA nuts, and gets turned into cultural wedge issues. Tango of fucking idiots, started by hard heft nuts who think about dipshit concepts such as one's sex being an entirely social construction.

How else but via hard-left lunatic thinking do we get an academe that reacts to the murder of Israelis with the response that it is their own fault?

My bad. It's govt worker donations to Ds.

"Federal employees donated at least $4.2 million to the major candidates for presidents in 2024, with nearly 84% of that total going to Vice President Kamala Harris."

https://www.govexec.com/workforce/20...harris/400760/

Now, go ahead and write, as you will, "She's not hard left. You said hard left." Okay. That's fair. She wasn't. But now ask yourself, "Is it normal to have 84% of donations going to one party?" And now add to that the well-known fact that over 90% of college professors today are on the left (liberal and progressive).

That's not skewed? Get fucking real.

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

Name one. What's an example of a significant cultural institution under the control of the hard left?

Yes and yes. But you are moving the goalposts -- we were talking about who is running things, not what some employees think.

Is there even such a thing on the left?

The existence and discussion of ideas with which you disagree is not evidence that the country's institutions are under the control of the hard left.

We wound up with discussions about gender and race because of the lived experiences of many, many people. The term woke comes out of black culture, not the academy. At the risk of stating the obvious, many people think American culture and society tend to systematically disadvantage people who are not white men. These views get discussed because they are material to ordinary people's lives, not because a cabal of leftists highjacked some institutions. I think the same is true of gender issues. I know many people, family and friends, whose children identify as something other than their gender at birth. These children haven't been reading academic papers on intersectionality. The causal relationship runs the other way: Academics are trying to understand things that are happening in the world.

But none of this has anything to do with the idea that the hard left has taken over the country's institutions.

There is not a single educational institution in this country of which I am aware where the dominant view is that October 7 was Israeli's fault, and the number of people who say such things is quite small, but they receive attention out of proportion to their number because agitating people is good for engagement, which makes money for media companies and platforms.

I agree with you that federal workers and college professors tend to support Democrats. With what Trump and Musk are trying to do to both of them, are you surprised? But that's a different subject from whether the hard left (as opposed to Democrats generally) controls major institutions.

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

Universities. Legacy media. Most govt agencies.

None are overtly controlled by it, but it influences and polices them all. Or at least it used to.

You have it backwards. The loons at the top have been running these nonsense theories about race and gender since the time of Marcuse and Foucault. It filters from the top down, not the other way around.

Look, their Presidents testified in front of Congress and they said what they said. Which was nuts. Argue with that record and get back to me.

They were all in for Ds before Musk and Trump. The Ds are at least now admitting out loud what we all knew before: Govt work is a trade - security for lower pay. Okay. That's fine. But if you've ever run any organization, you know, if you offer that kind of thing to people, roughly 40% will abuse it. Most people have to be incentivized to work. Some see opportunity. Others, you have to use fear. Giving someone security incentivizes these things: CYA behavior, laziness, and "staying in one's lane." These are anathema to innovation and effectiveness. And yes, even govt employees should be expected to innovate.

Personally, I'd pay govt workers on par with the private sector, and make them fireable just like the private sector. (The increased pay for good people would make up for the lost multiplier of giving loads of salaries to mediocre people.) I'd want better people. I'd never even think about hiring a person who just wanted guaranteed safety. Who would? Govt should not be a catch-all for folks who can't handle the stress of being subject to termination every day. There is no "safe space" in life, and nor should there be one.

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

What you said before was incontrovertibly wrong. Now you've walked it back (while trying to appear not to -- none are "overtly" controlled by the hard left, as if there is a single such institution you could name that is covertly controlled by the hard left). Now the hard left does "control" but you say it still "polices" institutions, as if that word means anything in the absence of control, if there is no difference between the neighborhood Karen who complains about things she doesn't like and the police who can charge, shoot and jail people. But, you've conceded the key point I was reacting to, so at least we found that meeting of the minds.

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

I don't really understand your theory of gravity here. No one theorizing about race and gender is at the top of anything that filters down to my niece, and they are not reading Marcuse and Foucault.

I am not defending those presidents, who hardly covered themselves in glory, but it is simply nonsense to suggest that the dominant view anywhere in academia is that October 7 was Israel's fault. Every school has its provocateurs, but none is run by them.

This not a Democratic idea. This happens because taxpayers don't want to pay taxes, and so governments negotiate with workers to give them things that don't cost money, like job security. No one thinks it's the best way to run an organization, but no one wants to pay taxes either.

And then you'd be unelected for raising taxes, and you'd sit in a diner and tell anyone who came near your table about how everything would be better if you were in charge.

Isn't it pretty to think so.

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

If it's too hard to name a single institution, can you name a single prominent individual who is a member of or has the beliefs of the "hard left?"

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

I feel like this lawyer chat board should have more chatting given everything that is going on.

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

You'd think.

OTOH, I'm not entirely sure if the law as we all understand it still exists.

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

Weird times, indeed.

But which is dumber: Dead Kennedys without Jello, or Sex Pistols without Johnny?

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

Depends on whether you're in court in Louisiana or California.

I am wondering how federal judges will hold administration officials in contempt. What happens then?

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

Maybe everyone is too busy ignoring oral orders and only following the written ones.

Holy shit I couldn't believe that position. I can't imagine trying to assert it with a straight face to a federal judge.

Anyway, I think the guardrails (the federal courts) are barely keeping the American bus on the road. Barely. I was certain they were going to start ignoring orders. And then this whole grand experiment would be over.

We just need to get to midterms, and I need to figure out what to do with my almost 6-year old Tesla.

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

We're fucked if it gets to that point.

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

I assume they are only (sorta) following orders now because they think the 6 will ultimately vindicate them. Before Trump v US, I would have thought they were overconfident, but when you ignore the literal text of the constitution to make up presidential immunity out of whole cloth, you've already trashed your integrity.

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

From some platforms I see that Musk’s company got astronauts back from the space station. But it is not widely reported. Did that happen?

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

Many of us are playing squirrel hiding from the hawk. When 47 starts squashing law firms, only lawyers give a fuck. Regular folk are like “Oh no. Anyway”.

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

Seems like we are going to get to that point very, very quickly, because the administration playbook right now is all about pushing back against any constraints on what they want to do.

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

I mean, today, they said "oops, our bad, we sent an innocent guy to the fucking gulag in El Salvador and we aren't going to do squat to rectify this".

This is the sort of shit they used to scare us about when they told us how horrible the communists in the USSR were when we were kids.

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

These tariffs are such a colossal, unforced, self-inflicted debacle, worse than the Gulf War or Brexit.

Barbara Tuchman wrote a book years ago called The March Of Folly, about governments that pursued mistakes that were widely understood at the time to be mistakes, like Britain's loss of the American colonies and the US in Vietnam. I think I need to re-read it.

Democrats ought to be branding this stuff with the word Republican, because Trump is not going to be running in two or four years, and congressional Republicans are too scared and feckless to stand up for what they know they ought to be doing. Congress gave the executive this tariff power, and Congress could take it away.

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

There are like three people in the world who thinks these tariffs are a good idea, but every GOP elected official fears one of them.

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

In other news Miley Cyrus does a decent version of Zombie by the Cranberries. . https://youtu.be/l81u-oSIAp4?si=ID_GfAD0N4r6klVZ

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

I can't think of a satisfying explanation for why he imposed these tariffs. The pundits who argue they're part of a grand scheme to lower federal debt service and tamp inflation seem like after the fact Rube Goldberg schematics.

The best explanation I have heard was from a DC reporter who pointed me to an open letter Trump published in a paper back in the 80s touting the need to impose reciprocal tariffs. It seems he's just had this idea in his head for four decades, and now that he has nothing to lose, he's testing it.

So we're all lab rats in a giant experiment hatched way back when everyone was concerned about Japan taking us over economically.

Maybe shoulder pads, Vaurnet sunglasses with the cloth attachments on the sides, Judd Nelson, and full bushes will come back into vogue too.

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

That one judge, Boasberg, is threatening to hold members of the admin in contempt.

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

I do not understand why this is a surprise to so many people. We have been saying this about him for a decade.