Curious Canid

The increasing levels of desperation are amazing.

Because there is money to be made. It’s just that simple.

This is exactly how science normally works. “We’ve figured out something extremely important, but we aren’t going to make it available for a month, so we can build up suspense.”

As with many people, it isn’t just about me. I am not willing to move my family and my elderly parent onto the streets at this stage.

The government could have taken all my assets at any point in the last 50 years if they wanted. We all have to deal with the current reality. I think we are still at a stage where protesting and voting may be enough to turn things around. Meanwhile, I am supporting local efforts to protect vulnerable people from the new policies. There is organized resistance and it is scaling up.

Understand that I don’t entirely disagree with you. Particularly on the first two points. Not going into work and not paying for housing are only effective if large numbers of other people are doing it too. We may get to that point, organized resistance is happening, but anyone doing those things right now is simply going to become homeless and desperate.

People rarely take actions that they know will destroy their lives unless they feel that they have nothing further to lose. More people are reaching that point every day and that may eventually make that kind of resistance effective. For better or worse, the average citizen is not there yet. I hope the growing protest movement will force changes first. It is still early days.

So you recommend becoming homeless as the best solution?

I’m just curious. What, exactly, would you be doing to stop this? And tell me how you think it would work.

Absolutely.

It’s hard to differentiate between the malicious lying and the incompetence of execution. The results come out the same, either way. It hurts all of us, except for the very wealthy.

My father went back to school at 50, while still working full-time, and earned a doctorate. He never advertised the fact, and he would ask people call him by his first name if they referred to him as Doctor or Doctor Smith. Very few people, including those he worked with, ever new he had the degree.

I can’t tell you home much I respect both the humility and the entirely personal appreciation for learning.

This does ring true. And the right has been systematically attacking public education for decades, with considerable success. They have created the constituency they knew they would need to do what they actually want to do. The worst of it is that there’s nothing we can do about it, in the short term. Education operates on a generational time scale. We desperately need to fix this, but even if we had the political power to do that, which we currently do not, it would be at least twenty years before it could begin to affect things.

I think we are nearing the point where even the far-right base is realizing that what’s being done is making things worse for the, not better. We may get a window of opportunity to start fixing things. When and if we do, progressives need to be decisive and daring. Big changes need to be made and made quickly.

The Democratic party, as it currently stands, is not going to do what is needed. It needs to be reformed or replaced if we’re going to make this work. The best of the alternatives would be the return of something like the Great Depression.

I don’t think the system we have will allow the practical creation of a new party, but I have begun to wonder if we can’t get away with bypassing the Democratic “leadership”. If we get progressive candidates through the primaries as Democrats, and support them directly with funding and volunteers, we can get them elected.

Under this administration, an ethics advisor is a clear case of government waste.

All of Trump’s appointments and hires have been based on compliance, and nothing else. Well, actually, competence may be a negative and honesty is completely unacceptable.

It’s impossible to tell anymore. There was a time when we could have assumed it was a bit. Now we have mentally incompetent people running our government and encouraging their followers to be delusional.

It will always be safer to store sensitive information in a system that you control than in a system that someone else controls. KeePass is easy to setup, it’s easy to use, and it provides excellent protection.

People are notoriously bad at correlating data. They personally experience a very limited number of data points, misremember half of them, then draw whatever conclusions they are predisposed to believe.

I know this perfectly well, but it still happens to me too. The difference is that people with a little less self-awareness find it easy to firmly convince themselves that their distorted perceptions represent absolute truth.

There are also areas where the data is open to broad interpretation. For example, the numbers for unemployment have looked surprisingly good for quite a while now. That’s because they don’t account for either the large number of people who have given up on looking or on the downgrading of many of the jobs from middle-class-breadwinner to minimum-wage-without-benefits. The numbers don’t look bad, but the numbers are a drastic oversimplification of the real situation. Similar questions about “the economy” are based on the assumption that what’s good for giant corporations is good for the average citizen, which has not been true for at least the last few decades.

The MAGA Cult strongly encourages people to lie to themselves, but that isn’t really necessary in a lot of cases.

As a practical matter, most or all of these people are wearing body armor. It isn’t full coverage, but it would make shooting them effectively a great deal more difficult. They also operate in large groups, which makes attacking any one of them a lot more dangerous.

The first civilian to shoot at them will almost certainly be killed within seconds. Anyone nearby is also likely to be hit, either accidentally or intentionally. Uninvolved civilians anywhere nearby are also likely to be hit. The agents are unlikely to care about their backstops or about collateral damage.

Any attack on possible government agents that is not part of a well-planned group response, using appropriate weapons, is going to result in civilian casualties and is unlikely to have any effect on the agents. That is not to say it couldn’t be done, but a few people responding with concealed carry weapons are not likely to succeed.

I agree with you. Outside of sarcasm, I’m tempted to apply this version of the word:

“We’ll give you a fair trial, followed by a first-class hanging.” –Sheriff Cobb in Silverado

I don’t think violence is really the right answer to this mess, but I have to keep telling myself that. The hardest thing about facing down awful and destructive people isn’t winning, it’s not becoming them in the process.

To be fair, Trumpists have no idea how to actual govern, so to them, everything probably is an emergency.

I attended the rally in Madison today. It was a large and enthusiastic crowd, estimated at over 15,000. There was a lot of anger, but it was all directed toward positive ends. The protest was peaceful and non-destructive.

I have to give credit to the State Troopers who provided security for the event. They got right everything the police in LA have gotten wrong. Our police were pleasant, helpful, and low-key.

There was a good lineup of speakers. One of was a reporter and author named John Nichols who has written several books with Bernie Sanders. He arranged for Bernie to speak to the rally by phone.

I left feeling more positive than I have for quite a while. It’s easy to feel helpless, and the authoritarians are doing their best to promote that feeling. Being part of a huge crowd with a common goal makes fixing this mess seem possible.