Trump / Musk (other than DOGE)

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superrific said:
They also hate weaponization of government so much that they are appointing a guy to head the FBI who has previously invoked the Fifth Amendment before a grand jury.

Also, the guy's 2020 portrait is Manson-esque. I don't know enough about human physiology to assess it. Are there people whose eyes naturally look sociopathic? I don't want to slam on the guy if this is just how he looks, but to me it looks like he's a crazy man.

en.wikipedia.org

Kash Patel - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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Wide eyes can indicate anxiety and/or predation (also general excitement); we're wired for, and conditioned to, ply caution with people in states of anxiety and fear (obviously) predation. Additionally, the flat affect more present in anti-social personality disorder robs us of the subconsciously and consciously processed information we rely on for sussing out danger.
 
HeelingAg said:
Wide eyes can indicate anxiety and/or predation (also general excitement); we're wired for, and conditioned to, ply caution with people in states of anxiety and fear (obviously) predation. Additionally, the flat affect more present in anti-social personality disorder robs us of the subconsciously and consciously processed information we rely on for sussing out danger.
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Well, Michelle Bachman had similar eyes and was also crazy.

Maybe you're right, that I'm reacting to the flat affect more than (or as much as) the eyes. Either way, that is not a photo of man I would like to see head the FBI. I mean, if there was nothing but the photo, it wouldn't be important -- but there's so much more with Kash. The photo seems to encapsulate his essence, in much the same way as Steven Cheung.
 
CFordUNC said:


Does this count as indoctrination, or is it only when woke lib teachers try to teach that slavery once existed in the United States and that Black people were considered to be 3/5 of a person?
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this guy wants to be Sec. of Education sooooo bad. Sounds like he's trying to beat out this wacko lady -
www.yahoo.com

Potential Trump education secretary calls for DOE to be 'shut down': 'Put parents back in the driver's seat'

Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice suggested that abolishing the Department of Education would be a positive step in fixing America's broken education system.
www.yahoo.com www.yahoo.com
 
superrific said:
What do you mean by mathematical? Like arithmetic?
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I was thinking more about using an argument with set theory or something although after typing out what I did below it isn't really a set theory argument. Hadn't really thought it through.

Let's say you have groups A and B where the crime rate committed by members of A > B. Let's assume the targets of the crimes committed by members of one group are equally likely to be in any group. (In reality crimes are committed against members of the same group at a higher rate than otherwise which you could add to the argument.) Now let's say you introduce C (immigrants) whose crime rate is less than A or B.

There will be some crimes committed by C against members of A or B. These are the ones you can argue "but if C didn't exist, so-and-so in A or B would not have been harmed." While true and unfortunate for the victims, the actual rate of crimes committed against members of A or B would be lower because A (having the higher crime rate) will now be committing some of their crime against group C. This would be a higher number than C committing crimes against A. So, in effect, you have lowered the rate of crime committed against A and B.

Something like that but I suppose to make it a fallacy one would have to make it about something more generic. I would imagine if we thought hard enough we could come up with other more benign scenarios that essentially boil down to the same problem.

One complication is that it is probably true that the more people you have the higher the overall crime rate tends to be because people having more interactions with others - road rage, etc - although we are talking about a relatively small percentage of people added.
 
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CFordUNC said:


There's a lot that is funny about this tweet, but #historiclandslide might be the funniest.
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Trump didn't even win a majority of votes and will finish probably around 1.5% ahead of Kamala, but yeah lAnDsLiDe. Unfortunately, that narrative is already canon in the MAGA community and no one will ever be able to convince them otherwise.
 
www.nytimes.com

Trump Transition: Lawyer Says Client Saw Gaetz Have Sex With Underage Girl

The client’s reported testimony before the House Ethics Committee added to the controversy around Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general as the president-elect tries to fill his cabinet.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com

“… Mr. Trump’s top immigration policy adviser, Stephen Miller, said that military funds would be used to build “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers” for immigrants as their cases progressed and they waited to be flown to other countries.

…The Trump team believes that such camps could enable the government to accelerate deportations of undocumented people who fight their expulsion from the country. The idea is that more people would voluntarily accept removal instead of pursuing a long-shot effort to remain in the country if they had to stay locked up in the interim.

Mr. Miller has also talked about invoking a public health emergency power to curtail hearing asylum claims, as the Trump administration did during the Covid-19 pandemic.

… Other elements of the team’s plan include bolstering the ranks of ICE officers with law enforcement officials who would be temporarily reassigned from other agencies, and with state National Guardsmen and federal troops activated to enforce the law on domestic soil under the Insurrection Act.

The team also plans to expand a form of due-process-free expulsions known as expedited removal, which is currently used near the border for recent arrivals, to people living across the interior of the country who cannot prove they have been in the United States for more than two years.

And the team plans to stop issuing citizenship-affirming documents, like passports and Social Security cards, to infants born on domestic soil to undocumented migrant parents in a bid to end birthright citizenship.

Mr. Trump has already signaled his intent to follow through on his promises with personnel announcements. He named Mr. Miller as a deputy chief of staff in his administration with influence over domestic policy. And Mr. Trump said he would make Thomas Homan, who ran ICE for the first year and a half of the Trump administration and was an early proponent of separating families to deter migrants, his administration’s “border czar.” …”
 
ChapelHillSooner said:
Let's say you have groups A and B where the crime rate committed by members of A > B. Let's assume the targets of the crimes committed by members of one group are equally likely to be in any group. (In reality crimes are committed against members of the same group at a higher rate than otherwise which you could add to the argument.) Now let's say you introduce C (immigrants) whose crime rate is less than A or B.

There will be some crimes committed by C against members of A or B. These are the ones you can argue "but if C didn't exist, so-and-so in A or B would not have been harmed." While true and unfortunate for the victims, the actual rate of crimes committed against members of A or B would be lower because A (having the higher crime rate) will now be committing some of their crime against group C. This would be a higher number than C committing crimes against A. So, in effect, you have lowered the rate of crime committed against A and B.

Something like that but I suppose to make it a fallacy one would have to make it about something more generic. I would imagine if we thought hard enough we could come up with other more benign scenarios that essentially boil down to the same problem.
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I think this is identical to what I wrote above. You've reproduced the arithmetic argument precisely, and the fallacy can be named "but for" or "excess causation."

Legal theory addresses these problems because they come up in court. There's a famous case where an ambulance was driving an injured person to the hospital when it was hit by another vehicle and rendered undriveable. It wasn't like a hit-and-run or a reckless driving or anything like that -- it was just an ordinary accident. But the patient died because they didn't get to the hospital in time, and the patient's family then sued the driver for wrongful death. If the driver hadn't hit the ambulance, the patient would have survived. And the court said (and this is either a view of all states or a large majority of them) that the accident was not the cause of the patient's death. It was a "but for" cause, but not the "proximate cause" (which was whatever caused the injury in the first place).

There was also a subplot in the third season (I think, maybe second season) of The Good Place that indirectly addressed the issue. It was the discovery that nobody had been able to get into the Good Place for centuries because so many of our actions cause harm that we can't see, and thus we aren't "good." Like if you eat chocolate, you are subsidizing slave labor in Africa so you're bad.
 
nycfan said:
And the team plans to stop issuing citizenship-affirming documents, like passports and Social Security cards, to infants born on domestic soil to undocumented migrant parents in a bid to end birthright citizenship.
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This is core MAGA. The cruelty is the point. These are men who are literally taking out their anger on babies. The economic anxiety is just so much to overcome.
 
mynameisbond said:
Have we talked about Chris Wright yet?
DOE headed by a climate change denier.
What could possibly go wrong?
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The EPA is the more relevant department for climate change. Yes, there's an anti-climate person there too. This is one reason why I have viewed Trump's election as catastrophic for the planet. They could set climate progress back a decade and make it all but impossible to avoid the worst case scenarios.
 

NPR (@npr.org)

SpaceX and Amazon are asking the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to find the National Labor Relations Board unconstitutional. The federal agency is tasked with enforcing workers' right to organize. https://www.npr.org/2024/11/18/nx-s1-5192918/spacex-amazon-nlrb-labor-board-elon-musk
bsky.app bsky.app
 
ZenMode said:
I'm cautiously optimistic about DOGE. Objective assessment and change often has to be spearheaded by an outsider, which Musk and Ramaswamy are.
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Dude, "rooting out inefficiency in government" has been a GOP thing for decades. Every GOP administration sets up some sort of task force to cut the fat. Sometimes Congress too. Do you remember Simpson Bowles?

And the reason you don't hear about it is that there just isn't much waste at all (outside of the DoD, which I can't comment on). When the GOP talks about waste, they are only talking about things they don't like (as always) and it's usually ignorant. These things have a purpose. If you don't like the purpose, fine, but it's not just waste or inefficiency.

You'll see. This DOGE thing will come up with basically nothing and probably you will never hear of it again after the inauguration. If you do, it will be some symbolic bullshit or talking about cutting valuable programs that Musk etc. just don't like (which is not the same thing at all).
 
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