Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
No bio...
User ID: 297
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
So your argument is that the Civil Service Reform Act is unconstitutional, and Trump should simply ignore it and do an Andrew Johnson? I mean, that's a coherent argument, but I'll return to my question about whether you are okay with the next (Democratic) president doing the same thing?
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
Of course the idea of having to explain what you did this week to your boss is not absurd. Elon Musk is not the boss of anyone in the government, though, and people who won't see the email are just the beginning of why this is a stupid idea. What about employees who are on leave? Out sick? Working jobs without email access? (Lots of government jobs involve being out in the field for extended periods.) Working on classified networks? One could charitably assume that Musk intended such obvious cases to be exceptions to the "Everyone must answer by Monday midnight" edict, but he indicated no such exceptions or even awareness that such might exist. Moreover, I can only assume he intends to use some kind of AI to process these emails since he can't possibly have enough employees in DOGE to read them. On Twitter he's shit-posting about how "All you have to do is use words that make sense about what you're doing- such a low bar!" Yeah bro, so how is your LLM going to individually judge each and every response and decide if it was adequate? If it flags it as "insufficient" does a human review it, or has he set up an automated system to send out termination letters? Which I would not put past him, and which is, also, illegal, because Musk has no legal authority to terminate civil servants.
It's so ridiculous, I am starting to wonder if he is just... unwell.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
You may feel that the idea that the executive cannot arbitrarily fire any civil servant he wants to is absurd, but that is actually the law right now. Likewise, government sector unions are legal. Change the law if you don't like it. Schoolhouse Rock told me that's what Congress is supposed to do, but apparently we don't care about that anymore, so uncharted waters ahoy. My point was that the wheel turns.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
That appears to be the case, yes. What they want to do is simply fire everyone from every agency they don't think should exist. The law doesn't actually allow them to do that, so instead they're firing all the employees they believe can be legally terminated without process.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
How about actually engaging with people and articulating your disagreement, or else just letting it go?
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
I think that's a reason to think less of the Catholic Church as an organization, but not of random Catholic laypeople, or Christianity as a belief system in general.
Sure, and generally speaking I do not think less of individual Catholics even though I think their religion and their Church is hokum. I also do not think less of individual trans people - the ones I know are generally pretty nice and chill. That said, I can tell the Catholics I know (if it comes up) that I don't share their beliefs or support their Church, and they might argue with me but they generally won't take offense as long as I'm not being an asshole about it. I cannot tell the trans people I know that I am only being polite and I don't really think they are women (or "non-binary"). They might suspect that's how I feel (they probably know that's how many people feel) but if I were to let the mask slip, even unintentionally and without malice, there would be social consequences. I resent this, and I do think it comes pretty close to being unquestionable holy doctrine in the minds of many activists.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
I am, actually. The Roman Catholic Church justifiably took a huge hit because they chose to protect a tiny handful of bad actors rather than let them be properly exposed and punished. And to be fair, the Church never claimed that what their child molesting priests did was okay, or that it didn't happen. Which is different from trans activists, who generally take the position that no trans woman is ever a bad actor, and if there are any, they are singular exceptions and only bigots would notice them.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
You know better than to post low-effort one-word sneers.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
While covering for bad actors in your ingroup is certainly a normal thing to do, I will die on the hill of insisting it is unprincipled and ultimately unproductive. Would I feel differently if I were a Jew in Nazi Germany? Probably, but I cannot emphasize how much I think "trans genocide" is absolute bullshit. This is like the feminists who think we are literally on the verge of The Handmaid's Tale. If you justify closing ranks around predators because your enemies are Literally Hitler then you pretty much lose any appeal to rational acceptance and tolerance.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
Musk has no authority except what the President gives him, and the President cannot simply say "Everything Elon Musk says is a lawful order."
The President also cannot sack federal employees with tenure like this. For probationary employees it's... debatable whether what they are doing right now will hold up in court. But the civil service reforms that ended the patronage system explicitly prohibit the executive branch from simply firing civil servants at will. Congress can withhold funding and the President can perhaps abolish certain programs, but federal agencies have to follow a prescribed RIF procedure. They can't just arbitrarily fire people without cause like this.
Elon Musk sending an email saying "If you don't reply, you're fired" is absurd to the extreme. And how will that even work? Who is going to be reading the hundreds of thousands of emails federal employees send in reply? Are they going to do this every week?
It is unworkable and makes no sense. There is no way this can withstand any legal scrutiny.
That said, it appears the administration is operating on the principle of "legal is what you can get away with." Many people here seem to like this, so I can only assume those who do are operating on the assumption that Trump and his successors will never lose power again.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
Men can lactate if they have unusual medical conditions, or are pumped full of hormones, and even then they cannot really "breastfeed" except in a sort of performative manner.
I mean, come on, most women don't join a lactation support group thinking they need to specificy that it's for women who lactate. Additionally, when a group does try to specify that it's for women only, it tends to get attacked and deplatformed. In a significant sense they are not free to start a group that would explicitly exclude someone like Darone. If they did, you would probably say they deserve to be pilloried for being transphobic.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
Why should a lactation support group be "trans positive" in the sense that they can't tell a trans woman that she cannot lactate or miscarry?
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
And if they said "you're not a woman and this is in bad taste"?
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
I appreciate you responding, as I do any trans or trans-sympathetic posters here in a very unfriendly space. Now I have to admit the trans issue is one of those that has come close to tilting me away from what used to be my very strong liberal affinity. I really want to be sympathetic to them. I still remain very much "live and let live, and you do you" in my personal ethos. But I think your response is typical in that you see people who object to trans ideologies merely reacting out of disgust, or dislike that trans people are engaging in delusion. That's a lot of it, I'm sure. But:
And as a side-point which I feel is worth mentioning, re: "fulfilling some sort of fantasy to which the women were made non-consenting participants"… I mean, tough. I don't believe in thoughtcrime.
Okay, fine, fair enough. If a trans woman is actually getting off hanging out with women in a locker room and imagining herself one of them, or fantasizing about being a pretty pretty girl being railed by a totally straight dude who either doesn't know or doesn't care that she's trans, yes, I agree, it's "whatever" as far as what is going on in her own mind.
The problem is that when we talk about "bad actors," we're not just talking about trans people having dirty thoughts they keep to themselves. We're talking about, for example in the Gabrielle Darone case, a trans woman who got women who had miscarriages kicked out of a support group because they won't go along with her fantasy of having miscarried. We're talking about trans women who walk around in women's locker rooms sporting a very obvious erection. It too often is being indecent in public, and then bullying any women who object.
If they stuck to jerking off at home, neither I nor anyone else would know or care. If they posted on Twitter about how much they like jerking off while fantasizing about being a woman, maybe some people would be disgusted but no one has to read their posts. But it's the public behavior which tipped me over the edge. And the thing is, I realize that only a small fraction of trans women do things like this, but the rest of them, and their defenders, seem determined to justify such behavior. It makes it a lot harder to believe the line about trans people who "just want to live their lives."
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
I didn't follow the story myself, I only know how it was reported second-hand on Twitter, but my understanding is that Darone:
(1) Simulated being "pregnant" in a group for pregnant and lactating women. (2) When her "'pregnancy" was supposed to come to term, roleplayed having a miscarriage, simulating her supposed grief at not having a child, and expected the women in the group to support her the way they would for someone who had actually had a miscarriage. (3) When some women (including some who had actually had miscarriages) objected to this, they were kicked out of the group.
I don't think anyone is demanding you be mad about it. But if you find nothing unobjectionable in this behavior, I question your "confusion."
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
Do you have any links? I would be interested in reading more. To my mind the central bad thing in this incident is the "pretending to have lost a pregnancy to miscarriage," something cis women could also do. If the individual in question had been "really" trans (whatever that means to you) and had stuck strictly to relating their own experiences would that still have been bad?
If a trans woman stuck to "relating their own experiences," what place would they have in a group for pregnant and lactating women?
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
Did they focus on probationary employees, or employees in probationary positions? I've heard a lot of claims that there are employees who got a probationary promotion, but the probationary status of "depending on performance the promotion might become permanent or you might be returned to your old job" was just replaced by "you don't have any job now".
In the government, you are typically in a probationary status in three situations:
-
When you are first hired. Most agencies have a probationary period of 1 year (some are 2). The reason for this being that it's statutorily harder to fire civil servants who have tenure, so you want to make sure someone is a suitable employee before making them permanent. In theory, probationary employees can be let go at any time for substandard performance, though most agencies have rules about how much notification and opportunity to improve probies must be given. (Even more so than with private companies, the onboarding and training period is expensive so it's really not cost effective to be casually churning employees.) DOGE is discarding the "theory" and just mandating that all probationary (i.e, can be legally fired at will) employees be cut.
-
When you switch agencies. This is what's biting a lot of long-term government employees. You might have 15 years in civil service, but for whatever reason you switch from one agency to another. You are once again in a probationary period in your new agency. Usually this is a formality, but suddenly people who recently switched agencies are being cut just like new employees.
-
When you are elevated to the Senior Executive Service. This isn't a regular promotion in the GS levels; SESs are division chiefs or VP equivalents. They're senior decision makers, and again, they are put in a probationary period in their new position. Previously, a senior who failed probation for whatever reason (which is, unsurprisingly, rare) would just be returned to a GS15 position, but now DOGE is taking advantage of their "probationary" status to summarily fire them too.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
They don't actually want trad mores. They're mostly just resentful and sexually unsuccessful men who'd like the rules to change so women can't reject them.
You know that old joke about how feminist journalists all write articles about how, come the revolution, they will be considered hotter? I consider Dread Jim and much of the redpill crowd to be the male version of that.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
What would that look like, exactly? I know it's Dread Jim's obsession, but that sort of social control is unlikely to happen without an onerous religious regime that would place additional restrictions on you that you probably wouldn't like; it won't just be "You get to choose a young hottie wife who isn't allowed to say no to you."
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
I'm escalating this to permaban - we know who you are.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
Well, if you say everyone you know has relationships like that, I guess I'll believe you, but that sounds sad and tragic to me. Maybe you are not surrounding yourself with the best examples. I mean, certainly breakups happen and some of them are shitty and people can be heartless, but it is not my experience that most people are that casual and callous. (Except the part about sexual histories. Having to accept that you probably won't be marrying a virgin - yeah, that part is true. Live with it or take the shahada, I guess.)
Kind of. David Foster Wallace is considered "dude lit" (which is bad) and he was a complicated genius dude who didn't fit neatly into any ideological box but was not visibly pro-feminist, which means promoting him as an Important Writer is bad. Plus reading a complicated and notoriously difficult 1000-page novel is very male-coded (thus, bad). Basically, it appeals to the sort of nerdy, intellectual dude who might not be woke - hence, a "red flag "
(Disclaimer: I have not read Infinite Jest. I read one of DFW's other books and just didn't like it much.)
I genuinely don't understand the difference you are pointing at here. The law is pretty clear, and you are saying Trump should ignore it and see what Supreme Court says?
More options
Context Copy link