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Donald Trump vs. the Blob Part 2 : Electric Boogaloo
Ladies and gentlemen, it's been 4 years since our last bout. In one corner, we have the undisputed champ, the greatest of all time, the BADDEST man on planet Earth, the king, the DC blllooob! And in the other corner, the challenger, the next Hitler, the orange man, the Donald himself, Donaaallld Trump.
Let's.. get... ready.. to... rumble!
Holy shit it's been a crazy week for the current members of the Federal bureaucracy. Let's review:
Trump issued an Executive Order that almost all federal workers will have to return to office five days a week
All federal workers also received an offer to resign immediately. If they accept, they will get their current salary and benefits until September (an incredibly generous 8 month severance package). All they have to do is reply with the word "resign".
But also, workers will have to prove that they haven't been working a second or third job (in Reddit parlance, a J2, J3, etc..) It turns out this is actually a crime punishable by prison.
On the other hand side, we have the Reddit hivemind.
There is a Reddit for federal workers called /r/fednews. It's a revealing glimpse into an entitled and mentally ill slice of our federal workforce. Much like every other website, and especially themotte.org, they post almost exclusively during working hours.
These "workers" also may be violating federal law by explicitly campaigning on the behalf of one political party over another. Even posting on Reddit may be illegal.
So who wins?
It's a tough call. On one hand, in theory, Trump controls the executive branch. On the other hand, he doesn't control the judiciary who will ultimately decide the outcome. Already, many lawsuits have been filed on behalf of aggrieved federal employees.
Furthermore, not counting the military, there are 2 million federal employees. This is a massive army of people who, though already 95% anti-Trump, are now galvanized into action to prevent the erasure of their generous pay and benefits.
Has Trump bitten off more than he can chew? Will the champion remain undefeated? Or will the challenger land enough blows to sway the judges. You decide! Respond in the comments below.
In my personal experience, growing up in Northern Virginia, all of the most obnoxious, mediocre, self obsessed people I know are government bureaucrats. They literally can't describe what they do at all, but they constantly brag about random brownie points they've collected on their way up the career ladder, like anybody else cares. They brag about what abstract and meaningless code level of bureaucrat they've gotten to. H10 or G34 and other random letter and number combinations I've never felt any desire to learn the meaning behind. It's a profession made up almost entirely of easily mollified, brown nosing teachers pets. And the seriousness with which they treat their zoom jobs disgust me. It lays bare that all they really do is ritualistically go through meetings where check boxes get ticked by the performative act of repeating managerial chants and "delegating" anything that requires knowledge, expertise, action, or even the assumption of responsibility down a memory hole where presumably it becomes somebody else's problem on the other side. Do this enough times, and take a few more meaningless certifications and they go up another level of bureaucrat!
If I and my spouse had a bullshit job, both pulling in 6 figures a year, we'd be multi millionaires by now. Fuck, on my single income, with a family, through shrewdness, luck and daring I attained the meaningless distinction of being a "qualified investor" last year. I think that's pretty OK for 40. But these bureaucrats, despite the profound and unearned government stipend they've lucked into, are constantly broke and in debt. Every penny earned goes towards conspicuous consumption to show off how "well" they are doing. I mean, bragging about the pay bump they got when they hit T76 isn't enough, they need to show off the $1000 leased vehicle they just got too! There is a level of overcompensation to show that their jobs are "real" that is hard to believe unless you've grown up around it.
In the last 10 years a bunch of them decided they were poly, which was just the extra gross cherry on top of their DINK lifestyles. As these were often people so dysfunctional interpersonally, it was terrifying to contemplate them being in a single relationship, much less multiple. And somehow it all becomes part of their conspicuous consumption lifestyle. I just became a G14-8 and to celebrate my wife, my wife's boyfriend and I all went to Spain!
Leaving Northern Virginia was the best decision I ever made. It may be up there with South Park's old depiction of San Francisco getting high off their own farts. They need a humbling experience or twelve just to show them the world doesn't revolve around them, and that bad things are allowed to happen to them too. It's not just for the little people who live outside the beltway.
The stultifying status competition struck me when my girlfriend lived in the DMV — it just seems so insane to me to care about things that are so trivial, like your bureaucrat code or whether you live in Bethesda or
Rockville“North Bethesda.” I just don’t get it. The sort of raw, fruitless ambition, disconnected from anything that ambition might actually reward, like a more enjoyable job or more flexibility for your family.I can grok the love of status and I can grok the love of money, but for me those things are always concretely connected to their ability to relieve stress, provide for loved ones, and increase slack. To love them for their own sake is just strange… though it perhaps shouldn’t be so strange, as I’m fascinated by network switches and could stare at blinkenlights all day, and those are just tools to many people.
We've found the Sub-genius. All glory to Bob!
Alas, that was presumably in reference to Zvi and not the Church.
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