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Notes -
Nothing Ever Happens
DOGE is as good as dead. They’ve hit the wall.
Federal judge pauses deadline for federal workers to accept Trump’s resignation offer.
DOGE Staffer Resigns Over Racist Posts.
The one shining light of hope for true government reform was Elon Musk’s DOGE. They seemed to be making real progress. They may not have been loved, but they were feared, and Machiavelli said that’s enough.
Now they have lost the momentum. Stays and injunctions will start pouring in as district court judges stop fearing that their orders will be simply ignored.
If the
deep statecareer civil service can draw blood with a trick as old as “drag-up old racist internet comments”, then DOGE really are toothless. No one will take them seriously anymore.Maybe Congress can tap in…
In my opinion, that might be a good thing for what I value. I would much prefer for some other arm of Tumpism to be stopped, not DOGE, since I value cutting government bloat... but at least it's something. My politics is based on the idea of keeping the left and the right stuck in a stalemate so that neither becomes dominant.
Now that Trumpism and the new right in general have given the woke a number of brutal punches and the woke is on the ropes in several ways, Trumpism begins to seem to me like the bigger threat, so now I turn my attention to strategies for doing some damage to Trumpism.
This would not have come about, other than that the left turned out to be weaker than I expected. I thought they would put up more of a fight, and that the stalemate I wanted would naturally come about, but I was wrong. The left has turned out to be a bit of a paper tiger and Trump's people have been running wild, which was never my preferred outcome. I just wanted to stop woke authoritarianism. So now I pivot yet again and, since the left turned out to be weaker than I had expected them to be, I now, despite having no love for the left, find myself wanting to at least prevent them from being crushed, since although I am neither left nor right, unfortunately the left is the only political force in the US with enough numbers to contain the right, just like the right is the only political force in the US with enough numbers to contain the left.
You are basically a leftist, dude. The left wins by pretending neutrality and always demanding the right to be impotent.
The right will need to do a lot more victories before anything like a stalemate happens.
A somewhat blunt way to put it, but I agree even as another person who would take 100% Left domination over 100% Right domination without blinking. It would take a lot more to balance the scales - when as many universities test right-wing credentials for applicants to student or faculty positions as do diversity statements and progressive stack scoring and 50% of illegal immigrants to the US have actually been removed, you could talk about the two parties being in a stalemate. The problem is that the US Left has really destroyed any objective sense of what balance looks like by tactical Overton window shifting, so even slight compromises to their preferences are depicted as huge norm-shattering transgressions, and in the end removing some 0.0?01% of illegal immigrants or firing that percentage of progressive federal government workers winds up feeling as if it may outweigh continued progressive domination of whole industries.
The problem in doing this for Leftists themselves, I think, is that in a world where so much power is built on kayfabe or rather the perception of invincibility, this might actually result in their downfall against all odds. You can keep a roomful of unarmed people in check with a machinegun, but if your strategy is to hide the gun and instead insist that you are a Sith lord who could force choke them at any moment, someone calling the bluff on your sad devotion to that ancient religion might just result in everyone laughing and bumrushing you before you can get enough bullets through your barrel.
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