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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.
Let me tell you it makes me a bit sick to be doing my best @2rafa impression, but my guy it's been 18 days. It probably took you longer than 18 days to turn against the party of Obama, did it not? Can you explain how the woke is on the ropes in several ways? A few federally sponsored organizations have been told to stop doing some types of work.
What exactly been done that can't be undone January 20th, 2029?
I never supported the party of Obama to begin with. I enjoyed seeing the Republicans go down, but Obama's movement creeped me out. I found all that hope and change stuff, and the legions of young people treating Obama like some kind of superhero, to be disturbing in a cult-like way. But I did enjoy seeing the Republicans eat shit.
The woke is on the ropes. First, they have failed to censor discussion. The old meme was "just build your own Internet". The anti-woke did just that, but what's more, they didn't even get driven off most of the existing Internet. Un-woke discussion is completely mainstream on X, Facebook, and YouTube. Second, DEI is being rolled back both in government and business. Third, the Democrats completely embarrassed themselves in the last year. Even a bunch of their supporters are disgusted by their ineffectiveness and elitism and/or are calling for them to become less woke. Fourth, apparently zoomer guys are lurching right.
The woke isn't completely defeated, but they have sustained massive blows. In my opinion, the woke is still a threat but a relatively minor one, at least to my values. The bigger threat to my values, which are largely classical liberal, right now is, I think, for the first time ever, the Trump coalition. I do hope that the Trump coalition deals huge damage to the establishment blob before it goes down, though. That said, I also do not want to live in a country dominated by Trumpism.
Edit: One important thing I should add, which I did not think of when I originally wrote this, is that I still view the woke as being excessively strong when it comes to property crime and violent crime in blue cities. Some progress (as judged according to my values) has been made on this issue lately, as one can see for example from the fact that even on Reddit, which is a solid blue bastion, blue city subreddits have been condemning overly progressive approaches to policing lately. However, the "defund the police" types are still too strong for my tastes.
I know this isn't your main point, but I'm glad I'm not the only one who felt this way. It was so creepy the way a cult of personality formed around Obama. Even still, to this day, my mother in law basically equates "the Obamas" with "good people". There's a similar thing with Trump but nowhere near to the same extent as it was for Obama. "Cult-like" is a great way to describe it, and I was astonished how many people just fell into the cult.
Obviously I'm not saying that all Obama supporters were in the cult of personality, much as not all Trump supporters are. But it was so pronounced that it really was freaky.
C'mon, are you kidding me with this?
I haven't seen any actual shrines to trump with candles and offerings at the alter, and I haven't seen any newspaper articles saying "Many spiritually advanced people I know identify Trump as a lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet"
So that's one level of crazy even his colloidal silver quaffing fans haven't reached yet. They just think he executed Hillary Clinton and replaced her with a clone as part of The Plan.
I know people (unwillingly; they're in my neighborhood) who honestly think that if they can just manage to get Trump to pray for someone sick, said person will be healed. No shrines and prayer candles that I'm aware of, but I don't hang out at their house, either.
I mean to be fair, judging by all the prayer request chain emails I get from friends, they think this about a lot of people. There's some carcinisation features of folk religions that evolve over and over. In another fifty years I wouldn't be surprised to see Americans burning money at funerals so the deceased can tip St Peter the customary 25%
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