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Messages - honk

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1
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: Today at 03:36:31 PM »
Correct. There are many justly layoffs occurring in the federal government right now. The DOE gave the orders, and they likely know what the NNSA is, so they should know if they are actually putting the nuclear stockpile at risk with the layoffs.

You're very gullible if you believe that, which I seriously doubt you do. The Department of Energy knows what it's doing when it comes to properly managing nuclear weapons. Trump and Musk don't. The obvious conclusion is that it was Trump and Musk who ordered these firings without realizing what they meant, not that the DOE coincidentally just happened to fire a bunch of employees at the same time that Trump and Musk have been pursuing mass firings of federal employees. In other news:

https://abcnews.go.com/US/doj-files-motion-dismiss-charges-mayor-eric-adams/story?id=118847473

This is transparently corrupt. Adams is a crook who should have been drummed out of office a long time ago. Instead, Trump has thrown out the charges against him in a blatant quid pro quo for his own political benefit. It's not draining the swamp, it's not telling it like it is, it's two crooks making a deal.

2
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: February 15, 2025, 09:25:16 PM »
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/14/climate/nuclear-nnsa-firings-trump/index.html

Even if we take it for granted that the federal budget is in urgent need of cutting, and even if we take it for granted that this cutting needs to take the form of mass firings (despite the salaries of federal employees making up only a tiny part of the federal budget), this is ample evidence that Elon Musk and his team of broccoli-headed kids aren't the ones who should be doing it. They're morons.

I don't see "DOGE" or "Elon" mentioned anywhere in that article. It says "Congress is freaking out because it appears DOE didn’t really realize NNSA oversees the nuclear stockpile". Why wouldn't the Department of Energy know that the National Nuclear Security Administration maintains the nuclear stockpile? This article cites anonymous sources "with knowledge on the matter". That is code that they interviewed random nitwits.

Read the article, DOGE or Elon are not mentioned. It accusing the Department of Energy of not knowing that the NNSA is, which is questionable. The article is also trying really hard to conflate Department of Energy officials with "Trump administration officials":

    Trump administration officials fired more than 300 staffers Thursday night at the National Nuclear Security Administration — the agency tasked with managing the nation’s nuclear stockpile — as part of broader Energy Department layoffs, according to four people with knowledge of the matter.

    Sources told CNN the officials did not seem to know this agency oversees America’s nuclear weapons.

    An Energy Department spokesperson disputed the number of personnel affected, telling CNN that “less than 50 people” were “dismissed” from NNSA, and that the dismissed staffers “held primarily administrative and clerical roles.”

The DOE spokesperson says that it is false alarmism. If you keep reading it turns out that the DOE had terminated new probationary employees, and then brought them back. If they fired them and brought them back it could be for a number of reasons, such as budget or priority revision, and it is a stretch to imply that there was ever a direct danger of nuclear accident without these people. The article heavily suggests that everyone in the NNSA is an incredibly important and critical part of nuclear safety, and that job losses undoubtedly put us all in grave danger, which is blatantly false. This is just fear mongering and yellow journalism.

Of course it wasn't really the Department of Energy that suddenly, independently decided to fire a large number of employees at the exact same time that Musk and Trump have begun their promised purge of the federal workforce. That's obviously just how they're dressing it up. They gave the orders, and everyone fired is told "(insert agency/department name here) has determined that your position is now redundant," blah blah blah. That's obvious. And of course career officials at the Department of Energy would know that nuclear weapons would fall under their own purview. They wouldn't make that mistake. The two famously arrogant and not particularly bright businessmen now running this country, both of whom have spent their whole lives thinking they know better than everyone else? They would.

3
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: February 15, 2025, 05:47:36 PM »
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/14/climate/nuclear-nnsa-firings-trump/index.html

Even if we take it for granted that the federal budget is in urgent need of cutting, and even if we take it for granted that this cutting needs to take the form of mass firings (despite the salaries of federal employees making up only a tiny part of the federal budget), this is ample evidence that Elon Musk and his team of broccoli-headed kids aren't the ones who should be doing it. They're morons.

4
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: February 13, 2025, 03:51:02 AM »
https://www.newsweek.com/republicans-reveal-trump-tax-plan-will-cost-us-45-trillion-2030024

It's all about fiscal responsibility, guys. Reducing government waste, managing the national debt, and giving the extremely wealthy more enormous tax cuts.

5
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: February 12, 2025, 03:01:59 AM »
That headline is extremely misleading, in case anyone is wondering. Certainly no fraud was involved.

6
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: February 08, 2025, 07:02:04 PM »
Yeah, sure. If one of the right-wing techbro oligarchs pulling Trump's strings says these things, they must be true. It's not like he'd lie, right? If he's really concerned about this country's debt, maybe he should support rolling back the enormous tax cuts that Trump gave him and his fellow oligarchs.

7
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: February 06, 2025, 09:36:14 PM »
Bitch away, LD, bitch away...

Triggered...LOL!

This is the real Trumpian Manifesto. At its core, it's a juvenile eagerness to upset, hurt, or otherwise oppress the people they hate. Conservatives don't vote in their own best interests; they vote in whatever they think will be the worst interests of the people they hate. They'd rather ensure everyone, including themselves, are miserable rather than be happy and risk the people they hate being happy too. The cruelty is the point.

8
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: February 06, 2025, 06:39:06 PM »
It's really interesting how the men who are deeply concerned about trans people ruining women's sports are the exact same men who ordinarily show zero interest in women's sports except to mock them. I'm qualifying this as "men" because there are a number of female transphobes, as well as a few mediocre female athletes who have seen profit in complaining about supposedly being unfairly beaten by trans athletes. But 100% of the men who treat this as a huge issue have nothing but disdain for women's sports to begin with. Not 90%, not 99%, 100%.

9
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: February 06, 2025, 03:27:43 AM »
Then why does the President have the power to assassinate US Citizens at will?

That's a dubious piece of hyperbole, but even if we assume it to be true, there's an easy answer - because the Supreme Court, the body representing the judicial branch of government, chose to allow him to. They didn't have to. They could have - and, needless to say, absolutely should have - ruled against him, and if they had, Trump couldn't have done anything about it, just as Biden couldn't do anything about them ruling in Trump's favor. Like Congress, the Supreme Court has a number of ways to check Trump's power, and also like Congress, they're refusing to use them.

10
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: February 05, 2025, 03:07:43 AM »
Okay, there's a lot of wildly incorrect stuff being posted here. No, the president is not a king or dictator, nor were they ever intended to be. Avoiding having a single ruler with overwhelming power is arguably the one issue that every single one of the Founding Fathers were agreed upon. We have separation of powers, and Congress has several means at its disposal to check the executive branch. They are currently choosing to exercise none of them.

Personally, I think a strong case to impeach Trump could be made over his essential abdication of his office to a group of unelected oligarchs and ideologues. The president has the right to choose their advisors and listen to them, certainly, but I'd argue that he doesn't have the right to let them govern in his stead, which is clearly what's going on right now. It's very obvious that Trump has had no input or involvement in planning the orders he's been obediently signing off on, and he doesn't seem to be involved in any way with the current systematic crippling of the federal government. Trump was the one elected president, not Elon Musk. If he doesn't want to do the job anymore, then there's a line of succession that needs to be followed.

11
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: February 02, 2025, 01:19:19 AM »
Trump was the one who made this political by immediately insisting without evidence (and incorrectly, as it turned out) that this was caused by DEI policies. Any other president would have offered consolation and enjoyed some positive press for leading the country through tragedy, but Trump can't let a single incident pass without turning it into an us-vs-them moment. Of course, Trump's cynical strategy of fostering division rather than unity has now gotten him elected twice, so who am I to say it's ineffective?

12
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: February 01, 2025, 12:52:36 AM »
I guess "needs training" is its own DEI category, then? Clearly, the military should only be recruiting people who are already fully trained to do the job.

13
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: January 31, 2025, 10:54:48 PM »
Apparently the pilot was an unidentified woman who was undergoing flight instruction. Close enough.

I don't understand how that's even remotely close to DEI being responsible for what happened. If the argument is that the pilot's lack of extensive experience is what caused the crash, then why assume that her being a woman is relevant? All pilots need to be trained.

14
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: January 30, 2025, 02:30:19 AM »
The vast majority of the government employees Trump is targeting have very little power to impede or enact a MAGA agenda, and even if they did, vetting and hiring hundreds of thousands - or even just tens of thousands - of loyalists to fill all these positions isn't a feasible task. Trump himself might not realize that, but the people actually setting the agenda for his time in office certainly do. My bet is that these guys - a mix of greedy oligarchs and wild-eyed Christian fundamentalists - have a more drastic plan of outright crippling the federal government and using that as an excuse to create a whole new government of their own design from the ground up. They'll inevitably end up fighting once their goals become incompatible, but for the moment, they're united, and Trump's marching orders are clear.

15
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: January 25, 2025, 06:34:17 PM »
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/24/nx-s1-5272854/trump-cabinet-picks-pete-hegseth-senate-confirmation-vote

Even setting aside the spousal abuse and rape allegations, Hegseth is ludicrously, absurdly unqualified for this role. He was a major in the National Guard, and he ran a small lobbying group before he was forced out for (at best) incompetence. That's it. That's all his relevant experience with the government, military, or general leadership/managerial roles. He's also an alcoholic, but don't worry - he plans to stop drinking now that he has this very difficult and stressful job. Of course, it was never the point for him to be actually qualified. What Trump wants is someone who'll do what they're told, not someone who can actually do their job well. We're well past the point of actual professionals wanting to work for Trump.

16
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: President Joe Biden
« on: January 24, 2025, 05:07:23 AM »
It was not "dicta." It was part of the actual basis leading them to the decision they rendered in the case.

...which is called dicta, and is distinct from the ruling itself. Look at the link to Burdick I posted. This was the ruling of the Supreme Court:

Quote
  • A pardoned person must introduce the pardon into court proceedings, otherwise the pardon is considered a private matter, unknown to and unable to be acted on by the court.
  • No formal acceptance is necessary to give effect to the pardons. If a pardon is rejected, it cannot be forced upon its subject.

The ruling doesn't say that accepting a pardon means that the recipient has admitted guilt, therefore the SC didn't rule that accepting a pardon means that the recipient has admitted guilt. It really is as simple as that. As per the Constitution, courts can only rule on specific cases that specific parties have brought before them. They aren't allowed to go on a tangent and issue as many rulings as they like on related subjects within the majority opinion. Again, it just isn't how case law works in this country.

I'm not fazed by your transparent appeals to authority, although it is a funny argument coming from you, of all people. People make mistakes all the time, even experts in their own areas of expertise. I suspect that whoever wrote the article for the National Constitution Center just added a bit of trivia without double-checking to see if it was true, as their focus was on writing an article about Nixon and Ford's pardon of him.  I must have missed the occasion where every member of Congress apparently made a unanimous statement about how accepting a pardon legally means that the recipient has admitted guilt, but even if they really had done that, they would still be wrong.

17
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: President Joe Biden
« on: January 23, 2025, 04:29:17 AM »
The US Supreme Court has disagreed with you:

"...:a 1915 Supreme Court decision. In Burdick v. United States, the Court ruled that a pardon carried an "imputation of guilt" and accepting a pardon was "an admission of guilt.”. Thus, this decision implied that Nixon accepted his guilt in the Watergate controversy by also accepting Ford’s pardon."

So, even a scumbag like Nixon knew the deal.

The Supreme Court didn't "rule" any such thing. I'm not surprised that Ford would have been eager to believe this, but the National Constitution Center should have known better than to phrase it so misleadingly. The actual ruling of Burlick had nothing to do with whether or not accepting a pardon meant admitting guilt. They said it in the majority opinion, and maybe it really was how they felt, but it wasn't their ruling. It was dicta, one line among many in the majority opinion explaining how they made their ruling, not a legal ruling in and of itself. You could come up with a thousand radical new legal rulings if you combed through the SC's majority opinions and treated each separate line in them as a ruling unto itself. But that's not how case law in this country works, as a federal court of appeals has ruled. The only ones who can overrule them now are the SC.

18
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: President Joe Biden
« on: January 22, 2025, 07:28:17 PM »
Okay? It doesn't really matter what term you use. The point is that the idea that receiving a pardon legally signifies an admission of guilt becomes nonsensical when you take into account people who haven't been charged with any crime and have been pardoned of all possible crimes. The Bidens have no more admitted they're guilty of whatever corruption scheme you have in mind than Nixon admitted he was guilty of smuggling cocaine in from Colombia.

19
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: President Joe Biden
« on: January 22, 2025, 04:33:57 PM »
If accepting a pardon requires an admission of guilt, then what are people who receive general pardons for all federal offenses - like the Bidens - even admitting guilt to? All federal offenses, from drug trafficking to mail fraud to terrorism? They've been pardoned for those crimes just as much as they've been pardoned for whatever crime you or Trump or anyone might have thought they really were guilty of. Doesn't make much sense, does it? Adding to that, no court has ever treated being pardoned as evidence of guilt. Like I said, the DoJ were just mad that years of work were about to go up in smoke, so they made a weak effort at saving face. The Jan. 6th rioters aren't implicated by being pardoned, and neither is anyone whom Biden has pardoned.

20
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: President Joe Biden
« on: January 22, 2025, 02:35:47 PM »
The DOJ under Biden clearly stated that acceptance of a pardon required an admission of guilt of the crime.

It doesn't. That was simply them trying to save face in anticipation of the Jan. 6th participants being pardoned.

You might be more convincing if the family members Biden pardoned weren't being investigated by a congressional committee over the last two years, who have shown evidence of them receiving millions of dollars from foreign sources despite offering no known product or service.

Two years of liars telling Republicans what they wanted to hear, general FUD, and miscellaneous failson sleaze, all presided over by a body that didn't lift a finger when Trump openly monetized his office, ushered government business his way, and sold access to himself far more blatantly than any Biden did.

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