It is the will of the american people. Trump is doing pretty much exactly what he said he would do.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/07/us/politics/trump-rally-wisconsin.html
2024 US Election
Dictatorship of the majority as a legitimate model of government or even as a form of democracy has been rejected a long time ago. Don't be a child.
Gurgen I think Europe needs to take some of the blame here as well. I don't agree with the American stance but Europe has been for too long ignored their own armed defences and relied upon American security for a long time. They've pissed away their money and now they'll be dictated to by the Americans how this war ends and the terms of it. They know exactly what Russia are like yet still chose that path, hell they happily bought oil off them.
Lets see what Trump does but early signs are he wants the war to stop and doesn't really care too much about anything else. Europe does have a lot of frozen Russian assets which it could try to use as leverage. But right now a lot of European countries needs to have a long hard think about how they prepare going forward. The Americans are not providing security any more, if they do it will come at a high cost.
Kel Varnsen I agree with the goal of Musk and Trump. Not sure they are doing it the right/most efficient way though.. we'll see in a year or two. Reducing the bureaucracy (in size and power) is necessary. Liberal democracies need more democracy (populism) and a less liberalism (institutions).
Democrats used to talk about this as well. I don't know how much Clinton and Obama got done, I do recall the last time their government had a surplus was under Clinton and possibly the first year of Bush.
Mirth What you described is a common scam that most businesses face and unfortunately some fall victim to.
I dare say that if the NHS flagged it at £250k, they have more sophisticated controls than Meta and Google!
I can't remember now how it was picked up but it happened long after the money had gone and they didn't recover anything. That Meta scam seems a lot more sophisticated then just sending an invoice through the post and hoping it gets paid!
Claudius So you actually need to actively create programs to grow and retain women. Doesn’t mean that the women are too stupid for the work. They juat face a million structural constraints that make their lives a lot harder than a man’s. That’s what DEI is about. It’s not about getting stupid people into your company.
Like I said it started with good intentions but it clearly being abused when less clever kids get vip lanes into top universities over more brighter kids because of their colour. I strongly support programs which have helped physically and mentally disabled people get into work, the problem is these good programs end up being abused by people with certain ideological beliefs.
awooga83 Your presumption seems to be that what they claim is the truth even without the evidence to I support it. You want transparency from government, why can't we have transparency from Musk et al?
That is the way government works, if Elon and Trump are fucking around they won't be able to hide it. In a couple years time when the next elections happen Trump will end up as a lame duck president like he did last time and then nothing gets done.
JazzG That is the way government works, if Elon and Trump are fucking around they won't be able to hide it. In a couple years time when the next elections happen Trump will end up as a lame duck president like he did last time and then nothing gets done.
Which is fine but it's only worth considering what they have alleged when they provide the supporting evidence, until then it's unverified and not worth taking on board because you have no way to know what's true.
The anti-DEI stuff is engineered to give its spectator the vicarious thrill of punishing minority groups and their supporters.
That thrill is what you get to have instead of getting to have a more level playing field, a fair society and a better life. You're still behind the legacy admissions getting into the Ivy League.
I saw someone had filmed a good ole' boy / minuteman type blocking the door of a USAID office the other day. Then someone else made a photo montage of mostly just the black women who couldn't attend their former workplace. Which promptly went viral among Twitter fascists. That's what "anti-DEI" means: payback for chauvinists.
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JazzG on look, 2 elected officials talking about making improvements to the government. the way clinton conducted his government efficiency initiative is a million miles away from what musk is doing. another decent attempt at a false equivalency though. this 'what are you, against fixing waste and corruption bro?' argument is peurile. keep trying though.
JazzG I’ve worked in an admissions and financial aid university of a big school doing admin while I was a student. I can assure you that’s not what happens in these places. People don’t sit around conspiring to fill the school with dumb black and brown kids.
What you will find though is a lot of white kids being pushed through because their folks donated a million dollars or they have a chance to be a future Olympic athlete. Why aren’t you complaining about that? In fact legacies are 2-5x as likely as regular applicants to be admitted at Ivy League schools, where typically only 1/20 make the cut.
Claudius it's funny to complain about "DEI hires" and then look at the various people Trump has chosen for their roles.
QuincyAbeyie yup. Cos it’s not about DEI. It’s about maintaining white supremacy.
At least Trump and co don’t try to hide it. They’re quite open with policies like refugee programs for Afrikaners. Other folks have had to operate on the fringes with words like woke for the last few years. It’s a good time to be a white supremacist. .
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-gen-z-popularity-favorable-rating-yougov-2030595
The 18-29 bracket aren't really a long term indicator - they're the most likely to shift over time compared to 30+
Gazza M Trump said Elon Musk and his team were gonna do it this way and that is what is happening. I mean tough if you don't like it but he won the popular vote and all swing states, he has a pretty strong mandate to do all this. When mid terms come if this all turns out to be a load of rubbish the voters will punish them and he'll end up a lame duck president for the rest of his term.
Obama's staffers talking about it and saying they should have done some of this stuff.
Mirth I'd agree with the latter, the US are taking about multi polar worlds and looks like they have no interest in spreading themselves thin. Their main worry and focus is China. Marco Rubio did an interview recently and it kind of gave a glimpse into their thinking. Ties into this all of a sudden obsession with the Panama Canal and Greenland.
Claudius The supreme court ruling that overturned Affirmative Action was bought forward by I think a conservative group who said the policies discriminated again Asian American students, are these Asian Americans the people who are trying to maintain white supremacy? A recent case gone into California alleging discrimination against Asian Americans. My understanding is that community feels pretty strongly about this, I had a few Chinese friends and spoke about them about this culture in their community of prioritising education over everything else. So I'm not surprised they feel a bit annoyed.
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JazzG he had the lowest popular vote margin since Gerald Ford. that's not a mandate, which is a word republicans seem to have conflated with monarch.
obama had an actual 'mandate' margin of 9m in term one and 5m in term two. his guys wish they could get away with this stuff, but they know he would've been lynched and probably assassinated if he'd tried a fraction of what the current administration is doing.
A mandate doesn't come from what margin you think is acceptable. He won the electoral college, popular votes and all the swing states. And all this DOGE stuff he has been going on about it since the summer.
Yes Obama had a mandate and a shame he didn't use his mandate to go after the banks and put people in jail after their fucks up tanked the world economy. Living a nice cushy life now I hear though.
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JazzG stop trying to pretend the way DOGE is conducting itself was always part of the agenda. it was sold as an external consultancy that would only be making cost cutting recommendations to the executive and congressional branches to decide on. I knew that was an utter load of horseshit, just like their denials abour P25 being their agenda despite them now enacting it basically line for line. no-one voted for elon musk to delete entire govt departments and have hiring/firing power over the federal workforce with no oversight, no matter how many times the word mandate is thrown around.
This tweet goes into the detail about DOGE, if this is correct they have repurposed one of Obama's agencies and turned it into DOGE.
@JazzG , mate, your sources are about as neutral as an Arsenal fan at Spurs' stadium: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2021/09/20/vaccine-lawsuits-thomas-renz-covid/
Jazz, I don't mean to go at you so hard mate, honestly. we've shared the same digital space since like 2003 and i know you to be a top poster. to be completely candid, OMITT is one of the last pockets of the internet I actually frequent, since I've watched the rest of it go to hell over the last 15 years. there's so much fast moving bullshit out there, that I feel doubly compelled to call it out when I see some of it in here. chalk it under being overly protective perhaps. anyway I'll probably post in this thread a bit less. the political climate is aimed to demoralise and get people disengaged and I fear it's working to a tee.
Maybe we can get an ignore button.
It’s tempting, but I’d very much advocate against this. I like to know what people think and how they think. Folks here recently have heard my views on the transgender debate. It may not be popular, but I feel unless people are being genuinely and deliberately reckless and malicious with their words, then by all means, I want to hear their views. You learn a little in every discussion, whether or not you end up in agreement eventually.
Plus, eda o laropin. People experience shit, perspectives change.
I agree with you both on that @Gazza M @flobaba.
It's a non echo chamber type space online, which is a bit of a rarity. We've also still got people from quite a few different places and walks of life on here. No bad thing we don't agree on everything.
My views on politics are actually a bit more relaxed (believe it or not) than they used to be. But I am damn sure I don't think what's happening in the US currently is a democratic restoration.
Gazza M he had the lowest popular vote margin since Gerald Ford
And that was competing with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, between them comfortably the two shittest candidates I've ever seen the Democrats put in the field, running the worst campaign.
Biden or Harris versus Trump: suggesting that Clayton's choice proves what's occurring now is the will of the people is like saying Burger King must be good food because I chose it over Wendy's.
The shocking state the Democrats are in is pretty good evidence of system capture.
According to this data (haven't vetted it) that age bracket is already the cohort with the worst nett negative on Trump.
What we're looking at is the next stage of disintegration, not a bright new movement.
Kel is right, Trump's doing the will of the people. Some really weak-willed dumb people.
LOL at the gall of this orange clown who did all he could to avoid disclosing his own financial records in his last term and will also avoid any scrutiny of the massive conflicts of interest at play in this DOGE scam. I'm sorry, but anyone who thinks there is any genuine 'public interest' motive or outcome in what these lot are up to is also a clown.
I mean, if you want to lick Trump and Elon's balls, then go right ahead if that's your jam. But please spare us from any attempts to paint this as some benevolent strategy to restore democracy and transparency in government.
est Definitely not elitist in any way.
nope definitely not. When a group of people vote against their best interests despite other groups in their own demographics warning them of such, there's little else that can be said. You don't have to be an elite to make that analysis. Their own peers are doing it.
The good thing though is that they can treat it as a learning experience and do better next time.
The bigger problem is that a trans people don't even have to do that to gain access to women spaces. A biological male can have his genitals intact and have no hormone therapy undertaken, but if they identify as a woman they can use female changing rooms which is scandalous.
JD Vance with a very strongly worded speech in Munich. A lot of hard truths there which people need to take on. There is a bit of hypocrisy which he conveniently misses out. He talks about the EU overturned the Romanian election and how Thierry Breton boasts about about they'd do the same in Germany if needed which is obviously about authoritarian as you can get. Unless there is some pretty hard evidence of election interference you can't go around cancelling elections because you don't like the votes. Then again Trump still hasn't accepted he lost in 2020! The migrant crisis from the middle eastern countries I'd argue has come about from American policy. The Americans triggered Article 5 for the war in Afghanistan and if they had left it there maybe we wouldn't have got into this mess. It was imo the war in Iraq literally opened pandora's box and destabilised the whole region and they didn't stop at Iraq. Out of that we had ISIS and this migrant crisis and even now people are suffering.
But Vance is completely right in saying we've got absolutely batshit crazy policies here. Europe needs to get its act together. These populist parties aren't just rising up because of people are stupid and falling for misinformation, which seems to be the popular view among some.
Mirth I did say "if this is correct" but again people going after me for the source but not the actual content which has become common. If what he is saying is wrong I'd love to hear it. I just found it interesting as there has been a lot of talk about the legality of this DOGE and how an executive order would give them this much power. From having a quick google and even running through AI broadly what he is saying is right, USDS was reorganized and renamed as the United States DOGE Service (USDS).
Gazza M I don't take it personally mate, go as hard as you like 
I've always been able to keep the politics separate, we don't agree and I leave it at that. I have plenty of disagreements here but never hold it against anyone or not respond on other parts of the forum.
flobaba Agreed and I think it is something which has gone wrong in society. Nobody has time or wants to hear the other side. No matter where you stand politically I don't think we should ever take it personally nor should we ever let it ruin long standing friendships/relationships. The thing to realise is these politicians do take their supporters for mugs, on camera they slam the other side but behind closed doors they are usually very friendly with each other.
banduan This is what happens when the so called normal politicians let people down, they look elsewhere. I think most people in the UK know Farage is a knob but his party is pretty much just ahead in the polls, not because they like him but because they are sick of the Conservatives and now Labour.
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JazzG These populist parties aren't just rising up because of people are stupid and falling for misinformation
"Ordinary people" are rational but they do have incorrect premises. Like anyone is, they're apt to prefer explanations for things that are more reassuring.
In the OECD the domestic wage share of revenue has stagnated for over fifty years, as these nations have unevenly deindustrialised due to globalisation.
The familiar public goods of the post-WWII social democratic wave (like the NHS) were brought about by the mass politics of the labour movement and the need and opportunity of renewal following disastrous warfare. That politics relied on strong unions with high density in the workforce. But those unions relied on the industries that started moving offshore during the era of globalisation, so this way of doing things began to slowly fail.
The first big way this failure emerged was in the union-busting conflicts of the 70s and 80s. Traditionally powerful unions fought rearguard actions against an alliance of national governments with freshly international and mobile forms of capital. They lost.
We still talk about these conflicts now (eg the coal miners' strikes of the Thatcher era or the Australian airline disputes of the 1980s) because there have been few to match them since. The bosses won, and the labour movement's role has been reduced to bargaining since.
In the 80s and 90s, Thatcherism or "third way" politics (pick your poison) brought the managerialist neoliberalism we have now. Centre left parties disaffiliated themselves from the weakened labour movement. Tottering deindustrialising economies were patched up by way of privatisations, credit booms, and the rise of new forms of knowledge and service work.
All through this history, social and economic inequality has continued unevenly to rise. There's no mechanism that keeps it in check now. A gap in living standards has tended to rise everywhere, with degraded relative expectations about welfare, housing, and access to health and education for the majority.
This inequality has been masked by the price benefits of offshoring production, making many everyday goods wonderfully cheap by historical standards, but it becomes impossible to ignore.
By around 2000 "pasokification" (named after the old Greek centre left party PASOK) was in motion. Centre left parties have been getting irregularly hammered at the polls by a rational public increasingly aware of the reduced appeal of its offering. No labour movement, no proper labour parties.
But parties of the centre right are actually worse: all they do is sell things off, abandon helpful economic regulation to attract capital, apply austerity measures to people who don't vote for them, and use tax policy to redistribute overall wealth to their constituency. In effect these parties accelerate system failure.
The last decade's wave of ambiguous populism comes about because these old parties of government are failing. Greater numbers of "ordinary people" are resentfully severed from both sides of the parliaments supposed to represent them. It is highly rational they want new politics that appear to be different.
This new populism has two basic traits: nostalgia and scapegoating.
Its nostalgia harkens back to before globalisation and deindustrialisation. It promises its supporters a powerful phantasm, supported by cherry-picked history, film and photography, of an era when their nations manufactured advanced goods, and everyone was more equal with much fairer access to public goods. It edits out all the bad points, the relative poverty, the racism and misogyny, etc.
Along with this nostalgia come varying stories about who to blame. These go along with fantasies about rolling back social changes of this past half century: women entering the workforce, multiculturalism, etc.
"Ordinary people" prefer not to admit that for fifty years they've been spectating economic changes their withering politics has never been in a position to prevent.
Populists never, ever state that they're not magically in a position to reverse these changes. No one votes for that.
With "ordinary people" and their politicians preferring neither to accept the situation nor be accountable, it becomes a question of scapegoating.
So now it's terrorists, the Chinese, the migrants, the Muslims, the EU ... and now it's affirmative action and trans people wrecking the joint. Even during Trump's political career, the emphasis of blame has changed up a few times.
As the emphasis changes, so too does the symbolic spectacle of "something being done": Rwanda deportation flights, confiscating asylum seekers' family heirlooms at the border, "building the Wall", national enquiries, assassinations and airstrikes ... and now it's purging HR departments of efforts to reduce workplace prejudice.
Let's be clear. Trump, Farage, Le Pen and other populists have nothing more to offer than the centre left and right figures and parties they're displacing.
They have no renewed mass politics, no base in society, and no loyalty to the collective interest. They have no coherent plan and no particular expertise. And since women, migrants, and trans people aren't the problem, punishing and disciplining them will fix nothing.
The populists can "win", but the framework of power doesn't change. A general decline of civic standards leaves the door wide open for unprecedented looting of public goods by capital.
Quite likely the United States federal apparatus is about to get rolled over, ripped off and wrecked in a way that'll resemble the Tory Cabinet feeding their in-laws contracts during COVID-19.
It's also possible some things can incrementally improve, because there's no doubt fifty years of shittifying managerialism have left a fair few easy wins.
I predict we'll hear all about savings and victories through this period, but at its end the US system and its agencies will become even more dysfunctional, half the services they used to provide will be gone, the US will be a pariah in many more multilateral institutions, and nothing will get better for "ordinary people".
When the dust settles on Trump and Musk (or Farage or Le Pen or Beppe bloody Grillo) we're left right back where we were with the other parties. There's no politics here that can check capital and enforce outcomes in our collective interest. Let's hope the new bosses are kind.
Burnwinter Let's be clear. Trump, Farage, Le Pen and other populists have nothing more to offer than the centre left and right figures and parties they're displacing.
Possibly so, do you think people should accept their decline in living standards and just be told to suck it up? Clearly there were policies which were not popular with people. I mean the reason why the Conservative party imo is facing near extinction is they campaigned on enforcing stronger borders and then ended up letting a record amount in legally and illegally. There are perfectly valid reasons to argue that not having this immigration would have made us even worse off than we are now but that isn't what people voted for.
A lot will look to America, I know many have ruled Trump out already but what if, and that is a big if, he does turn things around and there. If not then we are back to square one and someone else has a crack at it. That is how democracy works isn't it?