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Comment by smitty1e | Hacker News Reader

I gather that I'm further right than much of the HN crowd, having been on the edge of the Tea Party movement &c.

The presence of the Citrus Caesar and the billionaire boys is due to substantial, ongoing problems. The U.S. Government, like any code base, has accrued much cruft over the last century. Whether or not DJT has any lasting positive effect isn't knowable yet.

The risk of this current course being a cure worse than the disease is substantial. The two things to keep in mind in any case are:

- trust, but verify

- look for the substantive reform, not lipstick on the pig

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What part of the cure is illegally firing someone who was investigating you for a valid, non political reason?

There's no cure in that, just corruption.

Except that nothing is illegal now, Biden showed that with blanket pardons. So for all intents and purposes they will do what they like and Trump can just wipe it clean at the end.

Do you mean “SCOTUS ruled that the president has ultimate immunity”?

Sure, fine, whatever. However, when you fire all the inspectors general, without any evidence that they're being bribed, you're basically saying that you're planning corruption. The whole purpose of the position is to make sure the government is doing its job and firing them sends a signal that you are putting the watchdog role in a political light.

>- look for the substantive reform, not lipstick on the pig

Mitch McConnell made it his personal mission to prevent "substantive reform" of any kind from being passed through the Senate.

A third thing to keep in mind: law is law and must be followed.

That's an excellent going-in position. Given sufficient complexity and overlap, frictions arise. Hence all of the allegations and lawsuits and appeals and so forth.

The voters are the ultimate judge, and typically end up with a government that reflects them, warts and all.

There’s nothing complex about “IGs cannot be dismissed without 30 days notice to Congress.”

And no, judges are judges. That’s why they’re called that.

I guess that I'd be closer to your position if the last eight years of...however you characterize it...hadn't gone down.

It’s interesting how these “both sides are bad” convos degrade into one side saying: “he clearly broke the law literally written specifically for him” and the other side trying to invoke some incredibly vague “whatever you call the last 8 years” imagery.

It's interesting that when one tries to encourage a stepping back from the problem to consider larger patterns, that effort at abstraction gets carpet-bombed in the (im)moderation.

More saying-nothing going on here.

The larger pattern is actually that reactionary politics have no coherent model of the world, and that’s why it’s showing up by your continued inability to state your position.

For any readers interested in an extreme version of the intellectual emptiness that dominates this sphere (apparently Andreessen finds compelling!), the NYTimes profile of Curtis Yarvin was pretty hilarious for exactly this reason.

It is indeed a larger pattern!

> More saying-nothing going on here.

The Tower of Babel: who can understand it?

Let us go ahead and assign you the "W". Best wishes, and the last word is yours.

> The Tower of Babel: who can understand it?

Great commit to the bit

They are looking to kill the pig, eat the meat, blame women, trans and minorities for no one else being able to benefit from the pig anymore. And then their supporters will consider themselves primary victims and blame everyone except themselves and people they voted for for harm caused to them too.

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