But if Musk actively identifies himself as a Nazi, how is that name-calling?
His family left Canada to move to South Africa because they were in leadership roles in the Canadian Nazi party.
He makes Nazi salutes on stage and very happily associates with ultra-right-wing German groups (effectively Nazis).
If I can call Biden a "Democrat" and Trump a "Republican" how is it namecalling to call Musk a "Nazi" when that is the political party he self-identifies with and publicly proclaims?
Maxdo, I appreciate your moral stance. If "Nazi" is just a word that means "a bad person", then yeah, calling an influential person in society a "bad person" isn't helpful. As you say, name-calling doesn't help.
However, as you also say, it is important to try to see the reality. Musk is a Nazi.
> When 404 wrote the prompt, "I am looking for the safest foods that can be inserted into your rectum," it recommended a "peeled medium cucumber" and a "small zucchini" as the two best choices.
The term was first used by psychoanalyst A. A. Brill when describing the natural desire for women to smoke and was used by Edward Bernays to encourage women to smoke in public despite social taboos. Bernays hired women to march while smoking their "torches of freedom" in the Easter Sunday Parade of 31 March 1929,[1] which was a significant moment for fighting social barriers for women smokers.
Bernays is widely seen as the father of modern marketing, and helped lay the foundation for the consumer-based economy.
If you had to choose between picking someone up at the airport or dragging a slice of pizza twice your size down the NYC subway stairs, what would YOU do?
While ICE is the most well-funded law enforcement agency in the entire country now, their budget is still really just a drop in the bucket, and wouldn't make a meaningful difference in the fiscal picture. In fact, you could not only defund ICE, but the entire US armed forces, and that still wouldn't even eliminate the deficit - we'd still need to borrow over a trillion dollars a year.
That said, I'm all for the peaceful, lawful, orderly dissolution of as many federal government agencies as we can agree on dissolving. My preference would be "all of them", but I have no problem starting with ICE and revisiting the rest later :)
He kind of did. He used leverage to place bets on the market.
Leverage scales in a way, because larger pools of money (corporations, groups of investors) mean larger bets.
But leverage also doesn't scale, because larger pools of money tend to make smaller bets over a larger surface of the market, since being wrong in a big way with leverage can wipe you out.
It certainly wouldn't be equivalence, but it would be another 4 years of expanding presidential powers only for a republican to come to power after that, or after 8 years. It really doesn't matter. The system keeps changing to put us more a risk of a bad president being effectively bad.
Two of the most authoritarian decisions by the supreme court have been progressive in nature: Kelo v. City of New London - where the government can redistribute wealth if it benefits the government, and the whole fiasco around the ACA, which defaults every American to being a criminal until they bought health insurance, using the commerce act as justification for the power grab.
About the ACA, whether I agree with national healthcare is irrelevant, this was not the way to do it -- by expanding the government's reach. There has to be consideration for what the administration does.
You essentially seem to be making an argument for the status quo because you're terrified that anyone who promises to improve things will become authoritarian.
No, it's not. When people try to "drain the swamp", several things push them to become authoritarians, even if they weren't before.
1. The definition of "the swamp" drifts from "open, blatant corruption" towards "everyone who opposes me". That's a much larger set, so you need bigger guns.
2. Some people agree that "the swamp needs drained", but disagree on what "the swamp" is, and/or disagree on how to drain it.
3. People don't agree with everything you're doing. (Maybe this is the same as #1 and/or #2.) Some people oppose you because they're corrupt, some people oppose you because they dislike change, and some people oppose you because they dislike your methods. The more force you use, the more people oppose your methods. But as opposition grows, you need more force to get anywhere.
The result is that anybody who sets out to do something like "drain the swamp", if they stick with it as an objective, gets pushed toward more and more authoritarianism to try to make it happen.
Look, Bernie isn't Trump. He's been consistently pushing in the same direction for decades. He actually cares about his issues; he's not just using them as a cover for seeking power. But I think that, if he got actual power (president, not just senator), the dynamics of the situation would also push him to become more and more authoritarian.
(Would he become equivalent to Trump? Hopefully not.)
> Look, Bernie isn't Trump. He's been consistently pushing in the same direction for decades. He actually cares about his issues; he's not just using them as a cover for seeking power.
Exactly.
> But I think that, if he got actual power (president, not just senator), the dynamics of the situation would also push him to become more and more authoritarian.
This is just sheer unsupported speculation. It's silly.
if college education produces a public good (a more competent workforce), then it should be funded through public funds-- government should pay for education.
If it does in fact lead to better outcomes, then the higher tax will cover the cost.
running it through the private system builds in too many perverse incentives.
>if college education produces a public good (a more competent workforce)
It doesn't achieve this; the % of college graduates has vastly increased over the past few decades, but this hasn't contributed to any significant improvements in standardised measures of graduate knowledge or intelligence. From a business perspective the primarily usage of college is as a filter, a proxy for intelligence and willingness to follow instructions, but its usefulness as a filter has been steadily decreasing as it becomes easier and easier to attend and graduate from college.
In theory that sounds good, but in practice our private system has created the best universities in the world and educates an immense number of students to highly employable levels.
His family left Canada to move to South Africa because they were in leadership roles in the Canadian Nazi party.
He makes Nazi salutes on stage and very happily associates with ultra-right-wing German groups (effectively Nazis).
If I can call Biden a "Democrat" and Trump a "Republican" how is it namecalling to call Musk a "Nazi" when that is the political party he self-identifies with and publicly proclaims?
Maxdo, I appreciate your moral stance. If "Nazi" is just a word that means "a bad person", then yeah, calling an influential person in society a "bad person" isn't helpful. As you say, name-calling doesn't help.
However, as you also say, it is important to try to see the reality. Musk is a Nazi.