I’m sure you’d like to think this is a dispassionate judgment with coincidental timing, but I’m skeptical.
The sad thing about it is that you’re actually a knowledgeable guy and on balance are an asset to GQ (as a poster). But you’d be a much bigger asset if you knew your limitations. No one knows everything, and it’s important to appreciate your limits. But sometimes knowledgeable people build their self-images around themselves being fonts of wisdom, and this leads them to greatly overestimate the extent of their knowledge. (This is especially true if, as is frequently the case, they are losers in other areas of life, e.g. financially or socially, which causes them to overcompensate via an inflated assessment of their own wisdom.) So what you get in such cases is people who can contribute useful knowledge when they to have it handy (which will be often), but to speculate when they don’t and to fail to distinguish between the two. And more importantly here, to get highly insulted if this “expertise” is questioned or rejected, since it shakes the basis of their fragile self-esteem.
So my suggestion for you is to be more accepting of reality in this regard so that this won’t be such a sore area for you. Or, as I put it more succinctly earlier, get over it.
Bottom line is that despite all that, I was fairly certain that this would not happen, as I said repeatedly in that thread.
But that’s not the point here, anyway. Whether you should have been surprised or not, bottom line is that it appears that many liberals are likewise surprised. In this thread I was responding to someone who seemed to suggest otherwise.
To be honest, that doesn’t seem like a big deal one way or the other. Granted I’m possibly not up on the significance of who does or doesn’t have permanent seats on that body, but from I read in coverage at the time it didn’t seem like a big deal, so I’m pretty much ambivalent about it.
It’s interesting that you blithely ignore one of the central concerns that many people have expressed about this order: the fact that the head of the Executive Branch apparently didn’t know what his own Executive Order was actually going to do, and only realized its true consequences AFTER it was dissected and heavily criticized in the media.
As for your point about not being “up on the significance of who does or doesn’t have permanent seats on that body,” how about you try some plain old common sense: does it seem reasonable to you that the Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs should probably be part of it?
Not really. I take a dim view of Trump as it is, and don’t know that his involvement in things improves them. In any event, I was discussing the EOs themselves and not how they were made.
Depends. Some of the reporting I saw said that these people were not being frozen out of anything but were being freed from mandatory attendance at meetings that they felt were not relevant to them.
This issue came up a bit in the discussion of Trump blowing off some security briefings. People have the impression that anything involving intelligence involves some super important stuff, but there are undoubtedly a lot of meetings and updates etc. which don’t require the attendance of every last player.
Speaking of which … I just saw the clip of Stephen Miller on the Sunday talk shows (and the Morning Joe :eek: reaction). Miller was practically in SS uniform as he spoke of the powers of the president. It was utterly appalling.
I have to have eye surgery next month. I selected an eye surgeon that has performed hundreds of these surgeries. By her own admission her record is not perfect, she has had patients who have had problems and were dissatisfied with the results although these outcomes are very unusual.
You know what I DIDN’T do? I didn’t pick someone that has never DONE eye surgery on the grounds that they’ve never botched an eye surgery. That would be really stupid
I read from Trump supporters before the election that his more extreme promises were not meant to be taken literally. They were just rhetorical flourishes meant to fire up his base, or piss off liberals, or shake up the system, and he’d be a great president because, of course, he wouldn’t really do those things he said he’d do. So, yeah, keeping his promises is a bad thing.
So with Republicans in control for the next few years, if one Republican manages to rein in other Republicans and limit the damage done by the party in power to just a catastrophe, then that guy in that party should be put in charge next?
The Army Corps is absolutely not following standard procedures and recommendations. They’ve made up their own despite the complaints by the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. The pipeline company knows damn well what the standards are, too, because every other federal regulatory and land managing agency makes them follow the rules.
Security briefings are cumulative. The pieces fit together to produce a larger picture of a very complex issue. For him to think that he can just make a critical decision on an urgent issue without knowing the background and what has led up to it, despite him being “a very smart person”, is to court disaster on the world stage. Security agencies should not have to expect they will need to give the president a two-hour catch-up briefing on a critical issue when an immediate informed decision is needed.
OK, I’m not sure I’m going to argue this. But in general, what you write contradicts all the reporting I’ve seen on the issue, as well as common sense. IMHO it’s silly to assume that a company well versed in what the standard procedures are would invest $3.8B based on an assumption that they could cut corners down the road. Logic is in accordance with the reporting I’ve seen on the issue (which may not be in accordance with whatever various activists are claiming) which is that DAP followed standard procedure and got sandbagged when activists found a sympathetic ear in the Obama Administration.
I don’t agree with this. Presidents rely on their experts, and in the case of Trump it’s more important than ever that he do this rather than relying on himself.
DAPL followed what the Army Corps told them, which it assumed it could get away with because the Corps’ been getting away with it. Cultural resource management and archaeology, as fields, don’t exactly have a ton of power, especially when you’re talking about land in the middle of Nowhere, North Dakota, rather than a famous white person historic place. The EIS that Obama called for should have been done in the beginning, for the entire length of the pipeline.
I say this as a person who has worked in cultural resource management, the field that works with federal and state cultural and historical regulations, for about a decade. I also have a master’s in anthropology, with a focus on archaeology, which is the standard degree for those of us in this field. I’ve worked on numerous oil and gas pipelines, some as large as the DAPL, and now I work for a state agency overseeing compliance on projects (not oil and gas, though). The Advisory Council, which is the federal department that, among other things, advises the president on historic preservation and cultural resources, as well as the Society for American Archaeology, agree with my opinion, and the American Cultural Resources Association agrees with my explanation.
Eat shit, you pompous pedantic windbag. As I said, you’re an asshole in general. Your belief that any conflict I’ve had with you in GQ is the main reason for my opinion of you is enormously inflating your own importance.
“currently informed on world affairs” is a very broad statement. Yes, he needs to be informed as to world affairs. But there’s a limit on the amount of detail that he needs to know about each area of government, which is why there are cabinets and agencies that focus more on each individual area. Those cabinet members themselves are not as up on every area under their jurisdiction as are the various employees in their agencies whose job it is to focus on that specific area. So the idea is that the president has a broad understanding of the bigger picture, the cabinet members have more specific knowledge, and the people who work for them have more specific knowledge yet, and so on down the line.
I assume you agree with this as a general rule. What we’re presumably disagreeing about is whether the president definitely needs the level of foreign affairs knowledge from daily intelligence briefings. I’m not an expert in this area, but I assume there is generally not all that much changing from day to day, such that the president can rely on his experts to tell him whether a particularly daily briefing is uniquely important, but otherwise rely on a less frequent schedule. YMMV.
And again, in the case of Trump specifically, my position is that having him rely on his experts more rather than less is a Good Thing.
OK, but then it sounds like you’re agreeing with me that the DAPL followed what had been standard SOP. As you say, they “followed what the Army Corp told them”, the Army Corp being the government body with authority over this area, and that the Corp has been “getting away with it”.
It sounds like you’re now saying that you feel “Cultural resource management and archaeology” should have more power, but that’s not the same as saying these are standards that the government put in place before this company went out and spent $3.8B.
I call 'em as I see 'em, sorry. And you do seem a bit sensitive, what can I say.
In any event, whatever your problem is, my advice to get over it stands.
No, the standards of the field are what every other freaking federal agency follows. The Army Corps is completely in the wrong. The pipeline company absolutely knew better, because they definitely would have had to deal with the other agencies on some project or another - I’ve worked in North Dakota and the surrounding states, all the oil and gas people have gone through the BLM or Forest Service before. I can’t entirely blame the pipeline company, as I don’t really expect private corporations to be concerned with anything other than their own profit. However, I also know from working out there that there are oil and gas companies and workers who are interested in cultural resources and making nice with the locals, and they happily follow standard regs because it’s better for their corporate image anyway. The DAPL, on the other hand, plowed through Native American burials, so fuck them.