News flash: that shit works great!
Expect to see more of it every day that bastard remains alive.
Which may have just gotten the masses even angrier and more eager to vote for whoever said otherwise. “Come on at least tell me you’ll TRY!!”
This is one of the core impulses humans seem to have that really short-circuits any attempt at logic. If there’s a problem, doing something always feels better than doing nothing. Even if the something diverts resources from actually helpful activities, or actively causes things to get worse, people will keep asking for more of the something not because it is getting results, but because we want to feel like someone is taking action. Also because we don’t want to believe our intuition or inherited cultural “knowledge” about a situation is wrong.
There’s been studies on this and it’s true, with both animals and humans. If you subject a volunteer or experimental animal to random electric shocks, giving them a button to press reduces their stress even if the button doesn’t actually do anything.
The problem with this is famously articulated by Rudyard Kipling:
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
Yes, sadly, the experiment of one person saying “Inflation is all the president’s fault, and I’ll fix it in 5 minutes” versus “It’s a lot more complex than that, but we can look at ways to subsidize prices” has been done and the former won.
From a quick look on maga forums, the current line is simply that the rising prices are still the previous president’s fault, because he “started” it. No attempt to form a better understanding of any of this.
If you’re alluding to the same studies I’ve seen, I think the point is people believe there is some pattern “If I press the button 3 times quickly, it won’t shock me–” *ouch* “Ok, it shocked me that time, but it was just a little shock…it usually works anyway”
It makes sense that we evolved this cognitive bias, because, in our natural environment, it was useful to try to find ways to avoid or lessen some bad thing, even if from our current understanding it appeared like a random event with no rhyme or reason.
But it’s also important that we now recognize this bias and mentally correct for it.
Which Biden did- and it was working- but slowly. There is no magic wand.
Yep- the Big Lie.
The MAGAs had three of them- “The economy is terrible” (actually it was great), “there is a huge problem at the Southern Border” /“we have an open border” (some issues, but not a huge problem, and the border was by no means open) and “Crime is out of control!”- violent crime was down.
I honestly think Harris should have just called out the lies and proven each was false.
Because I think the underlying Atlantic article is paywalled, I’ll offer this link. If you can access the Atlantic article, it’s well worth reading:
Atlantic journalist says Trump officials included him in war plans group chat
I would offer that this incident marks the new high water mark for gross incompetence if nothing else.
It’s jaw-dropping in its kakistocratic ineptitude.
Of course, even if Harris was a 60 year old white dude, they would say that Harris was lying.
Yeah, that story is popping up in lots of places. Looking forward to what Rachel Maddow will have to say about it this evening.
“Heads should roll”: Congress erupts over stunning Trump admin leak
https://www.axios.com/2025/03/24/atlantic-yemen-signal-hegseth-jeffrey-goldberg
So is this a surprise to anyone? While Trump 1.0 was rife with incredible incompetence, Trump 2.0 is far worse due to being staffed solely with loyalists who are clearly and comically unqualified for their jobs. Trump 1.0 had lots of incompetence; Trump 2.0 embodies incompetence as a primary feature, from Elon Musk as a wrecking ball indiscriminately destroying the civil service to a degenerate alcoholic as the Secretary of Defense, all supervised by an aging orange man-child with increasingly debilitating dementia. I’m certainly not surprised.
I mean, yes? There’s incompetence, and then there’s “Invite a journalist to a secret chat room where we’ll illegally discuss classified information”.
I sometimes get e-mails for a guy with the same name as me, so I can understand how some mistakes are made, but this journalist’s name is completely unlike any of the players in this drama. And the players all know each other, they’re all prominent members of the current US government. It boggles the mind that they sent the invitation in the first place, and then never realized it, even after they guy logged out of the conversation.
This guy seems to be all over the place:
Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wisc.), in a phone interview with Axios, argued there needs to be some form of “administrative accountability” — such as retraining — if the breach was a mistake.
- If it was intentional, Van Orden said, there should be “legal accountability.”
- Such reprisals, he asserted, were “missing over the last four years under the Biden travesty of an administration.”
- Asked if resignations may be warranted, Van Orden responded “there’s a scenario for anything you can think of,” though he also argued this was an “isolated incident.”
“Biden sucked at this, he would have just let them get away with it, there was never any legal accountability, but it might have just been an isolated incident, they just need some remedial training in not violating national security like a bunch of jackasses”.
Couple of points. First, this is Trump’s description of what happened. So it could be off by a factor of 100. Also, it’s pro bono work, so no real person is being billed. The firm could easily say the value of the work is $2,000 per hour. It doesn’t take too long to get to $40M that way. And, of course, what if they don’t? I can’t see anyone remembering in Year 3, and saying, “hey, you’re not on pace to get to $40M, better step it up a little.”
The real problem is the perception that everyone is caving to his whims.
Not to mention the legal work could be sit on their hands for a month and then say nothing can be done. It’s just more BS.
Read it many years ago, then heard it sung by Leslie Fish.
Nothing this administration does would surprise me, unless it was something that actually made sense.
Yahoo News reprinted the original article in full here, this should be accessible to all:
This came up in a discussion we’re having about possible problems both fans and guests may have getting to Worldcon in Seattle later this year: Some European countries and Canada issue advisories for travelers to the U.S. | MPR News
Gender identification is only one of the problems visitors may encounter:"Finland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, citing Trump’s executive order that the U.S. now only recognizes two sexes, male and female, says if the gender listed on an applicant’s passport does not match their gender assigned at birth, their travel permit or visa application can be denied.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Denmark updated its visa guidelines on Thursday with a similar warning, telling those applying for a visa or ESTA to the U.S. that the country only allows two gender options to choose from. For travelers whose passport has an X marker or one that’s different than their assigned gender at birth, the ministry recommends that they contact the U.S. embassy for further guidance."
POLITICO: Waltz’s future in doubt following accidental war plan leak
Going by Goldberg’s article, Hegseth was the worst in terms of sharing the most important secrets, with a large group, using a platform he knew was forbidden for the purpose. But Hegseth is too Trumpy to get rid of – Waltz is closer to normie.
As for letting them all get away with it, Trump might. But there is a problem with ignoring a very recent security violation in his administration and then arresting Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden for security issues. Arresting one, or both, of them, when there was no sanction at all for the big Trumper security lapse, might create too much of an appearance of hypocrisy, even for Trump.
There is a chance of a Waltz arrest being followed by arrests of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.
P.S. Crazy post? Maybe, maybe not. I’m reading about the fall of the Roman Republic, and it gives one these sorts of ideas.