Trump's new cabinet

Politics & Elections
381

To speculate, there is a belief in alt-med circles that the formal health care system is much more concerned with how to monetize healthcare rather than make people healthier. They believe that simple, “natural” methods and treatments are far better than manufactured drugs.

They talk about conventional medicine as “allopathic”, and assert doctors would rather treat chronic conditions than cure them or prevent them. Because chronic conditions mean repeat visits for “routine followups” and medications mean drug companies make regular income rather than a one-time cure.

There may be something legitimate in how the system is primed. Once your start seeing a specialist, do they ever say “you don’t need to come back?” Or is it always “see you in 6 months.”

But it’s mostly a charicature of health care and health providers. Doctors works be thrilled to find actual cures for diseases. Antibiotics is curative.

Doctors also discuss overall health and illness prevention, including losing weight, improving diet, cutting smoking, limiting drinking, healthy lifestyle choices, the works.

But guess what - too many people are unwilling to make all the recommended changes. And some notions of healthy diet may have bad underlying assumptions, data, or science.

And even if you do all that right, there are things that happen due to aging, or genetics, or other factors.

The alt med holistic medicine types want to believe there’s a magical way to live that is healthy, that special treatments or practices will enhance your health without side effects, And that if we all just did all that, the majority of our chronic diseases quid disappear.

While the majority of us could do some things better and reduce the incidence of things like heart disease, there are still problems we face that won’t go away with wishful thinking.

So to bring it back to the quote, the “illness industrial complex” is the traditional diet and health care industry that focuses on keeping us sick so it can keep treating us, and the chronic diseases are the result of the industry’s focus on treatment, not cures or prevention.

382

TLDR summary: Doctors want to keep us sick, because money.

383

I have great respect for your opinions, particularly on medical matters. And I agree that Oz was doing some of the stuff he did for the ratings. You never said that was his only motive, either. I was just pointing out that it wasn’t. I’d feel a whole lot better if it were.

384

I’d bet money he got it from RFK, Jr., who surely heard about the military-industrial complex while growing up and thought this was a clever take on it. Trump thought it sounded impressive.

Trump’s cabinet is unhinged.

385

If he’s only hiring TV people, does fox have home repair show guy to fix it?

386

Ever hear of the Free Concert at Altamont (1969)? The organizers decided to contract security to the Hell’s Angels motorcycle club for about $500 worth of beer.

Violence was the result. Scores were injured. At least one died. Property damage was ginormous. It was a disaster.

This is an example of the wrong solution to a legitimate problem.

Trump identified a very few legitimate problems in the 2016 and 2024 campaigns, but he was the absolutely wrong man, with the absolutely wrong plan (if any), to address those problems.

Whatever the question, Trump isn’t the answer.
Whatever the problem, Trump isn’t the solution.

387

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. - H. L. Mencken.

388

That’s the best explanation I’ve seen yet. Think of how soul-sucking it would be to be a highly qualified and experienced civil servant, and have one of these clowns come in and play-act as the head of your department…

389

The more this has gone on, the more it’s clear to me that these appointments are a deliberate strategy of Trump’s (or at least of his inner circle). He’s making an absolute circus of these Cabinet-level appointments because he wants them to suck up all of the oxygen in the room. He wants the drama of their nomination and confirmation to dominate the attention of Washington and the public at large. If they get through, great. They’ll continue to draw all the attention at their agencies through their wild rhetoric and other antics.

Meanwhile, he will stack the next tier down at these agencies with faceless, competent, Heritage Society-vetted lobbyists, lawyers and compliant bureaucrats who know these agencies and who will take up the real work of undoing the regulatory state, dismantling federal assistance programs, politicizing investigations and otherwise twisting the organs of government to accomplish Trumpian ends. And they’ll be able to do so in relative obscurity as all of the media and public attention is driven by whatever buffoonish thing Matt Gaetz or Tulsi Gabbard most recently said.

390

Yes, I think you are right.

391

That’s too clever and involved for a 78-year-old dementia patient to pull off.

392

Bolding mine above.

Competent? Um no. It will be their fishing buddies or their sisters next door neighbor that needs a job.

393

Nah fascism isn’t the veneer of insanity with shrewd thinking underneath, it actually is insanity through and through.

Under liberal norms we all assume that there’s a level of competence required to smash all of these carefully constructed institutions, but a cult of personality without inhibitions is always a threat to turn liberal institutions into a dictator’s personal gang.

394

I could be wrong, but I don’t think so. Mostly because Trump won’t be making these next-tier appointments. He loves to make cabinet appointments because they’re flashy, but he couldn’t give less of a shit who’s the Under Secretary of Education. But the insiders who’ve glommed onto him do understand the power of these positions. It’s like how he farmed out appointing judges during his first term to the Federalist Society.

395

They won’t be competent at the job we want them to do. They’ll be competent at the job the Project 2025 people want them to do, which will be largely finding ways to shut down as much of the government as possible, while making the rest as subservient to their partisan interests as possible.

Actually delivering the government services that lie under their mandate won’t be much of a consideration at all.

396

Right. The 2025ers would meet with the putative top appointee with a list of who should be in the actual operational positions, and if they’ve done their homework that will include promotable-from-inside types.

397

Sure, the Project 2025 people will have loyal believers. They will replace the underlings with people that suck up to them, or friends and families or other incompetent people.

“10 years of service? My brother in law needs a job. Buh By.”

Following ‘Dear Leader’s’ example. Sort of like Trumps proposed cabinet itself.

398

Honestly, I hope you’re right. Four years of agencies stacked top-to-bottom with bungling incompetents we can probably recover from. But if what I fear comes to pass, then we could be looking at a federal government fundamentally remade and deeply entrenched.

399

I see what you mean, but I can still watch Democracy Now, read Mother Jones, and plenty of journalists are watching, and reporting. We have not had a crackdown by the govt on the press. I know Mika and Joe are disappointing many people right now, but if you want to know which side I am talking about…it is the side that is still out there, and not letting this go. I lean left, so I go to alt journalism media. Maybe that biases me, but…hell, I am biased then. But in the best way.

400

Which is why I always advocate that we strengthen and improve the electoral college rather than go even more strongly into full populism by disbanding the setup altogether.

That the Democrats won the majority but lost the electoral college a couple of times - by tiny numbers - was not evidence that the majority is an effective bulwark against tyranny. It was only ever evidence of how necessary it is to guard against the masses.

You can make strong and fair systems, with reduced opportunities for corruption. Those systems will always reduce the amount of pure democracy, but they do not need to be any more anti-democratic than having a Congress is. A professional Congress is better than direct democracy. A properly executed electoral college would, likewise, be better than what we have today.