What does a TRUMP presidency look like?

[Valmy]

How would guys hired to design rockets make air traffic control safer?

[grumbler]

How would guys hired to design rockets make air traffic control safer?

By shooting all of the woke into the sun.

[Baron von Schtinkenbutt]

How would guys hired to design rockets make air traffic control safer?

Melon Tusk is from a long line of Valley types who think they can do anything because they know how to tell computers what to do and (think they) can understand any domain but just reading a few books or papers in it.  Normally the worst these types do is blow a couple billion in venture capital.  We now have them "fixing" the federal government.

[Sophie Scholl]

The grift will be real, and Elon thinks he is running Wayne Enterprises.

...so the plan will be to get rid of crashes by just having planes explode mid-air? That seems to be the SpaceX solution.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

The grift will be real, and Elon thinks he is running Wayne Enterprises.

...so the plan will be to get rid of crashes by just having planes explode mid-air? That seems to be the SpaceX solution.

and occassionally have part of the engine land on sea

[mongers]

How would guys hired to design rockets make air traffic control safer?

Melon Tusk is from a long line of Valley types who think they can do anything because they know how to tell computers what to do and (think they) can understand any domain but just reading a few books or papers in it.  Normally the worst these types do is blow a couple billion in venture capital.  We now have them "fixing" the federal government.

Indeed.

Also ironic this coming from Mr.Space X, the company that seems at times to have a cavalier attitude to air exclusion zones and flight path safety during their own rocket launches.

[grumbler]

Maybe the first thing that they should look at is not firing air traffic controllers just because they are new hires or "DEI hires." Biden didn't blindly fire FAA personnel, and there were no fatal commercial airline crashes during his time in office.

[The Minsky Moment]

Maybe the first thing that they should look at is not firing air traffic controllers just because they are new hires or "DEI hires."

Priorities grumbler.
The lives of a few thousand air passengers is a small price to pay for the everlasting glory of owning the libs.

[Razgovory]

Didn't know if should put this here or the GOP thread

How the Woke Right Replaced the Woke Left
The hypocrisy of Trump's language wars
By Thomas Chatterton Williams

One of the defining features of the social-justice orthodoxy that swept through American culture between roughly the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012 to Hamas's assault on Israel in 2023 was the policing of language. Many advocates became obsessed with enforcing syntactical etiquette and banishing certain words.
"Wokeness," as it's known, introduced the asymmetrical capitalization of the letter b in Black but not the w in white. It forced Romance languages like Spanish to submit to gender-neutral constructions such as Latinx. It called for the display of pronouns in email signatures and social-media bios. It replaced a slew of traditional words and phrases: People were told to stop saying master bedroom, breastfeeding, manpower, and brown-bag lunch, and to start saying primary bedroom, chestfeeding, workforce, and sack lunch. At the extreme, it designated certain words—such as brave—beyond redemption.

This was often a nuisance and sometimes a trap, causing the perpetual sense that one might inadvertently offend and consequently self-destruct. In certain industries and professions, wrongspeak had tangible consequences. In 2018, Twitter introduced a policy against "dehumanizing language" and posts that "deadnamed" transgender users (or referred to them by their pre-transition names). Those who were judged to have violated the rules could be banned or suspended.
Donald Trump promised that his election would free Americans from ever having to worry about saying the wrong thing again. He even signed an executive order titled "Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship." But a few weeks into his administration, we hardly find ourselves enjoying a culture of free speech and tolerance for opposing views. Almost immediately, the president did the opposite of what he'd promised and put together his own linguistic proscriptions. Most of the banned words related to gender and diversity, and this time the rules had the force of the government behind them.
"Fear that other words could run afoul of the new edicts led anxious agency officials to come up with lists of potentially problematic words on their own," wrote Shawn McCreesh in The New York Times. These included: "Equity. Gender. Transgender. Nonbinary. Pregnant people. Assigned male at birth. Antiracist. Trauma. Hate speech. Intersectional. Multicultural. Oppression. Such words were scrubbed from federal websites."
Plus ça change. The government itself determining the limits of acceptable speech is undeniably far more chilling and pernicious—and potentially unconstitutional—than private actors attempting to do so. But what is most striking about this dismal back-and-forth is how well it demonstrates that the illiberal impulse to dictate what can and cannot be said is always fundamentally the same, whether it appears on the right or the left.

An extraordinary number of conservatives have ignored and even delighted in their side's astonishing hypocrisy. But a few consistent defenders of free speech have not gone along with what they see as the new "woke right."
The pervasive and nitpicky control of language is a crucial, but far from the sole, component of the woke-right movement. Like its antithesis on the left, the woke right places identity grievance, ethnic consciousness, and tribal striving at the center of its behavior and thought. One of the best descriptions I can find of it comes from Kevin DeYoung, a pastor and seminary professor, in a 2022 article called "The Rise of Right-Wing Wokeism." DeYoung, reviewing a book on Christian nationalism in The Gospel Coalition, argues that the book's "apocalyptic vision—for all of its vitriol toward the secular elites—borrows liberally from the playbook of the left." It "redefines the nature of oppression as psychological oppression" and tells white and male right-wing Americans that they are the country's real victims. But "the world is out to get you, and people out there hate you," DeYoung warns, "is not a message that will ultimately help white men or any other group that considers themselves oppressed."

Another hallmark of wokeness is an overriding impulse to contest and revise the historical record in service of contemporary debates. The New York Times' "1619 Project," which reimagined this nation's founding, was emblematic of this trend from the left. But similar attempts are happening on the right. Last summer, the amateur historian Darryl Cooper caused an uproar when he made the case, on Tucker Carlson's podcast, that Winston Churchill was the real villain of World War II.
The compelled politesse of the left has been swapped out for the reflexive and gratuitous disrespect of the right. Representative Mary Miller of Illinois recently introduced Representative Sarah McBride, Congress's sole transgender member, as "the gentleman from Delaware, Mr. McBride." The activist Christopher Rufo, one of the most belligerent voices on the right, endorsed the move: "We are all tempted to be polite," he wrote on X. "But complicity in the pronoun game is the opening ante for the entire lie. Once you agree to falsify reality, you have signaled your submission to the gender cult."
Speaking of falsifying reality: The Trump administration seems to be devoting a remarkable amount of energy toward making sure people call the Gulf of Mexico the "Gulf of America." In the White House press room last week, the administration went so far as to eject Associated Press reporters because the publication refused to alter its stylebook to comply with the change. "I was very up front in my briefing on Day 1 that if we feel that there are lies being pushed by outlets in this room, we are going to hold those lies accountable," the White House press secretary said. "And it is a fact that the body of water off the coast of Louisiana is called the Gulf of America." European exploration records have referred to El Golfo de México since the 16th century.


Trump supporters fell immediately into line. Representative Mike Collins of Georgia—in a gesture encapsulating the digital-political fusion that has come to define the woke right—tweeted trollingly, "Stop deadnaming the Gulf of America."
Just as corporations genuflected at the altar of wokeness during and after the summer of 2020—posting their identical black squares on Instagram and Facebook and, in the case of Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, and CBS Sports, pausing their content for a symbolic eight minutes and 46 seconds—some of the country's most prominent companies have preemptively submitted to the woke right's new power play. Google and Apple have both relabeled the Gulf of Mexico on their map apps with Trump's risible neologism. And an NPR analysis of regulatory filings found that "at least a dozen of the largest U.S. companies have deleted some, or all, references to 'diversity, equity, and inclusion' and 'DEI' from their most recent annual reports to investors."
Some state leaders are following in Trump's footsteps. In January, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued the "Executive Order to Respect the Latino Community by Eliminating Culturally Insensitive Words From Official Use in Government"—a loquacious way to say she ordered state agencies to stop using the word Latinx. Others, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, were woke right avant la lettre. The 2022 Individual Freedom Law, paradoxically known as the "Stop WOKE" act—developed under Rufo's guidance—imagines the state as one enormous, humid safe space. The legislation aggressively restricts speech in workplaces, K–12 schools, and public universities, and even encourages snitching on community members who dare to advance illicit perspectives.


All of these moves are ripe for mockery—and they deserve it. The scholar and provocateur James Lindsay gained a large online following in 2018 after he and two colleagues successfully placed a number of outrageously bogus papers in peer-reviewed academic journals focused on what Lindsay called "grievance studies," including one text arguing that dogs engage in "rape culture" and another that rewrote Mein Kampf from a feminist point of view. Last year, Lindsay applied the same test to the woke right, cribbing 2,000 words from Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto and submitting them as a critique of liberalism to The American Reformer, a respected platform in conservative Christian media. The gag ran under the title "The Liberal Consensus and the New Christian Right."
"What the Woke Right fundamentally don't understand as they make their bid for power now, and why they'll lose," Lindsay wrote last week on X, "is that none of us want more ideological crazy stuff. We don't want another freaking movement. We want to go back to our lives." The obligation to call people aliens or unlearn the name of a body of water appears every bit as petty as the prohibition on describing boring things as "lame." More than that, it amounts to a politics of brute domination, a forced and demoralizing expression of subservience that only a genuine fanatic could abide.
Voters in both parties are already signaling that the right's woke antics are unattractive to them. When it comes to its edgelord in chief, Elon Musk, an Economist/YouGov poll found that the share of Republicans who say he should have "a lot" of influence has dropped significantly over the past three months, to 26 percent. Seventeen percent say they want him to have no influence "at all." Over the past two weeks, Trump's approval rating has fallen.
The truth is that most Americans bristle at wokeness from whichever direction it arrives. As the left is learning now, no victory can ever be final. The right's illiberal zeal only creates the conditions for an equal and opposite reaction to come.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/woke-right/681716/?utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=true-anthem&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwY2xjawIgc_JleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHSg6Z3uagcQaMyo72-GahznxY4Jrw-gtmhJ5gXrQhx6DkPr50RyY-ypcaQ_aem_IMYq6VvetN5Ip0XdXR5KCA

[Valmy]

That language police thing was annoying and I remember it from back in the 1990s. The whole thing about how what words we use has all this meaning and by reforming our language we can actually...I don't know...do something.

I think it is better to spend political and social capital doing things more substantial than that.

Having said that I still think you should refer to people by their preferred pronouns  but how people personally prefer to be addressed strikes me as a different issue than saying you can no longer use the word "brave".

[mongers]

That language police thing was annoying and I remember it from back in the 1990s. The whole thing about how what words we use has all this meaning and by reforming our language we can actually...I don't know...do something.

I think it is better to spend political and social capital doing things more substantial than that.

Having said that I still think you should refer to people by their preferred pronouns  but how people personally prefer to be addressed strikes me as a different issue than saying you can no longer use the word "brave".

I'm do even know what's that about.

{i]edit{/i]

Oh, is it about Native American warriors being called braves? And if so was the 'ban' for it's use in just that context or all?

[HVC]

That language police thing was annoying and I remember it from back in the 1990s. The whole thing about how what words we use has all this meaning and by reforming our language we can actually...I don't know...do something.

I think it is better to spend political and social capital doing things more substantial than that.

Having said that I still think you should refer to people by their preferred pronouns  but how people personally prefer to be addressed strikes me as a different issue than saying you can no longer use the word "brave".

I never even heard some of those. Chestfeeding? Is that an attempt to remove sexualization/feminist or a gender/pronoun aligned thing?

The only one that I find truly annoying is the LatinX one in that it's supremely patronizing in a way only a white person can be

Some I just find dumb, like the replacing a word deemed inappropriate with a basically similar word, but it's not like I find offensive in the same way as Latinx. It just seems like a lazy way to say "see, I'm one of the good ones".

[viper37]

I tend to no longer see these neutral gender absurdities in French.  Well, I still see them sometimes, but not as prevalent as they once were.

Maybe not as many mentally deranged people as we once had.  The fad has passed quickly once people realized that it does not fixed their stagnating income, high inflation and increasing rent prices.

[DGuller]

For a brief time I had the speech coach turned on in Teams.  Every time I used the word "master", in any context, regardless of whether it was a noun, a verb, or an adjective, it complained about me not using inclusive language. 

On the one hand, this kind of stupidity is harmless.  On the other hand, it's the kind of stupidity that reveals how strong the culture of fear is.  Surely someone at Microsoft must've been aware that it would look stupid to make an m-word out of "master", but yet it has gone out in the final product.  As low as my opinion of QA at Microsoft is, they don't release things anywhere near that stupid that don't involve the w-word.

[Razgovory]

It's not a my custom to share memes, but I liked this one.