Does a computer science major or engineering degree really need history or humanities classes? Sure, it might make more rounded humans but they are completely unnecessary. However, most colleges require these unnecessary classes to get a STEM degree.
I've been thinking recently about Hannah Arendt's description of Eichmann. He was good at doing his job, but had no ability to understand that he was doing a job that no human being should ever do.
I think about this in the context of the DOGE goons, who are so happy to show off their technical skills in the service of dismantling humanitarian aid to starving people.
The people that Palantir hires will have tremendous power in this world. I hope that they have the ability to think critically about the impact of what they are doing and why they are doing it. Learning the humanities helps with this.
Well, it's impossible to know if Eichmann really thought about the ethics of his job. With regards to his trial, it didn't matter anyway. Every captured Nazi official claimed they were just a cog in the machine and had to follow orders. The judges rightfully dismissed this, because otherwise Hitler would have been the only one responsible (how convenient!). They were all put on trial for their specific actions and decisions.
My take from Hannah Arendt's work is that normal people will do evil things if they think they can get away with it.
I am writing scheduling software for an uncommon use case.
The best method I have found is to use the interface and fix the parts that annoy me. After decades of games and internet I think we all know what good interfaces feel like. Smooth and seamless to get a particular job done. If it doesn't feel good to use it is going to cause problems with users.
Thats said. I see the software they use on the sales side. People will learn complexity if they have to.
Just stop with that BS. I guarantee that "white nationalism" was the farthest thing from the majority of Trump voters mind. If you come out of the gate saying all Trump supporters are racist most people are just going to roll their eyes at you at walk away. You have already told them you dont like them and that you will most likely not even entertain their reasons as acceptable.
You're the one who was in another comment talking about how the dems ran on a platform of flooding our country with immigrants and giving them our tax money; sounds like you are, in fact, closer to the racist/white supremacist set than you might realize. At the very least, you share their goals or vision for America.
He said "I will be a dictator on day 1", and he meant it. It wasn't "a joke".
He's using US Military on US soil. Sending National Guard in where there is no legal justification for it. This is what the start of a civil war looks like.
That's such a vague response that it's difficult to respond with any specifics, but I will say that I can't imagine how you thought Donald Trump was the better of the two candidates to achieve either of these goals.
The primary reason you yourself gave was a view of "immigration issues" that is detached from the reality that Democrats have continually increased funding for CBP and ICE and increased militarization of the border with every single presidency since and including Clinton.
At the same time, your belief is that failure to enact a nativist crackdown will result in "a civil war". I thought it went without saying, but this is a very extreme view, to say the least...
The connection between nativist policy advocacy and white supremacist ideology in the US isn't new. It goes back to the very notion of "illegal immigrant"; the politician who shepherded the bill that criminalized unauthorized entry to the United States was an open an enthusiastic white supremacist who pushed this bill forward to advance his white supremacy: https://immigrationhistory.org/item/undesirable-aliens-act-o...
At the same time, this relationship is not ancient history. Indeed, nativist sentiments and white supremacist ideology are still closely linked today. See, e.g.:
> The correlation between immigration preferences and racial resentment was significant in every year. The steady correlation of 0.30 throughout the 1990s and early 2000s was impressively strong by the standards of opinion data of this sort. The rise from 0.30 to 0.50 by 2018 indicates an uncommonly strong relationship. [...] [E]very measure we have indicates that Whites' views of immigration are closely tied to their views of race.
There are many, many similar correlations between nativist beliefs and policy support and "racial conservatism", white supremacist beliefs, and Trump support (including support of Trump's extreme immigration measures).
"Racist" is not currently a label that many people in the United States are willing to openly embrace, even to themselves. It's not surprising that actual or perceived accusations of racism are received with defensiveness. But individual (and nominal) disavowal of "racism" is frankly less compelling than the entire history and presently observable empirical reality of nativism in the United States.
Not OP but I reluctantly voted for Trump because of the direction he proclaimed he wanted the country to go. I could not tolerate the direction the democrats were wanting to go as it seemed an inevitable path to civil war.
But I knew Trump was shady and didn't like that he partied with Epstein in the 90s. A country takes a long time to change directions. I saw a chance for a smaller less restricting federal government. It was a gamble I was willing to take to at least get the ship turning around.
J/w: what direction does it seem to you that Democrats want? At least judging by its elected officials and internal leaders, it seems like a pretty directionless party to me.
When did your ancestors immigrate to the country? What was the process for immigration then?
For the majority of the history of the country it has never been anything like it is today. Until 1819 you basically literally just showed up. After that, ships had to include passenger manifest and pass that along to the state, and then state's handled immigration - but none there did more than try to charge 'head fees' to keep the truly destitute out, but not all states even did that. 1875/1876 there were laws that changed this - largely banning Asian immigrants and making immigration federal purview. The next couple of decades things got more formalized, but if you were a normal human being capable of supporting yourself you basically got held for a basic check and then were let in. <1-2% got turned away most years. It wasn't until 1921/4 that anything resembling our current immigration system was put into place, and while it saw significant revision in 1965 to how the caps and quotas were organized, we've not seen anything major change.
The Democrats want significant immigration reform, true. They want a path for people that have been living here as productive members of society to stay here. They want them to be treated like human beings.
This is not "flooding" the nation.
> and given them our tax money
This talking point seems to be repeated a lot, but it's just not true. Illegal immigrants pay more taxes in to the system than they receive in benefits - largely because they are ineligible for the vast majority of benefits. If you want to increase our tax revenue, more illegal immigrants is better than less. We effectively rip them off. It's like the claims that the shutdown is over giving illegal immigrants free healthcare - not a dime of the funding being discussed would go to them. You're being lied to.
I'm all for a system where we screen our immigrants for criminals, terrorists, etc. But the current system is broken, and we have built our way of life off of exploiting a large amount of hardworking people that contribute a hell of a lot to our ability to live the way we do. Legalizing them, streamlining the immigration process, etc., is not at risk of bankrupting our coffers.
This country was a frontier in 1819. We needed labor to tame the wilderness. We don't need more unskilled laborers anymore.
We have immigration laws. The US is incredibly generous, and naturalizes more than 1 million immigrants each year.
The American people don't want a "path" for illegal aliens. We already tried that in 1986. All it did was incentivize more illegal immigration.
And what the last administration did was absolutely flooding the nation. They removed nearly every EO related to border security, and then complained that they needed more laws to "fix" the problem they created.
> I'm all for a system where we screen our immigrants for criminals, terrorists, etc. But the current system is broken,
The current system is broken insofar as we are not enforcing the law thoroughly enough. We already have a system, it just needs to be followed. All illegal aliens have to go back.
> I could not tolerate the direction the democrats were wanting to go as it seemed an inevitable path to civil war.
Trumps action with ICE will lead to waco situations. Undocumented immigrants can obtain guns in this country and will not continue to go quietly into the night. Seems to me that his actions are far more likely to lead to civil war
I think a more likely scenario is that a citizen gets tired of being rounded up every other weekend or shaken down for ICE protection money and decides to put a stop to it, one way or another. And it would in many cases be legal too, because those iceholes don't identify themselves.
If somebody that is here illegally picks up a gun and fights citizens or government they are a foreign combatant on US soil. Fighting them is not civil war it is national defense and is the whole reason the federal government was established.
Now, if you are talking about citizens supporting an invasion against those that oppose it that is civil war. I agree that is a none zero possibility. However, telling citizens to get fucked while taking their money and giving it to non citizens, to me, was certain to lead to violent conflict between citizens.
>However, telling citizens to get fucked while taking their money and giving it to non citizens, to me, was certain to lead to violent conflict between citizens.
Whose money? Being given to which non-citizens?
Seriously. Be specific here. the words you used are all in English and are even fairly grammatical. But they don't model reality.
Undocumented folks, by virtue of being undocumented, are ineligible for public assistance of any kind, pretty much everywhere in the US.
What's more, in order to work, they need to provide an SSN and they need to use someone else's because they can't get their own -- because they're undocumented. But they and their employer must each still pay Social Security and Medicare taxes which pay for those programs -- but since they're undocumented, they'll never collect any of the money they paid into those programs in taxes.
So I ask again, specifically, what taxpayer money is being paid to which non-citizens? Please be specific here.
So you're saying that if people do accept it then nothing can be done, so better not to accept it and continue to live in a fairy tale controlled by criminals? I don't get it.
No. To make changes you have to participate or vote. But, if you dont like what we have now you are stuck with it until elections come up. No amount of complaining on the internet is going to change that. So, you just keep doing what you are doing because now is not the time we can make changes.
If you take that stance you have concluded that it is futile or the only way to make change is through violence. If that is your conclusion we have already lost. When violence starts there is no telling how it shakes out or how many die. That is why rational people will avoid it as long as possible.
The colonial grievances that led to war are explicitly stated in the Declaration of Independence.
It can be assumed that the British occupation forces were just as brutal as any other occupying military force in history. The only restraint in those situations is morals and a boss that was across an ocean.
I hope that we never have to find out how ferocious the quiet, "leave me alone", armed populous is. I feel we are on that path and grouping people as the other just fuels the fire.
We already bastardized the senate by electing senators by popular vote. Senators are supposed to represent each states government, not the people of the state. As a single member of the union a state doesn't need more senators. Making ingredients the proportional to population just makes the senate another house. The people have the house. The cap of representatives has also been harmful to the voice of the people being heard. Representatives are the face for too many people for them to truly represent their constituents.
Well, yes, the senate is useless. It was useful to check the South’s power in the Great Conpromise, but now the most deliberative body is not needed when the House can slow things down all by itself. Unicameral works for me.
Representatives would be more representative if not for gerrymandering.
It doesn't for me. That is an acceptance that we are a single federal government and the states are nothing more than administrative units of that federal government. For states to remain as sovereign entities that have collectively created the federal government the entity of the state must have representation at the federal level.
As for returning back to the original state appointment of senators, that is required for the senate to appropriately represent the state government at the federal level.
The original house apportionment had representatives that had about 35000 people. The size of the house was locked at 435 in 1913. Before then the number of representatives grew slower than population but still grew. After the last 2020 census there are 761,000 people per representative. The unevenness of how many constituents a representative from Wyoming has vs a representative from California has is a point of contention in higher population states. The complaint is that the representatives from smaller states have more proportional power. I think that is a bit ridiculous but that is what some Californian's told me. Increasing the size of the house to have a more proportional representation would alleviate that point of contention between states.
Gerrymandering is a side effect of not increasing the size of the house.
Unfortunately taking over a dominant party was the easiest way to have a "different" party that could actually win. Both parties have built a mountain of obstacles to prevent a third party from ever getting close to challenging them.
I find it best to view parties like any other faction or gang. They don't want challengers to their current power. Primaries are supposed to be the democratic way to steer a party but we've seen how that goes. They aren't going to change unless it is from within. So,remove all obstacles to being on the ballot and let the existing parties whine about it when they start to lose.
