You were correct in your initial assumption. The show The West Wing only focused on a core of close advisors, but you often got reference or hints at others that were just never featured much on screen.

Traditionally, a President has a very large staff. They have panels of experts on all kinds of different things (The President’s Council of Economic Advisors, the President’s Council on Physical Fitness, etc, etc). A quick (and not at all thorough) web search shows that the Executive Office of the President of the United States typically employs ~2,000 people.

The current administration is run by neophytes and morons who have little-to-no experience in government and don’t really know what they’re doing. They’re running the government like the mob, where they value loyalty and ideological purity over experience and expertise. So they only give important jobs (like making their tariff list) to very loyal people who will do whatever the President wants. As such, the people doing the work have no clue what the fuck they’re doing, so they look for shortcuts. That’s why we keep seeing things like programs being cancelled which include the word “biodiversity” as a result of them just ctrl+f “diversity” and hitting delete. That’s also why they turned to ChatGPT to figure out their tariffs, because they have no clue how else to do it, and have nobody with intelligence and experience to ask.

The egg is the only possible correct answer to this.

Modern chickens didn’t exist until something like 10,000 years ago. The egg was a key development in allowing animals to live on land, and first came about somewhere around 300 million years ago.

But if you want to narrow it down to just chicken eggs, then you have it right. The immediate predecessor to the first thing that can be called a ‘chicken’ laid a chicken egg from which hatched a chicken.

The egg absolutely came first.

I have a better idea. Why don’t we just leave them the fuck alone?

Raised his national profile. If he keeps up political theater like this for the next 3 year’s he’ll have a good shot at the Democratic nomination.

I’m not turning a blind eye to anything. I’m just not making up conspiracies where there’s clearly none. There isn’t some hyper intelligent grandmaster planning everything out 15 moves in advance. This isn’t Lex Luthor or Doctor Doom running the show. It’s a bunch of morons whose understanding of economics ended with mercantilism asking ChatGPT how to run an economy.

It makes complete sense if you are looking at it from the perspective of an oligarch. They are just trying to tank the economy to hoover up even more assets. They’re banking on an eventual recovery, after which they’ll be even richer and more powerful than they are now.

As with most things in life, assuming some grander Machiavellian scheme is usually wrong. People don’t think and plan like that outside of movies and TV. Most people, especially the very rich and powerful, only plan for the short term.

There is no 3-4 steps down the road. They’re just trying to repeat exactly what they did during/after the COVID recession. And the Great Recession. And the '01 dot-com recession, etc, etc, etc.

Maybe dumb people who bought the Trump line on tariffs think that, but most people know it’s not true.

All the talk about bringing back manufacturing is just a smoke screen to cover the fact they’re intentionally tanking the economy so the oligarchs can buy the dip and get even richer when the economy recovers. That’s all it is.

It’s not that complex or Machiavellian.

Look at what rich people have done after every recession of the past 40 years and how what’s happened to their wealth after the recovery. The economy crashes forcing middle-class people to sell off what scant assets they own. Even people on the lower end of upper-class tend to sell off assets when the stock market crashes. Super rich people who have enough money to weather the economic downturn buy the dip, gobbling up all those assets people are selling. Then when the economy recovers the rich people make out like bandits (which they are).

That’s all that’s happening. He’s tanking the economy so Musk and his other rich friends can buy the dip and increase their wealth even more when the economy improves.

It makes me feel like they’re trying to minimize or discount my own feelings (of disappointment, anger, betrayal etc) to present themself as a victim. To me, an apology doesn’t really mean much. It’s just words. If you apologize, then continue to do the same thing that elicited the need for the apology in the first place, then you’re not really sorry. You’re just apologizing to get me to stop being upset/confrontational/etc.

Say ‘sorry’ once, but demonstrate you’re actually sorry by changing your behavior. Otherwise, you’re just repeating false platitudes in order to dismiss my own feelings.

WFH isn’t available to most people. To have a WFH opportunity, you have to have a job that’s almost entirely done on a computer with no need to be on-site almost ever. That’s just not a reality for most people. For some? Sure. But even most people with jobs that are largely WFH still have to go into their office once or twice a week.

I’m not debating the the Democratic Party has moved to the right over the past decade. However, (a) I wouldn’t call the Democrats Progressive, and they never really have been. There is a fringe of the party that is progressive, but they’ve never been the majority or leadership. And (b) both progressives and the Democratic Party are still to the left of George W Bush on most issues. He campaigned on a same-sex marriage constitutional amendment. He was a climate denier. He fabricated evidence of WMDs in Iraq in order to start his second of what would become decades-long wars. He opened Gitmo. He institutionalized a torture program as policy. None of that is anywhere close to what progressives are pushing for now.

I guess my main question to you is this: who are you defining as ‘progressives’?

All the President’s Men is my favorite political movie.

It was a gradual thing. I remember when my uncle got married in 2006 he told me that he had met his wife on Match.com, but it was a bit of a secret. My uncle didn’t mind if I and my siblings knew (I was 20 at the time), but didn’t want my dad or grandparents to learn because he felt there would be some stigma because they met online.

It was my generation (I was born in '86) that kicked off the apps/online dating thing. I started dating my (now) wife in 2010. We met at a party and neither of us ever did online dating or the dating apps. But so many of our friends did/do.

I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that we were the fist generation to socialize on the internet on a large scale. We grew up in high school on AOL Instant Messenger and Myspace. We got on Facebook back in 2004/2005 when it launched. We were just very primed to be open to online socializing, which is just a step away from dating.

As soon as we became old enough to be in charge of our own finances and be a demographic group businesses were willing to market to, the online dating world opened up in a BIG way.

It’s democratic confederalism

Yes, it’s possible. Any system built by people can be destroyed by people.

Now, of course, there would be a reaction. What specifically that would be I can’t say. I’d like to think it would cause serious blowback, but I’m also pretty jaded and don’t really have that much faith in people all the time.

Great example! These little turns of phrases and wordplay that reveal the incredible right-wing bias of our media are all over the place if you learn how to look for them.

Another great example you see all the time is “office involved shooting” whenever someone is shot by police. It’s always something like “John Smith died after an officer involved shooting” or “a gun was discharged in an officer involved shooting that resulted in the death of Jane Smith.” Where it should be “Officer Joe Blow murdered John and Jane Smith.”

Those of us who pay attention know.

However, the media ecosystem is INCREDIBLY conservative and pumps out the rah-rah jingoism whenever it can. Those of who just stick to the mainstream echochambers think the US is a bastion of freedom and peace.

This is a common myth that isn’t really backed up by the historical or archeological record. Most pirate crews were not proto-anarchists looking to live a life of absolute liberty. They were more comparable to modern street gangs. The captains tended to be a strongman type leader who imposed their will over the crew through fear and coercion. The pirates themselves tended to be outcasts from society who couldn’t turn to authorities to try to escape their situation for a variety of reasons, mostly because they were criminals who knew they’d be imprisoned or killed if they went to authorities.

Probably the only place where anything close to what you describe ever really existed was small communities in Madagascar which became the inspiration for the probably mythical Libertatia. The communities that definitely did exist weren’t some ideological project to try to craft a society absent hierarchical power structures. They were just small, impoverished communities of families where the patriarchs (the pirates) spent most of their time away (at sea doing pirating) so the communities largely ran themselves without a power structure. This isn’t because they had an ideological opposition to them, but because the authority was the pirate leader who spent 3/4 of their time away (and, therefore, couldn’t do the job of being in charge) and when they were home they spent their time partying.

No, the idea of authority is not necessarily contrary to anarchism. You need to first examine the source of that authority’s power, the structures which put them into power, and how that power is enforced.

If it’s coercive in any way, that is, if you are threatened with violence in some way if you do not comply, then it is indeed counter to anarchism. However, that’s not how anarchist brigades in 1930s Spain, the Makhnovshchina, the Korean People’s Association in Manchuria, the anarchist brigades during the Russian Civil War, etc worked. First, membership was pretty much always voluntary. If you didn’t want to follow an order, you didn’t have to and you wouldn’t be executed or tried as deserter or whatever like in most traditional armies. If you didn’t want to follow an order, it was generally accepted that it was your right to refuse.

Second, there weren’t set terms between elections like you might be thinking of within a modern representative democracy. If an elected officer was issuing commands the rest of the soldiers didn’t agree with or like, they could be voted out at any moment, including in the middle of battle. This tended to present problems in the Spanish Civil War where the Soviet Union tried to exert complete control over everyone on the anti-fascist side. They’d send in Soviet officers to lead anarchist battalions. As soon as the Soviet gave an order that the rest didn’t like, they’d vote him out. When the Soviets refused to give up authority, the entire battalion would disband, steal all their supplies, and reform a few miles away as a “new” battalion and elect their own leader.

They also weren’t usually structured like we tend to think of military units with a mass of enlisted and a few detached officers issuing orders. The officers tended to come from the enlisted ranks. The officer position was less of a leader and more of a coordinator. Plans were usually made collaboratively by the whole unit (or those who cared to take part). If the heat of battle when snap decisions needed to be made, the officer tended to be the one who made those decisions, but there was no expectation that anyone who disobeyed would be killed or court-marshalled. People obeyed because they knew the person making the decision, why they were making the decision they made, and that if it was a bad decision they could replace that person.