Etiquette



DP Etiquette

First rule: Don't be a jackass.

Other rules: Do not attack or insult people you disagree with. Engage with facts, logic and beliefs. Out of respect for others, please provide some sources for the facts and truths you rely on if you are asked for that. If emotion is getting out of hand, get it back in hand. To limit dehumanizing people, don't call people or whole groups of people disrespectful names, e.g., stupid, dumb or liar. Insulting people is counterproductive to rational discussion. Insult makes people angry and defensive. All points of view are welcome, right, center, left and elsewhere. Just disagree, but don't be belligerent or reject inconvenient facts, truths or defensible reasoning.

Tuesday, January 28, 2025

Regarding the unforgivable rarity of the A-words

I've criticized the MSM repeatedly because I believe that it softens and normalizes concepts of authoritarianism and authoritarian (A-words) people. The MSM misleadingly uses words like conservative or conservatism. As far as I know, no MSM sources consistently uses A-words to describe the GOP, DJT, Project 2025 or the MAGA wealth and power movement. When an A-word is used, it's a rare moment of honest accuracy and candor. Far too rare. 

Slate writes:
On Monday night, while much of the United States was tuned in to the College Football Playoff game, newly inaugurated President Donald Trump released 41 different executive orders and memorandums covering such issues as varied as immigration, energy, gender identity, and even the names of significant geographic features.

In both form and substance, these Day 1 actions leave no doubt that the Trump administration intends to take up the mantle of Project 2025—the Heritage Foundation–led blueprint for building an authoritarian executive branch. Project 2025 is best known for its mammoth 900-page manifesto, which assembled a comprehensive right-wing agenda for nearly every policy issue you can think of.

Receiving less attention, though, was the effort’s promised “180-day playbook” for taking quick action to advance that agenda, beginning on Inauguration Day. Notably, that playbook, which Heritage advertised but never made public, called for aggressive use of executive orders and memorandums soon after inauguration.  
As these Day 1 actions indicate, the unitary executive theory supplies a veneer of academic respectability for the Trump administration’s policy goal of creating an authoritarian president. That has enabled the administration to wield it to justify presidential actions that arguably violate the law as well as to defeat attempts to oversee or hold the president accountable for those actions. Thus, it undergirds the memo’s call for political appointees to find ways to sideline the top career staff in their agencies as well as the order’s plan to make it easier to fire career civil servants and replace them with people willing to put loyalty to the president ahead of their legal duties. (emphases added)
Well there it is ladies 'n germs, a few A-words used by the MSM. Savor it. It will likely soon become rarer, if not completely extinct. Dictators, theocrats, kleptocrats, oligarchs, MAGA and their politics really, really hate being referred to by A-words. They call themselves patriots defending democracy, the opposite of what they actually are.