Kepler
Si certus es dubita
Re: Campaign XXVI: The Drumpf World Order
This conversation is happening in every civil servant's home right now.
Dr. Mrs. works for an agency whose very mission is threatened by the Trump regime's rhetoric. They exist to protect people's civil rights and civil liberties. Luckily they are statutory so he can't just wish them into the cornfield. Congress could always knee-cap them but that's a pain to do and it would be better to just leave them in place as window dressing.
Both Dr. Mrs. and I seriously considered quitting outright for the damage we could be a part of. For now our take is wait and see -- we can always pull the trigger. In the meantime, we can do our jobs correctly and keep our eyes open for the invasion of ideological insanity that damages our institutional controls. There's also whistle-blowing if bad stuff happens so fast we can do nothing to prevent it.
Everybody with any degree of self-knowledge has asked themselves the hypothetical, "would I be a Good German if {your morally difficult situation here}"? Hundreds of thousands of civil servants first, but then contractors in general, will have to face that question for the next four years. My advice to them is to stay and fight the good fight. Slow them down every inch of the way. Keep the machine transparent and honest. Use the hundred tools of bureaucratic sclerosis to weather the storm.
During my idiotic youthful flirtation with libertarianism I had a t-shirt like this one. Roughly it translates as, "do not join evil but fight all the harder against it." Or, as Victor Lazlo said, "If we stop breathing, we die. If we stop fighting the Nazis, the world will die."
This conversation is happening in every civil servant's home right now.
Dr. Mrs. works for an agency whose very mission is threatened by the Trump regime's rhetoric. They exist to protect people's civil rights and civil liberties. Luckily they are statutory so he can't just wish them into the cornfield. Congress could always knee-cap them but that's a pain to do and it would be better to just leave them in place as window dressing.
Both Dr. Mrs. and I seriously considered quitting outright for the damage we could be a part of. For now our take is wait and see -- we can always pull the trigger. In the meantime, we can do our jobs correctly and keep our eyes open for the invasion of ideological insanity that damages our institutional controls. There's also whistle-blowing if bad stuff happens so fast we can do nothing to prevent it.
Everybody with any degree of self-knowledge has asked themselves the hypothetical, "would I be a Good German if {your morally difficult situation here}"? Hundreds of thousands of civil servants first, but then contractors in general, will have to face that question for the next four years. My advice to them is to stay and fight the good fight. Slow them down every inch of the way. Keep the machine transparent and honest. Use the hundred tools of bureaucratic sclerosis to weather the storm.
During my idiotic youthful flirtation with libertarianism I had a t-shirt like this one. Roughly it translates as, "do not join evil but fight all the harder against it." Or, as Victor Lazlo said, "If we stop breathing, we die. If we stop fighting the Nazis, the world will die."
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