Random Politics Thread

[The Cat]

 

[Totenkindly]

Key US officials tell staff not to answer Musk email on what they did last week - BBC News

Some departments encouraged staff to respond, while others requested employees wait for further guidance.

www.bbc.com

Amusing that it's total chaos again from these dumb-ass e-mails that circumvent the chain of command. Both the State Dept and FBI (both run by tools) STILL are telling their workers to await further guidance.

I'll explain the issues here because it's decidedly not that "we should be able to share five things we did during the week" -- we have been required to write weekly status for at least a decade or more, for our supervisors -- my weekly reports (and I know I go beyond what is requested) are 25-30 bullets at least, and take 2-3 pages:

1. The fed gov divides function among various agencies. Each agency monitors its own mission and this filters down to the bottom levels where people actually doing work are being assigned work in accordance with that agency. Agencies are monitoring the work done in their agency already. We now have one agency (OPM) going outside the chain of command, skipping all the various offices and divisions management within another agency, drilling down to the actual workers to demand to know their work. They should be going through the agency because it puts the workers in a terrible bind as to who they are reporting to. (Hint: They should not be reporting to another agency. This is not just shady and immoral, but also just bad organization -- why have organizations if you're just going to run roughshod over them?)

2. Human Resources doesn't focus on the work that is done. It is the human resources area and is focused on the flux of, well, human resources -- benefits, hiring, releasing, worker support, etc. But even within a particular agency with its own HR department, the HR department typically only gets involved in issues because the supervisors/managers of people doing work have reported a problem. (HR does not do employee reviews; they are done by the worker's manager. They do not collect status reports; they are collected by the worker's manager. Management decides who needs to be dealt with by HR.) HR is completely unknowledgeable of what workloads are being down by individuals nor do they have the knowledge to understand, prioritize, or evaluate the workloads being done -- especially if they are going to use this in some way to cut workloads (without the agency's express approval) or fire employees.

3. Now repeat #2 again, this time with the knowledge that the HR dept we are mailing to is OPM -- they have doubly no idea of the context, priority, value, or place in the agency's big scheme that a workload entails. They also have no information about performance, because that lies with the supervisors of the workers who do periodic reviews.

4. It's not clear who specifically is receiving this information, what they are using this information for, or how it will be applied -- and it's being sent outside the agency the worker belongs to. What an opportunity for malfeasance, misapplication, misunderstanding, and/or abuse.

5. The executive branch can't even decide if Elon Musk is officially the head of DOGE. They are providing conflicting information. This is probably on purpose -- because then he cannot be held accountable for things that go wrong or plans that backfire, yet he can otherwise tell people what to do with impunity. This is not how an organization is run. You need to have clear lines of responsibility with a "buck stops here" individual. A lot of the confusion would also be alleviated if they'd at least commit to who is in charge.

The losers here are the workers, who now have to either disobey their agency's instructions to "await further guidance" or run the risk of not responding by this arbitrary deadline and losing their job. But hey that is the point too, I guess -- scare/frustrate/stress people out enough to quit, let them choose the "wrong" vague option that you can then leverage to fire them, or confuse everyone so much they just start to comply.

 

[Coriolis]

While I don't disagree with any of the content in this video, the title is very misleading. "These three steps" suggests action that can be taken, perhaps by the public, perhaps by some other entity. But there is nothing of the sort presented, only the same preaching to the choir. Yes, we can listen and be reassured that our perspectives are sound, but then what?

 

[The Cat]

While I don't disagree with any of the content in this video, the title is very misleading. "These three steps" suggests action that can be taken, perhaps by the public, perhaps by some other entity. But there is nothing of the sort presented, only the same preaching to the choir. Yes, we can listen and be reassured that our perspectives are sound, but then what?

I agree with you. Thom Hartman is less a solution provider and more of a thermometer of what the liberal elite book deal nerds are up to. The people who care, but for whom its largely academic. The people who would be able to flee economically. Its often shared as a this is what's out there being said by this group. Many of his vids irritate me for the reasons you cited, I have my own irritations, but they're not relevant to this conversation, but others.

I've been palantiring through the various newses of the various places and the patterns are consistent but often irritatingly futile. I'm cruising towards burn out, but then so is the economy, and national security, and yeah it shouldnt be this hard to fight the rise of fascism and yet here we all are. 30% of our country thinks everything is fine business as usual.

 

[The Cat]

 

[ygolo]

For those dealing with "Al Gore did it" in response to criticisms of DOGE, here are some strong contrasts:

 

[Totenkindly]

So, for the semi-good:
Today when we got into work, there was guidance from HR telling us to provide the work status bullets to OPM as requested. Okay, fine, whatever. We're not "security-adjacent," like the DoD or the State dept, so whatever. One of my team threatened to just quit because she was so offended by the idea (we're all offended, hon -- it's not like we haven't been sending in status reports weekly for years), but told me I could write her a bullet list and she'd humor whether she would do the assignment.

For myself, I had my own list done by mid-morning, then got buried in a ton of work, and finally went back to it after lunch. My supervisor said I had written it very well (I had cut down words from my rough draft) and told me to send it.

Ten minutes after I sent it (at 2pm EST), OPM finally says officially, "you don't need to do the assignment / there's no threat of getting fired if you do not respond."

This is what we are dealing with. At best, a bunch of incompetent, unvetted, and purely spurious demands that then get changed a day later when the drugs have worn off, so no one knows what the hell is going on. At worst, it's all done purposefully as a form of psychological torture and scorn -- because yeah, people just get sick of it and want to walk, or otherwise now can't even escape the torture on the weekend.

I do have to wonder if OPM relenting is in part an admission that all of you folks sending copious quantities of crap data to their e-mail address and jamming their servers (maybe) have made the data unusable, or if they also realize their legal peril here and just gave up.



For the not-so-good:
Based on my role in the org, I often get to read (or have to respond) to a lot of memos that come through. One I saw this afternoon pissed me off, since it was attached to the "defense of women" act that restricts humanity for now and forever to two genders.

Initially they had put a moratorium on all sex field changes to records (in contrast to all past policy). Yeah, crappy -- but we knew it was coming and it's very easy to do. You just refuse to update the field anymore.

Today they actually had the gall to ask if we had any plans to go through the NUMIDENT file and restore any edited sex fields to their original values -- and if so, what would the timeline be?

There's a lot of issues with this:

1. This is the master SSN file. It's huge, and has hundreds of millions of entries. This is an utter waste of time, at a time when we still have delays in claim benefits and people should be focused on THAT work. A significant number of people might also be dead, since it started collecting SSN data in 1936. It is totally off-mission.
2. Not all changes to sex are related to trans people. Just flipping / restoring values would also screw over anyone who had a legitimate reason for a sex field change (due to a typo in the original BC, for example) or intersexed people as well. or Anyone their stupid hackers who don't actually seem to understand the data manage to flip by accident.
3. what happens if the USA doesn't die by this summer and a new administration comes in and wants to restore all this? Now you need to change it all back somehow. Good lord. This is why we're supposed to be apolitical -- so we don't waste all of this time repainting the house so to speak when a new guy moves in.

So either you do it by hand (HUGE time and prone to error / missing entries), or you try to hack the database to do a scripted update based on logic, but that's hugely risky if you miss any necessary logic / conditions to avoid mistaken changes (HUGE risk). And there's no payoff here except for ideological. This is purely an ideological request. Sex means nothing materially in the claim. Want to save millions of dollars? DO NOT DO THIS.

I can't imagine us agreeing to do a cleanup on this, all things considered, although with the new sycophant in control, who really knows anymore....

 

[Totenkindly]

Also, I got my hands on a memo from the union describing their meeting with the new agency lead last week. Because our agency has already been excluded from a lot of the personnel loss (such as the Resign offer -- my area was not exempt, but a large majority was), they asked to be excluded from the RTO as well because there is an estimation from surveys that literally 50% of our org might walk if unable to telework. (Yeah, that's like 25-30K people.) As much as that might be making the administration salivate, it would be catastrophic to processing and paying benefits to 70 million or more Americans. They also insisted we needed to be immune to blanket termination of probationary employees.

as of that time, only SES have been called back on site -- although I note this week the contractors are back on site 5/days a week. Still, we have received no RTO date. This could change tomorrow, since we have a mandatory in-person all-hands.

We are also asking to be excluded from the hiring cap freeze ratio (of 1 to 4).

Finally, there's a huge problem with the directive for GSA to terminate 7500 leases, 1300 of them belong to us, if we are supposed to RTO + we need to have accessible offices for claimants to come in and not drive over an hour (considering if they are applying for benefits, they are likely elderly or disabled). I gotta think along with the "we don't care" attitude, some of this is the "We don't think through anything whatsoever before we make extreme decisions."

Fascinating reading. But it's been a week, and I have concerns about the new guy -- who either carries water for the administration while pretending not to, or is just too new, unsavvy, and beholden/weak to stand up against unreasonable demands. Experience and character matters SO much. There's something to be said for the savviness (and all the struggles you work through) as you work upwards through the structure and learn how to be both effective and reasonable by all those prior battles you have fought. People without that experience could easily be eaten alive or suckered for all they are worth.

 

[Totenkindly]

The purge is coming.

LGBTQ federal workers brace for a McCarthyist purge

"They’re not asking people, ‘Are you gay? Are you lesbian?’ They’re asking, ‘Who is participating in DEI?'"

www.motherjones.com

I think the example that pisses me off the most is the transwoman with a legal name change who just got swept up in the "probationary" purge instead ... but her termination letter used her dead name.

 

[Virtual ghost]

Trump, Macron talk ceasefire as Ukraine marks 3 years of war

 

[SensEye]

I noticed the UN Security Council took a vote on a new resolution today declaring Russia an aggressor country and demanding their with drawl from Ukraine. I think it is similar to other resolutions but with stronger language relating to Russia being the aggressor.

Anyhow those opposed:

Russia, Belarus, North Korea and ... the USA.

Strange bedfellows indeed.

 

[Totenkindly]

I noticed the UN Security Council took a vote on a new resolution today declaring Russia an aggressor country and demanding their with drawl from Ukraine. I think it is similar to other resolutions but with stronger language relating to Russia being the aggressor.

Anyhow those opposed:

Russia, Belarus, North Korea and ... the USA.

Strange bedfellows indeed.

Just... holy shit.
I mean, we knew it would be that way.
But... yeah. Here we are.

 

[Totenkindly]

See, this is exactly the shady stuff I was complaining about them possibly doing.

He's taking information for a use that wasn't mentioned in the request, to decide whose job is important, after threatening people with getting fired if they did not respond.

So now if you actually complied, with workloads you were assigned by your agency, you might get terminated. And who knows what rules the AI is using?

This is just pretty immoral.

DOGE will use AI to assess the responses of federal workers who were told to justify their jobs via email

The revelation comes as federal workers face a midnight deadline to respond.

www.nbcnews.com

WASHINGTON — Responses to the Elon Musk-directed email to government employees about what work they had accomplished in the last week are expected to be fed into an artificial intelligence system to determine whether those jobs are necessary, according to three sources with knowledge of the system.

The information will go into an LLM (Large Language Model), an advanced AI system that looks at huge amounts of text data to understand, generate and process human language, the sources said. The AI system will determine whether someone’s work is mission-critical or not.

Edit: Also.... apparently it violates federal cyber security rules.

 

[Coriolis]

So, for the semi-good:
Today when we got into work, there was guidance from HR telling us to provide the work status bullets to OPM as requested. Okay, fine, whatever. We're not "security-adjacent," like the DoD or the State dept, so whatever. One of my team threatened to just quit because she was so offended by the idea (we're all offended, hon -- it's not like we haven't been sending in status reports weekly for years), but told me I could write her a bullet list and she'd humor whether she would do the assignment.

For myself, I had my own list done by mid-morning, then got buried in a ton of work, and finally went back to it after lunch. My supervisor said I had written it very well (I had cut down words from my rough draft) and told me to send it.

Ten minutes after I sent it (at 2pm EST), OPM finally says officially, "you don't need to do the assignment / there's no threat of getting fired if you do not respond."

This is what we are dealing with. At best, a bunch of incompetent, unvetted, and purely spurious demands that then get changed a day later when the drugs have worn off, so no one knows what the hell is going on. At worst, it's all done purposefully as a form of psychological torture and scorn -- because yeah, people just get sick of it and want to walk, or otherwise now can't even escape the torture on the weekend.

I do have to wonder if OPM relenting is in part an admission that all of you folks sending copious quantities of crap data to their e-mail address and jamming their servers (maybe) have made the data unusable, or if they also realize their legal peril here and just gave up.

I heard some people were replying to OPM simply that they were already reporting weekly progress to management, whether by their own initiative, or at the direction of management.

To put the most positive spin possible on this, for the sake of argument, assuming the intent is truly to make sure everyone is being productive: just who would be reading all these reports from fed employees? Is there staff on hand to sift through so many replies in a timely manner, not to mention staff familiar enough with the various organizations' missions and workload to know whether the replies demonstrate productive work, slacking off, or just plain BS? It sounds like lots of folks have been spamming the address. Good.

The purge is coming.

LGBTQ federal workers brace for a McCarthyist purge

"They’re not asking people, ‘Are you gay? Are you lesbian?’ They’re asking, ‘Who is participating in DEI?'"

www.motherjones.com

I think the example that pisses me off the most is the transwoman with a legal name change who just got swept up in the "probationary" purge instead ... but her termination letter used her dead name.

They are going to pick up non-LGBTQ allies this way, perhaps even people who were "voluntold" to represent their unit in this or that group. I'm sure that doesn't matter. The fascists don't care. The only hope is that, as quickly as they are doing all of this, they will hurt enough people fast enough to get an effective backlash. I still fault the mainstream media for not reporting on opposition activities widely enough, unless that actually helps keep them below the radar.

 

[ygolo]

 

[Kingu Kurimuzon]

So who do you see doing something that is actually effective?

I am actually hoping churches and other faith groups will step up. For all the talk of the MAGA folks wanting to impose a Christian theocracy, their actions do not align at all with the example of Jesus. We've seen people for years trying to avoid dispensing medical care, providing legal services, and vaccinating their kids on "religious grounds". As AOC pointed out in her famous rant, using faith as a tool of hate and bigotry. Time for Christians who really follow Christ - and other faith leaders - to insist on their right to practice their faith by caring for the stranger, the imprisoned, the marginalized.

This is my hope when I say we need millions protesting. That enough moderates and conservatives wake up and realize right wing authoritarianism is just as bad for them and then actually join the fight.

But I’m not very optimistic based on past history of moderates and conservatives rolling over for right wingers and/or not realizing the severity until it’s too late

 

[Red Herring]

From what I have seen these are still pretty normal people. There are much bigger crazies out there.

But I said, this is basically a peasant rebellion. Something that was happening all cross the world for centuries (and for pretty similar reasons). Which all come down to the fact that establishment messed up in the big picture. So the people have decided to make their own show and make a complete mockery of the system since they don't really believe in it anymore. I mean this is what people do when they start running out of options in life.

You posted this in November 2023. I just remembered reading it somewhere on the forum at some point and found this.
We are currently at the quincentennial of the German Peasants' War (1524-1525), the largest European popular rebellion before the French revolution. There are some history magazine covers dedicated to this right now and it somehow seems fitting.

However, the peasants' war failed. One could argue forever on the success or failure of the French revolution. From my understanding of history, it is technological progress as well as major desasters like wars and pandemics that allow for significant social shifts and a reshuffling of power. Otherwise, it tends to be one oligarchy replacing another.

 

[Kingu Kurimuzon]

It’s interesting to see when/how certain people like things that wouldn’t be expected to be enjoyed by someone of their political persuasion/affiliation

For me, my guilty pleasure is watching movies like the Dirty Harry films, the Death Wish films, Red Dawn, et al. I am a bleeding heart that is generally nervous around guns, against excessive police force, etc, but I just find so much enjoyment in those types of films and I wonder if it’s because they just come across as absurdly naive and often unintentionally comedic in their black and white take on crime and vigilantism in the 70s/80s.

These films are almost offensive in their take on those issues but they also have a fantastic element to them and it’s also worth noting they at least tried to appear sensitive to certain issues such as racial relations. For instance I love how the villains are usually multi ethnic gangs or crazed white psychopaths in the Dirty Harry series, despite a lot of people having a misconception that he is usually just blasting black criminals in those films. It’s like the writers were saying, “look, sure he’s a reactionary cop but at least he’s an equal opportunity killer!” Which is probably fair, if anything, the Harry character is just written as a general grumpy misanthrope, not someone who holds a grudge against a particular demo

 

[The Cat]

The new administration is planning on misusing the military.​

 

[Virtual ghost]

You posted this in November 2023. I just remembered reading it somewhere on the forum at some point and found this.
We are currently at the quincentennial of the German Peasants' War (1524-1525), the largest European popular rebellion before the French revolution. There are some history magazine covers dedicated to this right now and it somehow seems fitting.

However, the peasants' war failed. One could argue forever on the success or failure of the French revolution. From my understanding of history, it is technological progress as well as major desasters like wars and pandemics that allow for significant social shifts and a reshuffling of power. Otherwise, it tends to be one oligarchy replacing another.

Well, I never said that this will work for sure.
I was simply saying that current situation in US isn't something truly new (once you take a wider historical and geographic context).