Summary
President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence has sparked intense criticism over her lack of intelligence experience and perceived pro-Russia stance.
Critics, including intelligence officials and Democrats, fear Gabbard’s appointment reflects Trump’s prioritization of loyalty over competence, potentially politicizing the intelligence community and straining trust with foreign allies.
Gabbard, a former Democrat who left the party in 2022, is controversial for her isolationist views and criticism of U.S. support for Ukraine.
While her confirmation is likely given a Republican Senate majority, significant resistance is expected during hearings.
I abandoned hope years ago after fighting the good fight for a couple decades. Partly because hope and its close sibling fear are by far the easiest vectors bypass a person’s reason and manipulate them, and partly because holding on to hope with increasingly dire data points and increasingly disappearing paths for a societal reformation just led to never ending anxiety and depression for me.
There is peace in understanding and acceptance, at least that’s been my experience. I still vote out of harm reduction, but not out of hope. That’s about who I am for me, you know, “to that starfish it mattered,” not about hoping it will be effective, because in 24 years of voting, it’s yet to do anything but perhaps slightly slow down our nation’s and our species’ march to avarice motivated self-destruction, and by slow down I mean we keep driving towards the capitalist made climate apocalypse cliff at 87 under someone like Obama instead of 90 like Bush or 110 like Trump.
If a candidate being taken seriously started talking about reducing manufacturing solely to medical, ecological housing materials, and food production and basically ending pointless consumerism and winding down to more reasonable, agricultural way of life for the sake of the habitability of Earth for humans, maybe I’d reconsider my stance on hope. Better chance of being struck by lighting 10 times in an hour though.
I came to it later than you, but I agree. I see no way out. Currently, I think a military coup is the only thing that can prevent a complete collapse of the nation. I hope I’m wrong.
Then you have to ask yourself, does that happening, and a couple million Americans being killed by the American Military to get the other couple hundred of million in line, is that a nation that worth continuing? Basically being held at gunpoint to keep laboring for the owners as the point and pretend everything is fine?
Things may somehow end up even worse upon collapse initially, but given our people’s apparent hatred for one another across identity lines and clear geographical lines, I have to believe maybe collapse, divorce, and reformation into several nations would be for the best long term.
They say the history bends towards justice, but maybe that requires something that the modern nation states, made in the pursuit of perpetual stability, left out an essential component that may also be absolutely vital in nature: the renewal that comes from collapse.
It sucks, it will hurt if it happens, but I try to take a larger view than that, generational suffering.
Maybe this stranglehold by the owners is inevitable when things become too intransigent. Maybe the information age accelerates the decay of an empire. I don’t know.
But I’m hesitant about maintaining this union at perpetual gunpoint again. It’s a fucked situation, maybe indicitive of a reality we just aren’t open to hearing, that the science and progress people need to be separated from the god and racial resentment people.
That said, ecological collapse is decades away however we rearrange this deck chairs because people still want their fucking POP figures, smoke em if you got em, TB.
I’m not the way I am to be sad, BTW, it’s just how I get to peace instead of horror, disdain, depression, and anger. I zoom out enough until the soap opera of my fellow self-sabotaging monkeys floating around the nearby star becomes academic. It’s a viable coping mechanism that isn’t born out of willful ignorance (which I despise above all) but intential detachment, for what it’s worth.