This is such a weird hill to die on. I'm pretty sure none of the cabinet positions are described by the constitution, so I'm not sure citing it here has any relevance at all?
The constitution assigns legislative power to the Congress, and does not allow the President to rewrite law by fiat.
The Department of Defense was established by the National Security Act of 1947 and is still the law of the land until they pass legislation amending it.
The Trump Administration could request the Republican controlled Congress rename the DoD in the NDA, but for whatever reason they have not done so.
So it's correct to say that accepting the idea that a President can rewrite a law based on their own personal whims without Congress is in opposition to fundamental constitutional separation of powers.
Still seems like a really weird hill to die on. It's just branding, as far as I can tell?
And the President of this country has frequently rewritten laws based on their own personal whims, for a very long time now. Trump's actions in this vein might be the most blatant in this regard, but Executive power has been allowed to grow relatively unchecked for a number of decades already, largely because Congress has been unwilling or unable to do anything about it.
Which is why I think opposing this particular abuse of Executive power (if it really is such a thing) is a really weird hill to die on.
With a malevolent agent in the bully pulpit deliberately swamping the American zeitgeist with hostile nonsense ("flood the zone with shit"), it has become every American's duty to be on guard to avoid propagating the regime's bullshit. We are indeed at war, an information war of the US elites against We The People. So buck up.
I'm not american, and further, whether a department name change is a primary name change, or an alias slapped on, seems pretty low on the list of things to care about.
Is your argument that you're not involved enough in American politics to have responsible opinions about it, even though you're involved enough to comment in the first place?
I agree this in isolation is low stakes. The problem is the volume. The memetic assault is everywhere you turn, and propagating it helps the regime. And yes, it's far too easy to do accidentally. That doesn't mean we shouldn't appreciate others calling it out.
Is your argument that you're not involved enough in American politics to have responsible opinions about it, even though you're involved enough to comment in the first place?
I wonder who or what you're replying to here. Certainly, it has no relation to anything I've said in this thread.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't appreciate others calling it out.
Again, who are you replying to with this?
I said "take it easy", not "don't ever bring that up".
You said "I'm not american" as the lead in to your comment. What was the point of saying this other than to disclaim the responsibility I invoked? (which technically wasn't even directed at you directly)
For the overall argument, you called out a comment for calling out a comment whose only contribution was to promote the term "DOW". If it had been a substantive comment that someone jumped on for merely using the term, you'd have had a reasonable point. But it wasn't.
This team politics, the me-vs-them, this red-vs-blue that your country, and you, and everyone upthread was precisely what I was commenting on. It's sad, it's destructive, and both sides of your little game have created the situation you are in today.
Jumping on a guy because he corrected someone, and immediately presuming it had an entire slew of politics attached, instead of it being a mere technical correction, is prime example of everything wrong with the US today. Everything.
Me vs them. One word means a political stance. The wrong thing said, accidentally, you're the enemy. It's literally sad. I stand, as a Canadian, watching my brother make horrible life choices, and I want to help, yet I just see more anger and hate and discord.
None of this serves any of you well, it all serves your enemies. Right now, your acts, and the act of the guy super-upset that someone said DOW, serves your enemies. 90% of this is fueled by state actor controlled bots and comments, and you guys eat it up as manna.
So yes, I have an entirely reasonable point. The guy literally might have had no idea. I certainly didn't. You don't even know if that dude is american or not!
DOW is all over the news.
The presumption is wrong. The anger is wrong. The hate is wrong. The attitude is wrong.
On both sides. Of both sides of your little squabble.
I don't care who started it. The entire lot of you need a parent to come into the room, and tell just that, and that you both should go to your room.
And if you don't watch it? If you don't stop stepping out of bounds. If you don't halt it.
The rest of as are going to have to.
And that would be the saddest thing of all. For all of us.
Framing the argument here as "both sides" team sport is not appropriate. Did these "state actor controlled bots" also create the term DOW? No, the needlessly-divisive propaganda is now coming directly from the White House itself.
I'm a libertarian who sees both leftist and rightist thinking as two halves of a complete analysis. This situation isn't "red-vs-blue". Rather this is social-media-psychosis-red vs everybody else.
If social-media-psychosis-blue was in power and similarly attacking our society, I would be calling that out as well! But they aren't, and they haven't really been in powerful national political offices, because so far the blue extremists' main political success has been to just sandbag the Democratic party. (ostensibly because blue extremism runs counter to the parties' sponsors' interests, confining professional blue extremists to culture war topics that most people see through)
As I said, the fundamental dynamic with the original comment is that "correcting" to "DOW" was its only point. If you just casually heard the term in some [likely government] news media, you're not going to rush out and repeat it as a correction for someone saying DOD.
But sure, we can't really still assign a known motive - maybe that commenter was pointing out the "war" part to try and highlight what this administration shamelessly wants to use "AI" for. But the easy way to avoid being jumped on is to include some constructive context for what one is actually trying to get at, rather than leaving readers to apply Occam's razor themselves. So either way, that response to it was not unreasonable.
There is so much ensnarled in US mind-think here, it's difficult to respond cogently. Every fiber of your response is keyed to knock down "the other guy".
Let's start with this.
Framing the argument here as "both sides" team sport is not appropriate. Did these "state actor controlled bots" also create the term DOW? No, the needlessly-divisive propaganda is now coming directly from the White House itself.
You are literally framing the argument as left vs right, whilst trying to pin this very mode of thought upon me. This is because you cannot see the world any other way. Meanwhile, at no point did I ever, not once, say the correction was wrong. Not once.
So mired in this horrid quicksand, this "thought-scape" is your political world-view, that if someone says "Don't say that in such a mean way, be nice to one another", your immediate thought is "OMG! Siding with the enemy! Attack!".
The entirety of US political culture is now as that of an abusive family. The son that grows up with an alcoholic, abusive father, and is beat, yet the cycle repeats with his own son. It is learned behaviour. It is difficult to stop. Even desiring to do so, the son fails when he is the father. And you and all your brothers are caught in it.
The post I replied to painted "the guy", and you have painted "the guy", as someone on a mission to aid "the other team". His mere utterance of a single word, to correct to a name he believes to be the "new name", is viewed as you as a "bad thing".
And this is the problem I speak of. Not correcting someone back. The thought process and the mode of correction. As I said, the anger, the hate, the emotion. And it is emotion laden, not thought driven. It isn't logical, it's reactive emotion.
And yes, it only serves your enemies.
I'll be very blunt here, and I am speaking over decades, not right now. History is vital to comprehension of something like this. When the rest of the world looks at the US. When Canada, the UK, Europe, and all friendlies to the US look at the US?
We can barely tell the differences between your two political parties.
Viewed from the politics of another nation, your left and right are functionally identical. There's zero difference.
The above sentence should make you happy. It really should! It is a true sentence, and what it means is that there is more that binds Americans together, than that which pulls it apart. Yet I am willing to bet that your hackles bristled at such a concept.
And the very fact that they did, is the problem here.
--
Let's discuss state actors, because you seem unaware of how it works. The entire point is not any specific action. It is not about this administration. In fact, the current administration is a product of this decades, yes decades long propaganda by state actors.
The entire point, the easiest way to think of it, is that it amplifies any angst, concern, hostility against "the other team". Surely you are aware of Cambridge Analytics, well that's child's play in comparison, and what I am describing is not secret, or new information, it is well documented, well known, and simply is.
As your two sides become more hostile, you make poor choices out of panic, anger, angst.
Look at what happened with the last US election. Each side terrified about the other gaining power, and so one side hides that an octogenarian might be suffering from old age. Hiding this was a morally repugnant act. Meanwhile the other side chooses someone that much of their party felt they had no other choice but to go with.
Neither party should have chosen either these two. Each is choosing people so aged, so old, that they are barely capable of running the country. I wouldn't want an 80 year old person in charge of anything of this scope and size, yet each of your teams think this is just grand, great, a wonderful choice.
Why?
Because "OMG no, the other guy!"
Both sides are making choices, not with the goal of "What is best for my country", but instead "If the other guy gets in power, the entire country will be destroyed, so we must fight the other team, THEY are the enemy of the true America!". Meanwhile, 99.9% of the decisions made by an administration are functionally identical regardless of the party.
Whether team red or team blue in the last 50 years, the wars continue, the foreign politics is mostly the same. The US has been withdrawing from the world under each team, bombing the middle east under each team, and the list goes on. The debt isn't a problem because of the current administration, it's a problem because of all of them. Every administration for the last 50 years.
There are a myriad of ways to resolve this problem.
There are a myriad of ways to make it worse.
Making presumptions about someone because of one word they say, and jumping down their throat about it, is not how to make it better.
It's how to make it worse.
It's everything that's wrong with America today.
And I know you cannot see it, for your reply shows you cannot.
Look again at my words:
So cut the guy some slack.
Did I say don't correct him? Did I say he shouldn't be corrected? Did I argue whether or not the point was wrong or right? Nope. Not at all.
Instead, I simply said to take it easy in correcting someone.
In the lingo and context of my words in this reply to you, I was saying "Don't make it worse".
Your response was "OMG but he was purposefully aiding the other team!", without any knowledge that it was so.
My response was "be nice to one another, in how you argue".
--
I have written this response hoping that you may grok of what I speak. That you might understand that it is the way you are carrying your argument that is the issue. Not that you have a dispute. The presumptive, hostile response. The immediate assignment of motive and judge/jury/executioner attitude of "Nope, he said a word because of the other team!" thought.
It's all wrong.
It's wrong if it is them or you.
It's wrong no matter who does it, or why.
It doesn't matter who started it.
Go back to your room. You, and everyone else in the US.
Go back to your room, be quiet, and think about it.
I'm not the one writing ever-longer screeds. Perhaps you need to reflect on your own anger here?
Factually, you have written a lot of things I do agree with. I'm not new to this rodeo. I've been around the left-right gamut. Reading Moldbug is actually what started the end of my rightist-fundamentalist phase.
I've never been friendly to this entrenched corporate power structure that backs both major parties as if they're sponsoring racehorses. I had been both sidesing up until June of 2020. I'm not sitting here going "How could anyone ever vote for Trump?!?!". In 2016, I was telling my blue tribe friends that he had a good chance of winning, as they stood there aghast.
But after an abject failure of a concrete term in office, where the guy basically never stopped divisively campaigning? When faced with a pan-political national emergency, his response was effectively dereliction of duty?? If he had merely led us during Covid, like any other President of the past thirty years (and like most state governors tried to do), I suspect he would have had a shoe-in second term.
So voting for more of that in 2020 or 2024? That is embracing the exact hot mess of crazy that you're condemning here. Obviously the people who voted for him did not feel that way. From everything I've been able to surmise this is due to their media sources making them think the Democratic party is just as crazy. But from what I've seen much of this is based around sensationalizing some otherwise banal realities, and the Democratic party itself is nowhere near as far gone as the Republican party - the prominent members are still basically milquetoast status-quo-supporting bureaucrats who pay some lip service to the extremists, rather than having been taken over by a strongman primarily pandering to the extremists.
For example, one concrete data point:
> We can barely tell the differences between your two political parties.
Do you think a President Harris would be threatening war with Canada? That should be pretty pronounced and quite pertinent to you, right?
Your first sentence is bizarre, considering this post is longer than you last. And really, more engagement is a bad thing? Come now.
I feel you're still not getting it though. Because it's not about which side is worse, or who started it, or who's right about something, or who voted for who. It's about how this is discussed, how this is handled.
That's the biggest problem there is.
And yes, I said "barely", and it's quite true. A Democrat could easily be elected just as unhinged. An independent. Yet this sort of highlights my point.
If you stand Trump up against any other US president, just as with an ape or a human, he's literally identical on 98% of things. And really, it's more like 99.9% from an external viewpoint. Yet just as with an ape, that small amount can result in startling differences.
But your parties? The differences are barely noticeable.
> Your first sentence is bizarre, considering this post is longer than you last
Half my post was trying to explain some context where I am coming from. I was addressing the general tone of your post, and pointing out why I was not going to pick through each point line by line trying to tease out nuance. What's bizarre is for you to go here, as it seems exactly like a condemnation "keyed to knock down "the other guy".
As far as both the parties ? I just said that I have long acknowledged the commonalities. I had never voted for a major party candidate in a national election until I voted Biden in 2020. Doing so required swallowing a lot of pride, and I considered it as voting conservatively due to getting older. I can certainly imagine Trumpism's core message of "burn it all down" as being highly appealing to younger me - remember how I said I was telling aghast friends in 2016 that Trump had a good chance at winning?
You also dodged my direct question of whether a President Harris would be threatening war with Canada. Details like this are precisely why there is something here worth fighting for and not merely "both sidesing" it as merely a communication style.
Trying to move on to constructive topics, you say this is about "how" is it discussed. How exactly do you think the bare repetition of partisan propaganda should to be discussed, regardless of the actual intentions? Do we need to treat every commenter with kid gloves, detail the actual wider context, get lost in the semantics of whether it is a "legal name change" (even though the legality is not the actual reason to reject the name!), all the while hoping they will be receptive to those points, etc?
Because the way I see it, a comment that is merely a "correction" in terminology is nothing but flamebait - essentially the same thing as tone/terminology policing by the blue extremists. It's exactly the type of thing that needs to be shut down quickly if we're trying to have constructive discussions.
So when I write at length, it's worthy of note. When you do, it's for "reasons".
When I shorten my responses, I'm now "dodging" questions, is that it? So no matter my post length, I'm in error?
And I directly answered your question, by saying there is no appreciable difference between US presidents, predicated upon party lines, when viewed externally.
There is no other way to answer, for no one on this planet, even those scornful of Trump, ever expected this 51st state nonsense prior to his term. No one. At all.
I know nothing of Harris, and even if I did, comparatively, Trump's behaviour in this respect was a surprise.
Do ypu think any Canadian thinks this will be isolated to this single administration?
No, the thrust of that remark wasn't about the length. Seriously, go back and read your own tone. I said I agreed with a lot of what you wrote, factually. But it felt like you were trying to beat me over the head with a barrage of points - that same team sport dynamic you're bemoaning.
> Do you think any Canadian thinks this will be isolated to this single administration?
I don't know - I cannot answer for what Canadians think. I would hope not, but if you do then it is not really my place to dissuade you from thinking so.
As an American I hope that the reaction to the Trumpist destruction will be some long-overdue major reforms (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47092688) and accountability for the current regime that might engender trust and repairing of relationships over time. But I was also hopeful that my fellow countrymen wouldn't be foolish enough to vote for a candidate with a proven track record of "death to America", so I'm probably being overly hopeful here.
Uh, what?! You really, really aren't getting it. Discussing a point isn't the issue. Debating with someone, your position, isn't the issue.
It's the presumptive assignment of "this other side is the enemy" and "he said a word, thus he must be the enemy" and all that blather which I've described repeatedly up-post. And yes, you were complaining about length, else you would not have mentioned it.
I can tell you won't get what I say, no matter what I write here.
All I will close with, is that while I see you are working on ways to resolve some issues, the single biggest issue is money. You need to remove almost all campaign funding from elections. Capping all funding to $1000/person, and $1000/company, along with lots of other things (such as, no "gifts", no donations, etc) would make an enormous difference.
Not only would it make it easier for grass roots, new parties to rise up, it would also remove all dependence upon mega-corps to successfully run a campaign.
You should put that at the top of the list.
In a lot of countries (including Canada), if you go to lunch with a politician, you cannot pay for his lunch. Nor he, yours. That's illegal.
... signal a particular vice. It's vice signalling. We generally think of war as bad and try to avoid it, most especially the people tasked with fighting said wars.
Nothing has changed about the performative-ness, in fact if anything it's gotten more performative and hollow. They just signal vices rather than virtues, so a bunch of rightist-flavored-Lenin's useful idiots think it is fresh or effective or anti-"woke" or at least different.
The "Orwellian newspeak" at least makes an effort to aim for positive values, despite falling short. That's the point.
Also, please define what you mean by "leftist". These days it seems like it gets applied to anybody who believes in Constitutionally-limited government and the rule of law. That used to just be called being an American, but social media is a hell of a drug.
Progressive disclosure is good for reducing context usage but it also reduces the benefit of token caching. It might be a toss-up, given this research result.
Claude Code's handling of multiple choice questions is awfully nice (it uses an interactive interface to let you use arrows to select answers, and supports multiple answers). I haven't seen opencode do that yet, although I don't know if that's just a model integration issue -- I've only tried with GLM 4.7, GPT 5.1 Codex Mini, and GPT 5.2 Codex.
Indeed, Opencode has it too. They've been improving it the past few weeks to look more like the one in Claude-Code. I disable it all the time though, I find it such a pain (in both Claude-Code and OpenCode)
I'm not the site owner but it might help to share some of the content you'll see in Gmail when you hit "show original". That'll show things like SPF and DMARC pass/fail.
Google Maps regularly sends contractors, delivery drivers, etc to a blocked off utility "road" that has never allowed traffic. Apple Maps doesn't. I've given up reporting the problem to Google. (And besides, Google eventually took away the report feature from either desktop or mobile, I forget which, telling me their engineers don't care at all about quality.)
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