Agreed that we largely probably aren’t going to come to an agreement as we just have fundamentally different opinions on this.

I do think your first point here about this enabling corporate espionage is a bit nonsensical. That’s so far afield as to be borderline unrelated. It’s very “if we let gay people get married what’s next? People marrying horses???” Like, it doesn’t make sense on its face. (And to be clear, so that I’m not misinterpreted again. I’m not saying that gay marriage is bad because then people would marry horses. I am again using this as a parallel example to the point you made, as it makes just as much sense.)

Vis-a-vis birtherism. Do you know how many people I had tell me that, “if Obama was actually a citizen, all he would have to do is share his long form birth certificate. The fact that he won’t do that one tiny simple thing is clear evidence that it doesn’t exist. The fact that you can’t see that is absolutely asinine, and the only reason I think you might deny it is that you are being willfully obtuse and arguing in bad faith.”? It was a lot. I’m from a red area. There are a lot of morons. But you can see how that maybe has some parallels to the people who are saying, “all he has to do to prove he’s not dead is share a photo (oh, wait, he did, it’s probably shopped)… I mean video, yeah, that’s what I said. And the fact that he doesn’t put out a response to every moved goalpost is a clear indication he’s actually a corpse.”

For the last part, I will say, you’re conflating a lot of things here that aren’t the same. It’s a very shallow understanding of how the cyber field works. It’s like saying “Trump gutted the Navy’s budget, and now people wonder why they’re not able to catch any murders in Miami? Come on! Don’t you see how these are related?” Yeah, I mean, they are both related to use of force. They are both kind of water related. But they really don’t have anything to do with one another.

Our country doesn’t have any capability right now to fight online scammers. We have military cyber. We have DoD cyber personnel. But that isn’t their mission set. They aren’t working it. FBI cyber is the closest thing we have to this, and they are woefully unequipped to go after international organized cyber crime. They deal more with online drug and CSAM trafficking. We need to address this issue.

And as I say, recruitment drives to bring in cyber professionals as government employees have failed miserably. The government can’t pay enough, and there’s no real way to fix that.

My cherry pick was federal (non-military) employees. Which he raised by 4.6%, in line with Biden. The first three links you picked were about private sector workers, which as nothing to do with the EO in question. The last is for military personnel, who are handled differently. But the raise for federal employees was a good thing. Just like it was a good thing every time Biden did it. He could have chosen to say eff’em, and not given them their raise, but he didn’t. And that’s a good thing. All the links you posted I fully agree are bad things. But unrelated bad things.

My point (to reiterate for the 50th time) isn’t that he is good or does good things generally. Just that if you kneejerk react with “that’s a bad thing,” even when he’s just doing things that are traditionally viewed as good under better leadership, then you’re just playing team sport politics, not actually paying attention to the reality of what’s going on. And if someone’s not paying attention, it’s hard to take them seriously.

ETA: You also seem reasonable. I think you may be a bit in the tribalism weeds, but I appreciate that you’re willing to engage. As for down votes, I looked back through and I’m pretty even. My worst spread is on the first post at +4/-13, which isn’t too bad. Especially when I’m taking a stance that goes against the group think. I’m not sad about it. I’ve got plenty of net positive comments elsewhere to balance it out, lol.

I mean, I’m happy to take a gentleman’s bet that this will be a net good. I agree it depends on implementation, and we’ll see what that looks like. Honestly, the realist interpretation is that 5yrs from now it’s tied up in the courts and has gone nowhere. That’s really the most likely outcome.

I brought up birtherism as an example of obvious nonsense that Obama handled in the right way by not engaging with. I, in fact, brought it up because it obviously had no truth, and the fact that you could read what I said in any other way speaks to either intentional bad faith or exceptionally poor reading comprehension. My point was that McConnell was following Obama’s lead in not engaging with conspiracy theories, as it only hurts to do so.

You keep not engaging with the example good thing I gave. Again pointing to bad faith engagement with my argument. The example “good thing” is raising the wages of federal employees. That is good. That has been my one example of a good thing. You say experts disagree with me? Find one expert saying that raising the federal pay scale was bad.

I said that the new cyber EO could be good, depending on implementation, but that I’m tentatively hopeful.

And everything in the bottom of your post is about cyber warfare, which is wholly irrelevant to the conversation at hand by any metric. The military should not be going after scammers. The military is not for hunting criminals. The war in Iran has nothing to do with scamming grandmas. These are completely separate parts of the government that have nothing to do with one another. This is an FBI program to hire cyber bounty hunters.

And I’m not saying private industry is inherently better. The government just has trouble hiring technical experts across the board because the governmental pay scale is very rigid. Top cyber experts can easily charge $250k+/yr. What GS level do you offer to make it where you hire competent people? There isn’t one that matches industry. If you are a government employee you are on a G scale (or are an executive level appointee), no exceptions. The government doesn’t have the flexibility to pay experts enough to fill these roles.

Would I welcome a sweeping change that allows the government more flexibility in how much they pay people? Absolutely. But that’s a major overhaul of how federal employment works writ large. The current solution is butts in seats contractors who work for private companies doing the work. That’s happening now. This is just an extension of that.

There’s a difference between being morally against the Nazis and being the kind of person who refuses to drive on the Autobahn because the Nazis built it. You can say the Autobahn is a good road system without endorsing the group that made it or the methods used to do so.

I don’t think they’ve been especially hiding him any more than Obama was hiding his long form birth certificate. He’s been discharged to his home. He’s had multiple communications at this point. But every time he sends a message or uploads a picture, people call it AI or his handlers doing it. There’s no point in engaging with conspiracy theories because every time you jump through a demanded hoop they just demand another one.

I didn’t say Trump increasing the federal salaries made up for anything. And we agree that he’s a disaster. I in no way am saying that the administration is good just because they did one good thing. I’m just also willing to acknowledge the evidence of my eyes. They did a good thing. It in no way diminishes all the evil they’ve done. But if you can’t be honest about when they do a good thing, you’re not engaging with reality.

With regards to the actual bill at hand, I’d like to see the government scale up its in house cyber capabilities as well. That is something they have a poor track record of however.

Congress is broken at this point. You can’t get it to pass a bill that says the sky is blue. That doesn’t excuse all the executive orders, but there’s a reason every president since Obama has leaned so heavily on them. Congress can’t figure out how to pass even the most broad appeal bills anymore. That’s a whole separate problem that needs fixing.

And to be clear, these are not military operations. These are not valid military targets. We don’t mobilize the army to target theives. We don’t send in aircraft carriers in response to fraud. These are criminal investigative proceedings. This is the same as a police department hiring bounty hunters. Maybe a little scummy. Maybe something that I’d in general be against. But in this case, where we have a known criminal element that the police aren’t equipped to deal with it, maybe hiring some bounty hunters is the best solution. It’s certainly better than continuing to do nothing.

You want to read through this thread and see what percentage of people think it’s a joke? https://vger.to/piefed.social/c/politicalhumor@lemmy.world/p/2235683/10-more-days-until-mitch-mcconnell-is-allowed-to-die

Some do certainly, but there’s a preponderance of people who are very much convinced we were gonna get an announcement on 8/3 that he was dead or in a coma.

My point with that wasn’t to defend McConnell. It was that people wanted him to be dead/braindead so badly that it made them accept things at face value that were almost certainly not true.

He’s 84. Regardless of any official statement or anything, the wildly most likely thing that happened was that he fell. That’s what 84 year olds do. They fall. That’s what I assumed happened before we had literally any information, and then every single piece of information since then has pointed to that being the most likely explanation. The only evidence for stroke/dead/vegetable has been “because I really want it to be true.”

So you think it was a bad thing when Trump signed an executive order raising the salaries of all the federal government employees by 3.8%?

Look man, maybe you missed the literal hundreds of posts a few weeks ago saying that they’re secretly hiding the fact that he’s dead and that they’re going to announce it at 12:01 on August 3rd. It was “established fact” that the pictures of him were photoshopped, and that his wife was writing all of his messages for him, and that he was either already dead or in a vegetative state. None of that was true.

Should he retire? Obviously. Is he able to do his job right now? Obviously not. Is he gonna return after the summer is over anyway? Probably. He’s been going blank on camera for years now. He’s been unfit for years now.

But that’s not what people were claiming or what I was referring to. People were spreading obvious conspiracy theories that they were “weekend at bernies”-ing him to get past some imagined deadline. If need be, I’ll happily scroll back a few weeks in any politics related community and get you a few hundred people saying exactly that.

I don’t think it’s defending the man to say he’s not dead or a vegetable. He’s an abhorrent human being, but so are a lot of people who aren’t dead or vegetables. And denying reality by saying they are isn’t exactly the flex you seem to think it is.

Look man, you sound like one of those people who for weeks assured me that Mitch McConnell was a dead man. Fully a vegetable. No question, and that I was an utter fool for saying it probably wasn’t true. That of course it had to be true. Just look at the track record of this administration. They lie all the time. Of course he’s a vegetable.

Turns out, it was all conspiracy theory nonsense.

I literally linked an executive order at the top of my last post which was this administration doing the right thing. You didn’t engage with it because it was unimpeachably good. His track record isn’t 0% unless you want to refute the one I linked literally last message in this thread.

It’s not good. This administration has been overwhelmingly bad. But if your desire to hate this administration makes you engage in doublethink where you have to call things evil that in literally any other circumstance you would call good, you probably need to take a step back.

I’m not saying not to be wary. I’m not saying not to have a critical eye. But this isn’t bad on its face. Maybe it will be later, but as a first step, it’s one in the right direction. Nothing about it so far is something to hate on. Maybe that will come later, and if so I’ll gladly jump on the dogpile.

But as written, so far, it’s good. And even in a worst case, it will survive into a new administration who will administer it better. That’s still something good to be looked forward to. So far little to no action has been taken against this issue, so I look to any positive motion as a net good, even if it’s helmed by crooks for now.

Executive order 2025-23844 raises the wages for all federal employees by 3.8 percent: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/12/23/2025-23844/adjustments-of-certain-rates-of-pay

Is this a scam to line the pockets of Trump cronies, or is it a Trump policy you agree with? If the former, why was it okay when every president before Trump did it. If the latter, then we agree that there are in fact good policies out of this administration, and we therefore have to engage with them on a case by case basis.

And in the case of this method of going after cyber criminals, I’ve seen versions of this policy in both the House and Senate every few years for the past 20yrs or so. It always has bipartisan support but gets held up in committee, usually over legal concerns. It’s a good policy that everyone agrees with. It may get shot down as illegal, but it’s a good policy.

And sure, notionally it could be used to funnel money to Trump cronies, but that will be in how the payment structure gets laid out. Most versions of this in previous iterations allowed the company to keep some percentage of recovered assets, with the government paying little to nothing for administration and overhead. Worked like truly old school privateering.

Now, we will have to wait and see how the actual payment structures end up being laid out, but under that system (which seems likely based off historical attempts at this sort of legislation), would you agree that it would be exceptionally difficult for this to be some secret way of funnelling money to Trump cronies, and therefore admit it is just good policy?

I’ll freely offer up that, if it turns out to just be huge, billion dollar vehicles awarded to limited bid contract companies that were recently stood up, that it was a bad thing. If that’s the way it goes, I’ll freely eat crow.

But if it goes the way I think it likely will, and that it’s a bounty system and it gets awarded to companies with a history of cyber security expertise, will you eat crow and admit that it was a good thing after all?

Trump is on camera eating tacos. Am I now morally required to say all Mexican food is bad? Trump loves dogs. Am I required to go around kicking dogs now?

If your hatred for the administration has you in a place where you feel the need to deny the reality of your own eyes in order to justify your hatred, you’re living in a fantasy land as deep as any MAGA fanatic.

This administration is evil. They’re doing terrible things. No question at all. But that’s not going to make me swear off tacos just because Trump likes them too.

Go look through the list of executive orders. I promise you that there are some in there you will fully agree with. Not many. And many are morally abhorrent, no question. But they exist. And saying otherwise is just closing your eyes, covering your ears, and saying “nanananana, I refuse to engage with nuanced reality.”

Trump says he loves dogs. He’s a huge fan of them. Am I morally required to hate dogs now? Is it supporting the Trump administration if I also love dogs?

Do you think Trump is writing every order that crosses his desk? Of the hundreds of things he signs a month, many are things that are just the output of the normal workings of government.

For instance, here’s one from last year increasing funding for medical marijuana research: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/12/23/2025-23846/increasing-medical-marijuana-and-cannabidiol-research

Here was one giving pay increases to all federal government employees: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/12/23/2025-23844/adjustments-of-certain-rates-of-pay

Am I required to be against both of those as well? How is paying government employees (not contractors, people in direct employ of the government) putting money into his cronies pockets?

Just because he’s a terrible president doing terrible things doesn’t mean I need to deny reality in order to vilify him. He’s bad. He’s doing evil things. No question at all. But if you’re so far in the weeds that you’re taking positions like, “Trump ate a taco, so all Mexican food is actually disgusting,” then you’re living in as big a fantasy land as any MAGA nutjob.

Did you read the order? It seems to have legitimate government oversight.

It’s administered by the DHS/FBI, and targets are determined by them. Work is done via their direction and oversight, and only by companies that have been vetted to be able to do the work responsibly.

That seems like literally exactly what you’re asking for. So what’s the issue?

I don’t like this administration either, but that doesn’t mean I have to be instantly morally against literally everything they do. There are in fact issues that are still bipartisan, and dealing with elder scammers is one of them. This is just a good idea.

This is one of those things I don’t actually hate. Not in general, but this particular use case.

Like, overseas criminals have stolen your grandmother’s life savings. Those criminals’ home countries have said that they are unwilling or unable to investigate or prosecute them. So what should be done?

There’s not a lot of great solutions, but empowering vetted, domestic cyber security experts to attempt to reclaim the stolen property seems like as good a solution as we’re gonna get?

You can call it “privatizing law enforcement” if you want, but I do think it’s a problem that needs solving, and I don’t know what solution would be better?

If you have better alternatives I’d love to hear them though.

Sure, and while I realize that I posted this as a top comment, it was after reading a dozen other comments on this post, so it was more in response to the general sentiment I was seeing.

I didn’t feel the need to respond individually to 20 people when it seemed like the overwhelming majority opinion, so I just made a top level comment.

I can see how that could be confusing though.

Sure, but it seems like people here might have a selective problem with one of them too, just in the opposite direction. Not sure if you’ve read some of the other comments.

I’m just saying we should probably not have a problem with either. Neither is doing anything wrong or bad.

We should absolutely call out when the media freaks out about a Muslim worship service. But that’s not a good reason to freak out about a Christian worship service.

I don’t think I have a problem with a bunch of soldiers going to a voluntary worship service, regardless of the religion it is for.

I certainly wouldn’t have a problem if this was a bunch of Muslim soldiers worshipping Allah, so I don’t know why I should have a problem with this?

Woah, there are 8300 other people just like me out there? That’s too many.

Raise them better.

Tough to follow the thread when my old comments keep getting removed, lol.

You keep accusing me of dishonesty, which I’m genuinely not being, but I don’t think I’m going to change your opinion of me.

You did point out I was incorrect on something and I verified it and affirmed that you were correct. I’m not sure what else you want from me there.

However, if we’re accusing each other of arguing in bad faith, I think it’s pretty clear I wasn’t saying, “the savages can’t govern themselves.” We don’t need to resort to flagrant misrepresentation. I think I’ve attempted to approach your position charitably and engage with it in a respectful manner.

I did struggle to figure out what exactly it is you’re arguing for in the last block of quotes. Do you think that reconciliation between Israel and Palestine is actually an easy problem that can be achieved without outside influence? Looking back I don’t know that you’ve established what you think should be done to resolve all this.

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