I mean, they will likely add to the deficit mostly because they won’t collect taxes on the rich. The current spending, if I’m being honest, isn’t really an accurate prediction of their actions since contracts are still playing out and plenty of money is still being spent, although I’m betting additional costs are incurred if it’s covering severance costs and legal bills, which could be temporary if they have their way.

We’re two months in; if in a year they “win” and a ton of people aren’t still sueing them (which honestly is unlikely unless we really go full nazi) then sure, it’ll cost less because it won’t be doing jack shit for the American people. Still not a win, of course, since it’s like saying you lost weight after a quadruple amputation.

Depressing, but just the other day at a USC coffee place I overheard some rich white girls make a joke about something “being a DEI thing!”, albeit with the same kind of slight hesitation as one would have with the N-Word. So yeah, that’s their slur now, I guess.

Oddly, I feel Mexico is a better fit for my state of California, especially with their recent cool shift in an educated President. Maybe we can get a sort of E.U. style thing except for Canada, Mexico and blue states, plus whoever else would make sense.

My students said it was awful. They actually like the actress in that role, btw, but just… Everything else is awful.

Depends on who ya sample, haha. Obedience has a lot of factors, and yes, the Trump voters share a lot of those traits, like authortarian thinking and black and white morality; but also not in some regards (agreeableness, for instance, is likely to confirm but that can easily define neolibs too).

Social intelligence, though, less likely as well as self-monitoring and a few other things that I’ll need to check my notes on that I don’t remember off hand. It’s pretty intuitive, you don’t shock people if you have a traits that make you question your actions and would ultimately regret it.

Third fun fact for you, obedience research came out of WW2, and Milgrim in particular was trying to understand why people would follow Nazi orders. Weird how history repeats itself, huh?

As fucked as this all is, it really is a “they’re just like us!” group running things. It might as well be on fucking Discord with people going “gg Yemen.”

Note: you do not want laymen running your fucking military, let alone the whole government.

Fun fact, there’s limited replication studies because it was unethical and caused participants a lot of distress. Some IRBs will permit a replication up to a much less severe supposed voltage (150 instead of 450) and the actor pretending to be shocked doesn’t have a full on breakdown into collapse (read the actor transcript, around 330 iirc, they bang on the wall begging to have the experiment stop).

Other fun fact, obedience isn’t universal. The least obedient group as far as I remember were female Australians at only 16% participation rate. There is a much higher rate for folks living in authoritarian states, though.