Are these people trying to be funny? I can’t guess.
American excellence consists of traitors who’d sell out their country for a few bucks? Is that some sort of a joke? The poster is on Bluesky, which means he’s probably not big on humor.
Excellent Traitors
Clarissa's Blog 
The idea with these people is that since the grift is going, the grift must go on.
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If the commentary I’m hearing is any indicator, the grift is going, and because the grift has been going for so long, the grifters are entitled to keep doing it.
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It is a strange idea that as soon as one faces any hardship in life, one will immediately turn to unethical and immoral actions, and that such a move is understandable and ought to be excused. If you’re poor, it’s okay to steal. If you’re a laid off govt. employee, it’s okay to sell state secrets.
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Right? My university is eliminating my department but I didn’t start acting like an evildoer to students and colleagues. It never occurred to me to act out in this way.
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If this is the way the salary class is raising their children, I’m really, really glad I grew up working-class. We were one drunk driver away from that.
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I imagine a fair number of these career state department employees will be financially ruined, unable to find new employment, coming up short on their mortgage payments, and losing the health insurance that is keeping their spouses alive.
Must be nice to be so cavalier!
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Don’t you think you are being a tad dramatic? Getting fired is very unpleasant. It happened to most of us, so we know. It’s an unavoidable part of life in capitalist societies. It’s how we pay for the economic comforts of this system of property relations. We all experience it, yet we are all very much alive.
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And yet, when we were out there in the job market, looking for jobs my husband qualified for with his degree-with-honors… nobody felt at all sorry for us. The standard response was: *Why didn’t you get a degree in something useful*? Not, you know, oh, the government owes you a good job in perpetuity.
Welcome to the real world people. And that includes my own relatives who took the early-exit deal. They’re getting paid for *months* without doing any work at all. They’re all “boohoo, where am I gonna work now?” but you know what? *They’re not even looking for jobs*. WTF? As long as that severance check is still coming in, they’re just gonna take a long vacation. When they *could* be racking up TWO incomes for those months, working on getting a replacement job, starting a business with all their free time, writing a novel…. nope. Not doing any of those things. Just collecting the check, moping about their loss of prestigious job titles, wondering how they’re gonna pay the mortgage when the checks stop coming, and hoping the midterm elections will bring their jobs back. Never once occurs to them to… I dunno, get some job training in something useful LIKE WE DID when we found out our college was worth nothing.
But hey, I guess if you ever had a job in government, then the public owes you a living forever? Shoot, not just a living, but a six-figure salary with benefits.
60% of American households can’t afford to buy a house right now. Not, like, a nice house in an HOA neighborhood. Can’t afford ANY house, even in a sketchy neighborhood, and rent is eating more than a third of take-home pay for most normal people.
Don’t expect us to cry about it.
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People are such lemmings. They coexist comfortably their entire lives with the reality of at-will firing but then they hear on FB that this particular firing is like, total fascism, and suddenly they are incensed. They need social media to tell them what to think and how to feel about everything.
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“They need social media to tell them what to think and how to feel about everything”
I have sympathy for those being laid off, especially since there doesn’t seem to be any particular grounds beyond neoliberal slash and burn economics and the neoliberal love of destroying systems . And I’m fairly sure that among those fired there are some doing necessary work and their loss will have negative effects… somewhere at some point in the future: Neoliberals don’t understand how sytems or governments work or what they need (including redundancy and lots of it).
But I’d have more sympathy if they weren’t determined to act like hysterical martyrs in public. People lose jobs and deal with it all the time
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geez, I must’ve touched a nerve.
at any rate, I hope the severance process is done very carefully.
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There are many places online where dumb people congregate. This is not one of them. If you can’t keep up, go to a website where you can. I heard there are cute videos of kittens on Instagram. Those might be easier for you to process.
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Why you are so pissy at this person is puzzling, Clarissa. Perhaps I don’t have your X-Ray vision into other people’s prose.
I think your reader is saying that the State Department – like the CIA and military intelligence – needs to take special care in firing people. Their knowledge of USA systems is priceless, and you don’t want to bankrupt them. I think 1500 people are being fired. One percent is 15. You know that Israel, Russia, and China are making nice with the most vulnerable. They are not offering kittens.
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It’s the contrast between excellence and “they will sell out to China” that is funny. They are either excellent at their jobs or will eagerly betray their country. Both things at once are not possible.
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Did you miss the part where these people were offered six months of pay without work?
How much more coddling do they need to help them transition to other jobs?
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Like, what else are they owed here? A whole new government office to help them look for jobs? Somebody to send out resumes for them? Do they not know how to look for a job?
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…they could just go down to the unemployment office like the rest of us, you know. There are nice people there who will help you use resume templates…
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