[kragen]

In general, yes. With narrow exceptions, employment as a public servant is a matter of public record and subject to public comment. Such comments are not only protected by US constitional law but in many cases are statutorily required to be taken into account by regulatory proceedings.

This makes it rather galling that Elmu is seeking to shield DOGE employees from such accountability, but understandable when people on Reddit are openly advocating their assassination.

[kspacewalk2]

>understandable when people on Reddit are openly advocating their assassination.

Is this standard of shielding government employees from accountability applicable only to DOGE employees, or could we also have applied it to the many employees receiving death threats from Elon's fan base? Consistency on this would be welcome.

[kragen]

I think that in general it's going to be hard to square the liberal bedrock ideal of government accountability with networked mob violence, individual superempowerment, the rise of surveillance capitalism and the surveillance state, and autonomous swarming weaponry. When the people winning every armed conflict are those who can protect their anonymity while penetrating the anonymity of their opponents, republicanism itself seems like it has to be politically unstable, much less the consent of the governed.

Briefly, in the firearm age, respecting the popular vote was a Nash equilibrium, because if you lost the vote, you probably wouldn't be able to field enough riflemen to win on the battlefield either, so your best option was to lick your wounds and make do under the opposition party until the next election. Despite the resounding defeats of the US by masses of riflemen in Vietnam and Afghanistan, and of the USSR in Afghanistan in between, that equilibrium seems increasingly unstable in the drone age. The first warning signs of this were the staggeringly unequal death tolls in the US's first Iraq invasion, reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa. Recent examples of this instability might include the US's successful initial invasion of Afghanistan, the US's successful eventual defeat of Daesh in western Iraq (despite the relative hostility of current Iraqi leadership to the US, which counts as a sort of defeat), Israel's utter dismemberment of Hizbullah, Israel successfully stymieing Iran's nuclear weapons program, and Ukraine's surprisingly successful resistance to the invasion by Russia's much larger army. Also Hamas doesn't seem to be doing very well at defending Gaza.

Unfortunately the literature I could recommend to you on this topic has mostly been flagged as wrongthink, so I won't recommend that, but Slaughterbots is probably still safe to watch. It contains the memorable line "nuclear is obsolete", a riff on Putin's remarks at Valdai in Sochi 11 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA

It's fiction, of course, but thought-provoking fiction, scripted by leading AI researchers to be as realistic as possible, and it may have more truth in it than we would like.