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.