Comment by modeless
2 days ago
> But this government [...]
I'm hearing a lot of this kind of thing. "Oh if only it was a different government". I'm sorry, but when you cry out for government involvement, it's not always going to be coming from the government you personally wanted. This is the whole problem with government involvement! I don't think that message is getting through, but it's the real lesson that should be learned here.
We're truly lost when we can't see that there is such a thing as good government and bad government. That there is a difference between corruption and modern liberal regulation that follows fair rules. That we can't see that it's ok to regulate CFCs to prevent ozone catastrophe, and not ok to use back room deals to pick favorites. It's not about sides or teams, but there is still right and wrong even in the administration of nation states. And we fluctuate along a gradient with our governments, sometimes its better, sometimes its worse, never perfect, but sometimes much better.
I think everyone does see that there is good government and bad government. They just disagree about which one is the good one and which is the bad one.
The real problem is when people demand heavy government involvement but don’t think about what could go wrong if an administration decided to misuse the regulation. They just assume it’s going to be used perfectly as they imagined it, usually to punish the companies they dislike while completely sparing the companies they like.
A good example is the usual chorus of people demanding heavy regulations or bans of social media, who always imagine that the regulator won’t touch their websites. They imagine surgical laws hitting Facebook and TikTok because they don’t use those websites, but they imagine the law won’t touch their Discords or require them to do any age verification on their phone or PC for the sites they use. Then we get the intrusive age and ID checking law proposals that everyone hates.
> I think everyone does see that there is good government and bad government.
I only know the time and place I've lived in (United States, born in 1977), but I feel like the trope of "all government is bad" has been the rallying cry of conservatives since the Reagan era.
I'm convinced enough people have grown up hearing that trope that your assumption is incorrect. I think a ton of people believe there can only be bad government because they've never had to think about it-- they've been told that from birth.
I'm not a student of history. Maybe this isn't a new thing and this "all government bad" trope has been a consistent feature of US politics. It doesn't feel like it, though.
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If that is the case, then its no skin off of anyone’s back to state it.
As long as I have paid attention to American politics, it’s always had a major undercurrent of “all government bad”, with a subtext of “this thing I know about is an exception”.
Alas I suspect the two major forms of government in the US have their own visions of good and bad across the board when there should be no disagreement on issues like CFCs were bad and that we need to break our addiction to coal. But good luck on that when the system itself only rewards short-term achievements and private money is now effectively unlimited. I have issues with both options, but many more issues with one side. But I am fed up with having only two options and picking the lesser of two evils that mostly drop their differences to keep the electoral status quo intact.
You are correct: there is a right and wrong. Rights are actions which do not initiate harm in the form of murder, assault, rape, theft, trespass, coercion, or deception. Wrong actions are the initiation of harm. What is truly lost is the ability to assess on first principles. You are afraid of an outcome, and think "good government" is going to protect you from that risk. A better master who will gaurd you instead of whip you is your end point. It is actually reflective of your character.
We should demand and work towards good public institutions that do their job. It's perfectly consistent to say "this is a job that legitimate democratic institutions should perform" and complain that currently the legitimacy of institutions is undermined.
Let's take your argument to it's extreme point: The state should never regulate anything because the state might be bad!
This is structurally the same fallacy as "people shouldn't be allowed to do anything, because some people are bad!".
> Let's take your argument to it's extreme point: The state should never regulate anything because the state might be bad!
I'm not convinced you understand the sentiment of the parent comment. It's that one should consider all possible scenarios of one's actions when making requests of a powerful entity they can't control. The mechanics of government make it such that once something is under their control, it'll be more effort to remove those controls than what it took to initially add them.
It should also be expected that legitimate regime changes can put people in power that current lobbyists may disagree with. Lobbyists should then be conscious that by lobbying for regulation, they implicitly trust that the will of the people will always align with what they think is best for the industry being regulated in the long term (otherwise they wouldn't be lobbying or would do so in a way that confines the power to the current administration).
I can control government more than I can control Google or Anthropic.
Also your argument is along the lines of thinking I argue for: You say I shouldn't lobby for regulation I believe is beneficial because a future government might change the regulations to make them not beneficial. This implicitly assumes that the future government wouldn't implement the non-beneficial regulations if the current government doesn't do the beneficial ones. Possibly! But this is arguing that we should firmly establish principles, values and precedents that future administrations will feel bound by. And that I would agree with: Regulations and governance should arise from principles (practical details and grey areas will always require a ton of messy detailed negotiations, but within the confines of principles!). One of the things the current US administration has done is to show that it is possible to disregard principles if you are powerful with no consequences. You can lie about elections being fraudulent, watch your supporters storm parliament and get reelected a few years later.
But if principles don't matter to those in power then the conclusion is actually the opposite of what you say. While your allies are in power you should use power however you can to further your interests, because when others are in power they will not feel bound by your restraint, and at least they first have to undo your work.
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This extreme makes the question meaningless. A government isn't a government if it can't regulate and has no authority.
Its fundamentally different to say governments or individuals should have no power or freedom.
By design, governments have the winning end of a power imbalance and limiting them helps protect those on the losing end. Limiting those already on the losing end makes it worse for almost everyone (assuming the government is a small portion of the population).
I don't think it does make it meaningless. If governments aren't allowed to regulate they aren't governments, its anarchy. Somebody must have the power to curtail the excesses of the moneied class. If the government is prevented from doing that only vigilantism will.
We've already seen this play out. Government let's health insurance company get away with almost anything. The GOP wants to let them get away with more. One person who couldn't get the health care he was paying for took matters into his own hand
We're supposed to be giving governments the winning end because if they don't have it, robber barons will. Supposed to.
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There’s a certain argument that people are just in over their heads for a society as large and complex as our and we just can’t cut it. Nothing that won’t be fixed by overshoot.
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I don't entirely disagree with your sentiment, but context and scale matters. The damage a corrupt institution can make is far bigger than some "bad" individual can do on their own.
You essentially made the libertarian argument without realizing it. According to this line of thinking, we should leave as little as possible in the hands of government exactly because it's either bad already or it will eventually be bad. We should then apply an exceptionally high bar to government responsibilities. These would be things that would be even worse in private hands (police for a simple example).
The fallacy of the libertarian argument is the assumption that it’s possible to have a small distributed government trivially doesn’t hold in presence of bigger adversarial monolithic governments elsewhere.
Avoid walls when walking in hallways.
I think it should be noted that the current government, which did this silly thing, belongs to a party that is pretty much advertising on wanting to be a smaller government that gets involved less. That is a large part of why people vote for them.
Small government has always been a euphemism for a government working on less distribution of wealth. Governments always intervene in the economy one way or another.
No but lots of republicans vote for them actually hoping for smaller less interventionary government, believe it or not. The voters that give them power do not view it as that euphemism.
It's a fairy tale, but they do believe/hope for it.
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That's exactly right. The US Government is ruthlessly efficient - yeah, people don't want to hear that. Sure, there are Pentagon-related boondoggles, but that's different.
Try working in a government office - you will be lucky to get a water cooler - BYOW.
"Small government" means "fuck you, I got mine, now let's gut the IRS so I can do some white collar crime".
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I miss the days when that was the argument. Maybe I'm getting old, but growing up the general categorization was that Democrats were for the working class, opposed to large corporations, and for individual freedoms and Republicans were for a small federal government, balanced budgets, and a grab bag of "conservative" views that often rolled up to traditional family and christian values.
Today those tropes are very inaccurate, but many voters still take them as true distinctions. The last balanced budget was under a democratic president. Both parties have voted for expansions of federal authority, the Patriot Act and its renewal for example. Both parties want to tell us what we can and can't do to our own bodies, though they disagree on specific policies. Both parties believe in states' rights only after losing federal office.
The list goes on and on, suffice it to say we don't have a clear distinction of two parties with differing principles of how governments should be designed.
In a two party system, do you vote for the party that promises small government and never delivers, or the party that promises bigger government and does delive?
There's vastly more to politics than that. There's even more to "small" vs "big" government than that, or to who really promises and delivers what. This convenient reduction to handy little words obscures all that, to the point where it stops mapping to reality in a meaningful way. It's a fictional abstraction.
If anything, your question reduces to making one party sound incompetent or deceitful, I don't know if that's intended. (And considering that aspect of the party is another fun can full of real-life worms.)
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Looks like those in favor of small government should not vote - to apply evolutionary pressure instead of rewarding unacceptable behavior
The second biggest problem with this comment is that the conclusion we must take from it if we buy into your statement is that we shouldn’t bother voting.
We would not have a costly war in Iran, blockaded Strait of Hormuz, $6-7/gallon gas, or blanket import tariffs hiking up the prices of consumer staple goods if we voted for the “party that promises bigger government and does deliver.”
I would submit the idea that the latter party is consistently misrepresented and has been the only one that has delivered smaller budget deficits anytime recently.
See also: Tax Cut and Jobs Act, the Kansas Experiment.
The truth of the matter is, our elites are undertaxed at historic levels. At no point in our lifetime have the wealthy been taxed at a lower rate than they are today. There isn’t actually anything wrong with government spending outside of the endless/aimless wars (started by…). It’s the revenue side that deserves scrutiny.
Despite advertising themselves as such, the party hasn't been for actual small government at least during my entire lifetime (40+ years).
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> belongs to a party that is pretty much advertising on wanting to be a smaller government that gets involved less.
It's the other way around. Americans voted for Trump hoping he'd improve the country's economy and address the cost-of-living crisis. For example, one of the main proposals was to make ICE bigger and use it to deport as many people as possible, hoping it'd give back jobs to Americans. Another key proposal was to withdraw from climate agreements and stimulate the mining industry.
Right, but both of those examples are terrible ideas on their face.
On migrant workers, much of the US economy is underpinned by the assumption that cheap manual labor is abundant, with the implicit assumption that this tier of labour isn’t going to try and clamour for workers rights (which is a whole other story, but whatever). It’s (part of) the reason the US continues to have globally extremely cheap gas even as the prices hit highs within a domestic frame of reference.
And restarting mining rather than trying to adapt the mining workforce better to a changing landscape is just going to make it hurt worse when the US has to catch up with the rest of the developed world on that front.
As a close outside observer, it feels more like one side of the US electorate is motivated by sore and a misplaced sense of being owed retribution more than anything else.
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> Americans voted for Trump hoping
There was like 70 million Americans who voted for Trump, most likely for a wide range of reasons, and sometimes multiple reasons and sometimes probably even conflicting reasons. People are complicated, saying that half a country did something because of some few reasons usually over-simplifies so much it gets harder for you to actually understand what is happening/happened.
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>belongs to a party that is pretty much advertising on wanting to be a smaller government that gets involved less. That is a large part of why people vote for them.
I don't think that's been the Republican messaging for years (ever since Trump) and it's certainly not a "large part of why people vote for them".
I think a very large fraction of Republican support in this day and age is based on social and cultural topics and feelings.
That is a view of the American Republican party that is multiple decades out of date.
despite not doing what they claim to do, this is still what they always claim to do.
Then the people voting for them should pay more attention to what that party does when it is in power.
Those days are long gone. Trump is much more of a statist when it comes to the economy. Not that surprising coming from a long-time Democrat.
> Those days are long gone. > Not that surprising coming from a long-time Democrat.
So repubblicans have not been about small government for a long time and Trump is not even a pure-blood repubblican so it was to be expected that he would do the thing that repubblicans have not been about for a long time...what in the circular reasoning? Oh and please name one repubblican president who successfully reduced spending or "made government smaller"
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“Advertising” vs “doing”
"Small government" is a euphemism for letting racist people be racist without censure.
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Reductionist "if only the government didn't get involved" doesn't work unless you presume no government is beneficial (it is not since you just recreate all the bad parts of government anyway)
You can be critical of the policy of export controls and the meaning of them in modern day but saying it is a problem with the government in general is nonsensical.
The problem is not a presumption that government can't ever be good. The problem is that the team you personally think is "good" won't be in charge forever.
Everyone loves enabling broad government authority when people they like happen to be in charge.
Sooner or later, a government that is "bad" (for any possible definition of "bad" that you personally approve of) will someday be in charge. Then, suddenly, enabling all that broad government authority seems like not such a great idea.
Your analysis presumes that the government is controlled by a single group which hasn't historically been the case.
This weird hyper politicization is young in terms of the US.
And again you don't acknowledge that "government control" is too vague a metric to be useful.
The government has some form of control by virtue of existing so if you want to be critical of it you need to be more specific.
I don't think this hypocrisy is as common as you believe it to be. I think the current government is extraordinarily bad - I'm on record calling them fascists and murderers quite a lot - and nevertheless it must be allowed to have this authority. There's no better option.
> Reductionist "if only the government didn't get involved" doesn't work unless you presume no government is beneficial
One can believe a government shouldn't get involved in *some* things without subscribing to the belief that "no government is beneficial".
I agree and that was my criticism specifically.
Don't say "government involvement is bad" specify what exactly you mean.
>You can be critical of the policy of export controls and the meaning of them in modern day but saying it is a problem with the government in general is nonsensical.
Hardly non-sensical. You just have a different default.
Government has control by virtue of existing.
If you say government control is bad in general you are just saying there shouldn't be government.
This is impossible as the things the government does will happen it would just be under a different label.
That is all I meant by non-sensical, you need to be more specific to have a real point.
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You can reverse it. "If the government gets involved" doesn't work unless you presume government is beneficial (it is not since you just recreate all the bad parts of no government anyway).
> unless you presume government is beneficial
That's the constitutional bedrock of our societies. That doesn't mean it's always true but if you denounce that as a legitimate and achievable goal then you don't have a society anymore.
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The idea that government could _not_ be involved is nonsense. You simply don't perceive some government involvement as involvement because you take it for granted. The only question is where do you personally want to draw the line, and by what principles do we organise government involvement.
You probably don't want the government to stop being involved in securing your property or maintaining roads. None of the tech firms want the government to stop being involved in securing IP rights. Etc. etc. etc...
I agree. This situation was created in the first place because both parties and their constituents have been OK giving the executive branch more and more power as long as it benefits “their team”.
The left has been complaining about the executive branch over reach for quite a long time.
Hell as much as the drone strikes get simplified down to "Obama killed people without trials" the main complaint at the time was that he was acting without Congressional approval.
Democrats shouldn't have responded to Congress getting blocked up by Republicans realizing that they could make "ineffective government" a self fulfilling prophecy but pretending everyone is okay with it isn't accurate either.
Saying "both sides" doesn't make you enlightened. It's either intellectual laziness or intentional dishonesty. I absolutely abhor "bothsidesism".
One party is rounding up people and putting them into concentration camps while doing a mass deportation. That same party is trying to end birthright citizenship. That same party set the world order ablaze with a completely pointless tariffs regime. That same party started a war in Iran to please their donors and the Israeli PM, a war that is going to (IMHO) go down as the biggest strategic blunder in US history. One party doesn't want half the population to have bodily autonomy. In fact some of them have openly said they want to hand out the death penalty for getting an abortion. One party has doubled the national debt in a decade to hand out massive tax cuts to the ultra-wealthy and also gutting essential services. One party has a president credibly implicated with Jeffrey Epstein. That entire party bar a handful of individuals (who have been punished for their "disloyalty") have gone to great lengths to hide the evidence of that malfeasance. One party is killing people essentially to manipulate the market with repeated lies about an "imminent deal". One party is wholesale engaged in voter suppression and election rigging.
It's the same party for all of these things. What the other party is guilty of is being complicit in all of the above by refusing to oppose it. Still bad but nowhere near the same.
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This government is corrupt to the core, with individuals in it wanting a piece of the pie for themselves. Anthropic wouldn't share, hence the reprecussions.
It is an extreme edge case and the argument for a sane government oversight is still perfectly valid. No oversight makes corporations dump waste into the water supply and market asbestos-lined cigarettes. It's naive to think that no oversight is needed.
Agreed. It feels intellectually childish to say we can never have any government because of corruption. This government is flagrantly corrupt, has publicly ignored the courts, and weaponized the DOJ. This is not normal.
I’m pretty certain that most of my issues are with a specific kind of government, not with government in general.
Government is fine if it’s done by people that aren’t in it only for themselves. Actually it is often still fine if it’s done by people only in it for themselves. It’s just that the people in it right now will burn the world down to enrich themselves.
> "Government is fine if it’s done by people that aren’t in it only for themselves."
Academic studies consistently show that people attracted to a career in politics (regardless of affiliation) score higher on "Dark Triad" personality traits (narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy).
And even for the non-sociopaths, the problem with humans is instinctively we ARE only in it for ourselves and our family. Anyone claiming otherwise, ironically, is probably attempting to signal virtue for...personal gain...yet again.
I think it's reductionist to say politicians are psychopaths.and it's completely dependent on how you structure your society. And, regardless, social coordination is absolutely necessary and you won't be able to do it without the state.
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Some people are wired such that altruism makes them feel good and gives them a sense of purpose. Maybe it's evolutionary, but it doesn't change the fact that they don't think of it as 'virtue signalling' or personal gain when they do it.
In fact the ones who can only classify the behavior as such because they can't even comprehend it look like the real sociopaths.
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But in democracy you do get to say which government you want.
You can pick which of the two possibilities, neither of which is even close to your political views, will oppress you for the next 4 years.
That is true in the US, but that is not typical. I cannot think of another democracy that is as firmly two party as the US. Even the UK which I felt was too two party has always had some smaller parties (for many decades the Liberals, and then the Lib Dems, and Northern Irish parties), many smaller ones more recently (add the Scottish and Welsh Nationalists) and with two smaller parties gaining a lot of ground in the last few years the next general election looks like a four way fight.
In many countries multiple parties and coalition governments are the norm.
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The solution is ranked choice voting and getting money out of politics.
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While the USA is famously a two-party system, that’s not true of every democracy.
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Another prediction win for the Simpson's [1].
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8hDsIoEFYw
Yes, but the other N% of the country still might vote for the government you didn't want.
You say it, but you don't always get it.
Yes, you get to say what you want, but that doesn’t mean you get what you want. With millions of people all saying something different, nobody gets exactly what they want.
There's currently no real democracy on earth.
Issues with majority support never change in almost all of the biggest democracies in the world right now.
For the US specifically its a representative oligopoly with Madisonian gridlock and a few million non-elected bureaucrats thrown in the middle.
The US gives the smallest amount of say to people to pick either Coke or Pepsi. Don't like sugary soda and think its making you fat? Tough luck, you gotta pick Coke or Pepsi.
> There's currently no real democracy on earth.
That's a claim.
Switzerland is so democratic they refused to let women vote until the 1990s (in the last canton) because the voters (men) didn't allow that. It's my go-to example of how direct democracy has pitfalls too.
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US is in almost no way democratic. There is not enough unity for that. The idea and reasoning behind Democracy was that a people (i.e. a demos) rules itself. But in US there is no longer one people, and it's fracturing even faster and more.
I don't think it's helpful to be flippant in this analysis. The US falls in the category of flawed democracies, together with Botswana, Indonesia, India, Mongolia, Philippines, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, and many other countries with, shall we say, significant potential for development.
I don't think anybody who has actually lived under a pre-democratic regime would call the US "no way democratic". There are many democratic aspects of the US, and it has reasonably strong institutions. But it seems that most Americans have not yet realized what category they're in, and think that the US is some kind of front-runner.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index
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All the more reason to let states and local governments do more. Rather than a unitary congress or executive that only 1/2 the people (+/-) like.
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There is not much example of actual democracy at scale though. Even Switzerland which is often cited as the closest form of actual democratic governance is still not ticking all of the basics of a democratic checklist.
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This. There really is no such thing as an entirely good government. Government is composed of people. From politicians to clerks, it's people all the way down. Some people are good, most are just trying to get through the day, and some are evil. Seriously: in any government, some of the bureaucrats and politicians will be corrupt or power hungry or sadistic or whatever.
When you give a government power, there are people in place who can and will abuse that power. If not now, then next year, or in five years. After all, power granted to the government rarely goes away.
This is the reason that you should always consider the worst case, when governments gain power. The power to ban a specific technology? What could go wrong? How could that be abused? Let me count the ways...
I'm curious if you apply the same logic to speculation markets and corporate profits.
It’s actually ok to be more critical of a government that’s capricious than one that merely advances polices one disagrees with
Of course the tired follow-up: “But if the government was functioning properly it would only do the things I want”.
And the logical interpretation of that statement would be "if a government doesn't do things I want, it's not functioning properly".
Seems a little slippery-slopey to me
Mmm. Same argument for any seat of power though.
“It’s not always going to be the (oligo|mono)polistic corporation you personally wanted” either.
So we invent democracy, term limits, anti-trust, branches of government, environmental safety regulations, the SEC etc. etc.
Whether in the public or private sphere we have created social technologies to make power more diffuse and constrained, and corruption and misalignment less likely (never impossible).
One feature of the last decade is the steady erosion of these safety rails.
I agree with the point, but I think it's fair to acknowledge that the current US government is not a "normal" one in any sense.
Right - this government has it's own problems, and Trump is of course entirely transactional so will be looking for something in return for rescinding this order (as he of course will).
But of course Anthropic has been lobbying hard for this, for government regulation, and finally they've (at least temporarily) got what they want. Maybe they are actually happy with the outcome, who knows. They get to IPO and all get rich, they get to sell current level models, and future development gets heavily regulated.
It was always going to happen anyway - just a matter of time. At some point (whether that is today is beside the point) AI/AGI will become powerful enough to have national security implications and of course the government is going to regulate who can have access or not, put in place export controls, require clearance for developers, etc.
That’s a strange argument. If my postman shits in my letterbox, is that proof that the whole concept of postmen is a bad idea?
Each government just adds shit on the previous, with small optics differences, anyway.
Like, in the US, Trump might do the ICE show for his voters, but Obama's deportated 3 million just fine in his time.
ICE does a lot of objectionable things no matter what you think about deporting illegals
Great, so nihilism
>it's the real lesson that should be learned here
I believe the real lesson is that we need to fix government. Too many things that people assumed to be codified were actually only ever enforced by social contract.
Until now, we've largely operated within a band of norms that served us fairly well, if imperfectly.
However, we're now seeing what's possible when the social contract is shattered. We need to codify in ways that insulate government from wide variances in the reasonable operation of our form of government. And, we need to root out regulatory capture while we're at it.
Government involvement should be the people's voice. We need to restore that in earnest versus eliminate government involvement; else we're merely a corporatocracy.
Ah yes, so we should have corporations controlling it? Because they can't be corrupt or evil?
The whole point of government control is at least everyone has some say in it, if we build the government decently. It has to be controlled by one or more human institutions, so choose your poison: government, nonprofits, forprofits, ... ?
American hostility to the whole concept of government has led you to Trump’s brand of gangster capitalism (which will lead you to fascism if you let it).
Government intervention is good and useful and keeps a markets free and society fair, preventing things like monopolies, robber barons and insider trading.
When those constraints are removed, when government becomes the source of corruption, we end up wheee the US has arrived today - where companies that bribe government officials get preferred treatment and the law is used selectively as a weapon.
This is a very dangerous moment for the US.
> where companies that bribe government officials get preferred treatment
Do you think lobbying did not exist prior to two years ago?
Lobbying is bad, open corruption, grift and bribery at the highest level is even worse.
Agreed.
HN perceives America as a temporarily embarrassed Libertarian state.
Crony capitalism, media echo-chambers and inequality have fomented an unshakeable disbelief in positive government intervention, thus the only thing left politically tenable is flagrant corruption (drain the swamp).
I'm vey grateful for the Australian federal government; their actions have steered us to a much better 2025/2026 than many other countries.
> I'm sorry, but when you cry out for government involvement, it's not always going to be coming from the government you personally wanted.
I've pointed this out so many times when enforced DEI and cancellation culture was rife, and was asked, basically, why I wanted to be a nazi :-/
If no government ever got involved we would all be slaves to a family of inbred kings.
not really, the problem here is not that the government is involved per se, but that there is practically no involvment at all as the government is directly controlled by a clique of businessmen
so instead of involvment proper there is leverage somebody tries to pass onto competitors
Nonsense. That's like saying that the concept of government in general is bad because a particular government might be bad.
It's perfectly reasonable to want government involvement that for sane governments is OK, even when you don't like that government. The current US government is a completely insane outlier. You cannot expect everything to adjust for the most insane outlier.
I have been surprised how few people seem to gave taken the lesson from Trump that creating federal authority today empowers all future leaders.
Courts have slapped down some of Trump's actions thankfully, but a lot of what he has done that many disagree with simply shouldn't be legal and only are because in the past we had what may have been good reason to solve a short term problem.
Trump shouldn't have been legally allowed to enact a war without congressional approval before it began. As it stands he was able to sneak through with the war powers act, congress is completely unwilling to enforce their own oversight authority, and Trump eventually redefined how to interpret the war powers act and again congress rolled their eyes and didn't challenge it.
Do you not see the difference between Trumpian dictator-level “involvement” and regular day-to-day steering of legislation in a party-friendly manner?
This is laughable “both parties are as bad” thinking. By reasonable standards your current government has gone through involvement, passed straight through tampering and is now into nation-destruction mode. It’s a new thing for the rest of the world to see.
> I'm sorry, but when you cry out for government involvement, it's not always going to be coming from the government you personally wanted. This is the whole problem with government involvement!
That is not the problem with government involvement, it is the problem with bad governments.
It’s the insidious dualistic emotional trap that so many people are in, “my team is good and your team is bad”. People scoff at things like WWE but it’s really no different if you have a “my team” in sports (look around your space) or a side/team in the political theater where you vote really hard, pulling levers that have even categorically been shown are not connected to anything [1]. Please control the urge to respond or even think that your political team the controllers gave you siding with is somehow better. Your political WWE wrestler is not better than any others, it’s still all “scripted”, only actions and activities within system accepted bounds are permitted.
Sure, there are some differences and it’s not as scripted, just like how professional sports is not as scripted as WWE or other things people see in their rectangle called a phone/tv (even though people still debate, e.g., which super hero is better), but it’s still controlled by an overarching control harness.
It’s why regardless of voting or party in power, we always get the sane direction of movement even if one is flavored blue and another time it’s flavored red or the March forward has a left or right lean. Just like the manipulation of emotions in WWE or and soap opera drama, the manipulation works best when there’s cycles of tension and conflict to move people. That’s how narcissistic manipulators work.
It’s one of the ways in which you can tell they’re behind it all when you can take a step back and realize that there’s always this tension and constant conflict and drama, but somehow everything always works out in the narcissist’s interest and desired direction. It’s insidious.
Grok and ChatGpT are more in line with the narcissistic system’s interest of world domination by a cabal of psychopathic and extremely narcissistic and supremacist people … so Anthropic that may not want to participate in murder and mayhem and could be used by people who oppose murder, mayhem, and world domination needs to be kneecapped … ideally into submission. That’s all that this is, the constant evil that controls America doing what it has always done, rapaciously consume and abuse.
[1] https://stonecenter.gc.cuny.edu/files/2022/09/Hertel-Fernand...
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I'm enjoying imagining that this comment was typed by Dario. It sure sounds like him. I mean, he's not usually this profane, but maybe on an alt account...
Whenever someone wants "small government" I assume they mean "a government that does not prevent me from shackling you" and hoo boy does that end up correct a lot.
There were certainly self-styled libertarians who were very keen on this particular US administration and its laissez-faire approach to rules, especially rules binding on the executive...
Turns out the alternative to bureaucracy and regulation (good and bad) is executive fiat, which is a lot less predictable and trustworthy even if their reasoning is good (which in this case it theoretically might be) and often is bad
When you get big enough, the govt is always going to want to get involved.
We've seen how social media sites have always been in contention with govs regarding free speech even tho theyre fundamentally a way for other people to socialize with one another