There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing
12gramsofcarbon.com275 points by theahura 6 hours ago
275 points by theahura 6 hours 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.
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.
Most of these republicans/libertarians only want the government to leave them alone. They don't care when a company they aren't affiliated with is regulated. You can see Marc Andreesen celebrating the government's decision on Anthropic. Similarly, when Silicon Valley Bank went bankrupt, libertarians such as David Sacks were loudly calling for government bailouts. It's just hypocrisy all the way up.
The entire movement of conservatism in America is a propaganda operation oriented around manufacturing consent for a return to the Gilded Age. It is entirely bankrupt of morals and has been from the beginning. If you personally are a conservative, now is a good time to take a good hard honest look at the history of your movement in American politics. There might even still be time to realign yourself with a movement that isn't actively seeking to harm you.
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.)
> There's vastly more to politics than that.
I thought so in my teens. But now I know that I was naive. How can you be sure that you're not?
> 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.
>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.
Despite advertising themselves as such, the party hasn't been for actual small government at least during my entire lifetime (40+ years).
They both are bought and paid for by the Epsteinites: D takes away guns from the population so they can't effectively fight back against the benefactors, while R lets the benefactors dump toxic waste into water tables. They hit us from both sides.
US still has the second amendment and the most guns per person of any country in the world (more than 10x the average), yet I don't see anybody "fight back against the benefactors"
The people who are really into guns and the second amendment are somehow on the side of their oppressors.
Ffs, Trump is not an oppressor. You're not helping by pointlessly exaggerating things, you'll only derail the discussion.
The US has plenty of guns. The idea that there aren't sufficient guns for some kind of armed resistance is absurd. The issue is cultural - we'd apparently rather fire them off in schools and malls and movie theaters.
how useful will those guns be against an army of AI driven drones
just look at what's going on in Ukraine right now
More than you'd think but it'd get unbelievably ugly. Reign of terror would look like a cakewalk.
> D takes away guns from the population so they can't effectively fight back against the benefactors
Please remind us when Democrats have "taken away guns", and while you're at it when were those small arms last used to fight back against a tyrannical government?
Not in the US, and not addressing whether the governments controlled were tyrannical or not (in many cases the rebels were definitely bad) but there are lots of wars around the world that were started by people with small arms and home made bombs that built up into full scale wars.
Brady bill? Blue states and cities making it impossible to conceal carry?
Neither of those are "taking away your guns" and you forgot to answer my second question. Is concealed carry essential to overthrow a tyrannical government?
It raises the risks for the enforcers taking a paycheck to oppress the [subset of the] population. Bullies think twice when they can be punched square in the face.
Riiiiight, it doesn't just make the bully invest billions in military grade weapons to be used against civilians. Soon you'll have superdrones with superguns patrolling the US and you will still be clinging to your right to carry a musket.