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.
It's a fairy tale, but they do believe/hope for it.
I will gladly live in a conservative county over progressive one. And reading this paragraph in a article about AI is complete nonsense. This is a go touch grass moment if you needed one.
Your personal preferences and beliefs have little to do with conservatism at large and the motivations of the powerful people who promote it. If you want to reach a place of open minded debate and discussion in which there can be different legitimate approaches to governing, you have to start with an honest assessment of the world as it is, not as you would like it to be.
The reason it's relevant in an article about AI should be self-evident. AI is powerful, the industry is already massive, and the leaders in that industry are involved in quite a bit of political maneuvering. You may choose to ignore politics, but politics will not ignore you.
"The entire movement of conservatism in America is a propaganda operation"
This is nonsense. I could easily say the same thing about progressives highlighting/cherrypicking some of the worst living situations in America today.
This idea that if some group isn’t all reading from the same sheet of music you imagine they should be reading from means they are hypocrites is just wrong.
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".
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.
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.)
I thought so in my teens. But now I know that I was naive. How can you be sure that you're not?
But if you've spent the time since your teens to come to the opposite conclusion in spite of everything going on around, then I suspect there will be very little I can say to you that will make sense to you.
But politics is really about negotiating ownership in companies that the politician will approve for government projects. And if you aren't doing that, then no other politicians will care to work with you, because it's not profitable for them. You'll be an irrelevant politician that accomplished nothing.
Which side of the aisle you sit on is more typically about where your lobbyists' marketing team agreed would better depict their brand, actually having very little to do with big or small government. Both sides want big government because it means more money for big projects for companies that they will or do own in part.
Sorry to dishearten you if you planned on going into politics.
You don't have to "wrongly imagine" anything. Everyone not doing what's "best for society" is how the world works, authoritarianism and the rule of rich elites is the default that everything wants to regress to. There are only ever islands where people managed to push this back towards the corners and make room for more of us.
Human societies have taken millenia to come up with a system (or a few similar systems) which have a chance of holding things somewhat at bay. Is it perfect? Far from it. Does it work? Just honestly compare how things are for disadvantaged or even normal, ordinary people in places that work differently. Could it be better? You bet, there's lots to criticize. But notice that you _can_ criticize. Usually, elsewhere, you can't. Is it getting worse? Yes. The lesson is that you have to keep defending this system that gives you a chance to hold people to account and remove them from power.
Comments like yours above, which claim that everything is maximally bad and rigged, do nothing but help things decay further. "There's nothing that can be done! It's the same everywhere! Why even try?" That's how you get other people to stop caring, too, and then the real assholes take over. You're playing right into their hands. You think it's already as bad as it gets? You think you're no longer naive? Well, then maybe you're doing this on purpose; or you're just a new kind of naive. Either way: you are an active part of this problem.
You think people pointing out problems in a broken system are the problem.
Respectfully then, YOU'RE the problem. Before you decide to fix something, you ought to stop and ask what people have already tried.
That's called team work.
Not what I said, nor does it follow from what I said. Also, not really what you were doing. There's a difference between pointing out problems, or using the existence of problems to trash the reputation of something or someone. Problems are easy to find. It's a convenient excuse to hide behind. But in the end, you can tell from how things are being presented and contextualized, and from what conclusion is actually being promoted.
I'm not going to keep discussing this with you. I think I've done enough to counter this corrosive narrative, no matter where it comes from.
If you're genuine and you do in fact care, you might want to ponder what you're doing, and if it's making things better or worse.
Have a nice day.
I'm sorry to tell you, you're simply in the wrong. It's you causing the problems. Self reflect.
Read again, and honestly self reflect.
You're pointing at everyone but yourself and spreading discord. Ask yourself if that's what peace looks like.
You have your opinion, and you're free to express it. However, you chose to express it in a way commonly used by the enemies of democracy and liberty. That does not make you one of them, not at all. But it should give you pause. Why do they say the things they do? They are after a certain effect. Is this the effect that you also want?
They use it, have used it, are using it, because they know it's effective in undermining trust in the system and because it helps their agenda of replacing it with something much worse. This has worked in the past, and we can see it working in the present. Yes, the system is flawed, but your way of expressing opinions about it is demonstrably not helping to make it better, on the contrary.
As I tried to make clear, there are constructive and destructive ways to "point out problems". That's why I asked you to consider the danger of your words. So, of course you can provide opinions, but you are also responsible for their effect, and if you do care, you should be mindful of it. Criticism is fine and necessary, but a I said before, what conclusion it promotes matters a great deal.
My goal in this conversations was mainly to not let your position stand undisputed, to show up how unfairly reductive it is, and how much that only serves to undermine what we should all care for.
I did not intend to insult you. I did point out what I perceive as flaws and real-life consequences of your position, and I turned your heavy insinuation of naivete back at you. I stand by the stance that comments like yours above are problematic, for the reasons given.
I do realize you feel insulted nonetheless. I also realize that my comments were lacking empathy for your position. In the end, I do care more about pushing back this narrative than about how you feel, but maybe that's the wrong way to go about it. My words were harsh, and you must have felt bad. For that, I feel bad, and I'm sorry.
Differences of opinion exist, and discussing them and their consequences is a necessary part of dealing with them. This is in fact what peace looks like, and how you defend and preserve it: by talking it out. And having said that, I again wish you a nice day.
So to expand on your take, I would encourage you to consider, before you turn 70, that what you've suggested has been tried before. By me and many others before me. And thus far, it hasn't solved anything. In fact, it has empowered politicians ability to capitalize on the trust of the voter to further their personal gains.
If you've already tried and succeeded, point to where that has happened.
But if you are zealous to push a solution, without considering what has already been tried before you, then you'll have set yourself up for disappointment. And you'll have only yourself to blame as many of us have already experienced before you.
Good luck.
Based on the parent comment, I think it's more "one party sound incompetent and the other deceitful". There was a senator who used to say that American politics was a contest between the stupid party and the evil party.
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.
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.
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.
> the American electorate is relatively simple-minded
It's favorable for many people who don't agree with the current administration to believe so, I'm not sure how true it is in practice, and again, I believe believing so might hurt your chances of actually understanding things properly. That sort of bias really get in the way.
> https://navigatorresearch.org/2024-post-election-survey-the-...
> findings from our post-election survey among 5,000 self-reported 2024 general election voters
Again, more than 70 million Americans voted for Trump, you're not gonna gain any understanding from a self-reported survey of ~2500 people.
A sample size of ~2500 is statistically huge - the margin of error is very small. You should sign up to a stats course.
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.
>COVID restrictions
>The state of the economy
>The state of culture, broadly-speaking
>Letting a black man become president, and the attendant ramifications (intrinsic and extrinsic, cause and effect)
I'll leave it to readers to judge. (You can probably guess what I, as a progressive, think of these impetuses, in driving half-ish of the country to vote for everything Trump embodies. And, frankly, what drove the other half-ish of the country to vote for Biden and Harris.)
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.
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"