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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 smalle
by dxuh 4mo ago
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.
- seattle_spring 4mo agoDespite advertising themselves as such, the party hasn't been for actual small government at least during my entire lifetime (40+ years).
- rustcleaner 4mo ago[flagged]
- hmry 4mo agoUS 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"
- YeahThisIsMe 4mo agoThe people who are really into guns and the second amendment are somehow on the side of their oppressors.
- Yiin 4mo agofew years ago they weren't
- ffsm8 4mo agoFfs, Trump is not an oppressor. You're not helping by pointlessly exaggerating things, you'll only derail the discussion.
- wolvoleo 4mo agoYeah if you're straight and white he's not
- ffsm8 4mo ago[flagged]
- arcatech 4mo ago> You either have lost touch with reality so far to be unable to understand what "oppressed" means or you're just parotting someone else who suffers from that affliction. This 100% applies to you. If you can’t see ICE actions as oppressive, you’ve definitely lost touch with reality.
- ffsm8 4mo agoICE is just enforcing law. Also they're enforcing the law regardless of the skim color. There are plenty of white people which have been removed from the USA by ICE, consequently invalidating the previous thesis of it being about white/straight people. Complete brainrot...
- arcatech 4mo ago> ICE is just enforcing law. "This changed in June 2025, just weeks after White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, reportedly frustrated with the slow increase in ICE arrests, called the head of every ICE Field Office into a room in Washington, DC and ordered them to “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens.” Following this meeting, the Trump administration launched its first splashy raid of an American city, sending hundreds of agents into Los Angeles and sparking fiery confrontations between protestors and federal agents." [0] That's what you're talking about when you say "just enforcing the law"? > Also they're enforcing the law regardless of the skim color. "Publicly available ICE and research datasets show clear shifts in who is being arrested and detained—large growth in interior arrests and detention of people without U.S. criminal convictions and major variation across states—but they do not provide a consistent, complete public breakdown of ICE arrests and detention by race and nationality at the county level, so any precise county-level racial or national origin tallies are not available from the cited public sources." [1] So how do you know that? Are you just guessing? You're accusing me of the exact thing you're doing. Honestly it sounds to me like you're the one suffering from some serious brainrot. [0]: https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/ice-arrest-statistics-americans-noncriminals/ https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/ice-arrest-s... [1]: https://factually.co/fact-checks/justice/ice-arrests-detention-statistics-by-race-nationality-county-level-71d024 https://factually.co/fact-checks/justice/ice-arrests-detenti...
- dudefeliciano 4mo ago> 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?
- rustcleaner 4mo ago[flagged]
- dudefeliciano 4mo agoNeither of those are "taking away your guns" and you forgot to answer my second question. Is concealed carry essential to overthrow a tyrannical government?
- rustcleaner 4mo agoIt 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.
- dudefeliciano 4mo agoRiiiiight, 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.
- boppo1 4mo ago2A people don't want the right to carry a musket, they want the right to those same superdrones. You are framing their desires in bad faith.
- 4mo ago
- tdeck 4mo agoThe 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.
- hurtigioll 4mo agohow useful will those guns be against an army of AI driven drones just look at what's going on in Ukraine right now
- boppo1 4mo agoMore than you'd think but it'd get unbelievably ugly. Reign of terror would look like a cakewalk.
- goatlover 4mo agoThen the people voting for them should pay more attention to what that party does when it is in power.
- olalonde 4mo agoThose 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.
- dudefeliciano 4mo ago> 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"
- AlotOfReading 4mo agoI know it's not what you mean, but Lincoln dramatically shrank the size of the Confederate government.
- olalonde 4mo agoTrump is much more of a statist than previous Republican presidents (and arguably Democratic ones as well).
- otikik 4mo ago“Advertising” vs “doing”
- mvdtnz 4mo agoThat is a view of the American Republican party that is multiple decades out of date.
- bryanrasmussen 4mo agodespite not doing what they claim to do, this is still what they always claim to do.
- imjonse 4mo agoSmall 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.
- boppo1 4mo agoNo 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.
- FiberBundle 4mo agoMost 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.
- gwerbin 4mo agoThe 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.
- mlrtime 4mo agoThis is garbage reposted in every HN article that starts to talk about any related to politics. 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.
- Marazan 4mo ago"Small government" is a euphemism for letting racist people be racist without censure.
- logicchains 4mo ago[flagged]
- sdthjbvuiiijbb 4mo ago>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.
- mkl95 4mo ago> 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.
- embedding-shape 4mo ago> 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.
- mkl95 4mo agoFrom an EU perspective it can look complicated. But when you look at the data, the American electorate is relatively simple-minded. For example: https://navigatorresearch.org/2024-post-election-survey-the-reasons-for-voting-for-trump-and-harris/ https://navigatorresearch.org/2024-post-election-survey-the-...
- embedding-shape 4mo agoWhy would "EU perspective" make it look more or less complicated? People are people everywhere, regardless of country. > 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-reasons-for-voting-for-trump-and-harris/ 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.
- sharperguy 4mo agoIn 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?
- dxdm 4mo agoThere'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.)
- trimethylpurine 4mo ago> 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?
- dxdm 4mo agoIt's stupidly obvious. Politics is about how we organize government and distribute power to solve the problems of living together as a society of individuals. "Big" vs "small" government is a particular way of interpreting one aspect of that. It's an important aspect and a useful perspective, but even if taken at face value it completely neglects other important things like the rules for making policy and their actual content. Of course, the face value of big vs small has become a mask for something else. 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.
- trimethylpurine 4mo agoOh everything you said makes sense so long as I imagine wrongly that everyone is doing what's best for society, and that's why they got into politics. 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.
- _heimdall 4mo agoI 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.