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Next time someone tells you this is the party of free market and small government, I guess you just laugh now?
by kristopolous 3mo ago
Next time someone tells you this is the party of free market and small government, I guess you just laugh now?
- ryanar 3mo ago[flagged]
- Klathmon 3mo agoBut it's not just him, it's the entire party aggressively supporting him and everything he does.
- atlgator 3mo agoThey passed one major piece of legislation since he took office and it was loaded with pork to get everyone onboard. I wouldn't call that aggressive. The Right is very fractured right now.
- wk_end 3mo agoAt least in part that's because they've stopped legislating. The executive now basically just does whatever it wants.
- jLaForest 3mo agoThe right is fractured is several ways but there is one unifying value: unquestioning support for Trump
- atlgator 3mo agoI can't tell if you're disingenuous or just ignorant. The Trump admin has been completely coopted by the pro-Israel lobby and Big Tech. He betrayed his entire base. He's ruling by executive fiat (EOs). Anyone that speaks out publicly for the original platform gets a primary challenger funded by Miriam Adelson or threats. See Thomas Massie, MTG, Lauren Boebert, etc. Are you paying attention at all? The Boomers watching Fox News propaganda in their nursing homes all day are not a reflection of party unity.
- preg_match 3mo agoThe Fox News boomers were pawns, but everyone knew that. Trump is a “money talks” kind of guy, that’s why people voted for him. Yes that was shortsighted but it’s worked out well for trump. He can basically just… do whatever. Nobody needs to legislate, he’s essentially congress at this point.
- jknoepfler 3mo agoIt's fractured as a consequence of its own actions, which all of its constituent members bear direct responsibility for. Epstein cover up? Iran? COVID denialism? Complete disregard for rule of law? Accepting massive, direct bribes? Trying to control broadcast media? That's all on the Republican party as a collective, who did absolutely nothing to resist it and everything to put him in power TWICE. TWICE.
- andsoitis 3mo ago> the entire party aggressively supporting him and everything he does. That's untrue. If you do some homework you will see Republican politicians and the Supreme Court disagreeing on a number of issues. Amongst Republican voters, his approval rating has been sliding and is now below 80% in most polls.
- joshgachnang 3mo agoAnd yet the rest of the party falls in behind him.
- keyle 3mo agoIt seems people can flip that coin whenever it suits them.
- malcolmgreaves 3mo agoThe entire Republican party in all branches of government is supporting Trump. His politics and the Republican party politics are one and the same. The last election the party did not have a platform because, quite literally, they said that whatever Trump says _is_ their platform.
- afavour 3mo agoThey have affiliated themselves to him. Watch, within a month of Democrats being back in power they’ll be harping small government, denigrating the national debt they ballooned themselves. There’s no reason to help them attempt to disavow it.
- kristopolous 3mo agoTrump will be called a liberal woke socialist within your lifetime because conservatives will need to distance themselves from him
- gkoberger 3mo agoTrump has an 87% approval rating amongst Republicans as of the last poll I can find. While Trump is a megalomanic and does whatever he wants, he has the mandate of the Republican party, whose elected officials could choose at any moment to end this by withdrawing support. Don't let them off the hook.
- andsoitis 3mo ago> Trump has an 87% approval rating amongst Republicans as of the last poll I can find. It's lower than that. Most polls show below 80%. > Don't let them off the hook. That's not the way.
- digitaltrees 3mo ago80% is cult numbers especially when you consider Trump has changed the platform to be the opposite of basically everything the party stood for.
- kristopolous 3mo agoThis is what they want. When they say "small government" they mean "small autocratic ruling party". When they say "personal responsibility" they mean "societal harm burdened on the individual" When they say "liberty" they mean liberty to oppress others ... I've heard this language my whole life. I know what these people stand for and I've seen it in practice. It's heinous and repulsive.
- ryanmcbride 3mo agoit's actually the entire party that's propping him up. If it was just trump he would be living on the street.
- jknoepfler 3mo ago[flagged]
- trimethylpurine 3mo ago[flagged]
- azan_ 3mo agoCovid vaccines are very safe and saved lots of lives. That’s what actual research shows, not your delusions. I’m biochemistry phd so yeah, step up.
- trimethylpurine 3mo agoMath please? Specifically citing the research that the FDA cited from the NEJoM. Please include the published injury rate, and the published efficacy. If you can't make a point with the math, then don't bother replying. My invitation is to discuss with scientists, to be clear. CNN is not qualified as a scientific body, despite claiming to be. I'm aware that most of the US believes that CNN is the arbiter of science. I'm referring specifically to a scientific paper published by the manufacturer of the drug you are pedaling. And that's my point. You can't. You're consuming media and calling it science. You're lying to yourself. Please prove me wrong. Look at the injury rate in the NEJoM study submitted by Pfizer, and look at the rate of disease symptoms (later decreased but we'll ignore that for the sake of driving my point home), and tell me what the rest of us scientists missed. Or at least admit that you didn't really notice that it killed and injured more people in Pfizer's own study than you had realized (for the sake of honest scientists if you care to call yourself one). I'll even overlook the fact that all the "peer reviewers" were Pfizer employees who couldn't bring themselves to the level of shame so as to falsify the results. Instead they themselves published blatantly that the drug is more destructive than the disease it purports to treat. Thankfully we have some moral fiber in the field.
- azan_ 3mo agoBut you did not make any point, you keep using buzzword without referencing any data. You did not even link exact study you are talking about (there are lots of nejm covid studies…). You did not reference a single number. So please, if you want math actually make your point without bullshit about me consuming media etc.
- MaxHoppersGhost 3mo ago[flagged]
- preg_match 3mo agoSome things are just true. Rape bad, murder bad, war bad. I have never understood this reasoning. If things are bad are we just supposed to… pretend… they’re not? And that… would help things? Like how? What’s even the mechanism for that?
- GolfPopper 3mo agoI've been laughing when people tell me that for my entire adult life. It remains a pretty funny bit of dark humor, though.
- z3c0 3mo agoGrowing up rural, the grift has been obvious my whole ĺife
- az226 3mo agoNot just that, Biden administration started with some AI regulation that the Trump administration nixed, and then outright banning models. Lunacy.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- nutjob2 3mo agoAlso free speech/the first amendment and various other rights people are supposed to have but don't in practice.
- DANmode 3mo agoFourth Amendment, through corporate data purchase or exfiltration.
- paytonjjones 3mo agoThat's always been a relative, rather than absolute statement. Genuine question: if Democrats take power, do you expect them to be more interventionist or less interventionist with respect to AI? Bernie's jockeying leads me to suspect "more", but I could very well be wrong. (FWIW I personally think modern AI falls in the small realm of potentially dangerous technologies that merit careful, ideally bipartisan, government oversight)
- brokencode 3mo agoI think they’d try to get something through Congress to regulate the industry in a rules-based way. The current admin flies by the seat of their pants and at least creates the perception of political decision making.
- FireBeyond 3mo ago> the perception of political decision making The what? More like "the whims of an eighty year old in cognitive decline and those wishing to curry or keep his favor" - quite an expansive definition of "political decision making".
- dualvariable 3mo agoDon't forget the blatant grift and corruption.
- Alupis 3mo ago> More like "the whims of an eighty year old in cognitive decline..." The previous administration was totally not exactly what's described here...
- preg_match 3mo agoIt wasn’t. Biden largely didn’t do much. The trump administration does illegal things that get struck down in courts on a daily basis. We’re all very desensitized to it. But yes, Biden was old and cognitively not well. But his “whims” didn’t exist much, and they were always fairly reasonable. Trump is the most unreasonable president, most likely in US history. I would even categorize Andrew Jackson as more restrained.
- jknoepfler 3mo agoEver since I've been conscious (the 80s), it's been the party of fear, violence and greed. They've consistently nominated actual clowns for positions of power. B-movie actor Ronald Reagan... Dan Quayle... Sarah Palin... the current, truly stunning iteration of absolute moral and intellectual bankruptcy TWICE after he killed hundreds of thousands of people due to COVID/vaccine skepticism and staged a violent attack on the capitol after losing a democratic election. Free market? Small government? Big police state, trillions in defense contractor grift, unsustainable tax breaks to the wealthiest leading to massive spending deficits... all while doing everything to erode access to education, healthcare and basic services. It is just utterly baffling to me. I'm... well along the spectrum... so people not responding correctly to obvious information is just something I've gotten used to but just... wow. edit: typo
- danans 3mo ago> It is just utterly baffling to me. I'm... well along the spectrum... so people not responding correctly to obvious information is just something I've gotten used to but just... wow. People get quite a kick out of seeing people they don't like get hurt. They can stay entertained by that for a long time until it bites them. Only now is it finally biting with the collapse of the rural medical clinics, the war induced spike in the price of gasoline, etc. That's probably playing a big part in the seeming shift in the electorate in every election.
- MaxPock 3mo agoRepublicans trust Americans with guns and not an LLM. That should tell you something.
- GolfPopper 3mo agoIt tells me that the people who buy Republican politicians make money from selling Americans guns, and somebody with influence thinks they can make money by restricting LLM release.
- Gagarin1917 3mo agoNow?
- jmyeet 3mo agoConsidering there's no such thing as a "free market" I've been laughing for a real long time. Markets require regulation and enforcement to function. The US government was created to protect the interests of rich, white, male slave owners. And if you look at Louisiana State Penintentiary (often called "Angola"), which is essentialy a Southern plantation with forced labor, you realize not as much has changed as you might otherwise think.
- paulddraper 3mo agoThe it did a pretty shit job of it. Within 100 years it was killing hundreds of thousands to fight against that purpose.
- mullingitover 3mo agoThe point of slavery was money, and the point of money was power. By the time of the civil war the real power for the ruling class was coming from industrialization.
- jmyeet 3mo agoLincoln disagrees [1]: > My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. While chattel slavery ended when the 13th Amendment was ratified in 1865, slavery continued through debt bondage and convict leasing up until 1941 where FDR suddenly decided to aggressively prosecute the practice for fear of the Japanese using it for propaganda value. I'm referring to Circular 3591 [2]. And while that heavily curtailed abuse (eg by locking people up essentially indefinitely for "vagrancy" or imaged debts), forced prison labor continues to this day, including private companies profiting from prison labor. Also, while the Confederacy lost the Civil War, the South arguably won. Reconstruction saw severe curtailment of newly-established civil rights for former enslaved people. And after Reconstruction came Jim Crow until the 1960s. [1]: https://www.loc.gov/collections/abraham-lincoln-papers/articles-and-essays/abraham-lincoln-and-emancipation/ https://www.loc.gov/collections/abraham-lincoln-papers/artic... [2]: https://www.endslaverynow.org/blog/articles/state-imposed-forced-labor-history-of-prison-labor-in-the-us https://www.endslaverynow.org/blog/articles/state-imposed-fo...
- paulddraper 3mo agoThen cry as you look for the free market/small government leaders.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- bilsbie 3mo agoWhich party is?
- iAMkenough 3mo agoThe one currently running the show.
- seemaze 3mo agoHaving an a collective economy governed by the “free market” is like having a pile of stones governed by gravity. There exists a primary directive force, but if you want to construct a cathedral or a bomb shelter, you need to impose some constraints, lest you revert to the angle of repose.
- m4nu3l 3mo agoThis is a very bad analogy. Markets behave like an imperfect optimisation algorithm, and you can prove that, under some conditions which are most often met, they give people what they want. In fact, you can almost always expect governments to be less effective and less rational than markets in allocating resources to satisfy the desires of people, even when democratic. You can prove it either by using the same logic that tells you when markets fail (externalities, information asymmetry), or empirically by looking at what was basically the most perfect A/B test we had on society over the 20th century. Although it was a comparison between mixed economies and fully centralised ones, there is no reason to expect the optimum mix of centralisation/distribution to be closer to the worst-performing one (the fully centralised one).
- plaguuuuuu 3mo agoYou can't prove your free-market theory because it's not falsifiable. This is why arguments about this go in circles. You either argue from a pure theoretic POV back and forth, or you go off data - at which point, bringing up every failure of free markets (like, obviously, US healthcare) is dismissed as "not really a free market" Even the theoreticians on the free-market side are far less solid than.. all the other sides (behavioural economics, information asymmetry.. even Marx) but I regard it as deeply unpragmatic when there's so much data out there indicating what actually happens in the real world when you go one way or the other.
- m4nu3l 3mo ago> You can't prove your free-market theory because it's not falsifiable. You can prove the logic part starting from the assumptions. It's also falsifiable. I just mentioned it was literally the most controlled test on human society you could make. We tested by splitting societies at the level of the entire planet, states and cities. US healthcare is mostly not a free market; by free market, at minimum, I mean that the quantities and prices (ideally even the quality) are not set. The US healthcare system has a fixed number of practitioners who can get a license every year. This is as far as a market can be from being free (together with the case of having price controls). In fact, free market theory predicts that when you restrict quantity, you get higher prices for the same quality. It literally predicts the US situation. It's funny you mention Marx, given I regard most of his claims as either unfalsifiable or easily proven false.
- JPKab 3mo agoIf you think that anthropic wasn't pushing aggressive regulatory capture legislation in the Biden administration, why do you think they hired a bunch of people from it?
- Alupis 3mo agoIt's very fashionable to hate on the current administration, despite what the previous administration was doing. That's reality and I'll be punished to hell for saying so.
- SpicyLemonZest 3mo agoIf you don't want the current administration to be blindly hated, perhaps you should ask the president to stop publishing daily statements about how much he hates various people. You reap what you sow.
- Alupis 3mo agoIt'll never stop amusing me how blind we are to politicians that are "on our side".
- SpicyLemonZest 3mo agoAgain, you're seeing this as some kind of clever invariant of politics, but it's not. People are blind to politicians on their side because Donald Trump has spent the past 10 years working hard to make sure that everyone in politics is constantly enraged at the other side. You're being "punished to hell", in your words, because you're blaming Trump's passionate embrace of hatred-based politics on his opponents.
- Alupis 3mo ago> you're seeing this as some kind of clever invariant of politics, but it's not. People are blind to politicians on their side because Donald Trump Yes, sure, it is I who is blind...
- ch4s3 3mo agoThey haven’t claimed to be the free market party since Obama was in office. Trump very much ran an anti free market campaign the first time.
- digitaltrees 3mo agoYes they have.
- ch4s3 3mo agoNot really. They’re all lousy pro tariffs, anti immigration, pro tech regulations, and so on. Paul Ryan is gone.
- digitaltrees 3mo agoThey still spout off about free markets all the time with no sense of irony.
- CamperBob2 3mo agoThey'll literally tell you it's not raining while you're standing there getting soaked. [1] Anything the Republicans say is meaningless. 1: https://www.usnews.com/opinion/thomas-jefferson-street/articles/2017-01-23/donald-trumps-inauguration-lies-and-sean-spicers-alternative-facts https://www.usnews.com/opinion/thomas-jefferson-street/artic...
- ch4s3 3mo agoLiterally who? The young MAGA folks in congress like Josh Hawley certainly don’t. I guess Rand Paul is a free market guy, but he’s pretty much the only one. Even Susan Colins is signing onto tariffs and other nonsense.
- digitaltrees 3mo agoAnyone that complains about socialism or communism as a criticism of democrats is pretending to be a free market capitalist.
- y1n0 3mo agoWell, there are the political ideals expressed or embraced by the populace, and then there are politicians. AFAICT political parties at the national level and state level in the US is pure theater.
- rikfckfj284 3mo agothe question isn’t about size, it’s about who the government works for. Small government can promote private interests by not entering certain societal spaces, leaving them for profit making — education, healthcare, housing etc. But large government can also promote private interests, by directing tax dollars to corporations (and still not entering certain societal spaces). It’s not about size, it’s about where it chooses to operate
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- jandrewrogers 3mo agoThe authority under which this was done has been operative and actively used for several decades. It isn't a partisan issue, it is a policy of American governance. Anyone that has worked on frontier "dual use" technologies will be familiar with the legal regime. The only thing that changed is people are writing articles about it in the news media.
- typeofhuman 3mo agoThe only correct reply.
- digitaltrees 3mo agoIf by correct you mean, inconsistent with the American tradition of the rule of law and commitment to equal protection of the law, and the emergence of an authoritarian kleptocracy that picks winners and losers. Then yes. Correct.
- dmix 3mo agoWhich has been obvious trend the last few decades and is now being done openly and shamelessly like a tinpot dicator. Largely through a new populist protectionism ideology that is popular on social media. Which makes it much more public and well documented. Usually companies do this stuff quietly with lots of small new rules via Congress creating barriers to entry or through national security angles like the Chips act which funneled money and tax breaks to huge weathy companies, or Boeing, or the car industry, etc. Anthropic and OpenAI went hard in the paint pushing for AI safety and it backfired into hurting their companies rather than protecting their interests.
- digitaltrees 3mo agoStop with the false equivalence.
- dmix 3mo ago
- digitaltrees 3mo agoIf you laugh you’re a communist and against Christianity and part of a satanic cabal.
- kristopolous 3mo agothese days my actual policy is to find whoever is being slandered as a communist and vote for them.
- sharts 3mo agoFree for me, not for thee