The "small government" conservatives really showed their true faces in 2025 and 2026. Anyone espousing these ideas will not be taken seriously by me going forward.
Do you hear how this reads? It reads like you're not going to take warnings about the dangers of government power seriously because the people espousing them are trying to use government power dangerously themselves.
If you can't see the irony in that, that their warnings are twice as important if the pool of potential abusers if government power is twice as big, then nobody's really losing anything when you opt out of engaging these people.
> Anyone espousing these ideas will not be taken seriously by me going forward.
Just because they're hypocrites does not make them wrong. Remember it was the GOP that passed the PATRIOT Act, and people were warning about that from the very beginning.
Though they've been arguing in bad faith on any number of topics (and have been for decades):
The hypocrisy of the conservatives aside, the Democrats also end up doing nothing meaningful to thwart any of it when they are in power. The higher ranks of Democrats are almost as conservative as the Republicans. Palantir is not a post-2024 phenomenon. The data was always collected. They are just being brazen now.
Yes but at least in places like Venezuela and Philippines it can be bought cheap enough the common man might be able to access it.
It's almost worse in the USA because the corruption is only accessible to those in quasi-oligarchical roles. There's some point at which increased corruption actually becomes more egalitarian (though obviously, not as egalitarian as zero corruption).
smeej|1 month ago
If you can't see the irony in that, that their warnings are twice as important if the pool of potential abusers if government power is twice as big, then nobody's really losing anything when you opt out of engaging these people.
throw0101a|1 month ago
Just because they're hypocrites does not make them wrong. Remember it was the GOP that passed the PATRIOT Act, and people were warning about that from the very beginning.
Though they've been arguing in bad faith on any number of topics (and have been for decades):
* https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/03/arguing-with-z...
* https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324005018
unknown|1 month ago
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mlnj|1 month ago
varispeed|1 month ago
mothballed|1 month ago
It's almost worse in the USA because the corruption is only accessible to those in quasi-oligarchical roles. There's some point at which increased corruption actually becomes more egalitarian (though obviously, not as egalitarian as zero corruption).