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.

▲

smeej 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

▲

throw0101a 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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):

* https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/03/arguing-with-z...

* https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324005018

▲

3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

▲

varispeed 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Bear in mind that corruption is politically agnostic. If there are no checks and balances, any government can be bought.

▲

mothballed 3 hours ago | parent [-]

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).

▲

rudhdb773b 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't know why this is down voted. It's a very valid point.

In countries where the police and government officials can be bought for pocket change by the middle class, the masses have relatively more power vs the elite who control the central government.

▲

2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

▲

JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s a stupid point that ignores how corruption actually works, particularly when someone thinks being able to bribe the local police means an ordinary person in Venezuela has more power than an average American.

▲

rudhdb773b 2 hours ago | parent [-]

It's not. I'm not familiar with Venezuela, but here in SE Asia if I want to open a small business say a bar along the beach, I just pay off the local police with a small cut of my profits. Where I grew up in the US, it would either be impossible or takes years and millions of dollars to get all the approvals.

That's a real-world difference that gives the middle class more freedom to start a business that is really only feasible for the wealthy in the US.

▲

JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> I just pay off the local police with a small cut of my profits. Where I grew up in the US, it would either be impossible or takes years and millions of dollars to get all the approvals

You’re comparing permitting processes. That’s orthogonal to corruption. You can set up a beach bar in most of America without a permit and without getting cited for months on end, too, and plenty of people do it. (The pot-brownie sellers in Dolores Park aren’t licensed.)

	▲	woooooo 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Its not orthogonal, they are saying that the corruption is an easier permitting process. The main point of this thread that I found very poignant was the accessibility of corruption. In the USA, only the rich get to be corrupt.

▲

mlnj 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.