Dumbass Government - A repository and search engine of government blunders | Hacker News Reader

Dumbass Government - A repository and search engine of government blunders

dumbassgovernment.com

8 pointscivilian10 comments

This makes me uncomfortable. Disregarding the fact that you use terms like "lamestream media" un-ironically on your blog, your point seems to be "all government is bad". The basis for this? "Look at all the stupidity."

While I agree that government stupidity abounds, it's unfair (and intellectually dishonest) to disparage it categorically. In a random I.T. department there may be broken policies carried out by incompetent people but nobody ever thinks about all the things that are working properly due to other people's hard work and attention to detail; they fixate on things with "easy" or "obvious" fixes.

People love incredible stories, and there are plenty of tales of stupidity both inside and outside of government. But you didn't call your site "dumbass human beings" because that isn't pejorative enough towards government. In this way you expose your bias and make me extremely skeptical about your politics.

I didn't make the site, but I think it's a good site to have. I think the idea is that it just makes it easier for people to find examples of government making mistakes-- and government makes mistakes consistently. And I acknowledge that the plural of anecdotes isn't proper proof-- but it works on a lot of people.

Personally, I have tried to use principles to argue against government and people throw anecdotal excuses back at me. (For example: It's been proven that the existence of a minimum wage reduces employment in low-skilled workers http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0c2vmFGbtk )

There is a lot of bias in the article summaries though. :/

Civilian, the site is definitely biased, but not partisan. It's biased in favor of personal liberty and meritocracy, yes. But it's not anti-government or anarchist.

The idea behind DAG is that you can quickly spot where the trouble areas in government are, be they people or bureaucracies. If the site has wide enough readership, being named on DAG could eventually become a political scarlet letter.

You're correct that it's not "anti-government" but pretending that it has much intellectual, political, or literary merit is "anti-critical-thinking".

If TheDailyWTF.com was instead called "Dumbass Programmers" and promised to help people "quickly spot where the trouble areas in programming are" it would be simplistic to the point of tedium. The real problems are not simply a matter of someone being a "dumbass", that analysis is just self-serving pablum.

Other than the name of the site, how do you come to the conclusion that DAG is "anti-government" outright? Did you actually read the stories?

I skimmed the blog and the stories and I came to the conclusion that DAG's intent is not to foster critical thinking about the social, political, cognitive, and philosophical issues in governance but rather to reinforce the reader's cynical views about government as being run by "dumbasses" instead of being "of the people".

The site never promised to be an in-depth analysis of the systemic issues that produce "dumbass government", those being the principles of power metastasis, authority-liability mismatch, and the absence of anti-dynastic measures (or more accurately, the presence of pro-dynastic mechanisms).

I can't tell if you're being disingenuous or what, but the site makes no claim to be a forum of deep debate. It's a search of government screwups. It's an invaluable tool if you're an activist. Imagine if Americans were motivated enough to use DumbassGovernment to find out who is screwing up and lobby to have them fired.

What if every corrupt cop that got exposed on DAG couldn't go to a restaurant without someone urinating in their food? What if the politically correct bureaucratic morons that gave $4.5 million to an illegal immigrant pedophile were totally ostracized from their community? THAT is the end purpose of DumbassGovernment: to make incompetence as corrosive to the bureaucrat as to the nation.

So it's not meant to be a thoughtful mechanism for promoting change, just a way for people to act out their fight club fantasies on deserving victims. Gotcha, sorry I was so critical of you.

Fight club? I'm talking about ostracism, not violence. It's sort of like the Perverted Justice except instead of going after pedophiles, it goes after corrupt government (which often involves pedophilia). PJ doesn't advocate violence. It's a public shaming mechanism.

How is that not a mechanism for promoting change? If bureaucrats and politicians are no longer safe behind a veil of anonymity, and must fear social ostracism, they're much more likely to behave. What's wrong with that?

"It's okay for me to urinate in someone's food as long as I'm doing it to make them a social pariah" is exactly the kind of uncritical self-serving rationalization that leads to "dumbass government".

Go look in the mirror before you act like your juvenile world view is beyond reproach.

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