I have zero faith in "free market" ideologues, because what we actually get when they gain power is just favoritism for "free market" ideologues.
Wilhoit’s Law has never been truer.
I suspect this divergence comes from people who have internalized the 1960s civil rights movement view, and whose chief concern is the government protecting minorities from the majority. Meanwhile, the more traditional Anglo-american view is chiefly concerned with protecting the majority from the government.
From what I see and know, among conservative supporters violence against police is strongly condemned and to be harshly punished, as is any form of protest that is arguably the slightest bit disruptive.
> chiefly concerned with protecting the majority from the government.
In fact, by their actions, they make the government - police and prosecutors - free to abuse people in almost any way with no reprocussions. One of the latest Trump executive orders even tells the DoJ to go after any legal authority prosecuting police.
And by their actions, they are chiefly concerned with using the government to persecute and suppress anyone they disagree with.
> 60s ... traditional
It's a nice tactic to try to attribute those who disagree to a passing fancy, and your beliefs to 'tradition'.
The question is who the police are being deployed to protect, private citizens or the government itself. Ordinarily police are deployed to protect citizens from criminals, so it’s bad to attack the police. But the Capitol police are protecting government officials from citizens, so attacking them is less bad. That’s the view.
> 60s ... traditional It's a nice tactic to try to attribute those who disagree to a passing fancy, and your beliefs to 'tradition'.
The assertion that the civil rights era signaled a major shift in views about the relationship between individuals and the government is hardly controversial. There’s a book on this idea (probably more than one): https://lawliberty.org/did-the-civil-rights-constitution-dis....
Indeed, folks in the progressive left share more or less the same premise. If you talk to a progressive about foundational principles like federalism and limited government, the chief response is that those ideas were championed by our forebearers so that the government wouldn’t be powerful enough to protect minorities from the majority. The point of disagreement is about whether the new approach is better than the traditional one.
We live in different bubbles, it seems. I haven't heard that argument. I have heard that 'states rights' is intended to workaround various federal rules, including civil rights.
The foundation is that "all ... are creatd equal", which includes all members of minorities. The Bill of Rights is there to protect unpopular minorities from the majority. The majority can always protect itself by changing the law.
Edit:
> https://lawliberty.org/did-the-civil-rights-constitution-dis....
I skimmed through this. The source is anti-left; of course they are going to give characterizations like that. And look at this piece of doublespeak:
When I talk about civil rights, the reader should not get the impression that I’m friendly to segregation, or hostile to the civil rights movement as it existed for the whole of the 20th century up until 1964. In fact, I’m very much in sympathy with the claims to an agitation for equal citizenship that went on up till then, but there were problems in the Civil Rights Act that were not evident at first.
They won't say they are hostile to the Civil Rights Act and every solution to problems like segregation, oppression of minorities and women, etc. And they don't offer any other solution. They are "very much in sympathy with the claims to an agitation", however. :)
That’s the same argument from the other direction. The federal government, as designed, wasn’t powerful enough to protect minorities from the majority. Those rules entailed a major expansion of federal power. Indeed, you can see the seams in the civil rights laws. For example, Title VI’s ban on discrimination in public education is implemented through conditions on federal funding. Because the federal government can’t legislate such a ban directly.
> The foundation is that "all ... are creatd equal", which includes all members of minorities. The Bill of Rights is there to protect unpopular minorities from the majority.
That’s exactly the civil rights era retconning of the constitution I’m talking about. The statement that “all men are created equal” has nothing to do with minorities. Read the context right before and right after: https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcrip.... The statement is about self determination: the right of a people to determine their own form of government. The equality being referred to is the equality between Britain and its monarch and the colonists.
The founders said almost nothing about protecting minorities from the majority, except perhaps in the context of religious freedom. Their concern was exactly the opposite: that a minority cabal in the government would oppress the majority.
The context before and after is quite well known; I don't have to read it. What they say is that 'all men are created equal, and they are endowed by their creator with inalienable rights, among those life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And to protect those rights, governments are instituted among men.' (from memory, probably a few errors).
All means all - minorities included. The equality is for "all men"; rights are for "all men". Nothing is said about Britain and its monarch, except in your dreams of rationalizing oppression. The language is plain and clear, part of the reason it is so well-known.
A document cannot simultaneously holds all minorities to be equal with a right to liberty and accommodate slavery as it existed in the 1700s. Some of the signers may personally have disagreed with slavery but it seems difficult to say that the document itself represented a repudiation of the practice.
That's a unique take fundamentally at odds with the very concept of the Senate.
But I think leftists would share the same premise! They would phrase it differently, they’d say something like: “the founders were white men who wanted to limit government power so the government wouldn’t be powerful enough to do things like end slavery or take their property.” But that’s the same argument. The traditional view is a small government of enumerated powers. The post-civil rights view is a powerful federal government that can protect minorities from democracy.
> They won't say they are hostile to the Civil Rights Act and every solution to problems like segregation, oppression of minorities and women, etc. And they don't offer any other solution.
That doesn’t logically follow. The analogous mistaken argument would be saying that those who insist on due process for deportations must support illegal immigration, because “they don’t offer any other solution.” Of course that argument is wrong. Those people simply aren’t willing to compromise on due process to address illegal immigration.
Similarly, you can be unwilling to compromise on federalism and limited government, even if it’s to address oppression of minorities. That doesn’t mean you support such oppression, simply that you prioritize other values more highly.
Yes it does, in fact. And while people can try to doublespeak and have everyone parsing it out, all that matters is where you end up.
James Madison, one of the founding fathers of the United States, wrote:
> "This view of the subject must particularly recommend a proper federal system ...[or else] oppressive combinations of a majority will be facilitated: the best security, under the republican forms, for the rights of every class of citizens, will be diminished... Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit."
As well as : > "In a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature, where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger; and as, in the latter state, even the stronger individuals are prompted, by the uncertainty of their condition, to submit to a government which may protect the weak as well as themselves; so, in the former state, will the more powerful factions or parties be gradually induced, by a like motive, to wish for a government which will protect all parties, the weaker as well as the more powerful."
As well as:
> "It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens. If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure."
This is why he distinguishes between the civil rights movement before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which was only concerned with preventing government enforced segregation.
In life, in practice, there isn't meaningful difference. They still drown because you abandoned your responsibilities.
I must have missed the outpouring of Republican support for the black lives matter protests when they were attacked by police riots or when police stations were attacked. No private citizens being protected there, and the protesting was directly against government oppression (including of the 2nd amendment even!).
The point is that even in very clear cut situations where the police are in the wrong, and have trampled over the very 2nd amendment rights that Republicans claim to love so much, it's then still crickets from Republicans. So this alleged "violence against the government is treated as distinct" seems to be just more post-hoc rationalization nonsense.
The problem is that rayiner is continually trolling with gut-appealing half-truths, sidesteps the straightforward logical implications as long as he can by responding tangentially, and when he can't do that any longer he just bails on the conversation rather than confronting the contradiction.
I guess I'm just glad us actually-conservatives (meaning everyone from "RINOs" to "the left" that actually respects our societal institutions enough to not want to see our country on the scrap heap) have reached a critical mass to beat back this wall of disingenuous bad-faith bullshit.
I hope so.
Unless it's the Jan 6th protesters.
Or the so-called "trucker convoy" across the border up here in Canada. (Convinced half the new-found hostility to us comes from this incident somehow getting on the radar of people who normally barely acknowledge Canada as existing)
In the end it's very much tribal, and little to do with the substance of issues and more to do with perceived teams.
Suffice to say, like most ideologues, the beliefs make sense when analyzed in accordance with the logic rules of the holder of the beliefs.
Think of the beliefs being discussed more as doctrinal tenets of a pseudo religious sect, and you get a little closer to the thinking of the adherents.
Members of the in-group have divine right and shouldn't be bound by laws. Anyone who opposes them is the enemy and should be harmed or destroyed.
For them, Sweden and North Korea are on the same spectrum of communism and will end up the same.
The problem with the saying "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it" is that a lot of people haven't forgotten history; they simply never learned it in the first place.
https://slate.com/business/2022/06/wilhoits-law-conservative...
It's just half of a truism: people apply different standards to "their side". As true of the left wing as the right.
> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:
> There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progre...
What groups? What people? Are they on HN? Are you responding to them?
This is just sneering. You're not responding to a particular argument or person - you're you're just creating a fictional (in that they don't exist as a coherent, self-identified group, and are only a group in your own mind based solely off of these attributes) until group of people with some alleged hypocrisy and using them to dog-whistle indirectly attack a group of people based on some political ideology that you don't like (and which is largely irrelevant to the alleged hypocrisy that you're inventing). This is some of the most anti-intellectual drivel possible and the diametric opposite of what belongs on HN.
If anything, they are doing exactly what they promised. They were against globalism and elites and international agreements and governance and they are being true to their words.
I’ve read a lot of Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell back in the 2000s and the first half of the 2010s. I also voted for Ron Paul in the 2008 and 2012 primary and regular elections. I used to consider myself a Rothbardian-style libertarian. While I still view the Austrian School of Economics with high regard, my biggest problem with Rothbardianism is Rothbard’s 1990s turn to the right before his passing around 1995, and its deleterious effect on libertarianism. Rothbard supported “right-wing populism” as a way for the libertarian movement to advance. Rothbard supported Pat Buchanan’s 1992 presidential run (though Rothbard would fall out with Buchanan over the latter’s support for protectionism), and Rothbard even went as far as to support the notorious David Duke’s gubernatorial campaign in Louisiana. This right-wing populism strategy led to the paleolibertarian movement, which is limited-to-no government fused with a culturally conservative outlook. However, it’s this cultural conservative mindset that has led so many libertarians to be so enamored with Trump. Trump, after all, is a much more bombastic version of Buchanan, who has a similar ideology. It seems protectionism can be overlooked when people view “wokeness,” and not a breakdown of rule of law, is the biggest problem in American society…
Ironically, it was Rothbard himself who complained earlier in his career about right-wingers who “hated the left more than they hated the state,” yet so many libertarians today are willing to embrace the far-right because they view the left as enemy #1. If I had a dollar for every time I saw a post or article sympathetic to Pinochet, I’d probably have enough for a nice MacBook Pro.
I realized over the years that while I’m still very skeptical of government power, I don’t hate the state, and I prefer good government over chaos. I value liberal institutions and feel they should be defended.
Although I'm more Georgist these days.
Also not sure if the idea of paying out people from this tax makes much sense. Arguable it made more sense when he wrote it, before the social state.
To me it is logically impossible to reconcile the two positions. You simply can’t be a pro-authoritarian libertarian.
You can’t really espouse libertarian values while being what is coded as “culturally conservative”, because that worldview demands conformity and the mechanisms to enforce same, which are inherently anti-liberty.
A good rule of thumb is that anyone who had any issue whatsoever with other people wearing masks during the pandemic are pretty obviously not pro-individual-liberty and just factional culture brawlers.
There seems to be a lot of definiton drift in the term “libertarian”, and that seems wrong to me. (The same thing happened to my other primary identifying social group, “techno”. I spend a lot of time yelling at clouds now.)
An example would be how Barry Goldwater, a proto-libertarian, was able to win some solidly Democratic Deep South states in 1964, the first to do so since Reconstruction. It wasn’t because those Southerners had a libertarian moment. No, it was because Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Although Goldwater supported civil rights and voted for previous civil rights legislation, he felt that the 1964 act was an unconstitutional infringement on the rights of private businesses. However, there were many voters in the South who were swayed to vote for Goldwater not because they were libertarians, but because they supported discrimination, and despite their support for Democrats from Reconstruction through the New Deal, anti-discrimination laws were enough for them to break nearly a century of party loyalty.
During the pandemic, I was dismayed by anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers who used libertarian rhetoric to engage in reckless behavior that harmed not only themselves, but others, especially the immunocompromised. It’s one thing to be saddened and taken aback by the extraordinary powers governments at various levels took during the pandemic. Unfortunately, any type of principled opposition to government overreach during the pandemic was overwhelmed by all sorts of selfish, reckless acts. I was completely dismayed by the behavior I’ve witnessed, disappointed not only with various levels of government, but also with some conservatives and libertarians who managed to make COVID a “culture war” matter.
It turned out many of the libertarians I’ve looked up to were just very articulate right wingers. When push comes to shove, they’d excuse people like Trump, Le Pen, Putin, and the like, justifying them under the guise that we’d be worse off under a standard-issue Democrat or a social democrat like Sanders or AOC. I’m not a Democrat by any means, but the past decade has shown the damage that MAGA-style right-wing populism could do to a country. I’m not a Bernie Sanders supporter, but Bernie or even AOC would be less destructive to society than Trump and his allies.
I am completely saddened by the culture wars and how we are unable to solve structural economic and political problems in America because we are mired in the culture wars. This is tearing our country apart and may make the world worse off as other nations fight to fill in a power void made available by a descending United States.
The rich, like the poor, are free to live under bridges and starve.
Libertarianism is very simple and easy to dismiss out of hand if you believe this about it.
When I was younger I'd do online political tests and invariably come back with left-libertarian. Then the detour into cpunks, ancap, and the "two axis political chart" made me see myself unaligned and see a lot of utility in rightism. But that started to fall apart when it became clear that fundamentalism doesn't address the big picture of emergent layers of complexity. Ironically it was Moldbug's writing that nudged my transition back to seeing myself as latently left-aligned. No matter how much you'd like to, you can't fight thermodynamics!
In addition to that, it always had a strong southern "state rights" dog whistle. Personally I never liked Murray Rothbard. And the Rothbardian full on appropriation of Mises. Plus they often welcomed 'libertarians' that had very bad ideas, like Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
In terms of Austrian economics, I always much prefer the George Mason people. I think the economics fundamentals of Austrianism were very forward thinking and they produced a lot of great stuff and people, both directly and in the larger bubble of associated researchers.
> I realized over the years that while I’m still very skeptical of government power, I don’t hate the state, and I prefer good government over chaos. I value liberal institutions and feel they should be defended.
I think American Libertarianism basically went way to far into hyper-individualism and total freedom of action and defense of historical privileges and laws. While different classical liberal philosophies would focus way more on the cost of those actions and negotiation a balance between individual freedom and society.
Classical liberal philosophy was never supposed to mean that you can park your car anywhere and throw garbage out of the window or that you can carry your gun everywhere.
Also I think there is a huge difference between restricting government on a federal level and on a local level. I don't think any philosophical school has really figured out this issue. Both centralizing and localizing have lots of problems.
I'm at the point where I am not really have a clear 'movement' that I can point to. I still agree with much of the criticism of communism, socialism and many typically left ideas. I disagree even more strongly with the far-right.
In Europe we have central parties, but those often are socially conservative and have sub-optimal economic policy and bad local politics. So like many others I have to end up voting center-left even if I don't agree in principle with their philosophy.
On thing that helped me is not to think of absolutes and end-states, and only think of incrementalism. Even if I disagree with the something in principle. As current laws exist I might support things I wouldn't in a different situation.
In Swizterland where I life, at least we can often vote on specific issues. And that can cut across parties. And the consensus based federal government is globally unique and works pretty well for stability and consistency.
He made a shit ton of promises and many were nonsensical and contradictory. But that doesn't change that he hasn't delivered on them. The problem is people see him doing the most ridiculous stuff people thought he would drop and assume that means he kept most of his promises
>> One of Trump’s most audacious promises was that he could end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of taking office — or even before.
“That is a war that’s dying to be settled. I will get it settled before I even become president,”
It's not my fault he made such a dumb, impossible promise. It is true he broke it.
He never backed that officially though, right? It's just that everyone rational knew what's happening anyway, but otherwise - even the not knowing about it was a lie, not an explicit promise.
It's truly remarkable how much honest material there is to criticize Trump with, yet folks insist on repeating blatant lies.
Yes, that is the "blatant lie" being discussed.
I don't get what you mean. It's not some secret - it's available for everyone to read. It's also written by people who are all around Trump and who got influential positions from him. It's been talked about for ages. Trump not knowing about it would be extremely weird. (Or if he actually never heard about it, that would mean he's extremely clueless - I'm not sure what's worse for him)
You are confusing that with Agenda 47. While Project 2025 was all those things you describe, that Trump endorsed any of it or is implementing any of those destructive things simply isn't true.
He's faithfully implementing Agenda 47, just like the majority of people in this country elected him to do. And all of those people expected the storm before the calm.
You seem to have missed, "highly illegal".
But sure "the trains are running on time"
https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/donald-trump-jr-m...
True to their word!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morrill_Tariff
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot%E2%80%93Hawley_Tariff_Ac...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock
Meanwhile, as others have pointed out, our current president has been advocating for tariffs for about as long as the Republicans were in favor of the free market.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/trumps-tariff-str...
Which is the relevant part. I’m not really concerned with historical positions of the party itself so much as the politicians themselves, none of whom were alive a century ago.
I think you might just want an excuse to believe what you already believe
> reflect what voters want.
The changes made thus far present at least a decade of rebuilding to fix, and we're only 100 days in.
We're never out of time but the problem is time? There is absolutely a point of no return.
The problem is the time frame of the fix
If the US ends up a smoking ruin it can still be fixed, it'll just take longer.
The problem with the US is though, that they have the most powerful military on the planet, and the US ending up in smoking ruins probably means lots of other places going down with it, when the US looks outside for reasons of its failure. It is quite dangerous.
Maybe they don't like the fact that there's people out there making 500 grand a year? At least not while they're struggling to make ends meet on 50 grand a year.
Now your leaders are supposed to be wise enough to not take down the 500 grand a year guys. But what if they aren't?
Yet people seem to have far less concern about people with such relatively low wealth.
But it's not really compatible with a system where one person represents millions. You'd need something recursive such that no person represents more than a hundred or so, that way there's time to circle back and explain why certain complaints aren't being addressed this cycle and such. You know, responsibility of leadership to the people.
It's also not really compatible with a system where your representative for foo-type issues must also be your representative for bar-type issues, because "competent people" is too broad of a category to be useful.
How to get there from here? I'm not sure but it seems like it'll require a more significant discontinuity than we've seen so far.
What does each one do? What agency does each have?
They get 20 minutes a year to speak assuming a 2000 hour working year.
In a single seat district system, increase in seats its also proven to improve representation for minorities.
I don't think the expansion by itself is a fix-all solution.
One of the issues is that you have many single issue districts and those that get elected can vote whatever they want on everything else. That is both good and bad in some situations.
> They get 20 minutes a year to speak assuming a 2000 hour working year.
Congress isn't about making public speeches, its about legislating in congress. Turning congress into a TV show is part of the issue in the first place.
I think the larger problem with democracy in general is that constituencies are no longer geographic. A software engineer in Austin and one in San Jose have far more in common than a software engineer in Austin and a Tractor dealer in Austin.
The representative for Austin has to represent the conflicting views of both the Tractor dealer and the software engineer.
> I think the larger problem with democracy in general is that constituencies are no longer geographic.
I think that is a good point. Specifically on federal level. On local level geographic still matters.
Its basically the old socialist argument about class system. Just with a much more complex class system.
I guess you could have some sort of cluster analysis putting into X different interest clusters and you could vote for a representative in each. And then somehow calculate an optimal congress.
"Vote for me, I'm representing technically inclined fantasy nerds that like cat girls"
Not sure that is the solution. But you are right that the 'pyramid' style system used in most countries could be improved on. A simple version of this is basically to do all federal votes for congress and use some kind of representation algorithm.
The issue with this is that doing a political campaign on a federal level is insanely expensive. And I can't even imagine if each congress person had to try to get elected on federal level. The amount of political adds would be crazy.
I really don't have the solution and its hard to run experiments on things like this.
> The representative for Austin has to represent the conflicting views of both the Tractor dealer and the software engineer.
Smaller countries does help her, as geographic area gets smaller more interested are represented.
Along these lines, policy kind of went to shit when they got rid of earmarks.
It used to be some congressman from rural Ohio being able to vote in favor of union stuff his people want but the party doesn't because he knows the bill has some pork for his district to make his people happy so he'll be secure next election.
Now that guy's security next election is all dependent on party funding so he's gotta vote the party line every time and any deviations from the party line are a complex game of favor trading and backroom dealing and whatnot.
In Britain, you basically get removed from the party very quickly and as an independent its incredibly hard.
Trump is only the latest example of how parties are weak in the US.
Farming, Tech, Fossil Fuels, Civil Rights, etc. Maybe as many as 50.
Each one puts up candidates, perhaps on a list basis,
You give everyone 10 votes to distribute to those candidates. If you're really into supporting Farming, you might put 10 votes to Farmers and screw the rest. If you are more widely concerned you might put a couple in tech, a couple in civil rights, one in space, etc.
Those votes are then distributed and the number of representatives are chosen in proportion. If Farming gets twice the votes as Tech, they have twice the congressmen, and Farming gets twice the representation at a national level.
If you don't have this, you end up with widely supported low level things (say a 15% support evenly across the country - truckers for example) with no representation, but areas where there are high levels of concentrated support (Tech for example) with a lot of representation.
Its an interesting concept, I don't know of anybody that has fully defined how this would work.
I imagine a sort of cultural "open enrollment" period during which anyone can mark anyone else as their representative. Perhaps we create four or five categories that we need representation in (foreign policy, infrastructure, education, monetary policy... something like that), so you gotta then find four or five representatives which you personally know and trust.
Then we follow the directed representation graph to its terminal nodes (or cycles) and those are the representatives that we ask to get together and get things done. Those are our leaders. They meet only sometimes, the rest of the year they spend working with their constituents.
You don't have to be tapped in to see that whatever is said on Fox becomes Republican dogma very quickly. That's why half the country is more concerned that Zelenskyy is, somehow, a dictator, and less concerned that we ushered Russian state media into our white house.
It's an embarrassing state we're in, but many voters have been fostered with complete incuriosity with what Republican politicians stand for.
Essentially if you have the very strong support of 10-15% of the party voters, you’re untouchable.
Of course that also relies on those “I don’t want Trump” republicans actually voting for him.
But let’s assume that all happens and it’s not the fault of republicans because they are apethetic. How do you explain the congress and senate members who back him?
But then they also vote for him in the general election, since he won, so I conclude he has the support of the Republican base.
If you were evaluating him as a regular person you'd conclude he was demented or otherwise had significant brain damage, and was the no-inhibition combative type that needed to be in a facility. But his word salad apparently appealed to enough people's self-centeredness to end up as President instead. Maybe my happy place can be imagining he's got aphasia, doesn't want any of these harmful policies either, and he's suffering right along with the rest of us.
I think a multi-party parliamentary system would be better at finding middle ground, but it's silly to say that the two-party system keeps politics "fixed".
I would say that in this case, it's a party aligning to an individual far more than it has ever been in the past. Racist Southern Democrats didn't become Republicans because they were enamored with a Republican leader, they changed parties because they found themselves misaligned with the Democratic Party's pivot to civil rights.
I wholeheartedly agree that a parliamentary system would serve the US better.
The Trump administration seems to run a protectionist policy, with a deregulated home market. This will hurt exports as it makes products more expensive, but also less likely to be able to comply with the regulations of other markets, e.g. in the EU, which is heavily regulated. US companies have a reduced incentive to comply with EU rules, if they know they have a protected market at home they can milk instead.
It's much in the same vein that Putin allows a few token 'opposition' politicians to exist.
Its an extremely big difference from the Biden era where any post critical of the vaccine and backed up with papers was taken down pronto. This was even confirmed in several senate hearings.
https://www.axios.com/2024/08/27/zuckerberg-biden-administra...
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/10/mark-zuckerberg-says-biden-p...
As a non-American, I was very happy when Musk bought out twitter - it was ridiculous being unable to criticize vaccines - you couldn't even articulate the Indian government's stance on Pfizer and how Pfizer refused to provde test data. "Freedom of speech" was utterly non-existent in that era.
> “The words ‘cis’ or ‘cisgender’ are considered slurs on this platform,” Mr Musk wrote in June.
> “Repeated, targeted harassment against any account will cause the harassing accounts to receive, at minimum, temporary suspensions.”
> The newly enforced policy, first reported by TechCrunch on Tuesday, saw some users greeted with a full-screen warning when trying to publish a post using the terms on the X mobile app.
The fact that this is arbitrarily enforced isn't exactly painting it as a haven for free speech. The only thing worse than absolute censorship (which is obvious and can be routed around) is stochastic, inconsistent censorship - which gives him and his defenders a fig leaf[1] to hide behind.
Look, maybe you prefer the new brand of censorship X has adopted. It sounds like you do. Great. But what you can't do is call it a free speech platform, while keeping a straight face.
[1] I would like to point out, as an example: that China doesn't censor the internet - you just mysteriously have your connection go to shit and drop out if you try to search for 4/15.
Did you ever try writing a mRNA-vaccine critical post during the Biden administration on twitter, quoting factual sources and linking to scientific papers ? Your account got banned pronto.
And as we all know now - it was done at the behest of the US white house.
And that's not an argument that you're going to do well with. Because the claim is utterly pants-on-head, irredeemably farcical, as is anyone who would stand behind it.
---
But, secondly, if you read the screenshots in the link, you'll see that the posts are being suppressed.
---
And thirdly, you don't see me claiming that pre-Musk Twitter was any kind of bastion of 'free speech absolutism'. I'm not making that argument.
The argument I'm making is that post-Musk Twitter definitely isn't one.
Integrity, honesty, and principles is literally what they mean by the word "woke" when they harass people for being it.
No it isn't, and saying things like this just adds noise. What they mean by the word "woke" is a worldview that delegitimises the things they aspire to or worked hard for (status based on power based on individual agency), and prioritises other forms of social currency (victimisation by external forces) in a way they find performative.
If you genuinely don't think that each side has principles, which in fact overlap considerably, you aren't very curious about the world.
ETA: In case you are genuinely interested in learning about how liberal and conservative people differ psychologically, Jonathan Haidt is a very good person to read.
Arbitrary corrupt incompetency is what they're looking for.
Caring about other, having respect, being sensitive, these are all 'woke' things from the "great awakening" cult.
I want more affordable college and the people in charge want to send people like me to concentration camps through kangaroo courts. This is the difference.
If you want free markets look more to Lee Kuan Yew and Singapore (#1 on the "Index of Economic Freedom").
One of the virtues of proper free markets is the markets largely figure which companies win in a relatively non corrupt way, rather than politicians leaning on the scales.
The difference is between Singaporean policymakers/civil servants and their counterparts from elsewhere is that the former are actually world-class in terms of competence, and their interventions are generally very well-designed/well-justified.
We can learn a lot from the policies, both free market and otherwise. And we shouldn't learn from others.
No free market person thinks of Singapore as some prefect example. As that doesn't exist. So you have to take example from different places. And Singapore has more good examples then most.
Sure, from a financial perspective, particularly around mortgages.
Singapore owns the HDB, which owns the leasing rights to 80%+ of all residential property and almost all land in the country. Issuing 99 year leases to citizens and PRs.
Imagine if the US government owned all land rights, built virtually all apartments and instigated racial quotas to match the demographics of the country; then subsidized the price drastically to make it affordable for the population. That's what Singapore does.
This isn't unique either.
The other libertarian wet-dream Hong Kong has a similar land-leasing policy. The major difference there is that 999 year leases were allowed at one point (rare and no longer issued).
In fact the only freehold property in Hong Kong is St John’s Cathedral.
The person above pointed out that Singpore, is #1 on the "Index of Economic Freedom" and the rank high in other such indexes.
Housing policy in regards to ownership maybe a counterpoint to that, but we are not looking at individual policy but the at everything.
If you want to dispute the claim that Singpore is not 'free market' at all, then please direct me to an index with better methodology in that regard.
> Sure, from a financial perspective, particularly around mortgages.
That to, but that's not primary what I am talking about.
No I'm talking about zoning and many, many, many other types of regulation. Plus of course, tax code and many other things.
Typically new land for a city is rezoned, then a developer comes in, build there and often inherits the infrastructure to the city to maintain. Then the city collects some property tax from that.
That is different then the Singapore model but its also a gigantic intervention in pretty much every aspect of the housing market.
Not to mention the government hold many plots of lands that could be developed. The government owns quite a lot of land.
The direct ownership is only one aspect, what you can do is another.
And as I said, I'm not disputing that in such a ranking, their land and housing policy could be considered as a negative compared to the US.
https://fee.org/articles/10-crazy-examples-of-unrelated-wast...
2) whether anything that happened in the last month is going to promote more domestic manifacturing is quite dubious at best.
As a quick excercise:
- for almost every industry new factories would be needed to significantly increase domestic production
- you are disencintivized to mix foreign and domestic materials if you plan to export (as you are going to pay potentially double tariffs)
- most things (especially cars) have long supply chains
- building a factory takes both non-trivial investment and at least a few months
And you get that for many products it would take sorta
lenght_of_supply_chain * (few_months + gathering_fund_permits_time)
My claim was merely that the situation was analogous. So yes, it is the point, in my view.
There is a grey area where you can do things that the electorate may want, which also happen to benefit your cronies. This overall issue is more severe for big government types, since more largesse is getting handed out.
I'd additionally highlight your use of the term "relevant electorate". Which underscores that "cronies" and "voters" may be the same people.
Direct Tesla subsidies would probably be quite popular with Tesla workers. That's a relevant electorate. Would that therefore make direct Tesla subsidies defensible? That's what your argument seems to imply.
>2) whether anything that happened in the last month is going to promote more domestic manifacturing is quite dubious at best.
I suspect some of the items from the FEE list won't be particularly effective at their stated goal either. In general, people will disagree about the likely effectiveness of government programs. So I'm not sure "likely effectiveness" is a great way to check for favoritism.