rule
the title was a reference to this meme:
(except it said 41kb, I can’t find that version for some reason)
EDIT: shoutout to @AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world for making a version of the gif that’s actually 41kb
EDIT 2: it wasn’t loading for some people so I changed it back, womp womp :(
This rhetoric was used most notably by Reagan to dismantle the Community Services Administration, he argued the government couldn’t be trusted to tackle poverty.
Governments aren’t a single body; they’re a sum of the people you add to them. The people within them all have their own levers of power and things they wish to enact. When the government does something bad, do not shrug and say, “Well, of course the government did something bad,” take names, primary them out. Anything but blind cynicism.
And see: the Iron Law of Institutions. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_institutions
Nazi/Maga fallacy
How so? Most governments around the world are a collection of many independent bodies which have their own interests and powers, which is why people usually call a government “the bueraucracy”, since it’s a clunky machine instead of the single unified command structure like how the media portrays it.
Don’t waste your time replying to NotAnOtter. If someone slings mud without taking a stance, they aren’t looking to debate, they’re looking to bicker. Good points, though.
original is 1.1mb, a version that’s actually 41kb:
anyways probably I would probably say I trust the US government rn about as much as I trust large for-profit corporations, but in more normal times I trust it more. It really depends on what specifically you’re talking about though, since both obviously have their own aspects that they’re more or less trustworthy in. Like I would trust Microsoft not to randomly shoot someone much more than the government (Although I would not trust Microsoft to not be helping with AI targeting of people for the military to shoot…), and I would trust reports from the EPA much more than I would trust Microsoft press releases
Which government, and trust that government to do what?
See, that’s the thing, you lost.
You assumed any government can be trusted. You learned enough about That One Government You Hate and not enough about actual history, across cultures and technological eras. You assumed that The Government That You Like wouldn’t become corrupt given the right opportunity + market & political forces.
So trust for you is an absolute thing? That must make human relationships of any sort incredibly difficult for you.
So you hate waffles?
That’s not how that meme works. You were treating trust as a binary “do not trust” or “trust”. They called you out on it because trust is obviously a multi-factor continuum. You might trust your coworker to do their job, but not trust them with your phone passcode. Meanwhile, you might trust a partner with your phone passcode (mileage may vary) but not trust them to make a doctor’s appointment because they’re anxious or something Obviously it depends on the person, but you get the idea. Trust isn’t just a binary “trust” or “not trust”.
That’s not even taking into account that “the government” isn’t actually one singular entity but rather a whole group of individuals who all have their own agendas, some for the better and some for the worse, and it’s the citizenry’s job to steer the group toward a desired outcome by electing people with similar ideals. For example, would I trust Donald Trump to have anyone’s interest in mind but himself? No. But I would trust Mamdani to have people’s best interest in mind. That doesn’t mean I trust or distrust “the government” but rather that I trust people in government who’ve shown they deserve it and distrust those who’ve shown they don’t. And I would trust neither with my phone passcode. Trust is not binary.
Propagandists hate this guy.
My absolute distrust of governments does not conclude literally anything about my perspective on trust in personal relationships, you waffle hater.
Out of curiosity, do you believe that the “waffle hater” concept implies that all forms of analogy are flawed and not to be used? I think you’re confusing the waffle hater thing for “I don’t understand how analogies work”. Or are a troll. My troll radar is terrible.
I’m engaging earnestly / not trolling. You can disagree with me but I’m not just stating random BS.
They took my statement about distrusting governments and concluded I have a bad relationship with trust in personal relationships. But those are fundamentally different things.
Even if I trusted every individual in a group, that doesn’t necessarily mean I should trust the group behavior. One easy example is the Tragedy of the Commons but there are better examples if you spend more time on it. I trust farmers to care for their land and try to grow the best crops with the resources as their disposal; I do not trust them to collectively reduce water consumption for the health of the ecosystem. Etc. Trusting group behavior is fundamentally different from trusting individuals. They didn’t make a metaphor I disagreed with they just took my statement A and made a totally unrelated conclusion about B. Hence waffle vs pancake.
I could make a stronger argument centered on distrust of government but the above serves to defend the waffle refutation specifically.
So you don’t trust that the government will take money from you in the form of taxes?
Google False Literalism
You lost? No one mentioned waffles.
Google en passant
I don’t give anywhere near enough of a shit to chase down whatever thing it is you are trying to reference. Just say what you actually mean.
holy hell
If no government yet made can be trusted, then we need to build a better one, until we reach one that can.
This implies the theoretical existence of a government you can trust.
You’re proposing some entity with power over your income, way of life, healthcare, etc. that is many orders of magnitude greater than your own but is immune to corruption. “If every island has a coastline we just need to keep looking for more islands until we find one that doesn’t”
Immunity to corruption isnt actually a necessity for a “trustworthy” government in my view. You need it to stay that way, sure, but literally all complex things are prone to some form of decay that requires they be maintained or replaced eventually. For example, can you trust an airplane to be reasonably safe to travel in? Yes, but only if you dont require that the aircraft be passively able to do this indefinitely, because if you do require that, you run into the issue that without repair and replacement of parts and eventually the whole thing, it will decay and eventually become unsafe to use. That is to say, I view corruption as something like the decay state of governments, I think you can theoretically have a trustworthy government if it is well designed- for a period of time after it is established, with that length of time depending on the efforts of the people living in that society to keep corruption out. When those efforts inevitably fail, it’s in need to replacement or at least refurbishment, but that does not mean that the people that lived in the time before that corruption began to mount were unable to rely on it. That we cant design a society to be reliable forever after doesnt mean we cannot build one that is reliable to us and maybe the next generation, we just have to accept that at some point, it’ll be the problem of people of the future to do the same.
You can replace it with any power.
Be it government or corporate.
However government is designed nowadays to be renewed every so often.
The Secret Services and other Shadow state institutions however are almost even more uncontrollable than monopolies.
In modern societies the people are the government. We’re not all americans or russians.
This is satire, right?
No it’s a forum post, not a half man half goat creature from myth
No no, thats a satyr. A satire is a string instrument from India 😜
I thought satire was a large gaseous planet
No, that’s Saturn and a sitar. A satire is a type of wound closure used in surgery
the title was a reference to this meme:
Shout out to my close and personal friend, Yotsuba Koiwai
Generic anti government sentiment is what fuels people like trump and putin. Be careful people, be very careful…
I know very well what I say. I’m a brazilian and our recent history involves attempts from the far rigth to destroy our social order and our democracy to put it into the hands of the usa oligarchs. All that began around 2013 with a wave of anti government propaganda that looked like silly innocent memes…
“Government bad ahahahah. Taxes are theft, better pay for subscriptions instead. Public services will indoctrinate you. Government wants to vaccinate you, vaccines bad hahahaha. I’m very intelligent, you’re dumb for trusting your government and not wanting to destroy it with me”
Don’t fall for that, people, you’re much better than that
Nazi fallacy except it’s MAGA fallacy in this case.
For anyone unfamiliar with what they’re referencing, it’s more commonly called “Reductio ad Hitlerum” (or more generally, “guilt by association”) and a good summary is given by wikipedia:
Reductio ad Hitlerum (Latin for ‘reduction to Hitler’), also known as the Hitler fallacy or playing the Nazi card,[1][2] is an attempt to invalidate someone else’s argument on the basis that the same idea was promoted or practised by Adolf Hitler or the Nazi Party.[3] Arguments may be termed reductio ad Hitlerum if they are fallacious (e.g., arguing that because Hitler abstained from eating meat or opposed smoking, anyone else who does so is a Nazi).
However it’s important to make note of the most important consideration when applying this rule:
straightforward arguments critiquing specifically fascist components of Nazism like Führerprinzip are not part of the association fallacy.
In this case, exploiting and amplifying distrust in the government (then the weimar republic) was a core aspect of how the Nazi state rose to power, with particular attention needing to be paid to the idea of ‘Dolchstoss im Rücken’ (“stab in the back”), a conspiracy theory about the Weimar government which the Nazis “made […] an integral part of their official history of the 1920s, portraying the Weimar Republic as the work of the “November criminals” who had “stabbed the nation in the back” in order to seize power.” If that sounds suspiciously like the GOP messaging about the idea “the election was stolen” or “democrats are criminals”, well, that’s because there are some extremely relevant parallels between the rise of fascism ~95 years ago and the rise of fascism today.
In terms of either the classic definition, or it’s expansion to the MAGA movement, it’s fairly clear that this fallacy is not applicable to this conversation.
Neat. Thanks for the info.
Still a weak argument in context. they laid out the pitfalls with the thinking and this only attacks the inference of the association.
Yeah, there’s certainly ways the argument could be improved. I just get particularly irked when I see people throwing logical fallacies out like a rhetorical pokemon, especially when they’re misusing them.
Hey comrades, let’s all go against democractically elected governments and give the power to corporations and trillionaires. That way, we can take the means of production into the workers’ hands for real. Of course we will respect human dignity , rights and freedoms once we take power by force, pinkie promise!
I don’t think distrusting the government has to be a libertarian/corporate thing. I just don’t want a CIA backdoor in my phone bro.
I agree with you there; but the current political climate has used these catchphrases to make wonderful headways in the dystopia that I am also against.
This, any power taken from the government will be gobbled up by corporations at this point
I don’t trust the government to provide me healthcare
Ok here’s a parasitic insurance company that will make decisions about your health care based on trying to generate profit.
Or you can get the worst of both worlds like mass surveillance where governments and corporations are tracking you constantly…
Because billionaires owning the media and spending billions to manipulate public opinion is clearly how democratic societies are structured.
Ever notice how people always talk about antidisestablishmentarianism but never disestablishmentarianism?
But this one goes to 28
Replace “Government” with wealthy people
Well yeah, that’s what happens.
What am I looking at (left column)?
Slider switches to confirm yes (slide right) or no (slide left)
Originally all are indicating “no” and as you click on them, since some are incompatible with others, they move themselves back to “no”
You can’t know history and trust your government, while being a sane person.
Oh, thanks. My lemmy client doesn’t play gifs until you click on them, so I just saw stationary blurry tube things.
Yeah, mine was doing that for a bit when my server admin updated last, but it’s sorted out for us. Maybe similar issue? Idk I’m not a Tech Priest lmao
Without them moving I doubt I’d be able to immediately recognize them.
I have translated this into a ternary plot
(edit: more betterer version)
I translated into a soil texture triangle
this is helpful, im sure of it
Fuck sand.
I can’t stand in-silts, they are crazy.
Also, I always suspected people were mostly made of loam, and sandy loam.
Silt is kinda based
YOU CAN ONLY BE SANE BY KNOWING NOTHING AND TRUSTING NOTHING
deleted by creator
Don’t trust big government, and don’t trust any system that forms a tree structure with a single central person at the top.
Truly decentralized small governments (millions of micronations) have the chance to be trustworthy. (They can still be cancerous, but at least they have the chance to not be that.)
Huh the old gif worked fine but the new one shows as a static image in Summit
oop, thanks for the heads up I’ll change it back
Of course I don’t trust the government. I worked for the government for roughly 12 years. They will fuck you over happily.
Anti-intellectualism. History is written by academia, not the guberment.
Unless you’re redefining history to mean what the warmongers of the lying newspapers are printing.
