Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
It wasn't a shot at Biden, obviously. It was both-sidesism. You have a pathological need to say that both sides of the political spectrum are similar.
And your idea that we need to "get back to the notion that government should be small, limited, and apply the most minimal of guardrails" is a nostalgia for something we have never had. "Allowing people the freedom to live as they want" doesn't work, because the freedom many people want is to disadvantage other people. I would like to be free from worrying about someone shooting up my children's school, and you would like to be free to carry a semi-automatic rifle when you go out, and so on.
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They are. Both are committed to compelling people they know do not want to live as they desire them to live to nevertheless do so. The only difference is form of coercion.
The hard left has sway over the cultural institutions and until recently, govt institutions. It compelled people who did not want to be part of something like, say, DEI, to nevertheless go along with it by emphasizing it in policies - "nudging" the private sector, as Sunstein would put it. Or compelling it where necessary. The woke folks force-fed their ideology on everyone the same way.
The hard right doesn't practice soft coercion. They engage in blunt attacks on what they don't like, and enact policies which make what they don't like unlawful, or subject to penalty from regulators, as Trump has done.
Both are trying to force roughly half the country that does not want to behave they way they would like them to behave to do so.
In simplest parlance, that's being a dick. An asshole. Not observing people's rights to live as they like.
To borrow your analogy, I don't like guns. And where I live, a lot of people agree with me. But also, a lot of people don't. They like their guns. They like to carry them. Seems strange to me, but they have that right. So we have gun laws that make it difficult to carry, and make it illegal to carry automatics of any kind, even to hunt. And We All Get Along.
May somebody shoot up a school? Sure. But is the solution to that me telling the 99.9% of people who don't shoot up schools that they can't have a carry permit? No. The solution is making it difficult to get one, and illegal to even own an automatic weapon.
Drugs is another one of these issues. We now know that legalizing weed was always a good idea. It's much safer than alcohol. But why was it illegal for so long? Because one group of people that didn't like it lobbied the govt to tell everyone else what to do. How many lives were ruined as a result?
Every policy that smells of social engineering or nannyism which is considered by the govt should be subject to this scrutiny (akin to the standard for a preliminary injunction): Is this absolutely positively necessary to prevent a severe, immediate, and irreparable harm? Is it anathema to a large number of people? And most importantly...
Is this policy rooted in the emotional/philosophical/pseudo-scientific positions of a group of people who think they know what's best for everyone else, a/k/a, Officious Arrogant Assholes?
If a policy fails those balancing tests, and both the govt's advocacy for DEI under Biden, and against it under Trump, fails them all, stunningly, the govt has no business pushing such a policy on society.
("Leave people the fuck alone unless it's a goddamn four alarm fire," is a good rule for the govt. Alas, in CA, it appears govt has little interest in meeting that test. But that's another conversation. Bill Maher has my proxy there.)
