DavidOdden

The problem with her statement is that they are logically unrelated to the ultimate claim about what the government should do. The only facts reported by her are assertions of her emotions – what she wants or thinks should be the case. You cannot respond to emotional claims, unless you make an absurd statement like “No, you do not want that; no, you do not feel that way”. I don’t care if you want a new local burger join to live or die based on its product and service, I don’t want you to make arguments based on forcing others to comply with your wishes. If you cannot get her to advance an actual argument rather than a report of emotion, then this simply isn’t a logical discussion. This is endemic in our culture, and it is why Trump got elected despite all the rational arguments against him as president – it came down to raw feelings and not facts and logic. As for the claim that Google engages in fraud, that is utterly laughable. To even get to first base on that claim, you have to establish that there is some false claim which induced people to enter into a contract with the company that they would not have otherwise entered in. Google is a free service, which you do not pay for. They have made no promise to you. It is fraud to call Google’s practices fraud (by that misunderstanding both of Google’s practices and of fraud). Where is the promise about search results? This is a cousin to the socialist concept of “network neutrality” which is based on the miscreant notion that Google is a public service, not a private money-making business. I go to the local Kroger store and I see tons of “fraud” in the form of promotions for Kroger goods, but no promotions for the goods of a competitor. I read the local paper and I see only the ads of companies who pay to have ads placed, not those of companies who didn’t pay. I look at OO, which stands for Objectivism Online and I see the opposite of Objectivism, I see fraudulent representation of socialism, progressivism and statist being passed off as Objectivism – pure fraud. The government should do something to clean up this mess.

An example of a company actually suppressing another company is when AT&T enjoyed a statutory monopoly over phone services and therefore smaller companies could not even exist. A current one is interstate passenger rail and letter-delivery. Likewise water, gas, electricity, internet service and other so-called “natural monopolies”, depending on your location. Google does not “suppress” Yahoo search, it is just more widely chosen by users. It is the customers who are “suppressing” Yahoo, by being allowed to freely choose according to their individual interests. Similarly, in the marketplace of politics, the Demopublicans do not “suppress” the Libertarians, they are simply more successful in selling their product. Why do we tolerate consumer preference, if the goal is to make all product be “equal” with respect to market share? The government could, instead, ration access to goods and services in such a way that all businesses have an identical market share, and this is enforced by regulating customer choice, and not what the goods and services are. This offers an alternative means of reaching the assumed goal of “equal market share”, and does a better job of aligning to the actual cause of poor market performance. Yahoo does not under-perform relative to Google because of a direct interference in Yahoo’s operation, it under-performs because Google offers a superior product and customer choice is un-regulated. The anti-monopoly assumption is that the solution to the “problem” should be some ill-defined limit on what Google can offer to customers, but why is that better than limiting customer freedom of choice? Obviously, this is a tongue in cheek argument, but reductio ad absurdum is a legitimate tool to exposing the flaws in an opponents argument. What fact justifies putting the burden on Google, rather than on the consumer? Or, why not regulate Yahoo to force it to improve its product, for example by requiring it to put all profits into research and development? Reasons given in opposition to such alternatives can easily be turned into arguments against restricting what Google can do, and have the advantage that your opponent has granted the legitimacy of the principle.

I appreciate the offer, but have no idea what it would take to convince you that you were wrong. I don’t predict that America will devolve into hard Nazism over the next year, it will be more subtle and take longer. Based on local responses (OO) to continued encroachments on individual rights, we can even predict the kind of excuse-making that will be offered by Trump supporters. It is even now a standard response that immigrants have no rights in the US because rights derive from government and not man's nature. There is a delusion that imposing tariffs on imports is not a violation of individual rights, even though the (American) importer pays the tax, and there is a side-show to the effect that this is “just punishment” of businesses that deal with nations which violate individual rights (China, Canada, Mexico – plainly a delusion in the latter two cases). The government has multiple structural contradictions that result in rights violations: interference in the market by requiring government approval of action. So simply withdraw approvals – which results in a blanket prohibition, not a removal of the rights violations in the first place. We will concretely discover the consequences of exercising individual rights because the federal government will withdraw money from states that have become dependent on federal largesse. The new rule will be "If you exercise your rights, we will withdraw financial support". The proper rule would be unconditional "we will withdraw financial support", and not punitive "we will withdraw support if you do not comply with our demand to restrict individual rights". You are exactly right that Trump has rejected the traditional reason-based rhetoric of traditional conservatives, no doubt substantially aided by the religious right which were the leading edge of the perversion of conservatism and the interest in individual rights. It is irrational to hope that there will be a return to the rule of law and reason, those days are over for the foreseeable future. And the seeds of destruction were indeed planted by the radical left back in the 60’s. The reason why Trump prevailed in the last election was not an appeal to a mythical pent-up frustration in the US with expanding government violation of individual rights, is was the simple fact that the (original) competition was senile and the last-minute replacement was manifestly unfit for the job. Your question where is the other antidote on the horizon is spot on. The Republicans dug for themselves a hole so deep and lined with garbage that De Santis was (ugh) the “best alternative”, and hardly an alternative at all. For laughs I might point to a Libertarian party candidate, but those are not realistic candidates – despite their political platforms, they just do not gain enough votes to be worth even talking about. There simply are no marginally reasonable choices for President in the US. Trump was the worst of the two in this last round because of what he brings to the table that is significantly new – a change from a society of laws to a society of managerial decisions. Though more specifically, what he introduced was the absoluteness of his abandonment of the rule of law. Expansion of executive power is the brain-child of the Democrats, Trump was simply inspired by his more-constrained predecessors in the Donkey Party.

It is a characteristic of the neocon movement, especially the MAGA offshoot, that limited government and individual rights are secondary, to be subordinated to the primary goal of National Greatness. When rights are subordinated to “collective greatness”, you have exactly the premise that leads to and did lead to fascism. I do suggest reading Neoconservatism, which analyzes this intellectual shift in-depth – an analysis echoes in the OP. Entirely consistent with the leftist epistemology underlying the MAGA cult, we find Trump engaging in the same kind of rhetorical abuses always practices by the standard left (not the Trotskyite left-turned-right). There is no denying that intellectual dishonesty is the main tool of all oppressors

So what kind of fascism does that justify? I understand that every wrong must be cancelled by another wrong, in the new regime, I just don't see which specific wrong is thus justified. Or does it matter – is it that any wrong is justified to balance an existing wrong?

Some of us are familiar with the 2012 book Neoconservatism: an obituary for an idea by C. Bradley Thompson and Yaron Brook, which documents the subversion of conservatism by the radical left. For a while, there was a terminological division between neocons and Reagan Republicans, the former being the ideological leftists that subverted the conservative movement, but there seems to be little left of the traditional conservative movement. The utterly uncivilized methods of Trumpism, culminating in the January 6 riots, have exact parallels in the leftist antics ranging from numerous anti-war riots, the Days of Rage, WTO riots, BLM riots, and a widespread “shut it down” policy of suppressing speakers whom they disagree with. There is a real difference between Trump and the hard left. The Hard Left wants to outlaw profit and private ownership, Trump wants to maximize profit and private ownership by whatever means necessary. Both sides recognize that this requires the ability to (over)write the law, and they agree that reason and persuasion are fragile tools for achieving their ends.

The rules of this debate are somewhere between unclear and non-existent. What are the exact claims and counter-claims? Is antitrust law actually relevant – e.g. is the thesis “therefore the government should nationalize Google?”. Or is the question “how do I technically overcome this limit”. I suspect it is not the latter, but if so you need to go to the dark web to find people who will reveal Google secrets to figure out how to become technically superior. Look for her assumptions, which need checking. She rejects the idea of (unspecified person) using other search engines, based on the assumption that it would take “extra time”, therefore the assumption which you are being told to make is that everybody has the right to the best-possible search technology yet requiring the minimal contribution from the user (in time, money, knowledge etc). Apart from the fact that this is a stupid assumption, almost everybody uses Google, so urging everybody to switch to Yandex, Baidu, DuckDuckGoose, Bing and its synonyms is fairly pointless – the argument will simply become “Yeah, but people won’t use Yandex, or Bong”. The “argument” seems to be structured via implicit assumptions leading to confiscation and destruction in some form of Google. If not, at what point should the destruction of Google be limited – and why? The underlying premise held by most – the exposure of which should be your main concern – is that the “biggest” business in an area should always be destroyed by splitting it up into numerous smaller businesses, so as to “increase competition”. What is competition? “Competition”, in this view, is the case where transactions are randomly distributed among the businesses in an area, therefore each business has an equal percentage of all transactions. If there are 5 companies selling widgets, each firm sells 20% of the widgets. Could be 22% or 30%, but definitely never 60%, that is significantly higher that an “even split”. Microsoft is the biggest computer software company, and should be broken up into maybe a half dozen smaller companies. Amazon should be broken up into e.g. BuyBooks, WatchMovies, PurchaseHardware, FoodAreUs… each with a smaller, narrower customer and distribution base. Apple needs to be broken up into totally separate companies for phones, computers, whatever else they do, likewise CVS, Costco, JPMorgan, Ford and so on should all be subdivided. The thing is, once you destroy all of the biggest companies in an area by forcibly dividing them to make them less competitive, some new company become the biggest, and in need of destruction. After Ford is cut down to size, the government (and the activists) can turn their attention to GM, then after the demise of Costco take on Kroger… The reductio ad absurdum of this program is a return to the good old days of mom and pop enterprises where you get the bare minimum needed, and you really would not expect to find light bulbs, bread, potting soil and aspirin in the same store. That is why Nanna spent her entire day wandering from store to store to get what is necessary for survival. The ultimate goal is to bring back the good old days that babushka had to suffer through under Stalin. Perhaps the shared assumption is “we’re not trying to totally destroy the economy”. That might yield some practical progress.

Ah, well then your puzzlement would be over why any populace allows foreign aid programs. The US is the global leader in foreign aid, but the proper concern is with all government expenditures. It is not worse to burn US money overseas compared to burning US money within the US. Such wealth-redistribution programs exist in all of the successful western nations, as well as in China, Japan, Korea, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Turkey. Even ZA apparently throws away some money through ARF, nobody know how much is actually exported as opposed to providing local jobs for the nephew. In the US, and other nations with free elections, we passively “allow” systematic self-abuse of rights because virtually nobody has a sense of self-interest and individual rights, and we don’t care what the government does. The relationship between government expenditures and taxation is mostly an academic abstraction which people notice only when the property tax bill comes around, and then the complaints are aimed at the state government rather than the federal government. The US (government) gives away so much more money because it has so much more money, and citizens do not care to engage in academic abstractions. Yet. We are not alone in this practice, which is enabled by the fact that the government can write rubber checks an commit to paying off the debt in 20 years (by borrowing more money). This is the fundamental explanation for why these programs are allowed – the world operates on the myth of government bonds as actual creators, rather than destroyers, of wealth. About 1% of the time people timidly ask “how are we going to pay this off?”, 99% of the time the talk is “how do we force Congress to keep the government running?”.

The crucial distinction does lie in ending the leviathan state, not just swapping out and even increasing bureaucrat for bureaucrat. Simple firing is no proof of good intent. The premise of eliminating the leviathan is not “you got the wrong guy in that position”, it is “that position should not exist in the first place”. There is a common business practice of sacking-and-replacing in order to work around the higher wages of more experiences employees, so as a money-saving but not actual bureaucracy-reducing move, you could fire everybody and replace them with fresh graduates or even unpaid interns. Then repeat in another 8 years, though eventually people will catch on. What we want is not “efficiency”, we want “less government”. The SS was efficient, so was Cheka / NKVD / KGB / FSB, Savak / Vevak / Vaja or the Chinese Ministry of State Security. It’s difficult to make this distinction, but government jobs can be assessed on a propriety scale. Soldiers and police fall on the “more proper” range of that scale, also jailers, judges and attorneys. Somewhere on the “yes” side of the line would be diplomats who represent the US to foreign countries. Theoretically, infrastructure necessary to the maintenance of more-proper governmental services would be farmed out to private industry, but at least right this month, that’s an idealistic hallucination, there will still be engineers, janitors, programmers and accountants making government operations possible. The right question is: which departments should first be eliminated entirely. Some good candidates for mass reduction (total elimination) are: the Dept’s of Agriculture, Energy, Education, Labor, Interior, HHS, HUD and Transportation. Plus, the entire DOGE bureaucracy should be eliminated. First on the second round chopping block would be VA, and the entire Treasury section that is the IRS. We will not be able to evaluate the present scheme of firings as being “brand shifting” versus actual bureaucracy reduction, because some of the first people to be fired under the pogrom are the bureaucrats who comply with the legal requirement to provide public records of the government’s operation. Being insulated from any oversight, it’s impossible to point to concrete evidence – the records are now hidden. Eventually, someone will sue and SCOTUS will order Trump or his successor to comply with the law, but it will be too late at that point, and all we will have is the smug knowledge that he carried an ideological purge illegally, as belatedly acknowledged by the courts. And as not even in the slightest a matter of concern for voters. At least, until Musk’s cache of confiscated passwords and financial records of Americans get hacked and half the nation loses its assets because of slovenly data management practices carried out by an incompetent hack who fired everybody that tried to point out why “1234” is not a good password for crucial data. The proper means is by law rather than mob or dictatorial action, but this society has little interest in subordinating government to objective law, which is a crying shame.

Have you never been to church, have you never heard the preachers screaming on Sunday mornings? It's very simple: people do not understand money, they have no idea where it comes from, they just know that it is the root of all evil. In order to compat these ideas, you have to understand what the ideas are.

In Egypt, they simply traded one dictatorship for another, having experimented briefly with theocratic dictatorship and is still under the thumb of a now-retired general. Libya had total collapse, similar to Somalia. US Aid to Egypt is about $1.5B compared to $3.3B to Israel (the top for Middle East and North Africa), and $59M to Libya (near the bottom, next to Kuwait which doesn't need any help). I don't think any country in Africa is "well on its way to a liberal democracy". Literally, I would say that Kenya has arrived at the state of "liberal democracy" – it is the reductio ad absurdum of the goals of liberalism and mob rule. Maybe you mean something approximating "free nation", in which case Botswana, Ghana and South Africa are the best you can find, but SA is flirting with collapse. It seems you are hallucinating as to my claim. Foreign aid is an opiate, which in carefully administered low doses can be be effective in the recovery of a severely injured patient like morphine is, but easily "morphs" into a debilitating addictive drug as heroin does. The US has been poisoning Africa for decades. Our motivations are either military or altruistic (the official story is altruism but there has always been an undercurrent of fighting low key proxy wars against Russia and China). US policy of constantly feeding money to countries regardless of their government structure clearly indicates that we are being driven to share the wealth in order to advance freedom, even though the threat of withholding money caused a number of single-party states to allow multiple parties. It turns out that "multiple parties" does not equal "freedom".

What? I don't understand the question. What franchise and regimes are you talking about?

Which boils down to the fact that the “system” is irrelevant, what matters the most is the will of the people. Or, the “won’t” – Afwerki remains in power because the populace won’t expel him. The same could be said of Mubarak and Gaddafi, until the populace found the will. It will be interesting to see how the situation with USAID plays out. The US played the “free elections or no money” card to sweep away many one-party states, but now there is no “or”, so will African rulers rediscover the need for “stability”, Eritrean-style? For the most part, the West is at least temporarily beyond that level of mob rule, but "power to the people" still remains a strong motivation in certain countries (*ahem*). We're a long ways from Congo-collapse or even Kenyan political cinema, but we're much closer than we used to be. Why? Because the character of "the masses" has changed, from many diverse individuals to one of two large churning masses.

More generally, irrationality is a problem. The problem.

The vast majority of African nations have a good “system”, the problem is not the system, it is the fact that “demographics” overrules reason in implementing the system. All systems require a system-respecting society, to function properly. Simply put, it’s time for our tribe to get our share of the nation’s wealth. Ethnic voting is the rule, not the exception. The runner-up problem is the lack of demand for respecting the rule of law, a problem that the US is now adopting.