rule

EDIT: shoutout to @AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world for making a version of the gif that's actually 41kb, the title was a reference to this meme:


(except it said 41kb, I can't find that version for some reason)

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[+] -6 points 5 hours ago* (23 children)

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.

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  • [–] 27 points 5 hours ago (13 children)

    So trust for you is an absolute thing? That must make human relationships of any sort incredibly difficult for you.

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  • [–] -3 points 5 hours ago (12 children)
  • [–] 21 points 5 hours ago (5 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 hours ago* (3 children)

    My absolute distrust of governments does not conclude literally anything about my perspective on trust in personal relationships, you waffle hater.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 hours ago

    Right. But you can see the implied logical step right?

    1. Corupt politicians in government have screwed society over, therefore I distrust the government as a whole
    2. Skipped: assuming that my reasoning is consistent and that behaviors of the members of a group reflects on the group as a whole...
    3. I don't trust my group of friends because some of them are assholes

    I also distrust the government as a starting default. But as soon as I have more specific information about specific members of that group, I change my trust level to reflect the more specific data I now have rather than falling back to my default assumptions inherited from the group.

    Let's use your analogy. If one farmer did use water responsibly, would you not encourage, and set them up as a model example of The Good Farmer? Or would you scoff and say "give them time. All farmers are selfish in the end"?

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  • [–] 5 points 5 hours ago (5 children)

    You lost? No one mentioned waffles.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 hours ago (4 children)
  • [–] 11 points 5 hours ago (4 children)

    If no government yet made can be trusted, then we need to build a better one, until we reach one that can.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (3 children)

    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"

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  • [–] 5 points 4 hours ago

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 hour ago

    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.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 hours ago (3 children)
  • [–] 3 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

    No it's a forum post, not a half man half goat creature from myth

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