Electric Sheep on Nostr: How are so many people even literate enough to dribble this 100% fact-free gibbering ...
How are so many people even literate enough to dribble this 100% fact-free gibbering nonsense at us? Oh yes, because of the public education that does it best to make sure everyone can read and write, regardless of their parents' income or class position.
I'm no fan of the state and I doubt @Rabble is either. But here's the tricky thing about states; trying to make them minimal tends to a) have the opposite result, and b) make them worse at doing anything publicly useful. I'll give you two examples.
Actually-Existing-Communism (eg Soviet Union, China today) came about because of an attempt to create a minimal state, which Marx called "the dictatorship of the propletariat". Whose one job was meant to be stopping the Czarists from restoring the monarchy, or any other attempt by aristocratic elites to reimpose top-down rule. Every attempt to keep it minimal and focused on that goal made it bigger and more monstrous (normalised surveillance etc).
The state you grew up under (if I'm right in guessing you're under 35) also resulted from an attempt to create a minimal state, which we could call a 'dictatorship of the entrepreneuriat'. Whose one job is meant to be defending businesses from burglars, mobsters, fraudsters and foreign invasions (cops, courts, prisons, military, nothing else). Every attempt to keep it minimal and focused on that goal made it bigger and more monstrous (normalised surveillance etc).
Both the GoP and the Democrats have subscribed to this minimal state doctrine since Reagan. Drumpf is the ultimate expression of it.
But the administration that's been running the US for the last four years while Biden dribbled into his coffee, has been strongly influenced by a totally different doctrine. One that understands that the we need to judge the state not by its size, but by whether its operations make our society more functional and our lives better. Also that the dictatorship of the entrepreneuriat has been a total failure on *both* measures, just like its Soviet/ Maoist counterpart.
I'm no fan of the state and I doubt @Rabble is either. But here's the tricky thing about states; trying to make them minimal tends to a) have the opposite result, and b) make them worse at doing anything publicly useful. I'll give you two examples.
Actually-Existing-Communism (eg Soviet Union, China today) came about because of an attempt to create a minimal state, which Marx called "the dictatorship of the propletariat". Whose one job was meant to be stopping the Czarists from restoring the monarchy, or any other attempt by aristocratic elites to reimpose top-down rule. Every attempt to keep it minimal and focused on that goal made it bigger and more monstrous (normalised surveillance etc).
The state you grew up under (if I'm right in guessing you're under 35) also resulted from an attempt to create a minimal state, which we could call a 'dictatorship of the entrepreneuriat'. Whose one job is meant to be defending businesses from burglars, mobsters, fraudsters and foreign invasions (cops, courts, prisons, military, nothing else). Every attempt to keep it minimal and focused on that goal made it bigger and more monstrous (normalised surveillance etc).
Both the GoP and the Democrats have subscribed to this minimal state doctrine since Reagan. Drumpf is the ultimate expression of it.
But the administration that's been running the US for the last four years while Biden dribbled into his coffee, has been strongly influenced by a totally different doctrine. One that understands that the we need to judge the state not by its size, but by whether its operations make our society more functional and our lives better. Also that the dictatorship of the entrepreneuriat has been a total failure on *both* measures, just like its Soviet/ Maoist counterpart.