“Only a [insert terrible name here] would disagree with me” is a rhetorical tactic for getting weak-minded people to passively go along with you. It’s not a way to attract competent people to actively buy in and help you.
Conversation
It’s kind of like — I find it skeevy to guilt-trip people into giving to charity. “You SHOULD be more generous.” The reality is, people are already pretty generous. You can provide donors *value* by offering them unusually good opportunities to help.
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“Put more effort/attention into MY favored project or I’ll withdraw my approval from you” is a song anyone can sing, and the loudest, nastiest voices are the best at it. I don’t think it’s a smart tactic for those whose causes are actually good.
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Yes, I admit I’m sensitive about this personally. I think shaming people for not being good enough causes a lot of toxic side-effects. I know sometimes the right thing to do *is* to try harder, but there are ways to encourage effort that install less malware, I think.
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Good exhortatory content makes doing a hard thing look necessary, exciting, and *doable by you*. Skip the last part and you just demotivate people.
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I suspect almost all the failures can be attributed to funding cuts over the years rather than incompetence. It is highly disingenuous of small government types to undermine state and international agency funding and then attribute failures to incompetence.
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this argument makes sense for things like not having an adequate strategic national reserve, but it's difficult to see how the FDA making it illegal for local entities to create tests is a problem of inadequate funding or power
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Agreed, it’s not a complete explanation. These comparisons are messy. For things like weird rules, the answer is nearly always regulatory capture of a weakened state agency by a private interest. I’d bet $10 that FDA policy was written by lobbyists for a big commercial lab chain
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In general, a lot of the dumb shit attributed to state agencies that get in the way of small private actors was actually crafted by large private actors interested in keeping small fry competition in their place
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re regulatory capture, it's not clear that the blame lies on companies. the regulators have the legal power. if they're getting captured, they are allowing themselves to be captured. in the case of FDA/CDC, they're not elected, so there's not the excuse of needing campaign funds
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Political appointees at the top of all US state agencies are appointed by candidates who need campaign funds and return favors via handing over agencies on a platter. Hence Scott Pruitt landing in the EPA. And guy who sells weather data in charge of national weather service.
worth noting that the solution to that specific problem would look more like appointing permanent deep state bureaucrats (a la 10% less democracy) rather than looking at budget or privatization. but then we get back to the original point of "who are the bureaucrats?"


