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Of course it's possible. I support principled application of laws (and general principles) all the time. Just because lots of people are hypocrites doesn't mean that it's impossible to escape that, it means that they are choosing to be hypocrites.
For individuals, yes, but I think on the national, let alone international level your representatives and elected government act a lot more like medieval potentates protecting and trying to expand their power and fiefdoms. To give a fairly recent example, the government is supporting Israel (I personally agree with them, but whatever). This is despite a large, fairly active movement that might have tipped the election to Trump and is unpopular with democrats and is strongest in supposed must-win states. By Democratic logic, it should be a slam dunk to support Palestine and go with the thing the public seems to want. Or the BBB which is unpopular and passed anyway. The government barely cares what people actually want, they care for their fiefdoms and maintaining power. If they can do so, they do so by rigging the districts so they aren’t competitive.
If forcing dissidents whether liberal or conservative to shut up allows them to win power games, they’re perfectly fine doing so. It will be hate speech or misinformation or state secrets.
Sure, I would agree that the government has come largely (some would argue entirely) unmoored from the will of the people. And I certainly agree that politicians continually act in unprincipled ways. Perhaps I misunderstood you as referring to all people rather than just politics.
I’m not convinced that anything has changed, that’s my point. The way politics has always worked is based on power, and whatever the window-dressing might be, and if the actual power elites don’t want a thing to happen, it will not happen. If those same elites want something to happen it will absolutely happen. It’s been that way since the first brick was laid at the foundation of the first city. Nobody with power has ever cared about what the public wants, nor do they care about the peasant population of their country. As long as the little people shut up and obey (or at least not interfere too much in the affairs of their betters), the powerful do not care.
The control mechanism of democracy is basically mass gaslighting. First convince everyone that whatever “the public” wants is what the government should do. Then propagandize the population to believe whatever the elites want to have happen. In the meantime you rig the districts such that those who the elites support have an easier time winning. Once this is done, most people will vote as instructed, and most of the rest will go along because they’ve been taught from birth that the results of the election represent the “will of the people” and thus cannot be questioned. So when the government serving the elites does something wrong, stupid, or evil, it’s your fault. The people in charge, running the show were just doing whatever they were told to do by you. So you vote as instructed and wonder why things don’t improve.
I’m fine with any sort of government that mostly works for most people without being too harsh on the average citizen. The form of government isn’t important, customer service is. By which I mean management should provide the vast majority a fairly comfortable lifestyle, they should build and keep up good infrastructure, to live in a stable and secure society, and to not have foreign governments attacking us, our trade routes, and so on.
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