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Maybe it's just me, but I've been getting this vibe (it's strong here, but I'm feeling it elsewhere too) that there are folks who would like to see our entire society come crashing down.
Perhaps they think we can build something better, and like the Phoenix, emerge from the ashes, strong and vibrant.
And I guess I can see the attraction. Our government has been co-opted by the monied interests, our waking lives seem to be either being tracked by corporations or one government agency or another, the same monied interests seem determined to depress wages to keep us docile and hungry for the resources we need to keep ourselves and our families alive. And on and on. It's as if our society has been taken over by greedy, corrupt and amoral scumbags.
And to an extent, all of this is true. Which begs the question: What can/should we do about it?
There is one thing most of us can agree upon: That those elected to administer our governmental systems aren't acting in the best interests of the greater populace. Rather, they seem to be taking their marching orders from those with the resources to command their attention, their wallets and their votes.
There's quite a bit of agreement about that. The problem is that there are large groups of people on various sides of this question with different prescriptions for solving these problems:
Some think we need to strip the Federal government of most of its power and leave things to the states/counties/municipalities.
Some think we need to reform our existing political systems to reduce the influence of money on our elected officials (at all levels of government).
Some think it's just a lost cause and we need to just tear it all down and start over.
The biggest issue, IMHO, is that those same folks who are controlling our political systems for their own benefit use these differences of opinion to divide us. This keeps us from putting aside our differences so we can work together to create the kind of society of which we can all be proud.
Which brings me to the folks who want to tear our system down. With what shall we replace it?
Destroying one of the bulwarks of our society seems like we're creating change. But what are the consequences of doing so, intended or otherwise?
History (cf. all the infighting and problems with the Articles of Confederation) tells us that a strong central government was necessary back in the late 18th century, and (again, IMHO) is even more important today.
Could government be more distributed than it is? Possibly. Should there be stronger controls on how the central government treats its citizens? Almost certainly.
But if we destroy the "beast in DC" to punish those who have so egregiously abused it, who will pay the price when chaos ensues.
Just some semi-random thoughts.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Thursday July 14 2016, @04:20PM
Perhaps you're right, and there will be revolution. I hope I don't live to see it.
Sadly, history has shown that the vast majority of people who are present during such uprisings tend to suffer greatly.
Whether it be Rome in the second through fourth centuries CE, France in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Russia, Spain, China, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan and others in the 20th century, or Iraq, Syria, Lybia, etc., etc., etc. in the 21st century, the blood of innocent, decent people were and are being shed.
That's a huge waste of human potential. I believe that sentient life is precious and we should try to preserve it.
IMHO, blowing everything up is antithetical to that. What's more, history also tells us that it's entirely likely that something much worse than what we have now will rise from the ashes of such a revolution.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 14 2016, @09:32PM
We've done it correctly before. Maybe next time we'll figure out how to actually curtail corruption instead of just mitigating its impact.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Thursday July 14 2016, @10:37PM
Defeatist and pre-SENS thinking.
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(Score: 2) by JNCF on Friday July 22 2016, @09:36AM
pre-SENS thinking
I'm finding a lot of acronyms that form SENS, but none of them are making any particular sense in this context. Enlightenment?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday July 22 2016, @06:21PM
Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, an approach to anti-aging:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategies_for_Engineered_Negligible_Senescence [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SENS_Research_Foundation [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey [wikipedia.org]
http://www.sens.org/ [sens.org]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsNNUEx5OkU [youtube.com] (1h20m, not too in-depth, use it as background noise. part of the video is a Q&A)
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(Score: 2) by JNCF on Friday July 22 2016, @06:40PM
Ah! I thought you meant politically defeatist. You mean that he has accepted defeat at the hands of death. I had considered that acronym, but the pieces weren't clicking. Thanks for the links.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Friday July 22 2016, @04:18AM
I agree that it is a huge waste of human potential, but that's exactly what's driving this now. Everybody can feel the fury building, even the 1%. They're building bunkers and buying remote islands as fast as they can, thinking they can take the money and run.
We ought to return to the philosophy of Checks & Balances. Money has utterly captured every lever of society because there is no check on it. And people who place money above the commonweal are by definition, sociopaths. So any successor system must be engineered to block regulatory capture by wealth, and prevent sociopaths from gaining office.
In the American legal provenance, a really great start to the former would be to abolish corporate personhood. Corporations are not people. For the latter, we need tests (bran scans? comprehensive psych evals?) to disqualify sociopaths from positions of authority.
Further, strict term limits and transparency laws must be anchored to the bedrock of the Constitution to eliminate the entrenched political class. Backstop that with the death penalty for official corruption, and we could have a republic that could run well for another 500 years.
Washington DC delenda est.