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I'm not really qualified to have such a discussion, but I guess the reasoning is that, if you have an actual revolution, you can quickly throw out the old crapp

by Maro 16y ago

I'm not really qualified to have such a discussion, but I guess the reasoning is that, if you have an actual revolution, you can quickly throw out the old crappy stuff (bad laws, bad taxes, gov't agencies, etc.) and introduce new, better ones. Then, more importantly, if a nation had to fight for its political system, it will value it and not fuck it up. Eg. as I describe in a post below, our current gov't is using its current power to change the constitution to better fit its short term political goals, in other words they don't respect it, unlike eg. the way the U.S. Constitution is a symbol of the country's core social values. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Constitution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Constitution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_amendments_to_the_United_States_Constitution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_amendments_to_the_Unite...

barrkel 16y ago
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose... Rules chosen in haste are very far from guaranteed to be better than what they replace. Most likely, in the massive rush to replace everything, cronies and political allies will carve off chunks, loopholes etc. to profit from. The USA is different in that its institutions grew up over a few hundred years, starting out with a fairly trivial population and minimal government over a primarily agricultural people, and growing the state in response to crises. It's certainly important that it had a very good core in the constitution and the early amendments (bill of rights etc.); but that just laid down the architecture of what grew like a crystal afterwords. Unfortunately, there's a brand of anacho-libertarianism in certain influential chunks of American thought, especially in economic circles, which believes that government itself is evil, and that if you only overthrow it, everything will be better. They tried that with shock therapy in Russia, and to a degree even tried it again in Iraq - no planning for aftermath etc. It's my opinion that almost every part of a well-functioning state is balanced between strain in multiple directions, getting larger and getting smaller, regulating more and regulating less, clamping down on moral offenses and easing back on others, etc. These kinds of strains oscillate with the political winds, and the organizations that are grown in prevailing winds are stunted in one direction or another, and only corrected when they've gone too far, in a crisis. In the light of this metaphor, it should be clear that an overthrow isn't the right recipe to grow a good new state: the organization won't have had the time and crises to grow in balance with its competing stresses. Instead, the immediate insiders will be unstoppable political gales, deep structural faults will be embedded into the heart of the operation that guarantee the politically favoured factions rents for decades to come. I speak of an Irishman, who has, of late, longed for a revolution in my homeland, but recognizes it for the folly it would be. My country's primary problem is that it has too many representatives, too much clientelism, too much of politics is cynically local, and above all too much voting is based on tribal allegiances that date back to civil war nearly 100 years ago.

by Maro 16y ago

barrkel 16y ago

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose... Rules chosen in haste are very far from guaranteed to be better than what they replace. Most likely, in the massive rush to replace everything, cronies and political allies will carve off chunks, loopholes etc. to profit from. The USA is different in that its institutions grew up over a few hundred years, starting out with a fairly trivial population and minimal government over a primarily agricultural people, and growing the state in response to crises. It's certainly important that it had a very good core in the constitution and the early amendments (bill of rights etc.); but that just laid down the architecture of what grew like a crystal afterwords. Unfortunately, there's a brand of anacho-libertarianism in certain influential chunks of American thought, especially in economic circles, which believes that government itself is evil, and that if you only overthrow it, everything will be better. They tried that with shock therapy in Russia, and to a degree even tried it again in Iraq - no planning for aftermath etc. It's my opinion that almost every part of a well-functioning state is balanced between strain in multiple directions, getting larger and getting smaller, regulating more and regulating less, clamping down on moral offenses and easing back on others, etc. These kinds of strains oscillate with the political winds, and the organizations that are grown in prevailing winds are stunted in one direction or another, and only corrected when they've gone too far, in a crisis. In the light of this metaphor, it should be clear that an overthrow isn't the right recipe to grow a good new state: the organization won't have had the time and crises to grow in balance with its competing stresses. Instead, the immediate insiders will be unstoppable political gales, deep structural faults will be embedded into the heart of the operation that guarantee the politically favoured factions rents for decades to come. I speak of an Irishman, who has, of late, longed for a revolution in my homeland, but recognizes it for the folly it would be. My country's primary problem is that it has too many representatives, too much clientelism, too much of politics is cynically local, and above all too much voting is based on tribal allegiances that date back to civil war nearly 100 years ago.