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Sure but building solidarity locally is the first step unless you have billions of dollars at your disposal. In times of crisis, it's the local network that wi

by hnbad 5y ago

Sure but building solidarity locally is the first step unless you have billions of dollars at your disposal. In times of crisis, it's the local network that will support you, not the federal government. As much as we've been told to embrace individualism over the past century, we're still a cooperative species and will default to cooperation when things turn bad. If you want to see how well top-down nation building works out, ask the Afghans. The reason the new government never took hold was that there was no political will to address corruption so the old system still endured in local bonds and power structures. You can't have structural reforms without addressing root causes.

mistermann 5y ago
> Sure but building solidarity locally is the first step unless you have billions of dollars at your disposal. Only for a given subset of implementations (ones that require billions of dollars). Also: there are many billions of dollars looking for a place to be deployed, so it's not even a hard stop either, only a major difficulty. I suspect there are other barriers in the mix that are a bit harder to see though (for some, at least), and may also have very powerful active defence measures that are maintained and improved on an ongoing basis. > In times of crisis, it's the local network that will support you, not the federal government. As much as we've been told to embrace individualism over the past century, we're still a cooperative species and will default to cooperation when things turn bad. I very much agree, and this is only one of many ~base-capabilities that ship as defaults from the factory. Perhaps one could make use of these services if one could reverse engineer their behavior, and discover the various API's that must be called. > If you want to see how well top-down nation building works out, ask the Afghans. This is but one example (therefore, not scientific thinking - the best kind of thinking...or so "they" say). > The reason the new government never took hold was that there was no political will to address corruption so the old system still endured in local bonds and power structures. You can't have structural reforms without addressing root causes. 110% agree. So if one was to dig down into the infinitely complex causality, deeper and deeper, what plausibly most important root cause(s) might one find at the very lowest levels?

by hnbad 5y ago

mistermann 5y ago

> Sure but building solidarity locally is the first step unless you have billions of dollars at your disposal. Only for a given subset of implementations (ones that require billions of dollars). Also: there are many billions of dollars looking for a place to be deployed, so it's not even a hard stop either, only a major difficulty. I suspect there are other barriers in the mix that are a bit harder to see though (for some, at least), and may also have very powerful active defence measures that are maintained and improved on an ongoing basis. > In times of crisis, it's the local network that will support you, not the federal government. As much as we've been told to embrace individualism over the past century, we're still a cooperative species and will default to cooperation when things turn bad. I very much agree, and this is only one of many ~base-capabilities that ship as defaults from the factory. Perhaps one could make use of these services if one could reverse engineer their behavior, and discover the various API's that must be called. > If you want to see how well top-down nation building works out, ask the Afghans. This is but one example (therefore, not scientific thinking - the best kind of thinking...or so "they" say). > The reason the new government never took hold was that there was no political will to address corruption so the old system still endured in local bonds and power structures. You can't have structural reforms without addressing root causes. 110% agree. So if one was to dig down into the infinitely complex causality, deeper and deeper, what plausibly most important root cause(s) might one find at the very lowest levels?