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All of these are criticisms of heavily centralized power strucrures. It's not like everyone in Italy had to come to a consensus to burn someone at the stake. It

by tdeck 5y ago

All of these are criticisms of heavily centralized power strucrures. It's not like everyone in Italy had to come to a consensus to burn someone at the stake. It's the same with redlining - a few people in the federal housing administration wrote these rules that everyone else had to follow. How can 90 people discriminate against a group of 10 people if every adverse action against one person requires the other 99 to agree? This system makes abuse much more difficult than the system we have now.

ralusek 5y ago
The counter is liberalism, i.e. governing structures characterized primarily by their defenses against authority. No redlining, but also no removing people that you don't like. The rule is that the state is limited in its ability to force individuals to do things. People seem to think that democracy is the ticket and that anything decided by the democracy is the best we can do, but liberalism will elevate anti-authoritarianism above the will of the people, as a majority is no less capable of authoritarianism than a dictator.
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
Easy, you single out one of them and the rest are afraid to back them up. I was just studying a case where a person was accused of a crime, and there was a massive media campaign slinging dirt at him. He needed several people to testify to his innocence, but everyone was afraid of being associated with him and of consequences that might have for their career. He was sentences to 8 years in jail. On appeal the media crazy died down, so the folks did testify, and he was acquitted, but he spent two years in jail for no reason. "All of these are criticisms of heavily centralized power strucrures. It's not like everyone in Italy had to come to a consensus to burn someone at the stake." You are contradicting yourself - lynching and burning people at the stake are local decisions. They happen when there is no centralised power. Centralised power structures usually follow rules, however flawed they are. Clauses like this don't even have rules, they can just remove you because they hate you.
- tdeck 5y ago
  > You are contradicting yourself - lynching and burning people at the stake are local decisions. They happen when there is no centralised power. A local power is still a centralized power compared to a system where everyone has to agree on a decision. In this case, priests and local police were instrumental in creating and maintaining the environments where these things happened. And I seem to recall that there was a certain international organization putting people on trial and then burning them. Your argument is basically that we need to set up some people with way more power than other people, so they can protect the least powerful people in the society from abuse. Then we set up rules and hope people in power do what they're "supposed to". Sometimes that works out for some people, but as a general principle it's completely backwards. A better idea would be to distribute power more equally to everyone, so that they don't have to wait around for the favor of the powerful. All these civil rights examples seem to conveniently gloss over the century when our federal government explicitly supported slavery and the decades when that government did nothing about lynching. That's not because the federal government wasn't powerful enough - it commands the armed forces. It was because the constituency affected by these things didn't have enough power to make the government change it's policies.

by tdeck 5y ago

ralusek 5y ago

The counter is liberalism, i.e. governing structures characterized primarily by their defenses against authority. No redlining, but also no removing people that you don't like. The rule is that the state is limited in its ability to force individuals to do things. People seem to think that democracy is the ticket and that anything decided by the democracy is the best we can do, but liberalism will elevate anti-authoritarianism above the will of the people, as a majority is no less capable of authoritarianism than a dictator.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

Easy, you single out one of them and the rest are afraid to back them up. I was just studying a case where a person was accused of a crime, and there was a massive media campaign slinging dirt at him. He needed several people to testify to his innocence, but everyone was afraid of being associated with him and of consequences that might have for their career. He was sentences to 8 years in jail. On appeal the media crazy died down, so the folks did testify, and he was acquitted, but he spent two years in jail for no reason. "All of these are criticisms of heavily centralized power strucrures. It's not like everyone in Italy had to come to a consensus to burn someone at the stake." You are contradicting yourself - lynching and burning people at the stake are local decisions. They happen when there is no centralised power. Centralised power structures usually follow rules, however flawed they are. Clauses like this don't even have rules, they can just remove you because they hate you.

tdeck 5y ago
> You are contradicting yourself - lynching and burning people at the stake are local decisions. They happen when there is no centralised power. A local power is still a centralized power compared to a system where everyone has to agree on a decision. In this case, priests and local police were instrumental in creating and maintaining the environments where these things happened. And I seem to recall that there was a certain international organization putting people on trial and then burning them. Your argument is basically that we need to set up some people with way more power than other people, so they can protect the least powerful people in the society from abuse. Then we set up rules and hope people in power do what they're "supposed to". Sometimes that works out for some people, but as a general principle it's completely backwards. A better idea would be to distribute power more equally to everyone, so that they don't have to wait around for the favor of the powerful. All these civil rights examples seem to conveniently gloss over the century when our federal government explicitly supported slavery and the decades when that government did nothing about lynching. That's not because the federal government wasn't powerful enough - it commands the armed forces. It was because the constituency affected by these things didn't have enough power to make the government change it's policies.