5 ms·

I'd feel obliged to add some "but, her emails..." reference. But it feels million years away. It's interesting to wonder how you get out of a spiral of incomp

I'd feel obliged to add some "but, her emails..." reference. But it feels million years away. It's interesting to wonder how you get out of a spiral of incompetence and border-line (to be polite) corrumption at the highest level. Putting those people in charge was quick ; sure, a future administration could put them out quickly enough ; but how long will there be decently skilled people willing to take those positions ? How long until the only ones who want to put their toes in the swamp are those who really enjoy the mud ? Put differently: can a liberal democracy organize a "just" version of a purge ?

edg5000 7mo ago
We'd have to look at the longest-running democracies and observe how they handled periodic refactorings
- alchemism 7mo ago
  Well….they tended to collapse after a couple centuries.
- kingleopold 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  - mpalmer 7mo ago
    The quotee would be surprised to see how little voting is being done by the people receiving the largesse in the last 20 years. Not to mention how little voters had to do with the decisions which caused the deficit to rise the most. The Iraq war, poor handling of COVID, tax cuts for the wealthy.
    - fn-mote 7mo ago
      > The Iraq war, poor handling of COVID, tax cuts for the wealthy. And now the Iran War, wait for it.
    - xvector 7mo ago
      40% of Americans pay nothing in federal income tax
      - testaccount28 7mo ago
        do you think these are the ones voting?
        kortilla 7mo ago
        Definitely. They are the reason republicans spend time trying to make voting difficult
  - mpalmer 7mo ago
    You know, it's very funny. This is the most reproduced quote from Tytler, and yet you also have these chestnuts: While man is being instigated by the love of power—a passion visible in an infant, and common to us even with the inferior animals—he will seek personal superiority in preference to every matter of a general concern. The people flatter themselves that they have the sovereign power. These are, in fact, words without meaning. It is true they elected governors; but how are these elections brought about? In every instance of election by the mass of a people—through the influence of those governors themselves, and by means the most opposite to a free and disinterested choice, by the basest corruption and bribery. But those governors once selected, where is the boasted freedom of the people? They must submit to their rule and control, with the same abandonment of their natural liberty, the freedom of their will, and the command of their actions, as if they were under the rule of a monarch.
    - hammock 7mo ago
      Relevant quote today but seems to misunderstand the U.S. framers’ idea of what the U.S. govt was set up to be, namely by consent of the governed. It is not enough that a law is just, nor that the judge should be convinced of its justice; those from whom obedience is expected should have that conviction too. -Tertullian, 1st century. The power used by government…is justified merely because it is a better way of protecting natural right than the self-help to which each man is naturally entitled -Sabine explaining John Locke Therefore if the governors ever fail the criteria of said justification, the consent is removed by default, irrespective of their elected term length or anything else. One particular democratic election or another is not the contract. The Constitution itself is the contract, countersigned by the 50 U.S. states.
  - xpe 7mo ago
    "A witty saying proves nothing." ― Voltaire 1767 Tytler's quote is trying to say too much. It might be acceptable as historical commentary, but it carries little weight to me; it seems overly confident about what the future might hold.* Tytler died in 1813. We have learned much since then: much about human nature, institutions, experimentation, statistics, evidence, constructing good theories, and governance.** Sure, the quote is worth some reflection; it has grains of truth, but it should not be given undue weight. * I am not saying "we can predict nothing"! Far from it. I am ok with predictions (even bold ones) to the extent they are deeply rooted in the best understandings and models we have available. ** I'm talking about what motivated people figure out through careful reasoning and evidence, not simply how the median person funnels information from their ears to their mouth. And I'm certainly not commending the effort and thought that the median person puts into stewarding their democracy (if they have one). While we (in the USA, for the time being?) have something like one.
    - saxonww 7mo ago
      It's not a Tytler quote anyway, and as mentioned by others it's demonstrably false. https://web.archive.org/web/20110723192744/http://www.lorencollins.net/tytler.html https://web.archive.org/web/20110723192744/http://www.lorenc... https://freakonomics.com/2009/01/our-daily-bleg-what-quotes-do-you-want-me-to-trace/ https://freakonomics.com/2009/01/our-daily-bleg-what-quotes-...
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - epsteingpt 7mo ago
    The whole reason the US founding fathers are amazing is that they proved him concretely incorrect. US will celebrate 250 years of democracy this year.
    - a022311 7mo ago
      If that's what you call a democracy, sure... I don't think most people will agree with you though.
    - jkaplowitz 7mo ago
      That doesn’t disprove him at all: if the average one lasts 200 years and not all last exactly 200, then some will necessarily last more than 200. This is a mathematical consequence of what an average means.
    - convolvatron 7mo ago
      what better way to celebrate the democracy by combining it with a celebration of the birthday of the Great Leader, with a soviet style military parade and an admonition that any protest will be met with the harshest of consequences.
    - blurbleblurble 7mo ago
      It'd be hilarious if it was a fiction, some bitter comedic cautionary satire
    - hluska 7mo ago
      I know that math makes it harder to come up with political zingers but if there are two civilizations; one lasted 150 years and the other lasted 250 years the average is 200.
  - kergonath 7mo ago
    > the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. Except, of course, that this is historically wrong. Transitions from democracy to dictatorship are common, but I cannot think of one that happened because of "loose fiscal policy".
    - hluska 7mo ago
      If the Central Intelligence Agency’s definition of ‘loose fiscal policy’ is good enough, Pinochet’s rise is a good example.
    - tolciho 7mo ago
      Athens spending like drunken sailors during the Peloponnesian War and the subsequent Oligarchical Coup d’Etat comes to mind. Or must the dictator be just one person and not a bunch of Orwell's pigs?
  - ineedasername 7mo ago
    Pithy. But a made up quote by Tytler, he never said or wrote that. Tyler expressed some skepticism of Democracies but nothing like this. The too on-the-nose nature of this often passed along bit of propaganda should also be the giveaway that it might be one of those rare things on the internet that someone may have been less than honest about the origins, and go look and see.
razakel 7mo ago
The coup has already happened.
bergoid 7mo ago
>I'd feel obliged to add some "but, her emails..." reference. HRC's secret email server and the leaked Kash Patel emails couldn't be more different. The first one is, in the words of a federal District of Columbia judge: "one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency". [1] The second one is the malicious leaking of some private emails. These emails are frankly none of our business (unless you are part of Kash Patel's family or friends). [1] https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/07/politics/clinton-emails-lamberth/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/07/politics/clinton-emails-l...
- _heimdall 7mo ago
  Not sure why this is being down voted. There is a difference for sure between hosting your own email server and using it for official government communications and having your own personal email address used for personal communications. The issue that seemed to completely disappear related to the use of Signal messenger for official white house communications seems more aligned to the email server issue. It was reported heavily at the time what the reporting requirements were and that they would have to submit the full chat histories within 30 days or something like that to stay within the law. I never heard whether that actually happened or not, the story just died.
  - azinman2 7mo ago
    I think we all know the answer to that…
  - greenavocado 7mo ago
    [flagged]
  - jasonlotito 7mo ago
    It's beind downvoted because "but, her emails..." is not saying it's the same thing, but rather, that so much fuss was made about her emails, and then when something similar happens, the right conveniently ignores it. For example, as you mentioned, signalgate, or the times members of the Trump administration used their "own email server and using it for official government communications and having your own personal email address used for personal communications." It's being down voted because it's attacking a strawman. No one is saying they are the same exact thing. It's that you will see people activatley defending this as a big nothingburger when in truth, it's still a security breach that has the potential to lower our defenses.
b00ty4breakfast 7mo ago
>It's interesting to wonder how you get out of a spiral of incompetence and border-line (to be polite) corrumption at the highest level. you get out when the thing dies because these kinds of organizations always end the same way; competence is usurped by sycophancy and flattery until there's no one left to keep it functioning and it collapses under the weight of it's own bullshit. hopefully, there will be something to salvage but the longer these folks are in charge the bigger the splash will be when they finally bottom out
cagenut 7mo ago
honestly, look internally. after the plane from qatar. after the son-in-law's real estate dealings. after the visible-to-everyone kalshi and oil futures bets frontrunning the administrations announcements. for you to still feel the need to frame things as "border-line (to be polite)" is, in and of itself, the perfect example of the overall problem. take your inability to draw a clear-as-day conclusion and state it plainly and multiply it by another ~50M "centrists" who continue to believe that staying "not political" and "avoiding the news" is a viable strategy to just wait the problem out. until the checked out cowards realize that strategy isn't going to work, things will continue to get worse. "no politics" might as as well be the second maga slogan.
- miki123211 7mo ago
  "no politics" is the immune response to the social-media-fueled, conspiracy-theory-driven "we are the good guys, you basically deserve to die" craze. Both sides are culpable here. In the US, both parties were literally claiming that the elections were stolen (Republicans in 2020, Democrats with the since-debunked 2016 Cambridge Analytica scandal). Other countries had different issues, but the shape of the problem was basically the same everywhere. If you keep being called bad words for years for no reason, seeing your side do the exact same thing, no surprise you tune out.
  - whoiskevin 7mo ago
    "Both sides" is the biggest cop out of the last decade.
  - ses1984 7mo ago
    How was Cambridge analytica debunked?
  - craftkiller 7mo ago
    I'd say the bigger issue in 2016 was the Russian interference, which has been proven and has lead to convictions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_2016_United_States_elections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20... > Simultaneously, the Republican-led Senate and House Intelligence Committees conducted their own investigations into the Russians' activities. The Senate committee's report, released in five volumes between July 2019 and August 2020, found that the Russian government had engaged in an "extensive campaign" to sabotage the election in favor of Trump I'm also curious how you think Cambridge Analytica was debunked. I don't see any mention of debunking on their wikipedia page, but I do see facebook being fined billions for it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
hillarycliton 7mo ago
Referencing Hillary’s email would be kinda silly. She self hosted the email account she used for official government business. It was loaded with classified information. This guy, while incompetent, had his personal email hacked. Important distinction.
- eszed 7mo ago
  You are correct. On the other hand, Patel's emails "appear to show a mix of personal and work correspondence". We already know that people in government - this isn't a partisan point: folks of all factions do it - use private communication channels to discuss "official business" specifically to avoid mandated disclosure and archival requirements. If (and I emphasize "if", because we don't yet know if this was the case), if Patel was doing that, and especially if he was sharing / discussing classified material, then the facts of the case would bump right up against what Clinton and Powell did.
- LightBug1 7mo ago
  Please. Same shit, different day. Trying to distinguish between the two acts is like splitting hairs on the same arse. Just makes you look silly.
pqtyw 7mo ago
> border-line (to be polite) corrumption Hard to imagine what would constitute "full blown corruption" based on this standard?
- panta 7mo ago
  Maybe it's borderline because it's coming from the other direction. Corruption presumes some kind of "covertness", when you break all the rules without even trying to be discreet can you still talk of corruption?
  - philipov 7mo ago
    Yes. Only people who are used to living in non-corrupt countries presume corruption is covert.
greenavocado 7mo ago
> can a liberal democracy organize a "just" version of a purge ? Absolutely, it happened before on January 30, 1933
zzzeek 7mo ago
Why not look for historical examples? There should be hundreds not to mention the obvious ones?
rozal 7mo ago
[dead]
cineticdaffodil 7mo ago
Those that got fired where the good ones. Sometimes the best career move is to get fired. Reminds me of the old faces running the BRD after the war. Democratic floatsome in a thin crust residing over an ocean of collaborators.
marcosdumay 7mo ago
> Put differently: can a liberal democracy organize a "just" version of a purge? This is how all of them started. But once you have a liberal democracy, people will refuse another purge. For very good reasons.
dijit 7mo ago
Sorry, as much as I despise Trump (though I'm thankful it caused Europe to wake up to the idea that the US is an unreliable ally); "Her emails" were: A) Used for Official business as secretary of state B) Full of national security strategically important decisions. C) Improperly secured. FBI directors personal email feels less cutting in that context. Breaching my personal email (or my own mail server, I host one) will tell you literally nothing about my employer except perhaps the conversation from when I joined and my own employment contract.

edg5000 7mo ago

We'd have to look at the longest-running democracies and observe how they handled periodic refactorings

alchemism 7mo ago
Well….they tended to collapse after a couple centuries.
kingleopold 7mo ago
[flagged]
- mpalmer 7mo ago
  The quotee would be surprised to see how little voting is being done by the people receiving the largesse in the last 20 years. Not to mention how little voters had to do with the decisions which caused the deficit to rise the most. The Iraq war, poor handling of COVID, tax cuts for the wealthy.
  - fn-mote 7mo ago
    > The Iraq war, poor handling of COVID, tax cuts for the wealthy. And now the Iran War, wait for it.
  - xvector 7mo ago
    40% of Americans pay nothing in federal income tax
    - testaccount28 7mo ago
      do you think these are the ones voting?
      - kortilla 7mo ago
        Definitely. They are the reason republicans spend time trying to make voting difficult
- mpalmer 7mo ago
  You know, it's very funny. This is the most reproduced quote from Tytler, and yet you also have these chestnuts: While man is being instigated by the love of power—a passion visible in an infant, and common to us even with the inferior animals—he will seek personal superiority in preference to every matter of a general concern. The people flatter themselves that they have the sovereign power. These are, in fact, words without meaning. It is true they elected governors; but how are these elections brought about? In every instance of election by the mass of a people—through the influence of those governors themselves, and by means the most opposite to a free and disinterested choice, by the basest corruption and bribery. But those governors once selected, where is the boasted freedom of the people? They must submit to their rule and control, with the same abandonment of their natural liberty, the freedom of their will, and the command of their actions, as if they were under the rule of a monarch.
  - hammock 7mo ago
    Relevant quote today but seems to misunderstand the U.S. framers’ idea of what the U.S. govt was set up to be, namely by consent of the governed. It is not enough that a law is just, nor that the judge should be convinced of its justice; those from whom obedience is expected should have that conviction too. -Tertullian, 1st century. The power used by government…is justified merely because it is a better way of protecting natural right than the self-help to which each man is naturally entitled -Sabine explaining John Locke Therefore if the governors ever fail the criteria of said justification, the consent is removed by default, irrespective of their elected term length or anything else. One particular democratic election or another is not the contract. The Constitution itself is the contract, countersigned by the 50 U.S. states.
- xpe 7mo ago
  "A witty saying proves nothing." ― Voltaire 1767 Tytler's quote is trying to say too much. It might be acceptable as historical commentary, but it carries little weight to me; it seems overly confident about what the future might hold.* Tytler died in 1813. We have learned much since then: much about human nature, institutions, experimentation, statistics, evidence, constructing good theories, and governance.** Sure, the quote is worth some reflection; it has grains of truth, but it should not be given undue weight. * I am not saying "we can predict nothing"! Far from it. I am ok with predictions (even bold ones) to the extent they are deeply rooted in the best understandings and models we have available. ** I'm talking about what motivated people figure out through careful reasoning and evidence, not simply how the median person funnels information from their ears to their mouth. And I'm certainly not commending the effort and thought that the median person puts into stewarding their democracy (if they have one). While we (in the USA, for the time being?) have something like one.
  - saxonww 7mo ago
    It's not a Tytler quote anyway, and as mentioned by others it's demonstrably false. https://web.archive.org/web/20110723192744/http://www.lorencollins.net/tytler.html https://web.archive.org/web/20110723192744/http://www.lorenc... https://freakonomics.com/2009/01/our-daily-bleg-what-quotes-do-you-want-me-to-trace/ https://freakonomics.com/2009/01/our-daily-bleg-what-quotes-...
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- epsteingpt 7mo ago
  The whole reason the US founding fathers are amazing is that they proved him concretely incorrect. US will celebrate 250 years of democracy this year.
  - a022311 7mo ago
    If that's what you call a democracy, sure... I don't think most people will agree with you though.
  - jkaplowitz 7mo ago
    That doesn’t disprove him at all: if the average one lasts 200 years and not all last exactly 200, then some will necessarily last more than 200. This is a mathematical consequence of what an average means.
  - convolvatron 7mo ago
    what better way to celebrate the democracy by combining it with a celebration of the birthday of the Great Leader, with a soviet style military parade and an admonition that any protest will be met with the harshest of consequences.
  - blurbleblurble 7mo ago
    It'd be hilarious if it was a fiction, some bitter comedic cautionary satire
  - hluska 7mo ago
    I know that math makes it harder to come up with political zingers but if there are two civilizations; one lasted 150 years and the other lasted 250 years the average is 200.
- kergonath 7mo ago
  > the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. Except, of course, that this is historically wrong. Transitions from democracy to dictatorship are common, but I cannot think of one that happened because of "loose fiscal policy".
  - hluska 7mo ago
    If the Central Intelligence Agency’s definition of ‘loose fiscal policy’ is good enough, Pinochet’s rise is a good example.
  - tolciho 7mo ago
    Athens spending like drunken sailors during the Peloponnesian War and the subsequent Oligarchical Coup d’Etat comes to mind. Or must the dictator be just one person and not a bunch of Orwell's pigs?
- ineedasername 7mo ago
  Pithy. But a made up quote by Tytler, he never said or wrote that. Tyler expressed some skepticism of Democracies but nothing like this. The too on-the-nose nature of this often passed along bit of propaganda should also be the giveaway that it might be one of those rare things on the internet that someone may have been less than honest about the origins, and go look and see.

razakel 7mo ago

The coup has already happened.

bergoid 7mo ago

>I'd feel obliged to add some "but, her emails..." reference. HRC's secret email server and the leaked Kash Patel emails couldn't be more different. The first one is, in the words of a federal District of Columbia judge: "one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency". [1] The second one is the malicious leaking of some private emails. These emails are frankly none of our business (unless you are part of Kash Patel's family or friends). [1] https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/07/politics/clinton-emails-lamberth/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/07/politics/clinton-emails-l...

_heimdall 7mo ago
Not sure why this is being down voted. There is a difference for sure between hosting your own email server and using it for official government communications and having your own personal email address used for personal communications. The issue that seemed to completely disappear related to the use of Signal messenger for official white house communications seems more aligned to the email server issue. It was reported heavily at the time what the reporting requirements were and that they would have to submit the full chat histories within 30 days or something like that to stay within the law. I never heard whether that actually happened or not, the story just died.
- azinman2 7mo ago
  I think we all know the answer to that…
- greenavocado 7mo ago
  [flagged]
- jasonlotito 7mo ago
  It's beind downvoted because "but, her emails..." is not saying it's the same thing, but rather, that so much fuss was made about her emails, and then when something similar happens, the right conveniently ignores it. For example, as you mentioned, signalgate, or the times members of the Trump administration used their "own email server and using it for official government communications and having your own personal email address used for personal communications." It's being down voted because it's attacking a strawman. No one is saying they are the same exact thing. It's that you will see people activatley defending this as a big nothingburger when in truth, it's still a security breach that has the potential to lower our defenses.

b00ty4breakfast 7mo ago

>It's interesting to wonder how you get out of a spiral of incompetence and border-line (to be polite) corrumption at the highest level. you get out when the thing dies because these kinds of organizations always end the same way; competence is usurped by sycophancy and flattery until there's no one left to keep it functioning and it collapses under the weight of it's own bullshit. hopefully, there will be something to salvage but the longer these folks are in charge the bigger the splash will be when they finally bottom out

cagenut 7mo ago

honestly, look internally. after the plane from qatar. after the son-in-law's real estate dealings. after the visible-to-everyone kalshi and oil futures bets frontrunning the administrations announcements. for you to still feel the need to frame things as "border-line (to be polite)" is, in and of itself, the perfect example of the overall problem. take your inability to draw a clear-as-day conclusion and state it plainly and multiply it by another ~50M "centrists" who continue to believe that staying "not political" and "avoiding the news" is a viable strategy to just wait the problem out. until the checked out cowards realize that strategy isn't going to work, things will continue to get worse. "no politics" might as as well be the second maga slogan.

miki123211 7mo ago
"no politics" is the immune response to the social-media-fueled, conspiracy-theory-driven "we are the good guys, you basically deserve to die" craze. Both sides are culpable here. In the US, both parties were literally claiming that the elections were stolen (Republicans in 2020, Democrats with the since-debunked 2016 Cambridge Analytica scandal). Other countries had different issues, but the shape of the problem was basically the same everywhere. If you keep being called bad words for years for no reason, seeing your side do the exact same thing, no surprise you tune out.
- whoiskevin 7mo ago
  "Both sides" is the biggest cop out of the last decade.
- ses1984 7mo ago
  How was Cambridge analytica debunked?
- craftkiller 7mo ago
  I'd say the bigger issue in 2016 was the Russian interference, which has been proven and has lead to convictions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_2016_United_States_elections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20... > Simultaneously, the Republican-led Senate and House Intelligence Committees conducted their own investigations into the Russians' activities. The Senate committee's report, released in five volumes between July 2019 and August 2020, found that the Russian government had engaged in an "extensive campaign" to sabotage the election in favor of Trump I'm also curious how you think Cambridge Analytica was debunked. I don't see any mention of debunking on their wikipedia page, but I do see facebook being fined billions for it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

hillarycliton 7mo ago

Referencing Hillary’s email would be kinda silly. She self hosted the email account she used for official government business. It was loaded with classified information. This guy, while incompetent, had his personal email hacked. Important distinction.

eszed 7mo ago
You are correct. On the other hand, Patel's emails "appear to show a mix of personal and work correspondence". We already know that people in government - this isn't a partisan point: folks of all factions do it - use private communication channels to discuss "official business" specifically to avoid mandated disclosure and archival requirements. If (and I emphasize "if", because we don't yet know if this was the case), if Patel was doing that, and especially if he was sharing / discussing classified material, then the facts of the case would bump right up against what Clinton and Powell did.
LightBug1 7mo ago
Please. Same shit, different day. Trying to distinguish between the two acts is like splitting hairs on the same arse. Just makes you look silly.

pqtyw 7mo ago

> border-line (to be polite) corrumption Hard to imagine what would constitute "full blown corruption" based on this standard?

panta 7mo ago
Maybe it's borderline because it's coming from the other direction. Corruption presumes some kind of "covertness", when you break all the rules without even trying to be discreet can you still talk of corruption?
- philipov 7mo ago
  Yes. Only people who are used to living in non-corrupt countries presume corruption is covert.

greenavocado 7mo ago

> can a liberal democracy organize a "just" version of a purge ? Absolutely, it happened before on January 30, 1933

zzzeek 7mo ago

Why not look for historical examples? There should be hundreds not to mention the obvious ones?

rozal 7mo ago

[dead]

cineticdaffodil 7mo ago

Those that got fired where the good ones. Sometimes the best career move is to get fired. Reminds me of the old faces running the BRD after the war. Democratic floatsome in a thin crust residing over an ocean of collaborators.

marcosdumay 7mo ago

> Put differently: can a liberal democracy organize a "just" version of a purge? This is how all of them started. But once you have a liberal democracy, people will refuse another purge. For very good reasons.

dijit 7mo ago

Sorry, as much as I despise Trump (though I'm thankful it caused Europe to wake up to the idea that the US is an unreliable ally); "Her emails" were: A) Used for Official business as secretary of state B) Full of national security strategically important decisions. C) Improperly secured. FBI directors personal email feels less cutting in that context. Breaching my personal email (or my own mail server, I host one) will tell you literally nothing about my employer except perhaps the conversation from when I joined and my own employment contract.