5 ms·

Regardless of the disorganization, there is a set of people at the top that are going to be extremely difficult to dislodge, and they will thwart your every mov

by Torgo 13y ago

Regardless of the disorganization, there is a set of people at the top that are going to be extremely difficult to dislodge, and they will thwart your every move. I am not a Ron Paul person, but you can look at what the party did to disenfranchise him. The problem here is that political parties are basically clubs, they have their own rules. So when party leaders violate parliamentary procedure to ignore successful votes to remove leaders, when they set up shadow offices for Establishment candidate when he doesn't win in a district, when they call police to eject people who win votes, your only alternative is "to form another party." At the same time the RNC and DNC have managed to weasel their way into preferential treatment under state laws, so they get to have their cake and eat it too. I don't have a solution.

rayiner 13y ago
> Regardless of the disorganization, there is a set of people at the top that are going to be extremely difficult to dislodge, and they will thwart your every move. You don't need to dislodge them. You just need to convince them that you've got a political platform that will get votes, to counter demographic trends (people who remember the Soviet Union dying off, etc) that don't work in their favor. Bill surveillance as an attack on religious groups, a way for the IRS to more strictly enforce tax laws, etc, and you can present them with a platform that will get votes from their base. I haven't been watching the news lately, but I can't believe that the republicans aren't already trying to tie the NSA thing to the IRS thing.
- Torgo 13y ago
  You're right, I was coming at it presuming they don't want to address this issue. But I think I have a good case for that. These programs pump a lot of money into the defense industry, which they are beholden to. I don't see that changing. I could be wrong about that, but they are a strong lobby.
- euroclydon 13y ago
  I believe some republicans are trying to tie the NSA and IRS things to the Obama's campaign voter-database prowess.
- nitrogen 13y ago
  I think a lot of people who oppose ubiquitous, unchecked surveillance also want to fix the two-party system, and would have a hard time compromising on the second to accomplish the first.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    I mean that's the basic problem, isn't it? Some people can't compromise. Many people who are proponents of privacy rights, oppose copyright, etc, consider themselves too good to participate in the political system, and would never stoop to, say, trying to find common ground with religious or social conservatives on the subject of surveillance, even though there might be politically valuable common ground to be found.
zanny 13y ago
The solution in every generation before this one was to go somewhere else and start a new country. Too bad there is no land left on the planet to move to. You can't try new ideas that would flip the worlds political ideologies on their head without somewhere to try it. The alternative is what all the communist countries and most of Europe did in the last 200 years - violent revolutions overthrowing the current regime. Problem is, our regime isn't nearly as bad as those regimes were, so the pressure isn't there and it is much harder to justify. I'm all up for a floating city on Venus, though.
- rayiner 13y ago
  > The solution in every generation before this one was to go somewhere else and start a new country. That's not true. England transitioned from a feudal society into its modern state with a shocking amount of continuity.
  - yareally 13y ago
    If omitting things like the War of the Roses, Wars of the Three Kingdoms and the English Civil War, then yes, they did have a good amount of continuity (at least when compared to much of what mainland Europe went from the end of the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution). However, they were not without their times of chaos and uncertainty.
    - rayiner 13y ago
      The English civil war is a good example of continuity. Despite the violence, it was a war between supporters of the monarchy and supporters of parliament, two institutions that had existed for hundreds of years. Unlikr in other countries, nobody was trying to wipe the slate and start over. It should be noted that we also had a civil war to decide the boundaries of powers in our government (between the states and the federal government).
      - yareally 13y ago
        It was more than just Monarchy versus Parliament though. The Roundheads in Parliament were ultra-conservative Puritans that wanted to reform British Culture to match their beliefs as sort of a "counter-culture" to what they considered the extravagance/depravity of the Monarchy. Of course not all members of Parliament were Roundheads, but they were stuck until the death of Cromwell in following much of what they demanded. In some ways, no different than the Iranian Revolution (if not reading too far into details). While you are correct in that it involved 2 labels of British Society that had been around for years, the details behind each faction and the changes that the leaders of the side of Parliament wanted to bring were more discontinuous. If Cromwell's supporters and his son had been able to hold onto power after his death, I would imagine Great Britain to have changed in some striking ways over the next few centuries.

by Torgo 13y ago

rayiner 13y ago

> Regardless of the disorganization, there is a set of people at the top that are going to be extremely difficult to dislodge, and they will thwart your every move. You don't need to dislodge them. You just need to convince them that you've got a political platform that will get votes, to counter demographic trends (people who remember the Soviet Union dying off, etc) that don't work in their favor. Bill surveillance as an attack on religious groups, a way for the IRS to more strictly enforce tax laws, etc, and you can present them with a platform that will get votes from their base. I haven't been watching the news lately, but I can't believe that the republicans aren't already trying to tie the NSA thing to the IRS thing.

Torgo 13y ago
You're right, I was coming at it presuming they don't want to address this issue. But I think I have a good case for that. These programs pump a lot of money into the defense industry, which they are beholden to. I don't see that changing. I could be wrong about that, but they are a strong lobby.
euroclydon 13y ago
I believe some republicans are trying to tie the NSA and IRS things to the Obama's campaign voter-database prowess.
nitrogen 13y ago
I think a lot of people who oppose ubiquitous, unchecked surveillance also want to fix the two-party system, and would have a hard time compromising on the second to accomplish the first.
- rayiner 13y ago
  I mean that's the basic problem, isn't it? Some people can't compromise. Many people who are proponents of privacy rights, oppose copyright, etc, consider themselves too good to participate in the political system, and would never stoop to, say, trying to find common ground with religious or social conservatives on the subject of surveillance, even though there might be politically valuable common ground to be found.

zanny 13y ago

The solution in every generation before this one was to go somewhere else and start a new country. Too bad there is no land left on the planet to move to. You can't try new ideas that would flip the worlds political ideologies on their head without somewhere to try it. The alternative is what all the communist countries and most of Europe did in the last 200 years - violent revolutions overthrowing the current regime. Problem is, our regime isn't nearly as bad as those regimes were, so the pressure isn't there and it is much harder to justify. I'm all up for a floating city on Venus, though.

rayiner 13y ago
> The solution in every generation before this one was to go somewhere else and start a new country. That's not true. England transitioned from a feudal society into its modern state with a shocking amount of continuity.
- yareally 13y ago
  If omitting things like the War of the Roses, Wars of the Three Kingdoms and the English Civil War, then yes, they did have a good amount of continuity (at least when compared to much of what mainland Europe went from the end of the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution). However, they were not without their times of chaos and uncertainty.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    The English civil war is a good example of continuity. Despite the violence, it was a war between supporters of the monarchy and supporters of parliament, two institutions that had existed for hundreds of years. Unlikr in other countries, nobody was trying to wipe the slate and start over. It should be noted that we also had a civil war to decide the boundaries of powers in our government (between the states and the federal government).
    - yareally 13y ago
      It was more than just Monarchy versus Parliament though. The Roundheads in Parliament were ultra-conservative Puritans that wanted to reform British Culture to match their beliefs as sort of a "counter-culture" to what they considered the extravagance/depravity of the Monarchy. Of course not all members of Parliament were Roundheads, but they were stuck until the death of Cromwell in following much of what they demanded. In some ways, no different than the Iranian Revolution (if not reading too far into details). While you are correct in that it involved 2 labels of British Society that had been around for years, the details behind each faction and the changes that the leaders of the side of Parliament wanted to bring were more discontinuous. If Cromwell's supporters and his son had been able to hold onto power after his death, I would imagine Great Britain to have changed in some striking ways over the next few centuries.