4 ms·

> And once the government starts operating outside the law, answerable to no one but itself, there’s no way to rein it back in, short of revolution. Exactly. O

• CapitalistCartr 13y ago
  In the early Nineties the White government of South Africa conceded power to the Black African National Congress. At that time, they had made about six nukes, with the help of Israel, which they weren't willing to hand over to the new government, so they dismantled them and the whole program.
• trebor 13y ago
  And a revolution fighting against modern weaponry is practically guaranteed to fail. With the government constantly trying to restrict the citizens' access to weaponry there's no way to even make parody (pun intended) to hold the government accountable. Add to that the fact we've a standing military, something the Constitution never authorized, that's professionally trained. We've had problematic generals before but none of them tried to seize control of the country, yet. If a revolution breaks out we aren't talking about a conflict the size of Syria's or Egypt's. We're probably talking about the biggest civil war ever, or a military coup. And the outcome of it (no matter if it worked or failed) would effectively gut the USA. Tyranny is almost assured. We're on the bubble right now if the outcome hasn't already been decided (and we won't know except in hind-sight).
  • abawany 13y ago
    I hope that just partly like in Syria, the troops would eventually balk at killing their fellow citizens. However, I admit that such a possibility is less likely for armed forces that are engaging in war remotely. *: I believe that at some point, the majority of Syrian resistance was formerly the Syrian army.
• jerf 13y ago
  The British Isles have a long history of the government relatively painlessly surrendering and/or distributing bits of its power going back centuries. It of course also has some examples of it being done only painfully and with blood, but there's still multiple existence proofs there. I don't think we've reached the point where this is out of the question per se. I do think it's pretty unlikely that we're going to be able to just extract out this particular bit of government, though. The only hope is a broad-based move in a libertarian direction. Plink just the NSA right now and adhoc combinations of other agencies will seamlessly move right in. To name one example, the DEA would happily step in to this sort of surveillance if the NSA wasn't there. (I operate on a "direction" theory of voting. You don't have to be a libertarian right now to vote that way. You just have to think we have too much government right now. It's not a forever commitment. If we somehow finally reach "too little", feel free to vote for "bigger".)
• kaonashi 13y ago
  The security state received a nice trim back in the 70's. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee
• tomjen3 13y ago
  Cincinatti gave up his power to rule Rome absolutely as soon as his reason for becoming dictator ended, so there is that.
• gizmo686 13y ago
  Ignoring the cases where the government was on the loosing side of a war, the only example I can think of is the American colonies, which voluntarily gave up power when they formed the union.
• narrator 13y ago
  The Eastern Roman Empire gave up a lot of its power when they decentralized the military in favor of the "theme" system. Ironically, this reform was undertaken in order to more effectively combat the constant Islamic invasions that were taking place at the time (More at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theme_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theme_system).