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I'm not sure if anyone has ever done this before, but it might be worth considering what the US Congress has done correctly. Namely, they haven't really screwed
by karmacondon 12y ago
I'm not sure if anyone has ever done this before, but it might be worth considering what the US Congress has done correctly. Namely, they haven't really screwed things up. America is still here, and is still the most powerful and respected* organization of humans to ever exist. That does count for something.
There was talk here not too long ago about comparing programmers who fly by the seat of their pants and end up looking like heroes to programmers who write solid, maintainable and reliable code. The boss notices when you pull an all nighter and crank out thousands of lines of code to solve a P1 critical bug. But they notice less often the programmers who write good code that doesn't produce a lot of bugs in the first place. Congress is kind of like the second programmer. Their bosses, the voters, generally pay no thought to their passing of procedural matters, vetting various candidates, oversight meetings and routine votes. C-SPAN viewership will attest to this. People only care when there is drama, scandal or crisis. It's a surprisingly thankless job, and like the all the rest of us congress people tend to focus on money as a meaningless way to keep score.
On balance, the entire US government has done more good than bad. This generation was handed a finely tuned machine with one mandate: Don't fuck it up. And they haven't so far. Of course things could always be better. I wish that congress would do the things that I want them to do, and not the things that other people want them to do. But they haven't caused me any problems in particular, and haven't harmed most of the people that I know. It's very easy to complain about how someone else does their job, but obviously difficult to do it better ourselves. We have the option of firing hundreds of them at a time. We're just waiting for them to give us a reason to do so.
* "respected" in the "envied and feared" sense, not the "what a nice bunch of people" sense
- stingraycharles 12y agoIf your whole argument boils down to "well, we're still alive and respected", it is not a good srgument. I understand there is no "control group", but it would be interesting to see what would happen if various raised issues were resolved. Also, I wonder whether the US will remain the most powerful nation say, 50 years down the road.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- vegetor 12y agoI'm not even going to honour that zealousness with a serious comment, I got too much self respect.
- hatmatrix 12y ago"Namely, they haven't really screwed things up." Could it be that in the past, external factors prevented that from happening: the industrial revolution, 2 world wars, the cold war, etc. But in the world we're in now, they aren't set up properly to save the declining domestic quality of life for the average citizen (e.g., see arguments along the lines of _The Two Income Trap_)?