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It's a shame the US civil war ruined the concept of a confederation forever
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@Alex they don't work. sociopaths are all unified in wanting more power at any cost. everything else ends up losing to squabbles.
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@Alex problem is sociopaths will just take everything in the end, if they aren't burned off like weeds.
like america tried being a confederacy but people like rockefeller come by and zip everything up under their ownership and then become more powerful than the state, and then just take over the state.
or as a recent irl shitpost goes, "our medicine is the result of a robber oil baron protecting his investments in war criminals (mustard gas factories.) no wonder health is fucked."
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Personally I just think smaller mostly independent systems have a greater chance of having more freedom and having at least one of them work out well, and I view confederation as a way to enable a multitude of small systems to reap some of the advantages of a larger system (mainly mutual aid and defense) with much less risk the corruption and oppression that a larger system rapidly spirals into.
I don't view it as an ideal system or anything like that, just as one superior to a centralized federation, and as a stepping stone towards more minimal governments.
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I think that's a flaw inherent in basically any system of government, unfortunately.
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@Alex one thing i noticed in my failed career of strategy games is when looking at a scenario, and all the options seem terrible, there is one overlooked option of "don't be in this situation." which basically says the situation you are in is bad/unwinnable and you have to figure out why you ended up *here* to begin with.
i think history ends up being a bit of that too. we see people in 'current world state' trying to make a ham fisted and direct attempt at a problem. which is, ok, unsophisticated people do this (the toddler vs harvard experiments where toddlers just startj amming noodles in to meatballs), but historical knowledge + systems analysis might suggest that you are in the wrong problem space. rather than milking millionaires to pay for overpriced services (medicare) perhaps the problem is why the services are overpriced (capitalism, perverse incentives, protectionism laws)
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@Alex the other thing is like celts and gauls were kind of nicer but volatile and the romans more focused yet sociopathic (in later emperors) governance won in the end. the sociopaths always win, basically.
the reason things are not nice is because nice people get paved over.
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@Alex jefferson is long-term viable in a sense that when they all said those things it was with the caveat that "the price of liberty is eternal vigilance."
in quinn terms it means every generation has to remember sociopaths infest and win everything and burn them off on sight.
we don't do that. we get comfortable and then make weak men.
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I agree with this. Ideally we'd try to find a system resistant to this kind of corruption longterm, but from what I've seen, if you have a system that resists corruption, once that corruption inevitably sets in (and it always will), that corruption will have commandeered the means intended to prevent it from taking root, thus entrenching it far deeper than it would be otherwise. A system that takes a decade to corrupt might only take a single election to fix, whereas a system that takes a century to corrupt will be almost impossible to fix, and then you're just stuck waiting for its inevitable collapse centuries later.
I don't think there's an actual solution to this problem, aside from Jefferson's "tree of liberty" quote, and even that isn't a particularly viable long term solution.
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@Alex its also the role of negative reinforcement in living systems. its basically there as a means to say "NO." when the living system does something actively wrong. there is a positive and negative arc for both, and humans overly rely on the negative arcs on their own, but you do actually need to use them sometimes.
which is why i tend to advocate politicians and execs need to be punished for attempts and not allowed to walk their bullshit back. plebs don't get second chances, they get felony convictions. since the rule of law is conceptually about everyone having to follow the same rules, it goes that business elites also need to be appropriately burned for failed power plays.
feudal people understood this more than we do.
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@Alex court politics fucky because everyone wants more shit but while its illegal to strike down a noble, it doesn't apply quite as much if you get caught trying to commit murder. so they have to temper their power grabs. there won't be second chances at them. :blobcatdunno:
nowadays there is the exhaustion strategy where you just re-run laws like SOPA every goddamn session and just wait people out to be too exhausted to resist it. its the infosec line of the public has to win every round but the billionaire only has to win once.
:trans_paw:⛧Alex⛧:trans_paw:
iced depresso
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