Note: For unknown reasons, Substack failed to save part of the essay and as a result a prior draft was published. I have updated the text with the correct version. The section on the first wall is now much more detailed. Sorry for the inconvenience!
Many consider the Constitution to be a coup against the Articles of Confederation, and that we would have been far better off under the latter than the former. Curious to your thoughts on this.
In retrospect, I think it's clear we'd have been better off with the Articles of Confederation. The Federalists were proven wrong on every claim they made; power *did* centralize, a standing army *did* get created, the militia *did fail* to keep power in check, etc etc.
Regarding the Federalists being wrong, don't forget the Welfare Clause in the Preamble. They claimed that could not be used as a excuse to give away the Treasury to the unworthy, and yet Roosevelt did just that and made a point to name it "Welfare" for that very reason.
The 1861 crisis was the first point of failure, and the Confederates kept much of the ideas from 1789 in their Constitution and improved on many of them, such as this big one;
Article I, Section 9
Every law or resolution having the force of law, shall relate to but one subject, and that shall be expressed in the title.
I used to take an underground periodical in the 1990's that was way ahead of its time. In that era of a regenerated Patriot movement and widespread sentiment within for a restoration of the Republic, it was shocking to see the editorial stance evolve into a position that the American Republic and its Constitution were beyond saving and that our efforts ought to be directed toward what comes after and doing better next time. While it was hard to accept at the time, 25 years have show them to be correct.
Wow! You have convinced me that I need to finally get around to reading the Federalist Papers. I had no idea that Alexander Hamilton endorsed private gun ownership as a check on the federal government. I always associated that with Jefferson.
---
Regarding vertical separation: I have come to the conclusion that the reason the Democrats have become such serious centralists is that for Blue America, there is no such thing as local government. If you live in a county or city with 200,000+ people, your local government isn't really local. And since the federal government does have better rule of law than many city governments, federal bureaucrats -- and criminal gangs -- are more responsive than the titular local government. "You cannot fight City Hall"
Maybe the solution is to leverage the sentiments that launched BLM and Antifa and give those "anarchists" what they were truly asking for: local government. Do a bit of "formalizing" as Mencius Moldbug would put it.
"A government of laws, not of men" is a neat concept. Lots of people have wanted it throughout history. Clearly we aren't there yet, and America has done as well as it because this series of walls kept the racoons out for as long as it did.
Bitcoiners, however, have a working prototype. The 'crypto bro' manifesto says, hey, you can get rich in a few years if you invest in this shitcoin. Bitcoiners say, hey, the revolution started a decade ago and it'll probably keep going another few decades. If you can handle 80% drawdowns, you're welcome to join. Either way, you're along for the ride.
I had always thought than Montesquieu's "executive power" is a farce. As the royalist authors Rivarol and Bonald said : the only power is to decide of the law. "Executing laws" is just an employee stuff.
Same thing for Judiciary power : it's not a power, it's a delegation of power for... apply the law on people or judgements based on those laws.
Thus, the only power is the legislative one. Actually stolen by the Supreme Court.
IMO, the best way to have an efficient power and to preserve liberty is : legislative power in the hands of a king. National Assembly Delegates would be elected to control administrations and to use of a veto power (at 66.67% needed). If the king don't agree with the veto, he could make a referendum. His law would be revoqued if 50 (or 60) % of the electoral registered voters vote "no".
Of course, that's just an outline, wrote in bad english (I'm french), but it would be better than actual mess in France or USA.
Oh, and the constitution must emphasize that laws as patriot act can never be implemented
Jan 6, 2023·edited Jan 6, 2023Liked by Tree of Woe
The Supreme Court is limited by the need to have cases appealed to it, and by its inability to decide more than a few cases a year.
Also you're under estimating executive power. Executive power means you get to decide how the laws are actually applied in practice. Witness the numerous executive agencies with their ability to write "regulations" that have much more legislative power than the Supreme Court on a day-to-day basis.
The move from "Landed" voting to non-Landed forms of voting was inevitable.
This is because the movement/flow of Money in the West grew rapidly. In particular, during the era of "New Imperialism" (i.e in the Victorian age), the signs of decoupling from gold + silver had already begun. Such a trend meant that the vote had to be "scaled up" to include more people so that they wouldn't (like the average uppity peasant throughout History) "go feral".
Human Nature (and a proper understanding of its various iterations) therefore is the main determinant. One can make all sorts of "sophisticated" rules and put them on all sorts of sophisticated documents and whatnot... Human Nature, so long it is unaccounted for properly; will always win the "Long Marathon".
Jan 5, 2023·edited Jan 5, 2023Liked by Tree of Woe
When the Spartan general Lysander Routed the Athenian fleet at the Battle of Aegospotami, he surrounded Athens with the sole intention of starving it into surrender. In those days, such siege tactics (i.e. "pure attrition") was viewed by the common Spartan as "cowardice" and nothing more.
Here is a relevant snippet regarding his exploits:
>> Lysander finally set sail with some 200 ships, and among his early actions, which are variously reported by the sources, was the enslavement of the population of Cedreae, an ally of Athens. He continued toward the Hellespont to threaten the route of grain transports to Athens from the Black Sea, forcing the Athenians to send their fleet, 180 ships, in pursuit. Lysander set up anchor at Lampsacus and plundered it, while the Athenians took up a position at Aegospotami in the opposing shore of the straits. For several days Lysander refused battle, studying the opponent's moves, until, during a moment of enemy carelessness, he surprised the Athenians and captured most of their vessels as they were still ashore and unmanned. The entire Athenian fleet was gone, and Sparta had finally won the Peloponnesian War.[23]
Now in full command of the seas, Lysander began touring the Aegean to receive the surrender of enemy strongholds, ordering all captured Athenian garrisons and cleruchs (colonists) home in order to overcrowd the city and hasten its surrender through famine.[24] In many Greek cities, he installed ten-man governing boards (decarchies) whose members were selected from the oligarchic clubs he had sponsored earlier, supported and supervised by a Spartan harmost (military governor).[25] Democrats and other opponents of his narrow oligarchies were often massacred or banished.[26] In a propaganda gesture he restored places like Aegina, Melos and Scione to populations whom the Athenians had forcibly uprooted throughout the course of the war.[27] <<
We all know the rest: The Thirty Tyrants were installed over a defeated Athens that devolved from then onward into more Tyranny and Despotism. The "world's first democratic republic" ended thus with a whimper, and not a bang. Plato wrote His "Republic" whilst in the company of said Vile Traitors and Scum (i.e. The Thirty), so no wonder he spoke glowingly of "The Philosopher Kings".
It is said that history repeats first as tragedy and then as farce... clearly we are experiencing both simultaneously. Fortress America is being attrited into Total Surrender. Of course, we have developed "siegecraft" several generations more so than Lysander himself could have envisioned. In particular, modern siegecraft and its attritions are not merely in the realm of the physical.
Whether it is the Alphabet people's onslaught on the family unit; the technocrat assault on *the human being* as such, etc, etc... we have the same motif that Lysander from some 2,500 years ago came up with to end the decades long Peloponnesian War: Strike a Decisive Blow at the Vehicle/Engine of Military Prowess (for Athens, it was her Navy) and then Attrit away!
If anything, the American people are fortunate that they are getting the Attrition first and the Decisive Blow second. At least in this manner (unlike the Athenians) they have sufficient time to develop some false semblance of hope and comfort themselves with it as the end approaches.
The Athenians never had such a luxury; no such mercy was afforded to him as Lysander's thugs Raped and Pillaged the city. If the American Elite have some semblance of intelligence left, they ought to negotiate Terms of Surrender that best avoid (or at least minimize) what throughout Human History has been a constant: The victorious army's Sack of the City.
Because unlike Lysander's goons. this is not going to be merely a "Sack" of the physical sort. For if Siegecraft has already iterated several generations and made "progress" on that front, so too we can infer that "Crimes Inflicted" and whatnot will likewise have done so as well.
> A Constitution is essentially a compact or contract between citizens.
I came to believe that the American Constitution was more of a compact among the States, rather than the citizens. It's a slight, but very important difference.
Also, I think you are taking too idealistic of an approach. If ever The Constitution was a Citadel of Freedom, it was only rhetorically.
I'm taking a rhetorical approach in comparing it to Minas Tirith for sure. It's mostly just an interesting tact to take in understanding why things suck now.
I think there's a strong case that the Constitution was a compact among the States, though not as strong a case as for the Articles of Confederation.
Jan 6, 2023·edited Jan 6, 2023Liked by Tree of Woe
> I'm taking a rhetorical approach in comparing it to Minas Tirith for sure. It's mostly just an interesting tact to take in understanding why things suck now.
+1
> though not as strong a case as for the Articles of Confederation
The Constitutional Convention was supposed to revise the Articles of Confederation. Thus if the Articles of Confederation were a compact among the states, by extension so was the Constitution.
The important difference I am talking about is roughly the following: the States wanted a stronger Union for pragmatic reasons, but they did not want it to be too strong to preserve their power. Hence most, if not all, the freedoms and liberties granted by the Constitution should be viewed in that light: they were supposed to weaken the Federal Government in order to give the States (not the People) more power. All seven Walls that you have so aptly introduced served that purpose. The fact that they also provided the People with more freedom was incidental.
By the way, here is an example of the rhetorical genius of Hamilton & Co.: the original Federalists were those who supported the Independence and the Articles of Confederation. Hamilton was not a Federalist, he was a Nationalist. However, he adopted the moniker for himself and his supporters, to put their opponents in the unenviable position of trying to prove that they were not anti-Federalist. [Compare: being called a racist nowadays.]
This all makes sense if history does not lie. But it does. As Acton observed "There are no great men, only bad men, and they write the histories".
To paraphrase another great man, "Never trust a lawyer". Madison killed the Constitution, to erase a single phrase of Thomas Paine's. Acually, there were two troublesome phrases, but one overrode all else.
The aristocrats and plutocrats deliberately created an unnamed monarchy to protect their interests. They also made sure that the real inspiration for the Constitution, Thomas Paine, was excluded because his works contained two key phrases "The people are the source of all authority" was the most important, and "the aged, the sick and the infirm must be supported by public funds". The rich and powerful could not tolerate either.
But all of this circumvents an overiding consideration, one which explains why the word DEMOCRACY was carefully omitted. Because in a genune democracy you do not need a constitution, a bill of rights, or a treaty. As Lincoln clearly understood, all you need is "Government of the people, by the people and for the people".
Is there anybody out there who can grasp this? It meaans that "The people, fully informed on all issues, formulate policy. This policy is then implemented by the Public Service body".
The End.
No parliaments are necessary, No representation is necessary. No voting for candidates of parties. No majority votes. No elections. These are all political theatre to hide the exercise of central power, and as Acton also said, "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely". That is why the US of A was corrupted long before the Constitution was ratified.
Because the US is 39th on the global literacy scale, and falling fast, there seems to be no possibility of establishing a genuine democracy. The one slim possibility is if one warlike leader emerges who creates a dictatorship first and then implements democracy. The problem is, that such power would corrupt before the democracy was installed.
Aw shucks, Woeful. I try to do my li'l' bit to add to the mountain of human despair and hopelessness. But once the academics and scientists; bankers and plutocrats, really get going I will be knocked off my perch by the shrieking victims of Save The Earth.
Your remarks are both profoundly, but partially correct, and as dangerous as a toddler playing with nuclear weapons.
The correct: Yes, many of the Founders were property owners and much of their property was the result of rent-seeking or worse. George Washington was an Insider Trader par excellence., and he owned slaves.
BUT: that aristocratic impulse to defend the idea of Property is useful. It allows people to aspire to Property at great risk. For example, I have been working without pay for the past 7 months on a potentially profitable project on the assumption that I will own the results should it bear fruit.
Ideally, rent-seeking activities should be taxed to unprofitability, but given the choice of allowing some rent seeking in return for potential high rewards for risk vs. punishing taxation (or capricious rule of law) for success, I'll side with the rent-seeking aristocrats.
---
But here is where you are a naive baby: Democracy does not scale! The Founders understood this because many of them experienced democracy in action. To this day many New England towns practice true democracy., and their democracies predate our republic.
True democracy is HARD. I know this from direct experience. I learned this as a fraternity man in college. Even with a voting base of around 60 men (with very little Diversity, as in, one Iranian, one Filipino and a few Jews, and the rest White), and with limited stakes (how many kegs to order this weekend, what party theme, etc.) direct democracy was *still* tedious, and decisions tended to migrate to the executives, not because they were power-seeking, but because deciding things democratically is HARD.
In a parliamentary body of 60 people, each legislator gets ONE minute per hour to speak on average. (Actually less, as there is procedural overhead.)
In a truly Borg'd body where everyone is one the same page and/or willing to defer to the leadership, you can scale upwards. When I sat in on a Women's Democrat caucus, I saw this work. It was spooky.
When the group is deeply opinionated, such as a meeting of Libertarians, even a group of 15 is unworkable using Robert's Rules of Order. I know this first hand. Libertarians can game the crap out of Robert's Rules.
If you want to see the breakdown of direct democracy in all its gory, watch a national Libertarian Party Convention on CSPAN. Take ~1000 delegates who all believe they are equal or better than the leadership and appointed committees and behold an incredible spectacle of parliamentary procedure abuse. Bring popcorn. It's hilarious.
In my travels I have seen some very interesting experiments in improving democracy, including experiments from the ultra hippie Left. Two results stand out:
1. Look up Open Space Technology. It's a market approach to forming committees that comes from African tribes. It's rather cool, but you still need proper entire body voting afterwards.
2. Look up Range Voting. It is possible to rationally vote on more than two options/candidates if you get to rate each option/candidate.
With these two technologies in place, you can scale democracy up a bit more than what the Founders believed could work.
But only a bit.
Democracy does not scale. You need subsidiarity where possible, and representation where you really need a central government solution.
See also the link I made in an earlier comment on the mathematical limitations of democracy.
Well, you established a few facts, that's for sure.
First, you can't read... meaning, you are so pompous you felt you do not need to read. As an outcome, my central point slipped passed you unabsorbed. The US has no previous experience with democracy and has never been a democracy.
Ergo, you have no idea what a democracy is.
A parting point, whether or not somebody 200 years ago had a slave is irrelevant and means nothing.
I actively oppose the use of most plastics, especially in the retail industry, yet I use plastic bags. Does this make me a hypocrite or a plastics producer. No. It means I live in the monsoonal tropics with 98% humidity and 34 degrees celcius, and condensation from milk and meat causes the paper bags to fall apart in seconds. Living in a wilderness village, no other bags are available.
200 years ago, pretty much everybody had a slave or two, but sometimes they called it indentured labour, family, or wife. But I see labels confuse you.
As to your lessons on worldliness and property speculation, I was in a national top 4% of residential sales for Ray White Real Estate franchise. I can ID a vendor or buyer in seconds. You are a rationalising landlord. It's who you are, so go for it.
You have established yourself as a rude midwit who deserves less than what you are going to get if you get what claim you want.
Your land is basically uninhabited compared to India and China. Prepare for genocide unless you are prepared to defend some concept of Property.
The US was never democratic overall but the US started off as THESE United States. SOME of those states practiced democracy. Others did not. New England towns practiced direct democracy back in in the day and some still do in this day. Look up "Town Meeting."
States further south were indeed not democratic. Many of my ancestors were British aristocrats fleeing republican trends in the homeland. Guilty as charged. Allow me to display my pinky ring and give you a tour of my sharks with lasers.
Pro tip: don't claim I can't read. I read my first words when I was three years old. My parents throttled my reading abilities early on to prevent me from becoming an asocial freak.
They failed.
You have been warned.
I can doom you and your progeny (if you have any) to a horrible fate by doing....nothing at all.
As a supercilious ninny, you are fated to get worse than you deserve, unless you wake up.
Oooooooh goody. I have driven you into ranting and exposing even more of your ego. But, yes, you are right. I happily accept that I am a "rude midwit", because nobody has thus complimented me before. I am generally thought to be witless. so thanks.
And yes, I know about the adherence to old values in those towns and I even have a shakey theory about New Hampshire primaries, along those lines.
But you still can't read.
If I asked you now, in front of an audience, what I wrote, you would get it wrong. But I guess this failing is intergenerational, which you yourself reveal. However, on the 'supercilious' thingie, I'm not quite sure how you draw this conclusion. I left school at 16, worked cattle from the saddle, and have little to no education. My father was a musician and my mother was stark raving mad, and killed my father. He was a pacifist, poor thing.
I live in an Aboriginal community and we seldom speak English, only our local laguages and I am surrounded by wild buffalo, wild pigs, many dangerous snakes, crocodiles, urandji and box jellyfish, and tiger sharks and people here use shovel nose spears. If you plan to erase me from God's fair earth, in this part of the world you will stick out like dogs balls. And, anyway, get in the queue. I have quite lost count of the people who tried to kill me but there is probably some significance in the reality that they are mostly dead. All except the last one and he is still trying.
But, Fabius, all this just because I pointed out you could not define democracy. tsk tsk. Everybody else had at least a plausible reason for wanting me dead.
You need to work on your reading comprehension. I do not want you dead or physically harmed in any way. I would like to see your way of life preserved.
I was warning, not threatening. (OK, I "threatened: to do nothing -- perhaps I got too cute with the rhetoric.)
Your way of life requires large amounts of land per capita. It is good that the Australian government is preserving property rights for some of the remaining Aborigines. This is the good part of PC thinking.
However, your way of life is dependent on the might and determination of the Australian state -- which is rather puny compared to the rising national socialist superpower to your north. And it's punier yet now that Australia has done away with its militia capabilities. And if Australia adopts the PC thinking on immigration that infects the rest of the Anglosphere, Australia will be peaceably invaded and taken over by people who see your land as basically unused, and thus ripe for settlement.
Your way of life will be limited to the most inhospitable parts of the Outback.
And that is sad.
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Subsidiarity. Have your little island of "true democracy." Just recognize that there needs to be something rather more hierarchical and disciplined in order to protect that island.
The "genuine democracy" that you allude to scales even worse than a New England town meeting. Such societies are generally limited to small band nomadic hunter gatherers, where the harshness of the climate obviates the need for establishing territory. The Arctic Circle and the Kalahari Desert come to mind.
Brew up some COVID Extra Strength that wipes out 99+ percent of the population, and the type of society you envision might work for the remainder.
And no, you are not fully living in such a society. You are communicating via computer and Internet -- products of sophisticated forms of property and rule of law., products for which only a tiny fraction of society, if that, are "fully informed." Our technological civilization requires a great deal of specialization.
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Another reason for my poor reading comprehension is that you used words which have a long historical definitions that differ greatly from what you were referring to. The word Democracy goes back to ancient Greece, and referred to systems of voting for laws and public policy, not day to day activity. The ancient Athenians were not communal.
And, by the way, the Athenians handled the scaling problem of democracy by using a random sampling of their free male populace to form a legislature. Such a legislature can represent the will of the people thus sampled within the typical margin of error that pollsters claim to achieve.
--
When the Founders omitted the word "democracy" they were thinking of ancient Athens, New England town meetings, Old Testament style stonings, and Vikings banging spears against shields. They were also thinking of some of the democratic systems devised by the Native Americans, but those were not as fully communal/informal as what you are describing. Even after devastation from smallpox, the Native American population in what became the 13 colonies was still too dense for what you are describing.
There you go poor Fabius, you actually believe the Athenians 19% eligibility to vote constituted democracy. This was a community of inherited privilege and slavery, one above the other. It was never a democracy. Only the word is Greek. This was the propaganda devised by, many suggest, the City of London Khazarian’s. My guess is they were right. It sure worked on you.
Oh, and your Sherlockian deduction I don't live where I live because of the technology I am using, is merely the outcome of your distance from prosaic reality... unexpectedly, we are into our 18th day of monsoonal non-stop rain and I cannot go home until the waters and mud go down, even with my trusty 28 year old 4WD Landcruiser troopcarrier. Luckily, I am also our community's mechanic so I can maintain low tech too.
Unlike you, I cannot glare at the world from my upstairs window and plot the destruction of my legion enemies. I am a common worker, but with three jobs. I must go to work on house, water bore and airstrip construction while the sun shines, and then go to my job as researcher for a native Law project, and finally, when time permits, maintain my websites and emails and domestic duties. That's when I indulge myself with recreation time. OK?
Incidentally, no indigenous peoples were without traditional lands and none were aimlessly nomadic. They very sensibly followed food cycles dictated by expressions of mother nature. The Khazarians knew how to manipulate your superiority complex and thus enable you to dismiss indigenous peoples as primitives. Now we also know you are a colonial.
But now you are becoming tiresome, with your privileged pseudo upper-class tirades, distant as you are from everyday reality. You may be magnificently educated but you know nothing of the real world. Any American prepper could tell you that. You will not survive the coming civil strife and you will be shot as soon as you open your mouth. Had you listened to me you might have learned something useful. Trot along, please, Fabius.
> The aristocrats and plutocrats deliberately created an unnamed monarchy to protect their interests. They also made sure that the real inspiration for the Constitution, Thomas Paine, was excluded because his works contained two key phrases "The people are the source of all authority" was the most important, and "the aged, the sick and the infirm must be supported by public funds".
Good for them. Thomas Paine was frankly a radical nut and the country wouldn't have lasted the two centuries it did if his ideas had been implement. Eventually as part of FDR's New Deal, programs were in deed created to support the aged, sick, and infirm from public funds. We saw how that turned out.
With what is universally described as the worst public health safety net in the entire western world, what the hell are you talking about? Your response is pure ideology. Scandinavia, UK, Australia and New Zealand all had excellent health policies until the US Government moved in and converted these to the US failed model. Likewise, aged care, minimum wage, and insurance.
When America collapses, and collapse it will, the world will be freed from your anti-democratic imperial regime of exploitation and destruction. On this subject, I suggest you lobby your corrupt Congress to pull your troops and military installations out of the sixy sovereign nations thus occupied. If you do not pull them out and dismantle the installations, you may find the expulsions take the form of a mountain of body bags. Then will come the the international arrest squads for the perpetrators of the crimes against humanity and those who facilitated these. This will undoubtedly include academics who supported the policies, scientists who created bioweapons, and the manufacturers of the weapons used. I suspect America will be a quiet region of the Americas for a century thereafter.
Note: For unknown reasons, Substack failed to save part of the essay and as a result a prior draft was published. I have updated the text with the correct version. The section on the first wall is now much more detailed. Sorry for the inconvenience!
Many consider the Constitution to be a coup against the Articles of Confederation, and that we would have been far better off under the latter than the former. Curious to your thoughts on this.
In retrospect, I think it's clear we'd have been better off with the Articles of Confederation. The Federalists were proven wrong on every claim they made; power *did* centralize, a standing army *did* get created, the militia *did fail* to keep power in check, etc etc.
Regarding the Federalists being wrong, don't forget the Welfare Clause in the Preamble. They claimed that could not be used as a excuse to give away the Treasury to the unworthy, and yet Roosevelt did just that and made a point to name it "Welfare" for that very reason.
The 1861 crisis was the first point of failure, and the Confederates kept much of the ideas from 1789 in their Constitution and improved on many of them, such as this big one;
Article I, Section 9
Every law or resolution having the force of law, shall relate to but one subject, and that shall be expressed in the title.
I used to take an underground periodical in the 1990's that was way ahead of its time. In that era of a regenerated Patriot movement and widespread sentiment within for a restoration of the Republic, it was shocking to see the editorial stance evolve into a position that the American Republic and its Constitution were beyond saving and that our efforts ought to be directed toward what comes after and doing better next time. While it was hard to accept at the time, 25 years have show them to be correct.
Wow! You have convinced me that I need to finally get around to reading the Federalist Papers. I had no idea that Alexander Hamilton endorsed private gun ownership as a check on the federal government. I always associated that with Jefferson.
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Regarding vertical separation: I have come to the conclusion that the reason the Democrats have become such serious centralists is that for Blue America, there is no such thing as local government. If you live in a county or city with 200,000+ people, your local government isn't really local. And since the federal government does have better rule of law than many city governments, federal bureaucrats -- and criminal gangs -- are more responsive than the titular local government. "You cannot fight City Hall"
Maybe the solution is to leverage the sentiments that launched BLM and Antifa and give those "anarchists" what they were truly asking for: local government. Do a bit of "formalizing" as Mencius Moldbug would put it.
Much more here:
https://rulesforreactionaries.substack.com/p/rule-6-break-up-the-blue-zones
(Warning: it's a five-parter.)
Great point on the blue zones. I'll check out your five-parter. Glad I'm not the only one who does exhausting lengthy series around here...
ps thanks for recommending my TEDx talk to peeps!
"A government of laws, not of men" is a neat concept. Lots of people have wanted it throughout history. Clearly we aren't there yet, and America has done as well as it because this series of walls kept the racoons out for as long as it did.
Bitcoiners, however, have a working prototype. The 'crypto bro' manifesto says, hey, you can get rich in a few years if you invest in this shitcoin. Bitcoiners say, hey, the revolution started a decade ago and it'll probably keep going another few decades. If you can handle 80% drawdowns, you're welcome to join. Either way, you're along for the ride.
I had always thought than Montesquieu's "executive power" is a farce. As the royalist authors Rivarol and Bonald said : the only power is to decide of the law. "Executing laws" is just an employee stuff.
Same thing for Judiciary power : it's not a power, it's a delegation of power for... apply the law on people or judgements based on those laws.
Thus, the only power is the legislative one. Actually stolen by the Supreme Court.
IMO, the best way to have an efficient power and to preserve liberty is : legislative power in the hands of a king. National Assembly Delegates would be elected to control administrations and to use of a veto power (at 66.67% needed). If the king don't agree with the veto, he could make a referendum. His law would be revoqued if 50 (or 60) % of the electoral registered voters vote "no".
Of course, that's just an outline, wrote in bad english (I'm french), but it would be better than actual mess in France or USA.
Oh, and the constitution must emphasize that laws as patriot act can never be implemented
The Supreme Court is limited by the need to have cases appealed to it, and by its inability to decide more than a few cases a year.
Also you're under estimating executive power. Executive power means you get to decide how the laws are actually applied in practice. Witness the numerous executive agencies with their ability to write "regulations" that have much more legislative power than the Supreme Court on a day-to-day basis.
8. The exclusion of foreigners, women, boys under 21, and (usually) non-land-owners from voting to change any of the above walls.
I agree that recoupling voting rights with land ownership would do immeasurably more good than most people realize.
The move from "Landed" voting to non-Landed forms of voting was inevitable.
This is because the movement/flow of Money in the West grew rapidly. In particular, during the era of "New Imperialism" (i.e in the Victorian age), the signs of decoupling from gold + silver had already begun. Such a trend meant that the vote had to be "scaled up" to include more people so that they wouldn't (like the average uppity peasant throughout History) "go feral".
Human Nature (and a proper understanding of its various iterations) therefore is the main determinant. One can make all sorts of "sophisticated" rules and put them on all sorts of sophisticated documents and whatnot... Human Nature, so long it is unaccounted for properly; will always win the "Long Marathon".
When the Spartan general Lysander Routed the Athenian fleet at the Battle of Aegospotami, he surrounded Athens with the sole intention of starving it into surrender. In those days, such siege tactics (i.e. "pure attrition") was viewed by the common Spartan as "cowardice" and nothing more.
Here is a relevant snippet regarding his exploits:
>> Lysander finally set sail with some 200 ships, and among his early actions, which are variously reported by the sources, was the enslavement of the population of Cedreae, an ally of Athens. He continued toward the Hellespont to threaten the route of grain transports to Athens from the Black Sea, forcing the Athenians to send their fleet, 180 ships, in pursuit. Lysander set up anchor at Lampsacus and plundered it, while the Athenians took up a position at Aegospotami in the opposing shore of the straits. For several days Lysander refused battle, studying the opponent's moves, until, during a moment of enemy carelessness, he surprised the Athenians and captured most of their vessels as they were still ashore and unmanned. The entire Athenian fleet was gone, and Sparta had finally won the Peloponnesian War.[23]
Now in full command of the seas, Lysander began touring the Aegean to receive the surrender of enemy strongholds, ordering all captured Athenian garrisons and cleruchs (colonists) home in order to overcrowd the city and hasten its surrender through famine.[24] In many Greek cities, he installed ten-man governing boards (decarchies) whose members were selected from the oligarchic clubs he had sponsored earlier, supported and supervised by a Spartan harmost (military governor).[25] Democrats and other opponents of his narrow oligarchies were often massacred or banished.[26] In a propaganda gesture he restored places like Aegina, Melos and Scione to populations whom the Athenians had forcibly uprooted throughout the course of the war.[27] <<
We all know the rest: The Thirty Tyrants were installed over a defeated Athens that devolved from then onward into more Tyranny and Despotism. The "world's first democratic republic" ended thus with a whimper, and not a bang. Plato wrote His "Republic" whilst in the company of said Vile Traitors and Scum (i.e. The Thirty), so no wonder he spoke glowingly of "The Philosopher Kings".
It is said that history repeats first as tragedy and then as farce... clearly we are experiencing both simultaneously. Fortress America is being attrited into Total Surrender. Of course, we have developed "siegecraft" several generations more so than Lysander himself could have envisioned. In particular, modern siegecraft and its attritions are not merely in the realm of the physical.
Whether it is the Alphabet people's onslaught on the family unit; the technocrat assault on *the human being* as such, etc, etc... we have the same motif that Lysander from some 2,500 years ago came up with to end the decades long Peloponnesian War: Strike a Decisive Blow at the Vehicle/Engine of Military Prowess (for Athens, it was her Navy) and then Attrit away!
If anything, the American people are fortunate that they are getting the Attrition first and the Decisive Blow second. At least in this manner (unlike the Athenians) they have sufficient time to develop some false semblance of hope and comfort themselves with it as the end approaches.
The Athenians never had such a luxury; no such mercy was afforded to him as Lysander's thugs Raped and Pillaged the city. If the American Elite have some semblance of intelligence left, they ought to negotiate Terms of Surrender that best avoid (or at least minimize) what throughout Human History has been a constant: The victorious army's Sack of the City.
Because unlike Lysander's goons. this is not going to be merely a "Sack" of the physical sort. For if Siegecraft has already iterated several generations and made "progress" on that front, so too we can infer that "Crimes Inflicted" and whatnot will likewise have done so as well.
> A Constitution is essentially a compact or contract between citizens.
I came to believe that the American Constitution was more of a compact among the States, rather than the citizens. It's a slight, but very important difference.
Also, I think you are taking too idealistic of an approach. If ever The Constitution was a Citadel of Freedom, it was only rhetorically.
I'm taking a rhetorical approach in comparing it to Minas Tirith for sure. It's mostly just an interesting tact to take in understanding why things suck now.
I think there's a strong case that the Constitution was a compact among the States, though not as strong a case as for the Articles of Confederation.
> I'm taking a rhetorical approach in comparing it to Minas Tirith for sure. It's mostly just an interesting tact to take in understanding why things suck now.
+1
> though not as strong a case as for the Articles of Confederation
The Constitutional Convention was supposed to revise the Articles of Confederation. Thus if the Articles of Confederation were a compact among the states, by extension so was the Constitution.
The important difference I am talking about is roughly the following: the States wanted a stronger Union for pragmatic reasons, but they did not want it to be too strong to preserve their power. Hence most, if not all, the freedoms and liberties granted by the Constitution should be viewed in that light: they were supposed to weaken the Federal Government in order to give the States (not the People) more power. All seven Walls that you have so aptly introduced served that purpose. The fact that they also provided the People with more freedom was incidental.
By the way, here is an example of the rhetorical genius of Hamilton & Co.: the original Federalists were those who supported the Independence and the Articles of Confederation. Hamilton was not a Federalist, he was a Nationalist. However, he adopted the moniker for himself and his supporters, to put their opponents in the unenviable position of trying to prove that they were not anti-Federalist. [Compare: being called a racist nowadays.]
This all makes sense if history does not lie. But it does. As Acton observed "There are no great men, only bad men, and they write the histories".
To paraphrase another great man, "Never trust a lawyer". Madison killed the Constitution, to erase a single phrase of Thomas Paine's. Acually, there were two troublesome phrases, but one overrode all else.
The aristocrats and plutocrats deliberately created an unnamed monarchy to protect their interests. They also made sure that the real inspiration for the Constitution, Thomas Paine, was excluded because his works contained two key phrases "The people are the source of all authority" was the most important, and "the aged, the sick and the infirm must be supported by public funds". The rich and powerful could not tolerate either.
But all of this circumvents an overiding consideration, one which explains why the word DEMOCRACY was carefully omitted. Because in a genune democracy you do not need a constitution, a bill of rights, or a treaty. As Lincoln clearly understood, all you need is "Government of the people, by the people and for the people".
Is there anybody out there who can grasp this? It meaans that "The people, fully informed on all issues, formulate policy. This policy is then implemented by the Public Service body".
The End.
No parliaments are necessary, No representation is necessary. No voting for candidates of parties. No majority votes. No elections. These are all political theatre to hide the exercise of central power, and as Acton also said, "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely". That is why the US of A was corrupted long before the Constitution was ratified.
Because the US is 39th on the global literacy scale, and falling fast, there seems to be no possibility of establishing a genuine democracy. The one slim possibility is if one warlike leader emerges who creates a dictatorship first and then implements democracy. The problem is, that such power would corrupt before the democracy was installed.
You guys are fucked.
It is a source of perennial joy that no matter how dismal my view of things, someone here has one that's even more dismal :-D
It's a good thing I didn't call the blog "Contemplations on the Tree of Optimism"!
The Woe-ception has certainly grown stronger by the day here!
Aw shucks, Woeful. I try to do my li'l' bit to add to the mountain of human despair and hopelessness. But once the academics and scientists; bankers and plutocrats, really get going I will be knocked off my perch by the shrieking victims of Save The Earth.
Your remarks are both profoundly, but partially correct, and as dangerous as a toddler playing with nuclear weapons.
The correct: Yes, many of the Founders were property owners and much of their property was the result of rent-seeking or worse. George Washington was an Insider Trader par excellence., and he owned slaves.
BUT: that aristocratic impulse to defend the idea of Property is useful. It allows people to aspire to Property at great risk. For example, I have been working without pay for the past 7 months on a potentially profitable project on the assumption that I will own the results should it bear fruit.
Ideally, rent-seeking activities should be taxed to unprofitability, but given the choice of allowing some rent seeking in return for potential high rewards for risk vs. punishing taxation (or capricious rule of law) for success, I'll side with the rent-seeking aristocrats.
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But here is where you are a naive baby: Democracy does not scale! The Founders understood this because many of them experienced democracy in action. To this day many New England towns practice true democracy., and their democracies predate our republic.
True democracy is HARD. I know this from direct experience. I learned this as a fraternity man in college. Even with a voting base of around 60 men (with very little Diversity, as in, one Iranian, one Filipino and a few Jews, and the rest White), and with limited stakes (how many kegs to order this weekend, what party theme, etc.) direct democracy was *still* tedious, and decisions tended to migrate to the executives, not because they were power-seeking, but because deciding things democratically is HARD.
In a parliamentary body of 60 people, each legislator gets ONE minute per hour to speak on average. (Actually less, as there is procedural overhead.)
In a truly Borg'd body where everyone is one the same page and/or willing to defer to the leadership, you can scale upwards. When I sat in on a Women's Democrat caucus, I saw this work. It was spooky.
When the group is deeply opinionated, such as a meeting of Libertarians, even a group of 15 is unworkable using Robert's Rules of Order. I know this first hand. Libertarians can game the crap out of Robert's Rules.
If you want to see the breakdown of direct democracy in all its gory, watch a national Libertarian Party Convention on CSPAN. Take ~1000 delegates who all believe they are equal or better than the leadership and appointed committees and behold an incredible spectacle of parliamentary procedure abuse. Bring popcorn. It's hilarious.
In my travels I have seen some very interesting experiments in improving democracy, including experiments from the ultra hippie Left. Two results stand out:
1. Look up Open Space Technology. It's a market approach to forming committees that comes from African tribes. It's rather cool, but you still need proper entire body voting afterwards.
2. Look up Range Voting. It is possible to rationally vote on more than two options/candidates if you get to rate each option/candidate.
With these two technologies in place, you can scale democracy up a bit more than what the Founders believed could work.
But only a bit.
Democracy does not scale. You need subsidiarity where possible, and representation where you really need a central government solution.
See also the link I made in an earlier comment on the mathematical limitations of democracy.
>Democracy does not scale
Related: most healthy families practice communism - from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. Does not scale, though.
Fabius Monarchus...
Well, you established a few facts, that's for sure.
First, you can't read... meaning, you are so pompous you felt you do not need to read. As an outcome, my central point slipped passed you unabsorbed. The US has no previous experience with democracy and has never been a democracy.
Ergo, you have no idea what a democracy is.
A parting point, whether or not somebody 200 years ago had a slave is irrelevant and means nothing.
I actively oppose the use of most plastics, especially in the retail industry, yet I use plastic bags. Does this make me a hypocrite or a plastics producer. No. It means I live in the monsoonal tropics with 98% humidity and 34 degrees celcius, and condensation from milk and meat causes the paper bags to fall apart in seconds. Living in a wilderness village, no other bags are available.
200 years ago, pretty much everybody had a slave or two, but sometimes they called it indentured labour, family, or wife. But I see labels confuse you.
As to your lessons on worldliness and property speculation, I was in a national top 4% of residential sales for Ray White Real Estate franchise. I can ID a vendor or buyer in seconds. You are a rationalising landlord. It's who you are, so go for it.
You have established yourself as a rude midwit who deserves less than what you are going to get if you get what claim you want.
Your land is basically uninhabited compared to India and China. Prepare for genocide unless you are prepared to defend some concept of Property.
The US was never democratic overall but the US started off as THESE United States. SOME of those states practiced democracy. Others did not. New England towns practiced direct democracy back in in the day and some still do in this day. Look up "Town Meeting."
States further south were indeed not democratic. Many of my ancestors were British aristocrats fleeing republican trends in the homeland. Guilty as charged. Allow me to display my pinky ring and give you a tour of my sharks with lasers.
Pro tip: don't claim I can't read. I read my first words when I was three years old. My parents throttled my reading abilities early on to prevent me from becoming an asocial freak.
They failed.
You have been warned.
I can doom you and your progeny (if you have any) to a horrible fate by doing....nothing at all.
As a supercilious ninny, you are fated to get worse than you deserve, unless you wake up.
Oooooooh goody. I have driven you into ranting and exposing even more of your ego. But, yes, you are right. I happily accept that I am a "rude midwit", because nobody has thus complimented me before. I am generally thought to be witless. so thanks.
And yes, I know about the adherence to old values in those towns and I even have a shakey theory about New Hampshire primaries, along those lines.
But you still can't read.
If I asked you now, in front of an audience, what I wrote, you would get it wrong. But I guess this failing is intergenerational, which you yourself reveal. However, on the 'supercilious' thingie, I'm not quite sure how you draw this conclusion. I left school at 16, worked cattle from the saddle, and have little to no education. My father was a musician and my mother was stark raving mad, and killed my father. He was a pacifist, poor thing.
I live in an Aboriginal community and we seldom speak English, only our local laguages and I am surrounded by wild buffalo, wild pigs, many dangerous snakes, crocodiles, urandji and box jellyfish, and tiger sharks and people here use shovel nose spears. If you plan to erase me from God's fair earth, in this part of the world you will stick out like dogs balls. And, anyway, get in the queue. I have quite lost count of the people who tried to kill me but there is probably some significance in the reality that they are mostly dead. All except the last one and he is still trying.
But, Fabius, all this just because I pointed out you could not define democracy. tsk tsk. Everybody else had at least a plausible reason for wanting me dead.
You need to work on your reading comprehension. I do not want you dead or physically harmed in any way. I would like to see your way of life preserved.
I was warning, not threatening. (OK, I "threatened: to do nothing -- perhaps I got too cute with the rhetoric.)
Your way of life requires large amounts of land per capita. It is good that the Australian government is preserving property rights for some of the remaining Aborigines. This is the good part of PC thinking.
However, your way of life is dependent on the might and determination of the Australian state -- which is rather puny compared to the rising national socialist superpower to your north. And it's punier yet now that Australia has done away with its militia capabilities. And if Australia adopts the PC thinking on immigration that infects the rest of the Anglosphere, Australia will be peaceably invaded and taken over by people who see your land as basically unused, and thus ripe for settlement.
Your way of life will be limited to the most inhospitable parts of the Outback.
And that is sad.
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Subsidiarity. Have your little island of "true democracy." Just recognize that there needs to be something rather more hierarchical and disciplined in order to protect that island.
My apologies for overestimating your wisdom.
The "genuine democracy" that you allude to scales even worse than a New England town meeting. Such societies are generally limited to small band nomadic hunter gatherers, where the harshness of the climate obviates the need for establishing territory. The Arctic Circle and the Kalahari Desert come to mind.
Brew up some COVID Extra Strength that wipes out 99+ percent of the population, and the type of society you envision might work for the remainder.
And no, you are not fully living in such a society. You are communicating via computer and Internet -- products of sophisticated forms of property and rule of law., products for which only a tiny fraction of society, if that, are "fully informed." Our technological civilization requires a great deal of specialization.
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Another reason for my poor reading comprehension is that you used words which have a long historical definitions that differ greatly from what you were referring to. The word Democracy goes back to ancient Greece, and referred to systems of voting for laws and public policy, not day to day activity. The ancient Athenians were not communal.
And, by the way, the Athenians handled the scaling problem of democracy by using a random sampling of their free male populace to form a legislature. Such a legislature can represent the will of the people thus sampled within the typical margin of error that pollsters claim to achieve.
--
When the Founders omitted the word "democracy" they were thinking of ancient Athens, New England town meetings, Old Testament style stonings, and Vikings banging spears against shields. They were also thinking of some of the democratic systems devised by the Native Americans, but those were not as fully communal/informal as what you are describing. Even after devastation from smallpox, the Native American population in what became the 13 colonies was still too dense for what you are describing.
There you go poor Fabius, you actually believe the Athenians 19% eligibility to vote constituted democracy. This was a community of inherited privilege and slavery, one above the other. It was never a democracy. Only the word is Greek. This was the propaganda devised by, many suggest, the City of London Khazarian’s. My guess is they were right. It sure worked on you.
Oh, and your Sherlockian deduction I don't live where I live because of the technology I am using, is merely the outcome of your distance from prosaic reality... unexpectedly, we are into our 18th day of monsoonal non-stop rain and I cannot go home until the waters and mud go down, even with my trusty 28 year old 4WD Landcruiser troopcarrier. Luckily, I am also our community's mechanic so I can maintain low tech too.
Unlike you, I cannot glare at the world from my upstairs window and plot the destruction of my legion enemies. I am a common worker, but with three jobs. I must go to work on house, water bore and airstrip construction while the sun shines, and then go to my job as researcher for a native Law project, and finally, when time permits, maintain my websites and emails and domestic duties. That's when I indulge myself with recreation time. OK?
Incidentally, no indigenous peoples were without traditional lands and none were aimlessly nomadic. They very sensibly followed food cycles dictated by expressions of mother nature. The Khazarians knew how to manipulate your superiority complex and thus enable you to dismiss indigenous peoples as primitives. Now we also know you are a colonial.
But now you are becoming tiresome, with your privileged pseudo upper-class tirades, distant as you are from everyday reality. You may be magnificently educated but you know nothing of the real world. Any American prepper could tell you that. You will not survive the coming civil strife and you will be shot as soon as you open your mouth. Had you listened to me you might have learned something useful. Trot along, please, Fabius.
> The aristocrats and plutocrats deliberately created an unnamed monarchy to protect their interests. They also made sure that the real inspiration for the Constitution, Thomas Paine, was excluded because his works contained two key phrases "The people are the source of all authority" was the most important, and "the aged, the sick and the infirm must be supported by public funds".
Good for them. Thomas Paine was frankly a radical nut and the country wouldn't have lasted the two centuries it did if his ideas had been implement. Eventually as part of FDR's New Deal, programs were in deed created to support the aged, sick, and infirm from public funds. We saw how that turned out.
With what is universally described as the worst public health safety net in the entire western world, what the hell are you talking about? Your response is pure ideology. Scandinavia, UK, Australia and New Zealand all had excellent health policies until the US Government moved in and converted these to the US failed model. Likewise, aged care, minimum wage, and insurance.
When America collapses, and collapse it will, the world will be freed from your anti-democratic imperial regime of exploitation and destruction. On this subject, I suggest you lobby your corrupt Congress to pull your troops and military installations out of the sixy sovereign nations thus occupied. If you do not pull them out and dismantle the installations, you may find the expulsions take the form of a mountain of body bags. Then will come the the international arrest squads for the perpetrators of the crimes against humanity and those who facilitated these. This will undoubtedly include academics who supported the policies, scientists who created bioweapons, and the manufacturers of the weapons used. I suspect America will be a quiet region of the Americas for a century thereafter.
You’re writing is very clear and logical. Thank you.
The insane futility of a 'written constitution' is what we get for our rebellion against our king.