[cjs_ac]

That just proves my point. All that obsessing about preventing tyrants, and you still end up with one. Maybe if, as a culture, you spent less time poring over quotes from eighteenth-century political thinkers to divine the best possible theoretical form of government, and more time solving concrete problems faced by real-world people, this wouldn't have happened.

The Westminster system is looking very 'worse is better' at the moment.

[palmotea]

> The Westminster system is looking very 'worse is better' at the moment.

The same one that just today got Apple to remove E2E encryption from iCloud, so it could get backdoor access to people's data?

I beg to differ. Centralization is bad. IIRC, it's what's enabling Musk to do so much damage so quickly, and the UK has more of it.

[0xbadcafebee]

Culture's a funny thing. Extremely hard to change, very hard to predict or control. Based on my understanding of history, almost all cultures fail.

The ones that have lasted the longest have been taken over by foreign empires and despots, but persisted nonetheless. Others were taken over and converted to some other culture, or died entirely.

Want a really long-lived culture? Look at Egypt, India, Persia, China. Want a culture that resists outside influence? Probably Egypt, maybe next India, and then Rome - but the former were conquered, and the latter died.

(I'm a shit lay-historian so please somebody correct me)

If you look at the evolution of life on this planet, it's never really clear what's a "superior" lifeform until you look at it for a few hundred million years. Crocodiles looked like the dominant lifeform for a pretty long time, but even that ended. Our cultures are absolutely infantile in the grand scheme. We can come up with ideas and try them out, but there's no telling what works long-term. Only future generations can judge.

[JustExAWS]

The majority of the people in the US want the current situation. Between the fear of the country becoming minority-majority,losing “traditional American values”, and protecting pets from being eaten by Haitians, they see Trump/Musk as their last hope.

Admittedly, it didn’t help that the DNC re-enacted “Weekend at Bernie’s” with Biden for two years.

[saulpw]

No, a plurality of people voted for the current situation. Not a majority of people, not a majority of voters (many of whom didn't vote, or weren't able to vote), and not even a majority of people who voted (49.8%, and no you can't round up).

Also, voting for slate of candidates on one day in the middle of a billion-dollar multi-year misinformation campaign, does not equal "want the current situation". I agree that an egregious number of people are actively cheering for the current chaos, but let's not give them more psychic power than the institutional power they are already wielding.

[xp84]

The DNC keeps itself alive on a steady diet of fantasy that the bloc of nonvoters agrees with them and hates the Republicans, which if true would make the Democrat orthodoxy a robust majority in opinion, even if not in actual elections. Yet everyone outside the DNC echo chamber knew Trump would likely sail to victory over their hilariously unpopular candidate, yet the nonvoters didn’t lift a finger to try to prevent it. I think most of them don’t think either party is serious about anything actually important to them. Of the people who have an opinion, a lot more wanted the current outcome than wanted whatever the Dems were selling last year.

A little chaos is probably healthy at this point — we can’t grow government forever, and now the ideas that actually have popular support will have to be enshrined in actual permanent law instead of operating solely by the old gentleman’s agreement that we never cut any government program ever, since that agreement has been torn up and thrown out now.

[JustExAWS]

Why do people keep trying to use this as copium? This is exactly what the majority of the US wanted. If you lived in a deep blue state of deep red state, because of the way that the electoral college works, it doesn’t matter if you voted or not as far as the presidential election.

Unlike what Michelle Obama says, this is exactly who we are.

[DeepSeaTortoise]

> Maybe if, as a culture, you spent less time poring over quotes from eighteenth-century political thinkers to divine the best possible theoretical form of government

The problem being the founders having been anti-tyranny extremists.

E.g. the founders' opinion on whether everyone should be able to own his private tanks and warships is crystal clear: Absolutely. It's literally why they didn't just write "The right to bear arms shall not be infringed" but also "A well regulatef militia, being necessary to the security of a free state".

And nowadays the left screetches about noone needing to carry a butter knife with a blade length above 3inches and the right is divided over whether Soros should be able to buy Minuteman missiles with USAID money.

The only reason the right is disagreeing with the founders at all, is because the founders thought if a few immoral entities, not under the control of the people, became obscenely powerful, the people would just make use of their militias to get rid of them (see declaration of independence).

And that's also why the selfdeclared elite keeps trying to restrict the 2nd amendment. Because it protects the first. And why they keep trying to restrict the 1st amendment (hate speech, micro-aggressions, control over all the media, online censorship, "fact checking", trillion dollar judgements against journalists for minor offenses, ...). Because it protects the 2nd and all others.

[__MatrixMan__]

Are you proposing we create a government position for Musk and promote him into it so he can officially have no power? I think I'm on board.

How does it work, does one have to consent to become king or can we just sort of make it happen?