[try_the_bass]

> Yes that frees the people with a conscience to work on endeavours that challenge these corrupt institutions.

That... Isn't really how that works in the real world, though.

What happens when people with conscience leave legitimate institutions is that they lose legitimacy. Now you have a legitimate institution with power and no conscience, and a myriad of non-legitimate institutions with little power and some conscience.

This is a strictly worse situation to be in.

[duskdozer]

They may not all simply be replaced, limiting what can be done without them. https://www.americanbar.org/advocacy/governmental_legislativ...

[DANmode]

> That... Isn't really how that works in the real world, though.

It has in the past.

What changed?

[try_the_bass]

I don't think that's true. I don't think the world has ever worked the way the person I was replying to described it.

Organizations are always reflections of the individuals of which they exist, in aggregate. I think that has always been true, and always will be true. It's sort of true by definition?

I mean, unless you're talking about revolutions, I suppose, but that's usually the end result of the ruling class distilling their support structure too much?

[Teever]

That sounds great in theory, but how did it work out in practice?

It's been thirteen years since Snowden, and twenty years since Mark Klein, and there have been no real reforms in the system, people continue to work for them, and with them and it's only gotten worse.

The course of action that you suggest is exactly what has lead America into a Mad King scenario with big tech oligarchs and theocratic running the show with China on the cusp of becoming the world hegemon.

People keep chasing that carrot, keep working for the man and the end result is that they to chase that carrot a little bit harder, burning them out until the man replaces them with someone new just as eager to chase that carrot a little harder.

And all along the way the noose around all of us tightens a little bit more the temperature outside gets a little bit hotter and America's grip on the world weakens.

Where does this go?

[wakawaka28]

I'm not the guy you responded to, but I just wanted to say I think you misunderstood him. He wasn't prescribing a solution. He was describing a situation. If good people leave all institutions because of corruption, then only corrupt people will be left. There will most likely always be some corruption. We need to keep corruption and violations of rights from getting out of control because nobody wants to live through a war to restore order.

The US has been leaning toward the worse for years. I think it can be traced back to the JFK assassination or earlier. The Church Committee found out a lot and ultimately changed very little. We certainly have a theocratic influence but I think the Christians are played off the leftists masterfully to subvert the nation. If people weren't at each other's throats over random issues, they might start to think about where all the tax money goes.

It is pure arrogance to think that the US can essentially rule the world forever. Being in this position and having the reserve currency is why we seem superficially rich as all the production goes abroad. Instead of factory jobs, kids get to drive for DoorDash and stuff like that. If this trend is not reversed soon, we won't produce enough of anything to defend the country. We may already be in that position IMO.

Where does it go? I think we are in for a rude awakening. We might see severe economic turbulence and war, hopefully followed by peace and preservation of our individual and national sovereignty. I would count anything past this as a bonus.

[fwipsy]

I think there might have been some other reasons Trump got elected.

Which do you think works better--protesting/suing the people making the decision? Or being the person making the decision? It's much harder to change the course of law from the outside, without access to power. The problem is that power corrupts.

Either works if enough people care enough. Maybe instead of blaming the messengers for not putting their own careers on the line, you should blame all the people who just didn't care at all?

[try_the_bass]

I don't know, I think the Left's attitude of making civil institutions socially radioactive has contributed more to the decay than people burning out from within.

You speak as if "the man" is by definition "on the wrong side" (i.e. lacking conscience), but there is no "man", just a body of civil servants trying to do what they think is right, for varying definitions of right. After all, isn't that what folks were out protesting during the DOGE days, when whole departments were eliminated?

Your argument assumes its conclusion, and thus is circular.

I agree with the issue of folks trying their best and burning out--but this is why it's important that the people replacing them be just as hungry to do the right thing, if not more so.

However, it's been a tactic in politics recently to call entire departments corrupt, and insinuate that anyone who wants to work for them are likewise so.

But I don't understand the logic of doing this. If, for example, you think "all cops are bastards"... Wouldn't you want more people who think like you to become cops, instead of fewer? Wouldn't you rather run into your best friend in a cop's uniform, than someone you don't know? Why, then, would you vilify the entire organization, and make it clear you could never stand shoulder to shoulder with anyone who would dare want to be a police officer?

Wouldn't that make it less likely that someone who thinks the same as you would consider joining?

And yet the need for police persists; thus by vilifying them, your end up increasing the concentration of people who don't think like you. This seems, like my statement above, a strictly worse situation, and seems to be exactly what has played out in many jurisdictions!

You can apply the same line of thinking to all parts of the government, with similar results. In fact, I'll go further: I think this dynamic better explains the rotting of our institutions than yours does.

We should be encouraging people who think like us to work in the government, not discouraging them with pointless fatalism.

[Teever]

You're assuming that I subscribe to the left-right paradigm and that I am an American but that is not the case.

The way I see it the modern American left-right paradigm that you identify with is the problem. The little gotchas that you describe with people who complained about DOGE or ACAB are the problem.

Modern America itself is the problem. Modern Americans lack the mental capacity to reason about this.

I don't mean that as an insult, I mean that Americans for generations now are conditioned to not be able to reason about America not being the dominant player in the world, they can't process a scenario where America falls, and due to the past ten+ years of hyper-partisan political discourse and the corrosive effects that it has on their brains they lack the ability to understand these things when people talk about them.

Many Americans still believe that their country can be saved -- that it merely requires a reconfiguration of the existing pieces with some hardworking, dedicated people in the right positions to put things back in order. I'm sure there were people who believed the same in the USSR even in the final days before it fell apart but that didn't turn out to be the case.

You can put as many friendly people as you can find in the police force, and the same with the NSA and CIA, but it would be just as futile as doing the same with the Stasi, the KGB or the GRU.

The time to fix this was twenty years ago. George Bush and Dick Cheney should have spent the last twenty years in prison. Same with the heads of the NSA and CIA and thousands of other bureaucrats, the oligarchs who caused the 2008 financial crisis.

It didn't happen and it won't happen for this bunch of pedophile war criminals.

Authoritarians and theocrats have taken over.

America is falling down and it isn't going to get back up. I don't want that to be the case but it just is.

[try_the_bass]

> You're assuming that I subscribe to the left-right paradigm and that I am an American but that is not the case.

Not really. And you can choose to not subscribe to a "left-right paradigm", but it remains a functional reality in the US. Not believing in something doesn't always make it less real!

> Modern America itself is the problem. Modern Americans lack the mental capacity to reason about this.

This is a wildly arrogant take. I don't necessarily disagree that there are (a lot of!) real problems with "Modern America", but writing an entire country off, as an outsider, is incredibly self-centered.

> You can put as many friendly people as you can find in the police force, and the same with the NSA and CIA, but it would be just as futile as doing the same with the Stasi, the KGB or the GRU.

This is completely incorrect. If the government behind any of the examples you cited were actually full of "friendly people", those organizations would never have reached the points the did, or done the things they did.

You have a weirdly immutable view of the world, as if completely changing the moral and ethical makeup of entire governments would somehow have no effect on the actions that government takes?