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27 amendments in 235 years, the most recent proposed in 1791, in year 4, and only revived from the dead and acted on 202y later. “Submit a diff” = “fuck you” basically
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Replying to @vgr
They literally wrote a 1-pager w/ a version control process that's grown to 300M+ users, lasted over 200 years, and produced the largest economy in the world. Your critique compresses to "I don't like the contract anymore." Which is great. Submit a diff.
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Declaring the American experiment an unqualified success (ignoring negative externalities both domestically and globally) and attributing all that presumed success to the genius recipe of the constitution (ignoring historic luck and depredations) = bozo patriotism. Flip bozobit.
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Bozo patriotism is eating the world This problem is not unique to the US but is most pronounced here due to the odd combination of simultaneously being the oldest modern state and youngest nation
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Vaguely related… I’ve been part of a weekly governance studies group at the for 2 years now. This stuff is hard in ways ordinary PoliSci people just don’t appreciate because they dismiss technological change as rounding errors (eg DAOs) to historical experience
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We read and discuss a mix of recent history and tech stuff and old history/case studies. Approaching new technological potential in a historically informed way is just plain hard.
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I suspect the right move when you can’t think of good answers to hard questions is to loosen your grip on the situation and merely hold the questions and let a bit of anarchy reign for a bit for new creative possibilities to emerge. Not rush to precipitate new commitments.
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Unfortunately hard to do when the iron grip of history has rusted in place and there is no way to open things up and entertain hard questions. Creating and holding space itself seems to demand the violence of revolution. Which is often a cure worse than the disease.
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Feels like America runs on a kind of fossilized serendipity that basically ran out around 1974. The tech boom (built on 60s/70s serendipity) masked it for 50y but is no longer strong enough to mask. Need new lightning bolts of luck.
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Heh never thought of France this way. Hard to compare the two because France had 2000 years of baggage to process by revolutionary reconstitution rather than 200 like the US
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Replying to @vgr
Totally. The US just needs a little anarchy and then an iterative rebrand. France figured this out by tacking on a successor number, web-x style, onto each era - e.g., The Fifth Republic.
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