Amendability is a tough design variable. The Indian constitution is 105 amendments in 75y but then the doc itself is way bigger and there are 3 types. Various US state constitutions are all over the place. Alabama is 977, California is 516.
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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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Eg yesterdays session discussed, among other themes, whether blockchains could do better with historical travesties like this ugly handling of a native rights case in SoCal. Our conclusion: we have no good ideas. leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billComp
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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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Lol this turned into a rant advertisement for the governance chat. If interested, join our discord and show up 9 AM pacific Fridays yakcollective.org/join.html
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Replying to @vgr
This sounds fascinating, how does one get involved?
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For a taste, here’s a document we produced from the first year of studies.
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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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