To the extent the job of politics and law is to articulate and codify a causal and moral rationale for good fortune (aka claim parentage of success), you could say the deadbeat parent got custody of the prodigal child and the nurturing parent got ignored and cut out of the story
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Good question. I suspect perhaps the only morally defensible goal of a constitution is planned obsolescence. “This document will explode into flames in 42 years and you must hold a constitutional convention to reboot”
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Replying to @David_o_Bedlam and @vgr
Depends on what you consider the goal is or should have been. They created a compromise governance agreement for themselves, not for a country of unknown size and economic situation a century onward, much less two centuries.
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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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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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See you both next Friday 😆
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Lol this turned into a rant advertisement for the @yak_collective governance chat. If interested, join our discord and show up 9 AM pacific Fridays yakcollective.org/join.html
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