My journal has become various repostings of someone else's.
Keep in mind, I do it all for you guys... You can't miss this stuff.
Stolen from theferrett
At least once a day, I'm struck with awe at the intelligence of the men who founded our country. I'm a pretty smart guy - and yet when I think about the approach they took when they founded America, I realize I'm not that bright at all.
Part of my admiration stems from their commitment to democracy and the rule of the people - at least as they defined people. It's a pretty well-known fact that if he'd wanted to, George Washington was so popular that he probably could have installed himself as ruler-for-life, thus effectively ending the idea of democracy before it began. In fact, in 1776 during the worst part of the war, Congress gave Washington absolute power for six months, basically giving him full reign to be a dictator. But here's what he said:
"Instead of thinking myself freed of all civil obligations by this mark of their confidence, I shall constantly bear in mind that as the sword was the last resort for the preservation of liberties, so it might be the first to be laid aside when those liberties are firmly established."
You have to like a man who thinks like that when absolute power is handed to him.
But the most amazing thing the Founding Fathers did was that they stared reality right in the eye and bowed to it.
You see, a lot of people don't care about results. They're determined that everyone should be moral and upright, and are continually furious that people aren't acting out of sheer benevolence. Their end goal is not to stop harmful actions of the amoral, but is instead to instill morality into everyone who does not believe as they do.
The problem, of course, is that morality is a strange and wondrous beast; either you have it, and feel good when you take a certain action, or you don't. I mean, we've all had that weirdo conversation with the religious fanatic:
"If you give up having sex and devote your life to Zoroaster, your life will improve!" they cry.
"Why?"
"You'll be clean! You'll feel like a new person!"
"But I feel fine right now," you say, confused that someone would think that sex is wrong. "I don't feel bad when I have sex, and giving it up would only mean that I'm preventing myself from doing something I enjoy for no gain whatsoever."
"You sinner!" they cry. "How can you not know that sex is bad?"
And that is ultimately the flaw with moral arguments; they rely on the other person having a conscience. If you're the sort of scumbag who mugs people in alleyways, obviously you don't feel too guilty about it - otherwise you wouldn't be doing it. To a mugger, saying "You should do that because it's moral" pretty much reads as "You should give it up for a feeling of happiness that will never arrive."
It's hard to instill that sort of emotion into a fully-grown man.
Thus, there is a need for disincentives to convince the non-moral. You may not be inclined to stop rolling drunks out of the goodness of your heart, but if you know that a cop will throw your ass in jail if he catches you, that might stop you. You might not stop riffling through someone's valuables because other people tell you it's wrong, but you probably won't spend an hour trying to crack a lock on a safe. You might not have a problem with farting loudly in public, but you'll get the hint when you stop getting invited to parties.
For moral people, there's moral arguments. For everyone else, there's punishments and disincentives.
But to the folks who are determined to make everyone moral, the "lock your doors to prevent robbers" theory actually conflicts with their goals. After all, when the fear of a prison sentence is all that stops a guy from embezzling money from grandmothers, he's not moral. Remember, the end goal is to get people to do it out of the goodness of their hearts, not to prevent the actual crime. And should the crime occur, the question is never "What, if anything, could the victim have done to prevent this?" - since, as someone who was moral, the victim never has any choice or responsibility in what was done to them - but rather, "Who should be blamed?"
In other words, to the moral it's more important to assign blame than to stop the harmful action. The debate never centers around, "But what would have prevented the victim from being harmed?" - instead, it's "How can you say that my friend, who got drunk and fell asleep in an alleyway in the worst part of town, is to be blamed for the assholes who stole her purse?"
Should you suggest ways for the victim to make his or her life safer, suddenly you're excusing the behavior of the animals who do these shitty things, even if you're trying to figure out the most efficient way to stop these shitty things from taking place. They'd rather spend their time shouting about how people should act, rather than actually stopping the people responsible.
There's a surprising number of people like that out there.
And yet the amazing thing about the Founding Fathers is that they didn't give a rat's ass about morality when they designed our government. They didn't want to know how humans should behave; instead, when they designed the government for this country, they asked, "How do people actually behave?"
They looked at the idea of just having people just vote on everything, and said, "You know, people are fuckin' stupid. If we let them vote on every issue, they'll never vote for anything that involves sacrifice. Nobody ever wants more taxes, or to start a war even when it's totally necessary. Crap, if the country had voted on this war, we would have given it up in 1776 just before Washington crossed the Delaware."
"Okay, so we need a guy who can make unpopular decisions once in awhile. What about a President?"
"Hell, they'd elect anyone who had a nice smile and had won a war. We should give the President power, but if we let him be the only power then he's gonna take over the country in no time flat."
"Well, what about a Parliament to counterbalance him?"
"The problem with it is that no matter how we divvy it up, people are gonna get their panties in a wad. Go by population, and New York starts voting in the everything they want. Go by a simple state count, and then everyone else starts boning New York. And if the people don't feel represented, we'll see riots in a decade."
"How about both, then?"
"Good. Let's have one part with rapid turnover to get the quickest laws into place, and another part with a slower, more deliberative body that can be shielded from the whim of the crazes that pass every two years. If they have to, they can get rid of the President, but a ludicrous amount of people would have to agree on it."
"Hang on, though; like you said, people are pretty dumb. The majority is a tyranny, and they'd start pushing everyone else around the second they gained power. Freedom is about having people you don't like talking shit about you, and God forbid Congress and the President line up to vote free speech right out of existence."
"Or crap, once people get into power they start extending that power. We've got nothing to stop folks from extending Congressional terms to twenty years apiece. How can we stop that?"
"Um... we'd need a politically-isolated judge - someone who can't be bribed, or threatened with the sack - to have the biggest power. We can't give him the power to make new laws, or he'd be a tyrant, but he sure as shit could block the dumb-ass laws and Constitutional bastardization that people come up with."
"So he'd be the guardian of the Constitution?"
"Yeah. I like that. But shoot, that means that we'd be giving one guy total power for life."
"What about a panel of judges, then?"
"All right; a group of people, spread out over various Presidential terms, who can get elected only by, um, passing Congress and the Presidential seal of approval. It's not the greatest solution - they'll still be ludicrously powerful - but it'll have to do."
"Excellent. So what we've done here is to create a situation of political landlock, with the individual states (as represented by Congress) lining up against the President. The only way they can get anything done is if enough people agree on it from all over the damn country, both from the quickie-elect Housers and the long-term Senators.... and if the country agrees on some dumb-ass law that throws away everything we worked for, the Supreme Court will vote that shit down."
"Good work. Let's go home and have our slaves cook us a meal."
The amazing thing is that the system was designed to correct humanity's faults. The Founding Fathers assumed that our country would contain mad, power-hungry bastards who could gather immense masses of idiots to sweep them into power, and they created a system that would blunt that power.
That's such a baldly functional piece of design that we should all bow down in awe.
They didn't put their hands on their hips and shout, "By putting up safeguards to prevent the President's power, you're sympathizing with the amoral! People shouldn't elect bad Presidents, and if they do it's not the honest voter's fault!"
They looked at people and said, "There sure are a lot of bastards out there. What can we do to stop them?" And God bless them for that.
Oh, the Founding Fathers weren't perfect; as mentioned, they owned slaves and were all men who didn't think overmuch of women voting. (But at the same time, it would have been really easy to change the Declaration of Independence to say, "All white free men are born equal," or even just sort of quietly remove that clause to avoid angering the South.) They didn't anticipate gerrymandering. They didn't foresee how powerful the media would become. And they certainly didn't see how the winner-take-all mentality of Congress would polarize the electorate and actually reduce people's choices...
...but cut 'em a break. It was the first democracy in ages, and when the Greeks did it they voted on everything. Their design was light-years ahead of its time, and it's stood the test of time to this day through a Civil War and hotly-debated Presidential elections. If the people really care about something, the people can stop it. (The sad thing is how little the people care about things, but that's an issue for another day.)
In the end, the Founding Fathers asked one simple question: How can we build a country that will stand up against the bastards who will inevitably want to plunder it? And that planning has served us well.
Take a bow, guys. You've earned it.
Stolen from theferrett
At least once a day, I'm struck with awe at the intelligence of the men who founded our country. I'm a pretty smart guy - and yet when I think about the approach they took when they founded America, I realize I'm not that bright at all.
Part of my admiration stems from their commitment to democracy and the rule of the people - at least as they defined people. It's a pretty well-known fact that if he'd wanted to, George Washington was so popular that he probably could have installed himself as ruler-for-life, thus effectively ending the idea of democracy before it began. In fact, in 1776 during the worst part of the war, Congress gave Washington absolute power for six months, basically giving him full reign to be a dictator. But here's what he said:
"Instead of thinking myself freed of all civil obligations by this mark of their confidence, I shall constantly bear in mind that as the sword was the last resort for the preservation of liberties, so it might be the first to be laid aside when those liberties are firmly established."
You have to like a man who thinks like that when absolute power is handed to him.
But the most amazing thing the Founding Fathers did was that they stared reality right in the eye and bowed to it.
You see, a lot of people don't care about results. They're determined that everyone should be moral and upright, and are continually furious that people aren't acting out of sheer benevolence. Their end goal is not to stop harmful actions of the amoral, but is instead to instill morality into everyone who does not believe as they do.
The problem, of course, is that morality is a strange and wondrous beast; either you have it, and feel good when you take a certain action, or you don't. I mean, we've all had that weirdo conversation with the religious fanatic:
"If you give up having sex and devote your life to Zoroaster, your life will improve!" they cry.
"Why?"
"You'll be clean! You'll feel like a new person!"
"But I feel fine right now," you say, confused that someone would think that sex is wrong. "I don't feel bad when I have sex, and giving it up would only mean that I'm preventing myself from doing something I enjoy for no gain whatsoever."
"You sinner!" they cry. "How can you not know that sex is bad?"
And that is ultimately the flaw with moral arguments; they rely on the other person having a conscience. If you're the sort of scumbag who mugs people in alleyways, obviously you don't feel too guilty about it - otherwise you wouldn't be doing it. To a mugger, saying "You should do that because it's moral" pretty much reads as "You should give it up for a feeling of happiness that will never arrive."
It's hard to instill that sort of emotion into a fully-grown man.
Thus, there is a need for disincentives to convince the non-moral. You may not be inclined to stop rolling drunks out of the goodness of your heart, but if you know that a cop will throw your ass in jail if he catches you, that might stop you. You might not stop riffling through someone's valuables because other people tell you it's wrong, but you probably won't spend an hour trying to crack a lock on a safe. You might not have a problem with farting loudly in public, but you'll get the hint when you stop getting invited to parties.
For moral people, there's moral arguments. For everyone else, there's punishments and disincentives.
But to the folks who are determined to make everyone moral, the "lock your doors to prevent robbers" theory actually conflicts with their goals. After all, when the fear of a prison sentence is all that stops a guy from embezzling money from grandmothers, he's not moral. Remember, the end goal is to get people to do it out of the goodness of their hearts, not to prevent the actual crime. And should the crime occur, the question is never "What, if anything, could the victim have done to prevent this?" - since, as someone who was moral, the victim never has any choice or responsibility in what was done to them - but rather, "Who should be blamed?"
In other words, to the moral it's more important to assign blame than to stop the harmful action. The debate never centers around, "But what would have prevented the victim from being harmed?" - instead, it's "How can you say that my friend, who got drunk and fell asleep in an alleyway in the worst part of town, is to be blamed for the assholes who stole her purse?"
Should you suggest ways for the victim to make his or her life safer, suddenly you're excusing the behavior of the animals who do these shitty things, even if you're trying to figure out the most efficient way to stop these shitty things from taking place. They'd rather spend their time shouting about how people should act, rather than actually stopping the people responsible.
There's a surprising number of people like that out there.
And yet the amazing thing about the Founding Fathers is that they didn't give a rat's ass about morality when they designed our government. They didn't want to know how humans should behave; instead, when they designed the government for this country, they asked, "How do people actually behave?"
They looked at the idea of just having people just vote on everything, and said, "You know, people are fuckin' stupid. If we let them vote on every issue, they'll never vote for anything that involves sacrifice. Nobody ever wants more taxes, or to start a war even when it's totally necessary. Crap, if the country had voted on this war, we would have given it up in 1776 just before Washington crossed the Delaware."
"Okay, so we need a guy who can make unpopular decisions once in awhile. What about a President?"
"Hell, they'd elect anyone who had a nice smile and had won a war. We should give the President power, but if we let him be the only power then he's gonna take over the country in no time flat."
"Well, what about a Parliament to counterbalance him?"
"The problem with it is that no matter how we divvy it up, people are gonna get their panties in a wad. Go by population, and New York starts voting in the everything they want. Go by a simple state count, and then everyone else starts boning New York. And if the people don't feel represented, we'll see riots in a decade."
"How about both, then?"
"Good. Let's have one part with rapid turnover to get the quickest laws into place, and another part with a slower, more deliberative body that can be shielded from the whim of the crazes that pass every two years. If they have to, they can get rid of the President, but a ludicrous amount of people would have to agree on it."
"Hang on, though; like you said, people are pretty dumb. The majority is a tyranny, and they'd start pushing everyone else around the second they gained power. Freedom is about having people you don't like talking shit about you, and God forbid Congress and the President line up to vote free speech right out of existence."
"Or crap, once people get into power they start extending that power. We've got nothing to stop folks from extending Congressional terms to twenty years apiece. How can we stop that?"
"Um... we'd need a politically-isolated judge - someone who can't be bribed, or threatened with the sack - to have the biggest power. We can't give him the power to make new laws, or he'd be a tyrant, but he sure as shit could block the dumb-ass laws and Constitutional bastardization that people come up with."
"So he'd be the guardian of the Constitution?"
"Yeah. I like that. But shoot, that means that we'd be giving one guy total power for life."
"What about a panel of judges, then?"
"All right; a group of people, spread out over various Presidential terms, who can get elected only by, um, passing Congress and the Presidential seal of approval. It's not the greatest solution - they'll still be ludicrously powerful - but it'll have to do."
"Excellent. So what we've done here is to create a situation of political landlock, with the individual states (as represented by Congress) lining up against the President. The only way they can get anything done is if enough people agree on it from all over the damn country, both from the quickie-elect Housers and the long-term Senators.... and if the country agrees on some dumb-ass law that throws away everything we worked for, the Supreme Court will vote that shit down."
"Good work. Let's go home and have our slaves cook us a meal."
The amazing thing is that the system was designed to correct humanity's faults. The Founding Fathers assumed that our country would contain mad, power-hungry bastards who could gather immense masses of idiots to sweep them into power, and they created a system that would blunt that power.
That's such a baldly functional piece of design that we should all bow down in awe.
They didn't put their hands on their hips and shout, "By putting up safeguards to prevent the President's power, you're sympathizing with the amoral! People shouldn't elect bad Presidents, and if they do it's not the honest voter's fault!"
They looked at people and said, "There sure are a lot of bastards out there. What can we do to stop them?" And God bless them for that.
Oh, the Founding Fathers weren't perfect; as mentioned, they owned slaves and were all men who didn't think overmuch of women voting. (But at the same time, it would have been really easy to change the Declaration of Independence to say, "All white free men are born equal," or even just sort of quietly remove that clause to avoid angering the South.) They didn't anticipate gerrymandering. They didn't foresee how powerful the media would become. And they certainly didn't see how the winner-take-all mentality of Congress would polarize the electorate and actually reduce people's choices...
...but cut 'em a break. It was the first democracy in ages, and when the Greeks did it they voted on everything. Their design was light-years ahead of its time, and it's stood the test of time to this day through a Civil War and hotly-debated Presidential elections. If the people really care about something, the people can stop it. (The sad thing is how little the people care about things, but that's an issue for another day.)
In the end, the Founding Fathers asked one simple question: How can we build a country that will stand up against the bastards who will inevitably want to plunder it? And that planning has served us well.
Take a bow, guys. You've earned it.