[ExI] distribution of power, was: RE: Brain prosthetic startup

spike spike66 at att.net
Wed Aug 17 17:22:22 UTC 2016


 

 

From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace



 

>…So I propose altering candidates' hormone levels to where the sex hormones are very low until after the election.  (Would Trump have anything at all to say?)  bill w

 

 

 

Sure that’s a good start.  But another reasonable approach would be to distribute the authority to launch aggressive military action over several people.  Oh wait, someone already thought of that: the framers of the constitution.

 

Those guys already realized the danger of allowing one person to make the call on that, and they did it a long time ago, way before email existed.  They realized that one guy could be bribed, bluffed or blackmailed into launching a military attack on someone else’s enemy with no benefit to those having to pay the price for it (not that this has already happened (recently.))  

 

Consider this: Franklin Roosevelt was screaming to enter WW2.  Congress told him no.  Then when the Japanese hit Pearl, possibly as a result of being provoked by Roosevelt, congress went along.  A decade went by.  Truman wanted to enter the Korean war, congress said no.  He ordered military peacekeepers, who then became warriors.  Another decade went by.  Kennedy wanted to enter the Vietnam war, congress said no.  Following Truman’s precedent, he sent peacekeepers.  They became warriors.  Johnson escalated it, again without congressional approval.

 

Now, with the nukes being controlled by the executive branch, and all armed conflicts redefined as peacekeeping or regime change, we effectively handed over the authority to wage war to the executive branch and made the legislative branch nearly irrelevant.  So here we are in the position from which the framers of the constitution protected us and we defeated.  Natural result: America is in a virtual civil war over a question that shouldn’t be all that important: who will be president.  Reason: that office was never designed to carry all the power it has.  

 

Since we tack on all this extra power to that office, it makes that office attractive to power grabbers and power abusers.  Note that both major candidates are power grabbers and power abusers.  Does this surprise us?  Why?  We have a guy who is spending millions of his own money to get a job which pays a fraction of that amount.  Why would he want it?  We have a person who sold government favors for enormous sums, so it is perfectly clear why she would want access to still more government power.  No mystery there.  Of the major party nominees, one has already cashed in on and abused political power and the other apparently plans to.

 

Solution: restore that office to the level of authority it was originally designed for.  Get that nuclear goddam football away from that office, put it where it should have gone to start with: the speaker of the house, with a panel of about a dozen legislators responsible for it.  We don’t need those things on a hair trigger now.  We have instant communications available for everyone on a proposed nuclear football team, and we have early warning systems to tell us if an attack is coming, we have sea-based missiles that cannot be taken out by first strike.  Let us make it to where police action military exercises are restricted to a subset of the military.  

 

By parking all that power in one office, we have made it far too attractive to all the wrong kinds of people.  We brought these problems on ourselves.

 

spike

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