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

[William Flynn Wallace]

We brought these problems on ourselves.



spike


​Ah - quoting the famous philosopher Pogo, eh?


Changes such as you suggest would take a president and a Congress of the
same party, but I think that would result in more, not less, power of the
president.  They only want to castrate the other guys.


bill w​



On Wed, Aug 17, 2016 at 12:22 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

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> *From:* extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] *On
> Behalf Of *William Flynn Wallace
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> >…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
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> 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.
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> 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.))
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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>
> spike
>
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