[ExI] political disaster

[John Clark]

On Sun, Jun 5, 2016 at 2:09 PM, Dan TheBookMan <danust2012 at gmail.com> wrote:

​> ​
> To me, it's nutty that anyone anywhere should have political power over
> anyone else -- that this is acceptable at all. It's also nutty that some
> folks seem to be arguing over just how such power over others should be
> decided -- rather than the more fundamental problem of dismantling such
> power.
> Let me reduce this down again to one point. I believe actual libertarians
> should hold two points (and not only two, but these two preclude all this
> madness in the States over Trump vs. Hillary vs. Johnson) as basic:
> 1. No one has the right to rule over anyone else.
> 2. No one has the duty to obey anyone else.
> These two positions preclude elected and non-elected states period.
> ​ ​
> They also preclude obeying the Constitution.
>

​That's true, those two positions do preclude obeying the Constitution, but
when 15,375 H-bombs exist on the planet it's time to leave fantasies behind
and get practical.  No civilization in the history of the world has ever
operated according to those two positions, not even hunter gatherers, and
there is virtually no chance of our civilization evolving into one that
does. The reason is that once a standard has been set it's always very
difficult and often impossible to change. The genetic code is not the best
one around, Francis Crick found a better one in the 1950s, but there is no
going back now, the standard was set by a single microorganism 4 billion
years ago and now we're stuck with it, and it's not just us, all life on
the planet is stuck with it. So we'll just have to make the best of it. We
just can't go back 4 billion years and start over.

Well OK interpreting those 2 positions in a fundamentalist way and
developing a society around it (would such a thing even be a society?)
might not be quite as difficult as changing the genetic code but almost.

​> ​
> Anyhow, I mostly want to stay out of this discussion. I don't see it as
> productive. I also think it will almost no influence over what happens in
> November -- save that it'll likely make some folks here ever more
> antagonistic toward each other.
>

​Actually I like the people around here, I may yell at them a bit from time
to time but that doesn't mean I don't like them, that's why I've stayed on
the Extropian list for so long. I like the people because they're oddballs
just like me. Let's face it, our political and philosophic ideas are way
way way outside the mainstream even by the standards of western culture,
​by world standards we're even wackier and I'm one of the wackiest. Like it
or not there is just no way we're going to convince 7.1 billion people to
live a pure libertarian life, so we'll just have to do the best we can with
what we have, and one of the things we have is the US constitution. We
could do worse.

 John K Clark
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