On 9/1/16 1:35 PM, juan wrote:

On Thu, 1 Sep 2016 13:21:19 -0700
"Stephen D. Williams" <sdw@lig.net> wrote:

On 9/1/16 1:16 PM, juan wrote:

On Thu, 1 Sep 2016 12:34:53 -0700
"Stephen D. Williams" <sdw@lig.net> wrote:

Our
political system limits and weeds out crazy, preventing it from
taking over.

	The US is full of crazy fucks like you, and of course the %
of crazy fucks among politicians, military murderers and the
	corporate mafia is even higher.

Says one of the craziest people most of us know.

You have a loose definition of crazy.  Or a crazy definition of crazy.

But I'll ask anyway: What's your evidence?


	Reality. And reality is exactly what crazy people have problem
	grasping.

My reality is more real, and therefore more correct, than your reality. Prove me wrong.

So, let's go back to my statement:
"Our political system limits and weeds out crazy, preventing it from taking over."

Prove that isn't true. Especially prove that it isn't true for Americans. The US government kept functioning normally even through a civil war, world wars, 3 industrial revolutions, all kinds of corruption, etc. Here, I'm not talking about exceptionalism in general, just the point that if crazies make it into power, they are limited and don't last. Point out a better system. (The British are said to no longer be making fun of our political system as of Brexit. ;-) )

I don't have time to get into it, but I think that the exceptionalism perception, the quality of it, meaning, and use, is overblown in some key ways. We have evidence that certain things work and certain things don't. There is a big interplay with culture and back stories that affect some of that, but most of it could transfer anywhere. Maybe we're confused sometimes, but we have open debate to try to fix that. We regularly fix things that aren't working with only things like rights as being inviolable. It isn't 'we are Americans and therefore you suck'. It is more like "we have this cool open source government project, why not fork it and see if it works for you better than that old governmentware you're running". We are tired of being asked to fix your old broken down governmentputer because you insist on running VMS and Windows. Or your cousin's obsolete system because you can't support them well. Or whatever. If you can make it work, then do it. Otherwise, upgrade.

sdw

sdw