US Constitution
Article
US Constitution is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between March 18, 2021 and April 05, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “The US Constitution requires a lot more work”; “a common-sense approach based on the US Constitution and our Bill of Rights”; “The US Constitution made certain design decisions”. It most often appears alongside America, China, US.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 4
- Issue count: 4
- First seen: March 18, 2021
- Last seen: April 05, 2023
Appears In
- Book Review: The New Sultan
- California Gubernatorial Candidates From Z to Z
- Book Review: What We Owe The Future
- Most Technologies Aren’t Races
Related Pages
-
- America (3 shared issues)
-
- China (3 shared issues)
-
- US (3 shared issues)
-
- AI (2 shared issues)
-
- British (2 shared issues)
-
- Compton (2 shared issues)
-
- India (2 shared issues)
-
- Joe Biden (2 shared issues)
-
- New York Times (2 shared issues)
-
- Stalin (2 shared issues)
-
- Supreme Court (2 shared issues)
-
- Trump (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
The third big difference is that it's really hard to change the US Constitution. Erdogan was able to change the Turkish Constitution with a simple majority. Nobody took it too seriously, because the Constitution was just whatever the last group of military-coup-pulling generals said it was. The US Constitution requires a lot more work. And as the work of titans like George Washington and James Madison and so on, it has an aura of sacredness that makes it hard to add "PS: I can do whatever I want" to the end without a lot of people feeling violated. I know this has caused a lot of problems, but after seeing the ease with which Erdogan swept aside any part of the Turkish Constitution he didn't like, I have a new respect for it.
Erdogan's classmates were a lot like him - the sons of religious families who had made a calculated choice to raise their kids Muslim even if it meant torpedoing their career prospects. This was the age of Necmettin Erbakan, a Muslim politician who wanted to overturn Turkey's state-sponsored discrimination against observant Muslims, and the Imam Hatip kids were big fans. Young Erdogan decided that supporting Erbakan's crusade was his life's work, so with a year to go before graduating, he transferred to secular public school in order to get a degree that would allow him to participate in normal society and take a job in Erbakan's party. He rose through the ranks, and his efforts paid off - in the mid-1970s, Erbakan made it to Parliament, a major achievement for an openly Islamist politician. In 1980, the military decided they had seen enough, held a coup and arrested 650,000 (!) supporters of the old government, including Erbakan. After killing and torturing a few thousand people who resisted, the military declared that Islamic parties were extra-illegal and Erbakan was personally banned from politics for ten years. They also wrote a new constitution saying no party could enter Parliament without 10% of the vote, widely considered too high a bar for Islamists or other fringe parties to meet. Erdogan was pretty devastated, and retired from politics for a while, briefly finding work as a confectioner and a semi-professional soccer player.
Washington acquiesed in the "soft coup", if tacitly. US secretary of state Madeleine Albright explained on July 11, 1997 that while military intervention was not necessarily "a silver bullet" to Turkey's problems, the US had "made very clear that it is essential that Turkey continue in a secular, democratic way." The EU also put its tacit blessings behind the coup, saying that while it was "concerned at the implications for democratic pluralism and freedom of expression," "this decision [the coup] is in accordance with the provisions of the Turkish Constitution".
This 2022 election is all about stopping what is happening all around us. We sense an underlying, destructive anti-American presence that is causing California to be a less desirable place to live and do business. Obama’s prediction years ago that America must be “fundamentally transformed” is coming true before our eyes. Our news media has been compromised and we must dig deeper to be truly informed and understand how to fix this broken system. There is so many issues before us, each one rooted in bad ideologies and policies. Each of us have a personal responsibility to do our part to keep freedom alive. As Governor of California, I will fight for freedom, integrity, law and order, and a common-sense approach based on the US Constitution and our Bill of Rights. I am strongly against mandatory vaccinations, lockdowns, and mask mandates. I support science and freedom of individual choice. I am a capitalist who believes in free markets, not socialism. I am fed up with business as usual.
I will reverse the recent infuriating presidential order from president Obama which requires police departments nationwide to return most of the combat weapons and armored vehicles that they have received in the last decade back to the federal government. yes, these vehicles were wrongfully given to the police to fight unconstitutional victimless and/or consensual “crimes” like drug use and sales, and yes i will stop that day one i am in office, and yes they have been wrongfully used by police to suppress peaceful protests, which is one of the reasons our nation was founded was to preserve that right. But now we need police to be as heavily armed and armored as possible, to defend/guard us (and themselves) against, and god-forbid have to fight, terrorists here at home, and president Obama made a big mistake ordering them to return those weapons by April 2016. i will return those weapons to the police day one I’m in office, and simultaneously issue an order that police are never to pursue criminals for illegal unconstitutional “crimes” again, but only pursue real criminals, or guard us from them, using whatever our best technology can provide. if all those weapons can save the life of even one police-person defending us against terrorists, we must return them, so i will. Day one.
Some context for this: rumor has it that other states give their homeless people free tickets to California. The homeless like it, because California has better weather, and the other states like it, because they stop having homelessness problems. Anyway, this solution is extremely unconstitutional, but I like the way he thinks.
This might not be impossible. For example, Mohammed asked Muslims not to eat pork, and they still follow this command thousands of years later. The US Constitution made certain design decisions that still affect America today. Confucianism won the philosophical squabbles in China around the birth of Christ, and its ethos still influences modern China.
MacAskill frames this in terms of value malleability and value lock-in. There is a time of great malleability: maybe during the Constitutional Convention, if some delegate had given a slightly more elegant speech, they might have ditched the Senate or doubled the length of a presidential term or something. But after the Constitution was signed - and after it developed centuries of respect, and after tense battle lines got drawn up over every aspect of it - it became much harder to change the Constitution, to the point where almost nobody seriously expects this to work today. If another Chinese philosopher had fought a little harder in 100 BC, maybe his school would have beaten Confucius’ and the next 2000 years of Chinese history would have looked totally different.
This isn’t to say the future won’t have controversial political issues. Should you be allowed to wirehead yourself so thoroughly that you never want to stop? In what situations should people be allowed to have children? (surely not never, but also surely not creating a shockwave of trillions of children spreading at near-light-speed across the galaxy). Who gets the closest star systems? (there will be enough star systems to go around, but I assume the ones closer to Earth will be higher status) What kind of sims can you voluntarily consent to participate in? I’m okay with these decisions being decided by the usual decision-making methods of the National People’s Congress, the US constitution, or Meta’s corporate charter. At the very least, I don’t think switching from one of these to another is a big enough deal that it should trade off against the chance we survive at all.