Iceland was a real-world example which privately produced more peace than the US has had, for longer than the US has existed...[More]The comments in this thread went a bit far afield, and are buried in a post that is days old, and therefore not likely to be read.
How does a society with no "government" protect itself from invaders? I'm given the example of tenth to thirteenth century Iceland.
My read on that: we're talking a non-technological society that most of the world at the time didn't even know about, let alone have the means or the incentive to invade. It was a homogeneous culture--the same language, tradition, religion, mores, culture, history...
Let's examine the time and conditions in which we live.
I don't expect to resolve the anarchist/libertarianist vs. Constitutionalist debate here. I just wanted to make this dialog available for readers here to engage in.
Please read the linked comment thread before engaging, and then leave comments here (I'm turning them off in the older post so that we can move the discussion here).
And please--I started out my dialog with this poster with the understanding that name-calling would not be tolerated. Let's focus on light, not heat.
5 comments:
Any discussion of Iceland needs to keep two (at the least) things in mind:
1. The Norman Conquest. Amongst many other consequences, the Conquest shifted the political/cultural center of Europe from Scandinavia to France. By the time Iceland became worth invading economically, it wasn't worth the effort politically.
2. Weather/Climate. The period in question spans the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. Folks, even the greedy and avaricious nobility had other things to keep their attention, David's previous link regarding the Black Death and Wat Tyler's Rebellion being just two examples. And don't forget John Wycliffe and Jan Hus on the religious front.
Another reason to dismiss the Icelandic Theory is language: Iceland was/is such a backwater that if you can read Beowulf in the original, you can read any modern Icelandic newspaper, something one cannot do with any other Norse/Germanic language of the time.
My main point of contention is the out-of-hand dismissal of resetting the clock back to "177x": yes, it will probably degenerate as did the original, but it will take time, just as the original did. The current political climate didn't spring into existence at once, and getting back into strict Constitutional observance will allow at least two generations to be raised in the same conditions that obtained during the first century of the Republic.
We probably should be thinking in terms longer than a single lifetime.
Yes. Teach the children well.
there are a million things i could say about it, but i'll never capture it exactly. i can try:
a complete, superior plan is necessarily static, and therefore never superior to the time-insensitive consistent nature of "no plan at all." this is not a false choice, it is an inherent property of any formal system. a formal system is a program, a plan, or any other set of rules where the definitions are not fuzzy or casual. kurt godel proved that you cannot have both consistency and completeness in a single formal system.
if you abandon formality to escape the choice, then what you have is anarchy, anyways: no system at all. there are infinite levels of metaphysics to wade through, there.
we are dangerously unsafe not because of everyone else in the world, but because of the rigidity of our socialized defense. it cannot figure out how to avoid when to avoid and to engage when to engage. that's the root of it. these are economic calculations. being socialized, it cannot perform economic calculation -- which is another way of saying that even war planners can think up a strategic defense that turns out to be offense once tested in reality. such activity makes us even more unsafe than simply falling behind in tactics.
in other words in my opinion you are asking the wrong question. there is assuredly no better plan than the one the founders wrote with respect to the american tradition of militias.
but what is superior to even that is to let militias plan for themselves.
and what is superior beyond that? only the militias that have done the planning, survived and failed, written militia history, can begin to guess.
By the time Iceland became worth invading economically, it wasn't worth the effort politically.
The Iceland example failed/ended due to political conquest (co-option of the legal system), so there's something incomplete about this objection.
Iceland was/is such a backwater that if you can read Beowulf in the original, you can read any modern Icelandic newspaper, something one cannot do with any other Norse/Germanic language of the time.
I understand your objection to be that the Icelandic culture of that time was homogeneous, and stayed that way, so legal systems would work there that would not work in the modern US melting pot. I don't know enough Icelandic history to refute that, but I don't think it matters even if it were true: A large enough population overwhelms the tribal/kin loyalty/cooperation instincts we inherited from our monkey background, even if the other person looks, smells, and talks just like us.
My main point of contention is the out-of-hand dismissal of resetting the clock back to "177x": yes, it will probably degenerate as did the original, but it will take time, just as the original did.
No, it will decay faster than the original did, because human society is operating ever-faster due to better communications tech. Compare the time it took for hyperinflation to cause a qualitative shift in national dominance for ancient Rome; Spain, Portugal in the age of sailing exploration; and modern Britain, America, Germany, Argentina, Zimbabwe. If you imposed Constitution III, it'd probably decay to the present situation in 25 years instead of 250. The techniques of constitutional perversion are now well known; the new legislators could just cut and paste the bad laws from old lawbooks. Instead of coalescing power by monopolizing railroads they could monopolize rocket ships.
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