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Comment by properGander | Hacker News Reader

Appeals to authority of dead people’s political documents is propaganda.

Just because we can invoke historical story does not mean we abide it today.

The majority inherently rules whether it’s US Constitution or the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. Not really sure how you get to a system of material comfort and logistics we have without majority buy in to not fight and kill.

I wish people would realize how silly they sound reciting the dead peoples chants when the literal world clearly shows majority rule is not so bad literally. For whatever reason quite a few folks prefer to fight over which vain elders hallucinations and diatribes are the one true social system when the reality is providing real stuff to survive is all society really is about.

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> dead people’s political documents is propaganda.

Yours is no less propaganda.

People do cultural learning, pretty much everything you use from technology to medicine and yes politics is overwhelmingly based on dead people's ideas. That is the basis of us as cultural beings.

You're right with cultural learning we might inherit noise too, but you'll have to fight against the content of those ideas, not dismiss from mere historicity. If an idea has merit, it will be timeless.

Disagree I have to fight them. Every political system is eventually jettisoned by generational churn.

Medicines we keep using keep proving their value to the present through experiment. We have binned plenty discovered in the past but later revealed to be snake oil.

As ephemeral gibberish does not exist it is naturally lost to time as those who memorized it die off. What’s literally true remains always verifiable by experiment.

I can find academic papers, political arguments we are in violation of the old ideas today anyway. How do we know we even abide them as intended and aren’t just abiding arbitrary math for staffing institutions described by the Constitution? They are not like organic chemistry where cause-effect is obvious. Does “America” give rise to society or people engineering together casually referring to some old gibberish when pressed? How do you test for existence of political ideology except by populist poll? Democratic majority rule. But that’s anti-America which is to prevent majority rule!

What I advocate is more like forgetting they exist by not teaching them. We can teach how to create together versus destroy each other, without the history lesson, and measure for impact literally to avoid carrying forward snake oil.

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