Quote Originally Posted by Marlin View Post
As Biko pointed out, history will repeat itself, and the bloated empires always fail eventually.
Really? That's what you took away from me saying that no armed revolution has succeeded in eliminating corruption? You make a big deal about people not calling names but you really test the line by arguing in bad faith - that's worse than simply calling names because its so banal that its easy to simply accept.

Umm, perhaps it is the corruption that has lead to our success.
If that were true then North Korea would be an economic power-house. Corruption, practically by definition, is a restraint on broad economic development. Your proposed theory of "benign corruption" is not corruption at all - it is the system working.

When you define both success of the system and failure of the system as failure that's simply arguing in bad faith.

This repeated concept is really starting to frustrate me. THERE ARE NO ACTIONS BEING TAKEN. You keep saying that something is being done about what comes out on wikileaks, but what is being done? Not a DAMNED thing.
You have a double-standard for proof - on one hand you are preparing for the total collapse of society, yet no western democracy has ever even come close to, much less actually collapsed. On the other hand you demand that wikileaks be practically omnipotent - that if corruption doesn't immediately melt away under their trillions of candlepower then they are totally irrelevant. When it does happen in other much smaller countries, that doesn't count, but the inertia of the largest economy in the world is required to be no problem for omnipotent wikileaks.

Society does not work that way. Exposure of corruption causes slow change - people vote differently, legislation gets rewritten over the course of years, others still in the shadows aren't so bold with their conspiracies going forward. Spectacular implosions like Enron and Madoff are the very rare exception. They make great fodder for 24-hour news and faux-outrage pundits - but it's the slow inexorable plod of progress that does the most to improve the world. Corruption is a drag on that progress, exposure reduces that drag.