burger_flipper2 comments on The Two-Party Swindle - Less Wrong

42 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 01 January 2008 08:38AM

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Comment author: burger_flipper2 01 January 2008 05:35:48PM 0 points [-]

Mamet: "The stoics wrote that the excellent king can walk through the streets unguarded. Our contemporary Secret Service spends tens of millions of dollars every time the president and his retinue venture forth.

Mythologically, the money and the effort are spent not to protect the president's life--all our lives are fragile--but to protect the body politic against the perception that his job is ceremonial, and that for all our attempts to invest it with real power--the Monroe Doctrine, the war powers act, the "button"--there's no one there but us."