> It’s not even that democracy is bad; it’s just that it’s very weak. And the fact that it’s very weak is easily seen by the fact that very unpopular policies [...] persist despite strong majorities being against them.
Is this a sign democracy is weak? Or is it a sign that the political process has to choose between mutually exclusive popular policies?
In my country, the average voter wants their trash hauled away, but don't want any dumps or incinerators built. They want responsive public services, but they don't want tax increases, cuts to other services, or a deficit. They want good care for the elderly, but they don't want to spend more on care workers, or to give the jobs to poorly paid immigrants.
The US political system has a bunch of problems (deadlock and corruption for example) but when voters want to have their cake and eat it too, which is impossible, no political system is going to make it possible.
> In my country, the average voter wants their trash hauled away, but don't want any dumps or incinerators built. They want responsive public services, but they don't want tax increases, cuts to other services, or a deficit. They want good care for the elderly,
Many "undemocratic" nations have functioning public services, clean streets, low to virtually no-crime and good universities.
> but they don't want to spend more on care workers, or to give the jobs to poorly paid immigrants.
In a capitalist economy part of a global marketplace, you are not "owed" jobs.
>They want good care for the elderly, but they don't want to spend more on care workers, or to give the jobs to poorly paid immigrants.
The voters aren't a homogeneous group. Older voters, i.e. the baby boomers, the biggest voting block, want stability and extensive pension spending. Young people want economic opportunity and to avoid worse quality of life than their parents' generation, as evidenced by recent election results in the US and Europe, where under 30s, especially young men, voted for radical right-wing parties more than any other demographic. Due to the number of working people shrinking relative to the number of retirees, there's a fundamental conflict of interest between the older generation, and the young generation facing greater and greater financial burden to support them. The relatively greater number of voters in the older block is causing society to prioritise their needs over those of the youth, inverting the traditional structure where the old make sacrifices to support the young.
> Due to the number of working people shrinking relative to the number of retirees, there's a fundamental conflict of interest between the older generation, and the young generation facing greater and greater financial burden to support them.
The older generation's burden on the younger generation has always existed. It was paid by labor, usually uncompensated by women of earlier generations. Now, the burden is paid by money from tax revenue and/or personal savings.
We need to expand the financial base for many social services, including elder care. It is long past time that we tax wealth, as the wealthy extract their money from our pockets through various rent-seeking schemes.
> Is this a sign democracy is weak? Or is it a sign that the political process has to choose between mutually exclusive popular policies?
It is a sign democracy is fake. Democracy only exists at the grace of someone/something else that decides these very large (in terms of cost) and unpopular policies. And the only thing that really matters is whether people advance economically. This works in democracies because, in a democracy, it's very, very easy to prevent change, so the institutions and policies that existed before democracy was introduced (or before it was real democracy) persist almost everywhere.
Authoritarian changes, and eventually war, is what happens when you have a sustained economic deterioration in a country. The form of governance matters on an individual level, but not on a country level. We're in the first stages of that now, and it's hard to see anything happen but it getting worse from this point forward.
One application of this: if you want to defeat MAGA, you need to pay middle America. MAGA voters vote MAGA because their economic situation has been deteriorating since, well, really since 2008 (with local areas, like Detroit, further back), and accelerated since COVID. A very, very visible part of this deterioration on a household level, sorry, is the increase in household medical spending that is the result of ACA. Yes, it's a very good deal in terms of "how much medical care do I get for $x" (esp. if you're poor), but a pretty bad deal in terms of "if I don't care about medical anything, how much $ can I spend right now?" (especially if you work for those $, and what especially matters if it's more or less than last month/last year/last ... it's less)
More generally, medical and pension costs for the aging population are reducing everyone's standards of living ... and this will keep getting worse for at least 2 decades. We need a solution for this. Republicans' solution is to throw everyone to the curb (less medical care, less pensions, less public transport, even less education, less universities, ...). Can we do better? How?
> only thing that really matters is whether people advance
economically.
This is such an incomplete understanding of governance and state it
could only appear under already degenerate conditions of poor
political education and non-participation.
In which manner, in this theories, do you measure the performance of the « dictator »/CEO/president? Is it based on objective KPIs decided ahead of time? or are the KPIs supposed to be evaluated by the consumers/electors/ people?
And what consequences can those KPIs have, if considered to be poor?
Can we fire the dictator?
If no KPIs allow to maintain the system stable, as a feedback loop, then welcome to USSR where everything is fake, and the « government » governs itself until complete failure.
>In which manner, in this theories, do you measure the performance of the « dictator »/CEO/president? Is it based on objective KPIs decided ahead of time? or are the KPIs supposed to be evaluated by the consumers/electors/ people?
The Magna Carta had a solution for this:
> Under what historians later labelled "clause 61", or the "security clause", a council of 25 barons would be created to monitor and ensure John's future adherence to the charter.[46] If John did not conform to the charter within 40 days of being notified of a transgression by the council, the 25 barons were empowered by clause 61 to seize John's castles and lands until, in their judgement, amends had been made.[47] Men were to be compelled to swear an oath to assist the council in controlling the King, but once redress had been made for any breaches, the King would continue to rule as before.
Such an arrangement can only work when at least some part of the populace is well armed enough to overthrow the government if things get too bad.
> least some part of the populace is well armed enough to overthrow t
What a naive fantasy.
Organization of people is much more important than guns. You don't even need guns when you organize. You can stop the state just by collective action. See color revolutions.
When it is guns, you need RGP's, detonators and TNT (and drones), a good underground insurgent logistic chains. You also need commit to life in poverty and eventual death.
United States, Hungary, Turkey, Russia, Serbia have plenty of independent weapons, yet there is no fear of effective armed resistance. Everybody is a rebel in the Internet. When things go tough it's "I have to go to work and eat. My family needs me."
If the leader does too much of a poor job it tends to be voted out. Democracy doesn't work by ensuring great people get power. It just avoids perpetuating leadership that gets too misaligned with a large share of the population.
I have been told this guy is an irascible reactionary genius for like 15 years - he says so himself: "No. I’m an outsider, man. I’m an intellectual." Yet once again I see somebody with the sophistication of a teenager:
If you look at the administration of Washington, what is established looks a lot like a start-up. It looks so much like a start-up that this guy Alexander Hamilton, who was recognizably a start-up bro, is running the whole government — he is basically the Larry Page of this republic.
[...]
Understanding why Hitler was so bad, why Stalin was so bad, is essential to the riddle of the 20th century. But I think it’s important to note that we don’t see for the rest of European and world history a Holocaust. You can pull the camera way back and basically say, Wow, since the establishment of European civilization, we didn’t have this kind of chaos and violence.
This sounds like something that Ricken from Severance wrote in his self-help book:
It’s basically just a greater openness of mind and a greater ability to look around and say: We just assume that our political science is superior to Aristotle’s political science because our physics is superior to Aristotle’s physics. What if that isn’t so?
And I laughed out loud at this, he's just a ridiculous idiot:
When I look at the status of women in, say, a Jane Austen novel, which is well before Enfranchisement, it actually seems kind of OK.
I belong to the same X-gen group as Marc Andreessen, Curtis Yarvin, Elon Musk,Peter Thiel, and others. I have a background in computers and am financially independent.
While I strongly disagree with them, I feel an affinity and familiarity with their thinking. I have read the same books, seen the same news, and lived in the same era. I understand how they arrived where they are now.
The Neo-reactionary movement seems exactly like what my generation comes up from the right. Dark Psychology of Dark Enlightenment is a cyberpunk sci-fi world as a fantasy. To live with societal collapse, dystopia and decay with low-life and high-tech. Always framing oneself as an independent outsider and a rebel. Sarcasm as a reflex. These guys see themself living in William Gibson's Neuromancer world.
>> While I strongly disagree with them, I feel an affinity and familiarity with their thinking. I have read the same books, seen the same news, and lived in the same era. I understand how they arrived where they are now.
Similar , however I see them more as extreme greed (for power/control) and technological hubris.
Interesting how people interpret things differently based on their life experiences. I feel this is what strong advocates of objective facts and EMH tend to miss. People have the same input data, however the interpretations are different based on the (hidden) internal state.
I keep wondering, what does the richest man in the world want more ? Why this ? I find it a very revolting way to live.
I can see how you would draw this conclusion, and somewhat agree. However, viewed through occam's lens, I'm more inclined to go with simple greed (tale as old as time) over an adult male fantasy.
> I belong to the same X-gen group as Marc Andreessen, Curtis Yarvin, Elon Musk,Peter Thiel, and others.
Me too.
> I have a background in computers and am financially independent.
Me too.
I think having read the same books, seen the same movies and news, played similar games, having lived in the same era is only part of it.
Maybe where you came from, where and under what circumstances you grew up, which opportunities and/or (bad)luck you had, where the winds of chaos have blown you, how you were 'driven' to be 'driven' where you landed makes you more detached, or immune to such overgeneralizations, or maybe call it 'cultural' brainwashing?
IOW: There is too much trash in the minds of too many people. Memory leaks. Buffers overflow. Garbage collection is overdue. Or a reboot.
Edit: That's not to be read as an endorsement of the people you mentioned, and their likes. Or that I'd be a fan. Maybe my 'reboot' is useless, too. Because the filesystem is irrecoverably damaged, the hardware underneath has been replaced, and is working different, so a new install of another 'OS' is needed anyways.
Things change faster than tribalistic peoples grasp. Dunbar's Number etc.
Yarvin is only another horribly damaged person, squealing in pain in a pseudointellectual vocabulary. He has neither knowledge nor insight, but a gift for miming these things. The questions are, first, how might we stop so many children from being psychically tortured so that their minds become piles of bloody shred like this, and then second, why does anybody take it at face value when, rarely, one of them learns to scream in sounds that mimic high discourse?
Well, many of us take an LLM's outputs at face value, don't we?
Also, I don't claim to have any answers, but I found some insights about literacy (vs pre-literate orality) in Walter Ong's work "The Written Word". Maybe it'll spark some ideas in your mind as well.
The main tl;dr from Ong's work IMHO is that Literacy is a Technology, and every technology entices us to give up certain strengths and conveniences for other strengths and conveniences. Humanity bought into the power of the written word wholesale, but words can be hijacked to manipulate people (by LLMs, by Yarvin, etc.) at scale.
Readit News
Is this a sign democracy is weak? Or is it a sign that the political process has to choose between mutually exclusive popular policies?
In my country, the average voter wants their trash hauled away, but don't want any dumps or incinerators built. They want responsive public services, but they don't want tax increases, cuts to other services, or a deficit. They want good care for the elderly, but they don't want to spend more on care workers, or to give the jobs to poorly paid immigrants.
The US political system has a bunch of problems (deadlock and corruption for example) but when voters want to have their cake and eat it too, which is impossible, no political system is going to make it possible.
Many "undemocratic" nations have functioning public services, clean streets, low to virtually no-crime and good universities.
> but they don't want to spend more on care workers, or to give the jobs to poorly paid immigrants.
In a capitalist economy part of a global marketplace, you are not "owed" jobs.
The voters aren't a homogeneous group. Older voters, i.e. the baby boomers, the biggest voting block, want stability and extensive pension spending. Young people want economic opportunity and to avoid worse quality of life than their parents' generation, as evidenced by recent election results in the US and Europe, where under 30s, especially young men, voted for radical right-wing parties more than any other demographic. Due to the number of working people shrinking relative to the number of retirees, there's a fundamental conflict of interest between the older generation, and the young generation facing greater and greater financial burden to support them. The relatively greater number of voters in the older block is causing society to prioritise their needs over those of the youth, inverting the traditional structure where the old make sacrifices to support the young.
The older generation's burden on the younger generation has always existed. It was paid by labor, usually uncompensated by women of earlier generations. Now, the burden is paid by money from tax revenue and/or personal savings.
We need to expand the financial base for many social services, including elder care. It is long past time that we tax wealth, as the wealthy extract their money from our pockets through various rent-seeking schemes.
It is a sign democracy is fake. Democracy only exists at the grace of someone/something else that decides these very large (in terms of cost) and unpopular policies. And the only thing that really matters is whether people advance economically. This works in democracies because, in a democracy, it's very, very easy to prevent change, so the institutions and policies that existed before democracy was introduced (or before it was real democracy) persist almost everywhere.
Authoritarian changes, and eventually war, is what happens when you have a sustained economic deterioration in a country. The form of governance matters on an individual level, but not on a country level. We're in the first stages of that now, and it's hard to see anything happen but it getting worse from this point forward.
One application of this: if you want to defeat MAGA, you need to pay middle America. MAGA voters vote MAGA because their economic situation has been deteriorating since, well, really since 2008 (with local areas, like Detroit, further back), and accelerated since COVID. A very, very visible part of this deterioration on a household level, sorry, is the increase in household medical spending that is the result of ACA. Yes, it's a very good deal in terms of "how much medical care do I get for $x" (esp. if you're poor), but a pretty bad deal in terms of "if I don't care about medical anything, how much $ can I spend right now?" (especially if you work for those $, and what especially matters if it's more or less than last month/last year/last ... it's less)
More generally, medical and pension costs for the aging population are reducing everyone's standards of living ... and this will keep getting worse for at least 2 decades. We need a solution for this. Republicans' solution is to throw everyone to the curb (less medical care, less pensions, less public transport, even less education, less universities, ...). Can we do better? How?
This is such an incomplete understanding of governance and state it could only appear under already degenerate conditions of poor political education and non-participation.
And what consequences can those KPIs have, if considered to be poor? Can we fire the dictator?
If no KPIs allow to maintain the system stable, as a feedback loop, then welcome to USSR where everything is fake, and the « government » governs itself until complete failure.
The Magna Carta had a solution for this:
> Under what historians later labelled "clause 61", or the "security clause", a council of 25 barons would be created to monitor and ensure John's future adherence to the charter.[46] If John did not conform to the charter within 40 days of being notified of a transgression by the council, the 25 barons were empowered by clause 61 to seize John's castles and lands until, in their judgement, amends had been made.[47] Men were to be compelled to swear an oath to assist the council in controlling the King, but once redress had been made for any breaches, the King would continue to rule as before.
Such an arrangement can only work when at least some part of the populace is well armed enough to overthrow the government if things get too bad.
What a naive fantasy.
Organization of people is much more important than guns. You don't even need guns when you organize. You can stop the state just by collective action. See color revolutions.
When it is guns, you need RGP's, detonators and TNT (and drones), a good underground insurgent logistic chains. You also need commit to life in poverty and eventual death.
United States, Hungary, Turkey, Russia, Serbia have plenty of independent weapons, yet there is no fear of effective armed resistance. Everybody is a rebel in the Internet. When things go tough it's "I have to go to work and eat. My family needs me."
it seems that democratic regimes don't need any KPIs or any other performance review system, and people all agree with this
how the 'feedback loop' works?
If the leader does too much of a poor job it tends to be voted out. Democracy doesn't work by ensuring great people get power. It just avoids perpetuating leadership that gets too misaligned with a large share of the population.
Power = Business.
In the current world gigacorps, moving fast and breaking shit is good business
Democracies are NOT about moving fast and breaking shit.
Its hardly surprising that the gigacorp crowd want to replace Democracy with something they feel is doing so well.
Deleted Comment
While I strongly disagree with them, I feel an affinity and familiarity with their thinking. I have read the same books, seen the same news, and lived in the same era. I understand how they arrived where they are now.
The Neo-reactionary movement seems exactly like what my generation comes up from the right. Dark Psychology of Dark Enlightenment is a cyberpunk sci-fi world as a fantasy. To live with societal collapse, dystopia and decay with low-life and high-tech. Always framing oneself as an independent outsider and a rebel. Sarcasm as a reflex. These guys see themself living in William Gibson's Neuromancer world.
Similar , however I see them more as extreme greed (for power/control) and technological hubris.
Interesting how people interpret things differently based on their life experiences. I feel this is what strong advocates of objective facts and EMH tend to miss. People have the same input data, however the interpretations are different based on the (hidden) internal state.
I keep wondering, what does the richest man in the world want more ? Why this ? I find it a very revolting way to live.
Dead Comment
Me too.
> I have a background in computers and am financially independent.
Me too.
I think having read the same books, seen the same movies and news, played similar games, having lived in the same era is only part of it.
Maybe where you came from, where and under what circumstances you grew up, which opportunities and/or (bad)luck you had, where the winds of chaos have blown you, how you were 'driven' to be 'driven' where you landed makes you more detached, or immune to such overgeneralizations, or maybe call it 'cultural' brainwashing?
IOW: There is too much trash in the minds of too many people. Memory leaks. Buffers overflow. Garbage collection is overdue. Or a reboot.
Edit: That's not to be read as an endorsement of the people you mentioned, and their likes. Or that I'd be a fan. Maybe my 'reboot' is useless, too. Because the filesystem is irrecoverably damaged, the hardware underneath has been replaced, and is working different, so a new install of another 'OS' is needed anyways.
Things change faster than tribalistic peoples grasp. Dunbar's Number etc.
Also, I don't claim to have any answers, but I found some insights about literacy (vs pre-literate orality) in Walter Ong's work "The Written Word". Maybe it'll spark some ideas in your mind as well.
The main tl;dr from Ong's work IMHO is that Literacy is a Technology, and every technology entices us to give up certain strengths and conveniences for other strengths and conveniences. Humanity bought into the power of the written word wholesale, but words can be hijacked to manipulate people (by LLMs, by Yarvin, etc.) at scale.