> Yes, McDonald’s (not affiliated with Kevin MacDonald) would face legal consequences if they started drugging their Hebraic guests. Still: is that the main reason they don’t?
Quite probably. Still, many companies do everything in their powers to poison their customers for profit within the confines of the law or grey areas of it (from tobacco companies adding addictive substances, to Sony adding rootkits, all the way to drug companies wining and dining doctors to over-prescribe drugs, modern web "dark patterns", Facebook's "dopamine-binge" engineering and socio-political meddling and so on).
Hell, many companies poison their customers even outside what's legal to make a profit (from the car industry emissions scandal, to construction companies using subpar materials to cut costs, to the tons of scandals in the food industry).
That doesn't even touch the kind of scumbuggery involved in financial and/or white crime, from otherwise "respectable" CEOs of huge multinational and national banks, insurance companies, and so on.
And that's before we get to externalities, which those companies can conveniently ignore, but the monarch/government can't (or shouldn't) - because unlike a company, the domain of the government is the totality.
That is, if Exxon poisons some ecosystem, it's still fine (for Exxon and it's CEO, some damage control aside, iff they are found out, and even if found out, only iff they can't negotiate a good deal to get out of it with the political lackeys they sponsor). Exxon cares for "salus Exxon" alone. If the government does it, it's not OK, because the government is supposed to care for the "salus populi".
I'd also argue that the modern CEO is an example of the decline of corporations and of technological progress in its declining momentum (if not absolute velocity) stage.
Modern companies are mostly good in selling incremental engineering, making money out of pure BS like advertising and selling privacy data, and being middlemen, than from great tech and science advances (the last of which belong to the era of PARC, ARPA, and co., and smaller more nimble companies, owner-run enterprises, and independent research - this article makes the case better than me: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declining-rate-of-profit ).
And of course, late 20th/early 21-st century companies, are the province of a bureaucracy (not to mention mental conformity) that can put even USSR-era public sector to shame. Dilbert anyone?
Oh, and those CEOs? They can, and frequently do, burn their companies to the ground, and they'll still leave with golden parachutes and bonuses intact.
If a modern CEO-run company is our model of efficiency and governance, we aren't going to go very far.
> I am not a fascist—as a Jew, I cannot support fascism.
Technically speaking that's only true for historical Nazism - which was against the Jews. And even that might not be that absolute (I've read that there was a small "neonazi Jews" movement once in Israel, basically bored teenage Jew punks looking to shock their parents - but I digress).
Still, a Jew would be perfectly capable of supporting fascism in general, if it wasn't called "Nazi" and didn't target Jews. Hell, historically fascism was not about being against Jews (that was a later - German - addition), but a way to organise industry and society in opposition to liberal capitalism and communism - a kind of New Deal for Italy and Germany.
As for the nationalistic and "higher race" aspects of it, nothing would preclude a Jew, or for that matter, any nationality, from subscribing to those, including the US of marching imperialism, popular exceptionalism, and "manifest destiny".
> Each trustee has an NFT, of course. With this token he can do three things: converse anonymously with the other trustees; help them elect a new king, and designate a successor or string of successors.
Unless they also build, inspect, and maintain the infrastructure for this, then they are the mercy of those who do. And their identities can be found as readily as anybody's who thought themselves clever for using Tor or getting paid for black market services through a blockchain.
> The simple answer is that the first king is special. He appoints, as trustees, people he trusts. His goal is to in a sense perpetuate the promise of his initial message; to create a board which, initially stamped with his image, will retain it permanently. But the first king picks the first board and knows who they are—although the initial trustees should probably start their careers by retiring in favor of someone fully hidden.
Yeah, this will end well...
How isn't this just a recipe for a perpetual governance based on the interests of that initial king and his selected palies - and in general of their families/clan/class/party/etc?
Especially since not even an popular or army uprising can shake them, since they alone control those drones and robo-soldiers. Why would they give a fuck about "salus populi"? And if they do, why would their nth ancestor replacements continue to give?
One thing you could do - if you were one of those- would be to secretly contact the king (perhaps even anonymously), and tell him "I'm one of the veto-token holders. I expect others like me will contact you or already have. As you know, atm we don't have any other powers or benefits. But if you agree to give us some, we'll support you - we might even sell our tokens to you, if the reward is big enough. Sleep on it. When you reach a critical mass of us, just let us know".
"How isn't this just a recipe for a perpetual governance based on the interests of that initial king" --
I guess the idea is that the king would think of his realm as an extension of his own selfhood, so that the better off it's doing the more awesome he feels.
A problem I see here is that just as someone might feel most awesome if he achieves something impressive such as writing a great novel even at huge cost to his own mental and/or physical health, similarly the king might feel most awesome if his realm (for example) colonizes Mars at the cost of deep misery for most of his own people. The cost might even make him feel more awesome than he'd otherwise feel.
(Well, maybe this is where the trustees do their thing and remove him, but wouldn't they also think of the realm as extensions of themselves, and think that the costly Mars-colonization effort is swell?)
> I guess the idea is that the king would think of his realm as an extension of his own selfhood, so that the better off it's doing the more awesome he feels.
I'd say this whole thing devolves to: "If the monarch is good, they can rule well".
Which I believe we collectively knew, at least ever since the time of Amenhotep.
People that aren't hot for monarchy aren't because they disagree with this premise+conclusion pair. But they do find the prerequisite ("a good monarch") rare and unsustainable (both regarding succession and within a single monarch's full rule), they don't believe it's a rule with enough failsafes, and so on.
As for novelty here, the blockchain checks and balances, they're quite hand-wavy atm, and I think can be overcome in several ways (beyond the basic key of building, inspeting, maintaining, and thus trusting the whole technical infrastructure).
What America and its citizenry can get behind -- what they NEED -- is something cool. Coups and Larping isnt cool. Guns that run on bitcoin isn't cool. You know whats cool?
Pizza Hut.
Nobody likes silicon valley because it is full of nerds. Nerds are gay and it is natural and right to both dislike and distrust them. Who among you would swear fealty to Zuck? Few indeed, I fear. Likewise, who among you has not also tendered yourself to the sweet enjoyment of two sweaty litres of refrigerated cola and the luke-warm glistening of a medium pepperoni pizza? Who among you has not partaken? Perhaps there are even some who are partaking now as they read this.
Why advocate for a society run by silicon valley, when you could advocate for a hostile takeover of all USG assets by Pizza Hut TM (TICKER: YUM)? Why should we bother with the tired charade of POLITICKING into existence a president who will swear to use his constitutional powers to rule like a CEO, when we could advocate for a CEO of Pizza Hut who will use his EXECUTIVE powers to BECOME king?
Pizza Hut is loved and admired by all who matter. But it is despised only by our enemies. If you don't like PIZZA HUT there is something wrong with you, and you are not welcome in the New America, AMERICA 2: Presented By Pizza Hut.
Let HISTORY be your guide... From Lord Macaulay:
"It is a mistake to suppose that the Company was a merely commercial body till the middle of the last century. Commerce was its chief object; but in order to enable it to pursue that object, it had been, like the other Companies which were its rivals, like the Dutch India Company, like the French India Company, invested from a very early period with political functions. More than a hundred and twenty years ago, the Company was in miniature precisely what it now is. It was intrusted with the very highest prerogatives of sovereignty. It had its forts, and its white captains, and its black sepoys; it had its civil and criminal tribunals; it was authorised to proclaim martial law; it sent ambassadors to the native governments, and concluded treaties with them; it was Zemindar of several districts, and within those districts, like other Zemindars of the first class, it exercised the powers of a sovereign, even to the infliction of capital punishment on the Hindoos within its jurisdiction. It is incorrect, therefore, to say, that the Company was at first a mere trader, and has since become a sovereign. It was at first a great trader and a petty prince. The political functions at first attracted little notice, because they were merely auxiliary to the commercial functions. By degrees, however, the political functions became more and more important. The Zemindar became a great nabob, became sovereign of all India; the two hundred sepoys became two hundred thousand. This change was gradually wrought, and was not immediately comprehended... Thus the transformation of the Company from a trading body, which possessed some sovereign prerogatives for the purposes of trade, into a sovereign body, the trade of which was auxiliary to its sovereignty, was effected by degrees and under disguise. It is not strange, therefore, that the mercantile and political transactions of this great corporation should be entangled together in inextricable complication."
If Britain was able to absorb the East India Trading Company by degrees... Why shouldn't PIZZA HUT be able to do the reverse and absorb and control USG and its interests?
Sounds fine, until the rebels and/or an invading army destroy the internet architecture in their territory, and the regime's weapons are inoperable. If you bound all the specialized communication equipment modern armies use in this manner, you could probably get a similar result without your guys being extra screwed in a comms denied environment.
While it might seem like a trivial nitpick, this regime can only survive while it remains the dominant military force, otherwise your NFT against their bayonet is hardly a winning proposition.
It's akin to the misunderstanding of the permissive action links. They exist to ensure that the people who launch the nuclear missiles received authentic orders. They have nothing to do with actually using the weapons. Even weapons with codes to activate them the code is something like 12345, it exists to make sure the weapon is used purposefully, not accidentally.
I suspected that such a system was the way it was, but I have no hands on experience with nuclear weapons, and thus wasn't about to shoot my mouth off.
That's a non-trivial nitpick. The other option is going fire-safe measures, like when the power goes out, the security doors automatically unlock because of the fire hazard. There are just as many exploits, but the onus and risks go in the opposite directions. If the guns are all NFT-*dis*abled, the king needs to maintain power/internet to *suppress* the weapons. Enemies still need to disable the power to *enable* regime weapons to use against it. This is all in the internal world of the realm of course; foreign weapons will always work, in which case a foreign-supported internal coup could still work... There's a lot of kinks to work out here.
"America has no army of bloodthirsty, medieval-minded, spike-helmeted World War I veterans."
True. It does, however, have something like 2-3 million veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. This is a much smaller percentage of the population of the US than Great War veterans were of Weimar, true. But most of them are still alive, and many are still of military age.
How many of them do you think are fans of the Regime?
How many are killing themselves with heroin overdoses? How many are living under bridges? How many have ever done so much as throw a brick at a cop? lol
It is entirely possible that we *already* live under this regime. With the minor detail that neither the god-emperor nor his lieutenants care to be known publicly (Secrecy, plus a thick ablative coating of disposable meatpuppets is a pretty effective defense against regicide. Possibly even the only one.) And they have their own, however perverse, concept of "salus populi".
It's hard to write off the possibility of what you're saying. A centerless oligarchy that replenishes its ranks with the progressive religion explains a lot. But for decisions on the scale of "what will be the response to 9/11?", you have to think someone higher up than Rumsfeld is being deferred to for clarifying what options are even available. Maybe the political figures we hear about really do exercise personal discretion every so often, and I should ditch the tinfoil hat and take these events at face value when it seems that way.
"Everything leaks" seems to be an article of nearly religious faith, I doubt that I can dissuade believers.
But will note that e.g. Manhattan project did not publicly leak; nor the secret annex of "9/11 report"; and that in fact hardly anything other than minutiae ever seem to leak (the most commonly cited counterexample, the Snowden thing, imho shows every symptom of being a "hangout", rather than genuine leak.) And here speaking of merely the visible, official bureaucracy, rather than a hypothetical inner core. Even it is pretty good at keeping secrets when it actually counts.
Even if I humor you on this it will be a hollow ( pedantic ) victory, your original point was that it was possible to run a large project wo leaks and Stalin’s spies definitely count as leakers
"Mussolini was actually fired by his own Grand Council of Fascism."
And how did that work out for the Grand Council of Fascism?
"But most people in the PRC are Han Chinese and the Party is inevitably Han-centric."
The Chinese government still, even today, intentionally restricts Han fertility.
"But this key need not just be for nuclear weapons. Rather, all the military’s weapons can be prevented from operating without it. While anyone who truly cares about guns knows that the only worse thing than a “smart gun” is an Internet gun, the military is after all a special-purpose use case. It is not that hard to build a weapon that disables itself if it doesn’t get today’s downstream key. It’s for killing people, not culling hogs."
This leaves the entire government open to being neutered by simply disrupting telecommunications.
"but after Augustus prevailed, there was no politics and no politicians. And the class conflict in Rome was never heard from again."
Some of the politicians were never heard from again either.
"Accordingly, it requires much less commitment and participation than a 20th-century fascist or communist party. Participation in the movement feels less like enlisting in an army, more like playing a social game. And instead of beating your enemies up in the streets, the moves in this game are purely symbolic non-actions—like voting."
And other symbolic non-actions, like losing your job.
Why would anyone join a political movement that carries negative real world consequences for its members as long as the movement is unsuccessful, that doesn't also promise benefits in the event of success? If something has never existed there's generally a reason.
First week after the deployment of the unstoppable robot army:
- The army swiftly occupies all the major data centers in the country, giving the King physical control of >51% of validator nodes
- A team of loyal (or subjugated) programmers silently updates the code of the validator nodes, simply removing the ability of trustees to revoke the King's Token
- The King reigns tyrannically and eternally (until his death, when the sacred key gets inherited by his spoiled and decadent son)
Come on Curtis, hacky engineering decisions for reconciling absolute monarchy and accountability will never actually work.
A true monarchy of the future can only be led without any accountability by an immortal and genetically superior God-Emperor of Mankind, for emergence of which we should pray.
Proud to have been part of the Usenet crowd too :D Absolute Monarchy is the proven only successful system. I'm sorry for those who don't get that .... but they don't matter B)
Given that the failures of the "accountability" piece is the core reason everybody ditched monarchy in the modern world, don't you think you should have some better answers for it at this point than teenage techno-nerd "engineering" approaches? ( space nukes, blockchain)
It is interesting to consider the example of Charlemagne rather than Augustus. He ruled not by riding a popular wave to the top, but by the society first being broken up into 'natural aristocracies' that then each ceded a portion of their power to the highest man on the totem poll. This naturally evolving hierarchy seems, at first glance, more stable than the Gracchus brothers' option.
Our own natural aristocrats would be the main shareholders in our biggest industrial enterprises, right? But they don’t have power of their own to cede to someone they like and trust, because the bureaucratic network controls them via the national security bureaus. The CIA summons them to Bohemian Grove type meetings in order to remind of them of who’s in charge. So how do they destroy the bureaucratic network that’s keeping them impotent? With a cyber-attack? How would they plan it? I don’t see how they could plan it without the CIA finding out.
My question - was this a real speech? Based on his description of the event and crowd reaction, if it did indeed occur I'm guessing it was to the black pilled psychos at the Claremont Insitute?
Hahah, and here I was reading this and hearing his voice with an outdoor echo in my head, and I knew something about it still didn't seem real, haha... I was definitely missing the um's!
"I'm a crypto-fascist, but like, literally."
> Yes, McDonald’s (not affiliated with Kevin MacDonald) would face legal consequences if they started drugging their Hebraic guests. Still: is that the main reason they don’t?
Quite probably. Still, many companies do everything in their powers to poison their customers for profit within the confines of the law or grey areas of it (from tobacco companies adding addictive substances, to Sony adding rootkits, all the way to drug companies wining and dining doctors to over-prescribe drugs, modern web "dark patterns", Facebook's "dopamine-binge" engineering and socio-political meddling and so on).
Hell, many companies poison their customers even outside what's legal to make a profit (from the car industry emissions scandal, to construction companies using subpar materials to cut costs, to the tons of scandals in the food industry).
That doesn't even touch the kind of scumbuggery involved in financial and/or white crime, from otherwise "respectable" CEOs of huge multinational and national banks, insurance companies, and so on.
And that's before we get to externalities, which those companies can conveniently ignore, but the monarch/government can't (or shouldn't) - because unlike a company, the domain of the government is the totality.
That is, if Exxon poisons some ecosystem, it's still fine (for Exxon and it's CEO, some damage control aside, iff they are found out, and even if found out, only iff they can't negotiate a good deal to get out of it with the political lackeys they sponsor). Exxon cares for "salus Exxon" alone. If the government does it, it's not OK, because the government is supposed to care for the "salus populi".
I'd also argue that the modern CEO is an example of the decline of corporations and of technological progress in its declining momentum (if not absolute velocity) stage.
Modern companies are mostly good in selling incremental engineering, making money out of pure BS like advertising and selling privacy data, and being middlemen, than from great tech and science advances (the last of which belong to the era of PARC, ARPA, and co., and smaller more nimble companies, owner-run enterprises, and independent research - this article makes the case better than me: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declining-rate-of-profit ).
And of course, late 20th/early 21-st century companies, are the province of a bureaucracy (not to mention mental conformity) that can put even USSR-era public sector to shame. Dilbert anyone?
Oh, and those CEOs? They can, and frequently do, burn their companies to the ground, and they'll still leave with golden parachutes and bonuses intact.
If a modern CEO-run company is our model of efficiency and governance, we aren't going to go very far.
> I am not a fascist—as a Jew, I cannot support fascism.
Technically speaking that's only true for historical Nazism - which was against the Jews. And even that might not be that absolute (I've read that there was a small "neonazi Jews" movement once in Israel, basically bored teenage Jew punks looking to shock their parents - but I digress).
Still, a Jew would be perfectly capable of supporting fascism in general, if it wasn't called "Nazi" and didn't target Jews. Hell, historically fascism was not about being against Jews (that was a later - German - addition), but a way to organise industry and society in opposition to liberal capitalism and communism - a kind of New Deal for Italy and Germany.
As for the nationalistic and "higher race" aspects of it, nothing would preclude a Jew, or for that matter, any nationality, from subscribing to those, including the US of marching imperialism, popular exceptionalism, and "manifest destiny".
> Each trustee has an NFT, of course. With this token he can do three things: converse anonymously with the other trustees; help them elect a new king, and designate a successor or string of successors.
Unless they also build, inspect, and maintain the infrastructure for this, then they are the mercy of those who do. And their identities can be found as readily as anybody's who thought themselves clever for using Tor or getting paid for black market services through a blockchain.
> The simple answer is that the first king is special. He appoints, as trustees, people he trusts. His goal is to in a sense perpetuate the promise of his initial message; to create a board which, initially stamped with his image, will retain it permanently. But the first king picks the first board and knows who they are—although the initial trustees should probably start their careers by retiring in favor of someone fully hidden.
Yeah, this will end well...
How isn't this just a recipe for a perpetual governance based on the interests of that initial king and his selected palies - and in general of their families/clan/class/party/etc?
Especially since not even an popular or army uprising can shake them, since they alone control those drones and robo-soldiers. Why would they give a fuck about "salus populi"? And if they do, why would their nth ancestor replacements continue to give?
One thing you could do - if you were one of those- would be to secretly contact the king (perhaps even anonymously), and tell him "I'm one of the veto-token holders. I expect others like me will contact you or already have. As you know, atm we don't have any other powers or benefits. But if you agree to give us some, we'll support you - we might even sell our tokens to you, if the reward is big enough. Sleep on it. When you reach a critical mass of us, just let us know".
"How isn't this just a recipe for a perpetual governance based on the interests of that initial king" --
I guess the idea is that the king would think of his realm as an extension of his own selfhood, so that the better off it's doing the more awesome he feels.
A problem I see here is that just as someone might feel most awesome if he achieves something impressive such as writing a great novel even at huge cost to his own mental and/or physical health, similarly the king might feel most awesome if his realm (for example) colonizes Mars at the cost of deep misery for most of his own people. The cost might even make him feel more awesome than he'd otherwise feel.
(Well, maybe this is where the trustees do their thing and remove him, but wouldn't they also think of the realm as extensions of themselves, and think that the costly Mars-colonization effort is swell?)
> I guess the idea is that the king would think of his realm as an extension of his own selfhood, so that the better off it's doing the more awesome he feels.
I'd say this whole thing devolves to: "If the monarch is good, they can rule well".
Which I believe we collectively knew, at least ever since the time of Amenhotep.
People that aren't hot for monarchy aren't because they disagree with this premise+conclusion pair. But they do find the prerequisite ("a good monarch") rare and unsustainable (both regarding succession and within a single monarch's full rule), they don't believe it's a rule with enough failsafes, and so on.
As for novelty here, the blockchain checks and balances, they're quite hand-wavy atm, and I think can be overcome in several ways (beyond the basic key of building, inspeting, maintaining, and thus trusting the whole technical infrastructure).
ATTENTION PLEASE READ:
What America and its citizenry can get behind -- what they NEED -- is something cool. Coups and Larping isnt cool. Guns that run on bitcoin isn't cool. You know whats cool?
Pizza Hut.
Nobody likes silicon valley because it is full of nerds. Nerds are gay and it is natural and right to both dislike and distrust them. Who among you would swear fealty to Zuck? Few indeed, I fear. Likewise, who among you has not also tendered yourself to the sweet enjoyment of two sweaty litres of refrigerated cola and the luke-warm glistening of a medium pepperoni pizza? Who among you has not partaken? Perhaps there are even some who are partaking now as they read this.
Why advocate for a society run by silicon valley, when you could advocate for a hostile takeover of all USG assets by Pizza Hut TM (TICKER: YUM)? Why should we bother with the tired charade of POLITICKING into existence a president who will swear to use his constitutional powers to rule like a CEO, when we could advocate for a CEO of Pizza Hut who will use his EXECUTIVE powers to BECOME king?
Pizza Hut is loved and admired by all who matter. But it is despised only by our enemies. If you don't like PIZZA HUT there is something wrong with you, and you are not welcome in the New America, AMERICA 2: Presented By Pizza Hut.
Let HISTORY be your guide... From Lord Macaulay:
"It is a mistake to suppose that the Company was a merely commercial body till the middle of the last century. Commerce was its chief object; but in order to enable it to pursue that object, it had been, like the other Companies which were its rivals, like the Dutch India Company, like the French India Company, invested from a very early period with political functions. More than a hundred and twenty years ago, the Company was in miniature precisely what it now is. It was intrusted with the very highest prerogatives of sovereignty. It had its forts, and its white captains, and its black sepoys; it had its civil and criminal tribunals; it was authorised to proclaim martial law; it sent ambassadors to the native governments, and concluded treaties with them; it was Zemindar of several districts, and within those districts, like other Zemindars of the first class, it exercised the powers of a sovereign, even to the infliction of capital punishment on the Hindoos within its jurisdiction. It is incorrect, therefore, to say, that the Company was at first a mere trader, and has since become a sovereign. It was at first a great trader and a petty prince. The political functions at first attracted little notice, because they were merely auxiliary to the commercial functions. By degrees, however, the political functions became more and more important. The Zemindar became a great nabob, became sovereign of all India; the two hundred sepoys became two hundred thousand. This change was gradually wrought, and was not immediately comprehended... Thus the transformation of the Company from a trading body, which possessed some sovereign prerogatives for the purposes of trade, into a sovereign body, the trade of which was auxiliary to its sovereignty, was effected by degrees and under disguise. It is not strange, therefore, that the mercantile and political transactions of this great corporation should be entangled together in inextricable complication."
If Britain was able to absorb the East India Trading Company by degrees... Why shouldn't PIZZA HUT be able to do the reverse and absorb and control USG and its interests?
Sounds fine, until the rebels and/or an invading army destroy the internet architecture in their territory, and the regime's weapons are inoperable. If you bound all the specialized communication equipment modern armies use in this manner, you could probably get a similar result without your guys being extra screwed in a comms denied environment.
While it might seem like a trivial nitpick, this regime can only survive while it remains the dominant military force, otherwise your NFT against their bayonet is hardly a winning proposition.
It's akin to the misunderstanding of the permissive action links. They exist to ensure that the people who launch the nuclear missiles received authentic orders. They have nothing to do with actually using the weapons. Even weapons with codes to activate them the code is something like 12345, it exists to make sure the weapon is used purposefully, not accidentally.
I suspected that such a system was the way it was, but I have no hands on experience with nuclear weapons, and thus wasn't about to shoot my mouth off.
That's a non-trivial nitpick. The other option is going fire-safe measures, like when the power goes out, the security doors automatically unlock because of the fire hazard. There are just as many exploits, but the onus and risks go in the opposite directions. If the guns are all NFT-*dis*abled, the king needs to maintain power/internet to *suppress* the weapons. Enemies still need to disable the power to *enable* regime weapons to use against it. This is all in the internal world of the realm of course; foreign weapons will always work, in which case a foreign-supported internal coup could still work... There's a lot of kinks to work out here.
I think the habits of training or even breeding loyal and effective soldiers are safer overall than this system.
Congrats, you invented ephors.
"America has no army of bloodthirsty, medieval-minded, spike-helmeted World War I veterans."
True. It does, however, have something like 2-3 million veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. This is a much smaller percentage of the population of the US than Great War veterans were of Weimar, true. But most of them are still alive, and many are still of military age.
How many of them do you think are fans of the Regime?
How many are killing themselves with heroin overdoses? How many are living under bridges? How many have ever done so much as throw a brick at a cop? lol
It is entirely possible that we *already* live under this regime. With the minor detail that neither the god-emperor nor his lieutenants care to be known publicly (Secrecy, plus a thick ablative coating of disposable meatpuppets is a pretty effective defense against regicide. Possibly even the only one.) And they have their own, however perverse, concept of "salus populi".
It's hard to write off the possibility of what you're saying. A centerless oligarchy that replenishes its ranks with the progressive religion explains a lot. But for decisions on the scale of "what will be the response to 9/11?", you have to think someone higher up than Rumsfeld is being deferred to for clarifying what options are even available. Maybe the political figures we hear about really do exercise personal discretion every so often, and I should ditch the tinfoil hat and take these events at face value when it seems that way.
This would leak by now a billion times with evidence, so no it’s not possible
"Everything leaks" seems to be an article of nearly religious faith, I doubt that I can dissuade believers.
But will note that e.g. Manhattan project did not publicly leak; nor the secret annex of "9/11 report"; and that in fact hardly anything other than minutiae ever seem to leak (the most commonly cited counterexample, the Snowden thing, imho shows every symptom of being a "hangout", rather than genuine leak.) And here speaking of merely the visible, official bureaucracy, rather than a hypothetical inner core. Even it is pretty good at keeping secrets when it actually counts.
Manhatten project secrets were relayed to Stalin in real time
Stalin -- yes, the public -- no.
Even if I humor you on this it will be a hollow ( pedantic ) victory, your original point was that it was possible to run a large project wo leaks and Stalin’s spies definitely count as leakers
Hypothetically, is a "red telephone" on the desks of Bezos et. al, emitting occasional "offers they can't refuse", necessarily a "large project" ?
Wow!
Absolutely fucking brilliant.
You're not wrong Jurek :P
"Mussolini was actually fired by his own Grand Council of Fascism."
And how did that work out for the Grand Council of Fascism?
"But most people in the PRC are Han Chinese and the Party is inevitably Han-centric."
The Chinese government still, even today, intentionally restricts Han fertility.
"But this key need not just be for nuclear weapons. Rather, all the military’s weapons can be prevented from operating without it. While anyone who truly cares about guns knows that the only worse thing than a “smart gun” is an Internet gun, the military is after all a special-purpose use case. It is not that hard to build a weapon that disables itself if it doesn’t get today’s downstream key. It’s for killing people, not culling hogs."
This leaves the entire government open to being neutered by simply disrupting telecommunications.
"but after Augustus prevailed, there was no politics and no politicians. And the class conflict in Rome was never heard from again."
Some of the politicians were never heard from again either.
"Accordingly, it requires much less commitment and participation than a 20th-century fascist or communist party. Participation in the movement feels less like enlisting in an army, more like playing a social game. And instead of beating your enemies up in the streets, the moves in this game are purely symbolic non-actions—like voting."
And other symbolic non-actions, like losing your job.
Why would anyone join a political movement that carries negative real world consequences for its members as long as the movement is unsuccessful, that doesn't also promise benefits in the event of success? If something has never existed there's generally a reason.
First week after the deployment of the unstoppable robot army:
- The army swiftly occupies all the major data centers in the country, giving the King physical control of >51% of validator nodes
- A team of loyal (or subjugated) programmers silently updates the code of the validator nodes, simply removing the ability of trustees to revoke the King's Token
- The King reigns tyrannically and eternally (until his death, when the sacred key gets inherited by his spoiled and decadent son)
Come on Curtis, hacky engineering decisions for reconciling absolute monarchy and accountability will never actually work.
A true monarchy of the future can only be led without any accountability by an immortal and genetically superior God-Emperor of Mankind, for emergence of which we should pray.
Exactly correct, why do you think I support the restoration of the Stuart monarchy.
Lol
Well, hello! Might as well finish what we started with all our talk of coups and heists and blockchains. A l’Empereur!
Proud to have been part of the Usenet crowd too :D Absolute Monarchy is the proven only successful system. I'm sorry for those who don't get that .... but they don't matter B)
Given that the failures of the "accountability" piece is the core reason everybody ditched monarchy in the modern world, don't you think you should have some better answers for it at this point than teenage techno-nerd "engineering" approaches? ( space nukes, blockchain)
Seriously, man, step up your game!
It is interesting to consider the example of Charlemagne rather than Augustus. He ruled not by riding a popular wave to the top, but by the society first being broken up into 'natural aristocracies' that then each ceded a portion of their power to the highest man on the totem poll. This naturally evolving hierarchy seems, at first glance, more stable than the Gracchus brothers' option.
Our own natural aristocrats would be the main shareholders in our biggest industrial enterprises, right? But they don’t have power of their own to cede to someone they like and trust, because the bureaucratic network controls them via the national security bureaus. The CIA summons them to Bohemian Grove type meetings in order to remind of them of who’s in charge. So how do they destroy the bureaucratic network that’s keeping them impotent? With a cyber-attack? How would they plan it? I don’t see how they could plan it without the CIA finding out.
My question - was this a real speech? Based on his description of the event and crowd reaction, if it did indeed occur I'm guessing it was to the black pilled psychos at the Claremont Insitute?
There are not enough "um"s for it to be real.
You slip a transexual transcriptionist a few extra pesos and it/xe will remove those ugly 'ums' lickity split.
Hahah, and here I was reading this and hearing his voice with an outdoor echo in my head, and I knew something about it still didn't seem real, haha... I was definitely missing the um's!