How to make a great country

[Saint_Ann]

I'm wondering if the "No Kings" marches are a start of the little rebellion that is a good thing. Madison would certainly have been horrified at the ICE thugs smashing in doors and scooping US citizens off the street and throwing them into unmarked vans, horrified at the Executive branch ignoring the checks and balances of the Legislative and the Judicial branches, horrified at the extrajudicial killings, horrified at a pardon given to a legislator because he voted the way the President wanted . . .

There's a revolution underway and it's not being lead by demoncrats.

 

[Hel_Books]

Hel_Books said:
I'm wondering if the "No Kings" marches are a start of the little rebellion that is a good thing. Madison would certainly have been horrified at the ICE thugs smashing in doors and scooping US citizens off the street and throwing them into unmarked vans, horrified at the Executive branch ignoring the checks and balances of the Legislative and the Judicial branches, horrified at the extrajudicial killings, horrified at a pardon given to a legislator because he voted the way the President wanted . . .

There's a revolution underway and it's not being lead by demoncrats.

I'm sure there are plenty of people of all persuasions, Democrat, Republican, Independent, in those No Kings marches.

 

[Saint_Ann]

I'm sure there are plenty of people of all persuasions, Democrat, Republican, Independent, in those No Kings marches.

And what exactly did they accomplish? What policies were affected by them?

 

[GuiltyCowboy]

And what exactly did they accomplish? What policies were affected by them?

You're right - marches like that accomplish very little of practical consequence. Unless you think of it simply as marketing for an idea.

The idea itself is solid: Most people don’t actually want to live under unaccountable rulers.

If you're serious about forcing an authoritarian to change though - or having a revolution - then the march is always the final piece, not the first. Successful revolutions show marches make very little difference to anything unless you've already spent years putting in the hard work.

That work involves separating the authoritarian from their support (for example, by making oligarchs poorer for supporting him); making people who do his dirty work ashamed to face their family and friends; creating unity among all the people who refuse to live under an authoritarian, that means building bridges with people who have wildly different views; and ultimately making your side and your vision so much more appealing than the authoritarian’s - think grannies and beautiful women and brave people with a good sense of humor vs masked goons who are paid to bash people’s head in.

 

[Saint_Ann]

You're right - marches like that accomplish very little of practical consequence. Unless you think of it simply as marketing for an idea.

The idea itself is solid: Most people don’t actually want to live under unaccountable rulers.

If you're serious about forcing an authoritarian to change though - or having a revolution - then the march is always the final piece, not the first. Successful revolutions show marches make very little difference to anything unless you've already spent years putting in the hard work.

That work involves separating the authoritarian from their support (for example, by making oligarchs poorer for supporting him); making people who do his dirty work ashamed to face their family and friends; creating unity among all the people who refuse to live under an authoritarian, that means building bridges with people who have wildly different views; and ultimately making your side and your vision so much more appealing than the authoritarian’s - think grannies and beautiful women and brave people with a good sense of humor vs masked goons who are paid to bash people’s head in.

Billionaires vs. billionaires.

 

[GuiltyCowboy]

Billionaires vs. billionaires.

Right, the great trick that they've pulled off is splitting all us non-billionaires into two opposing groups.

We've been taught to think the world is split vertically when in fact it's really split horizontally.

 

[Rightguide]

Sometimes people wonder whether life was better in pre-industrialized societies or in the modern, industrialized one. But we don't actually have to wonder: there's hard data because there are many cases of people who have lived in both types of society. And it's no contest. When given the choice, people almost always choose the pre-industrialized way of life.

You can argue they're wrong to have made that choice but that's what all those people did in fact choose.

They also have given us clear reasons for their choice: they had more freedom, including sexual freedom, but especially freedom from constant toil in pursuit of wealth (people work far more today, in fact, than humans have ever worked before: the modern 9-5 office drone works cosniderably more than the average serf, for example); then there's the reluctance of those societies to let anyone fall into poverty, hunger or destitution; equality of opportunity is also a significant draw, where even outsiders achieve acceptance and prominent positions; but far away the most common reason was the intensity of the social bonds - basically, the security of knowing other people care about you.

Yes, the “preindustrial paradise,” where you could enjoy all that freedom while dying at 32 from an infected tooth, giving birth in a field, or watching half your children vanish into the ether before their fifth birthday. Nothing says liberation from "toil” like plowing by hand from dawn to dusk just to avoid starving through winter. And as for “equality of opportunity,” sure, everyone was equally malnourished, equally unwashed, and equally terrified of the next plague. Probably helped by the fact that fifteen people shared one smoky room, a single spoon, and absolutely no toilet paper. History’s great secret: civilization didn’t make us soft, but it give us plumbing, privacy, and quilted Charmin.

 

[GuiltyCowboy]

Yes, the “preindustrial paradise,” where you could enjoy all that freedom while dying at 32 from an infected tooth, giving birth in a field, or watching half your children vanish into the ether before their fifth birthday. Nothing says liberation from "toil” like plowing by hand from dawn to dusk just to avoid starving through winter. And as for “equality of opportunity,” sure, everyone was equally malnourished, equally unwashed, and equally terrified of the next plague. Probably helped by the fact that fifteen people shared one smoky room, a single spoon, and absolutely no toilet paper. History’s great secret: civilization didn’t make us soft, but it give us plumbing, privacy, and quilted Charmin.

Sure. And yet, despite all that, when people have experienced both lifestyles - people like Helena Valero and dozens of others - they always choose to give up the Charmin.

Speaking for myself, if I’m given the choice between taking a shit in the Savoy hotel or while crouching in a ditch in the driving rain then I’m going to pick the Savoy. But I think it would be foolish to ignore all those examples of people preferring the 'pre-industrialized' life.

They tell us something: They tell us that, above all else, people value meaningful relationships and not many people can forge a meaningful relationship with toilet paper - or their spoons or the S-trap under their kitchen sink.

 

[Rightguide]

Sure. And yet, despite all that, when people have experienced both lifestyles - people like Helena Valero and dozens of others - they always choose to give up the Charmin.

Speaking for myself, if I’m given the choice between taking a shit in the Savoy hotel or while crouching in a ditch in the driving rain then I’m going to pick the Savoy. But I think it would be foolish to ignore all those examples of people preferring the 'pre-industrialized' life.

They tell us something: They tell us that, above all else, people value meaningful relationships and not many people can forge a meaningful relationship with toilet paper - or their spoons or the S-trap under their kitchen sink.

Romanticizing the ditch doesn’t make it noble. A few nostalgic cases don’t erase the fact that preindustrial life was defined by hunger, disease, and early death. Civilization didn’t corrupt humanity, it liberated it from survival as a full-time occupation. People crave meaning, yes, but meaning doesn’t require dysentery and smoke inhalation to feel authentic. The ditch may build character, but plumbing built progress.

 

[Bray123]

What did all those people achieve who paid money to follow the Pedophile around and catch his Covid germs?
Quite a bit really, he was unable to assault any more underage girls with several hundred people all wearing red hats watching his every move. Americans were safer for his rallies and those who sacrificed their lives by breathing in his filthy emissions will be remembered for their sacrifice.

The hundreds of thousands of people who marched on 'No King's' didn't even bother to shit in the meeting rooms of the Capitol or steal government laptops, nor beat police with flag poles or set off fireworks in the corridors. There were some who danced around in frog costumes, but they were hard-core terrorists. What a waste of time.

 

[GuiltyCowboy]

Romanticizing the ditch doesn’t make it noble. A few nostalgic cases don’t erase the fact that preindustrial life was defined by hunger, disease, and early death. Civilization didn’t corrupt humanity, it liberated it from survival as a full-time occupation. People crave meaning, yes, but meaning doesn’t require dysentery and smoke inhalation to feel authentic. The ditch may build character, but plumbing built progress.

OK, let's say you've convinced me: we will have plumbing and toilet paper (and plenty of spoons) in this ideal country. Literally and figuratively.

Not that anyone was arguing against those things exactly. They were arguing against the reckless destruction of our habitat in pursuit of those things. And I agree with @Chernosoth on this point, at least in principle. I imagine most people do too: I mean, who actively wants to destroy the planet, right?

So this brings us to the crux of the matter...

Is it possible to have our material comforts + live lives with meaningful human connections + not destroy the planet? If it is, how do we do that?

 

[colddiesel]

Collect a large number of Ashkenazi Jews. They have the highest IQ averages of any race or sub race. They also have low rates of crime and illegitimacy. If you can put them some place where they do not need to defend themselves, like Israelis always have had to, and Jewish immigrants to the United States during the turn of the last century had to do, they will prosper, even if there are no natural resources.

I am not Jewish, by the way. I would not praise Jews if I was. I agree with Charles Murray, who noted this in his essay "Jewish Genius:"

"Since its first issue in 1945, COMMENTARY has published hundreds of articles about Jews and Judaism. As one would expect, they cover just about every important aspect of the topic. But there is a lacuna, and not one involving some obscure bit of Judaica. COMMENTARY has never published a systematic discussion of one of the most obvious topics of all: the extravagant overrepresentation of Jews, relative to their numbers, in the top ranks of the arts, sciences, law, medicine, finance, entrepreneurship, and the media."

"I have personal experience with the reluctance of Jews to talk about Jewish accomplishment—my co-author, the late Richard Herrnstein, gently resisted the paragraphs on Jewish IQ that I insisted on putting in The Bell Curve (1994)."

https://www.commentary.org/articles/charles-murray/jewish-genius/

If your premise is to be given any credence, can you explain why you think Sepphardic Jews are inferior to Askenazi Jews.

 

[Chernosoth]

Soft toilet paper is made from old growth trees, which we consume much faster than they grow, and we lose more in forest fires as the climate changes. Testing other options can avoid discomfort when only the rough paper from young trees remains.

 

[Hel_Books]

Hel_Books said:
I'm sure there are plenty of people of all persuasions, Democrat, Republican, Independent, in those No Kings marches.

And what exactly did they accomplish? What policies were affected by them?

What policies were affected by the freedom riders and the lunch counter sit-ins in your country back in the sixties?

 

[Holy_Seduction]

Productive means socially owned by those who work them, operated through democratically elected committees. Communities involved, through democratically elected committees, make the decisions about the allocation of local resources and development re: productive means.

 

[Holy_Seduction]

Soft toilet paper is made from old growth trees, which we consume much faster than they grow, and we lose more in forest fires as the climate changes. Testing other options can avoid discomfort when only the rough paper from young trees remains.

Never move to Europe. Those guys use not toilet paper but sand paper.

 

[Hel_Books]

Most of the nation's budget, public and private, is in sunk costs of disgraceful failures: education, healthcare,

Ah yes, healthcare! Finally someone is admitting that the solution is what other advanced nations are doing, not what your miserable go-bankrupt-go-to-the-emergency-ward-die-early system is perpetrating.

As for the budget, I mean, really, the waste is that defence spending for things like fighter aircraft falling off the decks of aircraft carriers into the sea!

 

[Wilson23]

OK, so here's an idea: what are some things that would make a country a genuinely great place to live?

If we just look at he countries that ARE the greatest places to live, what they all have in common is social democracy,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report

 

[Wilson23]

Public education starts with sustainable organic agriculture. Without food, nothing else matters.
Advocating nuclear energy is hate speech against the earth. Anyone doing that is immediately buried alive.
Lesser penalties for lesser environmental crimes.

Better still, teach kids the WHOLE truth: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nuclear_energy#Why_some_people_do_not_like_it

Nuclear energy was the central instrument of geopolitics during the Cold War. Both rival and openly hostile superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, had a large arsenal of nuclear weapons and held each other in a stalemate. Neither side could sanely strike first, because the other side would quickly launch a retaliation, resulting in global destruction. This situation is known as mutually assured destruction. While the resulting standoff turned out to be surprisingly stable and prevented any open armed conflict from occurring between the superpowers, the threat of synthetic Armageddon was something completely unprecedented in history. A powerful anti-nuclear movement intent on achieving nuclear disarmament was formed. It was successful in effectively banning nuclear explosions for any purposes (with one exception).

Unfortunately, the fuss with nuclear weapons caused the very word "nuclear" to carry a connotation of danger, evil and death. To this day it causes a lot of animosity towards peaceful uses of nuclear energy,[note 6] especially nuclear power.

Nuclear power (most especially fission) has been the subject of much controversy over the nearly 70 years that it has been studied and used; while the process of using nuclear-fired electricity generators is fairly clean, the technology of fission reactors is sometimes prone to problems.[note 7] Although waste is small in volume (compared to most industries), safe waste disposal is a tremendous problem, demanding answers that will allow the waste to stay stored for tens of thousands of years — substantially longer than all of current recorded history. A proposed waste-storage facility at Yucca Mountain has yet to be built, and few new reactors have been built in the US in recent decades.

Spent fuel can be reprocessed to extract fissionable material, but this raises security and proliferation concerns; much reprocessed uranium fuel is plutonium-239 created during the fission process, which is far more readily useful for building small nuclear weapons than uranium (it is also harder to fission plutonium-239 in a thermal-spectrum reactor feasibly than it is to fission uranium-235 or uranium-233 in a thermal-spectrum reactor; for this reason, most reactors that consume plutonium-239 are fast-spectrum reactors, which tend more towards having a "twitchy" control response than most thermal-spectrum reactors). Even with fuel reprocessing, however, the problem of disposal of support materials (contaminated gear and the like) remains.

In the United States, new construction licenses were not granted for 33 years after the Three Mile Island accident wiped out half the power generation capacity of a Pennsylvania plant in 1979. However, some plants which obtained construction licenses earlier or were mothballed in a partially-constructed state for a long time were completed in this period, notably Seabrook-I in New Hampshire — Seabrook-II was abandoned. The first new construction permit since then was granted at the beginning of 2012.[3] The sentiment towards nuclear energy has a lot of regional variation. Several European nations, such as Austria and Germany, have taken radical anti-nuclear positions, with Austria completely banning civilian nuclear power. Meanwhile, France gets more than three-quarters of its electricity from nuclear reactors.[4]

There are concerns that the use of nuclear reactors can be weaponized. While this is untrue,[5] people who don't take time to consider the difference between nuclear fuel and enriched uranium peddle these lies.

 

[Chernosoth]

Ah yes, healthcare! Finally someone is admitting that the solution is what other advanced nations are doing, not what your miserable go-bankrupt-go-to-the-emergency-ward-die-early system is perpetrating.

Many advanced nations are in a more advanced state of failure. The European model of conquering and spreading European values around the world is rapidly winding down. What works in America may be uniquely American. Other nations will eventually find their own solutions.

 

[Hel_Books]

Hel_Books said:
Ah yes, healthcare! Finally someone is admitting that the solution is what other advanced nations are doing, not what your miserable go-bankrupt-go-to-the-emergency-ward-die-early system is perpetrating.

Many advanced nations are in a more advanced state of failure. The European model of conquering and spreading European values around the world is rapidly winding down. What works in America may be uniquely American. Other nations will eventually find their own solutions.

The "European model of conquering" seems to be what your President is quite enthusiastic about right now, from Greenland to Venezuela.

As for what works in America, well, lots of things work, from the space program to farms that feed the world (as long as President Trump's tariffs don't get the produce excluded from big world markets!) to cutting edge scientific research (unless President Trump decides your university has to be punished by pulling funding approved by your Congress!)

But the one thing that isn't working in the USA is healthcare. That hit TV series Breaking Bad had the premise that the law-abiding schoolteacher would find his family thrown into poverty unless he could find some way to pay for his medical treatment. People in the rest of the civilised world are rather amused by all that!

 

[Wilson23]

Billionaires vs. billionaires.

If you want to fight the plutocracy, join the DSA. Nobody else will really even try.

 

[Wilson23]

What works in America may be uniquely American.

No, there is nothing so exceptional as that about America.

 

[Chernosoth]

But the one thing that isn't working in the USA is healthcare.

One of many. Some will eventually work at reduced scale and expense, and others will be discarded as insanely stupid.

 

[Wilson23]

There's a revolution underway and it's not being lead by demoncrats.

No revolution is now in birth unless it is the one led by Sanders and AOC. Anything that is both truly radical and to their right will die out in your lifetime -- mainly because of demographic changes, not ethnic or racial, but generational. In particular, CHRISTIANITY in America will die out in your lifetime, at least to the extent it already has died out in Europe. Economic conservatism may last longer, but any serious form of Libertarianism will never be a bigger deal than it is now -- and socialism WILL be.