politics

that's exactly the opening thesis

And I'd agree.

Occasionally reminding the people at the top that if they don't behave then they won't live very long.

So what’s the alternative?

Constantly improving the big compromise. No one size fits all. Constant work. Not only in the government, but also in people's heads.

Keeping the checks and balances in place. Finding loopholes and fixing them - if need be with more checks and balances.

Yes, a stable and relatively just state will always require administration. Be sure it doesn't all fall into one person's hand.

But the USA lost all this decades ago. Frankly, it's a miracle that it took so long for a president to take full advantage.

GET RID OF BILLIONAIRES

Create a society where you ban extreme wealth.

You allow people to gain wealth, as much as they want but you create an upper ceiling .... like say 100 million. Beyond that, any further wealth you create is just sent to the government as taxes and spent on public services and infrastructure and on other less fortunate people.

Wealth is also not inherited and when you die, a small part of your wealth is passed to your descendants but the majority is given over to the government to again be used for taxes, infrastructure and public services.

Humans will always be greedy bastards and there will always be people who will game the system in their favour for whatever psychotic or manic reason they have (similar to people with hoarding mentalities or people who collect cats or bottle caps) ... in this suggested society, people would still be allowed all the freedoms to fulfill their fantasies or manias within a controlled environment and not to the point where they are degrading all of humanity in the process.

UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME

And as you create an upper ceiling of wealth, you also create a lower floor of poverty ... you use all that extra money and institute Universal Basic Income and allow every able bodied human an equal opportunity to become as much of a greedy bastard as they want and start to gain their own wealth. Or they use their good start in life, generate a bit of wealth, get an education and find the cure for cancer. Imagine if we had thousands or even millions of scientists who no longer have to worry about making rent and instead spend their time trying to find cures for things or finding new solutions to the energy crisis or environmental problems like global warming.

Instead .... we have a world where we funnel all the wealth of the world to a small group of people who sit on it, defend it at all costs and send humanity to its doom while billions of people either starve, near starve or spend all their time and energy just barely getting by.

Good education is the main bulwark against this type of decline. Any political party that starts banning books, denigrating teachers, or cutting education funding should set off major alarms. Making people stupider is step one in the long game of authoritarian takeover.

We've only tried hierarchy with humans at the top.

If humanity survives long enough (that's a big if), I believe that the establishment of non-hierarchical systems is inevitable.

Humanity, as it matures philosophically, sociologically and psychologically, will outgrow the desire for hierarchy exactly as individuals outgrow the desire to be parented.

For the time being though, there is no alternative. Virtually every civilization that's ever existed on Earth has already died in more or less this same fashion, and the ones that haven't yet will.

As a bit of an aside though, my opinion is that the first step has to be a dedicated public health effort to diagnose antisocial personality disorder and ensure, by whatever means necessary, that society is protected from those who suffer from it.

Hopefully that's something our descendants can do when they build whatever they're going to build out of the rubble we'll leave behind.

Democratic socialism

The roots of America are a long trend away from these things.

He knows, but he's saying that on purpose, to make sure everyone who doesn't agree is lumped into the "other"s and ostracized. It's the same reason Trump is still blaming the "radical left" for Kirk's shooting, even though the shooter is by no means leftist.

Whenever you hear "the left", think "Emmanuel Goldstein", except less Jewish (because somehow the Israelis are on the same side as these people)

fentanyl and now carfentanyl are ravaging rural america. the repuplicans are trying to say its flowing across the border into our country. the truth is it is domestically manufactured. it originates in the core of appalachia and is then sold everywhere else. militarizing LA, DC, Chicago, Charlotte, or Memphis won't fix it, nor will 1k daily deportations. the only fix for these problems is to meet the needs of the people. rural americans are desperately poor. if we want to address crime, we should address their material needs.

but none of this is about preventing crime. it's all about supporting crime.

also. can we stop mythologizing the Massachusetts colony as being our national origin. the first english speaking colonists in the Virginia colony trying to make a quick buck through violence and deceit. yeah, the Massachusetts played a role in our modern christofascist imagery, but this whole thing has from the outset been about money and we can't do anything about that until we confront that