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Yo, Starfire! Happy New Year! o/

Since a democratic ethic is common where people want a kind of metric for "the will of the people," I am fine going along with something like an average for purposes of discussing whether a benevolent dictator (or benevolent monarch) has ever existed with that in mind. This isn't a precise conception, but I'd say people have preferences, strengths of preferences, and there is some sensible way we could think about what the "average" of that all amounts to, even if you could not pin that down precisely.

Within a democratic context, I take the view that doing what gets them re-elected is a decent guiding light. Someone who simply goes along with the policies the masses want while knowing that what the masses want will also piss them off so much that they'll get taken out of office should not do that policy, and I think this is all perfectly fine and democratic. This is called retrospective voting, and I think it's an element of democracy that constrains it from adopting policies that are too without basis. This arrangement balances both that people often want frankly stupid things that harm them and that people want to have good outcomes in their society.


Raising taxes is fairly unpopular on a broad level. Usually some big event sets it off like a big war. And a broad level of increasing taxation is what you need to notably increase government spending without using credit. The U.S. has been fairly stable in its level of government taxation for a good five decades or so. So, the more worrisome element is that the government has in that period been increasing its national debt as percentage of the economy. That said, increasing national spending without raising taxes has its own tangible consequences that are subject to retrospective voting: this increases the rate of inflation when you're past full employment, and around the world we have seen parties in power get punished for allowing high levels of inflation. It's also the case that not all democratic nations have an expanding debt problem even when they control their currency.

I made some historical points and case example points, but if you wanted me to get more theoretical to describe the benefits of democracy. Under selectorate theory, the benefit of a democracy is that you can't merely buy out people individually like you could as a king where the number of people you have to appeal to are much smaller: nobles and the military. This creates a case that democracies are more well incentivized to do public good provision: rule of law, property rights, and a fair legal system, because these are things you can provide that everyone can experience the benefits of. And they are also very predictive of good economic performance. And as a matter of fact, it does seem to be democracies where we see both economic and political liberalism. I can't think of an example of a non-democratic system that is also liberal in values.

I might also suspect that a king would be worried about the presence of the very rich and powerful in his nation, since that creates a potential block that can challenge his power. This may make kings more resistant to wanting to allow a society where they are plentiful despite the monetary value to himself.

But anyway, these are all theoretical stories we are telling, so I decided to jump to the historical case.

I'd be fine using a metric that goes either like "all their interests, considered as a whole on net." Or perhaps "the interests of people once they are generally informed on matters." When we look at subsets of the population that are more informed, they actually tend to align with each other independent of income, and it converges on the opinions of economists more than the opinions of the less informed.

I think we took either metric, we would say that whatever other goals people have, being more monetarily prosperous overrides everything else. Very few socialists, trade unions, or nationalists actively believe their view impoverishes society. The most you'll get socialists to concede, typically, is that "sure, there will be less rich people" with the implication that otherwise everyone else will be doing better.


I'm not under the impression that there can't be rich nations that are monarchical or dictatorial. The UAE and Qatar appear to be two examples of rich nations that have a monarchy. On the other side of the coin, we have rich Switzerland that is landlocked, has no natural resource wealth and is considered one of the most democratic countries on Earth. My contention was simply that monarchies do not have better incentives structures generally speaking.

I do want to clarify my views on Unabomber, but I agree with Meusnier to say that he was an average political thinker at best, as Industrial Society and Its Future is a largely derivative work. I agree with much of it mostly because I agree with Alduous Huxley's Brave New World, which is so fundamentally related to the work that it is wholly inseparable (I consider Brave New World to not appeal to any one end of the political spectrum, but a timeless classic of dystopian fiction) as many other bodies of work that Ted was known to have read prior to the murders.

Industrial Society and its Future is the sort of shit I'd write when I was 18 or 24. I see him as neither left-wing or right-wing, I agree.

To me, my interest in Unabomber is not in his political ideology but rather him as a person. I do sympathize with any man who felt estranged by society, and in this way I imagine many men would view him in a vein not dissimilar to Isla Vista shooter; these narratives do appeal to men who fell heavily into the redpill manosphere just as his anti-corporate sentiments would appeal to left-wing individuals. Anyone who knows about his life leading up to his murders should know that his manifesto is while agreeable enough in a vacuum, is also an excuse for his own antisocial, misanthropic nature. He hated men and he hated women. He resented them. That's why he killed.

So saying "Ted is right" is therefore fucking weird; Milton's devil lied with the truth. I don't blame Traed for assuming he was likely left-wing because of the lack of information and his apparent motive. Anticorporate sentiments, especially against healthcare, are generally more pronounced for left-wing and liberal parties and individuals, while right-wing and conservative tend to focus on economy; maybe they inextricably tied, but we Americans do not approach them that way.

I do want to say that while I disagree with your views on almost everything and it'll probably be a waste of time to discuss this (Canada does seem to have gone under, I would agree) and I make it a point to never discuss anything in my comments, I am glad you at least condemned the celebrations of Thompson's death, though I do not share in that condemnation (Or at least your disgust) due to my own sympathies to people's frustrations. Outside of healthcare, we are fucked due to our lack of regulations in many areas (Citizens United v. FEC was fucking bullshit), but I do think it is depraved and short-sighted, as I posted earlier in that thread.

Even if Thompson deserved it, death is not something worth celebrating, at least in this case. Just because something is "just", does not mean something is good. I can't condemn because I don't blame people for not celebrating when horrible people die or are defeated, but I don't recommend celebrating death.

I'm glad at least someone found it interesting haha. It is an emotionally charged topic indeed, but those are the topics where you should trust popular wisdom the least.



That's the crux of it to me as well. Normalizing that you will kill your way through a system if it ends up failing you just greenlights chaos and detorioration of your institutions. I don't think the people cheering right now have any leg to stand on against the pro-lifer, vegan, or open-borders supporter who wants to take matters into their own hands to what they see as a deeply immoral system. Because you set the rules that if you perceive a system to be failing you and that the attempts to reform it aren't good enough, you start blasting.

It's like how, even if a tactical nuke was used against Iran's nuclear research sites, which seems like one of the least bad ways to use a nuke, the mere fact that you used a nuke aggressively and the international sphere greenlit it, you opened the Pandora's box that that is a valid thing to do and we're all worse for it.

Oh and lastly, and I didn't mention this on the thread, I'm not entirely convinced the 1st order consequences even pan out. Their argument goes this will make them scared to have as high a claim denial rate. But another way I can see this going is, fewer people are willing to be a health insurance CEO now that everyone cheered when one got assasinated, the pool of capable picks shrink, a more incompetent person gets in charge, they are unable to negotiate prices with healthcare providers as effectively, their costs go up, and they pass that cost along to consumers in the form of higher premiums or more denial rates

hey, starfire (I knew it was you, by the way - nice profile!)

Life's been a bit of a roller-coaster this past year, but it's slowly getting better.
Anything new on your end?

what's up

https://x.com/_digital_witch_/media

my life completely changed the last two years but it was a short but intense time with bm

most of the concerts take place several hundrets of kilometres away from me too so its difficult to get there too

i bet youll find one or two good things in there

i found it in 2021/22 i think but i dont know the band that gotten me into it. it probably was darvaza or another band with bjorn/afgrundsprofet )or whatever name he has in every project) in it. the story behind the music is incredible. i spent hours reading or watching something about it

yes most bands tour in norway and neighbouring countries if they even tour. i saw many bands live on the brutal assault festival in 2022 and went to two other concerts where i saw fides inversa, marduk and vader. i have a signed biography of nergal, the way he sees things is really interesting

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2ElV9AAz6Vx1hajK1hyQRm thats a playlist i made some time ago with lots of black metal stuff in it

when and how did you discover bm? have you seen some bands live?

my my its rare to see someone who listens to first and second wave of bm. that brings back memories

Some say that many of those ideas involving Reptilians or other types of aliens rulling over humanity are just metaphors, even if they are disguised as supposedly unironical manifests claiming that there are indeed superior intelligent species that have been with humanity for a very long time. Maybe that's the case, at least for some of the ideologists spreading that kind of info. Instead of, I don't know, blaming certain nations or social groups, they go with rather abstract concepts, concentrating on all traits they see as harmful, but without pointing at a certain group of people, and instead choosing to actually point at fictional figures that might seem irrational or even silly at first glance. Nothing new when it comes to literature, haha.

But surely people's imagination skills evolve. We used to have rhetorical devices focused on comparing certain behaviors and certain people to animals in the past (many, many years before Orwell's "Animal Farm: A Fairy Story", huh), although modern times demand modern solutions, it seems. That's why animals as figurative expressions seem to be outdated, while aliens? Aliens are based. ;D

Sometimes I feel, at least when it comes to the entertainment industry, the world is slowly becoming a giant circus with many people trying so hard to become top-tier clowns in it. The aforementioned Reptilians perhaps sounded utterly bizarre and dumb, but these days the concept itself doesn't feel that much exotic anymore (even if it still is something wacky to read about, lol).

We are Internet only friends, so hmm... Partially yes, partially no, heh.