51–60 of 97 posts
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The best system of government is a benevolent dictatorship. If you can’t make it less dictatorial, at least make it more benevolent.
Power corrupts. The only way to make a government more benevolent is to make it weaker.
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Something I’ve noticed about UK conservatism — and maybe it’s true for the US too — is that women and minorities are much better represented at the very top than at the MP/Congress level. The Tories have 25% female MPs, but are also responsible for both female PMs. Half of the Great Offices of State in the UK are currently occupied by minorities. And if you look at the historic willingness of the Tories to run ethnic…
There's a simple logic to this. The center is left of the conservatives, so a woman or minority candidate allows them to capture swing voters. Racists and sexists will probably vote for them anyway. It's why Angela Merkel is such an effective politician. She essentially monopolizes the right, while being able to take positions that the right wing hate (e.g. on the refugee crisis), knowing they won't stop voting for h…
I don't think this is true. Thatcher, May, Priti Patel, Palin, and Andrea Leadsom are all hard-right enough that I don't believe any of them are more appealing to people in the center than white, male moderates like Cameron.
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How is it a good thing to have more efficient dictators?
The best system of government is a benevolent dictatorship. If you can’t make it less dictatorial, at least make it more benevolent.
Of course in an ideal world we wouldn't need a benevolent dictator at all, so, maybe a benevolent dictatorship is never the "best", but, at best, sometimes better than the worst.
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The problem is a benevolent dictator only lasts part of one lifetime. Then you have to deal with the problem of succession, which in a dictatorship likely means unpredictable chaos
In plato's republic the benevolent dictators choose their successors to also be benevolent dictators, do not know if that could work in real life but the CCP do chose their successors, and not based on blood lines
Interesting that their map seems to include Taiwan, although it is marked "NA", and no representatives come from there
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Yeah we fought a big war over it 160 years ago. 600,000 people died.
> Among this powerful elite which include all Central Committee members and provincial standing committee members, the share of women has gone up from a dismal 7.6% to a still-dismal 8.4% from the 18th CC to the 19th CC. Among the post-62 cohort active in the 19th CC, only 11% of the elite are women. To be sure, as more cadres in the post-62 cohort enter the vice-provincial elite, the share of women may rise, but it…
“We need more female genocidal tyrants!”
The CCP is terrible but there’s no question intellectually they outclass the United States’ geriatric leadership. Much more STEM too. We love our lawyers and business folk, don’t we?
Shou'en Li's answer to this Quora query[1] is insightful. > In China, if you want to be a leader, you have to start from the grassroots level to accumulate rich government work experiences after ascending nine levels of posts (section chief, deputy division chief, division chief, deputy director of general office, director of general office, vice-minister, minister, deputy-state leader, state leader). With such exper…
> Among this powerful elite which include all Central Committee members and provincial standing committee members, the share of women has gone up from a dismal 7.6% to a still-dismal 8.4% from the 18th CC to the 19th CC. Among the post-62 cohort active in the 19th CC, only 11% of the elite are women. To be sure, as more cadres in the post-62 cohort enter the vice-provincial elite, the share of women may rise, but it…
Worth noting is our own rather poor showing in elite politics in the US. Around 25% women in congress. And if you look at only Republicans it's under 9%. Yes, you read that correctly.
The average age of a congressperson is ~60 years old. So the average congress person was born in 1960. Our current crop of congress people were raised in the 60s, by WWII veterans. Even if you think society underwent changes and is far more gender equitable now than it was in 1960, you wouldn't expect to see that start to take effect in top level leadership until much later. It's the same reason why you wouldn't expect to see a woman or a black person on the supreme court 15 years after women or blacks were allowed to become lawyers.