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How transportation technologies shaped empires

unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com

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Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires

#291

Post by ssnistfajen »

wolverine876 wrote: post #220
ssnistfajen wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello? This is year 2023, not 1542. Communication happens at the speed of light and the only bottleneck is the human processing said communication. Obsessively devolving power to nesting lower levels of decision making bodies is just about the worst thing to do when technology has increasingly enabled organizations that are slim at the top to effectively manage complex systems at scale instead.

The local decision-makers know much better the local needs: Local people can communicate with local decision-makers, they have far more experience with local needs (lifetimes worth), and human cognitive capacity is limited - nobody single federal decision maker can learn and know what all the local mayors know. Nobody a thousand miles away can know my neighborhood the way I do. That's a reason decision-making in busi…

>The local decision-makers know much better the local needs

Do they really? Election voter turnout is absolutely abysmal and gets lower the lower the government level goes. This is a clear sign voters no longer believe in democracy at the local level because exercising democratic rights no longer has influence on the situation. Why? Because imbeciles have successfully embedded themselves in lower levels of governments and use the devolved power to keep the status quo in order to profit off of it.

Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires

#292

Post by DemocracyFTW2 »

mjcohen wrote: post #246
dalbasal wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Idk... Lots of conquests were hard, but time did them. Then they put down rebellions as necessary. I think the difference was that there was no way for time to "win" as they we used to. No palace to install governors in. No temple to place Roman statues in. How do twin? What do you win when you win? Rome wasn't after a tax base or plantations for cash crops. They were after a tax base. Most of their empire consisted…

This is not written in English. Maybe AI?

> Rome wasn't after a tax base [...]. They were after a tax base.

looks like a perfectly cromulent argumentation to me.

Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires

#293

Post by wolverine876 »

ssnistfajen wrote: post #291
wolverine876 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The local decision-makers know much better the local needs: Local people can communicate with local decision-makers, they have far more experience with local needs (lifetimes worth), and human cognitive capacity is limited - nobody single federal decision maker can learn and know what all the local mayors know. Nobody a thousand miles away can know my neighborhood the way I do. That's a reason decision-making in busi…

>The local decision-makers know much better the local needs Do they really? Election voter turnout is absolutely abysmal and gets lower the lower the government level goes. This is a clear sign voters no longer believe in democracy at the local level because exercising democratic rights no longer has influence on the situation. Why? Because imbeciles have successfully embedded themselves in lower levels of government…

Turnout was very high in 2016 and 2020 in the US.

Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires

#294

Post by wolverine876 »

ssnistfajen wrote: post #291
wolverine876 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The local decision-makers know much better the local needs: Local people can communicate with local decision-makers, they have far more experience with local needs (lifetimes worth), and human cognitive capacity is limited - nobody single federal decision maker can learn and know what all the local mayors know. Nobody a thousand miles away can know my neighborhood the way I do. That's a reason decision-making in busi…

>The local decision-makers know much better the local needs Do they really? Election voter turnout is absolutely abysmal and gets lower the lower the government level goes. This is a clear sign voters no longer believe in democracy at the local level because exercising democratic rights no longer has influence on the situation. Why? Because imbeciles have successfully embedded themselves in lower levels of government…

Turnout was relatively very high in 2016 and 2020.

> exercising democratic rights no longer has influence on the situation.

Progressives and the radical right don't think so, and they've certainly had tons of influence on government.

> Because imbeciles have successfully embedded themselves in lower levels of governments and use the devolved power to keep the status quo in order to profit off of it.

Not my local government. It isn't perfect, but it gets a lot done. Same in NYC. I certainly wouldn't call them imbeciles.

What local government are you talking about? There are GOP people who, in the name of demonstrating their radicalism, act like imbeciles, but I think they know what they are doing.

Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires

#295

Post by ssnistfajen »

wolverine876 wrote: post #294
ssnistfajen wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The local decision-makers know much better the local needs Do they really? Election voter turnout is absolutely abysmal and gets lower the lower the government level goes. This is a clear sign voters no longer believe in democracy at the local level because exercising democratic rights no longer has influence on the situation. Why? Because imbeciles have successfully embedded themselves in lower levels of government…

Turnout was relatively very high in 2016 and 2020. > exercising democratic rights no longer has influence on the situation. Progressives and the radical right don't think so, and they've certainly had tons of influence on government. > Because imbeciles have successfully embedded themselves in lower levels of governments and use the devolved power to keep the status quo in order to profit off of it. Not my local gove…

>Turnout was relatively very high in 2016 and 2020.

And? The U.S. has countless local elections happening almost every year. The turnouts are abysmal.

>Progressives and the radical right don't think so, and they've certainly had tons of influence on government.

Those aren't 100% of the electorate. This loops back to the point that democracy is failing when the bulk of the electorate no longer bother to vote.

Only in a country with FPTP and distorted voter power distribution would a 60% turnout be considered "relatively very high". European elections regularly have turnouts in the high 80s. That's what normal democracies look like.

Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires

#297

Post by int_19h »

ldh0011 wrote: post #184
lantry wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a big part of "the word for world is forest". A colony on one planet has essentially become self governing, until one day a ship delivers an instantaneous communication device, at which point the planet is back under imperial control. There's more to the story than that ofc There's also "The Dispossessed", where an anarchist movement travels to a distant planet in order to set up their own government.

> anarchist movement > set up their own government I'm pretty sure I get what you mean but I found that funny.

It's not a contradiction. Anarchists oppose states and hierarchies in general, not governments as such.

Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires

#298

Post by int_19h »

Symbiote wrote: post #287
ldh0011 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> anarchist movement > set up their own government I'm pretty sure I get what you mean but I found that funny.

It's a poor summary anyway. The Dispossessed describes an anarchist society on the impoverished moon of a verdant planet, and a scientist's struggle to reconcile his anarchism with his wish to further his research, which requires more resources than the anarchist society can provide. It is one of my favourite books. I also don't remember distant communication being relevant for The Word for World is Forest . That's f…

Distant communication is what establishes the setting in "Forest". At the very beginning, it is stated that the colony is 27 light years away - a frontier - and as the story progresses, there are hints that this is one of the reasons why the colonists can get away with brutalizing the local population, going far beyond the mandate that they have.

And then when they get the ansible midway through the story along with an inspection party that promptly reports their findings back to Earth, they start getting a steady stream of orders banning their various practices - slavery, violent reprisals etc. And when the local administration tries to implement some of those bans, the more hard-minded colonists deliberately provoke the natives into an open uprising by massacring their village. So it's a major plot driver, too.

Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires

#299

Post by int_19h »

complex_exp wrote: post #142
wintogreen74 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discontent seems (to me) implicit in foreign rule though, the degree just being a matter of with what and for how much the local population is being bought off. Are there any examples where an empire doesn't treat it's outer reaches as second-class citizens and survives?

Russia. All the asian russians are very much treated as second class citizens, from the top (deciding where to draft mobiks from) to the bottom (a much worse case of what americans today would call police brutality / bias). We have to see if it survives though.

The problem is that Russia has succeeded in settling many of its colonized territories such that natives are minorities in most of their titular region. Consider Buryatia for a prominent example - Buryats have been used as Russian shock troops in Ukraine since 2015 (Debaltsevo), yet population of the republic is only 44% Buryat but 53% Russian. On top of that, much of the native population is culturally Russified.

Tuva and ethnic republics of the Caucasus are where the natives have majorities that mostly retain their separate cultural and ethnic identity, so if something does fall apart, I would expect it to happen there.

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