131–140 of 200 posts
It's a fitting title to describe life today for most people.
The series actually talks about this in detail, in particular the (incorrect) trope that medieval peasants worked a lot less than we do.
The joys of progress.
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There is in one sense the king and the pawn are similar. Pawns are many, kings are few. If one pawn sacrifices itself to sacrifice the king, then kings ought to fear pawns and not take undue advantage.
If you look at history, that's really not how elites react to violence (or its threat) from the 99%. Regicide is a Crime against God - meaning the social order which puts the elites on top. Vs. peasants are expendable at scale if the elites feel that they need to violently defend their elite status. And this ain't chess, where Pawn x King is just another move. Nor 1960's America, where Mr. Oswald could buy a rifle an…
“Nor 1960's America, where Mr. Oswald could buy a rifle and 4X scope by mail order, then get a job in a convenient book depository”
Your broader argument still holds that those in power often don’t tend to view isolated threats from the public as truly existential threats (until they do, like we just saw in Nepal).
But it’s a bit hard to agree that even in America things are truly that much different.
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Being able to give a good speech is merit when the goal is to select a leader.
I used to think that, before 2016. Apparently, incoherent rambling is also a successful strategy.
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Are stump speeches not propaganda? I don't see why the election system should privilege candidates whose political views are most compellingly expressed in quick little text blurbs.
That is how the system already works. Tv and social media soundbites are king, rather than substance.
This blog series by Bret Devraux keeps bringing me back to the black death, and how that reformed labor relations. I have heard about that a few times now. But this series really emphasizes how much surplus labor the rich could extract. And hence shows how much social impact it had when that labor reduced, and could suddenly negotiate. I wonder if the black death, and subsequent social change, might have been the bes…
I wonder what would happen given today’s demographic if mass migration was shut down. There may be similar change. But ruling class is hard at work to avoid that.
Today's demographic situation also involves a shrinking population, but it's for lack of young people. The world is getting a lot older really quickly, and that means less energetic and dynamic, and it means a lot of resources flowing to older unproductive people.
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There's no other way to have a true democracy than to make things as equal as possible. As soon as you allow any level of inequality to exist, the power differentials caused by it will be used to increase the power differential and inequality even more, and over a long period of time you'll end up with a dictatorship. Once you have extreme concentration of power, it's only a matter of time until someone that should n…
What if a true democracy is not a worthy goal? What if some people should have more or less say in something. Should someone unrelated and likely non-impacted by a thing have as strong a voice in that thing? Should someone non-knowledgeable have an equal say to someone experienced? Is that fair? If A knows 2+2=4 and B says it is five, we don't average votes and call it 4.5. And if a large debate happens and B convinc…
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It is really great that Snopes was around in medieval times and can confirm or deny! /S The thing is, no one knows what medieval peasants were doing, cos we weren't there. We have this or that piece of evidence, but evidence can be misinterpreted.
The majority of people today don't work as hard as the farmers of today . It is completely implausible that they work harder than the farmers of the middle ages, who almost certainly had to work harder than modern farmers (thanks to no mechanization).
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>One can be negotiated with by voting, the other, violence. Violence like shooting political opponents for voicing their opinions?
Proof by counterexample: I think it would have been a good decision to shoot Adolf Hitler for his opinions, don't you?
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There's no other way to have a true democracy than to make things as equal as possible. As soon as you allow any level of inequality to exist, the power differentials caused by it will be used to increase the power differential and inequality even more, and over a long period of time you'll end up with a dictatorship. Once you have extreme concentration of power, it's only a matter of time until someone that should n…
What if a true democracy is not a worthy goal? What if some people should have more or less say in something. Should someone unrelated and likely non-impacted by a thing have as strong a voice in that thing? Should someone non-knowledgeable have an equal say to someone experienced? Is that fair? If A knows 2+2=4 and B says it is five, we don't average votes and call it 4.5. And if a large debate happens and B convinc…