61–70 of 97 posts
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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.
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?
Let's not forget that Wilson was a Princeton Professor and Hoover was an engineer. (Wilson appointed KKK members to his cabinet, screened a white supremacist film in the white house, invaded and occupied the soviet union for two years; hoover treated society as a machine that he would "tweak the knobs to try to optimize" - we all know how that turned out) And Coolidge, a lawyer, was arguably the "least bad" president…
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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…
That sounds like the system's ideal - but is that how most people become, say, deputy state leaders? Or can you pay your way in, advance through nepotism, or blackmailing, or mutual corruption, etc?
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Well, looking at it from a game-theory perspective: It might just mean that you have to be #1 in your local communist party to move up to the regional one, and you have to be #1 in the regional one to move up to the national one. Your chances of qualifying for each round up are inversely proportional to the number of people you're competing against, and their abilities. In such a system, you're better off going to (o…
I am not exactly well-versed in Chinese culture but it seems like locals would have an advantage over carpet-baggers given my paltry understanding of guanxi.
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Power corrupts. The only way to make a government more benevolent is to make it weaker.
The governments of the feudal era, let alone the night watch states of the 1800, were certainly more corrupt than the more centralized nations of China and the US. Disproving this hypothesis that I hear too much.
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Yeah we fought a big war over it 160 years ago. 600,000 people died.
I think it's kinda cute (but mostly sickening) that far left ideologues and far right ideologues can at least come together and agree that the Civil War was not actually about slavery (despite every fact contradicting that view).
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The governments of the feudal era, let alone the night watch states of the 1800, were certainly more corrupt than the more centralized nations of China and the US. Disproving this hypothesis that I hear too much.
Were they? Did the feudal era monarchies exert control over foreign governments in far away continents? The feudal era was marked by constant churn and shifting allegiances and there was always somewhere to escape to. Many escaped to the Americas, coincidentally, where they did eventually launch revolutions against the English and Spanish monarchy, which grew quite powerful and corrupt during the Imperial era. At any…
https://sci-hub.do/10.1017/S0305741000045495 > The Hakka are an impoverished and stigmatized subgroup of Han Chinese whose settlements are scattered from Jiangxi to Sichuan. Socialist revolution meshed well with the Hakka tradition of militant dissent, so that their 3 per cent of the mainland population has been three times more likely than other Han to hold high position. Six of the nine Soviet guerrilla bases were…
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Let's not forget that Wilson was a Princeton Professor and Hoover was an engineer. (Wilson appointed KKK members to his cabinet, screened a white supremacist film in the white house, invaded and occupied the soviet union for two years; hoover treated society as a machine that he would "tweak the knobs to try to optimize" - we all know how that turned out) And Coolidge, a lawyer, was arguably the "least bad" president…
Just to clarify for those reading this, Wilson studied political science and history, and went to law school. He wasn't a "STEM" professor.
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Were they? Did the feudal era monarchies exert control over foreign governments in far away continents? The feudal era was marked by constant churn and shifting allegiances and there was always somewhere to escape to. Many escaped to the Americas, coincidentally, where they did eventually launch revolutions against the English and Spanish monarchy, which grew quite powerful and corrupt during the Imperial era. At any…
Yes they objectively were and yes late feudal lords did exert control over far away lands (early ones as well like Charlemagne and even Charles Martel to a lesser extent.) Also the design of the US is to find a balance between a strong federal government and state governments. That is why the issue has dominated our politics, in one form the other, and we’ve had a two party system based around it, ever since.
Charlemagne exhibited control and influence over a smaller chunk of Europe than the current E.U. The U.S. can almost bankrupt any country at will by freezing it out of the banking system and imposing sanctions.