[52-6F-62]

Seriously. Have these guys actually read history?

The small patchwork of kingdoms were always redrawing their borders and sending people to fight over it.

But back then the nobles and kings were expected to at least be present for the fight.

It will not be peace. They will forever try to eat eachother and feed paupers to the war gods while these cowards hide in their luxury bunkers.

[tomrod]

Right now the theory of network states has a built in "Agree or Leave" policy, which I expect if network states actually come from this pitiful Butterfly Revolution will devolve into "Agree or Die." And the 20th century taught us that these sorts of glorious revolutions keep going until the policy is "Agree and Die!" through famines, resource depletion, and counter revolutions

The billionaires somehow think their current wealth protects them from a hungry mob. I really don't understand tbe reasoning.

Further, they still focus on a geographically based monarchy, which is stupid when you could have a federal platform handle the geography issues and evolve the nonessential services to subscriptions provided by any sort of group: multinational, union, church, local community, legacy geographic states and cities, etc.

The focus of any movement from status quo must be in terms of improvement of lives and capacity to handle global challenges, like global warming, space mining and settlement, etc.

[ben_w]

> The billionaires somehow think their current wealth protects them from a hungry mob. I really don't understand tbe reasoning.

Motivated reasoning makes it difficult for most of us to realise why someone else may call us a mortal enemy (unless we ourselves are severely depressed), and the super-rich are no better.

Outside-the-box thinking is also always difficult. Empires fall when the ruling classes begin to assume the empire's power is the natural order of the world and begin fighting each other to extract wealth from the empire rather than to grow it.

Even to the extent there is historical precident specifically of a threat to business leaders: talk of personal threats to those winning at capitalism has been around continuously since the Communist Manifesto, yet with the fall of the USSR many may think such talk is just talk, that Brian Thompson was a fluke rather than an indicator, etc.

[fragmede]

> The billionaires somehow think their current wealth protects them from a hungry mob.

Luigi Mangione aside, hasn't it? Their wealth gets spent on getting the hungry mob to fight amongst themselves about trans rights and abortion and government efficiency and it seems to have been pretty effective because we're no longer talking about taxing the rich and making life better for as many people as possible, instead we're talking about Elon Musk.

No one's storming the terrace at Mar a Lago over the price of eggs.

[dumbledoren]

There was another, recent incident in which some guy shot a few rounds to a healthcare exec's window in the night...

[AstralStorm]

The funny but tragic thing is why would you even try to do it that way rather than skip past all this nonsense by building a new separate equitable system that is dictator-proof.

Why not literally leave them in the dust, rather than negotiate with terrorists or try to change their mind?

The more they try to push back, the more we'll fix it to be resilient to it, and despite the resources and threats at their disposal we have to realize we actually have more.

[collingreen]

What would that look like?

My jaded, knee jerk response was going to be "build a dictator proof system and the world will build a better dictator". I don't want to be hopeless on this so I'm honestly asking about your ideas about it.

[TFYS]

We need to invest effort into researching how to make quick, high-quality decisions as a collective. Large concentrations of power emerge because we haven't yet discovered how to make effective decisions democratically. Representative democracy is not good enough. We need a robust system of direct democracy capable of producing decisions that are at least as good as those made by a skilled small group.

Innovations like blockchains and LLMs might finally enable us to develop such a system.

[sangnoir]

> We need to invest effort into researching how to make quick, high-quality decisions as a collective

Getting rid of First past the post voting systems will reduce incidents of extremism. Ranked choice voting, multiparty systems amd coalition governments would be an improvement on the current American status quo.

[CMCDragonkai]

Yes this is correct - which is why the crypto infrastructure is just bootstrapping a much more important piece of political infrastructure.

[tomrod]

Social Choice Theory begs to differ that we don't understand voting structure in great detail.

[steve_adams_86]

> Seriously. Have these guys actually read history?

If you read the work of someone like Yarvin, the answer appears to be: Yes, but selectively. Same with scientific literature. He's very selective in what he reads and how he interprets it. He does not appear to care about the implications of this bias, or register that it exists; his bias is such that it discounts the need to even account for its existence, if that makes sense.

I don't think these people do much reading about things that don't serve them. For lack of a better way to phrase it. I had this revelation while reading into project 2025, Yarvin's work itself, and other, related, periphery works.

I don't like it. I find it very unpleasant. I would rather read something I agree with more, or which feels constructive. I'd like to refine my understanding of history, policy, philosophy, and the rest of the world in ways which I find agreeable and additive to my own beliefs and desires in the world. But I recognize that that's overly self-serving and not conducive to functional, socially-integrated learning and growth. I don't want to bubble myself.

These people don't seem to care. They don't immerse themselves in the nuances of cultures, belief systems, or most plainly perhaps: the reality of people they don't agree with or care about.

The world isn't a complex system of people to them. Everyone else is a distraction or barrier to their desires and preferences. If it isn't functioning to serve them, something is wrong. This is why they all seem to land with this authoritarian stance. They reject everything else. They even want to destroy it.

That has been my take on it, anyway. Many would argue that the people behind Project 2025, the broligarchs, or someone like Yarvin are all far more intelligent than I am. I'm entirely open to that possibility.

[TFYS]

What if they have and it's what they want? If you're a billionaire who already has everything this system can offer, you'd likely desire a system that can give you even more. A system that doesn't limit you in ways that this one does. You'd want to be a king. Even if it means waging war with other kings, it would enable a far more exhilarating life, full of possibilities that don't exist in a system where ordinary people have a say.

[c22]

I haven't gotten there myself, but I like to think that if I was a billionaire I'd like to see as few ripples as possible in the system that's keeping track of my billions.

[einrealist]

And those small kingdoms did not care about oil, minerals back then - things that might not exist in your vicinity, but are required to run a modern economy today.

This entire concept of city-states exists on a premise of peaceful coexistence and cooperation. Given our history, this is pure fiction. (And then these people shit on Communism.)

[fodkodrasz]

Of course they did care about minerals. They cared about salt, gold, tin, copper, iron. Also about navigable seaports, sea passages, fertile land, forests, and also workforce. For these resources wars were waged all the time in the Middle ages.

Oil was not as valuable as nowadays, but it was a priced export used as lighting fuel, weapon component for Greek fire, and also as a drug for some health conditions since ~400 BC, and more so later. It was not the central fuel for the economy, but it was considered a valuable resource, though not one for which a war would be started probably.

[einrealist]

You are right. I oversimplified my statement to make the point that the resource requirements of modern economies are more complex. So conflicts happened over less complex resource requirements back then. Also resources are not just the source materials, but anything within a supply chain, including intermediate products.

[AstralStorm]

This is why the ultra rich now engage in prediction as to which resources will become critical, then try to monopolize that.

[dumbledoren]

> This entire concept of city-states exists on a premise of peaceful coexistence and cooperation

F*ck no. From early Sumerian cities to Greek city-states, they were at each others' throats regularly. You can speak of peaceful cooperation maybe in certain stages of Ancient Egypt, and very early Anatolian settlements like Catalhuyuk.