Anonymous asked:
A gauntlet is a piece of armor, used for defense. A better metaphor would be a bludgeon.
You say this, but what happened to those without states capable of enacting powerful force? They were, in general, destroyed.
It is neither the bludgeon, nor the sword, but the armored hand that wields them. The power of the knight, the army, and the sovereign. The power of command, backed by violence. Something we wear or put on.
The state is not so constrained in its capabilities as a sword or bludgeon would imply, but neither is it so gentle, nor does it exist in such a softer world, as an ordinary hand would imply.
But yes, for new readers wondering why there’s a “#the iron hand” tag, it’s because my visual metaphor for state power is literally a steel gauntlet.
It’s important to remember that state power is ultimately rooted in military strength, and that while state interference is powerful, it can ultimately be clumsy and inexact, and forceful.
And I say this as someone who is often in support of state interference.
Anonymous asked:
The Israelis have damn good desalination tech, IIRC. Per wiki, they get 50% of their water from artificial means and have capacity to spare. Energy concerns still stand, of course, but that's a general problem, so assuming civilisation survives fresh water is a problem that we can solve (ignoring Vegas-style "why did you build a city in the middle of a damn desert" problems of course).
I am so glad I don’t own any property in Las Vegas.
You, a Neoconservative who unironically supported the Iraq War while complaining about “Liberals clamping down on our freedoms”:
“Nanny State”
Me, completely unapologetic about the existence of a progressive income tax, flirting with the reintroduction of corporal punishment as an alternative to lengthy prison sentences, plotting the introduction of mixed martial arts to high school curricula as part of national civil defense infrastructure, and planning the partial legalization of some soft drugs in order to disrupt the cartels:
How about that GOP debate huh.
I see absolutely no price movement on the market, implying that no one has learned anything new from it whatsoever.
explodingbat said: i am absolutely not going to start paying attention to american politics — horrible toupée man will win and things will keep getting worse until the water wars begin
you heard it here first folks
and they say prediction markets are useless
12 months on and horrible toupée man is still hanging in there, water wars may yet arrive on schedule.
Water wars are actually a real risk unless better desalination tech exists or energy can remain cheap enough, particularly in the less developed countries, as we enter the mid-century.
A lot of the leftist anti-techie/anti-brogrammer sentiment is just a resurgence of old-school taylorist notions of management.
Dilbert, Hacker and Painters, How Software Companies Die, Managing Humans and similar works were about nerds being managed by people who did not understand their work, and about creative, exploratory or otherwise highly nonlinear projects doomed by the Waterfall Model and taylorism.
Suits, MBAs and Management Consultants have been reasserting themselves, but this time, they are #woke.
This post is interesting, because it is going “csa/nazi victories are racist, what if something Woke™ happened instead, like a native american victory,” but the reblogger preemptively notes the problem with it, that is, the writers would portray the natives as being just as bad. Such a portrayal is characterized as racist. This is dumb, but it does gesture at a point: no well-realized Native American victory scenario could please the kinds of people calling for one. The Aztecs and the Inca were both very unpleasant empires that engaged in human sacrifice and were defeated in part because their Spanish conquerors had ready-made allies in the form of the tribes they had subjugated and mistreated. The history of a native-run North and South America would be a history of emergent states fighting and conquering both their less sophisticated neighbors and each other. To say nothing of the fact that no polity grows into a global superpower without doing horrible, horrible things. All the great global empires–Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, the US, Russia, Germany, Japan–gained their power through violence, at home and abroad. An Inca superpower, an Aztec superpower, a Mississippian superpower: all these countries would gain and keep their power through the exact same imperialistic methods Europe and its settler states are denounced for. To explore a scenario in which the indigenous populace of the Americas get to run their continents more or less unmolested is to call attention to the fact that this means that while some people are going to win (ex. the Inca), other people are still going to lose (ex. the Mapuche). It is to acknowledge that scalping wasn’t just something inflicted on white settlers, that the difference between oppressor and oppressed is a matter of historical circumstance, that one world’s Poor Marginalized People of Color are another’s Imperialist Oppressors Living on Stolen Land, that a noble savage is only noble because he does not have the power to be wicked, and that, in gaining civilization, he gains that power. And that’s all a bit too much to handle for someone who thinks “I’m gonna write a story about members of the underground resistance in a world where Nazi Germany won” is racist.
Football Man can kneel if he wants. You, on the other hand, BuzzPo, are banned from Football House for this take.
(Did I write that correctly? I’m not very familiar with American Football.)