Out of Pod Experience

Yep, that's a general problem with bureaucracies. It starts quite promising but after a while it's turning really bad. No control, no accountability etc.
Btw our villain story continues. A day without a leak is a lost day
#The Caldari Secert Service is collecting one billion cell phone calls every single day: Watch from minute 40… #prism

Could be also FreedomFries 2013, it's just a name
To paraphrase Butch from Pulp Fiction "Names don't mean ****."

Right wing capitalism in the states and Socialism in Europe and Australia.

All if it's just been powerful governments gathering more power to them through whatever levers are to hand, same as in every advanced civilization in history thats trying to keep itself on top. It was fundamentalist Islam in the middle East in the 1500's leading to the Ottomans being dubbed the "sick man of Europe" as this decline continued over the centuries and the Qing dynasty from internalisation.

There was a good quote from a man more intelligent than is generally given credit to him.

"Someone once said that every form of government has one characteristic peculiar to it and if that characteristic is lost, the government will fall. In a monarchy, it is affection and respect for the royal family. If that is lost the monarch is lost. In a dictatorship, it is fear. If the people stop fearing the dictator he'll lose power. In a representative government such as ours, it is virtue. If virtue goes, the government fails. Are we choosing paths that are politically expedient and morally questionable? Are we in truth losing our virtue? . . . If so, we may be nearer the dustbin of history than we realize."

Cookies for anyone who can name that without looking it up on google, weigh up the words before you do though....

Tibus Heth visits South Africa. He is not welcomed in Soweto though. "Hundreds of South African demonstrators clashed with police outside of the Soweto campus of the University of Johannesburg on Saturday before a planned appearance by Tibus Heth "

I'm going to take a stab in the dark Turnahub and say you subscribe to the Austrian school of economics and are somewhat libertarian? It seems like anything other than unregulated capitalism is in contradiction to your position. Without the potential to regulate why would any business not exploit everything to its utmost? Would this not be essentially Communism by another means, given the differentiation between a Megacorporation and a Authoritarian Socialist state essentially blur into semantics?

Also yes, they developed top heavy bureaucracies, that was the point I was making, the origin of those bureaucracies was different but they ended up becoming more or less the same thing by necessity to control the population that supported the state. Take a look through the Hadith some time, quite interesting how much tax and finance law is in there for a supposedly holy text. I would argue it wasn't so much that they stifled trade, as that as President Regan pointed out, it was emerging technological applications by various means that brought down the core tenant of the state upon which the bureaucracy resided upon.

The point is that its largely immaterial what the original point was, all points of power flow through from it. Magna Carta, the US constitution ect, this is the basis of common law in our respective nations. Start pulling up those foundations and the subsequent laws and economics, which are articles of faith subscribed to the population on assumption it will apply to all regardless of the underlying reality. We act in the assumption, for the majority, that we are all equal. This is a core tenant of the west, and to start to see the logic fall apart in face of reality we get things like the Westminster declaration, the US civil rights movement and the UN declaration on human rights to try and reestablish the narrative.

The USSR collapsed shortly after people found out that the West was systematically outclassing their civilian quality of life. This came shortly (relatively) after large scale digital communications networks were being developed.

Historically, this will either be seen as a bump in the road, or a key item to be noted on the West's relationship with its governing structure. Personally I'm quite pissed off at this, though strategical I can see why it was done. My issue is that on a few rare occasions powerful people have stood down when they did not need to out of principle. Washington himself could have easily coined himself Emperor of America like Napoleon or Julius Ceaser.

Watch this space basically, my core point is that the narrative has been broken, and the narrative to keep going would require the governments to nominally act within the law they write for reasons the population will agree with.

I don't really subscribe to politics, but the praxeology of Austrian economics is logical, yes. Still I don't think that precludes limited government. Austrians can be anything politically. I am politically agnostic. In terms of business "exploiting," everything in the absence of regulation. I really just don't have a clue how they would. A business that isn't given special government privileged is liable for everything it does. As I mentioned earlier "corporation," is a government construct. The owners of a non-corporate business will be responsible for the harm their products cause, they will be responsible for any damage they do to their neighbors' environment, and they will be of-course, required to please their customers in order to stay in business.



No, actually the origin of those beuracracies was more or less the same despite the cultural diffirences. Take a look at the emergence of any empire in history. You have a boom period, usually brought on by relatively free trade. A centralization period, usually brought on by a large-scale war and political turmoil. Then you have the collapse. It happened in Egypt, Greece, Rome, Central America, Russia, China, and it will happen to the US and EU in due course.

Regan was a good speaker, but frankly he had no idea what he was talking about. The reason for the collapse of soviet communism was the fact that central planning was a ruinous misadventure. The great irony was that Regan expanded the military industrial complex (to combat communism of course) and put the US on the fast-track to its own collapse for no good reason.



And the most prescient counterpoint I can make of this is that none of those document have accomplished their stated goal for any significant amount of time. Manga Carta per-dates some of the most brutal autocrats of Europe. The US constitution is now a complete joke since it has been violated almost to the letter. To pretend that theses ruined documents are any kind of foundational guarantor of rights is simply preposterous. And to repeat the folly yet-again? Why?



I don't particularly care for the academic review of this moment in history, but I think you are right about the west getting a bit more acquainted with the structure of government. I certainly hope you and anyone else with eyes is pissed off about this, but if you can't understand why the state has an interest in keeping tabs on your then you've not paid much attention to what those rascals have been up to this last century.

You may well be right about Washington, although I have my doubts about the man since he was a voracious federalist, but why in the world would you want to pin your hopes on a leader that comes along once every few hundred years? I understand that an honorable statesman acting within the law is the ideal we are all taught to strive for, but I can't defend anything about the status quo based on how it was imagined to best work. I judge it in the same way I judge potential investments: how they have worked and how I can reasonably predict they will work.

I say this not in the hopes that I could design a better tomorrow, because I think that's ridiculous, but to inform people that they need not make today worse.