PrimeJunta

Shouldn't be too long. https://twitter.com/adam_brennecke/status/593292863082860544

There's a bigger "megatrend" at work here methinks. The world order since 1918 has been based on the idea of the nation-state. The idea that there's something called a "nation" and each "nation" should have a "state," i.e. a bunch of territory with a government. This has led to all kinds of consequences, some awful (the little Austrian corporal), some not-so-awful (e.g. the highly cohesive and generally well-functioning small nation-states of northwestern Europe). All this could only function if there was a strong national identity. That is, people felt that they belonged to "a nation" and strongly identified with their "nation-state." And, of course, it left people who, for any of a number of reasons, did not have a nation-state, or did not identify with the nation-state of which they were citizens, out in the cold. The thing is, this identity is now fragmenting. Not just in the US, but everywhere. More and more people are no longer identifying with their nation-state. Rather, they build their identity from other bits and pieces. Consumer identity ("gamer"). Race. Religion, or lack thereof. Political ideology. These are coalescing into inter- and transnational networks. I identify more with Greek Communists than Finnish nationalists, and the Finnish nationalists identify more with English, Swedish, or Greek nationalists than Finnish Communists. This means that the political and institutional superstructures of the nation-state are being put under more and more strain. We don't really have anything better available to replace them, and we're going to be in a lot of trouble if they fail catastrophically. Supranational organizations like the EU or the UN are clearly not working either. This I think is the big question for the next generation. What kind of social, political, and economic order are we going to come up with when the nation-state crumbles under our feet? I don't know, but the next 30 years or so are going to be pretty interesting. I hope I'll still be here when we start to see the answers.

I agree, not even the nicer colors can save it. Anything else?

Yeah, maybe it is a bit of a weird retort. What do you guys consider problematic about this, though?

Yeah it does need some work. I've no doubt Africa as a whole is on the way up though. We'll see pretty amazing stuff coming from there in the next 20 years or so.

Yeah. Learning strategic resource management is a big part of learning the game.

I don't think pan-Africanism, or the pan-African flags, are problematic. I think it's problematic that they're necessary.

As opposed to this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-African_flag http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-Africanism

More than that. Obsidian put a quite a bit of their own money into it as well. The figure of $6M has been floated but not confirmed.

Ick, I did not like that article. I'm more like

So basic income or some other means ? There are lots of possibilities. Basic income could be a part of it. Many goods can and in many places already are simply provided free of charge -- healthcare, education, access to basic cultural goods (libraries etc). I would like to add pretty much everything from the bottom two tiers of Maslow's hierarchy of needs: food, shelter, hygiene, basic clothing, and so on. Seriously, we could easily provide all that to everyone without breaking a sweat. We don't have a productive capacity problem; we have a distribution problem.

Have a progressive taxation system. Use the revenues to provide everyone with the necessities for a life of dignity. Adjust the tax progression so that an optimal distribution of wealth is maintained. (Right now though the acute problem is tax avoidance. Once your income goes past a certain point, you're able to avail yourself of financial tools that make taxes, essentially, voluntary. We need to fix that first, then we can worry about tax progression.)

@Gfted1 Apologies for attempting to have a conversation with you. It's quite obviously futile. I won't make that mistake again.

Yeah there's nobody in mainstream American politics even close to stuff like that. I'm all for shaping governmental power so it can be used to redistribute wealth more equitably. But then so is everybody outside the extreme political fringes where I'm from. Even the conservatives. The only disagreement is about what the optimal distribution of wealth is. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/26/world/europe/speeding-in-finland-can-cost-a-fortune-if-you-already-have-one.html?_r=0

Tangent, since the Wild West fantasists got me thinkin' about Lebanon. A lot of Lebanese are Shi'ites. They were the historical underclass. Apart from a couple of super-rich landowning families, they were dirt-poor, uneducated, and ostracized. The other Lebanese groups used them as seasonal/unskilled labor and scapegoats. Many turned to crime -- usually petty theft, vandalism, cheating, and what have you. Then the PLO moved in. The Palestinians are mostly Sunnis and Christians and they continued to treat the local Shi'ites like crap. So when the Israelis invaded to kick out the PLO, many of them welcomed them in. The Israelis continued to treat them like "garbage people." By then, they had started to self-organize. This guy called Moussa Sadr had started setting up a network providing education and minimal social services to the Shi'ites. Then Qaddafi had him murdered. That finally pissed them off enough to get them to give up on this nonviolence bullcrap and get real. And so the Hezbollah was born. I don't know how long you can push things in 'Murica, but do it long enough and eventually you will have gotten rid of all the nice grandmas and Martin Luther Kings, and will only have the seriously angry, seriously ruthless, and seriously cunning left. And at that point, no amount of B52's distributing pepper spray – or stronger stuff – is going to put the genie back in the bottle.

@Gfted1 and others: Yeah 'cuz that worked so well in Iraq and Afghanistan where you actually were allowed to do it. Seriously, grow the **** up. This isn't a joke. Do you actually want an organized violent insurrection on your hands?

That Wild West fantasy of turning society into a bunch of armed gangs "policing" each other also never fails to amaze me. They've tried it in a bunch of places and it's nowhere near as much fun as it sounds. My wife grew up in one, Beirut during the civil war. They were lucky, the worst that happened to them was a stray shell blowing up their TV.

I always laugh a little when Serious People say that Violence Is Unacceptable only at the point when their community is at the receiving end.

Transgender people do get treatment nowadays. Hormone therapy and, if necessary, gender reassignment surgery. What was your point again?

This would never have happened if people were only allowed to shoot caps.

Some context. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/the-brutality-of-police-culture-in-baltimore/391158/ To serve and to protect, yes indeedy.

Didn't take me an hour to find that. The rest of it, I spent trying to find another one which was named for Gloria Steinem. I did discover that you Dutch like to name streets after anti-colonialists and civil rights heroes of all kinds. No Sukarnoweg or -straat though, wonder why...

Don't do that. I've spent like an hour looking, and I found a roundabout connecting Martin Luther Kingweg and Mahatma Gandhiweg, but it's named Rotonde Moeder Teresa.

These are indispensable parts of any lasting solution, but so is addressing systemic racism. A community outreach program by the police force simply won't work if at the same time they're engaging in the shenaningans they're currently engaging in. It'll be rightly seen as an attempt to paper over the problems rather than address them.