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Most controversial or unpopular political/economic/social opinions?

Within a human generation the vast majority of individual humans can be capable of ruling themselves. To fetishize the technocrat is to not only insult humanity, it is a direct ideological position you intend to force upon the world, stymieing us all from reaching what we could become.
It isn't fetshizing the technocrat to say the people who don't believe in climate change, evolution, gay rights, minority rights, and just fucking science in general should not have a say in education, government investment, and what laws are passed.
 
Within a human generation the vast majority of individual humans can be capable of ruling themselves. To fetishize the technocrat is to not only insult humanity, it is a direct ideological position you intend to force upon the world, stymieing us all from reaching what we could become.
Nice. I'm sure you can define a nuclear policy and chemical waste treatment protocols that you will entrust your children to, all the while benefiting from electricity and plastics in your daily life. Once you're done about that, I'll need you to get your kids in an airliner that you, personally, will have determined safe for travel without anyone else having done the job to check on the designers' work. Once they've done travelling a few thousand km in that plane, they'll have to trust your self-ruling capacities on a few other technological details. That is, of course, assuming they are still alive after taking the medicine that you will have standardized and overseen during its development and production.

Is your name Dunning-Kruger, by any chance?
 
"My ignorance is a good as your knowledge" is not a great way to run things. That's what gets us Trump, Bolsonaro, Hitler, Mussolini, Duterte, etc... The "outsider" who screams about how the elites look down on everyone while looking down on everyone themselves AND not knowing wtf they are doing.
 
95% of humans are idiots, yet all of them believe that they belong in the remaining 5%.
 
95% of humans are idiots, yet all of them believe that they belong in the remaining 5%.
I'll go with what Jon Stewart said. I don't want a leader I can have a beer with. I want one that is embarrassingly smarter and better than me. I just know enough to know that no such leader is gonna be coming out of the rural conservative electorate. When you have 18 candidates and all of them are willing to say they are creationists on stage on live tv, then your party needs to not exist.
 
At this point, the Urban and Rural divide has an end in only two major directions: death and suffering and forcing equality.

Or as Aaron Fox suggested, just let economics take its course and let the cities become dominant. When cities contain the demographic majority of a population and produce the overwhelming majority of the wealth, it's normal for them to take charge.


The major reason that the GOP get their power is because the urban now holds practically all the power and thus dominates the scene.

They have power because the electoral systems favour large sparsely habbited areas over small dense urban areas, and values location over raw numbers. The rural areas hold political power, while urban areas have naturally occurring economic and social power.

Urban areas have a larger population than rural areas, and the population has been flowing out of rural areas into cities for centuries. It's natural for urban areas to hold power when they hold the demographic majority, produce more wealth and are the centre of culture and arts.

People don't do 'get left behind' well so they become increasingly more and more desperate and right now it is nearing 'there are no other alternatives, violence is the only answer' for the Rural. So in the coming years, I only see that the Rural start saying 'fuck it' and do things that they would (normally) won't do otherwise.

Have you considered that maybe a minority that constantly demonised outsiders, considered itself entitled to perpetual hegemony and is willing to use force to maintain power shouldn't be appeased. Desperation borne out of powerlust and spite isn't a new thing, and isn't something to be surrendered to.

Things like starve the cities (and in the US, the fucking planet) to death, terrorism, insurrection, and -if they get the tools and feel that there are no alternatives (and in this case that would be rather quick on the 'feel that there are no alternatives' bit)- bioterrorism with horrific synthetic plagues that would likely outstrip those created by nation-states...

Have you considered this argument applies globally to many areas outside of the USA. And that being willing to engage in mass murder to force people to obey you is something that should be opposed on principle. Or that you're argument is predicated on rural people being utterly monstrous and having no moral qualms whatsoever.

"Give us power or we'll use terrorism to kill hundreds of millions of peoples, because we really want power.", is not an idea decent people, or sane governments will accept, and by accepting it

So, to rectify this, you'll have to force a sort of economic and population normalization/equality policy. Break the mega-cities and basically decentralize the economic and political power. Not entirely turning back the urbanization clock mind you, but forcibly keep complete urban centralization from happening. If you don't, then it is likely that you'll have a lot of dead people on your hands...

This a policy that Karl Marx proposed that almost all communist countries did not implement because it's that stupid. It's something the Khmer Rouge actually tried. And it's policy even harder to achieve in a rich urbanised society. This a demand that fundamentally cannot be accepted, because to sheer costs to achieve it and side effects are really that bad. Your essential having government control of land of the same scale and type you find in communist countries, done with explicit goal of destroying value and stoping naturally occurring economic activities that again, actual communist countries, were smart enough to encourage.

Asking the majority to abandon their way of life or you'll kill them is not an inevitable idea, it's a caucus belli.

No, that is only going to have immense woe and death in the short and long term. Remember, if you do that then you are putting their backs to the wall and everyone knows that if you force an animal into a corner then they're the epitome of unpredictable... and in the case of humans willing to do anything to win. So by doing that, you'll have constant terrorist attacks and Oklahoma City bombings, literal armed insurrections in the countryside, and, if they believe that it is needed, willing to start throwing chemical and -likely- biological weapons to win.

Having the US turn into Afghanistan but worse is very bad for everyone, quite literally. That and having no food because the US's food production is ridiculous by itself.

The problem is the alternative is you've suggested is going to cause even more woe and death than this scenario, and lead to the previous urban majority becoming caged animals fighting for their survival. If rural people are trying to reenact the khmer rouge, then a civil war is preferable to having

Due to how mind boggling insane the rift between the urban and rural rift is in the US, it'll be -at best- the situation in Israel... worst case scenario is well within 'crimes against humanity' territory.

While the rift is really bad and I have low opinion or red tribe members, even I don't think mass support of terrorism is going to spread to that extent.

Problem is that we're in a similar situation as Truman was when given three choices to force Japan to surrender, either a) use atomic bombs on two of Japan's remaining industrial cities not Tokyo and hope for the best (this is the option that Truman picked), b) the clusterfuck of all clusterfucks known as Operation Downfall where Japan is almost certainly going to be wiped out as a culture and a nation, or c) Operation Starvation (which is exactly what it says on the tin, literally starving the nation into submission like in an old-fashioned castle/city siege).

We've basically got bad, worse, and horrifying... and 'population and economic normalization/equality' is the equivalent of using nukes. Simply locking them out is the equivalent of doing Operation Downfall... with all that it entails. So far I haven't seen what would be the equivalent of Operation Starvation...

No, "economic normalisation" is equivalent to being subject to Operation Downfall in this scenario for the urban populace. You are asking a prosperous majority to subject themselves to being wiped out as a national and a culture to appease the fears of rural people who are using mass starvation as a weapon of terror.

You've got the two options the wrong way round, "population normalisation and economic equality" is exactly what the Khmer Rouge tried to, and even if carried out successfully your subjecting people to more state control than modern China, constantly demolishing their homes, controlling where they have to live, and replacing organic economic growth with central planning that is going to totally ruin the economy and devastate the lives of everyone subject to it.
 
"My ignorance is a good as your knowledge" is not a great way to run things. That's what gets us Trump, Bolsonaro, Hitler, Mussolini, Duterte, etc... The "outsider" who screams about how the elites look down on everyone while looking down on everyone themselves AND not knowing wtf they are doing.

It isn't fetshizing the technocrat to say the people who don't believe in climate change, evolution, gay rights, minority rights, and just fucking science in general should not have a say in education, government investment, and what laws are passed.

That's what happens when the Elites lose legitimacy and do go "those mindless pesants don't have a high enough mind to understand the metaphysics of our benevolence!" in a manner reminiscent of Versailles elites in 1781. Trying to go "the elites are cultured sophisticates that are one with the world, so SIT DOWN AND SHUT UP YOU PEASANTS AND BE GRATEFUL FOR WHATEVER SCRAPS WE TOSS YOU!" is what gets them making Guillotines.

And even in the "Enlightened cities where everyone is a global citizen that is one with the world!" it is only a handful of cities that hoard all the wealth like Smaug while others are left with the scraps. For instance, look at how London has been bleeding the rest of the UK (including Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds) dry and acts as though it and only it is the United Kingdom.

No Matter Which What Way you cut it, this is fundamentally unsustainable at best and unless something drastic changes to curtail the growing power disparity that cities like London have on the rest of the UK, it is going to lead to a lot of pain.
 
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I think there should be more major cities with 1 million people or more in France. Ideally Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, Brest. I really don't like that the only major population center in the country is Paris.

Same with the UK really. And Germany gets a pass because of the Ruhr.

Sorry @Rufus Shinra. :p
 
It isn't fetshizing the technocrat to say the people who don't believe in climate change, evolution, gay rights, minority rights, and just fucking science in general should not have a say in education, government investment, and what laws are passed.

I said can, not are. I don't believe they think that because they are stupid, I believe they think that because someone wants them to, someone who's interests are served by the ignorance of the population.

Nice. I'm sure you can define a nuclear policy and chemical waste treatment protocols that you will entrust your children to, all the while benefiting from electricity and plastics in your daily life. Once you're done about that, I'll need you to get your kids in an airliner that you, personally, will have determined safe for travel without anyone else having done the job to check on the designers' work. Once they've done travelling a few thousand km in that plane, they'll have to trust your self-ruling capacities on a few other technological details. That is, of course, assuming they are still alive after taking the medicine that you will have standardized and overseen during its development and production.

Is your name Dunning-Kruger, by any chance?

Yes, I am sure that me and the rest of humanity can come up with good systems to organize our lives. A small subset of the population has been coming up with perfectly acceptable systems for millennia, and that small group does not self select for intelligence so much as desire for power, and to claim their inherent superiority over the rest of humanity is exactly the attitude I dismiss
 
I said can, not are. I don't believe they think that because they are stupid, I believe they think that because someone wants them to, someone who's interests are served by the ignorance of the population.



Yes, I am sure that me and the rest of humanity can come up with good systems to organize our lives. A small subset of the population has been coming up with perfectly acceptable systems for millennia, and that small group does not self select for intelligence so much as desire for power, and to claim their inherent superiority over the rest of humanity is exactly the attitude I dismiss
And what small group is that? Because that sounds a lot like a prelude to a ((())) rant

Edit: well that or a "the royal family are lizards" rant
 
And what small group is that? Because that sounds a lot like a prelude to a ((())) rant

Current business and governmental leadership. In the west, the liberal and business structures, in medieval Europe the feudal lords, clergy, whoever from the guilds had input on policy.

Don't be dense and call me a Nazi.
 
Current business and governmental leadership. In the west, the liberal and business structures, in medieval Europe the feudal lords, clergy, whoever from the guilds had input on policy.

Don't be dense and call me a Nazi.

But you don't understand! The Elite Urban Technocrats have a high enough IQ to understand Rick and Morty, unlike the plebs. Please be grateful for whatever scraps they toss from your plate and when you are angry about your situation just remember they are the elites for very good reason.
 
You talked about a single small subset controlling things for millennia. The current business leaders are not the same folks who controlled things prior to the late 1800s.

As for what you apparently DO mean, guess what? The rural conservative religious people are the power base of those folks who do all those horrible things you mention, and removing them from political power would open things to the side that actually wants to improve life for EVERYONE. Literally every major problem in America has a solution that starts with "get the social and fiscal conservatives put of power" and the biggest worldwide problem, climate change, has a solution that starts with "get the social and fiscal conservatives put of power in America"
 
You talked about a single small subset controlling things for millennia. The current business leaders are not the same folks who controlled things prior to the late 1800s.

As for what you apparently DO mean, guess what? The rural conservative religious people are the power base of those folks who do all those horrible things you mention, and removing them from political power would open things to the side that actually wants to improve life for EVERYONE. Literally every major problem in America has a solution that starts with "get the social and fiscal conservatives put of power" and the biggest worldwide problem, climate change, has a solution that starts with "get the social and fiscal conservatives put of power in America"

And pray tell how do you do that when not everyone is an enlightened urban sophisticate? Bring in a lot of immigrants and grant them citizenship instantly if they are non-white? Mandate Literacy Tests for anyone to vote so that only progressives pass? This goes into very ugly places very quickly and will not lead to Eternal Progressive Paradise.
 
You talked about a single small subset controlling things for millennia. The current business leaders are not the same folks who controlled things prior to the late 1800s.

As for what you apparently DO mean, guess what? The rural conservative religious people are the power base of those folks who do all those horrible things you mention, and removing them from political power would open things to the side that actually wants to improve life for EVERYONE. Literally every major problem in America has a solution that starts with "get the social and fiscal conservatives put of power" and the biggest worldwide problem, climate change, has a solution that starts with "get the social and fiscal conservatives put of power in America"

So, being serious here, why is that? Are they stupider? Do they have a bigot gene? Because elsewise, they're a product of modern material and ideological conditions, conditions which have, and will change again as they have in the past.

Would you rubbish liberalism because the majority of the peasants in 16th century were reactionary monarchists?
 
So, being serious here, why is that? Are they stupider? Do they have a bigot gene? Because elsewise, they're a product of modern material and ideological conditions, conditions which have, and will change again as they have in the past.

Would you rubbish liberalism because the majority of the peasants in 16th century were reactionary monarchists?

For Ravan, if you don't agree with him 100% or point out any flaws in his thinking, you are an EVIL NAZI BIGOT! If anything, the alt-right/Ultranationalists/etc. are emerging as the Progressive Technocracy model of the Third Way is coming apart at the seams and the failing system thinks it can appeal to WW2/the Cold War in an attempt to stave off its collapse. If the establishment doubles down on Ravan-esque thinking they are going to end up like the Versailles elite in the 1780s when it all comes crashing down.
 
So, being serious here, why is that? Are they stupider? Do they have a bigot gene? Because elsewise, they're a product of modern material and ideological conditions, conditions which have, and will change again as they have in the past.

Would you rubbish liberalism because the majority of the peasants in 16th century were reactionary monarchists?
Because rural life makes you not interact with the majority of viewpoints and types of people, and because they've completely fallen under the spell of generations of propaganda to the extent that to deprogram them is unfeasible without major rights violations.
 
Because rural life makes you not interact with the majority of viewpoints and types of people, and because they've completely fallen under the spell of generations of propaganda to the extent that to deprogram them is unfeasible without major rights violations.

Brazil's cities, despite these supposed advantages, still elected Bolsonaro overwhelmingly. Ontario still elected Doug Ford to a supermajority. British cities still voted for Brexit. Rome still elected League/M5S.
 
Yes, I am sure that me and the rest of humanity can come up with good systems to organize our lives. A small subset of the population has been coming up with perfectly acceptable systems for millennia, and that small group does not self select for intelligence so much as desire for power, and to claim their inherent superiority over the rest of humanity is exactly the attitude I dismiss
Riiiiiight. I need to check where in the degrees and exams come the desire for power part.
But you don't understand! The Elite Urban Technocrats have a high enough IQ to understand Rick and Morty, unlike the plebs. Please be grateful for whatever scraps they toss from your plate and when you are angry about your situation just remember they are the elites for very good reason.
For Ravan, if you don't agree with him 100% or point out any flaws in his thinking, you are an EVIL NAZI BIGOT! If anything, the alt-right/Ultranationalists/etc. are emerging as the Progressive Technocracy model of the Third Way is coming apart at the seams and the failing system thinks it can appeal to WW2/the Cold War in an attempt to stave off its collapse. If the establishment doubles down on Ravan-esque thinking they are going to end up like the Versailles elite in the 1780s when it all comes crashing down.
Is it even possible for you to not go strawman in every one of your posts? Oh, right, no it's not.
 
Ah fuck, I missed that part! I knew something was wrong when every other student, back then, came in a sectarian robe and started cackling maniacally in front of a professor who then graded and commented their laughter.

No, I think that was some bad mayonnaise at lunch.
 
So how do you propose to do that in 2021/2025? Import a lot of voters to ensure progressives remain in power forever? Implement an epistocracy where only college educated people vote?
"If it weren't for x we'd be just like Europe!" Is an extremely foolish fantasy. If anything America is going to become more like Colombia or Brazil or Guatemala as inequality and government dysfunction grows.
 
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