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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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Yeah, sometimes I daydream about a nonsensical timeline where we gave more power to the Imperial Family rather than take it away from them at all. A completely unrealistic timeline where the Emperor lead us into a civil war and stops the formation of a republic, perhaps even going back to absolutism.

Our last Emperor was a good man but the problem with "good men" is that they cannot be "great men" at the same time given accomplishing "great" things often involve at least some amount of sacrifice, pain and suffering. He said something along the lines of "Not wanting to spill more brazilian blood to keep the throne", but I wonder if he would change his mind knowing the circumstances of today.

I like "freedom of speech" because I enjoy being able to publicly debate certain ideas like the above in an attempt to understand and improve things, but if it wasn't for that I would probably prefer to live in China than most countries in The West at this point (to my younger self surprise), this late-stage of democracy turning into tyranny feels like living in asylum where everyone is demented by propaganda and you are supposed to pretend everything is normal or else be labeled "anti-whatever". Everything turns political.

My problem with the recent turn of events is that given democracy select for the most psychopathic narcissistic liars out there, when they get absolute power they generally don't really have a mindset of trying to build-up a nation, or perhaps it's often this way in Latin America because as a bunch of failed countries of immigrants there isn't a deep sense of patriotism like the Chinese seem to have. America seem to have gained patriotism through their collective great actions in the last centuries which Latin America obviously doesn't share.

If Lula, Alexandre and so on gave me any hope that we would be more like China and less like Venezuela, I wouldn't lose sleep over it, perhaps even welcome it because then a bunch of corrupt-but-technical-enough people would be in power and we could all stop pretending that the opinions of an uneducated 83 IQ population can do a better job, but they seem fully committed to become Venezuela rather than China and...it's just tiresome.

Perhaps China is just really bruteforcing everything because of higher IQ but I do wonder whether there's more factors than nationalism and IQ for this sort of "Totalitarian Technocracy" they seem to have, rather than the "We hate our people and want them to starve" Venezuelan/Soviet model. Any potential insights on that would be welcome.