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Revolutions are cool. They have happened in every country. Many countries are better after the fact. I would rather America have one now, when White people are in charge, than in 100 years when White people are ~20% of the population. And who made a better product: Steve Job’s at Apple with his monarchical approach, or the bureaucratic IBM / BlackBerry / Xerox? Jobs was, well, rage-filled and vengeful.
As far as I can tell, very few countries have been made better by revolutions. Look at France and Britain: the former abolished their monarchy via revolution and ended up with millions dead and a century of chaotic and unstable governments (three monarchies, two empires, and five republics) while the latter defanged their monarchy piecemeal over hundreds of years and took its place as the richest and most powerful country in the world. Certainly the various communist and Islamic revolutions have been disasters for the nations in which they took place. Whether the American Revolution was an improvement depends on how you feel about Enlightenment values. Perhaps only the Glorious Revolution counts as an unmitigated success.
The english civil war wasn't exactly bloodless. More than twice as many as a percentage of the population died in it compared to world wars.
That is true, although I would count it as another point in favor of the "revolutions are bad" camp.
I don't disagree, I just thought England was kind of a bad example of the reform path. Revolutions are bad and do a shit-ton of internal damage. In the long run this rarely matters (unless you end up with communism) but have your society destroyed and a large part of your population killed isnt particularly fun for the people involved. Things have to be extremely bad for it to be preferable to slow reform.
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Most countries are made worse by their revolutions. Even the U.S. revolution led to mass emigration of many of the best and brightest, as well as substantial inter-communal violence. And we got lucky that our Revolutionaries set ups something comparatively benign; we could have gotten Bolsheviks, Levellers, Chavistas, Maoists, Taiping-tier religious totalitarians, Bonapartists (who, for all his genius, wound up killing millions from his incessant warmongering, and shoved France from being the pinnacle of Europe into an early demographic transition which broke its power to this day), etc. etc.
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The thing that's really cool about being a radical wishing for a revolution, is that you don't know whether it's going to be your team or the other one that dumps you in a shallow grave.
Exactly, and right now is the best time for my team. In 100 years it will not be.
In 100 years the US whites will be steadily growing as a population share.
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I believe @johnfabian means that you, the reader, will end up in a shallow grave no matter if it's your team that enacts the revolution, or an opposing one. Which is preposterous for two reasons: it assumes that the probabilities are the same and are higher than that probability in case of the status quo standing; and it assumes there are no principles where the omelette is worth breaking the eggs even if you end up one of those eggs.
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At some point, Mr Fabian, the existing rulers become too corrupt for this to matter to anybody that takes politics seriously. "Anything but that" is the credo of all revolutions, whoever wins the ensuing brawl then attempts to pretend they were the sole opposition destined to power and legitimacy.
To mock revolutionaries as "they all think they'll be on top by the end" is missing the point. They all make the calculation that the shallow grave is preferable to the status quo.
Often their calculation is fatally flawed, driven by a drive for adventure more than anything else.
Of course. One always LARPs themselves into revolution after all. But rarely for no reason on the aggregate.
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Regardless of the governance of a firm, firms are subject to market discipline both on the demand side (who buys their product?) and on the supply side (who is willing to work for them?) in a way that states are not. Pretending that Apple is successful because it was a monarchy is to completely miss the fact that there's a million bankrupt firms with the same governance structure. The fact is that Apple's success is made possible by the competitive, decidedly non-monarchial conditions of the market.
Apple’s competitors also existed in competitive market conditions. The difference is that Apple is monarchical, run by someone with a track record and a powerful spirit, and the competitors were not. And so we still see that more monarchical is better (even in news, with the NYT, as Yarvin pointed out in his interview). So our monarchical elites should be selected from competitive industries, like real estate or private equity, and selected for a competitive personality so that they want America better than peers (for instance, in trade).
Not run by people like Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Thiel-acolytes. No one is saying that the country should be run by the median small business owner, so your argument falls flat. We can select our new “elites” from institutions that filter for actual skill, as opposed to academia-related skills and politicking-related skills. (Eg, the social skills that Kamala had in becoming VP has nothing to do with the skill required for running an organization, whether that org is a business or country.)
Yes, run by people like them too. Megalomania is not a trait in short supply among businessmen.
And let's not forget that Tesla is below NVidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta in market cap (and also has a tiny revenue compared to these companies).
Do you think those companies are also run like monarchies? Trust me, I can tell you from personal experience that they aren't.
On top of that, Jobs died 14 years ago and Apple has continued to prosper despite a decidedly non-monarchial government structure. Tim Cook is not running the company like Jobs did, not even close.
I won't even touch Trump because his firm makes just $600M in revenue which is way, way down the leaderboard of American companies (the 100th highest revenue company is fucking best buy at $43 billion with a B). I don't think any of the biggest companies are run by Thiel acolytes at all.
You're repeating a just-so story that explains one success without considering the other successes that work differently or the failures that work the same way. On top of that, you're under the impression that all companies run like this are the most successful in the country, which really isn't even close to true. Even Best Buy can out-earn one of your central examples of monarchical companies. Or should the country be run by Corie Barry?
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I've spent the last 15 years telling leftists who want to "tear down the system" how much that's a terrible idea, because when the system is torn down, tens of thousands of people die. I think there was some SSC post about this but I can't find it. I think it's beneficial to remember that tearing down the system is bad when the right wants to do it, just as when the left wants to do it. Now, defining what constitutes tearing down the system vs cleaning house and getting rid of waste and cruft may be the next place this argument would go, and I don't know any really good answers for that.
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Revolutions are very much not cool. They might be necessary, they may be beneficial in the long run (though they definitely aren't always), but they are still brutal affairs where a lot of blood gets spilled. They should be avoided unless absolutely necessary, much like drastic surgery.
Drastic surgery is always better than the alternative.
Even the kind of butchery they used to do before anesthesia and sterilization was recognized as better than doing nothing and waiting to die.
Drastic surgery is not always better than the alternative.
Plenty of people out there have been made worse off from unnecessary surgeries.
Awhile back I was having some back issues. Saw a surgeon who leveled with me that he could justify surgery, but he could do it for just about anyone my age, almost everyone's got some disc abnormalities that will show on an MRI. He told me that the outcomes from surgery would almost certainly be worse than non-surgical options. And so I went the non-surgical route and don't have back issues any longer.
Can you pop into the next Wellness Wednesday thread and talk about your route?
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