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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27516 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023

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Of course, this would require cutting costs in other areas, and more importantly it would require cutting cost disease and corruption. Tough to provide for your citizens when the budget is stretched to its limit on $200 aspirins and $100,000 sinecures.

Isn't cost disease and corruption literally the hardest thing to cut in a democracy?

It feels like we'd need a crisis on the order of WWII to meaningfully move the needle on these things. Even then, I'm not hopeful. The last crisis (Covid) seemed to accelerate this form of corruption.

In a democracy generally? I don't think so. In our current state? Probably yeah.

I guess I just don't move problems that are in the "We could solve this if the leadership actually attempted to solve it" bin over to the "Literally impossible to solve" bin just because there's currently no political will to solve it.

COVID didn't work because it didn't really threaten the people who mattered. There was a small chance of dying for many of them, sure, but no chance of losing their high positions (which is far worse.) A proper war would do it I think, or a real severe resource shortage. Maybe a civil war even.

Covid wasn't on the order of WW2. It was very overblown, it was presented as a disaster when it was really almost a nothingburger. That kind of thing just lets the bureaucracy grab more power.

A true life-or-death situation like WW2, for all its awfulness, demands that you shape up. Look at the Soviet Union for example, after a few humiliating defeats, Stalin threw out almost all the ideology that had so dominated the 1930s. Poverty was no problem, even famines were no problem, ideology came first, but once the Nazis were threatening to conquer the whole mess, it really was a matter of survival, and Stalin stopped caring about ideology, only about what worked.

That said, you don't want such desperate circumstances instead of what we have now.

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