@nprofile1q... I know what they were, but what was their endgame? What did their utopia look like?

@nprofile1q... @nprofile1q... Zack Polanski has taken to X and posted, "It's time we sorted out the press."

Reminds me of: "The J_____ press will have their lying mouths shut for them."

The UK press covered up a variety of scandals for decades. Grooming gangs, for one. Nobody believes them any more. That is why they want to ban social media.

The correct response is to put English language media in places that don't care about UK law.

@nprofile1q... Painful looking cop fail at the beginning. They need some athletic cops to deal with this sort of thing.

@nprofile1q... There's a video on YouTube of Indians repairing pole transformers. They had some scary unsafe looking tackle to get the transformer off the pole. Then they took it apart and cut out burned windings and replaced them.

In the USA they'd replace it with one from China, and send the busted one to Mexico for rebuilding.

We need that repair culture here.

@nprofile1q... Great. Nice to have a non-adversarial political discussion.

Personally I feel like the Greeks and Romans pretty well explored the options for human interaction above tribal scale. They tried democracy and dictatorship and royalism.

Tribes work better, but only up a scale capped by the human brain's hardware.

If we want something new, it will have to come out of technology and not pure human interaction.

Or we can figure out how the bonobos make it work.

@nprofile1q... I said it was unsolved, not unsolvable.

If there is a way forward, it's through technology. For example, there are several alternative economic and monetary theories. We don't know which if any of them work, because there was no way to perform controlled trials.

There is now. Discrete event simulations and multiplayer video games. If we could get rid of economic cycles, the rest would be a lot easier.

Periodic hunger was unsolvable until birth control and mechanized agriculture.

@nprofile1q... The common element here is, a lot of people have been dissatisfied with the structure of society for a long time, but none of the alternatives has worked.

Anarchism has no resistance to conquest, and Marxism always turns into bureaucratic tyranny.

The problem is unsolved.

@nprofile1q... Firearms are hard to improve. The last major change was the metallic cartridge. That enabled all the self-loading mechanisms. The last big breakthrough in pistol design was the 1911. Since then it's been new materials and better machining and adding safeties.

What exactly changed in the last 50 years? Snipers were making long shots in Vietnam. Other than electronics for scopes and aiming, what has changed?

@nprofile1q... They never do. They have a big blind spot there.

@nprofile1q... Didn't the Code of Hammurabi have something about dealing with arsonists and people looting at fires?

Something about throwing them into the fire.

@nprofile1q... This new one is an anomaly. Most of them can be avoided by just blocking /wp-login.php and /wp-admin behind a basic-auth.

@nprofile1q... @nprofile1q... I don't think we're going back to Zeus and Thor because we understand what causes lightning and thunder now. So where are we supposed to be going?

If you study spiritual experiences and near death experiences, you end up at a very benevolent do no harm type of belief system, often with belief in reincarnation. That leads to a happier life but not to worldly power.

The spirits that offer worldly power are NOT benevolent.