Check out the Powel Memorandum. From the 70s moneyed interests started to systematically shift power to the wealthy and large corporations. They created think tanks like the Heritage Foundation to give the project the veneer of scientific legitimation. Reagan was the first to accept a policy blue print from Heritage. Since then they have been working to stack the courts, form government policy and legislate a shift if money and power to the few. Trump is reaping the benefits of what has been prepared since Reagan. Trickle down economy was one of the greatest scams of all time.

That’s what is complicated with Heinlein. You can see it as him promoting fascism, as Verhoeven has.

But you also can read it as something promoting more healthy politics. Only people willing to put themselves on the line or at least endure some hardships were eligible to participate in politics. Johnny Rico’s parents didn’t want him to enlist as it was not necessary to have political rights if all you wanted was a good life.

If nothing else this policy would have not only prevented CPT Bonespurs from taking office but even that someone like him got a vote.

I do think though Heinlein was unrealistically idealistic with his book. And the movie took an even more pessimistic view than that.

Reich ME, considering how competent they run things.

Any IT device can be hacked. We completely missed the evolutionary opportunity to have secure computing devices. Proper object capability machines would make it possible. But quick and dirty and by Friday is what we got instead.

Huh, good job they developed that Rusty Dagger for Ukraine then. They could make a few for themselves on the quick.

But it very much depends on what you count as a language. German used to be a dialect continuum. People could understand their neighbors and a village or two over, but became mutually unintelligible pretty quickly. Transportation was slow, so populations just didn’t mix as much and language was more local. Latin used to mostly be the language of a single city.

Most of this entire discussion is missing the point. On the one hand a variety of views and/or options for political representation are needed. This is where first past the post utterly fails. It devolves mostly to a two choice system, as is becoming painfully obvious in the US. Or it might become unstable/unpredictable as seen in the UK where alternative parties are emerging, but probably to the detriment of the old parties. In the end it might well devolve back to a two party system, just two other parties. This is where some form of proportional representation system comes in. More than two parties are viable. But at the cost of stability. Back in schooly politics teacher liked to present Italy as the poster child for why (simple) PR doesn’t work well. Though in recent years the Italian government has proven quite stable. Also, in Italys Case I’d love to run the experiment how they did with nothing changed except for organized crime being eradicated. Alas, in humanities controlled experiments like that aren’t possible. But I’d not be surprised if spectacular corruption wasn’t the bigger problem.

So what could the solution be? First I’d like to see corruption stomped out completely. I know, that’s almost like wishing for world peace, and come to think about it, it’s mostly the same characters that are in the way. Second, the solution is likely to be neither a simple majority system nor a simple proportional system. Ranked choice? My teacher was taken by the German system (a mixture of both), but that has it’s own problems. Or something entirely different, like completely independent publicly funded media. Print, audio and audiovisual. And that media could run regular polls to publicly show which topics are important to people.

I think our problems stem more from the influence on populations rather than the actual modality in which our representation is formed. In Israel you have the corruptive influence of ultra-orthodox and nationalist hardliners mixed with some run if the mill corruption, in Italy you have a gigantic organized crime problem, with some rich people problem, in Germany the Springer group is trying to set up a Fox news situation and in the US you have the Fox/Heritage Foundation/billionaires and general corruption through money problem.

I don’t think it’s about being able to afford it. More that he is loath to let her have anything at all on principle.

It’s not about whether a perpetrator deserves to live or not. It’s about the reliabilty of the judicial system. Even this day and age with our amazing forensic techniques, plenty of innocent people get indicted instead of the actual perpetrators. It’s also about what executing people does to the society doing the executions. Honestly, I have tons of sympathy for the character Hawkeye in Avengers: Endgame. However in this sort of fiction the people getting killed absolutely certainly are guilty. Reality is much more messy than that.

Weird how counter-intelligence is not on her arse, like it would be if anyone of Bidens people were accused. Oh, hang on. They made a huge fuss about Biden’s son with a much less important allegation.

I think a significant number of states will now want to develop their own nuclear weapons. The US has been teaching people for the last 20 years that there is a significant difference in how they will treat countries that have the bomb like North Korea and those that haven’t, like Irak, Iran, Afganistan, Denmark and other NATO countries.

NATO countries I believe will mostly ralley around the UK and France. But even among them, in the medium run, I believe there might be some wanting their own. Turkey has just recently announced a missile that basically only makes sense as a nuklear weapon.

The rules based international relations was something making countries believe they don’t need nuclear weapons of their own. This premise doesn’t hold in the same way anymore. We’ll probably end up with 30-40 countries with nuclear weapons.

That’s fine, as long as the corporation does so without the aid of any other entity.

Nah, the reason is the Byzantine law enforcement structure in the US. You can’t just say “the police” because they have so many officers running around enforcing parts of the law that are not police. FBI, DEA, ATF CBP, ICE and god knows what else are state agents, are involved in law enforcement and are all arguably not police.

So to get a proper generic term, of course they add another TLA to the alphabet soup.