The people would remain though, and begin to rebuild unless the attacks were extremely broad and sustained for a long duration. No power or water stations in Gaza any more, but they are still hanging on in very dire conditions.
People are resilient. And adaptable. Just because we do things one way that works for us does not mean that one way is an absolute requirement.
Not that there wouldn’t be chaos, suffering and casualties. Just that it wouldn’t be the end.
For the record, Hitler initially won power through elections, he did not begin the whole totalitarian thing until he was already the Chancellor.
I think people tend to underestimate human resilience. To use the bronze age collapses as an example, sure, it brought down existing polities, the names drawn on maps changed.
But most of the cities were still there. People still lived in them. Does changing the rulers while keeping a similar paradigm ultimately matter that much? I’m reminded of accounts of the experiences of some Afghanis during the American intervention there. First they paid their taxes to the Taliban, then the govt we set up, then the Taliban again. shrug.
While supply chains could be disrupted, any time that happens it opens the door for another profitable enterprise to rise in its place. People suffer, some die, but life goes on. If the knowledge of how to build those supply chains is still around, it will be done, and swiftly.
Remember the write-in uncommitted thing? Those were primaries.
And this is presumably an early model, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they specifically want it to appear careful for the demo video.
Fortunately we’re not fully there yet. Still several steps away.
Been hearing that line for a long time. No point in it.
The US Constitution gives the Executive official responsibility for the enforcement of all federal law.
Bout time.
Well, a lot of them were purged over the past few years. Fascists doing their thing you know. Things change though, that is one certainty. Not very predictably either.
Also note, I didn’t exactly say it would be easy. Simply possible. Where, say, an amendment that made voting mandatory would be actually fully impossible.
I did. I saw a tired old man and a used car salesman. More importantly though, is I don’t think almost everyone gives two shits about debates or polls. They know these two guys, know them well. What they offer is clear.
Additionally, I don’t think a President has to be spry. They just need to be good at delegation, that is by far the most important skill. If you think about monarchy, the king did not need to run everything. Simply assign the tasks to people who did know all the details. Generals run the army. Finance ministers run economy. Diplomats run diplomacy. Etc.
No, there’s a lot of us that don’t want to surrender the incumbent advantage for the very common backlash-against-the-last-party phenomenon we’ve seen many times in the past decades.
We’re just not as loud as everyone else, and our position makes terrible clickbait.
It’ll definitely take some time, effort and big time coalition building. I doubt this specific one would be as impossible as it might seem though, due to the specifics.
Small govt types could be convinced to support something limiting executive power. That’s all the libertarians and some conservatives. In a bloc with liberals and progressives, it could reach 2/3rds support with the populace. Barely. Then 2/3rds the states would have to ratify.
The fact that it would be for limiting the power of govt, is critical though. Fascists don’t want small govt and just lie about it, but many people actually do. That becomes a middle position liberals can work with in a case like this, since we support separation of powers.
It’s also related to sex being a “special” or “sacred” act. If it was just something that could be potentially dangerous by resulting in STDs or unwanted pregnancy, like say, driving your car can be potentially dangerous by resulting in accidents and death, then no stigma would exist. But people give it this special character beyond any other human activities, and put it on a pedestal essentially.
Without that pedestal, a delivery driver delivering to someone they don’t like, for the money, is just … their job. Sex being a job is just … a job a person can have. Why make it special?
People basically want to put the pussy on a pedestal, and you don’t really need to be doing that. It doesn’t actually make any sense, it’s just tradition for some folks. Who then want other people to follow their tradition too.
It’s a battle that’s been going for centuries, bigger than any one of us. Taking it personally only has drawbacks, it’s not required for motivation. Breathing exercises can help.
Someone must always make decisions, a world where no decisions are made would devolve into a Mad Max type thing, where the fact that we are members of the animal kingdom would become very readily apparent. We used to decide these things with trial by combat, where the most skilled warrior (or who chose the most skilled as their champion) was right because God apparently said so, by making him so good at fighting. Still a person making a decision. Not far off from a world where you decide if someone was a witch by trying to build a bridge out of them.
The modern trick is dividing up the decision-making power so much that nobody can assemble it all into their personal toolkit and fully embrace corruption with no consequences.
Ah. Well, if all official duties of the Executive are immune to all laws lower than the Constitution itself, which itself bars him from very little and gives the Executive responsibility for enforcement of all laws, I guess a Constitutional Amendment is ultimately required then.
Authoritarians are irritating.
I know someone up there in years that enjoyed the Far Cry series. Didn’t really expect that. shrug
More generally I think it’ll commonly be something that relates to their interests when they were younger. Someone that retired 20 years ago from aerospace engineering might actually really enjoy Kerbal Space Program or even Outer Wilds, a former industrial foreman might like Factorio, for a retired military historian, bring on that Total War.
I can see games like Big Game Hunter and Truck Simulator being more broadly popular with certain segments. Some sports games maybe, like a tennis game or some golf thing maybe, I don’t know much about those. A simpler, realism-leaning racing game maybe. Flight simulator works great here.
The main thing is I’d avoid games with lots of layers of game design and abstraction. It should do what it says on the tin, and there shouldn’t be many steps or abstract mechanics between them and getting into the meat of the game and the core gameplay loop.
Minimal menus is probably a good idea. Like, a Paradox Interactive game would probably be a poor choice, just because they have so much you need to learn to become a proficient player. Fine text can be hard to read too, so menus and tooltips and complex status interfaces are usually gonna be pretty meh for most people. Can’t play Starcraft if you have to squint and lean in every time you want to know how many minerals you have.
Want that learning curve to just get into the initial gameplay to be pretty gentle overall. The experience should be fairly intuitive to real life, and real life doesn’t have that many menus and buttons. Usually, depending on their former career I guess.
Kudos for doing this btw.
(oh, and sorry I couldn’t answer your core question)
Very well summarized, I think this hits the majority of the most relevant points.
I think that’s a little sensationalist. For instance, we do find the ruins of ancient cities in archeological digs and can link them to where we do have surviving records of their appearance in stories.
Your point is taken, though. I do, however, remain convinced that people massively overestimate how many people would die in some form of collapse though, unless it somewhat swiftly took down major portions of the Earth’s biosphere.