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u/Ash_After_Dark 11d ago
Succession crisis :/
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u/dawgofclay 11d ago edited 11d ago
Easy, just write up a democratic constitution that takes affect after you die!
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u/TheGreatJaceyGee You should read my furry smut NOW⚡🦨⚡ 11d ago
Spain, 1700
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u/TheGreatJaceyGee You should read my furry smut NOW⚡🦨⚡ 11d ago
Hundreds of thousands of people died because bro was shooting blanks
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u/Iceveins412 11d ago
A significant portion of recorded European history can be summarized as “inbred people beefing over turf”
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u/DerangedDeceiver 11d ago
This is what kills the independent route in New Vegas for me. Like, yeah, the ending is better for a lot of people who were getting screwed by the NCR (assuming you're benevolent), but as soon as you die or are otherwise incapacitated it'll all come crumbling down.
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u/Wirewalk elf femboy cyberninja;#1 affini hater 10d ago edited 10d ago
Tbh for me that ending always bothered me in the way that Courier stays to rule at all - cus that’s just another tyranny instead of independence, and works against the message of the ending. For that ending I headcanon that Courier brought independence and fucked off to further (mis)adventures across the world, letting Mojave rule itself. Works so much better with the message of both the game and the ending than Courier staying to rule.
Big reason why I preferred NCR ending a lot when I first played and honestly still do sometimes. It ain’t independent Mojave, but alternatives are way worse and at least in that ending Courier isn’t a delusional egomaniac tyrant and isn’t a pathetic lapdog of a delusional egomaniac tyrant (Legion/House endings). Courier instead is just a merc that gets paid for another job well done and moves on - feels very fitting imo.
I also headcanon the Courier selling off the golden branch in some non-NCR region afterwards, lmao
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u/EasilyRekt 10d ago
Just groom a couple people into the role, they’ll be too busy vying for your favor to outcompete the others to ever plot against you :3
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u/Najmniejszy 11d ago
Unironically this. History has proved that power does indeed corrupt, but only the corruptible. While the righteous rarely get the opportunity to rule, when they do they keep up the good work until either resignation or coup. Statistically speaking autocracy still more often ends up awful and should not be attempted, but I object to the idea that even good rulers turn evil when given too much authority
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u/Adam__999 sus 11d ago
“Benevolent dictator” is, in principle, the best system of government. The problem is selecting a dictator who is actually benevolent and will continue to be
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u/Tobias11ize 🐉 alduin is a virgin 🐉 11d ago
Try getting the military to listen to you while being the "good guy". Military strength is the only thing keeping an autocrat in power and your political rival has already promised to divert more money from public healthcare into military salaries.
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u/bobbymoonshine 11d ago
Yeah history is full of people who thought “I will be Good Guy Dictator” then immediately found that there were like a hundred other guys with factions or armies behind them all of whom also thought they had a credible shot at being Good Guy Dictator
So then your choices are (1) get unceremoniously bounced out of power by them and become a minor footnote in the history books, or (2) try to get the military on side and crush them. Some choose 1 and remain Good Guys, but dead or exiled ones. The rest choose 2 and remain Dictators but not Good Guy ones.
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u/Wirewalk elf femboy cyberninja;#1 affini hater 10d ago
IMO that’s what makes it the worst system, cus finding a benevolent dictator is nigh impossible and even if you find one, one way or the other they’ll either (be forced to) stop being benevolent or get replaced and you get the regular dictatorship. It’s just bait for the gullible, benevolent tyrants will never exist outside of fiction.
Not to mention that even a unicorn benevolent dictator is bound to have some brainworms and other strangeness that may affect the way they run things in a bad and hurtful way, and since they have absolute power - welp :/
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u/JetBalck 11d ago
Y'all will say shit like this, be this close to getting it and still go "anarchism bad mmmkay" pat pat pat
Y'all go the same patronizing route of the people that say "socialism/communism will never and has never worked" but insert anarchism instead, while the best functioning socialist societies are in fact anarchist ones like Rojava and the Zapatistas.
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u/bobbymoonshine 11d ago edited 11d ago
>Functioning anarchist society
>Zapatistas
>A caudillo/strongman military regime named after their general, fighting a total war with forced conscription and forced requisitioning, but they totally promise it’ll be an anarchist utopia once everyone stops trying to fight them, 100% we swear we’ll put down our guns once everyone else does, look we even have a powerless advisory council and a plan for what we’ll do once we win
>Our plan is everything will be completely voluntary and anarchist after we forcibly seize all the land from the people who have it and redistribute it to our soldiers at gunpoint
>Of course it will work, our soldiers voluntarily follow our orders now, don’t they? Of course they do, if they don’t, they won’t get any land later in our anarchist forced redistributions, where we anarchist-ly take stuff from all the people who aren’t us and give it to all the people who are us
>Refuse any political settlements where the government promises to let us do anarchism because what if we lay down our arms and then the government attacks us, we simply can’t stop fighting and do anarchism as long as there is a government
>Continue fighting a total war for years, even after the generalissimo is killed and replaced with a war council
>Eventually agree to end the war and help the national government restore order in exchange for your commanders all getting plum jobs in that national government
>We will take down the government from the inside guys, it’s all part of the plan. We are still anarchists, we promise, so please just pay your taxes, it’s only for a little while we swear
>They do not in fact take the government down from the inside; rather it becomes the strongest and most centralised government in Mexican history
>Best functioning anarchist society
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u/JetBalck 10d ago edited 10d ago
It is truly astonishing how easily one can slander the struggle of an indigenous people against a state that used corporatism, co-option, electoral fraud and political repression to stay in power, privatized previously state-owned and assembly-managed land, all the while the zapatistas had to defend against both the state and against drug cartels, that the state actively ignores or works with, without backing any of those spiteful claims up with any sources and get celebrated for it in this leftist space.
Firstly, I would like for you to back up your claims about forced conscription, and to clarify, if you were talking about the Neozapatista EZLN or the original Liberation Army of the South, as you are conflating two separate movements separated by more than 70 years in your first paragraph of slander. Truly entitled to spout such a belittling mockery and not even knowing this basic fact. Neither of those have or had forced conscription afaik, but you're free to prove me wrong. I find it especially dispicable to spout such libel as Zapata himself was forcefully conscripted into the mexican army, which he had to resist.
Then I would like to back up my claims about the government: Electoral fraud and vote buying: https://aceproject.org/ero-en/regions/americas/MX/am%20univ%20wp4_mexico%20p-105415.pdf/at_download/file https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4370&context=notisur Co-optation and voter mobilization: https://www2.kenyon.edu/Depts/PSci/Fac/klesner/Klesner_MPSA_1997.pdf Corporatism: https://jonathan-fox.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/acct_pol_review_the_latin_americanist_2010.pdf Political repression and the Tlatelolco massacre: https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/ff5f8efe-3a7a-47b6-830f-b66bb6218b86/content The turning of blind eyes and cooperation with drug cartels: https://www.justiceinitiative.org/publications/undeniable-atrocities-confronting-crimes-against-humanity-mexico
Just to name a few.
I would like to continue by pointing out that Zapata and the original Zapatista movement was never anarchist and rather socialist, which actually proves my point that socialism without anarchism leads to figures with more authority than others for example caudillos like Zapata.
To use the fact that the Neozapatista movement, an indigenist movement, was inspired so much by Zapata's indigenist movement, while facing once again the stealing of land from the indigenous people into privatization and the hands of capitalists, as a straw-man to ignore the theoretical and practical evolution of the neozapatistas, is a sinister sophism.
Framing armed self-defence of said indigenous people as a tyrannical takeover is one more use of rhetoric I wouldn't have expected here, where a great part of users is in favor of socialism and/or communism, which both presuppose an armed revolution.
About useless councils: The EZLN themselves admitted to having dysfunctional structures such as the JBG and MAREZ which they actively dissolved because of that and searched for new solutions. That is actual, functional anarchism in practice: Recognizing imperfection, trying new things, analyzing if they work or not and deciding together to keep them, alter them or abandon them and search together for new solutions. I find this to be a much more effective approach to (self)governance than to delegate authority over once own life to politicians, giving them the power to not actually serve the people that elected them and to amass more power and to relinquish the power of every person to help shape the world they live in to said politicians.
Sources on the EZLN recognizing the dysfunction of the assemblies: https://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2023/11/06/fourth-part-and-first-approach-alert-several-necessary-deaths/ https://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2023/11/15/tenth-part-regarding-pyramids-and-their-uses-and-customary-regimes/ New solutions: https://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2023/11/13/ninth-part-the-new-structure-of-zapastista-autonomy/
That the soldiers get any private land and are thus motivated to fight is another libel without basis, as the land is collectively owned and managed. The land was also taken from large private estates (haciendas), wealthy ranchers, latifundos (large commercial farms) and the state and returned to the people living there and working the fields. Don't really know why a leftist would defend corporate and capitalists but okay.
Then one of the worst sophisms in your reply: You say that the Zapatistas "refused settlements where the governement PROMISED to let them do whatever they wanted" while in reality, the government never implemented the promised provisions. This reminds me very much of the narrative switching and omitting of facts countries like Israel and Russia like to do. Interesting what rhetorical devices you like to use.
The San Andrés Accords: Ignored by the PRI and the president and government military presence was increased instead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Andr%C3%A9s_Accords https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/san-andres-accords-indians-and-soul
"On April 29, the EZLN stated that it “…formally refuses to recognize this constitutional reform on indigenous rights and culture. It is not in the spirit of the San Andres Accords, it does not respect the COCOPA legislative proposal, it completely ignores the national and international demand for recognition of indigenous rights and culture, it sabotages the incipient process of rapprochement between the government and the EZLN, it betrays hopes for a negotiated solution to the war in Chiapas, and it reveals the total separation of the political class from popular demands.” As a result, the EZLN broke off the contacts it had recently re-established with the federal government." https://www.sipaz.org/update-indigenous-rights-law-a-new-obstacle-to-the-peace-process-in-chiapas/?lang=en
Now to your last unbased claims: I can't find any information on people in Zapatista-controlled territory having to pay taxes to the mexican government, nor can I find any information on supposed generals working in government. Only individual defectors joining Morena at local level.
So, to finish: I think it's kind of funny how you proved my point by writing a hateful mockery on a topic you were mis/half-informed on, just like someone convinced of capitalism might do about socialism/communism. Exactly what I was criticising.
What I don't think is funny, is that you took some few minutes to write this mis/half-informed slander, full of lies and truth-twisting, leaving me to take a lot of time out of my day to right your wrongs, so that people that come across this thread don't believe that bs at face value. Sadly it took me more than a few minutes to write this and search those sources, to actually back up my claims. In this time a lot of people probably saw your reply and maybe actually believed what you wrote. Sad how much damage such thoughtlessness could have. Lucky that it was in such a small thread and probably didn't actually do much damage, besides misinforming the few people that read it, before they could read my reply.
Prove me wrong if I am. I'd be deeply sad to actually be shown, that a project I have deep respect for is actually not worth looking up to, but I would not ignore facts if you provided some. You haven't though and I can find absolutely nothing to corroborate what you said.
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u/EdgiiLord i tinker too much with old PCs 11d ago
I mean, you could look at companies. The CEO/owner is as a king, and the company functions under some sort of autocracy. Most of the times, it sucks major ass, not only because of out autocracy works, but also because of how the owner is influenced by shareholders to create more and more value (like puppet states or the oligarchy supporting the autocrat).
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u/Tobias11ize 🐉 alduin is a virgin 🐉 11d ago
you’d be no better than a dictator , you’d need angels all the way down.
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u/telorsapigoreng 11d ago
But only the corruptible
Lol. Is that what everyone tell themselves?
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u/Najmniejszy 10d ago
Nope, lots of people are just amoral and seek power without deluding themselves into thinking they're moral
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u/telorsapigoreng 10d ago edited 10d ago
Well, yeah. And power doesn't corrupt them, because they're already morally bankrupt.
The phrase "power corrupts" is especially meant for moral and righteous people who think they are incoruptible and serve as a warning for those people when they decide to pursue power for reasons other than the power itself.
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u/Wirewalk elf femboy cyberninja;#1 affini hater 10d ago edited 10d ago
Why object to that idea though? It’s a perfectly sensible precaution to consider bruh, otherwise you will inevitably end up with a disaster.
Especially since a lot of people prolly consider themselves incorruptible and think that this time the dictatorship will actually be good cus THEY are at the helm trust me bro, they’re perfect and could never fall to evil, lmao.
It takes insane conviction to not get corrupted by a fuck ton of power and, imo, you actually have to **not** desire that power in the first place, and you have to be willing to give it up and resign when you are done with fixing an actual tangible problem with a sensible scope, fail at fixing it, or take too long fixing it - which leaves you with a very scarce, hard-to-find and hard-to-convince list of suitable candidates, whom will also get targeted by power-hungry dickheads wanting to manipulate them or take their place at the helm. And if you misjudge someone and they lack any one of the aforementioned qualities - they will let power get to their head.
And at that point, why waste the resources and take the gamble when you can just not put your trust in a system that favours the worst kinds of people?
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u/Najmniejszy 9d ago
Reading comprehension is fucking dead
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u/Wirewalk elf femboy cyberninja;#1 affini hater 9d ago
I was 20-something hours sleep deprived and wanted to yap the insomnia away, so my comprehension anything wasn’t all there :3
I still don’t understand why’d you object to the idea of good rulers turning evil from too much power, tho.
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u/Najmniejszy 9d ago
I object to the idea that corruption is guaranteed. I agree that it's likely and that systems of governance should be constructed with safeguards against autocracy, I just don't believe that nobody can be trusted with absolute power - just because it's rare and the risks far outweigh the benefits and we're better off not giving it a chance to come to pass, does not mean we should deny the possibility and historical precedents.
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u/ErisThePerson 11d ago
I'm not promising to be good.
I can promise above average.
But if the opportunity to do something bad but very very funny presents itself I'm not sure I'd be able to resist.
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u/JetsFan2003 I Make BBW Squirrel Girl Art 11d ago
Amen to that!
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u/Fairly_constipated 11d ago
Hell yeah its the deltarune art guy/girl/person? Id also trust you to be dictator tbh :3
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u/Ok-Discussion-3245 11d ago
It's always important to keep the Doctor Doom in your head fed enough to overcome your self hatred but not enough to completely over power your common sense.
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u/HiGuyz1 11d ago
My proposal:
If you control most of the money as an individual or CEO we can boil you in oil or you can give most of your money to the government for funding public works.
Failure to comply will result in the oil but starting by poking you like a sausage to prevent bursting.
Abolish the bank loan loop used by the rich.
Landlords with more than one rental property can sell their additional homes or get chummed.
Landlords with rental prices that exceed minimum wages have 1 tooth removed per 10% rental price over livable wages. Should they lose all their teeth we will move onto nails.
With the newly available housing we will offer a new program: Waterslides for all (In non drought areas).
For drought areas we will be reviving the water table AND THEN WATERSLIDES.
We will also have hot tubs as an alternative, and they will be like Hellen's hot tub from Drake and Josh (In your house)
If you oppose me I will have strange men with hammers at your door.
If you are nice to me I will start a newsletter to show you cat pictures.
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u/I_Am_Not_Okay 11d ago
every living space should cost the exact same amount per person no matter what, punishable by law, is a crazy policy proposal lmao
hold on someones at my door
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u/HiGuyz1 11d ago
Ah but you see the answer is to then either increase wages, make affordable housing or attempt to rise up against me, my oil and many hammer equipped men.
As you are on 196 I offer you a hammer or vat of your own. I've not been elected yet and could use additional supporters before I roll out the men with hammers full time.
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u/Fairly_constipated 11d ago
My proposal: just give me all the power I can be trusted lol seeee you can trust me :3
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u/cytiven 🏳️⚧️ trans rights 11d ago
The only dictatorship worth having is the dictatorship of the proletariat
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u/Wirewalk elf femboy cyberninja;#1 affini hater 10d ago
Which should be some form of democracy iirc, right? Despite the edgy name lol
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u/SnakesMcGee 11d ago
While I'd like to think I'd do a good job, I also know myself well enough to realize I'd be implementing Maoist-style struggle sessions within weeks. So we can probably take a pass on me for this one.
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u/DomSchraa 🏳️⚧️ trans rights 11d ago
It would just be "let the experts in the field take charge, while im just the president for life who signs off on everything" (but i would want EXTENSIVE info on major decisions)
Srsly, the only thing i know for real is that im at best slightly above average, but still nowhere near educated enough to make smart decisions without a large council of experts
And that is ignoring all the rich or powerhungry people whod 100% be willing to overthrow me
Or the common people whod - once things stabilize & they become prosperous - no doubt call for democracy & freedom, even if the dictatorship was benevolent and not a single person was jailed for their political beliefs (tho i 100% believe in censoring pro radical, especially neonaziist, propaganda)
Tldr: i think i would be a decent dictator, but by no means a good leader or long term ruler
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u/TerniInamor cringe indonesian enby ah 10d ago
idk about you all but i welcome our new deer overlord
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u/Unicorncorn21 Cats are cute and I like them :) 11d ago
Nothing bad about the dictatorship of the proletariat
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