Who will you choose to be dictator of the world?

Myself.

On a serious note, however, the only way human and animal suffering can be eliminated is if we have a unfied world government where everyone is catered for and looked after by a central economy.

Dream on!

No dictator. I don't think it would work out well.

I do not believe in a centralized government, or dictator. We lose our individual freedoms. Smaller units are better, individuals have more control over their lives. In our city, there were townships, then it expanded to the city...less control.

This survey inspired by Kristal_Rose

I'm not sure that I could trust anyone to resist the temptations of absolute power. I know plenty of people who would try to, who would believe that they should, but I doubt anyone could actually manage it.

Me. Off course. But I would still hire a bunch of experts who know what they're talking about and know more than me on any given issue and at least listen to them first.

Actually, I am an one of those anti-government wacko types (to a point off course), so putting me in power would be a bit of a contradiction. But I digress

I'll take it.

I can delegate.

I doubt I could make things worse.

I will start by putting some of my SC friends in charge of different things.

Cloudhugger will be in charge of clouds, Bill will be in charge of bills, Wicksy of wicks, and so on.

Matty will be in charge of mats, and we'll all think back to when he wanted to change his name to 'poopy_sandwich' and be glad he didn't.

Exactly!

I will appoint myself as dictator of the world

I'll appoint Jed Bartlett to be dictator of the world.

I'm the only one I trust to do a decent job.

I wonder what you could put me in charge of? Big(g) lesbians, perhaps? Or do I not get to be in charge of anything at all?

Apparently I'll be in charge of crystals, which would include the internet, watches, and digital electronics, as well as alchemists making those cool metal infused crystals. I came up with a new design for such this week, painting crystal points &/or clusters with beams of different metals.

That would indirectly put you in charge of digital electronics.

You'd also be in charge of roses

I'll put you in charge of everything Big. (big lesbians included)

I think that fits you perfectly!! See? I'm a great delegater.

I'm appointing jeremy. That would be a good position for him. he has enough experience, for sure...we've seen his resume.

And they is in charge of them!

Yep. Yep yep.

I thought about that.

And I am in charge of alpacas.

> I will start by putting some of my SC friends in charge of different
> things.
>
> Cloudhugger will be in charge of clouds, Bill will be in charge of
> bills, Wicksy of wicks, and so on.

I could look up WICKS myself but what exactly is WICKS?

You know, like in a candle... the wick.

I don't really believe in leaders. I am actually something of an anarchist at heart. Not that I actively work to to promote it or anything. I basically do what I believe to be right and live as I please regardless of what laws may surround me.

Bring back those ones from two millenia ago with the fine silky wool.
Did you know they crossed a llama and a camel a few years ago?

I assure you they exist. I've seen it for myself. They ride unicorns.

I've tried to dream up democratic communist-socialisms. The best I've come up with in this age is being 51% owner of an international employee owned corporate co-op, like a borderless nation of shared resources, engaged in creating trains, phone networks, and cottage craft industry networks. The 51% is so I can step in when democracy fails. The idea would be to spawn new nests (borderless communes) with their own cultural flavors, but the backup resources to economically/politically stand against covert capitalist nations and dictatorships.

Yep, it makes a Cama

> Bring back those ones from two millenia ago with the fine silky wool.
> Did you know they crossed a llama and a camel a few years ago?


Now that's interesting, I hadn't heard of that one. Not surprising though they would be successful, seeing that camels and llamas share a common ancestor.

> I assure you they exist. I've seen it for myself. They ride unicorns.

Yeah, they exist, but that doesn't necessarily mean I have to believe (have faith) in them.

>
> I've tried to dream up democratic communist-socialisms. The best I've
> come up with in this age is being 51% owner of an international employee
> owned corporate co-op, like a borderless nation of shared resources,
> engaged in creating trains, phone networks, and cottage craft industry
> networks. The 51% is so I can step in when democracy fails. The idea
> would be to spawn new nests (borderless communes) with their own cultural
> flavors, but the backup resources to economically/politically stand
> against covert capitalist nations and dictatorships.

In the long run, it doesn't much matter to me what form governments take, as long as they leave me in peace. The major problem I see with any form of government is that the longer it exists, the more it grows and strives for more and more power over the lives of individuals. I would have no problem at all with any form of cooperative society, so long as that cooperation is not coerced.

One problem I have with Marx is his notion of "the withering away of the State". Don't get me wrong, I would love to see the idea of the State wither away and die. But Marx's prescription for achieving that is to keep giving the State more and more power as outlined in his and Engel's Communist Manifesto. I don't understand how that is supposed to work. Keep giving the State what it needs to thrive and grow, and it will wither away and die? I don't think so...

It was quite cute as a baby. Never heard about it again. Don't know if it grew to be useful for both wool and desert travel, or possibly neither.

Depending on if you mean the age of 'a' government, or the evolution of governments, I might disagree with you. In centuries past the governments often had nearly as much power as parents do over children. In some respects our US government now exerts less control, but that is somewhat overshadowed by the more subtle increasing control.

Cooperation without cooercian is the tricky part. Any society which isn't jungle huts requires highways, fire services, and such, unles you go the pure capitalist route and even put direct tolls on all those things, which tends to get very corrupt where practiced. Thus, by taxation or service contribution, everyone needs to contribute somehow to make it a society. In my model I strive to let everyone choose their own nature of contribution to any degree posible. Basically everyone works as an independent contractor for the one diversified company on projects chosen democratically and suggested by the members (usually those volunteering to manage such a project). As far as coercian goes, everyone is expected, as evaluated by their peers, to contribute, to make themselves useful. That could be walking dogs, teaching guitar, or doing software intalls for neighbors, If they don't, there are two lines of recourse, counselling-therapy-assignment-prison, or member excommunication;love it or leave it. It not having geography, it's not too tough to leave. The collective might even set aside eviction entitlement funds to safely start someone off elsewhere. The way I envison it though is that the more choice of governments, the better. You can be a member of one collective, in a home owned and provided by your socialist collective, and your next door neighbor might rent their home from a owner who is a fellow member of a capitalist collective. The other person next door might Rent from Visa, work for it's 3rd party affiliates, and shop with all it's member affiliates. As an umbrella to all this, I would like to see some UN of global collective corporations which provides common laws for accepting and expelling members, and expatriation. The idea is that if people can shop for a choice of government, government will better serve the public interests. No minority will choose to stay in a collective based on slavery. Women might choose to walk around with veils if there were other perks to that particular government. I'd like to run a voluntary socialism, but I doubt more than 30% of the world would fit in a 'goodwill before self-interest' model, and would rather have such persons go join some sort of capitalist collective.

Communism has become such a dirty word here. No one can think of it without comparing it to the failed models of Russia and Mao, if they think about what it means at all. One thing they don't realize in this land of liberty is that one is not free to be a communist here. The whole IRS/economic structure prevents sharing resources and volunteering services. Encapsulating all this into a corporation was the only way I could imagine to do so. The IRS doesn't track which dministrators a secretary serves, what desks share a photcopier, or even charge employees for their share of the breakroom refridgerator on their tax return. I'd extend the idea to anyone working for anyone within the corporation, shaing amenities like the breakroom swimming pool or music instrument lounge. The employees are all stockholders, but the corporation invests in it's amenities and never makes a profit for which employees can be taxed. If it does make some profit (producing and selling exports), it's to finance things like wireless phone services or buy raw materials for housing and restaurant supplies, again, deductable expenses of the corporation which it's employees will use in their work, which might officially be R&D of planetary living solutions or something.

Don't bother to argue any Marx or Mao with me. They were brilliant mad-men with bad ideas. The USSR did wither away and die. I didn't know that was planned. No wonder their culture was so dreary. Actually it went bankrupt in the cold war because the populace lost faith in hopeful meaning for it's fictitious currency. The US is far more bankrupt, but we are still believers here. What I do know of Mark is that he believed capitalism was a pyramid scheme bound to eventually fail when debt based production and consumption could no longer be anticipated to escalate. It appears he was correct on this, but it took decades longer than he imagined. He did not envision disposable products or the software and movie industries, but expected little red wagons to be passed on to grand-children. His answer was most objectionable, to intentionally cripple production and perpetuate an economy driven by desperation. People standing in line all day for left shoes was by plan, not by desperate accident.

I have actually conceived a similar wither and die scheme. If a nation wants to conquer you, let them. Eventually the nation is stuck owning the world and supporting it's citizens. This is how the Roman empire died. It was based on constant expansion. It capitalized on foreign resources, but eventually those territory fringes joined the citizenry and there was no one left to capitalize upon, upon which they rotted from within, turning their ctizens into tax collectors with no one left to tax, and thus owing the senators who became the feudal barons of the next age, while the indebted citizens became the indentured servants. Power is dominance, give someone all they want and they lose that dominance. It's a pretty lofty and lame concept to base a government on, to be sure. Again, no wonder they were so frukked up there. I don't know what Marx's long term vision was, but it's not sounding promisisg, and people probably should have checked into that before supporting his thoughts. As messed up as Hitler was, he did at least have prosperity for those remaining in mind. I don't think our famous communists did. Even today (in recent years), I was speaking to a spearhead of the revolutionary communist party on the ideology of struggle. I was there to argue that struggle wasn't a necesary path to the goals of communism-socialism, and discovered to my dismay that as he saw it, perpetual struggle was the goal, that it was good for the soul. Right in line with what I hear about Marx, I guess. My vision was completely different I assure you, one of prosperity, liberty, creativity, individuality, goodwill, and kinship - not struggle.

Me...the first thing I would do is round up all real estate speculators, career politicians, Lawyers and Far Left Wing Loons and have mass executions...

> Depending on if you mean the age of 'a' government, or the evolution
> of governments, I might disagree with you. In centuries past the governments
> often had nearly as much power as parents do over children. In some
> respects our US government now exerts less control, but that is somewhat
> overshadowed by the more subtle increasing control.
>

Well, this is kind of a tricky proposition, comparing government today with governments of past centuries. On the one hand, you are correct, the absolute rule of monarchs in the past seems to represent more power than governments of today have. On the other hand, those past monarchs had no way to enforce laws such as a minimum drinking age or whether or not a particular plant was legal to ingest. Then, looking at feudal societies, generally taxation ran at a rate of 20%. Of course, that one-fifth was a flat tax, applying to everyone who worked the land regardless of what they actually came away with. In the 1970s, the maximum tax rate in the US ran as high as 91%, but it was graduated, not a flat tax. Governments today actually regulate aspects of individual life that were far less regulated under absolute monarchs.

But, I was actually speaking of the of 'a' government. The longer a particular government exists, the more power it accumulates, until it gets to the point that a significant portion of the population is unwilling to let that government continue growing. That 'significant portion' need not be a majority either. Bear in mind that fewer than 10% of the German people belonged to the Nazi party when they took over Germany's government.



> The way I
> envison it though is that the more choice of governments, the better.
> You can be a member of one collective, in a home owned and provided
> by your socialist collective, and your next door neighbor might rent
> their home from a owner who is a fellow member of a capitalist collective.
> The other person next door might Rent from Visa, work for it's 3rd
> party affiliates, and shop with all it's member affiliates. As an
> umbrella to all this, I would like to see some UN of global collective
> corporations which provides common laws for accepting and expelling
> members, and expatriation. The idea is that if people can shop for
> a choice of government, government will better serve the public interests.
> No minority will choose to stay in a collective based on slavery.
> Women might choose to walk around with veils if there were other perks
> to that particular government. I'd like to run a voluntary socialism,
> but I doubt more than 30% of the world would fit in a 'goodwill before
> self-interest' model, and would rather have such persons go join some
> sort of capitalist collective.
>

This sort of sounds like a system put forward by anarcho-syndicalists.

> One thing they don't realize in
> this land of liberty is that one is not free to be a communist here.

Well, it's never been actually illegal to be a communist or to belong to the communist party in the US, and there were quite a few communes springing up here and there in the 60s and 70s. Wavy Gravy's Pig Farm in New York for one, Timothy Leary's League for Spiritual Development was another. There was even a religious commune in Virginia Beach in the early 70s, Children of God. This actually has been going on almost since the birth of the US. Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter, The House of Seven Gables) belonged to a commune known as the Oneida Colony for a while.


>
> Don't bother to argue any Marx or Mao with me. They were brilliant
> mad-men with bad ideas. The USSR did wither away and die.

Yeah, but not I believe, in quite the way Marx had envisioned. Marx had envisioned the State withering away and dying and leaving a functional, fully cooperative society behind. I don't think he had a very firm understanding of human nature.


> People standing in line all day for left shoes was
> by plan, not by desperate accident.

Near the end of the Soviet Union, citizens of Moscow called their city the Land of Tomorrow. This was not because of all the advanced technology readily available there, but because that is what the shopkeepers were always telling them when they were trying to buy some necessity or other. "I don't have it today. Come back tomorrow, I'll have it."

> I have actually conceived a similar wither and die scheme. If a nation
> wants to conquer you, let them.

China was a master of this for thousands of years. The Chinese people of today are actually a hybrid people of dozens of foreign conquerors over the millenia. The way it worked in China though was, the conquerors wanted access to China's wealth, they had to occupy the cities. In so doing, they became absorbed into the existing Chinese culture.

> I don't
> think our famous communists did. Even today (in recent years), I was
> speaking to a spearhead of the revolutionary communist party on the
> ideology of struggle. I was there to argue that struggle wasn't a
> necesary path to the goals of communism-socialism, and discovered
> to my dismay that as he saw it, perpetual struggle was the goal, that
> it was good for the soul. Right in line with what I hear about Marx,
> I guess.

Yeah, Marxist philosophy is built on the foundation of Hegel's dialectic, which views history as a constant struggle between conflicting forces. I guess the idea is that without the constant struggle, no progress is made, and thus, no history.

In scottish baronies the Chief's officers practically lived and worked with you. But yeah, electronic surveillance combining purchases, electrical usage, library records, grocery receipts, and medical records is what I meant.

You mean anly 10% were registered Nazis before Hitler came into power? No, I did not know that. That's comforting in a way, that it's not so much about misguided human nature.

"anarcho-syndicalists" - Never heard of them, but I can imagine a similarity, every nest choose your own governance.
Can you describe them further? I know another anarchist of the 'wither' type, everyone become an anarchist until that's all that's left and the central government topples from lack of support.

What I meant was that unless you are in a commune, there's no support mechanism infrastructure to be a communist. Poor people can't move to an abandoned farm these days. If you want to be a communist, you have to pull togethor resources and buy a commune first, and then, as I said, make it a corporation, otherwise everyone is taxed for all their bartering with each other. More particularly one can't immediately switch lifestyle amongst urban resources. You can't suddenly switch to generous liberal barter with your neighbors and expect to keep your apartment or grab the groceries in the store which didn't come your way in spite of your generous contribution ta others in general. We are free to be communists like people in the Mohave desert are free to go surfing.

"Marx had envisioned the State withering away and dying and leaving a functional, fully cooperative society behind" - The employees often took ownership of their factories. At least his ideas lingered to have some affect during the collapse. It was run by the mob, which he hadn't counted on, but the party itself had evolved to become the mob, I suspect.

On conquering: Oh, I forgot to mention, nations gave up on that model, and now have the sense to infiltarte resources from within while keeping the territory an independent nation of citizens they have no responsibility for. We wouldn't want to make Iraq or any nation in So. America the 53rd state of the union. Alaska didn't have too many people to support. Hawaii was geographically strategic beyond it's resource:inhabitants ratio.

In the US we have the curious system where we have to invent new wealth to pay our debts. I suppose one has to go to So. America or Africa for cultures that simply coast along without either struggle or progress.

> "anarcho-syndicalists" - Never heard of them, but I can imagine a
> similarity, every nest choose your own governance.
> Can you describe them further? I know another anarchist of the 'wither'
> type, everyone become an anarchist until that's all that's left and
> the central government topples from lack of support.
>

Well, as I understand it, it is a form of self-governance in which production is accomplished by various "syndicates" or collectives or corporations, if you will. Each of these syndicates operates on it's own and barters with other syndicates for necessities they cannot themselves produce. So a farm syndicate might barter food with a contracting syndicate in order to build homes for their workers and with an electronics syndicate to provide computers, etc. There is a more technically oriented article about anarcho-syndicalism here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism.

Interesting. It has the same flaws as trade unions, that ultimately it would become just another competitive system.

If the textiles and office-workers unions raise their average wage (in our current US system), this merely forces the janitorial and hotel-workers to have to do likewise, and strands those not in unions.

My system seggregates on neither class nor trade. Broad scope collectives, just as corporations, would compete with each other, for membership as much as profit, but ideally each spin-off is as complete a self-contained eco-system as possible, differening in culture, not component role, within the fabric of international commerce.

> Interesting. It has the same flaws as trade unions, that ultimately
> it would become just another competitive system.
>
> If the textiles and office-workers unions raise their average wage
> (in our current US system), this merely forces the janitorial and
> hotel-workers to have to do likewise, and strands those not in unions.
>


I believe the ultimate goal of anarcho-syndicalism is to do away with money altogether. So wages as such would not be an issue. Eventually.

I think it would be pointless to do away with competition altogether though. I don't actually view competition as an opposite of cooperation. Competition, in my view, is merely another form of cooperation. Like playing a board game or any sport. Individual players or teams compete with each other in order to win the game, but they compete within a framework of mutually understood and agreed-upon rules. Of course, competition can be carried to unhealthy extremes in any case, whether on a football team or within a company or nation. On a football team, the result is deliberately maiming a star quarterback. Within a company, industrial espionage and among nations, war.

Competition can be good, depends on what type. 10 companies duplicitly competing to create the same product and only wins isn't good though. Students competing against seniors competing against defense isn't good. My nests would compete for memberhip. Credit companies competed for membership though, and that still didn't work out well. Classes and trades competing aginst each other for wages doesn't make make much sense.

wait, what?

jeremy=dictator.
You know it always ends badly.

Ah yes! Thanks

Mr. Rogers