It’s a great story - throws a lot of light on human nature. Sometimes it’s good never to be satisfied with what we have - great inventions come from this dissatisfaction…other times….
When I was eight a neighbor bought me the Grosset & Dunlap version with illustrations by Fritz Kredel, copyright 1945, to console me through tonsillectomy recovery, so that is my standard. It is a lovely book.
But in 2016 I found in a second-hand shop in the UK a small edition copyright 1912 and sent it to my brother as a gift. We were both bemused by the tale "The Jew and the Thornbush."
If you ever find it, I really recommend "An Illustrated Treasury of Swedish Folk Tales and Fairy Tales", it is a translated compilation of old folklore and folktales from a series that started publishing in 1907, and is still being published to this day.
Read the last chapters of 'Lord of the Ring' - the cleansing of the Shire that they left out of the movie - for that.
Small wonder it was left out. To maintain control and rule, half-orcs and highwaymen of strangers were brought in to terrorise and keep the hobbits in check.
If you've read the book, you also know what was the only solution for the hobbits.
Those movies were very expensive trash, and the only perfectly-cast roles were those of Gandalf and Sam.
And it's a funny thing. I used to reread the trilogy annually until I had my child and finally entered joyfully into real life I wouldn't trade for any fantasy anywhere.
The grandeur and spectacle put me off more than anything. Some scenes look amazing, but there's no soul to it.
As Tolkien was heavily inspired by Kalevala and Nordic mythology married to celtic such, and the book is far less dramatic and much more laxonic in tone than the movies, I find to this day the difference in tone jarring, and I would much have preferred if a more Saga-like style had been chosen.
Something harsher, coarser, starker. More real while still being fantastical.
I must confess that rather than going "Ahhh!" or "Cool!" when they show Minas Tirith for the first time, I burst out laughing. I believe I muttered something like "Lord of the Ring of Dungeons&Dragons..."
And in my view so few people realize that the true hero of the trilogy is Sam, and the true triumph was that he was able, finally, after all that death and sorrow, to go home and marry and have children and the only meaningful joy.
Everyone else had a motive--for good or ill, noble or mundane. Even Merry and Pippin just didn't want to be left out of any adventure. They were the good-hearted frat boys of The Shire.
But Sam, from beginning to end, was there for love and loyalty and with no expectations and with nothing beyond the unadorned honor of a true heart.
Also, Sam is given the choice of dying as a mortal or going on to the Deathless lands, since he briefly wore the Ring.
Bilbo and Frodo both have no choice in the matter, the evil of the Ring has damaged them so much that they will not die but fade, unless they go on to the lands removed from the world. And Gandalf and the other istari belong to that world anyway and aren't allowed to stay behind.
But Sam is given the choice, since it was by his free choice he originally came to carry it. Not because he wanted to, not even out of a sense of duty or of fate - just because then and there, it had to be done by him because there wasn't anyone else.
I fear for the day they try to adapt the tale of Beren and Luthien.
If you love a book, don't ever watch the movie adaption.
I made the mistake to watch the first of the LOT triologies, and it ruined the books for years.
I don't think it was a particular bad movie (it wasn't very good either), but the problem is that the books and the characters live in your imagination, and the movie forces them out of your imagination and become jvery different, two dimensional people.
No one can take away my teenage conception of Strider from me, lo this very many years. I guess that's because I knew he looked like the father from the family next door. Viggo Mortensen just couldn't compete with that quiet strength.
Movies are never better and usually infinitely worse than the book. I am in fear and trepidation when the vandals try to make a movie of a great book. Why do scriptwriters think they are better than authors? Why do authored go along with vandalism?
Often, the author signs away the rights to adaptations of their work in order to get published in the first place. Since you don't know if your novel will be a hit, it seems an easy choice to make in exchange for a bit more dosh in hand when signing.
Also, far few creatives bother with the expense of hiring a contract lawyer/attorney/solicitor when signing or negotiating. British comics writer Alan Moore and his DC odyssey in the US being a prime example of why that is folly.
Me, too. But what I'd really like is to read to the very end of this book, to find out the parts that haven't happened to us yet. Perhaps the Councillors notice that a certain group of people have contributed more to science, art, technology, and just plain good deeds than other groups, which is very unfair to the groups that haven't had time to make as many scientific discoveries and do as many good deeds, so they will burn the entire population of good-deeders, up to 95% of the populations of some villages, thereby creating a paradise on earth.
That's Animal Farm. Unlike the film, the pigs remain in control and the animals are still in drudgery and despair. The moral I guess is don't get new leaders, just dump the lot. 😉
The importation of mercenaries can be an Imperial strength, not a weakness . The British have been using - e.g. Fijian and Nepalese mercenaries since forever, and one benefit is that we have some first class Nepalese restaurants to enjoy. The French foreign legion is legend. The Romans managed their empire almost entirely using foreign legions - they ruled my part of Scotland with Syrian troops - and I have little doubt that Syrian genes are still bouncing around here. So what?
1) Mercenaries are a tool of empires. If your country regularly employs mercenaries, you are living in an empire.
2) Mercenaries allow the rulers to fight wars that their citizens may not approve of.
3) Mercenaries allow the rulers to use the military agianst the population where native or citizen-soldiers would refuse.
4) Mercenaries, when relied on too heavily, can become a political power in their own right, possibly even seizing power, for example, Goths and Mamluks.
No, the Hessians fought for the British Empire. Knowing the British, the Hessian mercenaries were probably paid by the taxes levied on the colonists. Britian had ties to Hessen, Saxony, and Hannover through the House of Hannover. George the 1st was the Elector of Hannover (Germany) and became king after the death of Queen Anne, who was childless. The colonists were too cash-strapped to hire mercenaries. Most of the Europeans who helped the colonists were volunteers who were paid a token wage.
I’m still hoping there’s some story book ending, where the villagers gather all the new Mayors of the valleys and deem them witches - and it ends with a massive fiery end. Sometimes a medium sized fire can also do some good in the meantime, I guess.
I would prefer a Peter and the Wolf scenario where after all this shrieking about the terrors gonna come and eat us, they all get et themselves while we've returned to our carefree gamboling in the cow-fertilized meadows .
I write to you today in a sincere effort to help you accomplish your noble goals for seeking this office.
That is to help you facilitate the betterment of our schools for our children and young people.
To do this, I ask you to make the Board meeting agenda and the data points behind them available to me as well as all of the other taxpayers.
Upload the stack to a server where we can read, ratify and or annul the elements after log on.
In a perfect world each paragraph must have at least three possible answers: agree, disagree, no opinion at this time.
Direct democracy is a growing trend, and many companies offer these services:
hosting, voter receipts, and a running tally of totals for everyone to see.
In this way Madam Trustee you are assured that you will always have the strength of the community with you when making the decisions that really do effect the lives of our people.
That sounds similar to how the House of Commons and House of Lords started. Commons was for the common folk to go to and rein in the Lords. I'm guessing back then it was the journeying to London that made it unworkable so we ended up with picking a local representative and got the government instead.
Though the way their minds work they'd probably already foreseen that.
Well, more than a big well, if we could get the majority to give all of parliament a vote of no confidence that means by law they're all out. Parliament has to be dissolved.
I suppose then we could claim back the original plan that democracy was brought in on.
I did say it sounds similar to how it was originally meant to be and I honestly think I like yours, so long as they leave the Internet working . It's more geeing the people up to want to do something about it.
Wonderful parable. And such common sense observations in this story. I'd go even further and note that the original Lord, at some point, earned his lands by achievement and family/tribal consent and not be extraction and conquest. And his entire ideology was one of service to his wards by virtue of universal accountability before God.
One of the reasons I admire the Latin Mass is that pastors face the altar during the Eucharistic prayers, rather than the people. It's a beautiful relic of how the entire West was once oriented in better times.
"... the original Lord, at some point, earned his lands by achievement and family/tribal consent ..."
Not usually. In places like Ireland and Scottland yes, but in the rest of Europe it was all about conquest from the time Ceasar conquered Gaul.
The bane of feudal lords was peasant uprisings. Too many of those ate up your resources, and you would probably lose your liege lord's confidence, because ultimately, they were HIS resources.
I'm coming to the conclusion that Plato was right all along. A monarchy with a virtuous king is the best form of government. Since it impossible to have a virtuous king, a "best" form of government is impossible. It will always cycle from tyranny to anarchy. I guess the best one can hope for is to be born in the middle of the cycle.
It’s not impossible it’s just extremely rare. When an individual is put into a position of authority a virus begins to eat the part of their brain that controls arrogance. They began to believe that they are set apart for greatness because of some intrinsic quality they always knew they posessed. Leaders need to be innoculated against this virus by suffering some drastic setback in their early life. Or possibly term limits. Remove them from the office before it eats their brain entirely. I could give examples but I doubt the necessity.
On the flip side, a term limit serves as incentive for the temporary king to enrich himself in the most gluttonous way possible as quickly as he can keep his hand in the till. At least a hereditary king might have some consideration for his *son's* kingdom.
Not that I'm advocating for that.
Generally, it's all terrible. I don't know what to do about it. I just want to be left alone. I'm willing to pay the price of leaving others alone in turn for that. But very few people seem to have that desire. :-/
Examples could not prove extreme rarity anyway. You are suggesting that the selection is the problem - hereditary monarchy is not ideal, neither would be electing our kings.
How about we select our king at random from among the first 500 names in the Boston telephone directory?
I insist we at least use a nationwide randomization. I get what you're saying buy I can just about guarantee that random citizens of Boston do not understand the issues that face New Mexico. To be fair, I don't understand the issues that face them either, other than that they suffer from crippling levels of humidity. ;)
Granted, I also agree with your position regarding anarchy. And truly "anarchy" and not merely "chaos".
Having a lottery instead of elections would be the second-most democratic way of selecting parliaments and presidents/kings.
Also, it would be fully representative of the nation's demography.
It's an idea I've been toying with and also have been giving serious consideration for a decade or so now; problem no. 1 is of course that none in power today - private or governement - stand to gain from it, so there's zero chance of any support from any such group, party or whatever.
Still, ideas are unthinkable until suddently they are reality.
Being relatively 'democratic' is not necessarily a good thing. Democracy has turned out to have some extremely bad results. A lottery might well do better.
Even if the king is virtuous, what about all his underlings?
One man cannot possibly be on top of all matters everywhere all the time, and what is done in the name of the king is - to the subject - tantamount to the king doing it.
And since the only way for the subject to get a message to the king is via the king's underlings. . .
I think the same solution applies to both Lords and Liberation Mayors. The government should *do* less.
The proper thing for the villagers to have done after they used their torches and pitchforks to roust the old Lord was not to install a new one to collect the bridge tolls. It would have been for them to declare that there weren't going to *be* bridge tolls any longer. For the villagers to get together themselves, and figure out what was needed in order to repair the bridge, and pitch in from the surplus they had which was no longer being seized by a Lord.
And this is even *more* the case in modern society where the majority of people aren't engaged in slightly-above subsistence farming.
The reason people try to hard to buy politicians is because owning one is worth so much more than one pays. If the government has less power, it's less worth controlling, and less dangerous to *not* control it.
War story: Long ago, when I was 11 or 12, a late spring thaw, accompanied by a massive rain storm, washed out several bridges on county roads in our chunk of paradise. So after church, a bunch of the local ranchers, farmers, and loggers got together and figured out, in about an hour, who could contribute what. Like equipment, timbers, planks, hardware and a few dozen loads of gravel. Later that week, most of them took a couple of days off, and re-built all three bridges.
The loggers could get to work. Folks could get to town. The school buses only missed one day,
The following week, the County send engineers to "survey the damage". The intent was to assess the original flood damage. Months of "you can't do that" hysteria ensued.
But we kept driving on those roads. Over those bridges. For years.
But sadly, while it occassionally works out as you describe, the instances it doesn't far outweighs the good. Same as with charity vs welfare, really.
It is of course highly dependent on what example we pick to study.
What I see as one of the underlying problems is, the state now instead of being practical about practical matters is instead value-based, seeing everything as normative matters or as matters of faith.
Which is akin to praying for a severed artery to clot, really.
When I was logging we would occasionally need a bridge across a creek or stream. Usually we could go from nothing to driving a vehicle across in 6 or 8 hours using trees in the area. With no engineering the bridge would support 200000 pounds. They would last 15 to 20 years in southern Alaska.
Yes. And if one or two ambitious villagers decided to invest their own capital and labor in bridge maintenance and ownership, maybe even incorporating and selling shares to other villagers, that wouldn't be a bad thing either.
In a city of a million or more, it doesn't make sense for everyone to take it to the dump under their own cognizance and power (we know from history how that plays out - the walls of Medieval Paris sometimes had so much feces and filth piled up outside you could step off the wall onto the crap). Therefore, some collective system must be organised.
In the country-side, where everyone and their mother owns a pick-up or similar plus a trailer or something similar, people can do it under their own power and/or organise it locally.
All the state or its local eq. has to do is provide a dumping are where trash is collected, sorted and handled properly. This can easily be combined with some kind of area for people who like to make things out of junk (like me - bias-alert!) to scrounge from. Spoke to a CNC-workshop in town the other week about the stack of empyt boxes they had out back. 360cm long, 40*60, inch-thick planks. Just laying there. They were happy I offered to haul them away for them - those planks will become a lot of things.
The only thing the state is needed for in this scenario is stand-offish oversight. Because there will always be alzy assholes who dump their old car batteries in the bin marked "Burnables" unless someone keeps tabs on them.
If you see what I mean (not sure I do myself, sometimes)?
I would say the State is needed for none of those things. A private landowner can sell land to a dump operator, or become a dump operator. States have proven utterly incapable of 'stand-offish oversight', but a private corporation could be more successful.
Sadly, history has shown (or rather: private business has) that that doesn't work better, or at all.
And that's before going into how private capital has never hesitated from despoiling and poisoning the environment, even if the property in question was privately owned.
Recall Chesterton's words about the rich and the poor in "The man who was Thursday": only the poor really has a stake in the country (nation, my note).
Have you not noticed - there is current world-wide shortage of underlings willing to acknowledge the very existence of the peasants, let alone intercede with their lords and masters on our behalf.
Well, it was just a throw away comment on a blog, not meant as a dissertation. Maybe our host will take up the debate, as there is surely one to be had.
You say you would prefer anarchy, but having never lived in one, I think you fantasize; overestimating the good and minimizing the bad. How much of your day is simplified by trust? When you put fuel in your vehicle, do you measure it to see that you got the amount they pump says? Do you perform chemical analysis on your groceries to see if you actually get what you think you're getting? Do you barter or use cash?
Anarchy is survivable but a horrible way to live.
Okay, okay, virtue is of course possible in a king, but extremely unlikely. You said you'd prefer anarchy. Why, if you believe in just kings?
You underestimate anarchy. Government is not the only means to enable trust, it is in fact a very poor way. Private, non-government entities are better capable of fuel certification, grocery rating and currency management. You only think these things must be done by government because you have lived too long under a government, as have we all. Anarchy - or call it liberty, if you prefer - is a great way to live, though I admit I have not seen much of it in the world lately.
My question on kings was just a question, not any kind of endorsement of the virtue of kings. I believe people are generally terrible, and kings are no better than other people. I was just curious about the idea that it's "impossible" to have a virtuous king. I think we can agree on "unlikely".
Haha, we don't know each other so you make inaccurate assumptions. I would sooner trust you than government. I'm under no illusion that government performs these functions even adequately, let alone best. But if you're talking about private groups doing these functions, you're not talking about anarchy, you're taking about small, limited government. See my comment below about what I believe to be the best form of government. I'm sure we agree on more than we disagree, it's just hard to get context from these limited comments.
Yes, it seems we largely agree. But I am indeed talking about anarchy, or absence of government, since the private entities performing useful functions would not be government agencies. That is, they would lack the key property of government - monopoly on violence, or monopoly on the legal use of force. In my example, no "small, limited government" exists.
Ok, playing devil's advocate. Does a mother and father have the legal use of force in your anarchy? Can I discipline my children with force? Is it proper to teach them to use force to get them to obey me sometimes? Do they share the use of force so as to eat candy all day if that's what they want, so as to avoid monopoly on force? Is a family a "private entity performing useful functions"? If you are a small child subject to those "useful functions", does it matter to you as that small child that it is not "government agencies" with no "monopoly"? Surely you can just leave and go somewhere else where conditions are better, right?
I would argue the best government is when individual men govern themselves individually. I believe in absolute freedom of speech, but I also believe some speech should be curtailed. How to reconcile? I should be the one curtailing my own speech. There are some things I think, but would never say. If you are honest, you'll admit the same.
Eugyppius, thank you so much for this wonderful post. Even though there is no happy ending to the fable, it proclaims the truth and gave me much pleasure to read.
Very apt. I did not know about a new law in the UK until I read about it yesterday. All cats have to have a subcutaneous identification tag, I assume RFID. There will be a central database of cats. There is a fine of £500 if your cat is not done. The 'reason' is so that people who lose their precious pets will be able to identify if found. I have no problem with anyone fitting a tag if that is what they want but to require it of everyone seems insane. Fortunately I don’t have a cat. Maybe it is an experiment before requiring all citizens to be tagged by law.
All inmates at Auschwitz in the 1940s were tattooed with their humeric identification. All citizens now are identifiable by numbers as well: social insurance numbers, health insurance numbers, credit card numbers, driver's licence number, bank account numbers, and far too many others to count them all. These are mostly required of everyone in a modern society. We may not like it, but it's already been done.
True, and facial recognition will tie it all together. However, being chipped would make us branded slaves, which seems to be the plan. We have to know our place.
It is difficult to discern whether or not there is a coherent plan. Certainly the lunatics of the WEF want there to be one. Hitler had a plan, Stalin had a plan, Mao had a plan. That doesn't mean that any of them were viable or practical. Also please note that all of the above-named ended in disaster for themselves and their regimes. Socialism wants everything planned but is invariably ruinously bad at either developing a coherent plan or implementing it. They always fail. This was glaringly evident for anyone like me who saw parts of the former Warsaw Pact nations immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The mismanagement of EVERYTHING was stunning.
We were warned about all this in the novel 1984 by George Orwell. A former devotee of socialism, Orwell had discovered just how vile it was. To which we can add, Big Brother is without exception stunningly stupid. It misunderstands basic human nature completely. All of the assorted utopias of Socialism - Plato's Republic, Thomas More's Utopia, Marx's Proletariat Republic, Hitler's Autarky - are all perfect replicas of Hell in its most brutal, savage, painful forms. Freedom does not exist; happiness does not exist. Everything is devoted solely to the State.
So being warned of the outcomes, no sane person wants any Socialist utopia if you have a choice. The whole point of Socialism is to take away any free choice you might have about anything.
If you took the injections you already let them in. There will be a record of your obedience. Most of the herd willingly participated because they were told that they would otherwise die. It doesn't take much to fool.the herd.
So you despise everyone who trusted government and their doctors? Your attitude is betrayed by your use of the word "herd". That is precisely how socialists show their contempt for most people.
I think the original idea, since semi-feral cats spread diseases and parasites to humans, not to mention how they massacre small birds and other smaller animals for sport, is to be able to trap and kill said semi-feral cats.
Which is why a quick-and-easy way to identify if the cat in trap is ok to kill is needed.
Also, for insurance-reasons. With the cat tagged, it is much easier to track the spread of diseases and such when cats are brought to the vet. Just blip it and enter into the on-line file what ails it.
Obviously, any such system can be abused, and equally obviously there is a perfectly valid arguement to be made that such systems serve to ease us into accepting the same for humans, at some point in the future.
There'll be no push for such a law for humans, until enough of the citizenry is judged to be in favour of such, perhaps even in demand of it. Therefore, such demand must be created which takes decades (but as that process started in the 1990s, we are nearing implementation if my speculation is true) and must feel natural: the two most obvious vectors that will be used (excepting convicts) is children with disabilities and certain diseases or conditions (epilepsy, autism, et c) and elders suffering from Alzheimers and such. What a great boon to nurses and care-takers, what a great relief for family to know that their loved one can easily be tracked down and found and made safe in case they wander off, is the selling point.
Sorry for a bit of a wall-of-text, but how ideas become/are made into reality is something of an old hobby-horse with me, so the urge to butt in on any conversation of such is almost a compulsion.
Very good analysis, much appreciated. For me, resources are always limited so how do you use them? How many people are there to catch feral cats? We have roads with unrepaired pot holes damaging vehicles. We have poor housing causing bad health, real diseases. There are hundreds of other infrastructure problems. On the other side we are building wind turbines that kill birds and off shore kill marine animals. Etc.
Thank you - I'm of the same mind re: practical matters is what matters, as resources are always limited (the original meaning of economy was indeed "how to make use of limited resources without using them up").
Elsewhere in this comment thread I mentioned in some other tangent that a major problem of modern-day governements, including the whole of civil/civic services in the term, is a focus on value-measurements, on normative matters that are more faith-based than reality-based.
Not a slur on faith, but when you have a a ruptured artery in your wrist, you don't pray for it to clot; you tie it off and get to the ER soon as you can.
There are many explanations for it. I'm very partial to explaining it as a lack of life-experience leading to no maturity coupled with never having to suffer any actual consequences of your values/actions.
A go-to example I've used when debating early release of sexual predators (pedos esp.) here is this:
The psychiatrist singing off on that the criminal is now safe to have out and about, should have the criminal in question live in-house with the psychiatrist, who will pay for the criminal's food, wifi, bus pass and other sundry day-to-day minor expenses. For a year.
There's no real way around that arguement.
Refuse, and the psychiatrist has just proven that he has no confidence in his own diagnosis/judgment. And then why should anyone else have confidence in it/him releasing criminals onto the population?
It works the same way with any practical matter. If wind power is so good, then why no rush by companies if there's no tax funding? Conversely, if it's paid by taxes, why should it be privately owned at all?
Politicians and their court of mandarins-cum-economists hate reality I think.
Must've been some Freudian message, that blue flag with the gold stars at the end ... :-) As Churchill once observed, "Democracy is the worst form of government ...except for all the rest." If one looks back at history, one can see that what we see transpiring today is merely the modern version of an age-old cycle that started with the rule of the ancient Mediterranean world by kings, morphed into the Roman Republic for 400 years, then crashed into the autocracy of the empire, which lasted only another 400 years (and bloody, disastrous years, at that). Then an interregnum of a thousand years before humanity set about re-inventing the democratic/republic wheel ... and the process begins all over again. Stand by for the crash of the "second Roman Republic" (i.e., Europe and North America)...
A government more representative and responsible? On what planet? No mater how far the pendulum swings in our favor, government will always be a master-slave relationship.
In true reality, a government could never represent every citizen nor would it ever be responsible for its actions. Responsibility means that you must accept the fact that you will be wrong much of the time.
What politician will give up their power and arrpogance to accept that type of responsibility? Government is the dumbest entity on the planet because it represents nothing but itself, 110% of the time. That is why the only way it can exist is to be shrouded in lies and propaganda. The citizen must never know that government is 95% flawed and irrational.
The best way to ensure that government behaves well is the threat of revolt. In front of every government building should be buckets of tar, bags of feathers, and a gallows to make sure every over-reaching politician know their potential fate. It also helps to have a sadistic segment of society always itching to use these, and muckrakers to keep the government honest. A paranoid government is an honest government.
"People should not fear their governments. Governments should fear their people." - V in V for Victory.
This was expressed first by Thomas Jefferson. "When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny."
Quite right. I think this should be done in all public institutions. For example, in every teachers lounge, there should be a large poster with a severely beaten prisoner and the caption "This is what happens to Pediphiles in Prison".
Grimm but true.
My, government, What big taxes you have!
The better to eat you with, my dear.
It's more I think like The Fisherman's Wife.
It’s a great story - throws a lot of light on human nature. Sometimes it’s good never to be satisfied with what we have - great inventions come from this dissatisfaction…other times….
The fatal difference from what you say and that fisherman's wife is she wasn't attempting to achieve anything herself.
She just wanted lots of increasingly elaborate freebies after having done a good deed.
I need to bone up on Grimm’s Tales. Recommended compilation?
When I was eight a neighbor bought me the Grosset & Dunlap version with illustrations by Fritz Kredel, copyright 1945, to console me through tonsillectomy recovery, so that is my standard. It is a lovely book.
But in 2016 I found in a second-hand shop in the UK a small edition copyright 1912 and sent it to my brother as a gift. We were both bemused by the tale "The Jew and the Thornbush."
If you ever find it, I really recommend "An Illustrated Treasury of Swedish Folk Tales and Fairy Tales", it is a translated compilation of old folklore and folktales from a series that started publishing in 1907, and is still being published to this day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Among_Gnomes_and_Trolls#Illustrated_English_Translation
Going on my list!
We have an actual real independent bookstore here that can try to find it for me.
You might like this /my podcast on tyranny catch-22:
https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/ey5vjGogmKb
Curious to see what happens when the pan-village council starts importing all the military-aged males from outside the valley.
It will be great. Diversity will become their strength.
Refusenick
Unrest and capture of the Villagers and the predictive Witches will occur and an intended civil war via non countryman all
orchestrated by the highest Councilmen so they can come to the people’s intended rescue ( largely incomplete this time ) for a price and job security.
Haha
lol
Read the last chapters of 'Lord of the Ring' - the cleansing of the Shire that they left out of the movie - for that.
Small wonder it was left out. To maintain control and rule, half-orcs and highwaymen of strangers were brought in to terrorise and keep the hobbits in check.
If you've read the book, you also know what was the only solution for the hobbits.
Those movies were very expensive trash, and the only perfectly-cast roles were those of Gandalf and Sam.
And it's a funny thing. I used to reread the trilogy annually until I had my child and finally entered joyfully into real life I wouldn't trade for any fantasy anywhere.
The grandeur and spectacle put me off more than anything. Some scenes look amazing, but there's no soul to it.
As Tolkien was heavily inspired by Kalevala and Nordic mythology married to celtic such, and the book is far less dramatic and much more laxonic in tone than the movies, I find to this day the difference in tone jarring, and I would much have preferred if a more Saga-like style had been chosen.
Something harsher, coarser, starker. More real while still being fantastical.
I must confess that rather than going "Ahhh!" or "Cool!" when they show Minas Tirith for the first time, I burst out laughing. I believe I muttered something like "Lord of the Ring of Dungeons&Dragons..."
And in my view so few people realize that the true hero of the trilogy is Sam, and the true triumph was that he was able, finally, after all that death and sorrow, to go home and marry and have children and the only meaningful joy.
There are multiple heroes. But Sam is surely the most underrated by far.
Everyone else had a motive--for good or ill, noble or mundane. Even Merry and Pippin just didn't want to be left out of any adventure. They were the good-hearted frat boys of The Shire.
But Sam, from beginning to end, was there for love and loyalty and with no expectations and with nothing beyond the unadorned honor of a true heart.
Also, Sam is given the choice of dying as a mortal or going on to the Deathless lands, since he briefly wore the Ring.
Bilbo and Frodo both have no choice in the matter, the evil of the Ring has damaged them so much that they will not die but fade, unless they go on to the lands removed from the world. And Gandalf and the other istari belong to that world anyway and aren't allowed to stay behind.
But Sam is given the choice, since it was by his free choice he originally came to carry it. Not because he wanted to, not even out of a sense of duty or of fate - just because then and there, it had to be done by him because there wasn't anyone else.
I fear for the day they try to adapt the tale of Beren and Luthien.
Sam did eventually head west I believe, after the death of his wife
I went to see the first movie in the series and found it absolutely stultifying. I was unhappy that I'd wasted my time sitting through it.
Me too. But to be honest I felt the same about the book
Never read it!
If you love a book, don't ever watch the movie adaption.
I made the mistake to watch the first of the LOT triologies, and it ruined the books for years.
I don't think it was a particular bad movie (it wasn't very good either), but the problem is that the books and the characters live in your imagination, and the movie forces them out of your imagination and become jvery different, two dimensional people.
Only watch movies of bad books.
No one can take away my teenage conception of Strider from me, lo this very many years. I guess that's because I knew he looked like the father from the family next door. Viggo Mortensen just couldn't compete with that quiet strength.
It is even worse for the characters you identify with yourself, e.g. Frodo or Sam.
And the elves, whose aethereal beauty you imagine like in a dream.
And then in the movie they are just good looking people with big ears. And your dreams vanish.
There are people who identify with Frodo?
Movies are never better and usually infinitely worse than the book. I am in fear and trepidation when the vandals try to make a movie of a great book. Why do scriptwriters think they are better than authors? Why do authored go along with vandalism?
"Why do authors go along with vandalism?"
Frequently they're very upset by the movie depiction of their works, and sometimes vow never to let Hollywood touch their material again.
But mostly they like the money.
Often, the author signs away the rights to adaptations of their work in order to get published in the first place. Since you don't know if your novel will be a hit, it seems an easy choice to make in exchange for a bit more dosh in hand when signing.
Also, far few creatives bother with the expense of hiring a contract lawyer/attorney/solicitor when signing or negotiating. British comics writer Alan Moore and his DC odyssey in the US being a prime example of why that is folly.
100%
Me, too. But what I'd really like is to read to the very end of this book, to find out the parts that haven't happened to us yet. Perhaps the Councillors notice that a certain group of people have contributed more to science, art, technology, and just plain good deeds than other groups, which is very unfair to the groups that haven't had time to make as many scientific discoveries and do as many good deeds, so they will burn the entire population of good-deeders, up to 95% of the populations of some villages, thereby creating a paradise on earth.
That's Animal Farm. Unlike the film, the pigs remain in control and the animals are still in drudgery and despair. The moral I guess is don't get new leaders, just dump the lot. 😉
A little bit exaggerated, but in essence that is what happened under the Bolsheviks and Chairman Mao's Red Guards.
The importation of mercenaries can be an Imperial strength, not a weakness . The British have been using - e.g. Fijian and Nepalese mercenaries since forever, and one benefit is that we have some first class Nepalese restaurants to enjoy. The French foreign legion is legend. The Romans managed their empire almost entirely using foreign legions - they ruled my part of Scotland with Syrian troops - and I have little doubt that Syrian genes are still bouncing around here. So what?
1) Mercenaries are a tool of empires. If your country regularly employs mercenaries, you are living in an empire.
2) Mercenaries allow the rulers to fight wars that their citizens may not approve of.
3) Mercenaries allow the rulers to use the military agianst the population where native or citizen-soldiers would refuse.
4) Mercenaries, when relied on too heavily, can become a political power in their own right, possibly even seizing power, for example, Goths and Mamluks.
Hessians - American Revolutionary War. How did they get paid? Qui bono?
Is this an exception - an anti-empire mercenary?
No, the Hessians fought for the British Empire. Knowing the British, the Hessian mercenaries were probably paid by the taxes levied on the colonists. Britian had ties to Hessen, Saxony, and Hannover through the House of Hannover. George the 1st was the Elector of Hannover (Germany) and became king after the death of Queen Anne, who was childless. The colonists were too cash-strapped to hire mercenaries. Most of the Europeans who helped the colonists were volunteers who were paid a token wage.
Generally not a problem for centuries past, but the idiot voters banned pitchforks, so they deserve to be conquered.
Those who seed the wind, they will reap the whirlwind.
I’m still hoping there’s some story book ending, where the villagers gather all the new Mayors of the valleys and deem them witches - and it ends with a massive fiery end. Sometimes a medium sized fire can also do some good in the meantime, I guess.
I would prefer a Peter and the Wolf scenario where after all this shrieking about the terrors gonna come and eat us, they all get et themselves while we've returned to our carefree gamboling in the cow-fertilized meadows .
In the version my grandma told us, Peter cries wolf until the villagers are so fed up they tie him to a tree in the forest for the wolf to eat.
Then they pick a new boy to watch the sheep.
The End.
Hmmm.
I wonder if our grandmas were related?
Yeah you two are definitely "freak" accidents!..
:)
I resemble that remark!
If I'd been able to trade my paternal grandma for yours...
Never doubt the cleansing power of a good hot fire....
I am more partial to tars and feathers and rope, but , alas, I'd take the burning. 10/10, would buy again.
I'm talking blow torches and pliers...and maybe a sawzall
Start here:
Dear Mr. / Madam School Board Trustee
I write to you today in a sincere effort to help you accomplish your noble goals for seeking this office.
That is to help you facilitate the betterment of our schools for our children and young people.
To do this, I ask you to make the Board meeting agenda and the data points behind them available to me as well as all of the other taxpayers.
Upload the stack to a server where we can read, ratify and or annul the elements after log on.
In a perfect world each paragraph must have at least three possible answers: agree, disagree, no opinion at this time.
Direct democracy is a growing trend, and many companies offer these services:
hosting, voter receipts, and a running tally of totals for everyone to see.
In this way Madam Trustee you are assured that you will always have the strength of the community with you when making the decisions that really do effect the lives of our people.
Vty,
Helpful Taxpayer Citizen
Hosting Companies:
https://teletownhall.com/products/text-to-online-surveys/
https://publicinput.com/wp/online-town-hall/
https://www.govtech.com/archive/introducing-the-21st-century-city-hall.html
That sounds similar to how the House of Commons and House of Lords started. Commons was for the common folk to go to and rein in the Lords. I'm guessing back then it was the journeying to London that made it unworkable so we ended up with picking a local representative and got the government instead.
Though the way their minds work they'd probably already foreseen that.
Ok, so what is your plan?
Well, more than a big well, if we could get the majority to give all of parliament a vote of no confidence that means by law they're all out. Parliament has to be dissolved.
I suppose then we could claim back the original plan that democracy was brought in on.
I did say it sounds similar to how it was originally meant to be and I honestly think I like yours, so long as they leave the Internet working . It's more geeing the people up to want to do something about it.
If I may suggest, try my letter, copy, paste and sent it to the personalities on the local school board or city council...
Something is better than nothing.
For sure, I completely agree with you.
I'm hanging on to that hope as well!!
Great truths wrapped in a wonderful read for a Sunday.
Abolish the EU. Abolish the UN & its WHO.
Abolish NATO, or at least get us out of it.
YESSS!!
Fabulous! 10/10. Awaiting the picture book release. :) :)
Illustrated by the ghost of Maurice Sendak.
Eugyppius sure knows his Hoppe...
Wonderful parable. And such common sense observations in this story. I'd go even further and note that the original Lord, at some point, earned his lands by achievement and family/tribal consent and not be extraction and conquest. And his entire ideology was one of service to his wards by virtue of universal accountability before God.
One of the reasons I admire the Latin Mass is that pastors face the altar during the Eucharistic prayers, rather than the people. It's a beautiful relic of how the entire West was once oriented in better times.
"... the original Lord, at some point, earned his lands by achievement and family/tribal consent ..."
Not usually. In places like Ireland and Scottland yes, but in the rest of Europe it was all about conquest from the time Ceasar conquered Gaul.
The bane of feudal lords was peasant uprisings. Too many of those ate up your resources, and you would probably lose your liege lord's confidence, because ultimately, they were HIS resources.
In the Christian Community service, the priest also faces the altar.
I'm coming to the conclusion that Plato was right all along. A monarchy with a virtuous king is the best form of government. Since it impossible to have a virtuous king, a "best" form of government is impossible. It will always cycle from tyranny to anarchy. I guess the best one can hope for is to be born in the middle of the cycle.
I'd rather be born into pure anarchy. The best government is no government.
Why is virtue impossible in a king? It's not guaranteed, but surely it's at least possible.
It’s not impossible it’s just extremely rare. When an individual is put into a position of authority a virus begins to eat the part of their brain that controls arrogance. They began to believe that they are set apart for greatness because of some intrinsic quality they always knew they posessed. Leaders need to be innoculated against this virus by suffering some drastic setback in their early life. Or possibly term limits. Remove them from the office before it eats their brain entirely. I could give examples but I doubt the necessity.
On the flip side, a term limit serves as incentive for the temporary king to enrich himself in the most gluttonous way possible as quickly as he can keep his hand in the till. At least a hereditary king might have some consideration for his *son's* kingdom.
Not that I'm advocating for that.
Generally, it's all terrible. I don't know what to do about it. I just want to be left alone. I'm willing to pay the price of leaving others alone in turn for that. But very few people seem to have that desire. :-/
Or maybe if the citizens would simply withdrawal consent.
Seems everyone forgot that in the US.
Examples could not prove extreme rarity anyway. You are suggesting that the selection is the problem - hereditary monarchy is not ideal, neither would be electing our kings.
How about we select our king at random from among the first 500 names in the Boston telephone directory?
I insist we at least use a nationwide randomization. I get what you're saying buy I can just about guarantee that random citizens of Boston do not understand the issues that face New Mexico. To be fair, I don't understand the issues that face them either, other than that they suffer from crippling levels of humidity. ;)
Granted, I also agree with your position regarding anarchy. And truly "anarchy" and not merely "chaos".
Having a lottery instead of elections would be the second-most democratic way of selecting parliaments and presidents/kings.
Also, it would be fully representative of the nation's demography.
It's an idea I've been toying with and also have been giving serious consideration for a decade or so now; problem no. 1 is of course that none in power today - private or governement - stand to gain from it, so there's zero chance of any support from any such group, party or whatever.
Still, ideas are unthinkable until suddently they are reality.
Being relatively 'democratic' is not necessarily a good thing. Democracy has turned out to have some extremely bad results. A lottery might well do better.
Thank you. Of course it's possible, just highly unlikely, and hence the poster's preference for anarchy.
Even if the king is virtuous, what about all his underlings?
One man cannot possibly be on top of all matters everywhere all the time, and what is done in the name of the king is - to the subject - tantamount to the king doing it.
And since the only way for the subject to get a message to the king is via the king's underlings. . .
I think the same solution applies to both Lords and Liberation Mayors. The government should *do* less.
The proper thing for the villagers to have done after they used their torches and pitchforks to roust the old Lord was not to install a new one to collect the bridge tolls. It would have been for them to declare that there weren't going to *be* bridge tolls any longer. For the villagers to get together themselves, and figure out what was needed in order to repair the bridge, and pitch in from the surplus they had which was no longer being seized by a Lord.
And this is even *more* the case in modern society where the majority of people aren't engaged in slightly-above subsistence farming.
The reason people try to hard to buy politicians is because owning one is worth so much more than one pays. If the government has less power, it's less worth controlling, and less dangerous to *not* control it.
War story: Long ago, when I was 11 or 12, a late spring thaw, accompanied by a massive rain storm, washed out several bridges on county roads in our chunk of paradise. So after church, a bunch of the local ranchers, farmers, and loggers got together and figured out, in about an hour, who could contribute what. Like equipment, timbers, planks, hardware and a few dozen loads of gravel. Later that week, most of them took a couple of days off, and re-built all three bridges.
The loggers could get to work. Folks could get to town. The school buses only missed one day,
The following week, the County send engineers to "survey the damage". The intent was to assess the original flood damage. Months of "you can't do that" hysteria ensued.
But we kept driving on those roads. Over those bridges. For years.
I could list similar if less dramatic examples.
But sadly, while it occassionally works out as you describe, the instances it doesn't far outweighs the good. Same as with charity vs welfare, really.
It is of course highly dependent on what example we pick to study.
What I see as one of the underlying problems is, the state now instead of being practical about practical matters is instead value-based, seeing everything as normative matters or as matters of faith.
Which is akin to praying for a severed artery to clot, really.
When I was logging we would occasionally need a bridge across a creek or stream. Usually we could go from nothing to driving a vehicle across in 6 or 8 hours using trees in the area. With no engineering the bridge would support 200000 pounds. They would last 15 to 20 years in southern Alaska.
Yes. And if one or two ambitious villagers decided to invest their own capital and labor in bridge maintenance and ownership, maybe even incorporating and selling shares to other villagers, that wouldn't be a bad thing either.
Yes.
My go-to example is garbage collection.
In a city of a million or more, it doesn't make sense for everyone to take it to the dump under their own cognizance and power (we know from history how that plays out - the walls of Medieval Paris sometimes had so much feces and filth piled up outside you could step off the wall onto the crap). Therefore, some collective system must be organised.
In the country-side, where everyone and their mother owns a pick-up or similar plus a trailer or something similar, people can do it under their own power and/or organise it locally.
All the state or its local eq. has to do is provide a dumping are where trash is collected, sorted and handled properly. This can easily be combined with some kind of area for people who like to make things out of junk (like me - bias-alert!) to scrounge from. Spoke to a CNC-workshop in town the other week about the stack of empyt boxes they had out back. 360cm long, 40*60, inch-thick planks. Just laying there. They were happy I offered to haul them away for them - those planks will become a lot of things.
The only thing the state is needed for in this scenario is stand-offish oversight. Because there will always be alzy assholes who dump their old car batteries in the bin marked "Burnables" unless someone keeps tabs on them.
If you see what I mean (not sure I do myself, sometimes)?
I would say the State is needed for none of those things. A private landowner can sell land to a dump operator, or become a dump operator. States have proven utterly incapable of 'stand-offish oversight', but a private corporation could be more successful.
Sadly, history has shown (or rather: private business has) that that doesn't work better, or at all.
And that's before going into how private capital has never hesitated from despoiling and poisoning the environment, even if the property in question was privately owned.
Recall Chesterton's words about the rich and the poor in "The man who was Thursday": only the poor really has a stake in the country (nation, my note).
The rich can simply leave and go live elsewhere.
Have you not noticed - there is current world-wide shortage of underlings willing to acknowledge the very existence of the peasants, let alone intercede with their lords and masters on our behalf.
Bingo
Well, it was just a throw away comment on a blog, not meant as a dissertation. Maybe our host will take up the debate, as there is surely one to be had.
You say you would prefer anarchy, but having never lived in one, I think you fantasize; overestimating the good and minimizing the bad. How much of your day is simplified by trust? When you put fuel in your vehicle, do you measure it to see that you got the amount they pump says? Do you perform chemical analysis on your groceries to see if you actually get what you think you're getting? Do you barter or use cash?
Anarchy is survivable but a horrible way to live.
Okay, okay, virtue is of course possible in a king, but extremely unlikely. You said you'd prefer anarchy. Why, if you believe in just kings?
You underestimate anarchy. Government is not the only means to enable trust, it is in fact a very poor way. Private, non-government entities are better capable of fuel certification, grocery rating and currency management. You only think these things must be done by government because you have lived too long under a government, as have we all. Anarchy - or call it liberty, if you prefer - is a great way to live, though I admit I have not seen much of it in the world lately.
My question on kings was just a question, not any kind of endorsement of the virtue of kings. I believe people are generally terrible, and kings are no better than other people. I was just curious about the idea that it's "impossible" to have a virtuous king. I think we can agree on "unlikely".
Haha, we don't know each other so you make inaccurate assumptions. I would sooner trust you than government. I'm under no illusion that government performs these functions even adequately, let alone best. But if you're talking about private groups doing these functions, you're not talking about anarchy, you're taking about small, limited government. See my comment below about what I believe to be the best form of government. I'm sure we agree on more than we disagree, it's just hard to get context from these limited comments.
Yes, it seems we largely agree. But I am indeed talking about anarchy, or absence of government, since the private entities performing useful functions would not be government agencies. That is, they would lack the key property of government - monopoly on violence, or monopoly on the legal use of force. In my example, no "small, limited government" exists.
Ok, playing devil's advocate. Does a mother and father have the legal use of force in your anarchy? Can I discipline my children with force? Is it proper to teach them to use force to get them to obey me sometimes? Do they share the use of force so as to eat candy all day if that's what they want, so as to avoid monopoly on force? Is a family a "private entity performing useful functions"? If you are a small child subject to those "useful functions", does it matter to you as that small child that it is not "government agencies" with no "monopoly"? Surely you can just leave and go somewhere else where conditions are better, right?
I would argue the best government is when individual men govern themselves individually. I believe in absolute freedom of speech, but I also believe some speech should be curtailed. How to reconcile? I should be the one curtailing my own speech. There are some things I think, but would never say. If you are honest, you'll admit the same.
Eugyppius, thank you so much for this wonderful post. Even though there is no happy ending to the fable, it proclaims the truth and gave me much pleasure to read.
Very apt. I did not know about a new law in the UK until I read about it yesterday. All cats have to have a subcutaneous identification tag, I assume RFID. There will be a central database of cats. There is a fine of £500 if your cat is not done. The 'reason' is so that people who lose their precious pets will be able to identify if found. I have no problem with anyone fitting a tag if that is what they want but to require it of everyone seems insane. Fortunately I don’t have a cat. Maybe it is an experiment before requiring all citizens to be tagged by law.
It's not my cat your Honour. It was just loitering on my property for a few years. Perfect defence. Cat 1 Government 0.
Think about Julian Assange and you will see not so.
All inmates at Auschwitz in the 1940s were tattooed with their humeric identification. All citizens now are identifiable by numbers as well: social insurance numbers, health insurance numbers, credit card numbers, driver's licence number, bank account numbers, and far too many others to count them all. These are mostly required of everyone in a modern society. We may not like it, but it's already been done.
True, and facial recognition will tie it all together. However, being chipped would make us branded slaves, which seems to be the plan. We have to know our place.
It is difficult to discern whether or not there is a coherent plan. Certainly the lunatics of the WEF want there to be one. Hitler had a plan, Stalin had a plan, Mao had a plan. That doesn't mean that any of them were viable or practical. Also please note that all of the above-named ended in disaster for themselves and their regimes. Socialism wants everything planned but is invariably ruinously bad at either developing a coherent plan or implementing it. They always fail. This was glaringly evident for anyone like me who saw parts of the former Warsaw Pact nations immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The mismanagement of EVERYTHING was stunning.
We were warned about all this in the novel 1984 by George Orwell. A former devotee of socialism, Orwell had discovered just how vile it was. To which we can add, Big Brother is without exception stunningly stupid. It misunderstands basic human nature completely. All of the assorted utopias of Socialism - Plato's Republic, Thomas More's Utopia, Marx's Proletariat Republic, Hitler's Autarky - are all perfect replicas of Hell in its most brutal, savage, painful forms. Freedom does not exist; happiness does not exist. Everything is devoted solely to the State.
So being warned of the outcomes, no sane person wants any Socialist utopia if you have a choice. The whole point of Socialism is to take away any free choice you might have about anything.
Scary
If you took the injections you already let them in. There will be a record of your obedience. Most of the herd willingly participated because they were told that they would otherwise die. It doesn't take much to fool.the herd.
So you despise everyone who trusted government and their doctors? Your attitude is betrayed by your use of the word "herd". That is precisely how socialists show their contempt for most people.
Despise is not the word. Despair is more like it, but then the herd will do what herds do.
I think the original idea, since semi-feral cats spread diseases and parasites to humans, not to mention how they massacre small birds and other smaller animals for sport, is to be able to trap and kill said semi-feral cats.
Which is why a quick-and-easy way to identify if the cat in trap is ok to kill is needed.
Also, for insurance-reasons. With the cat tagged, it is much easier to track the spread of diseases and such when cats are brought to the vet. Just blip it and enter into the on-line file what ails it.
Obviously, any such system can be abused, and equally obviously there is a perfectly valid arguement to be made that such systems serve to ease us into accepting the same for humans, at some point in the future.
There'll be no push for such a law for humans, until enough of the citizenry is judged to be in favour of such, perhaps even in demand of it. Therefore, such demand must be created which takes decades (but as that process started in the 1990s, we are nearing implementation if my speculation is true) and must feel natural: the two most obvious vectors that will be used (excepting convicts) is children with disabilities and certain diseases or conditions (epilepsy, autism, et c) and elders suffering from Alzheimers and such. What a great boon to nurses and care-takers, what a great relief for family to know that their loved one can easily be tracked down and found and made safe in case they wander off, is the selling point.
Sorry for a bit of a wall-of-text, but how ideas become/are made into reality is something of an old hobby-horse with me, so the urge to butt in on any conversation of such is almost a compulsion.
Very good analysis, much appreciated. For me, resources are always limited so how do you use them? How many people are there to catch feral cats? We have roads with unrepaired pot holes damaging vehicles. We have poor housing causing bad health, real diseases. There are hundreds of other infrastructure problems. On the other side we are building wind turbines that kill birds and off shore kill marine animals. Etc.
Thank you - I'm of the same mind re: practical matters is what matters, as resources are always limited (the original meaning of economy was indeed "how to make use of limited resources without using them up").
Elsewhere in this comment thread I mentioned in some other tangent that a major problem of modern-day governements, including the whole of civil/civic services in the term, is a focus on value-measurements, on normative matters that are more faith-based than reality-based.
Not a slur on faith, but when you have a a ruptured artery in your wrist, you don't pray for it to clot; you tie it off and get to the ER soon as you can.
There are many explanations for it. I'm very partial to explaining it as a lack of life-experience leading to no maturity coupled with never having to suffer any actual consequences of your values/actions.
A go-to example I've used when debating early release of sexual predators (pedos esp.) here is this:
The psychiatrist singing off on that the criminal is now safe to have out and about, should have the criminal in question live in-house with the psychiatrist, who will pay for the criminal's food, wifi, bus pass and other sundry day-to-day minor expenses. For a year.
There's no real way around that arguement.
Refuse, and the psychiatrist has just proven that he has no confidence in his own diagnosis/judgment. And then why should anyone else have confidence in it/him releasing criminals onto the population?
It works the same way with any practical matter. If wind power is so good, then why no rush by companies if there's no tax funding? Conversely, if it's paid by taxes, why should it be privately owned at all?
Politicians and their court of mandarins-cum-economists hate reality I think.
Governments are designed to be corrupt, look no further than the Bible, God's word explains it well for all of life's issues!
What a clever way to deliver a message E. You just keep getting better man!
Yes, he does.
"Which is better - to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away or by three thousand tyrants one mile away?"
Where is King George when we really need him?
One tyrant.
Easier to eliminate.
Just be careful what you replace him with. We eliminated King George, and now look at the mess we're in.
Yes, but we are now ruled by three thousand tyrants three thousand miles away.
This. Though hell, if it were *only* 3,000 tyrants... I'm sure it's far worse than that.
Must've been some Freudian message, that blue flag with the gold stars at the end ... :-) As Churchill once observed, "Democracy is the worst form of government ...except for all the rest." If one looks back at history, one can see that what we see transpiring today is merely the modern version of an age-old cycle that started with the rule of the ancient Mediterranean world by kings, morphed into the Roman Republic for 400 years, then crashed into the autocracy of the empire, which lasted only another 400 years (and bloody, disastrous years, at that). Then an interregnum of a thousand years before humanity set about re-inventing the democratic/republic wheel ... and the process begins all over again. Stand by for the crash of the "second Roman Republic" (i.e., Europe and North America)...
LIKE
A government more representative and responsible? On what planet? No mater how far the pendulum swings in our favor, government will always be a master-slave relationship.
In true reality, a government could never represent every citizen nor would it ever be responsible for its actions. Responsibility means that you must accept the fact that you will be wrong much of the time.
What politician will give up their power and arrpogance to accept that type of responsibility? Government is the dumbest entity on the planet because it represents nothing but itself, 110% of the time. That is why the only way it can exist is to be shrouded in lies and propaganda. The citizen must never know that government is 95% flawed and irrational.
The best way to ensure that government behaves well is the threat of revolt. In front of every government building should be buckets of tar, bags of feathers, and a gallows to make sure every over-reaching politician know their potential fate. It also helps to have a sadistic segment of society always itching to use these, and muckrakers to keep the government honest. A paranoid government is an honest government.
"People should not fear their governments. Governments should fear their people." - V in V for Victory.
This was expressed first by Thomas Jefferson. "When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny."
Quite right. I think this should be done in all public institutions. For example, in every teachers lounge, there should be a large poster with a severely beaten prisoner and the caption "This is what happens to Pediphiles in Prison".
Some nerve, publishing this in the middle of WitchPaganDruid+ Pride Month
😂🤣