Also, those expecting to renegotiate a good trade deal are out of their minds: The UK has no trade negotiators. They all work for the EU.
]]>I can't recall where I first saw the idea posed that militias have already lost due to a failure to imagine that economics and finance can be used violently.
]]>Did you really miss the development of Kibou-daini society around the political idea that if you have state corporatism and citizenship is a share in the state corporation then voting should be proxy-able? That drives the game of "What business am I really incentivized to be in?" and in that sense cryostasis is a macguffin since the companies are really in the business of acquiring proxy votes. Companies don't have to lobby/bribe government since they can explicitly have a vote that weighs more than others, and hilarity ensues.
I will grant you that Beta is kind of a Mary Sue of societies, but even there you get the tyranny of progressivism. There is also a "planet of hats" problem, but there are plenty of hats to go around, e.g. the libertarian paradise of Jacksons Whole, the (near) elimination of women from a reproductive society on Athos, etc.
I suppose that if you don't consider political science and economics to be science then you might claim that speculation in those fields is not SF.
However, in general my position on people who use phases like "not even SF" is not printable among polite company.
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