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Comment Threads

• Charlie Stross commented on Make it stop!
  By accident, we have a Head of State whose family starts training for the role in childhood, and who are rich enough to be incorruptible. There's no accident about it -- that kind of training has been SOP for monarchs-in-waiting since the early 19th century, if not before. Despite which, it doesn't stop such fuck-ups as Wilhelm II of Germany from happening. (If anything, making it a lifetime hereditary office makes it harder to remove them.) As for "rich enough to be incorruptible" I am sadly unconvinced that there is any such state....
• bjacques commented on Make it stop!
  There's still some good eatin' on this thread. My countryman Mark Twain chewed this one over roughly a hundred years ago. From living here in the Netherlands and also observing the doings across La Manche, I gather that royals raised to expensive tastes but subsisting on small allowances can be trouble. Randy Andy's already been bandied about, but over here it's hard to beat the late Prince Bernhard. Bernhard, aka "Agent Orange," was a bit Nazi-friendly until the war (which was very short for the Dutch). In the 1950s he made time with Evita Peron, giving her some nice pieces...
• Greg. Tingey commented on Make it stop!
  @ 116 "1776 took care of Kings" Actually it took care of the amazingly incompetent Guvmint of Lord North. And, of course pushed the slave-owning aristocracy of the new USA well up the pile. Washington, and others, could quite well see the way the wind was blowing in the UK. The emancipation of slaves, and the banning of slave-trading, and ... could be well seen as coming real soon, even then. So, revolt to save your people-owning property rights! Some would say that the USA hasn't changed a bit since then. Didn't someone mention the vile Koch brothers? Charlie @...
• Charlie Stross commented on Make it stop!
  If it's one thing that the past 100 years has shown, it's that egalitarianism is -impossible-. Not just undesirable, but physically impossible to achieve; and that the attempt does absolutely nothing but pile up corpses. But there's a flip side to that lesson, which is that increasing inequality leads to increasing civil unrest. I'll agree that you can't achieve absolute equality: humans have a tendency to form social hierarchies and there'll always be winners and losers. However, when you have a situation that creates hyper-winners and a large mass of the dispossessed, you create pre-revolutionary conditions. That's what the Arab...
• Greg. Tingey commented on Make it stop!
  Both Charlie & S.M. Stirling: Equality of OPPURTUNITY is the phrase, I think? That people should be given a FAIR CHANCE, and not deliberately ground down. That failures "higher-up" the social/political scale NOT be covered-up, and allowed to get away with it. That criminals in charge should be treated as any other criminal. And so on....