These interviews are really interesting! I’m going to have to go and read the book now.

Only three, huh? And people say he can’t change.

🖖

If us Star Trek nerds can’t get our facts straight, what hope for humanity?

Measure of a Man is season 2!

No, we understand. In fact, if anything it’s easier if you say soccer! If someone with an American accent says ‘football’ I normally assume they mean gridiron, so sayings soccer is actually a little clearer.

Of course, in different parts of the world, ‘football’ might mean rugby (either union or league), Gaelic football or Aussie rules football. So, the potential for confusion is pretty wide!

Yeah, that’s fair enough. Similar to Foucault’s critique, IIRC.

Fair enough. Sounds like you favour the idea of human rights but disagree on some specific conceptions of exactly what those rights are?

Right, it’s like when people try to justify colonialism. Would they be okay with their country being conquered and turned into a colony? No? Okay, so we’ve established colonialism is wrong. Everything after that is increasingly ludicrous special pleading. ‘Oh, but country X was more economically developed, so it was okay,’ is only a consistent argument if you actually go on to say ‘… and that’s why it would be a good thing if South Korea conquered Italy.’

There are also specific articles in the universal declaration of human rights that I think are wrong

Do you mind saying which ones?

Normally, to be honest, it’s because they want to hurt someone. Look at the Conservatives in the UK, who are desperate to repeal human rights legislation so that they can send refugees to Rwanda without right of appeal.

Note that those Conservatives still think that they have human rights. Their excuse for depriving refugees of human rights is that some of them have entered the country illegally. Yet, none of them thinks any Conservative MP should be detained arbitrarily or deported, even though they now acknowledge that they, their government and their party have broken the law in various ways. No, they want to strip rights from other people. Their argument doesn’t wash.

A few people here have pointed this out already, but people have thought the End was pretty Nigh for about as long as we’ve been thinking about things.

Other people are countering this point by saying, ‘Ah, but this time it’s real!’ which doesn’t prove anything. People thought it was real all those previous times (the ecological collapse on Easter Island, or the Bronze Age collapse, or the Roman Civil Wars, or the Black Death, or the French Revolution or the Cold War etc.) and not many of them killed themselves or joined suicide cults, so why would people act differently now?

This isn’t to be pollyannaish about things. All the examples I gave above really did kill huge numbers of people and the Cold War in particular really could’ve caused the collapse of modern civilisation (if a nuclear war had broken out). Climate change, war and resurgent fascism are truly huge problems. I just don’t think the particular example of suicide cults is a very likely development.

Lots of good suggestions here, including the difficulty in communicating inherent to being in a car.

I think another important factor is that driving itself is stressful. Surveys of commuters consistently show that people who walk or cycle have the highest satisfaction with their commute, while motorists ranks somewhere from the middle to the bottom (i.e., either ahead of or behind people who use public transport), depending on the study.

When you put people in a stressful situation where it’s difficult to communicate, inevitably some people lose their temper.

What you’re describing here (and in the thread below) sounds a bit like technocracy, so you might be interested in reading about the Technocracy Movement.

There aren’t any, because if there were, there would be good totalitarianisms.

I partially addressed the ‘fast decisions’ myth above in my comments about efficiency and in more detail here.

It’s not true that decisions can’t be made quickly by democratic governments. There are truly thousands of counter examples, but to take a single one, in the COVID-19 pandemic, many democratic governments took rapid decisions. Some of these decisions turned out badly and some well, which provides a second stumbling block to your thesis: decisions taken quickly can be bad as well as good.

Secondly, it’s not true that totalitarian regimes act quickly. There’s a governmental bottleneck of the ruler and his clique. If they’re not paying attention to a given issue at a given time, decisions can’t be taken at all, making for less efficient governance. And, in practice, such decisions as are taken are often not implemented: you end up with rune-reading and kremlinology by officials trying to work out what an order ‘really’ meant, or whether it really was an order, because there’s no clear method for governing other than ‘Do what the leader said’.

I appreciate, by the way, that you’re making a devil’s advocate argument, here. Just wanted to explain why it’s wrong, as OP seems pretty disposed to believe the devil!

I can imagine an alternative, but the reality is that such an alternative has never arisen.

The imaginary ‘good’ version of totalitarianism, I assume, is one where there’s a ‘good’ dictator who is also so intelligent they’re able to run everything very efficiently, where everyone enjoys or at least accepts the dictatorship because everything gets better for everyone. But that’s a very odd utopian daydream. In reality, being a dictator and being good are mutually incompatible.

EDIT: Read this back and realised I’m describing the plot of Red Son!

There aren’t any.

Totalitarian regimes are fundamentally not a sensible way of organising society at any level, even if we for some reason decide to ignore the manifold human rights violations committed by totalitarian governments. There is a longheld belief that they are in some ways more ‘efficient’ than democracies (as expressed in the myth that ‘Mussolini made the trains run on time’ – he didn’t) but this isn’t true.

To take two obvious points of comparison, North Korea, the closest to a completely totalitarian regime of any country on Earth, is one of the poorest countries in the world. South Korea, a democracy, is one of the wealthiest.

So people say. I’m a bit sceptical about that origin story because fossils aren’t seashells and, as far as I remember, Mary Anning didn’t sell many of her fossils!

You’re right, I take it back.