More seriously, can someone steel-man the case for executive power being less effective if subject to future evaluations and constraints?
I don't think I've ever looked at any singular leader of any organization and thought "the problem is they can't do what they want easily enough"
When I was younger I might have said that the director of a film or play can do better work if they are an unquestioned dictator... but I've grown to even reject that idea.
@futurebird I don't wanna make the case for it because I don't believe it... but it's a common belief among people who want BIG THINGS to get done. Huge infrastructure projects, decarbonization of the economy, space colonization, whatever. It would all be so much easier if there were a single leader with a vision and nothing in the leader's way. No red tape, no checks and balances to navigate.
Of course all that depends on the leader being right all the time. It's also how you get big mistakes and big atrocities.
Donald Trump tries his damnedest to present as that kind of guy. Look at all the skyscrapers with his name on them! Remember how it was always Infrastructure Week? His attempts to brand the COVID vaccine as his creation, and his fuming resentment when it didn't really work? The interesting thing is that if you're the President, it's also kind of contrary to the alleged conservative preference for a government that doesn't do much.
@futurebird I've followed science-fiction and space fandom for a long time and for some in that subculture, there's a disturbing note of yearning for human sacrifice. The idea that the reason we haven't expanded massively into the solar system like in old science fiction stories is that we have too much of a safety culture and aren't tolerant enough of people getting killed. I think it's kind of the same idea, that can-do spirit requires a lack of constraint, even neglecting some elements of basic human decency.
@futurebird I've also noticed that in stories about, say, China building out high-speed rail projects, there's often this subtextual note of "man, imagine what we could do if we were just controlled by a Xi Jinping who could make anything happen by saying a word."
@mattmcirvin@futurebird The annoying thing is that China's infrastructure buildout is utterly ordinary. It's what a Western European country would do if it were that large or what the US would do if it could build; they have environmental reviews, business cases, noise regulations, and everything else that infrastructure entails.
@oldgeek@mattmcirvin@futurebird China's high-speed rail network is safer than Germany's and I think also safer than Europe's in the aggregate. Nobody thinks that Germany's infrastructure is shoddy because of the Eschede crash, so why should anyone say the same about China over Wenzhou?
It's especially odd in Europe. I would love a functioning high-speed rail network spanning the continent like China has, but it's the lack of unified rules and standards that makes this difficult.
Perhaps a strong European leadership could cut through the red tape, but that's exactly what all the authoritarian parties over here abhor.
@pbloem@mattmcirvin@futurebird Yeah, exactly. The reason we don't have this network Europe-wide is that the EU is neither authoritarian nor democratic; it's not really a state. (And likewise, nation-states that have weak governments that are neither really democratic nor authoritarian have really bad rail infrastructure - look at Thailand or Indonesia or the Philippines and despair.)
@pbloem@Alon@futurebird The European passenger rail situation looks like utopia from a US perspective.
But the US has a titanic public passenger transport infrastructure, which despite our bellyaching is generally kept in good shape--it's just that we bet on it being freeways for automobiles back in the 1950s, and we have an ongoing commitment to that choice. For a lot of reasons (the environment, economic fairness, vulnerability to oil shocks, basic functioning at rush hour) it wasn't the best choice, but from the perspective of the Eisenhower administration that wasn't obvious.
@mattmcirvin@pbloem@futurebird Weak states generally are more car-oriented (again, look at non-Singapore Southeast Asia). Cars are driven by wealthier people, especially in developing countries, so if the state is weak, local elites step in and can widen roads one section at a time, without much coordination. Those local elites also look down on alternatives like public transit. Much of the US's car culture was created by WASP snobs who fled Jewish cities, a generation before white flight.
@Alon@pbloem@futurebird The US made the choice at what was probably the apex of the centralized US state. But there was a Cold War ideological angle to it, I think--personal automobiles as the capitalist individualist choice. Our conservatives insist that trains are Commie transport to this day.
@mattmcirvin@pbloem@futurebird Sort of. The technocrats even then were worried about the effect on the rail network; Thomas MacDonald wanted to rebalance investment toward both cars and trains (which is what Western Europe would do from the 1950s on), for which Eisenhower had him fired. The biggest household name in cars-only investment, Robert Moses, was a political operator and disdained professional planners. Then there were the already high construction costs, dooming Second Avenue Subway.
There are no upsides to consider with dictators unless YOU are the dictator or you are maybe a member of his family? (but even than are you really safe)
And no, the Nazi's didn't "build the Autobahn" or "make great scientific advancement" nor did the trains run on time to the south ... much of it didn't happen, and the little that did was in spite of a surrender to absolute ugly power.
@mattmcirvin@futurebird
1/2
yes, this is a major reason for my disillusionment with a genre I previously loved.
they look back, see that European expansion into the Americas, Africa, Australia, and Asia was built on rabid attacks on basic human decency, and think, ok, so that's what is needed for space expansion.
@apophis@futurebird@llewelly The difference between 20th-century American and British science fiction is that the American genre was playing on Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis and the British genre was working through the decline and critique of a colonial empire.
(Americans such as Asimov and George Lucas did sometimes do Edward Gibbon with the serial numbers filed off... but Asimov's characters all assume that a Second Empire would be a fine and feasible goal to work toward, and Lucas drops us onto the Western Planet in the first act.)
@mattmcirvin@apophis@futurebird@llewelly In that sense, of course, Warhammer 40,000 is a post-colonial critique (and satire of Thatcherism) that sometimes forgets its purpose. (Setting creator Rick Priestly has a degree in Archaeology and History, btw.)
@apophis@futurebird@llewelly What they had in common was that they were both becoming literary and screen genres during a period when transportation tech was having a Moore's Law-like explosion, so it was interesting to imagine what that would look like continued indefinitely. Nobody predicted that the exponential would just top out in a logistic way around 1970.
@mattmcirvin@apophis@futurebird
I recall a few, like Brunner, who seemed highly skeptical of space travel in their fiction, and LeGuin, who found space travel a useful device, but seemed to think it wasn't practical in the real world (as well as a few astronomers like Bob Park). But overal: not very many people expected it to behave like a logistic curve.
@llewelly@apophis@futurebird Some years ago, James Nicoll reviewed a 1970s Co-Evolution Quarterly issue that was all about space colonization--it had a lot of perspectives pro and con, including some people who thought the idea was an abomination. But even the people who hated it had a fatalistic idea that something like this was bound to happen, sooner than we think--they just didn't approve. And in hindsight, that was a point when development was already slowing down.
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