It’s when you consider problems like air traffic control (ATC) on a busy continent that practical problems with libertarianism become apparent. It’s a tightly synchronized federated architecture (ie a network of locally centralized entities) that’s hard to “libertarianize”
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But there may be non-collapse clever pathways to achieve such transitions. We’re navigating one (energy) right now. The small problem is some are impatient and want to try blowing up what we have to redo the whole thing, taking a leap of faith that it’s NOT collapse complete.
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The BIG problem is that many believe such transitions ARE in fact unavoidably collapse complete and *still* want them. Effectively they want to bunker down with civilizational crown jewels/reboot plans, let us other 99% subhumans die off, and emerge from bat caves to rule in 2119
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These are awful people, but they do exist, do hold such views and serious power, and do in fact react with glee to progress in BTFSTTG (burn the fucking shit to the ground) plans. 200 years ago BTFSTTG was a silly dream. In 2019, it could actually be done (reboot not guaranteed)
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These are “Sometimes Going Galt needs a Donald Trump to clear the way” people. Aka Claremont conservatives operating with a “Flight 93” theology. A sort of “we must burn it all down to save it” mindset.https://www.claremont.org/crb/basicpage/the-flight-93-election/ …
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Now we technological pragmatists still want to get to nice decentralized future outcomes, but we want to muddle through, in a messy, constant “under construction” slouching-towards-utopia way. We don’t want to blow it all up. We don’t want to BTFSTTG along the way.
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This is why the shutdown concern me. This isn’t like previous shutdowns. This is a shutdown with a lot of BTFSTTG types in power. Their BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement) is collapse. Maybe not ATC, but they’d like to see a lot of stack realities collapse for good
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Sure the risk of a crash caused by a fatigued unpaid controller moonlighting driving Lyft, leading to a strike, is low. But I bet there’s BTFSTTG people thinking “we could use a gory crash to force privatization of ATC, on the road to automation and eventual elimination. Win!”
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Government shrinkage by starvation collapse —> privatize —> automate. Gut what you can, when you can to transition it to your utopian state via crash chaos. There’s people in power who actually want lots of things to break and not be fixed. Reaganomics but with violent sadism.
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This is why, though I actually share many libertarian and ancap end goals, I don’t identify as either. I think most of them fetishize technology in illiterate sci-fi ways, understand it in micro bits that makes them overconfident about macro things, and are basically sadists.
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Starting a slide towards a Hobbesian world because they think they can come out the other end as winners. Because they’re idiots who think because they’re rich, they must be smart. Because they like apocalypse movies, they must be like The Rock themselves.
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Am I overstating things? Well, here we are, talking about diverting actual disaster relief funds to build a symbolic wall and wondering if it will take an airplane crash to get governance back, by people who will then predictably exploit the tragedy to burn more things down.
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This is what lunatics running the asylum looks like. Not “move fast and break things” which could at least be justified as calibrated risk-taking. No, this is “deliberately break things and hurt/kill people to reboot things” sadistic playbook. Happy Day 34 of a shutdown world.
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End of conversation
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