This is fallacious because good governance, while related to the fitness of your nation, is not the only factor in it. A country with poor governance, but with nukes, will survive a nation with good governance, but no nukes. In fact, this actually happened in 1945 with the fall of the Empire of the Rising Sun. Indeed, there are numerous counter-examples.

Perhaps other reactionaries pine for the return of monarchy because they like the dress code, but so far as I can tell, it’s the best form of governance for unmodified humans, and probably modified humans as well, and I always advocate optimization.

3. Kant’s prose is, to say the least, an acquired taste, but since he’s the master key to intellectual modernity there’s no sustainable alternative to teeth-gritted perseverance. ‘Difficult writing’ is a complex topic — in large part it’s a matter of weird socio-cultural games, and power, but not in any straightforward way (necessarily). Language wasn’t engineered for edgy abstraction, so it’s naive to assume that clarity — or conformity — is always available as a choice. Sometimes language has to be tortured to reach places that it wasn’t built to reach — after all, mathematical notation does that, in one way (abandoning the traditional resources of ‘natural language’ as inadequate to its unprecedented purposes). But this isn’t to say that tides of sheer BS, or academic guild codes, aren’t often deciding things.

4. Two centuries! Come on … (that’s Space Opera)

3. Heuristically speaking, I’m always skeptical of people who have that much difficulty with basic clarity… but of course, that makes getting along in the philosophical world somewhat difficult, since there I’m expected to have at least something good to say about Kant. (Foucault, on the other hand, could communicate coherently, but didn’t; and Nietzsche was clear but difficult. In the analytic crowd I’ve seen, Rawls is opposed with Nozick, which is a lot like opposing the Democrats with the Republicans. Yes, let’s counter a liberal rationalist moralist with a liberal rationalist moralist! Yawn.)

4. That’s ideal, but we’re out of land. I like the idea of separatism (except when it looks like the separate political body, if formed, would fail suicidally to govern itself) but seasteading seems like it’ll be impractical for another century or two due to transportation problems.

(2) Adams is witty and smart, but Stephenson is truly deep.

(3) Thanks I’ll follow that up, and, of course … f%$k Rawls.

(4) Data, yes, and especially experimentation. This area (micro-state constitutional engineering) strikes me as a zone where futuristic AI-stuff could quickly find a home. Would people want to live somewhere with maximally-predictable public rules, policed by a robot army? I’d be at least intrigued …

Although the interesting thing is that these myths are much more resilient than one might think. No economically rational agent would ever vote. Casting a secret vote is mathematically irrelevant in all but the smallest elections. But people–even people who attack the myths of dead and dying cultures–not only vote, but think it’s reasonable to vote, and it just doesn’t register that it’s mathematically stupid.

2. Haven’t read him except Cryptonomicon (although I’ll get to the rest eventually!), but I’d nominate Douglas Adams. (Empirically speaking, he was probably right about Thursdays… and when you can get that level of detail…)

3. That is not so far outside the mainstream of analytic political philosophy as one might expect… Skinner and Pettit have been working on a ‘neo-Roman’ theory of freedom, at least. It still carries with it the characteristic analytic dysfunction of being so abstract that it’s difficult to see what can be done with it, but less so than, say, Rawls.

4. I’m not sure what to make of that. It could be that trying to work around the failure of algorithmic, engineered government with more engineering is trying to create societal immortality… but it could also be that the exceptions are part of the plan, and don’t really do anything (or are counterproductive, maybe?) in terms of societal longevity. More data is needed.

Certainly the British tradition has something to it that others don’t; Britain and its colonies flourished in ways that, say, France and its colonies never did; even today, the best-off countries in Africa are former British possessions that didn’t get killed by the international community the way Rhodesia did. (Seychelles did have a coup that installed a one-party socialist government, but it got results. For that matter, Libya under Gaddafi didn’t do so badly by some metrics IIRC… but now its corpse is spewing blood on the ceiling. Thanks, NATO!)

We know what libertarian rot is; what is republican rot? Expanding power of government driven by the twin forces of moral or financial panics and career-seeking Vogons? Lasch seems to think that’s a natural process, that all (communist or fascist, but it’s visible under liberalism too) governments evolve into massive regulatory bureaucracies. And it’s not impossible that there are crises when government intervention is legitimately needed; but organizations, once formed, are driven by the iron law of inertia to find a purpose even if they shouldn’t have one. The Romans had a solution: an institutional out, in the form of a temporary dictator–but how can dictators be kept temporary?