God knows I love me a good dose of genre fiction, but I believe that if you're gonna base your entire worldview on fiction you should use something that's not second or third hand.
SCENE: a wind-blasted desert landscape. In the foreground, a weathered truck rests on the side of a ruined highway. The windscreen is dusty and cracked, and the tyres have long since rotted away.
A PAIR OF SCAVENGERS, clad in bulky rags, approach the truck with a mixture of excitement and trepidation.
Using a CROWBAR, they force open the back doors of the truck, and exclaim
Edit I found the time to read Didicosm and while it suffers from an Eganesque infodump (with diagrams!) it's not nearly as bad as the LWers are wittering on about. Part of me thinks they're mad because the main scientists are all women while the main dude is a stable, well-adjusted partner in the relationship.
Habryka @ LW takes a break from reinventing Western civilization from first Rat principles to advocate a RETVRN to incandescent lighting:
Eventually, in most of the western world outside of the US, incandescent lightbulbs were literally banned to promote energy saving policies.
This was the greatest uglification in history. Within two decades, much of the world that was previously filled with beautiful natural-feeling light started feeling alien, slightly off, and uncomfortable, and societal stigma around energy-saving policies prevented people from really doing anything about it.
If all you have is a blog, it's natural for you to think that you can effect regime change through blogging.
But there's a very large step between
blog a lot
???
absolute CEO-king
Culture matters. The US has had a de jure republic for almost 250 years. Even though the presidency has steadily moved to a more central role, it's one thing to have a literal KING in place. There needs to be a story there, and saying "we need to be more effective or the Chinese will win" doesn't really cut it.
It took France almost 100 years to finally establish republican rule: revolution, Directory, First Empire, Bourbon Restoration, Orleanist monarchy, Second Republic, coup, Second Empire, catastrophic military defeat, Third Republic.
Then we get narrow Pyhrric victory in WW1, defeat again, collaborationist dictatorship, 4th republic, de Gaulle gets fed up, 5th republic.
Even today the French president has more power than in many other republican constitutions.
How does Yarvin propose to remove the republican idea from American consciousness?
The commenter totally missed what a shock the executions of Charles I and Louis XVI were. The natural reaction to "if the king is bad just kill him" is for the king to more or less aggressively remove threats to their persons.
God knows I love me a good dose of genre fiction, but I believe that if you're gonna base your entire worldview on fiction you should use something that's not second or third hand.