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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 4m

I'd have to check, I am remembering that figure from Wolpert's book.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 11m

It is not an original coinage of mine, but it seems very apt.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 19m

I am increasingly concerned we are going to be at that outcome before the midterms provide an opportunity to change the balance of government. I had hoped SCOTUS might slow this process, but they're accelerating it instead, with remarkable foolishness.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 23m

MAGA is failing and flailing, but that doesn't make them harmless - I fear they will be even more immediately destructive in failure than success.

The good news: the Athenians retained their democracy. We can too.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 23m

The Thirty set about trying to butcher and exile their way to an oligarchic Athens; in the end they had to be defeated by force of arms and expelled. They probably murdered something like 5% of the population in the process of failing.

I am real worried we're headed in the same direction.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 23m

I think we're in a similar situation: American democratic institutions, right now, are too deeply rooted for that kind of 'soft' autocratic transition.

But that isn't the most comforting news, because like the Thirty, if these guys can't have a 'soft' transition, they'll try a 'hard' one.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 23m

After the Peloponnesian War - I promise this is relevant - Sparta installed an oligarchic puppet government, the Thirty Tyrants, in Athens.

What rapidly became clear was that Athenian democratic habits were so deeply rooted that tremendous violence would be necessary to remove them.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 23m

They'd need to cow the universities, buy or suppress the media - not just CBS, but MSNBC, NPR, the NYTimes, at some point getting to outlets like the Bulwark, so audiences don't just move - and silence pop-culture voices in music and Hollywood, get SNL to stop making fun of them, etc. etc.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 23m

But even as some institutions in the United States have shamefully folded, MAGA is far from achieving that kind of cultural/informational dominance outside of the Fox News Cinematic Universe to create that sort of 'good-news-only' media environment.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 23m

The 'soft' competitive-authoritarian transitions in countries like Hungary relied substantially on relatively weak liberal institutions and thus the ability to consolidate fairly broad popular support for the emerging autocratic regime, through an information environment favorable to the tyrant.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 23m

This seems true, but it has pretty dark implications, because the consistent historical trend is for radicals of this sort, when stymied, to ramp up the violence in an effort to break through.

I think some folks are expecting a 'soft' Hungary-style tyranny and I don't think that's in the cards.

jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 1h

a key thing about vought — and all of these guys — is that they have a totally top down and hierarchical vision of the world. they believe that the cultural changes they hate can be turned off by destroying the federal government because they can’t imagine that they emerged bottom-up in society

Thomas Zimmer @thomaszimmer.bsky.social · 1h

What he’s railing against is a profound shift in culture, status… He’s obsessed with the idea that America is controlled by a leftist “ruling elite” - but “elite” isn’t defined socio-economically or by political power, it means something like: Getting to define “real America” and who gets to belong.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 12h

The Fintan O'Toole book I was referencing there (We Don't Know Ourselves), was recommended to me by @beijingpalmer.bsky.social and is a remarkable read.

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Reposted by "Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux

"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 23h

This week on the blog: More Peasants!

This week, we're modeling the full(ish) structure of women's labor in a pre-industrial peasant household, very roughly assessing the work required for textiles, farming, cooking, cleaning, childcare, etc.

Now with pie chart!

acoup.blog/2025/10/10/c...

Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part IVe: The No-Rest Of It

This is the fifth dish of the fourth course of our series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, IVd) looking at the lives of pre-modern peasant farmers, who made up a majority of all of the humans who…

acoup.blog

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 12h

On the upside, as Charlie Chaplin, of all people, reminds us, "The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish."

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 12h

And its worth noting we're not *quite* out of backstops yet, though we may soon be. We're seeing, now that Congress and SCOTUS have folded, the pressure falling on lower courts and state governments.

After those, all that remains is the people. But it isn't the system's fault.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 13h

Fundamentally, there is no on-the-page institutional structure that can protect you from an absence of virtue among the citizenry.

That's just where we are - voters have learned a lot of bad habits. A lot of people thought they could vote MAGA again and it wouldn't matter; bad habits.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 13h

'The Constitution is crap because of this' is such an odd position because it isn't like other republics have proven remarkably more resistant to charismatic, populist demagogues.

If anything, parliamentary systems have been substantially more vulnerable.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 15h

Post-Trump government reform is obviously going to have to include moving a bunch of agencies out of the executive, but I think it probably also needs to include the creation of a watchdog org under congress that explicitly *always* has standing for constitutional violations by the executive.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 15h

This is coming to mind right now as the president goes to unconstitutionally appropriate and spend funds during a shutdown, a thing he absolutely cannot do, but which I imagine the courts will say that no one - save perhaps congress, collectively - has standing to sue to block.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 15h

I am struck by how lack of standing seems to so frequently evade court challenge to unconstitutional government actions.

It's an odd thing missing, given that this problem was solved in ancient Athens: for certain matters the entire citizen body ('ho boulomenos,' 'whoever wishes') had standing.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 20h

Yeah, and that's about it; the next post is part 5.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 20h

Right? There are parts of this genre that have figured out how to do it, but have kind of stopped being cRPGs in the process.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 20h

I mean, do Soulslikes count as cRPGs?

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 20h

As an aside, this strikes me as a meaningful problem with a lot of cRPGs - the prologue or first act are miserable, especially on higher difficulties, because you haven't had any chance to tailor your build and you don't have many meaningful tactical tools.

Starfish Who Can’t Think Something Witty @irhottakes.bsky.social · 21h

Thinking about what a good “baseline” for level 1 should be in a RPG. Luke Skywalker at the start of Ep. IV is where I’m landing. He can’t do fancy Jedi stuff, let alone fight Vader, he’s a rube who needs exposition, but he can do “Star Wars“ things like shoot, fly a space ship, fix a robot, etc.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 21h

But yeah, to get lost in Skyrim, you'd need to take away the map and the compass.

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