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[BorkBorkGoesTheCode]

What? Where?

After looking for a citation, I can gladly say that I was told a half-myth. http://www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/eugenics/
Many laws have been heavily modified, some have been totally repealed.

[scrdest]

I feel like the point/idea of meritocracy is that you get competent people making informed decisions in government, not you reward the people who appear most skilled.

Or you hold tournaments, and whoever survives may rule.

"Competent" is a nebulous concept, even when compared to "apparent skill."

Here's what we do.

Hopeful political leaders sign up to the Government Academy (run by an independent commission with as many layers of arbitration and quality control as the state can afford). They get training in How To Govern, managing priorities, organising development, all that stuff. Side classes on political history, debating skills, pros and cons of different ideologies.
After they've graduated through all that, they get appointed to some random town or district for a year or so to prove their skills. They get a grade based on how various demographics have changed during their term (with allowances for things like legislation changes, disasters, and so on).
Candidates who can reduce commuting times, improve safety, grow businesses, and plan development effectively get higher grades than people who faff around. Approval rating is more or less a modifier, people who fuck everything up but are loved by the people get kicked out immediately, people who are generally hated but achieve a great deal get put on a PR course.
Eventually, the people with the best grades make it to the top, and nobody realises the real government is actually just the Commission.

Isn't this roughly the same idea as what Chinese bureaucracy ran on?

[Orange Wizard]

Isn't this roughly the same idea as what Chinese bureaucracy ran on?

Goddammit why does China always think of everything first

[Tiruin]

There's nearly zero ambiguity to the fact that Cinder is impossibly adorable.

he's just so thai-knee

I'm 5'4" and I don't feel short
But yay puns \o/

Isn't this roughly the same idea as what Chinese bureaucracy ran on?

Goddammit why does China always think of everything first

Like man-made islands in the South China Sea. *COUGH* >_>
I'm all WTF over that matter but eh. <_<
Politics surprises me.

[scriver]

Better yet how do you stop what happens in real life...

Which is that there are "Sciences" that are basically a load of nonsense and bullock such as Eugenics?

As far as I understand things, eugenics, while morally reprehensible, is not scientifically unsound. Are you thinking of race-biology and how people in that field manufactured evidence of racial superiority? The terms aren't interchangeable.

I thought Eugenics was dead?

We euthanized it for the betterment of mankind.

Here's what we do.

Hopeful political leaders sign up to the Government Academy (run by an independent commission with as many layers of arbitration and quality control as the state can afford). They get training in How To Govern, managing priorities, organising development, all that stuff. Side classes on political history, debating skills, pros and cons of different ideologies.
After they've graduated through all that, they get appointed to some random town or district for a year or so to prove their skills. They get a grade based on how various demographics have changed during their term (with allowances for things like legislation changes, disasters, and so on).
Candidates who can reduce commuting times, improve safety, grow businesses, and plan development effectively get higher grades than people who faff around. Approval rating is more or less a modifier, people who fuck everything up but are loved by the people get kicked out immediately, people who are generally hated but achieve a great deal get put on a PR course.
Eventually, the people with the best grades make it to the top, and nobody realises the real government is actually just the Commission.

Eh, I dunno. It seems like it'd be a little too easy for someone (or multiple someones) to go all Comrade Index Card on it, or for the various ideological groups represented to coordinate to paralyze the system with calls of biased treatment (or just not doing their jobs properly) to get what they want/crash the government with no survivors.

In my mind the main threat to this system wouldn't be corporatins or other private interests buying influence nor any particulate party/ideology "purifying" the teachings, but the "old buddies" cliques and thinking that would naturally form from such a system. We have enough of this as it is, we don't need more Camerons committing necrobeastiality with his good ol' pals.

The ideal relationship is that Peasants provide Kings with wealth in order for them to defend the peasants.

Isn't that what feudalism was, and didn't that suck?

 
Not on it's own, but yes, but for majorly other reasons.

[Frumple]

That feeling when you realize that that thing you hid to keep other people from ruining too quickly, you hid too well.

Alas, poor cleaning sponges, I knew ye. I have no idea where the hell I put you. Maybe not hide the next batch quite so enthusiastically.

[scriver]

Maybe the others found them and used them up.

Maybe you are not... Spongeworthy.

[Frumple]

Naaah, they haven't been being used. Only places they get used are open, obvious, and walked by regularly. Things would have been notably cleaner if the sponges were being unearthed.

[SirQuiamus]

That's one of the decisions we have to make as a pre-post-scarcity society: do we make provisions for members of society who do not, have not, and will not contribute in any meaningful way to still enjoy the support and benefits of said society? Amusingly enough uselessness is classless, by the by.

Fuck yeah, lets turn all useless people into fertilizer and build a stronger loving world as efficient as clockwork! Whoops, sorry, I meant let's turn all useless poor people into fertilizer and let the rich and stupid inherit the Earth.

... by chapter six or seven or so, I have been introduced to the magnificent evil paper crane. Well, author, you've convinced me to keep reading this tale of a man somewhat traumatized by a tiny paper crane. Congratulations.

Thing's apparently called world of cultivation, since I'm usually not enough of a jackass to mention a work and not its title, so long as the content isn't too egregious.

This it? Nine hundred and fifteen chapters, three hundred and twenty seven of them translated. The amount of work that has gone into this crazy garbage is just staggering.

[TheBiggerFish]

I originally intended Joe to be a doctor but I felt that would make Bob less sympathetic. Becoming a doctor who saves lives takes a lot of hard work and self-sacrifice.

And a follow up to that, just because one person is put into a position to become a job that we consider to be prestigious and another isn't, doesn't mean that they don't still have equal value as sentient sapient beings. A problem with meritocracy and capitalist society is that the idea that people have a right to live and have access to food and shelter regardless of their ability or inability to work is regularly ignored or shut down altogether.

The solution is to establish that former idea and make sure that people have access to food, shelter, and medicine regardless of whether or not they are able to or decide to work or contribute production. Once people are guaranteed to not have what they need to live taken from them, the rest of local governing becomes about maintaince, regulation, and permissions, which doesn't seem that bad to me. Then it just becomes a question of how to decide who does the governing.

Universal minimum income :v

[hector13]

Too expensive.

[Lord Shonus]

Better yet how do you stop what happens in real life...

Which is that there are "Sciences" that are basically a load of nonsense and bullock such as Eugenics?

As far as I understand things, eugenics, while morally reprehensible, is not scientifically unsound. Are you thinking of race-biology and how people in that field manufactured evidence of racial superiority? The terms aren't interchangeable.

This is correct. Eugenics was little more than applying well-known and time-proven methods of improving crops and livestock to humanity. Some of the criteria for "culling" people from the gene pool (via sterilization in more civilized countries and execution in the Thousand Year Reich) was based on pure nonsense, and some of the issues targeted were not hereditary as was thought at the time, but the basic concept is sound. We as a society collectively rejected the science on ethical grounds (not least because the excesses of the Reich showed just how dark a path it could lead us down) in the mid-to-late 20th century, much as we as a society have collectively rejected bioweapons and poison gas as too horrible to even possess, but that doesn't make it a pseudoscience.

[Frumple]

This it? Nine hundred and fifteen chapters, three hundred and twenty seven of them translated. The amount of work that has gone into this crazy garbage is just staggering.

Not sure whether it's a violation of forum ToS or not to link to that (translations like that are usually examples of blatant copyright infringement ), but yeah, that's it. One of the amusing things is while the translation is further along than most, the work itself is apparently not particularly unusual vis a vis length for its sort of literature :V

It's becoming increasingly tempting to learn to read chinese (and japanese, and korean, ahahaha) just to have open access to the whole run of the stuff.

[Neonivek]

Better yet how do you stop what happens in real life...

Which is that there are "Sciences" that are basically a load of nonsense and bullock such as Eugenics?

As far as I understand things, eugenics, while morally reprehensible, is not scientifically unsound. Are you thinking of race-biology and how people in that field manufactured evidence of racial superiority? The terms aren't interchangeable.

This is correct. Eugenics was little more than applying well-known and time-proven methods of improving crops and livestock to humanity. Some of the criteria for "culling" people from the gene pool (via sterilization in more civilized countries and execution in the Thousand Year Reich) was based on pure nonsense, and some of the issues targeted were not hereditary as was thought at the time, but the basic concept is sound. We as a society collectively rejected the science on ethical grounds (not least because the excesses of the Reich showed just how dark a path it could lead us down) in the mid-to-late 20th century, much as we as a society have collectively rejected bioweapons and poison gas as too horrible to even possess, but that doesn't make it a pseudoscience.

Here is kind of the thing... "The basic concept is sound" is basically what Pseudo-science lives off of. The idea that a baby can have some form of brain problem from brain swelling viewed from booster shots? The basic concept is sound.

Eugenics, as it was studied, isn't about some form of "Human husbandry" where they wondered if by only having strong people breed that maybe we would get a breed of strong people.

Eugenics was originally created as a sort of way to explain why people of "Good Breeding" are just inherently better than everyone else. Oddly enough the earliest form of dissent against Eugenics was when they discovered, shock of all shocks, that peasants weren't stupid.

What makes pseudo-sciences pseudo-sciences is how they are studied... not how their "basic concept works"

[TheBiggerFish]

Too expensive.

Not really?  I mean I haven't seen studies or anything but I don't think that's the problem.