What if you were a dictator?

Something you wanna tell us, TH?

edited 24th Nov '12 1:09:11 PM by OfficerHotPantsMV

Well, for one thing, I used to think Chavez was a good guy, but, while I'm still holding off on calling him outright evil, he's definitely a Jerkass power-hoarder, and the fact that he uses and abuses democratic institutions to do that makes me sick. Putin too is a dictator in all but name. A rather competent and efficient dictator, but a dictator nonetheless, and, of course, a rotten liar.

Dictators are growing clever. And one of the things they do is, they insist they aren't dictators, that they're elected officials, which is technically true.

To keep up the light theme of the discussion, I'll say this:

If I were a dictator, I would;

• Openly acknowledge myself as such, calling myself The Infamous And Evil Overlord, God.
• Have my country renamed PeoplesThe Dictator's Undemocratic Dictatorship of Cyberpunk Mordor.
• Have the capital renamed Egopolis ☆. Not named after me; named Egopolis ☆. The little star is mandatory.
• My hometown will be renamed Bethlehem♥. Same deal.
• I'll institute a system of Liquid Democracy. I will call it "Liquidation of Democracy". The elections will be called "Popularity Contests". The elected officials will be called variations of Slave, Page, Lackey, Sycophant, and so on, depending on their rank. The Vice-President gets to be called Butler.
• No-one else is allowed to have a butler; the chiefs of domestic staff will be referred to as "domotics technicians".
• The public administration will be an Adhocracy, but will call the system Idiopracy.
• The Ministry of War (often called today "Ministry of Defense") will be renamed the Ministry of Industrialized Murder. It will focus on defensive capabilities for the Boring, but Practical side, especially the organization of civil defence and militias, and space-age weapons for the Awesome Yet Practical side.
• The space agency will be called The Room. Its cosmonauts will be called Bubbleheads. Its ships will be called Boomsticks. Its computers will be named HAL-[whatever serial number is appropriate]
• The Ministry of Youth and Sports will be renamed The Ministry of the Dumb.
• The Ministry of Education will be renamed Ministry of Formatting. It will get the highest budget of all ministries. Professors are to be renamed Drill Sergeants. It will copy the Scandinavian systems.
• There will be a coming-of-age ceremony where every thirteen-year-old boy will be afforded a state-of-the-art flesh-light and three hundred condoms. Every eleven-year-old girl will get three hundred condoms as well. And five "the day after" pills, just in case.
• The Ministry "of Interior" will be renamed Ministry of Brutality. Policemen will be required to shout "STOP RIGHT THERE, CRIMINAL SCUM" before telling the criminals their rights.
• Lawyers and Attorneys will be called Sues.
• There will be an immense particle accelerator built, for the sole pupose of being able to call it the Hard-on Collider.
• The Requisite Royal Regalia consist of something that looks vaguely like high-school uniform. So will the clothes of the military and civil service. Medals will be pins with snazzy puns on the feats recompensed. There will also be pins for embarassing or funny feats, and anyone with a high rank in the military or the civil service will be required to wear them. Either way, it will be required that every wearer customize their uniform as much as possible in order to be perfectly impossible not to distinguish from each other.
• I've run out of ideas right now, but I'm sure I will come up with more.

The idea is basically to enact an inverse Nineteen Eighty Four, where there's Double Speak, but instead of calling bad things nice names that are at odds with their function, we call good things terrible names.

I'd write up a constitution to stop myself from going mad with power, introduce a large number of democratic elements to the running of the country, and get the army to perform helicopter gunship raids on tax haven private islands...

Honestly, I'd probably turn it into an Orwellian nightmare. Machiavelli said that any ruler and lawmaker must assume two things—that humans are unequivocally evil, and are always looking for opportunities to present that evil. Thus, the only truly effective system of government is fascist/a dictatorship. I believe humans are more flawed/stupid and unfit to govern themselves than outright evil, but the principle is the same.

The country's internal security in general would be increased... a LOT. There'd be CCTV cameras on every corner and outside every home. Depending on tech and budget requirements, security systems for important installations (banks, etc.) would be weaponized and automated, in addition to having a security staff. Robots/drones may replace humans as security personnel in the future, depending on how smart they can be made, but the higher functions of law enforcement would be trusted to humans only.

Law enforcement would be seriously beefed up, if not done away with altogether and replaced with martial law. All crimes would be treated more or less as equal and cops/soldiers would be authorized to use brutal force to deter crime. Harsh, but nobody's going to run the risk of being shot for the sake of stealing a TV. I guarantee crime would drop. Jails would still exist, of course.

The press would be free, but criticizing the government or its leader/s would be taking your job and freedom into your own hands. If it's harmless criticism, I might let it slide. If it's deemed to be dangerous and/or deliberately trying to provoke seditious thought, expect a visit from the Thought Police to hand out jail time and revoke your journalism license.

Breeding licenses would be a thing. I am actually a big fan of this being applied in the real world, simply because there are too many stupid/unfit people breeding and it can't not be hurting future generations. The licensing would be handled by a government department, called something hilarious like the Department of Reproduction. Anyone wanting to breed would have to apply to the department and sit a series of aptitude tests. You fail, no license. You can resit the test, but only a limited number of times. The test would consist of things like how the applicant handles in a high-stress (i.e. multiple screaming children) environment, how well they empathize with other human beings, and in general whether they have the appropriate temperament for parenthood. Traits like irritability, impatience, etc. would affect the results negatively. There would be less emphasis on things like financial status and education. As long as you can provide the basic necessities, that's good enough, and it's not necessary to have a college degree to raise children, especially as there won't be any homeschooling and all education will be strictly controlled by the state. Of course, the truly stupid (to the degree of not knowing who the President is, or something) will lose points, but not being a Rhodes scholar won't preclude one from getting a license.

Eugenics would also factor. Our overall gene pool sucks, so the department would test for things like inheritable diseases and autism. Depending on the chance of the kids getting these diseases, it may be an automatic fail on the test. More likely, though, you'll just get a "red mark" of sorts on your name and your kids' names to indicate that you're not ideal genetic stock.

Mandatory sterilization would be enforced for people deemed unfit to breed by the bureau for reasons of drug addiction, persistent criminality, etc. To be clear, this is not ALL people who fail the test—it takes some seriously poor life choices before the bureau will invoke sterilization. Ideally, it would be reversible—if a person can prove they've cleaned up, they may be allowed to breed, depending on the type and severity of past crimes.

Getting a license doesn't necessarily mean you're in the clear, though. The bureau would show up at your house every so often to micromanage. They would check on the kids, make sure they're happy and that the household is overall stable. Fighting among the parents would be treated with the utmost seriousness, because that stuff can REALLY affect kids' happiness. At the end of it all, the department can revoke your license at any time if they feel you're no longer fit to parent. Kids will be removed and placed with a foster family.

There would be no elections. Simply put, democracy has gone the way of the dodo in Alma's dictatorship. I may be amenable to the idea of electing an advisory council democratically, but the leader cannot be deposed/voted out.

...I'm not an awful person, really. Don't hate me.

edited 25th Nov '12 6:39:10 AM by Alma

If I found myself in aboslute power because absolutly no one else was fit to rule I'd use the stability of my rule for long term projects like education, infrasturcture and environmental stuff. Hopefully I'd be able to fulfil a dream of mine that the adverage Joe is educated and passionate about issues so that when I retire the country doesn't go to pot and everything gets scritinized.

It strikes me that in recent years my political agenda is getting more and more anarchist.

Speaking as someone who lived and worked on one of those "tax haven private islands" in a law firm that specialized in offshore financing, I hope you realise the full implications of what you're saying. That's a lot of innocent people you'd be mowing down for no other reason than because they chose a certain way to earn a paycheck that is entirely legal, though limited in the ways it is regulated, and has bolstered the local economy quite significantly.

Serious mode off.

Judging by the way I've played most management sims, I'd probably end up spending loads of money on industrial capacity, follow it up with massive amounts of infrastructure upgrades, and then cause a catastrophic economic failure and turn my country into a cess pit of militias and foreign aid.

Having a country full of passionate People with educated political opinions would probably just lead to riots and lynch mobs. Worth a try maybe!