zlacker

At this point you only have your own kingdom if you have a standing army with nuclear weapons, you are sovereign, everyone else rents, this is just physics, the details are social contracts.

>>Sigmun+(OP)
Having your own nuclear weapons is probably like having firearms in your home in that you’re actually more likely to be the victim of that class of weapons.

>>tshadd+V
The alternative is you don't have them and you rent protection from someone who does.

>>Sigmun+R1
Right, I’m hinting that it’s probably not worth maintaining your own nuclear weapon system in order to host your own website and email newsletter.

>>tshadd+pa
"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe"

>>Sigmun+(OP)
A certain medieval gentlemen from Alamut would beg to differ. One does not need a standing army and nuclear weapons so much as the ability to inflict your politics on others credibly and unavoidably. There are many ways to do that, not all of which necessarily involve violence.

Put another way: There are many minority populations throughout history and up to this very day that have managed to carve out a niche in their host population without necessarily employing mass violence to do it.

>>EarlKi+lj
All politics is violence by other means.

>>throwa+WM
It does make Clausewitz's saying about war being "politics by other means" back in context when you put it that way.

But really politics is just about "one person causes another to act". This can be through persuasion. It doesn't have to be force (or fraud for that matter).

>>HPsqua+DY
Persuasion is merely the implication of force. All actions can be explained through the language of force from the tenuous to the direct.

>>throwa+w01
Consider the persuasion of making a sale. That's not force. People can sell political ideas in the same way, they can spread virally.

EDIT: Also I consider economics, politics and marketing as basically "mass psychology". Hence all the problems with replication in those fields.

EDIT 2: And with these things being psychology, there's a big "default biological drives" component. A lot of the motivations for political etc actions are internal to each person.

>>HPsqua+211
The replication issues in those fields are partly attributable to the fields inability to explain behavior in terms of the biological imperative.

There is the theoretical rational actor which while very misunderstood is also subject to the stochastic and entropic reality. The 'internal motivation'

Persuasion can be divided into carrot and stick. The stick the implication of force against the individual and the carrot the promise of the ability to use force against other actors. This can be further expanded to negative force inherent from a relatively worse off position for not taking the carrot.

With some creativity all behavior can be formulated from a few simple primitives.

>>throwa+WM
If you think that all politics is violence then you're always going to be woefully ineffective at it. Never bring a shotgun to a negotiation when a well-placed fact (or fiction) will do.

>>throwa+w01
Persuasion is the art of supplying facts to enable mutual self-interest. Not everyone has an implacable class interest.

>>throwa+C21
Interpersonal actions can be "win-win", "win-lose" (of which zero-sum is a subset) and "lose-lose". No force is needed to enter into a win-win arrangement.

>>HPsqua+vK2
My goal in this exercise is to be able to decompose all behavior into a few simple rules.

>>throwa+MG3
You may find this article interesting

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction

>>HPsqua+gI3
I don't find that particularly relevant to my line of thinking. My goal is to build layers of abstraction up from automata to where all behavior can have a rational basis or aberration thereof from a stochastic and entropic process.

>>tshadd+V
Your claim about nuclear weaposn increasing the risk of being subjected to nuclear attacks has no historical basis. If anything, there is evidence for the opposite.

Even for private firearm ownership you'd need to show more than just correlation to make that claim.