Is Trump A Dictator

Is Trump A Dictator

The biggest complaint I hear about Trump, is that he is a dictator. 

My answer is; That is his job requirement. To direct or dictate the priorities he has outlined, to direct the numerous departments and agencies under the executive branch. 

However, let us look at known Dictators of the 20th century. You have Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Adolph Hitler. And I could go on and list many more in the past century, and combined, they have killed more people than voted in the last presidential election.  All these people had one thing in common. That was they had the backing of all the State Apparatuses. From domestic security, to international security. From the educational institutions, to the penal institutions. There was not any government agency these people didn’t keep under control. And what ever they dictated was carried out by the appropriate state apparatus. If one of these men wanted you silenced, you were silence, without reservation. And if you disagreed, you were not just fired, in most accounts.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump cannot make a decision, without it being leaked, contested, or ignored. Don’t sound like a dictatorship to me. 

Don’t get me wrong, I think it is entirely possible that a dictatorship could arise in the United States government. In fact, I think that day is getting dangerously close. One does not have to look very far in history to see disturbing trends. Like an Internal Revenue Service, targeting groups based on ideological leanings. Or a DOJ and FBI, whitewashing one candidates’ transgression, while secretly using the powerful tools of surveillance on the other candidate. Or endless open-ended investigations into an elected official life. Or the rapid expansion of intelligence gathering agencies. 

That leads to the truth of Dictatorships. You do not need an individual to head up a dictatorship, only the collusion of the apparatuses of state, in like-thinking individuals’ serving their own self-interest. The State will appoint its own figurehead. Isn’t that the way of all feudal systems of government? And feudalism is the final result of all corrupt governments.

Eternity 3.0 A short story By Jeffrey Schaben Denise was startled from her daydreaming by the ding on her PIT. Technically known as a personal interface tablet. The message was a simple but ominous warning. “Dear user, your Personal Interface Tablet in no longer supported by the latest EOS upgrade. Please upgrade to a newer version of the Personal Interface Tablet.” It wasn’t that she needed the tablet to communicate with anyone. That technology was directly integrated into to the synapses of her mind. However, the tablet was the key card that let her function at this level, and losing it, and she would become an archive on the network, instead of an active member of the network. The PIT held all her financial data, and verified all her history, and was the most important object that any citizen could have. Most people kept their PIT hidden, but always accessible. Because, if anyone gained control of your PIT, they effectively had control of your official identity. And if they were skilled hackers, they could alter that identity. A majority of the citizen that occupied this city, were honest and respectful residents, and would never steal or even hold another person’s PIT. However, there always were Zombies, looking to gain access to PITs. There were two kinds of Zombies, the first were Normal looking people, whose sole purpose was to claim PITs, thus stealing your identity, and then you had the second type of Zombie. The victim of a Zombie attack. Whose identity had been compromised, and erased to be replaced by a zombie bot. And these Zombie bots, were upgraded and moved to the richer cities that are being created today, to acquire even more PITs. You see Denise died 35 years ago, and became a resident of Eternity, 3.0. Her resources kept her online for years, with careful budgeting. The sales pitch was. “You can live forever on our network.” And the brochures made it all seem possible, when a person thinks about the potential, but then ignores the logistics. And the simple logistics is: you are only valuable today, if people are making money from you. If not, you become irrelevant. And eternity last as long as you are relevant and making someone money. Back then the city was new and vibrant, everything had the feel of vitality, it was growing fast, with new buildings and adventures being created daily. Now, otherworld’s have been created, with more complexity, and even more expense had to been built to replace the Eternity 3.0. Leaving this version to fall into a cycle of neglect. And the citizen where helpless to stop this decline. Your only choice was to buy a new PIT, which would allow you access into the newer created worlds. And to buy a new Pit, you had to have a living resident, you could trust, buy it for you. The only people who could program on the platforms, had the distinction of being alive. This was because of the irrational fear held by the living, that if dead people where allowed to program, they may take over the living world. And turn the living into slaves of the dead. Instead the opposite dynamic was created, and the dead lived at the whims of the living. That led to the Zombies, selling you a newer PIT, if you did not have any living connections. Well not all of them were Zombies, they hid among the cheap affordable seller of Pits. The biggest problem Denise had was that she had no one she could trust anymore in the living world. No foundation set up to preserve her memories. Her fate was like most of the other middle-class resident. She had enough money to set up her existence in this realm, but not enough to keep it perpetually going. And no connection left in the living world, so she was at the mercy of the sellers. That left her with two options. The first was to spend out the rest of her eternity on this server, which may fail, or go inactive, or become overrun by spent zombies when there were no longer enough resources from the remaining residents to keep it active. Or spend most of her remaining resources on a new PIT, and hope its seller is not a Zombie. And going to a new server, would mean having to secure a new source of revenue to keep her active, she established that stream on this server, but could she on the new one. Where the maintenance fees were higher, and the competition fiercer. She could ride this server to the end, and have enough saved to move up by then, or leave today, and may be archived in a year on the new server from the lack of funds. “Who thought eternity could be so stressful.” Denise said to herself.

The Myth of a Virtual Eternity

I know people are excited about the future prospects of technology. And Technology is advancing at an accelerated pace, which could mean that true AI (Artificial intelligence) is likely within the horizon of your lifespan, and with that comes the ability to transfer all of your experiences and memories onto a theoretically infinite platform, or in plain language, to transfer yourself into a “living” avatar whose life could theoretically spans millennia. To coin a phrase, “The Millennials could be the first generation to live virtually a millennium”.

However, is this a true statement looking at the marketplace by today’s standards? Or even a true philosophical statement on what constitutes life?

By Todays standards, the market is fast paced, and broad. Therefore, the technological platform you use today may be obsolete in ten years, or unsupportable by the current operating system, rendering your virtual life on the web, a forgotten archive.

An example of this might be that you are a virtual resident on Virtual Heaven 3.0, that runs the EOS (Eternity Operating System) 10.5 and the next EOS upgrade announces that we are no longer supporting Virtual Heaven 3.0, and that you must move to a Virtual Heaven 4.0 or greater platform to continue your afterlife. If you are a resident of low standing on Virtual Heaven 3.0, you may not have the financial resources, or contact to a live entity to facilitate this move to a higher platform, and are thus regulated to a future of archival, which is then ignored until even your archive may be lost and  forgotten in the future.

Even if this is possible in the future, is it really a life? Or just a shadow of a former life?

Consider this: Let us say that the technology to do this is available today, and you decide to start the process while you are still living. The question becomes, is the person created on the Virtual Heaven Platform really me? Does it make the same decisions I make? Does it experience things as I would?

I think the answer would be no. Because, what the virtual life experiences would be different, then your real life. Its life would be controlled by decision analogs that were set at the start of the experience, and all decisions are based on past decisions. As you went through life conscious of your own mortality, the virtual you would not have that same emotional context (if true emotions could be created in a virtual world, and not just programed as random events). its life would be linear, while yours would be more chaotic. And your decision analog is always evolving (and not always in a positive way). While the virtual life could evolve its decision analog, it would be more logical. It may become its own viable entity, but you would cease to recognize it as yourself.

That is why I think there will be a new classification of person in the future. One would be the organic person that lived out their life in an organic world, and a virtual person, which lived its life in an electronic and preordained world. Therefore, the organic person and electronic person will become split at creation, to never reemerge as a single entity again. Therefore, a false premise on the promise of an electronic eternity.