What you’re describing here (and in the thread below) sounds a bit like technocracy, so you might be interested in reading about the Technocracy Movement.

There aren’t any, because if there were, there would be good totalitarianisms.

I partially addressed the ‘fast decisions’ myth above in my comments about efficiency and in more detail here.

It’s not true that decisions can’t be made quickly by democratic governments. There are truly thousands of counter examples, but to take a single one, in the COVID-19 pandemic, many democratic governments took rapid decisions. Some of these decisions turned out badly and some well, which provides a second stumbling block to your thesis: decisions taken quickly can be bad as well as good.

Secondly, it’s not true that totalitarian regimes act quickly. There’s a governmental bottleneck of the ruler and his clique. If they’re not paying attention to a given issue at a given time, decisions can’t be taken at all, making for less efficient governance. And, in practice, such decisions as are taken are often not implemented: you end up with rune-reading and kremlinology by officials trying to work out what an order ‘really’ meant, or whether it really was an order, because there’s no clear method for governing other than ‘Do what the leader said’.

I appreciate, by the way, that you’re making a devil’s advocate argument, here. Just wanted to explain why it’s wrong, as OP seems pretty disposed to believe the devil!

I can imagine an alternative, but the reality is that such an alternative has never arisen.

The imaginary ‘good’ version of totalitarianism, I assume, is one where there’s a ‘good’ dictator who is also so intelligent they’re able to run everything very efficiently, where everyone enjoys or at least accepts the dictatorship because everything gets better for everyone. But that’s a very odd utopian daydream. In reality, being a dictator and being good are mutually incompatible.

EDIT: Read this back and realised I’m describing the plot of Red Son!

There aren’t any.

Totalitarian regimes are fundamentally not a sensible way of organising society at any level, even if we for some reason decide to ignore the manifold human rights violations committed by totalitarian governments. There is a longheld belief that they are in some ways more ‘efficient’ than democracies (as expressed in the myth that ‘Mussolini made the trains run on time’ – he didn’t) but this isn’t true.

To take two obvious points of comparison, North Korea, the closest to a completely totalitarian regime of any country on Earth, is one of the poorest countries in the world. South Korea, a democracy, is one of the wealthiest.

So people say. I’m a bit sceptical about that origin story because fossils aren’t seashells and, as far as I remember, Mary Anning didn’t sell many of her fossils!

You’re right, I take it back.

Also, why would anyone she sell seashells by the seashore, of all places? Terrible business model to sell seashells where your customers can easily find their own.

Where are you from, out of interest? I’m trying to work out which accents have an e/a merge going on!

But it is gender neutral in English, the language OP was asking about.

Not a contemporary one, but during the French Revolution, they used ‘Citizen’ for everyone.

Thanks for the links! I wasn’t thinking about it all that seriously (this post is the first time I’ve mentioned it to anyone) but it’s interesting to know that it could do a lot more good than my previous plan of just… waiting till I die.

Indeed! I do donate blood on the regular, so thank you.

And if anyone reading this is in the UK and would like to also donate blood, you can sign up to do so at the wonderfully named website, blood.co.uk. They will also occasionally send you unintentionally(?) hilarious and sinister messages like, ‘The need for blood is rising’.

Nope.

Hemi-demi-semi final?

But that is what it’s called. E.g., the FIFA World Cup 2023 brackets.

‘Round of 8’, which others have suggested, doesn’t follow the convention, either, because that would be ‘eighth final’.

But George Orwell was a leftist.

But it’s the round of 16, because there are 16 teams.

The round of 16.

Because conservatism is more important to them than religion, essentially.