What are the most-favoured non-democratic political systems you mentioned, and how do they cope with the fact that the people in charge are sometimes evil? (Asking in good faith - I usually find your opinions at least interesting, and often convincing)

Ha.  Good question.  Too important (and too complicated) to be answered in a throwaway comment, really – I’ll put together an effortpost on the subject, perhaps, sometime when I feel like getting into a Really Big Internet Fight.  Unsurprisingly, my first-best political preferences are offbeat and homebrewed, and honestly I haven’t thought them through rigorously enough to think them worthy of public debate at this juncture. 

But it’s easy enough to say: “the people in charge are sometimes evil [or stupid]” is the key failure point, I do not take it for granted, and I think that it is the correct target for intervention.

The Emperor is one guy.  If you include the Emperor’s chief ministers and mandarins, the ones who actually formulate policy in a highly-centralized system, you’re talking about maybe a couple dozen guys.  When the numbers are that small, you can set up all kinds of super-duper-rigorous selection methods and deadhand-control schemes, safeguards for political excellence that wouldn’t even slightly work if they had to be applied at scale.  Those safeguards would have to be invested with legitimacy in the way that the Popular Vote is invested with legitimacy right now, but…[shrug] at least in the abstract this seems doable.