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cant cook creole bream posted:
It sounds a lot like representative democracy to me. Like, the whole idea is that we elect people who represent us because we ordinary folks on the street can't be arsed to sit down and learn about minutiae and sit in a whole lot of really boring meetings all the time, and those people appoint experts and functionaries to do specialized work. Unfortunately, aside from stricter limits on the terms that representatives serve, implementing multi-member proportional voting, decreasing constituency sizes to <10,000 and so on, I can't really think of any system that would be better than representative democracy. I sure as gently caress don't want to have to sit on my local citizen council every Saturday evening or whatever and listen to all my neighbors complain and vote on something I didn't bother to learn about because it's more interesting to watch Youtube or play games than nerd out about legislation.
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Jun 16, 2020 21:24
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Silver2195 posted:The disadvantages mostly come down to infighting within the Executive Branch. What happens when a Cabinet Secretary refuses to implement an Executive Order, for example? My preference would be to do away with the Executive Branch entirely. Why does the Executive need to be a co-equal branch of government? What do we really gain from it? In almost every sub-national, sub-state level government body, an elected board appoints and dismisses professional executives at their discretion. There should be a unicameral legislative body that appoints executives to carry out the peoples' will on a national scale. Under that system, the President would be nothing more than a kind of administrator that the legislature appoints to oversee the technocratic business of running a national bureaucracy.
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Jun 17, 2020 20:24
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Silver2195 posted:I think you would have to introduce proportional representation as well; otherwise the two-party system would still be entrenched, so there would be no need to form parliamentary coalitions, and thus no real constraints on the Speaker/Prime Minister barring an unlikely backbencher rebellion. (The UK does have multiple major parties without proportional representation, somehow, but the UK isn't exactly a positive model to point to at the moment). Well yeah, of course. I've already mentioned it in my first post in this thread - what I envision would be a major step forward in democracy isn't necessarily direct democracy, but a more direct representative democracy. That entails a few big reforms, reforms which (more broadly speaking) no one nation on earth presently has in full, though many countries have some of these features.They are: 1) A ratio of legislator to population of 10,000:1 or less. 2) Multi-winner proportional districts. 3) Unicameral legislature with the legislative body as the supreme organ of the state. 4) Full public funding of elections. 5) National holidays for voting. 6) National political parties regulated by strict legal guidelines with respects to procedures and the selection of candidates, etc. 7) Two year term limits for representatives, caps on maximum consecutive terms. 8) Independently elected citizen oversight bodies for all government bureaus. 9) Private organizations banned from donating to or advertising for elections. 10) A living Constitution with a scheduled automatic 10-year updating process. 11) Caps on private wealth for eligibility into civil service. No individual with wealth >5x the national average should be allowed to run for any office. 12) Algorithmic redrawing of districts into areas that accurately reflect the political affiliations of their constituent populations. 13) All citizens automatically registered to vote at age of majority, vote by mail as opt-out. That's just a few of the possible reforms that could be taken. I'm aware that for a country as large as China or the USA, that this would create legislatures with tens or hundreds of thousands of representatives, but there's no other way that we can ensure that democracy doesn't chug under its own mass as in a direct democracy, or become captured by a crooked political elite. Of course, true political democracy can't really be achieved unless we first have economic democracy in the form of some kind of socialism, but that's not the focus of this thread. DrSunshine fucked around with this message at 22:57 on Jun 17, 2020 |
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Jun 17, 2020 22:49
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So how does a hypothetical digital direct democracy deal with the ever persistent threat of cyber actors? Why is it that cybersecurity experts have consistently warned against holding elections using computer technology? I could see a nation that had set its sights on citizen participation in the democratic process online set up some kind of public key encryption system, but what if a citizen loses or has their key stolen? A government server can have all the firewalls and protection it can, but what about vulnerabilities in the endpoints-- the devices that citizens use to access the election system? What if some threat actor installs keyloggers to capture peoples' passwords? It happens all the time. Most people fall for phishing attacks and can never be arsed to bother with the inconvenience of two factor authentication. And you're proposing to put an entire country's very legislative system online?
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Jun 19, 2020 02:53
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Obviously the answer is not dictatorship, because whatever problems democracy has with the fallibility of individual voters or representatives is exponentially increased by restricting power to even smaller groups of Joe Schmoes. Do you really think that your hypothetical leftist benevolent god-king is any more intelligent or less prone to making mistakes, or rational, or vulnerable to cognitive biases than anyone else? If you do then I have a bridge to sell you! -- Actually the answer, then, is to invent superintelligent AGI and make that our immortal philosopher king.
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Jul 4, 2020 15:28
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SalamInsurrection posted:I see what the problem is here: the fact voting, for whatever reason, is seen as a right: that no matter how reckless you are with it, no matter how many bad decisions you make that endanger other people's lives with it, you get to keep doing it, no questions asked. How do you do this without the possibility that this will be used to punish and marginalize minority groups, the disenfranchised, and the disadvantaged?
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Jul 4, 2020 18:51
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It seems like we should just delegate all authority to an immortal and incorruptible philosopher god-king. Lacking that, we should therefore make pains to invent it.
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Jul 5, 2020 14:41
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Mooseontheloose posted:I will say living in Massachusetts, the town meeting model is loaded with problems not least of which is that it favors older white men to make decisions for the town despite being the cloest analogue to direct democracy in the United States. Sure in theory everyone can come and vote on town issues but realistically given that meetings are at night after work and goes on for hours closes decision making to most people. Has the Age of Covid changed any of this? So many meetings which once were in person are now on Zoom.
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Aug 29, 2020 17:14
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