4 ms·

The job of elected officials is to represent the people, no more, no less. "Improve stuff" is extremely subjective I don't think I want one guy to decide what

The job of elected officials is to represent the people, no more, no less. "Improve stuff" is extremely subjective I don't think I want one guy to decide what it is.

11235813213455 7y ago
There are some improvements, like planting trees, that can't be debated
- nickpeterson 7y ago
  Too many trees attract pests and their roots break water pipes, I think we should cut them all down.
arbol 7y ago
Leaders are supposed to lead...
acdha 7y ago
What is that supposed to mean in practice? Unless you have pure direct democracy on every issue, someone is going to make a judgement call which not everyone is going agree with. This is especially true on issues like allocation of public spaces where there’s always going to be someone who gets less than they want, and a vested interest which wants to preserve their advantage — like the drivers who’ve benefited from heavy subsidies in most of the industrialized world.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  > Unless you have pure direct democracy on every issue, someone is going to make a judgement call which not everyone is going agree with. This will still happen -- on every issue -- if you have pure direct democracy on every issue. It's not a problem that direct democracy improves or even addresses.
  - acdha 7y ago
    Not quite: you’d still have the issue of disagreement but without an intermediary. It’s totally unworkable in practice but you’d avoid the arguments about a politician not listening to one side.
erikpukinskis 7y ago
> I don't think I want one guy to decide what it is. She didn’t decide. She said what she wanted to do and then the city elected her. The city decided.
- davidivadavid 7y ago
  The people who vote in the city decided. The problem gets trickier when, e.g. the people who work in the city come from close suburbs and get priced out of the city, where a different demographic lives, but influences the way they commute, among other things.
Barrin92 7y ago
> "Improve stuff" is extremely subjective well breathing clean air and not cooking the planet is about as non-subjective as it gets. We're not really talking about sophisticated moral quandaries here, the bar for improvement in our societies is actually surprisingly low. Not having everyone of the billions of people living in our cities carry around two tons of steel wherever they go ought to appeal to anyone who can do a bit of napkin math about energy consumption. Elected officials doing whatever people tell them like a sort of walking strawpoll is a nice fiction but at the end of the day letting the inmates run the asylum is a bad idea. If we want to make necessary improvements it's going to come at the cost of going against the often short-sighted interests of citizens.
- brankoB 7y ago
  Ah yes the old "the majority of people are wrong, MY ideas are correct, why doesn't the government just implement all of MY ideas as they're obviously correct" argument.
  - Barrin92 7y ago
    in some cases the majority of people are wrong, and it is trivial to show why they are wrong. In case of environmental issues or degrading of the commons in general the issue is that externalities are not priced in as economists would say, and if they are tried to be priced in like in France, the democratic process or even street violence is used to prevent that from happening. Again I think it's important to state that this isn't the case for all issues. On many fronts majority opinion may be useful, but on some issues it's glaringly obvious that people are unwilling to bear the costs for their lifestyle, and ignore the long-term harm they cause. In fact there's another democratic majority that is completely ignored by this appeal to the people, and that is future citizens. As Chesteron once said about the dead “Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.” Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death." I think more importantly than the dead are the countless of people who have to live with the mess we've left for them and in which they didn't have a say.

The job of elected officials is to represent the people, no more, no less. "Improve stuff" is extremely subjective I don't think I want one guy to decide what it is.

11235813213455 7y ago

There are some improvements, like planting trees, that can't be debated

nickpeterson 7y ago
Too many trees attract pests and their roots break water pipes, I think we should cut them all down.

arbol 7y ago

Leaders are supposed to lead...

acdha 7y ago

What is that supposed to mean in practice? Unless you have pure direct democracy on every issue, someone is going to make a judgement call which not everyone is going agree with. This is especially true on issues like allocation of public spaces where there’s always going to be someone who gets less than they want, and a vested interest which wants to preserve their advantage — like the drivers who’ve benefited from heavy subsidies in most of the industrialized world.

thaumasiotes 7y ago
> Unless you have pure direct democracy on every issue, someone is going to make a judgement call which not everyone is going agree with. This will still happen -- on every issue -- if you have pure direct democracy on every issue. It's not a problem that direct democracy improves or even addresses.
- acdha 7y ago
  Not quite: you’d still have the issue of disagreement but without an intermediary. It’s totally unworkable in practice but you’d avoid the arguments about a politician not listening to one side.

erikpukinskis 7y ago

> I don't think I want one guy to decide what it is. She didn’t decide. She said what she wanted to do and then the city elected her. The city decided.

davidivadavid 7y ago
The people who vote in the city decided. The problem gets trickier when, e.g. the people who work in the city come from close suburbs and get priced out of the city, where a different demographic lives, but influences the way they commute, among other things.

Barrin92 7y ago

> "Improve stuff" is extremely subjective well breathing clean air and not cooking the planet is about as non-subjective as it gets. We're not really talking about sophisticated moral quandaries here, the bar for improvement in our societies is actually surprisingly low. Not having everyone of the billions of people living in our cities carry around two tons of steel wherever they go ought to appeal to anyone who can do a bit of napkin math about energy consumption. Elected officials doing whatever people tell them like a sort of walking strawpoll is a nice fiction but at the end of the day letting the inmates run the asylum is a bad idea. If we want to make necessary improvements it's going to come at the cost of going against the often short-sighted interests of citizens.

brankoB 7y ago
Ah yes the old "the majority of people are wrong, MY ideas are correct, why doesn't the government just implement all of MY ideas as they're obviously correct" argument.
- Barrin92 7y ago
  in some cases the majority of people are wrong, and it is trivial to show why they are wrong. In case of environmental issues or degrading of the commons in general the issue is that externalities are not priced in as economists would say, and if they are tried to be priced in like in France, the democratic process or even street violence is used to prevent that from happening. Again I think it's important to state that this isn't the case for all issues. On many fronts majority opinion may be useful, but on some issues it's glaringly obvious that people are unwilling to bear the costs for their lifestyle, and ignore the long-term harm they cause. In fact there's another democratic majority that is completely ignored by this appeal to the people, and that is future citizens. As Chesteron once said about the dead “Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.” Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death." I think more importantly than the dead are the countless of people who have to live with the mess we've left for them and in which they didn't have a say.