8 ms·

How can we repair a system that's been systematically corrupted over several years? As a systems engineer my instinct is to rebuild the system from the ground u

How can we repair a system that's been systematically corrupted over several years? As a systems engineer my instinct is to rebuild the system from the ground up. If only politics was that simple.

lallysingh 6y ago
An omnibus law of restrictions on law enforcement.
TehCorwiz 6y ago
I hear the French did that once with great success. Took a while though.
- grawprog 6y ago
  And cost a lot of heads.
- GrinningFool 6y ago
  I hear it was rough on headcount.
- kgin 6y ago
  Violent revolutions aren’t great when the ruling system is a democracy. By definition it’s going against the will of “the people”
  - projektfu 6y ago
    With gerrymandering, the non-proportional Senate, and the Electoral College system, it might be a stretch to call the US federal government a democracy. Something like it, but not exactly.
    - kgin 6y ago
      I would be down for a revolution against gerrymandering.
- xwolfi 6y ago
  Great success my ass, we got an Emperor, 3 kings and another emperor after that. We only got the right to vote for men in a republic after we patriotically enlisted in 1875 to fight Prussia, and women when they patriotically replaced men in factories during WWII. Notice a pattern ? Like it would be handled like a carrot to a population so exhausted the only thing they vote for is the people already at the top ? People who bullshit that beheading privilege-born people leads to great success is a lunatic and will be beheaded like Robespierre eventually. Even the second revolution in 1848 lead to the election of ... Napoleon III as president, before he created the "second empire"... Another violent fiasco. Not saying it should be that way, but tired of hearing the french revolution disaster quoted as a miracle of democracy by all pseudo-anarchists to justify their blind violence. It's not taught that way to children in France. We call part of it the Terror...
  - runawaybottle 6y ago
    It was an all consuming revolution, sure (just about everyone that started it ended up dead, and poetically by the very revolutionaries they instigated). I don’t think the Revolution was too interested in individual rights, but more so on the class disparity. It’s hard to judge because most nations as we know them were built on blood, however unjust. One is rarely handed a country, or in many cases, handed back a country.
  - jcranmer 6y ago
    The American Revolution produced first a weak Continental Congress under the Articles of Confederation, then changed their government in 1787 and the new constitution and... well, the most substantive change to that government was the 12th amendment that changed the electoral college procedures. Compare this to France, which went like this (not counting the smaller regimes): * Absolute monarchy (ancien regime) * Constitutional monarchy (until Louis XVII flees) * First Republic * First Empire (Napoleon seizes power) * Constitutional monarchy * Constitutional monarchy #2 (July Monarchy) * Second Republic * Second Empire (different Napoleon seizes power) * Third Republic (only because the monarchists couldn't decide on which branch to restore, and agreed to a republic until one of the contenders died... who took an awfully long time to do so) * Vichy France (after the Fall of France) * Free French government-in-exile * Fourth Republic * Fifth Republic (the one we're on today) Quite a stark contrast.
- rsynnott 6y ago
  Once? About eight times. Five republics, plus some empires and a monarchy or two.
munificent 6y ago
The way we fix legacy software systems: By carefully refactoring it one step at a time and testing and monitoring to make sure our refactoring doesn't break stuff that's working correctly. The big rewrite is always appealing but almost always doomed to failure. There is 200+ years of painfully learned lessons in the US legal code. If we throw it all out and start over, we'll have to re-learn all of those lessons one tragedy at a time.
- rapind 6y ago
  If only you could refactor faster than features are added...
- Cerium 6y ago
  How far can we push this software analogy... The government is a PAAS business. They have various customers, both direct B2C, like you and me, and B2B relationships with other companies that run business on their platform. Either way the customers pay quarterly or yearly for the services through a system called taxes. Political activists and are a type of white /gray hat hacker who seeks to demonstrate exploitable flaws in the platform and may benefit through bug bounties from backers or through getting advantageous features implemented. Lobbyists are a kind of social engineer that also wishes to influence feature decisions. Legislators are a type of software developer. Their job is complicated by the lack of adequate test and simulation environments, and the presence of competing interests who frequently oppose the suggested features or implementation decisions but whose approval is often needed for the PR to garnish approval.
  - ErikAugust 6y ago
    Well, a federal legislator has the states as a test environment. One of the great things about a federal system.
  - gumby 6y ago
    > How far can we push this software analogy... People used to talk about the "Microsoft tax"... well this system already has Federal, State, and local taxes...
Ididntdothis 6y ago
As a systems engineer you probably also know that building something complex from the ground up will have very buggy rollouts for the first versions :). Rewrites also have a pretty good history of bankrupting organizations. The current system is very fixable if somebody actually had the political will. Compared to building something new it will be easy. This reminds me of the discussion about terraforming Mars. It’s deemed to be too hard and expensive to reduce our greenhouse emissions on a perfectly fine planet like earth so people think it’s easier to terraform a barren planet.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
aaronbrethorst 6y ago
You'd probably want to start by passing a sweeping anti-corruption plan. https://www.vox.com/2019/9/16/20867216/elizabeth-warren-anti-corruption-bill https://www.vox.com/2019/9/16/20867216/elizabeth-warren-anti...
- thephyber 6y ago
  Larry Lessig also points at treating campaign donations like the illegal bribes they are and reforming the "money in politics" problem first.
  - aaronbrethorst 6y ago
    * Warren believes the flow of money in politics has stalled progress on a number of other issues, including gun violence, climate change, and the rising cost of health care. Stamping money out of politics goes to the root of these issues, she says.* And Lessig has been a supporter of Warren's for exactly this reason for years.
    - splintercell 6y ago
      I highly recommend watching this video [1] to understand why "progress has stalled". Believe it or not, it's by design. 1. https://youtu.be/Ggz_gd--UO0 https://youtu.be/Ggz_gd--UO0
      - AlexandrB 6y ago
        This was a good video! I'd never seen Scalia speak, and he's very compelling - I think he would have been a good teacher. Unfortunately, while the gridlock between senate and house is good at stopping progress benefitting the vulnerable, it has been less successful in stopping "progress" benefitting moneyed interests. This is perhaps because the jobs of both house and senate representatives depend so much on securing funding for their next campaign. Or maybe it's simply because most legislators personally benefit from such legislation, being moneyed themselves. Whatever the cause, the result resembles an oligarchy.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
arminiusreturns 6y ago
I've thought about this for a long time. Ranked choice voting and vote out everyone with a party affiliation on either side, the end goal being to take away the majority from both parties at both the state and federal level (and county etc also). After you get that you can start doing things like term limits, reining in K-street, etc. That's the start to taking back both congress and eventually potus/scotus etc. Unfortunately many people identify with their party as a tribe and fail to acknowledge the oligarchs own them both. As Chris Hedges says, it's the quiet bipartisanship you don't hear about that's the most dangerous.
- IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago
  Good attempt, but no. -Allow for voting for null. If null wins, position goes unfulfilled. Belgium did it for the longest time. Nothing broke in thr meantime. -Make it costly to bribe. All voting positions are subject to a random swap. For example the winner of a senate seat in FL is forced to swap for state assemblyman. If declined, the runner up takes the spot. And this is true for all elections including president. -Get people to fight about insignificant topics. In switzerland, people argue at the canton level about the size of the local roads. No oxygen left to argue national, topdown issues. This can be achieved by bringing direct democracy rules (similar to suisse) into USA. I think all 3 could pass on a nationwide referendum with a powerful enough executive.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
>How can we repair a system that's been systematically corrupted over several years? Slowly, over several years or quickly with high body count and/or slim odds of lasting success depending on the nature of the proposed changes. History is littered with attempts to move fast and break things but lasting change takes time because people's attitudes have to change. At the end of the day even unpopular dictators require some amount of consent of the governed in order to rule. You can try to play politics and then use the power gained to push whatever it faster with propaganda, indoctrination, legislation (which is somewhere between an appeal to authority and coercion when used in this manner) but if you push faster than the population actually wants they might push back.
badrabbit 6y ago
Speaking as an infosec practitioner,systems like this are pieced together over time, they are not and cannot be torn down and rebuilt since that implies you can plan a complete design and follow through. It takes time but a mess like this can be corrected. You first isolate/segment,then you determine scope and source of the compromise/failure as well as external communication channels. The cleaning up part starts when you first disable the communication channels, get forensics imaging as needed,surgically remove threats on critical systems and slowly rebuild systems that are less than critical. Think of america as a network instead of a system, the hackers have seized control of the domain controller and other critical systems but they haven't compromised all systems or prevented admins from kicking them out. The problem is not actually fixing America but convincing anyone how deep and widespread the problem is. You can fix it but the bad guys will just get back in, it's not just a cleanup but a systemic change on how security(national security,public security,etc..)is done. In american politics we're talking about changes to the constitution, perhaps even a rewrite. You can convince people a new president that will magically fix things is needed but you can't convince them the very foundation of the country has been cracked due to changes that happened over time and will cause a structural collapse.
- chiefalchemist 6y ago
  > The problem is not actually fixing America but convincing anyone how deep and widespread the problem is. There's a Churchill quote that's similar. Something like: The problem isn't winning the war, it's convincing others that it needs to be fought.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- kbenson 6y ago
  Unfortunately, in American politics, it's the equivalent of getting a week or two to work on the problem, and then you're fired and a new consultant is brought in. Do they identify the same problems? Even if they do, is their top of the list item to fix the same as the prior consultant's? Welcome to the revolving door of American politics. What's worse, it's not really like you're a consultant, because then you might be able to leave it behind. It's more like you all work for that company, and it's a revolving set of promotions and demotions, and you're forced to watch people abandon your work for some other goal that you think is at best less important, but have no real ability to influence.
meddlepal 6y ago
Burn it all to the ground and rebuild.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
newacct583 6y ago
> How can we repair a system that's been systematically corrupted over several years? It's not the fault of the "system". The "system" wrote a law that says what the DEA is allowed to do (not this). It's not the "system" deciding to ignore that law, it's people. Hell, it's literally people with names. There are senior administration officials named all over that article. You fix people by electing better people.
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  How do you elect those people? Sticking with the software analogy, it’s like our system has these environment variables that only administrators get to set. We don’t know how to make a simple change to those variables, so we’re coming up with all kinds of wonky workarounds. I agree with you, it’s as simple as changing the environment variables. What’s complex is that it’s impossible. That’s kind of the underlying frustration if we were to zoom out a bit. We need to make some simple changes in the config, and no one wants to give us admin rights or make the changes for us. It’s frustrating stuff, and has caused paralysis in our political system on every issue imaginable.
- jessaustin 6y ago
  Yeah I'm tired of this loudmouthed confused old man from the Northeast who groped and digitally penetrated his Senate staffer... oh, wait. Maybe this "electing better people" thing could be a challenge.
gumby 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect Of course the current US constitution is V2.
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  So how should it have gone? Roll with England’s framework and just ditch the King? Doesn’t sound too terrible, we’d have proportional representation at least.
  - jacobush 6y ago
    No, they have gerrymandering too. But more proportional, yes.
  - gumby 6y ago
    V1 was articles of confederation and it was pretty terrible.
xwolfi 6y ago
The system seems to be working as intended. You're asked every 4 years for a feedback and a direction, 30% of all concerned people bother to do so, 30% of the population is satisfied. Maybe, oh maybe, look at yourself in the mirror and at least use the system, before rebuilding it from absolute 0 ? It's not like Trump grabbed the power from the feeble hands of the poor masses. The masses chanted his name for christ's sake... on a platform to revoke everything the previous guy did... Sorry but this time, the system worked perfectly.
- wool_gather 6y ago
  If you had put it to them as a hypothetical scenario at the time, what percentage of 2016 Trump voters would you guess would approve of how his administration is handling the protests? Or what about other issues? (And we could ask the same question about other presidents, of course.)
lukifer 6y ago
Electoral reform. Every state manages its own electoral processes, and the vast majority of states have some mechanism for direct democracy through ballot initiatives. There are many potential improvements, from algorithmic redistricting to mail-in voting, but the big one IMO is Ranked Choice Voting (Maine has already achieved this successfully, and it's stood up against court challenges [0]). This allows us to break the R/D duopoly, and shift the incentives towards big-tent consensus-building rather than demonization and "lesser evilism", and giving independents and third parties a real path to victory. [0] https://www.maine.gov/sos/cec/elec/upcoming/rankedchoicefaq.html https://www.maine.gov/sos/cec/elec/upcoming/rankedchoicefaq....
- typest 6y ago
  Ranked choice voting (often implemented as instant runoff) likely won’t break the duopoly in the ways you think it will. Approval Voting is a better technique. Check out the Center for Election Science for more info.
  - lukifer 6y ago
    Funny you should mention it! I actually prefer Approval voting, partially for its simplicity, partially because it elegantly represents Consent of the Governed. I sometimes don't bother mentioning Approval, because RCV has greater mindshare, and "Ranked Choice" is a little stickier from a branding perspective. I kind of wish there were a better overarching term to describe multiple voting; either way, the priority IMO is that we get off of First Past The Post. I'll check out CES, thanks.
    - ClayShentrup 6y ago
      Fargo, ND will use approval voting for the first time this Tuesday, June 9th. First time in American history. Albeit this is a two-winner race. So their are 7 candidates on the ballot (one of whom dropped out), and two write-in slots. You can vote for as many candidates as you want to, and the two with the most votes win. https://www.inforum.com/news/government-and-politics/6492174-New-voting-system-mail-in-ballots-sure-to-make-Fargo-City-Commission-election-an-odd-one https://www.inforum.com/news/government-and-politics/6492174...
tonystubblebine 6y ago
Now is a very good time to focus on local politics. For example, the police is very much controlled locally. Do you have real civilian oversight? There are a host of policies that are mostly enacted locally that are recommended by this org: https://www.joincampaignzero.org/ https://www.joincampaignzero.org/
markus_zhang 6y ago
Friend if you think it is "just several years" then you have got it wrong. These degrees of corruption take time to build up, maybe even decades. It is just like the Republic. Does Palpadine magically corrupt it in just years? No the Republic has been corrupted long before. It is a systemic corruption and such thing takes a long time to happen.
Threeve303 6y ago
The answer appears to be build a new system quietly behind the scenes and then abruptly switch over to it one day without regard to the difference between systems. The U.S. is more a tale of peacefully handing power between two separate systems that both constantly evolve. From time to time, these two systems lead to a state of cognitive dissonance which threatens their existence until a time in which the rubber band violently snaps back to an equilibrium.
kilroy123 6y ago
This is one of the best ideas I've seen: https://anacyclosis.org/2020/05/25/how-do-we-save-democracy/ https://anacyclosis.org/2020/05/25/how-do-we-save-democracy/ TL;DR; Re-align the interest of the rich so they have a strong financial interest in the middle class doing better. By having a progressive tax pegged to the median income of Americans.
- grasshopperpurp 6y ago
  Really enjoyed this. Thanks for posting. It doesn't directly address the abuse of the lower class. Is it assuming that a stronger middle class will lead to a system that better protects the lower class?

How can we repair a system that's been systematically corrupted over several years? As a systems engineer my instinct is to rebuild the system from the ground up. If only politics was that simple.

lallysingh 6y ago

An omnibus law of restrictions on law enforcement.

TehCorwiz 6y ago

I hear the French did that once with great success. Took a while though.

grawprog 6y ago
And cost a lot of heads.
GrinningFool 6y ago
I hear it was rough on headcount.
kgin 6y ago
Violent revolutions aren’t great when the ruling system is a democracy. By definition it’s going against the will of “the people”
- projektfu 6y ago
  With gerrymandering, the non-proportional Senate, and the Electoral College system, it might be a stretch to call the US federal government a democracy. Something like it, but not exactly.
  - kgin 6y ago
    I would be down for a revolution against gerrymandering.
xwolfi 6y ago
Great success my ass, we got an Emperor, 3 kings and another emperor after that. We only got the right to vote for men in a republic after we patriotically enlisted in 1875 to fight Prussia, and women when they patriotically replaced men in factories during WWII. Notice a pattern ? Like it would be handled like a carrot to a population so exhausted the only thing they vote for is the people already at the top ? People who bullshit that beheading privilege-born people leads to great success is a lunatic and will be beheaded like Robespierre eventually. Even the second revolution in 1848 lead to the election of ... Napoleon III as president, before he created the "second empire"... Another violent fiasco. Not saying it should be that way, but tired of hearing the french revolution disaster quoted as a miracle of democracy by all pseudo-anarchists to justify their blind violence. It's not taught that way to children in France. We call part of it the Terror...
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  It was an all consuming revolution, sure (just about everyone that started it ended up dead, and poetically by the very revolutionaries they instigated). I don’t think the Revolution was too interested in individual rights, but more so on the class disparity. It’s hard to judge because most nations as we know them were built on blood, however unjust. One is rarely handed a country, or in many cases, handed back a country.
- jcranmer 6y ago
  The American Revolution produced first a weak Continental Congress under the Articles of Confederation, then changed their government in 1787 and the new constitution and... well, the most substantive change to that government was the 12th amendment that changed the electoral college procedures. Compare this to France, which went like this (not counting the smaller regimes): * Absolute monarchy (ancien regime) * Constitutional monarchy (until Louis XVII flees) * First Republic * First Empire (Napoleon seizes power) * Constitutional monarchy * Constitutional monarchy #2 (July Monarchy) * Second Republic * Second Empire (different Napoleon seizes power) * Third Republic (only because the monarchists couldn't decide on which branch to restore, and agreed to a republic until one of the contenders died... who took an awfully long time to do so) * Vichy France (after the Fall of France) * Free French government-in-exile * Fourth Republic * Fifth Republic (the one we're on today) Quite a stark contrast.
rsynnott 6y ago
Once? About eight times. Five republics, plus some empires and a monarchy or two.

munificent 6y ago

The way we fix legacy software systems: By carefully refactoring it one step at a time and testing and monitoring to make sure our refactoring doesn't break stuff that's working correctly. The big rewrite is always appealing but almost always doomed to failure. There is 200+ years of painfully learned lessons in the US legal code. If we throw it all out and start over, we'll have to re-learn all of those lessons one tragedy at a time.

rapind 6y ago
If only you could refactor faster than features are added...
Cerium 6y ago
How far can we push this software analogy... The government is a PAAS business. They have various customers, both direct B2C, like you and me, and B2B relationships with other companies that run business on their platform. Either way the customers pay quarterly or yearly for the services through a system called taxes. Political activists and are a type of white /gray hat hacker who seeks to demonstrate exploitable flaws in the platform and may benefit through bug bounties from backers or through getting advantageous features implemented. Lobbyists are a kind of social engineer that also wishes to influence feature decisions. Legislators are a type of software developer. Their job is complicated by the lack of adequate test and simulation environments, and the presence of competing interests who frequently oppose the suggested features or implementation decisions but whose approval is often needed for the PR to garnish approval.
- ErikAugust 6y ago
  Well, a federal legislator has the states as a test environment. One of the great things about a federal system.
- gumby 6y ago
  > How far can we push this software analogy... People used to talk about the "Microsoft tax"... well this system already has Federal, State, and local taxes...

Ididntdothis 6y ago

As a systems engineer you probably also know that building something complex from the ground up will have very buggy rollouts for the first versions :). Rewrites also have a pretty good history of bankrupting organizations. The current system is very fixable if somebody actually had the political will. Compared to building something new it will be easy. This reminds me of the discussion about terraforming Mars. It’s deemed to be too hard and expensive to reduce our greenhouse emissions on a perfectly fine planet like earth so people think it’s easier to terraform a barren planet.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

aaronbrethorst 6y ago

You'd probably want to start by passing a sweeping anti-corruption plan. https://www.vox.com/2019/9/16/20867216/elizabeth-warren-anti-corruption-bill https://www.vox.com/2019/9/16/20867216/elizabeth-warren-anti...

thephyber 6y ago
Larry Lessig also points at treating campaign donations like the illegal bribes they are and reforming the "money in politics" problem first.
- aaronbrethorst 6y ago
  * Warren believes the flow of money in politics has stalled progress on a number of other issues, including gun violence, climate change, and the rising cost of health care. Stamping money out of politics goes to the root of these issues, she says.* And Lessig has been a supporter of Warren's for exactly this reason for years.
  - splintercell 6y ago
    I highly recommend watching this video [1] to understand why "progress has stalled". Believe it or not, it's by design. 1. https://youtu.be/Ggz_gd--UO0 https://youtu.be/Ggz_gd--UO0
    - AlexandrB 6y ago
      This was a good video! I'd never seen Scalia speak, and he's very compelling - I think he would have been a good teacher. Unfortunately, while the gridlock between senate and house is good at stopping progress benefitting the vulnerable, it has been less successful in stopping "progress" benefitting moneyed interests. This is perhaps because the jobs of both house and senate representatives depend so much on securing funding for their next campaign. Or maybe it's simply because most legislators personally benefit from such legislation, being moneyed themselves. Whatever the cause, the result resembles an oligarchy.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

arminiusreturns 6y ago

I've thought about this for a long time. Ranked choice voting and vote out everyone with a party affiliation on either side, the end goal being to take away the majority from both parties at both the state and federal level (and county etc also). After you get that you can start doing things like term limits, reining in K-street, etc. That's the start to taking back both congress and eventually potus/scotus etc. Unfortunately many people identify with their party as a tribe and fail to acknowledge the oligarchs own them both. As Chris Hedges says, it's the quiet bipartisanship you don't hear about that's the most dangerous.

IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago
Good attempt, but no. -Allow for voting for null. If null wins, position goes unfulfilled. Belgium did it for the longest time. Nothing broke in thr meantime. -Make it costly to bribe. All voting positions are subject to a random swap. For example the winner of a senate seat in FL is forced to swap for state assemblyman. If declined, the runner up takes the spot. And this is true for all elections including president. -Get people to fight about insignificant topics. In switzerland, people argue at the canton level about the size of the local roads. No oxygen left to argue national, topdown issues. This can be achieved by bringing direct democracy rules (similar to suisse) into USA. I think all 3 could pass on a nationwide referendum with a powerful enough executive.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

>How can we repair a system that's been systematically corrupted over several years? Slowly, over several years or quickly with high body count and/or slim odds of lasting success depending on the nature of the proposed changes. History is littered with attempts to move fast and break things but lasting change takes time because people's attitudes have to change. At the end of the day even unpopular dictators require some amount of consent of the governed in order to rule. You can try to play politics and then use the power gained to push whatever it faster with propaganda, indoctrination, legislation (which is somewhere between an appeal to authority and coercion when used in this manner) but if you push faster than the population actually wants they might push back.

badrabbit 6y ago

Speaking as an infosec practitioner,systems like this are pieced together over time, they are not and cannot be torn down and rebuilt since that implies you can plan a complete design and follow through. It takes time but a mess like this can be corrected. You first isolate/segment,then you determine scope and source of the compromise/failure as well as external communication channels. The cleaning up part starts when you first disable the communication channels, get forensics imaging as needed,surgically remove threats on critical systems and slowly rebuild systems that are less than critical. Think of america as a network instead of a system, the hackers have seized control of the domain controller and other critical systems but they haven't compromised all systems or prevented admins from kicking them out. The problem is not actually fixing America but convincing anyone how deep and widespread the problem is. You can fix it but the bad guys will just get back in, it's not just a cleanup but a systemic change on how security(national security,public security,etc..)is done. In american politics we're talking about changes to the constitution, perhaps even a rewrite. You can convince people a new president that will magically fix things is needed but you can't convince them the very foundation of the country has been cracked due to changes that happened over time and will cause a structural collapse.

chiefalchemist 6y ago
> The problem is not actually fixing America but convincing anyone how deep and widespread the problem is. There's a Churchill quote that's similar. Something like: The problem isn't winning the war, it's convincing others that it needs to be fought.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
kbenson 6y ago
Unfortunately, in American politics, it's the equivalent of getting a week or two to work on the problem, and then you're fired and a new consultant is brought in. Do they identify the same problems? Even if they do, is their top of the list item to fix the same as the prior consultant's? Welcome to the revolving door of American politics. What's worse, it's not really like you're a consultant, because then you might be able to leave it behind. It's more like you all work for that company, and it's a revolving set of promotions and demotions, and you're forced to watch people abandon your work for some other goal that you think is at best less important, but have no real ability to influence.

meddlepal 6y ago

Burn it all to the ground and rebuild.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

newacct583 6y ago

> How can we repair a system that's been systematically corrupted over several years? It's not the fault of the "system". The "system" wrote a law that says what the DEA is allowed to do (not this). It's not the "system" deciding to ignore that law, it's people. Hell, it's literally people with names. There are senior administration officials named all over that article. You fix people by electing better people.

runawaybottle 6y ago
How do you elect those people? Sticking with the software analogy, it’s like our system has these environment variables that only administrators get to set. We don’t know how to make a simple change to those variables, so we’re coming up with all kinds of wonky workarounds. I agree with you, it’s as simple as changing the environment variables. What’s complex is that it’s impossible. That’s kind of the underlying frustration if we were to zoom out a bit. We need to make some simple changes in the config, and no one wants to give us admin rights or make the changes for us. It’s frustrating stuff, and has caused paralysis in our political system on every issue imaginable.
jessaustin 6y ago
Yeah I'm tired of this loudmouthed confused old man from the Northeast who groped and digitally penetrated his Senate staffer... oh, wait. Maybe this "electing better people" thing could be a challenge.

gumby 6y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect Of course the current US constitution is V2.

runawaybottle 6y ago
So how should it have gone? Roll with England’s framework and just ditch the King? Doesn’t sound too terrible, we’d have proportional representation at least.
- jacobush 6y ago
  No, they have gerrymandering too. But more proportional, yes.
- gumby 6y ago
  V1 was articles of confederation and it was pretty terrible.

xwolfi 6y ago

The system seems to be working as intended. You're asked every 4 years for a feedback and a direction, 30% of all concerned people bother to do so, 30% of the population is satisfied. Maybe, oh maybe, look at yourself in the mirror and at least use the system, before rebuilding it from absolute 0 ? It's not like Trump grabbed the power from the feeble hands of the poor masses. The masses chanted his name for christ's sake... on a platform to revoke everything the previous guy did... Sorry but this time, the system worked perfectly.

wool_gather 6y ago
If you had put it to them as a hypothetical scenario at the time, what percentage of 2016 Trump voters would you guess would approve of how his administration is handling the protests? Or what about other issues? (And we could ask the same question about other presidents, of course.)

lukifer 6y ago

Electoral reform. Every state manages its own electoral processes, and the vast majority of states have some mechanism for direct democracy through ballot initiatives. There are many potential improvements, from algorithmic redistricting to mail-in voting, but the big one IMO is Ranked Choice Voting (Maine has already achieved this successfully, and it's stood up against court challenges [0]). This allows us to break the R/D duopoly, and shift the incentives towards big-tent consensus-building rather than demonization and "lesser evilism", and giving independents and third parties a real path to victory. [0] https://www.maine.gov/sos/cec/elec/upcoming/rankedchoicefaq.html https://www.maine.gov/sos/cec/elec/upcoming/rankedchoicefaq....

typest 6y ago
Ranked choice voting (often implemented as instant runoff) likely won’t break the duopoly in the ways you think it will. Approval Voting is a better technique. Check out the Center for Election Science for more info.
- lukifer 6y ago
  Funny you should mention it! I actually prefer Approval voting, partially for its simplicity, partially because it elegantly represents Consent of the Governed. I sometimes don't bother mentioning Approval, because RCV has greater mindshare, and "Ranked Choice" is a little stickier from a branding perspective. I kind of wish there were a better overarching term to describe multiple voting; either way, the priority IMO is that we get off of First Past The Post. I'll check out CES, thanks.
  - ClayShentrup 6y ago
    Fargo, ND will use approval voting for the first time this Tuesday, June 9th. First time in American history. Albeit this is a two-winner race. So their are 7 candidates on the ballot (one of whom dropped out), and two write-in slots. You can vote for as many candidates as you want to, and the two with the most votes win. https://www.inforum.com/news/government-and-politics/6492174-New-voting-system-mail-in-ballots-sure-to-make-Fargo-City-Commission-election-an-odd-one https://www.inforum.com/news/government-and-politics/6492174...

tonystubblebine 6y ago

Now is a very good time to focus on local politics. For example, the police is very much controlled locally. Do you have real civilian oversight? There are a host of policies that are mostly enacted locally that are recommended by this org: https://www.joincampaignzero.org/ https://www.joincampaignzero.org/

markus_zhang 6y ago

Friend if you think it is "just several years" then you have got it wrong. These degrees of corruption take time to build up, maybe even decades. It is just like the Republic. Does Palpadine magically corrupt it in just years? No the Republic has been corrupted long before. It is a systemic corruption and such thing takes a long time to happen.

Threeve303 6y ago

The answer appears to be build a new system quietly behind the scenes and then abruptly switch over to it one day without regard to the difference between systems. The U.S. is more a tale of peacefully handing power between two separate systems that both constantly evolve. From time to time, these two systems lead to a state of cognitive dissonance which threatens their existence until a time in which the rubber band violently snaps back to an equilibrium.

kilroy123 6y ago

This is one of the best ideas I've seen: https://anacyclosis.org/2020/05/25/how-do-we-save-democracy/ https://anacyclosis.org/2020/05/25/how-do-we-save-democracy/ TL;DR; Re-align the interest of the rich so they have a strong financial interest in the middle class doing better. By having a progressive tax pegged to the median income of Americans.

grasshopperpurp 6y ago
Really enjoyed this. Thanks for posting. It doesn't directly address the abuse of the lower class. Is it assuming that a stronger middle class will lead to a system that better protects the lower class?