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It’s not cynical when looking at the incentives. Once a rule is in place for “safety” reasons the political cost to remove is really high (what if something bad

It’s not cynical when looking at the incentives. Once a rule is in place for “safety” reasons the political cost to remove is really high (what if something bad happens?). Politicians won’t touch it. That’s why I think exceptional measures should expire automatically (on a date or when a hard condition is met)

dopamean 5y ago
I agree fully re: expiration dates. IIRC the patriot act had an expiration date and it took nearly two decades for it to actually expire because it kept being reauthorized. It finally did expire last year and was not reauthorized and I suspect that is because we've actually already slipped far enough down the slope to no longer need that particular set of rules. So I support the expiration date idea. I just wish there was a way to implement it such that it actually had the desired effect.
q1w2 5y ago
That and the fact that one terrorist actually packed his sneakers with explosives and tried to detonate them on a plane.
BoxOfRain 5y ago
>That’s why I think exceptional measures should expire automatically I'd go even further than this, I'd argue that all laws that ordinary people are likely to come into contact with in the course of their everyday life should have an expiry date, forcing a debate every x decades as to whether or not they're still fit for purpose. The date could be variable based on the nature of the legislation, but this mechanism would be fantastic for forcibly clearing out a lot of society's "technical debt". This mechanism in my opinion would have stopped the lingering damage from moronic wars on abstract concepts. There would have to be some exceptions of course, things like fundamental liberties and human rights for example can't ever be negotiable in a civilised society. There's also an awful lot of very sector-specific legislation which probably doesn't need to be directly re-written every couple of decades too, although society at large won't be coming into contact with it much either so it's not really in the scope of the goal which is to stop yesterday's issues leaving nasty remants for today's societies.
- throaway46546 5y ago
  I think that would just cause issues like with the debt ceiling, but instead of a "government shutdown" we could have critical laws expiring and their renewal being held hostage.
  - BoxOfRain 5y ago
    This would fit quite nicely into another fairly radical idea which is to reform our countries as "zero party democracies". It strikes me that a lot of political ills come from within parties rather than governments due to the gulf between "party" and "country" and all the conflicting loyalty it causes. We could abolish parties altogether and instead elect all our representatives directly as independents, who would in turn appoint the executive branch from among themselves for a fixed period of time. We could even deprive the media of their ridiculous circus around general elections by abolishing them too and instead just having rotating by-elections in each seat which gives you the same amount of democracy but far less artificial conflict. Admittedly, this would work a lot better in parliamentary systems and would need to be adapted for presidential ones. There's no "us versus them" in this scenario, just "us". This approach immediately takes the poison out of the barb and makes politics far less adversarial. Politicians would be forced to rely on the strength of their arguments and the quality of their local representation rather than the colour of their rosette to get re-elected, and it also makes corruption more difficult as it's far easier to bribe a few members of the party top brass than it is to bribe 50% + 1 of a parliament. Of course informal alliances will form between politicians but that's fine as long as it happens transparently and within the public institutions which are accountable to all, this is very different to a party which is only accountable to its members.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > We could abolish parties altogether and instead elect all our representatives directly as independents No, we couldn't. I mean, we could eliminate formal parties, but making factionalism less transparent doesn't eliminate it, it just makes it harder for voters to know what they are getting. There's plenty of research about both better proportionality of results and more supported parties improves most measures of health of democracies, including popular satisfaction with government. > There's no "us versus them" in this scenario, just "us". Just because the labels associated with “us” and “them” don't appear on formal organizations or besides names on the ballot doesn't mean they don't exist. (You can see that within parties now—the harsh divisions between the progressive and neoliberal wings of the Democratic Party don't need separate formal parties, or even entities of any kind, to exist; further, the well-defined factions that became the original US parties existed and were widely recognized before formal parties did. Parties are a product, not the source, of factionalism.)
mike00632 5y ago
Right now most everyone has a sense of what it would be like to go back to normal pre-COVID life. I'm starting to lose a sense of what it would be like to go back to pre-War-On-Terror normalcy.
thepasswordis 5y ago
>Politicians won’t touch it. Some politicians won't touch it.

dopamean 5y ago

I agree fully re: expiration dates. IIRC the patriot act had an expiration date and it took nearly two decades for it to actually expire because it kept being reauthorized. It finally did expire last year and was not reauthorized and I suspect that is because we've actually already slipped far enough down the slope to no longer need that particular set of rules. So I support the expiration date idea. I just wish there was a way to implement it such that it actually had the desired effect.

q1w2 5y ago

That and the fact that one terrorist actually packed his sneakers with explosives and tried to detonate them on a plane.

BoxOfRain 5y ago

>That’s why I think exceptional measures should expire automatically I'd go even further than this, I'd argue that all laws that ordinary people are likely to come into contact with in the course of their everyday life should have an expiry date, forcing a debate every x decades as to whether or not they're still fit for purpose. The date could be variable based on the nature of the legislation, but this mechanism would be fantastic for forcibly clearing out a lot of society's "technical debt". This mechanism in my opinion would have stopped the lingering damage from moronic wars on abstract concepts. There would have to be some exceptions of course, things like fundamental liberties and human rights for example can't ever be negotiable in a civilised society. There's also an awful lot of very sector-specific legislation which probably doesn't need to be directly re-written every couple of decades too, although society at large won't be coming into contact with it much either so it's not really in the scope of the goal which is to stop yesterday's issues leaving nasty remants for today's societies.

throaway46546 5y ago
I think that would just cause issues like with the debt ceiling, but instead of a "government shutdown" we could have critical laws expiring and their renewal being held hostage.
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  This would fit quite nicely into another fairly radical idea which is to reform our countries as "zero party democracies". It strikes me that a lot of political ills come from within parties rather than governments due to the gulf between "party" and "country" and all the conflicting loyalty it causes. We could abolish parties altogether and instead elect all our representatives directly as independents, who would in turn appoint the executive branch from among themselves for a fixed period of time. We could even deprive the media of their ridiculous circus around general elections by abolishing them too and instead just having rotating by-elections in each seat which gives you the same amount of democracy but far less artificial conflict. Admittedly, this would work a lot better in parliamentary systems and would need to be adapted for presidential ones. There's no "us versus them" in this scenario, just "us". This approach immediately takes the poison out of the barb and makes politics far less adversarial. Politicians would be forced to rely on the strength of their arguments and the quality of their local representation rather than the colour of their rosette to get re-elected, and it also makes corruption more difficult as it's far easier to bribe a few members of the party top brass than it is to bribe 50% + 1 of a parliament. Of course informal alliances will form between politicians but that's fine as long as it happens transparently and within the public institutions which are accountable to all, this is very different to a party which is only accountable to its members.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > We could abolish parties altogether and instead elect all our representatives directly as independents No, we couldn't. I mean, we could eliminate formal parties, but making factionalism less transparent doesn't eliminate it, it just makes it harder for voters to know what they are getting. There's plenty of research about both better proportionality of results and more supported parties improves most measures of health of democracies, including popular satisfaction with government. > There's no "us versus them" in this scenario, just "us". Just because the labels associated with “us” and “them” don't appear on formal organizations or besides names on the ballot doesn't mean they don't exist. (You can see that within parties now—the harsh divisions between the progressive and neoliberal wings of the Democratic Party don't need separate formal parties, or even entities of any kind, to exist; further, the well-defined factions that became the original US parties existed and were widely recognized before formal parties did. Parties are a product, not the source, of factionalism.)

mike00632 5y ago

Right now most everyone has a sense of what it would be like to go back to normal pre-COVID life. I'm starting to lose a sense of what it would be like to go back to pre-War-On-Terror normalcy.

thepasswordis 5y ago

>Politicians won’t touch it. Some politicians won't touch it.