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Which is a point where, say, Westminster system or similar really starts to move ahead of the US system - not only do you have reasonable multi-party options (t

Which is a point where, say, Westminster system or similar really starts to move ahead of the US system - not only do you have reasonable multi-party options (to varying degrees) but also issues don’t boil down to a single person - the douche or turd sandwich - because whilst the modern media state does actually distill everything down to that single person as a figurehead, you still have to win 50% of electorates (or form coalitions to get there) and power is more devolved

sofixa 5y ago
The Westminster system is pretty close to the American one, and the fact that there are different parties is a bit by luck. A representative parliamentary system is much better for that - you don't disenfranchise up to half of the electorate, compromise is forced due to the need of coalitions, etc.
- ant6n 5y ago
  In a Multi Party First past the post system, u can disenfranchise much more than 50% of the population. In fact if there are N parties, it’s theoretically possible to have a majority government with 0.5*(1/N+epsilon)+epsilon of the votes (e.g. 12.5% in a 4 party system).
- robbiep 5y ago
  There are lots of ways to do democracy. I used one example because I am most familiar with that one example - australia has the Westminster system but it also has preferential voting which forces many of those same compromises and deals. For all those reading, because this is a place where pedantry is a rule, can they please appreciate that these replies of mine are sweeping and vague which necessarily recognises that there are both good and bad characteristics of all systems, as demonstrated by the history of those systems
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    And yet despite compromises, Australia still has concentration camps for immigrants on the northern coast. Ask ordinary people if they support such inhumane treatment and they'll tell you hell no, yet your political system still produces and legitimizes that. Australia is not a democracy, and i don't know many democratic systems in the world (except maybe for the Zapatistas caracoles in Chiapas or democratic confederalism in Rojava). Not judging, i'm myself from a colonial Empire masquerading as a democracy (France). It's just that changing the complexion/conditions of who exerts power is the wrong solution to a real problem: abolishing power is in my view a much more reasonable policy.
    - robbiep 5y ago
      reads post with disclaimer that I’m not trying to make any overly virtuous statements, then makes reply about that anyway ;) What do you mean by abolishing power? Like some sort of anarchy? Or are you referring more to a techno-anarchy, ie blockchain based
      - southerntofu 5y ago
        > reads post with disclaimer that I’m not trying to make any overly virtuous statements, then makes reply about that anyway Sorry i'm not a native speaker and i don't understand this sentence (promise i'm not GPT-3 ;)). > What do you mean by abolishing power? Like some sort of anarchy? Yes, exactly. As long as power is concentrated in some hands (authority), there's many incentives for injustice, and the attack surface to take over the entire system is much bigger. And when you have police, prisons and military to impose the rule of the few by force, you end up in the worst timeline we're currently in where we have an abundance of resources and yet screaming poverty, and our ruling elites keep on fucking up the planet even more instead of redistributing resources so that in the end our entire species (and millions of others) will be wiped out. If you want to see how alternative political systems could look in practice, i strongly recommend to check out the zapatistas (and their caracoles) in Chiapas or to some extent democratic confederalism in Rojava (which is less centered on horizontal power and more centered better representation of multi-cultural societies [0]). While much of the world is seeing setbacks on political freedoms and economic justice, these two regions are going in the opposite direction. Also, on principle i'm not opposed to some technology helping collective processes. But blockchain as we know it (PoW, PoS) is deeply flawed, and whatever digital system we'll come up with will never be as accessible and auditable as local public decision-making. I understand that public votes in a local-first world could exacerbate some inequalities locally (eg. with an oppressed ethnic/religious/sexual minority in a given commune), but i'm convinced the overall gains would far outweigh those downsides including for oppressed minorities (and can argue on that point if someone is not convinced). The problem with Nation States is comparable to blockchain. Consensus building is hard but can be done with a limited set of peers (a commune) in which there are existing trust relationships. Trying to build a wide-scale consensus among untrusted peers is doomed to failure and in the best scenario results in "dictatorship of the majority" which is not a good outcome for minorities, and more realistically ends up with an oligarchy controlling much of the network. In that sense, i would argue DHTs and Bittorrent-like protocols are more anarchist than blockchain: there is a notion of global consensus (content-addressed storage enforced by cryptographic hashes) but neither the DHT nor trackers (who federate between autonomous nodes/communes) end up dictating what your local computing/politics should be like. Does that make sense to you? [0] Rojava is under constant military threat by Daech and turkish military, and the influential PKK while undergoing anti-authoritarian self-critique has decades of authoritarian Marxist-Leninist practice to deconstruct. Both point don't help to build true local democracy (anarchy), although i would argue the region as a whole is moving in a better direction than most Nation States around the planet are.
fmajid 5y ago
The Westminster system has proven its utter failure to provide any measure of accountability for its executive when it emerged that the person who gets to decide whether Boris Johnson violated the Ministerial Code is one... Boris Johnson. US Presidents have been impeached, and in the case of Nixon forced to resign. French Presidents, probably the most powerful executives in the West, have been successfully prosecuted for crimes committed in office. Same with Helmut Kohl, the King of Spain, or Italian Prime Ministers. British Prime Ministers get a free ride for war crimes like Tony Blair or gross corruption like Boris Johnson.
rstuart4133 5y ago
I'm not really sure the Westminster system is that different to what the USA, or Australia or any country whose system is to divide the country into small pieces each of which elect a single member. They all evolve into two party system. The reason is pretty simple. If your country is divided into say 4 groups 40%, 30%, 20% and 10%, then it's likely highly either the 40% or 30% are going to win in every electorate. The 20% and the 10% won't get a look in. The 40% and 30% then become your two parties, and competition for the centre tends to make them look very similar. If you want you parliament to reflect that 40%, 30%, 20% and 10% ratio, then one way to do it is get rid of electorates. Instead ask the 40%, 30% ... parties to nominate candidates in ranked order, and appoint candidates to parliament in proportion to the votes the party received across the entire country. Mixed-member proportional representation [0] does that in a complicated way, mostly complicated because they keep electorates. It's been remarkably successful for countries that have adopted it, eg Germany, New Zealand, South Korea. And remarkably successful includes financial outcomes. (New Zealand was a mess before they adopted it.) Australia has it for it's upper house, and as an Australian I think that's what keeps the place sane. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_representation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr...

sofixa 5y ago

The Westminster system is pretty close to the American one, and the fact that there are different parties is a bit by luck. A representative parliamentary system is much better for that - you don't disenfranchise up to half of the electorate, compromise is forced due to the need of coalitions, etc.

ant6n 5y ago
In a Multi Party First past the post system, u can disenfranchise much more than 50% of the population. In fact if there are N parties, it’s theoretically possible to have a majority government with 0.5*(1/N+epsilon)+epsilon of the votes (e.g. 12.5% in a 4 party system).
robbiep 5y ago
There are lots of ways to do democracy. I used one example because I am most familiar with that one example - australia has the Westminster system but it also has preferential voting which forces many of those same compromises and deals. For all those reading, because this is a place where pedantry is a rule, can they please appreciate that these replies of mine are sweeping and vague which necessarily recognises that there are both good and bad characteristics of all systems, as demonstrated by the history of those systems
- southerntofu 5y ago
  And yet despite compromises, Australia still has concentration camps for immigrants on the northern coast. Ask ordinary people if they support such inhumane treatment and they'll tell you hell no, yet your political system still produces and legitimizes that. Australia is not a democracy, and i don't know many democratic systems in the world (except maybe for the Zapatistas caracoles in Chiapas or democratic confederalism in Rojava). Not judging, i'm myself from a colonial Empire masquerading as a democracy (France). It's just that changing the complexion/conditions of who exerts power is the wrong solution to a real problem: abolishing power is in my view a much more reasonable policy.
  - robbiep 5y ago
    reads post with disclaimer that I’m not trying to make any overly virtuous statements, then makes reply about that anyway ;) What do you mean by abolishing power? Like some sort of anarchy? Or are you referring more to a techno-anarchy, ie blockchain based
    - southerntofu 5y ago
      > reads post with disclaimer that I’m not trying to make any overly virtuous statements, then makes reply about that anyway Sorry i'm not a native speaker and i don't understand this sentence (promise i'm not GPT-3 ;)). > What do you mean by abolishing power? Like some sort of anarchy? Yes, exactly. As long as power is concentrated in some hands (authority), there's many incentives for injustice, and the attack surface to take over the entire system is much bigger. And when you have police, prisons and military to impose the rule of the few by force, you end up in the worst timeline we're currently in where we have an abundance of resources and yet screaming poverty, and our ruling elites keep on fucking up the planet even more instead of redistributing resources so that in the end our entire species (and millions of others) will be wiped out. If you want to see how alternative political systems could look in practice, i strongly recommend to check out the zapatistas (and their caracoles) in Chiapas or to some extent democratic confederalism in Rojava (which is less centered on horizontal power and more centered better representation of multi-cultural societies [0]). While much of the world is seeing setbacks on political freedoms and economic justice, these two regions are going in the opposite direction. Also, on principle i'm not opposed to some technology helping collective processes. But blockchain as we know it (PoW, PoS) is deeply flawed, and whatever digital system we'll come up with will never be as accessible and auditable as local public decision-making. I understand that public votes in a local-first world could exacerbate some inequalities locally (eg. with an oppressed ethnic/religious/sexual minority in a given commune), but i'm convinced the overall gains would far outweigh those downsides including for oppressed minorities (and can argue on that point if someone is not convinced). The problem with Nation States is comparable to blockchain. Consensus building is hard but can be done with a limited set of peers (a commune) in which there are existing trust relationships. Trying to build a wide-scale consensus among untrusted peers is doomed to failure and in the best scenario results in "dictatorship of the majority" which is not a good outcome for minorities, and more realistically ends up with an oligarchy controlling much of the network. In that sense, i would argue DHTs and Bittorrent-like protocols are more anarchist than blockchain: there is a notion of global consensus (content-addressed storage enforced by cryptographic hashes) but neither the DHT nor trackers (who federate between autonomous nodes/communes) end up dictating what your local computing/politics should be like. Does that make sense to you? [0] Rojava is under constant military threat by Daech and turkish military, and the influential PKK while undergoing anti-authoritarian self-critique has decades of authoritarian Marxist-Leninist practice to deconstruct. Both point don't help to build true local democracy (anarchy), although i would argue the region as a whole is moving in a better direction than most Nation States around the planet are.

fmajid 5y ago

The Westminster system has proven its utter failure to provide any measure of accountability for its executive when it emerged that the person who gets to decide whether Boris Johnson violated the Ministerial Code is one... Boris Johnson. US Presidents have been impeached, and in the case of Nixon forced to resign. French Presidents, probably the most powerful executives in the West, have been successfully prosecuted for crimes committed in office. Same with Helmut Kohl, the King of Spain, or Italian Prime Ministers. British Prime Ministers get a free ride for war crimes like Tony Blair or gross corruption like Boris Johnson.

rstuart4133 5y ago

I'm not really sure the Westminster system is that different to what the USA, or Australia or any country whose system is to divide the country into small pieces each of which elect a single member. They all evolve into two party system. The reason is pretty simple. If your country is divided into say 4 groups 40%, 30%, 20% and 10%, then it's likely highly either the 40% or 30% are going to win in every electorate. The 20% and the 10% won't get a look in. The 40% and 30% then become your two parties, and competition for the centre tends to make them look very similar. If you want you parliament to reflect that 40%, 30%, 20% and 10% ratio, then one way to do it is get rid of electorates. Instead ask the 40%, 30% ... parties to nominate candidates in ranked order, and appoint candidates to parliament in proportion to the votes the party received across the entire country. Mixed-member proportional representation [0] does that in a complicated way, mostly complicated because they keep electorates. It's been remarkably successful for countries that have adopted it, eg Germany, New Zealand, South Korea. And remarkably successful includes financial outcomes. (New Zealand was a mess before they adopted it.) Australia has it for it's upper house, and as an Australian I think that's what keeps the place sane. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_representation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr...