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No, vetocracy has always been the solution to majority votes. What's the problem with majority rule? That when 100 people vote, 51 can vote to take away the vot

No, vetocracy has always been the solution to majority votes. What's the problem with majority rule? That when 100 people vote, 51 can vote to take away the vote from the other 49, 26 can vote to take away the vote from 25, and so on until you have 2 voting to take away the vote from the third. The major problem of democracy is the preservation of minority rights, and this article takes an enormous amount of time to say that, and to propose a further question (should the minority affected by the decisions of a group have a bigger say than everyone else?) which has been discussed to no consensus since the Greeks. edit: if there's any answer, it's that a group needs to come up with a set of shared principles/axioms, and develop their decisionmaking process based on those (and how deliberative bodies have justified their processes in the past), rather than trying to cargo-cult some high-level framework built on sand.

bedobi 3y ago
Agree with some of what you say... in the case of fundamental rights. But that's not what the article is referring to. Vetocracy in practice is usually small minorities of privileged people protecting their right to keep things that aren't even theirs - in the case of NIMBYism, their "right" to keep a neighborhood from changing in any way, whether in terms of what types of homes are allowed to build there (no multifamily homes, even if they're constructed to be indistinguishable from the other homes!), whether there should be street parking should or not (of course, already wealthy detached home owners love being able to park their vehicles on public streets, at all other taxpayers expense), whether a bike lane should be allowed to pass through the neighbourhood or not (looking at you Chelsea Kensington), if a school, hospital, 7-11 or any other kind of service or business should be allowed to be built in the area or not etc etc. These are things best decided by majority and not left to vetocracy.
thsksbd 3y ago
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bedobi 3y ago

Agree with some of what you say... in the case of fundamental rights. But that's not what the article is referring to. Vetocracy in practice is usually small minorities of privileged people protecting their right to keep things that aren't even theirs - in the case of NIMBYism, their "right" to keep a neighborhood from changing in any way, whether in terms of what types of homes are allowed to build there (no multifamily homes, even if they're constructed to be indistinguishable from the other homes!), whether there should be street parking should or not (of course, already wealthy detached home owners love being able to park their vehicles on public streets, at all other taxpayers expense), whether a bike lane should be allowed to pass through the neighbourhood or not (looking at you Chelsea Kensington), if a school, hospital, 7-11 or any other kind of service or business should be allowed to be built in the area or not etc etc. These are things best decided by majority and not left to vetocracy.

thsksbd 3y ago

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