4 ms·
As a substitute for commercialized elections, I vote for sortition.
by 1letterunixname 3y ago
As a substitute for commercialized elections, I vote for sortition.
- labster 3y agoActually, the beauty of it is you don’t vote for sortition.
- ggm 3y agoStrong chicken/egg value here. Before you have sortition, how do you decide to have sortition?
- drewcoo 3y agoThe egg came first. Many lizard-deciding-bodies or mechanisms may have chosen sortition! And perhaps it was a bad habit or even an old charter to throw names in a hat, not without the notice of the literate or the haberdashers/milliners union(s), who sought to leverage their skills into greater advantage . . .
- drewcoo 3y agoI thought that was the joke.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoGeorge Carlin would agree. Fewer idiots electing fewer charismatic despots would be a good start. Also, I don't vote so the politicians are the responsibility of people who mistakenly believe their vote matters when they are selectively stolen, gerrymandered, and manufactured consent into futility. 45 may have tried to steal Georgia like a moron, but Bernie lost the 2016 WV primary even though every district voted for him as the consequence of that state's electors collusion with one candidate. Until there's sortition, campaign finance reform, or an emperor, NPVIC could eventually be a potential workaround for electoral mutinies. Until then, there's not much chance of change because the only viable candidates are celebrities and career politicians willing to bend the knee to big money donors in exchange for favor$.
- funnymony 3y agoProblem is that despots want power, whatever system you have you will get despots wanting to be at the top, and doing what is necessary to get there. Democracy at least moves them around a bit.
- nottorp 3y agoOne interesting fact in the article is that for the top spots at least, you did it once for a year and then you were barred from that office for like 10.
- notahacker 3y agoSortition doesn't remove the idiots who vote for charismatic despots, it hands them the role of drafting legislation and directly deciding which individuals run the public services and the military...
- ffhhttt 3y ago> career politicians Possibly preferable to career billionaires (which was the case in every premodern republic like Rome or Venice)
- qsort 3y agoThe election of the doge (ruler) in the Republic of Venice used a mixture of voting and sortition, ostensibly to make it harder to collude. https://www.theballotboy.com/electing-the-doge https://www.theballotboy.com/electing-the-doge
- Obscurity4340 3y agoAh, the origin of dogecoin
- 221qqwe 3y agoWas "doge" the Japanese dog meme really related to the Italian title, though? I thought it was just an intentional misspelling of dog
- lizardking 3y agoPretty sure it was and it’s a coincidence. There was an entire pseudo dialect around that meme
- Khaine 3y agoI always assumed it was supposed to be sounded out like dog-e-coin not doge-coin, but people did it the other way as a joke and it stuck.
- smolder 3y agoIt's not.
- Obscurity4340 3y agoI should have /s it
- chargingmarmot 3y agoI find it interesting to learn that the founding fathers made some explicit comparisons to ancient democracies while arguing for the US constitution, e.g. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed63.asp https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed63.asp (Relatedly, it seems like the anti-federalists turned out to be right about a lot of things they warned about during those debates.)
- drewcoo 3y ago> it seems like the anti-federalists turned out to be right about a lot of things they warned about The US was the first experiment in a capitalist country; the American revolution was the first capitalist revolution against the tyranny of market control. Any conservative claims that the old ways were better were likely to be true at least in some respects, just because it was so new. I suspect that if most HN folks looked at the anti-federalists with their anti-progress, anti-free-market stances, we'd see opposition to that. For good reason, possibly.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- chargingmarmot 3y agoI thought this was an interesting read: https://mises.org/library/political-economy-antifederalists-0 https://mises.org/library/political-economy-antifederalists-... Things don't seem entirely one-sided with regard to free trade; e.g. you have anti-federalists concerned about the federal government's ability to create monopolies: """monopolies in trade, granted to the favorites of government, by which the spirit of adventure will be destroyed, and the citizens subjected to the extortion of those companies who will have an exclusive right, to engross the different branches of commerce.""" (It seems one argument made by Madison and Hamilton who also supported free trade was that by centralizing regulatory authority they would have more leverage internationally to make treaties that would encourage trade.) When I said "the anti-federalists turned out to be right about a lot of things" I was thinking more about their concerns about how the unlimited tax authority given to the federal government would lead to scope creep. Apparently anti-federalists suggested that this could even lead to a federal income tax and this was considered ridiculous at the time.