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I've always been intreagued by the notion of democracy and allowing people to choose their leadership. All political systems sound good on paper. But my point

• jellicle 14y ago
  Yes, democracy is the worst system of governance we have, except for all the others. In Greece, voters punished the two main parties who colluded to fuck them over so badly, by voting for other parties. In fact, almost 20% of the parliament is now composed of members of brand new parties - brand new because many voters don't feel their interests are being represented by the older parties. Isn't this result exactly what we would want and hope for in a system of governance? > is threatening to wreck all progress to date on solving their financials issues for the sake of easing austerity. Oh my.
  • 10dpd 14y ago
    "If Athens doesn't keep its word, it will be a democratic choice. The consequence will be that the basis for fresh aid will disappear." Jens Weidmann, German bank chief (quote from today from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-18046280 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-18046280 )
    • hef19898 14y ago
      That's european union understanding of democracy. you can vote for what ever you want as long as it is what we want. they showed it time and again. Examples include the austrian government with far right participation, the felt 100 votes about eu membership and maastricht contracts (sometimes three times until they finally got slim pro vote). And thats one of the reasons the pirates and others are growing that fast: people are pissed by that, espacially the younger ones. just my 5 cents.
  • sparkie 14y ago
    > Isn't this result exactly what we would want and hope for in a system of governance? It's all too little too late - after most of Greece's public assets have already been plundered by the the ECB and the IMF. We wanted that result 3 years ago - not now. A country can be ruined in 4 years. Should we really need to wait until a country has become so fucked beyond repair that we can protest it by "punishing the main parties"? It doesn't matter who you vote for in the end, the government still gets in! While 'democracy' isn't inherently the problem, our current interpretation of it is. It goes as follows: Some men in suits make up lots of lies to gain your votes. After they get power, they ignore all their promises and usually do the opposite. If you don't like it, tough - come back in 4-5 years. We don't really have any democracies (rule of the mob), we have rule of the representatives. The flaw is that they don't represent the mob, they represent their own parties. The concept of a political party is undemocratic. If you vote for a representative in your constituency, he should be voting as his constituents want, not how his party tells him to. (And moreover, if this doesn't happen, you shouldn't need to wait 4 years to give him the boot)
  • jacquesm 14y ago
    I think the Greek situation is rather more complex than that it can be summed up by two parties fucking over the voters. Greece (and a whole bunch of other European countries) has a system of governance and a corruption level that is very different from other EU countries, and as such probably should not have been part of the EU to begin with. Now that they're in Greece is in a position to reap the benefits of that fact but the countries that have for many years (Germany foremost) kept the weaker countries afloat are now themselves getting into trouble. This upset a lot of apple-carts and now we are at a very difficult moment for the union and for Greece. As it is there are no real good solutions. Greece leaving the euro zone or being forced out will have big consequences for all parties involved and likely the end result of that route would be much worse for the general Greek population than any level of austerity that is currently in effect. Greece staying in the eurozone will require a lot of very unpopular sacrifices in many places, the end result of which will be a much weaker euro. There are no winners in any of these scenarios, only losers and it will take a long time (decades?) to fix this problem properly. What you are seeing here is the result of the EU growing too fast in order to win the pissing match about which economic block is the largest on the world stage. If the forging of the monetary union would have been done in a more restrained fashion a lot of this misery could have been avoided. Cowboy politics a decade ago are what caused this, emotional reactions to the problem at hand certainly won't repair it overnight. It will get worse before it can begin to get better.
    • VinceGuillardi 14y ago
      >the end result of which will be a much weaker euro. There are no winners in any of these scenarios, only losers Germany is the winner in this scenario. Having the Euro as a currency is a great boon to their national economy. They were at a trade deficit when they used the DM, but ever since the inception of the Euro, they have been cleaning-up export wise. Germany benefits from the Eurozone as consumers from EU nation-members can buy German products with no trade impediments. Germany benefits even more from a weak Euro as it makes their products very attractive for purchase from non-Euro countries.
      • soc88 14y ago
• KaoruAoiShiho 14y ago
  Democracy is not a good form of governance, nor was it supposed to be. Democracy is the best way to ensure social stability and the best way to protect the interests of the majority from that of the aristocracy. In the very long run those 2 concerns trump all others. Questions on the effectiveness of government is irrelevant when you consider that most human progress comes from private, non-governmental entities.
• muuh-gnu 14y ago
  > They do not have the indepth knowledge required to make a > good decision. You need knowledge to decide whether something is good or not, when the policy is fact-based. You dont need knowledge to decide whether you _want_ something or not, when the policy is purely opinion and preference based, for example filesharing. You dont need domain knowledge to decide that for you freedom to share information trumps the freedom to profit off information creation by enforcing artificial scarcity. > the ordinary person will vote for the person who promises > Thoughts? If people are not allowed to make bad decisions, you dont have democracy, but a kind of dictatorship disguising itself as democracy. "You can vote on whatever you want as long as I and the few other stakeholders approve of the results" is a fake democracy, designed solely to sedate people's natural desire for co-participation and to prevent uprising. Whatever your justification, you're trying to ban people from contributing their small share to the overall policy because you dont like their likely policy. One of the primary goals of the pirate parties is to fight opinions like yours and people like you by enabling maximum participation for everybody. Direct democracy baby. Bring on the regular swiss-style referendums.
• zanny 14y ago
  I always think that the best way to combat the unwillingness of the commoner to actively engage in politics is to bring them to the commoner. People behave very differently when comparing communities to even just the town or city they live in. They behave to their neighbor much differently than someone a 15 minute drive from, and absolutely differently from someone they never see. Given that (in the US at least) approximately 1.5~ in 10 people are public sector workers (I forgot where I got that statistic, but anything > 1 in 50 would suffice), you can easily go full republic and have small communities of 1,000 people (psychological analysis studies seem to lean towards something in the 700 - 1300 range being the maximum number of people any one individual can actively relate to at a human level) who elect a singular representative amongst themselves every year (with no re-elections, and at such a small scale, the politics of campaign finance break down completely - everyone should know each other.) You simply select, emotionally, the person amongst yourselves you feel best represents you individually, and those that want to take the local seat can debate one another in forum with whoever is interested. The rest can be expected to take sides, but the beauty of this idea is that as long as people remain mobile, you can expect common political interests to attract one another, and as long as you can preserve individual mobility (which is much easier in the modern world) you can expect people to move where the politics suit them. The idea is that you start legislation bottom up rather than top down. The most fundemental flaw in western politics, such as the controvesry surrounding the Euro, is that hundreds of millions of people can be legislated upon with no suffering or injustice. In terms of scale, have a "locality" be 1,000 people, have a "district" be 13,000 people (13 representatives), have a "region" be 273,000 people (21 representatives), have a "state" be 9,009,000 people (33 representatives), and have a national body be the sum of all member states in a nation. Those numbers are completely arbitrary - the idea is that each level up represents an approximate order of magnitude more people and has more representatives in chorus to represent more diverse viewpoints and require more debate and process. CPGrey has an excellent video series on the means to partition a nation into equally sized parts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUS9uvYyn3A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUS9uvYyn3A If you do the traditional every 10 year national census and split line partition, you MUST be able to get every district in a margin of 950 - 1050 people, and you can shift the per district number to make sure every region and state has the proper number of component members to match. The real "shift" here is you are actively breaking the boundries of artifical borders. Regions are liquid and determined by how large an area it takes to contain some number of people - naturally, cities will have highly concentrated people in little area and most of the US midwest would be massive regions. It gets rid of the great flaw of the American representational system that gives biased voting power to small states - an arbitrary hold over from when states were independent nations. One important facet is that each member body would elect amongst themselves someone to represent them at higher levels of governance. That means the national level has representatives beholden to four levels of government equally (civil service is real service, but realistically being a politician should only start being a full time job in these circumstances at the region level). Then, you have a constitutional requisite that for legisilation to be considered by a higher tier of representation (IE, for state law to be considered) a law must be drafted that has been passed in a majority of districts, and that law would require a a majority vote with less than 1/4 disapproval (ie, if 1/4 vote against higher legislation, it does not pass state-wide, or region-wide, or nationwide - it remains applied at the lower tiers). If localities attract mobile people who are like minded, the most successful jurisdictions would attract people, who grow the power base of the region and get entire swathes of the nation under like minded ideologies. As these areas naturally grow over time, and over decades of change, we can see diverse and disparate political ideologies put their ideas into practice in "test labs" of local governments, and then if policy is successful, you will see either other jurisdictions adopt it, or people will migrate to where good governance is practised. The result is that naturally good policy attracts adoption and migration to it, and ideas that fail to benefit a localities citizenry gets rejected - and in the case of majority opinions that harm minorities, a minority can concentrate regionally and prevent adoption of hostile legislation). Given a no tarrif system, and a tax code that requires that national tax be at most as large as the smallest state tax, the smallest state tax be as large as the smallest regional tax, and regional tax being as large as the smallest local tax, then you can keep tax from rapidly inflating out of control (local districts can heavily tax if need be, but national tax policy is forced to the minimum, preventing the current policy in the US of focusing all spending at the national level and making 50% of paid taxes be national tax). The weaknesses in this system are that because disparate ideologies converge, it creates tension between them. Historically, that leads to war, but we seem to have entered a period where hopefully first world countries won't be declaring war on one another over ideological differences. We hope. It is definitely a weakness of this design. Another one is that it requires mobility fundamentally - if you don't agree with your regional politics, you are at the mercy of your peers to implement legislation that can only be overturned with super-majority indifference in majority approved legislation to overturn it. Hopefully, that would mean that legislation without victims never passes through the system, but I feel it is vulnerable to holes. One important tenant would be that we maintain the ability for higher courts to declare legislation unconstitutional. A simple bill of global rights, that people are equal, you can not differentiate between people in government based on physical characteristics, fundamental rights to private propery and the resulting privacy, right to freedom of expression, press, religion, etc, right to bear arms - those would all be similarly constitutionally bound concepts and amending that document would require super majority (75%) support of all levels of government (and it would have to be proposed nationally to prevent localities from throwing amendment clutter at everyone in the country). So if you maintain mobility and human rights, have a forced free trade no war inter-state region, and let politics be local and thus emotionally bonded between small groups of people electing single representatives amongst themselves, with no re-elections, and thus no campaigns, and having each layer of government choose a singular representative to maintain their beliefs at each tier above that (who would most likely be moderate) you get "perfect republic". I feel like having digital remote communication allows politicians at each tier to be "in multiple places at once" much more effectively, enabling a tiered system like this. ... And I just wrote an essay on alternative republics. Go me?