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[Graknorke]

There is a difference between saying that white colonialists should've stayed home and saying that all lines should be traced back. Stop trying to apply reductio ad absurdum please, it doesn't fly here.

Actually it does.
You have no concrete distinction between who does deserve to be somewhere and who doesn't.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Do I need to spell it out for you? One shouldn't strive to treat everyone equally, since not everyone is in the same position. The imbalance in our society requires active counterbalancing. That is not oppression. Capiche?

No, Virex. Imbalances in society sometimes require compensation. What you are suggesting would create more problems than it could ever possibly solve. By striving to treat everyone equally, we will eventually make everyone equal in an actual sense.

Equal capacity and equal propensity are not the same. And white men, taken on average, do employ far more violence and oppression then other groups.

[citation needed]

How many women voted for the GOP? Numbers matter, but that's the numbers that vote for you. And you get those numbers by using power. That's how you get blacks to vote for racist legislation (or prevent them from voting at all), how you get women to vote against their own interest and how you get poor people to vote for even more tax breaks for the rich.

That's a pretty infantilizing outlook, and your use of "power" is quite vague. People have the free will to believe in certain outlooks on life that you may not agree with, and it is thus the nature of a democracy that they might vote for what others would see as voting for against their own interests. For example, in my opinion, I don't think it's in the interests of pretty much anybody (including us good old white male cis scum) to vote for the GOP. Nonetheless, people are free to believe what they will.

"My dad stole it so I have a right to it." Yeah, that totally makes sense. It doesn't matter that they were born there, they shouldn't have been born there in the first place.

You are free to believe that, but it's kind of too fucking late for that to be an argument. Colonialism came and went, Virex. People are not responsible for the sins of their ancestors, and certainly not so much so that there is any justification in uprooting them because it's not "land for those kind of people".

And it isn't like land has some kind of mystical property that assigns it to a specific people or race. South Africa managed an amazing thing in the dismantling of apartheid without significant conflict, and it is a great shame upon the South Africa of today that they are falling back into the same conflict again.

[misko27]

There is a difference between saying that white colonialists should've stayed home and saying that all lines should be traced back. Stop trying to apply reductio ad absurdum please, it doesn't fly here.

Actually it does.
You have no concrete distinction between who does deserve to be somewhere and who doesn't.

This poor thread.<div>
</div><div>

I do not know what the ultimate utopia would be. However, there's one simple fix to SIGNIFICANTLY improve the quality of any democracy: Take away the right to vote from white men and forbid white men from being elected. After all, the biggest problem with any democracy is that it is all too easy for the majority (in the power sense, not necessarily in the numerical sense) to abuse their power and override the rights of minority groups. In addition to that, white men are pretty unique in the extend to which they're willing to abuse and destroy for personal gain, both on a personal and institutional level. By taking away our suffrage and preventing us from being elected, a significant part of our political influence will be nullified, which should level the playing field for other minorities (women, black people etc.) somewhat.

This implies either White men are inherently power-hungry, which is racist, or that the system needs to be forcibly equalized, which while not inherently terrible, is put forward in a completely unfair manner.<span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 78%;">

</span></div>... &gt;_&gt;

Okay, come on folks. Let's try to keep this some sort of productive. If people want to argue something, let me throw out an idea that isn't "The best system of government is one where white men don't get to be involved".

Counter-argument: The fact that the notably intelligent and uniquely civil Bay12 Forums has devolved into a absurd argument immediately after a thread revolving around the foundation of most governments in the Western countries was created, speaks to the Fundamental flaws of the system. As for benefits, The fact that is has proven itself as possibly the most stable and secure form of government, the fact that it limits, compared to other governments, corruption and oppression, and the fact that given how all governments are forced by increasing secularism to draw their legitimacy from the people, it stands to reason that a government ruled by the people would be seen as making the most sense.<div>

I don't see "impediment of revolution" as a definitive positive. See for example Italy. They could do with a rather thorough and preferably bloody redesign of the political landscape.

Bu, what abo, ho-, how could y, bu why, but remember Germa-, *WARNING:&nbsp;Patience exhausted, Rage Reactor heating to critical levels, performing preemptive shutdown, attention being diverted*</div><div>

Obviously the best system of government is being ruled by my wife. It's pretty pleasant for me, so I assume it'd be great for everyone.

Well you are honest, and I respect that. And it certainly sounds like one of the most pleasant ideas in this thread. I'm putting my vote behind this one.</div>

[Another]

What about the following toy model?

Make a few hundred top legislative/executive positions fillable from the poll of all people eligible for jury duty by completely random lottery. A single term of maximum 4 years could be considered a civil duty and may be cut short by 2/3 majority referendum. If we allow those people to determine who goes to jail - they should be trustworthy in at least 50% of cases on average and that is IMHO better than professional politicians of today. Corruption could probably be reduced by losing any immunity and influence after 4 years and they don't have to satisfy people who donate to [re]election funds.

[10ebbor10]

Why would they be more reliable? They have, most likely, no technical knowledge on the matter at hand, no real interest in the job, and are probably losing from it.

Can't blame those people if they follow friendly hints from corporate associations, and even less if those corps give some gifts as thanks.

[MonkeyHead]

Here is a system I am very fond of: Parecon.

I have no idea how scaleable this is - it has been tried with some success to run small companies, but thats not any kind of indicator how it would work with a nation state.

[10ebbor10]

It works small scale, but you probably can't make any nation wide changes.

It's also inherently unstable, as many systems are.

[misko27]

What about the following toy model?

Make a few hundred top legislative/executive positions fillable from the poll of all people eligible for jury duty by completely random lottery. A single term of maximum 4 years could be considered a civil duty and may be cut short by 2/3 majority referendum. If we allow those people to determine who goes to jail - they should be trustworthy in at least 50% of cases on average and that is IMHO better than professional politicians of today. Corruption could probably be reduced by losing any immunity and influence after 4 years and they don't have to satisfy people who donate to [re]election funds.

I'd prefer professional politicians to professional morons.


The issues at hand are complex, most people don't care or have at most a limited understanding, and 11% of the US population believes that Obama is/was not born in the US. What rational person could see these facts and believe this is a good idea? Hell, Jury duty has a process when selecting people, and the spectrum of issues facing a country is far wider then a single court case. And any attempt to limit it based on that brings up old problems. And the massive turn-over would cause mass-unrest, and the whole system stinks to the heavens.


Yes, I would much prefer intelligent people running the country. It really doesn't matter if your hearts in the right place if you are bad at it.

[Lordinquisitor]

Direct Democracy is the way to go. Here`s an idea i had for my homeland, germany, for a while.

0. Remove our current corrupt Government. Create an, for a change, good and pure legislation which protects stuff like freedom, equality etc. No changes at all can be made to it.

1. Create "Voting machines" built with their own software and connect them. (But obviously not trough the internet.)

2. Install one in every city. (And/or more depending on the size of the city. This system is meant for germany.)

3. Remove all political parties from power.

4. Every citizen my enter a suggestion into one of the voting machines. Every citizen may vote on every suggestion.

5. Remove all political parties from power. Keep some bureaucrats and politicans around, though, cause..

6. Once an idea passes a certain threshold (In an ideal case it would be 50% of the population, but since not everyone can be arsed to vote one has to find the next best representative value.) the "government" (The remaining bureaucrats etc.) MUST execute the idea. Except, of course, if it`s against our theoretical perfect legislation.

7. In addition to the remaining bureaucrats an equal number of random eligible citizens is chosen each year in order to work together with them. They are reimbursed for it and can choose not to accept this honor. All the bureaucrats and the chosen people will elect a few members who can act in an limited scope, if quick action is necessary.

8.

9. The Will of the People in command!

[GlyphGryph]

I think the idea of randomly selected government members is terrible - I feel democracies strength is in that it comes the closest of systems tried so far to approaching a 'meritocracy with strong incentives to work towards making things better for the people of the country'. And while it doesn't do well at that in many ways, it does better than the alternatives.

A randomized system of service would mean people who are both incapable of executing improvement (in all likelihood) and simultaneously lacking any incentive to do so. It would be a disaster.

In my system, you'd have people working to hire the best person for the job, who knows if they want to keep doing the job they're going to get a "review of their efforts" by the next group, a sampling of the nation at-large. They know that they won't be able to avoid tough questions, not easily.

Bribery and kickbacks are possible, but, assuming the final vote was secret, I'm not sure how likely it would be - it doesn't seem like the incentives would line up, especially if there were severe penalties for getting caught accepting such bribes from the get go, especially if there were rules saying that they could vote on modifying the rules of the assembly, but only a future assembly could benefit from them. While each individual might wish to accept bribes, they would know the rules are strict - they are also not inclined to let other people accept bribes and make the original person worse off, so their unlikely to move to lighten the prohibitions. With a secret vote, even if they accept the bribes they have no incentive to actually vote for the candidate they promise to vote for - if they were honest and trustworthy and likely to make decisions based on moral loyalty, they probably wouldn't be accepting bribes to begin with.

Every incentive indicates a group that is significantly less likely to take bribes than our current congress - and who, if convened to elect members of that congress, are more likely to uncover evidence of such bribes and penalize those who accept them.

We already trust the people to select an effective ruler - My proposal mostly involves building a system that best equips them to do just that, in the most realistic way possible.

[MonkeyHead]

Then perhaps the problem is not democracy itself, and more probably the nature of political parties.

[10ebbor10]

Then perhaps the problem is not democracy itself, and more probably the nature of political parties.

Whose root cause is a problem with the people.

[GlyphGryph]

... what? Who was that in response to?

Political parties are the natural coalition effect of the democratic structure almost all democratic societies follow. They are not surprising, and are the only reasonable result of the incentives that exist and create them.

[Lagslayer]

The way I figure, the system itself doesn't mean all that much.

Direct democracy puts power in the hands of morons who don't know what they are talking about.

A dictatorship gives absolute power to a person, weather he is hyper competent or a buffoon, malignant or benign.

In any system, the charismatic can always convince people to do anything.

An objective system is impossible. Even if it's an AI, someone has to program the AI in the first place. A static, cold AI would also have problem actually treating people like people instead of robots. Then there's the charismatic people who can socially override anything the AI tells people to do.

Anarchy is self defeating.

Anything in between the extremes just splits the problems, but doesn't make them go away.

No system is going to fit the needs of every person. it's impossible. People are simply too diverse. If you were to remove this diversity, you might be able to construct a better system, but is it worth the cost?

[GlyphGryph]

That's a defeatist attitude - perfection may not be achievable, but are you seriously going to argue that no government does overall better than another?