Comment on Redditor accidentally reinvents discarded ’90s tool to escape today’s age gates

• rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Well, they are working to gain power. We are not working to stop them, just voting from time to time. Of course they are gaining more.

  That’s why I was at some point enthusiastic about Soviet system (not USSR, but what it initially pretended to build, hence the name of “Soviet socialist republics”), because it maximizes rotation and participation, except for voting replaced with sortition, because otherwise the majority vote through a few iterations kills every minority position (that’s how it quickly turned into USSR, yes, Stalin was voted in too, everybody somehow forgets that, but he was, through his oratory skills ; another good orator who was voted in and became dictator is kinda more known). So that there were no appointed administrators with power, only citizens randomly put to fulfill a duty just barely good enough.

  Because in such a system wide participation with effort is encouraged and normalized. I mean, I’m in … Russia, but in some randomly taken Western country of more than 10 mln population - provided I’m a citizen, - how do I put my name on the ballot? How do I participate provided I have time? How much does the effort converted to money cost?

  Participation should be free and easy. If it’s not, it’s not a democracy.

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  • shneancy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    yeah democracy as it is most common today has its issues, sadly, and propaganda is easier to spread than ever. and the soviet system of rotating positions also ensured people that were easy to control because they were new to the job. i do wonder if there is any system that could work for us humans

    i hope you stay safe in Russia, you sound highly aware of the motions in politics, and as you surely know the intelligence is often targeted first when a dictator wants to dictate without being questioned

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    • rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      and the soviet system of rotating positions also ensured people that were easy to control because they were new to the job.

      Not as much the rotation as that it could happen at any moment, a soviet of any level could vote to recall their representative any time, and that meant a chain reaction being possible, because their new representative could initiate a vote on recalling the next level representative, and so on.

      If you consider how often that could happen and that a soviet behind every representative of a higher level soviet could do that, you can see that the system could be disrupted by putting pressure at specific soviets, and even inconvenient representatives controlled through that.

      While that’s true, it’s still better than what we have now.

      Probably why USSR’s breakup really happened - the old system was falling apart, and the democratic movements were using the letter of the law against its spirit to make the country kinda work, and that meant resurrecting the soviet system which was purely symbolic for most of USSR’s existence. People like Sakharov and Starovoitova became politicians for the first time in eight decades.

      Hence the GKChP putsch attempt and the agreements between Soviet leaders to dissolve USSR, just when that seemed to start working.

      That’s usually a vatnik argument, but people did vote for USSR’s preservation on the referendum, after all. If the loudest people in that democratic movement were just a bit wiser, they’d see that after that they can’t support its dissolution, at least not without a new referendum. And the same in 1993 - if the supposed democratic movement people were wiser, they wouldn’t support Yeltsin technically usurping power.

      And every fscking time people judging like that think this time is different and they are smarter.

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      • shneancy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        that reminds me a bit of the Polish incident with liberum veto. in theory a good thing - those who could vote all had an equal voice to stop any Sejm gathering they wanted. but the obvious thing happened obviously - lower ranking nobles were getting bribed by domestic and foreign forces alike to veto new legislations seconds before they got signed, wasting days if not weeks of work, and basically stopping Polish politics in place. Poland only got our shit together too little and too late, in 1791 we got our constitution that finally removed liberum veto, but the damage was done, two years later the Second Partition happened

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