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Comment on Switzerland plans surveillance worse than US

No fucking way, but mah direct democracy …

So. Switzerland doesn’t really have fully direct democracy in the necessary sense. It’s still an old nation-state with laws made in the olden day when you had to compromise. There are many cases where the “direct” part is optional and requires interested people to assemble signatures yadda-yadda. Not good enough to counter a campaign for legal change with a goal. That aside, its system encourages it to have politicians as a thing. Which means that for some issues it will always drift shitward.

It also has separation of 3 kinds of government by degree of locality, but not separation of the “an entity ensuring food safety can’t regulate telecommunications” or “an entity regulating police labor safety can’t regulate riot police acceptable action” kinds.

(Which is why I usually refer to my preference for a kind of “direct democracy” as a revised one-level Soviet system with mandatory rotation, plenty of places and sortition to state worker roles, despite that not having very good connotations.)

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ruuster13@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Democracy is an infant still learning to walk. You plug the holes and add new institutions for oversight. You don’t shoot the damn baby and start over because you know how you’d force everyone to do it.

Kowloon wasn’t built in a day.

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- rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  
  Democracy is an infant still learning to walk.
  
  Bullshit. It’s older than gunpowder.
  
  And this argument has been used for every political system in history. Even in USSR in materials approved by censors it was normal to joke about it.
  
  You plug the holes and add new institutions for oversight.
  
  Why don’t you do that with real-life mechanisms? A moving part of a machine has corroded enough to have a hole unintended by design. Go on, plug it. Oh, it’s better to replace the part.
  
  That aside, I think you’ve missed my specific arguments, not providing any of your own. Those things about participation as wide as possible and rotation. This means that there should be as many political roles as possible (of a delegate or of a secretary or of anyone), often rotated, with the same person not being able to hold the same or similar post for longer than N months, and with sortition based on some pseudo-random mechanism (pseudo-random to be able to check the results for fraud). To reduce the power of any single delegate or bureaucrat and to make lobbying, bribing and blackmailing them harder. To simultaneously make the population more politically literate - by almost every citizen, ideally, participating in some kind of daily decision-making work. Not voting once a year (at best) from among choices given to them by someone else.
  
  That’s what con artists do - provide the victim with an illusion of choice.
  
  You don’t shoot the damn baby and start over because you know how you’d force everyone to do it.
  
  That’s exactly what you do. One consistent system does one thing by design. Another consistent system does another thing by design. Something in-between organically evolved does neither. Evolution is the survival of the fittest - fittest for survival. So an organically evolved system is approximating the optimum of power. The status quo.
  
  What it does not approximate over time is any idea of public good. That would be nuts - so, metaphorically, you’ve built a wooden bridge, do you think it’ll become more or less reliable over time under snow and rain and sun? Is a 100 years old bridge better than a bridge just built and tested?
  
  And the optimum of power is formed by the existing system among other things.
  
  Which means that it becomes more and more static and degenerate.
  
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  - RubberElectrons@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Con artists are also known for seeding bits of truth in with their turgid morass.
    
    There are parts of your monologue I’d agree with, but I suspect what your ultimate intent is.
    
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  - MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    
    Bullshit. It’s older than gunpowder.
    
    Compared to how long humanity lived in abdolutistic systems (dawn of civilization).
    
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AliSaket@mander.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
This is not law yet. The Federal Council (the executive) has started a consultation process at the beginning of the year which ended in May. They are now looking at all the feedback that came in, that was - unsurprisingly - exclusively negative from all sides. If the responsible minister wants to go ahead with it, it goes to the Federal Council for a vote. If they approve it, this would be a decree to change an existing decree and that would come into effect next year or the year after.

And this is where direct democracy comes in: If this is the case anyone can start getting signatures for a public initiative which would change the constitution to prohibit such practices. In fact anyone can start doing that now. If it succeeds, then it’ll come to a popular vote. Threema (a secure chat provider) has already announced that they would do that and I’m sure that they wouldn’t be the only ones to band together in this.

The process might take long, but this is in no way “not good enough to counter a campaign for legal change with a goal” and in fact has happened multiple times in the past. Hence why Switzerland has a direct vote on issues every few months because of something called “Referendum”, whereby a popular vote can be forced on an issue passing through parliament. I might have my criticisms of the political system, but this ain’t it.

its system encourages it to have politicians as a thing Well yes, there is some level of representation, so over 8 million people don’t have to decide every little detail on 1000s of changes of law. The system is built upon a “milita” system. I.e. politicians usually have a job. So people have the possibility to vote in experts or their vicinity and know that they won’t solely be career politicians. Unfortunately the laws around financing and propaganda are rather lax, giving an advantage to the rich, which leads to an over-representation of the capitalist class with occupations such as lawyers and business-owners and a clear under-representation of classical working-class jobs such as craftspeople or office workers. This is amendable though to correct the mismatch, if people realize their class interest and don’t fall for the same right-wing propaganda of a party whose playbook has been inspired by the US GOP for decades and who is inspiring Germany’s AfD now.

The main downside of the system imo has to do with people with no knowledge on an issue having to weigh in on them and therefore how powerful propaganda campaigns can be, which means that money buys power, as in every other existing so-called democracy - direct or not. Especially with how money shifts power away from the populace, this is inherent to capitalistic systems and it would be on the populace to protect itself from it. With enough propaganda though, people keep voting for more power of capital unbeknownst to them or not, just as they might vote against their interests on other things. The fact that you have to convince so many people, who hopefully do have some degree of education, makes it a lot harder though, for big capitalists to reach their goals, compared to less direct systems. And I know of several examples, how such a vote did not go in favor of big capital. What usually makes the difference is whether they succeed in portraying their advantage as the advantage of all.

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- rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Yeah, so the difference in what I’d like from what you describe as existing is:
  
  The representation should be spread thinner over the population, and with separate organs voting on separate kinds of matters. Ideally so that most of the population would have some short experience in participating in at least one of those organs by reaching the age of 30. Experience is needed to make your last paragraph less problematic, and wide participation - to gain that experience first-hand and also to make it very expensive to blackmail\bribe\threaten enough people. This might also make a referendum an event a bit more rare, because it won’t come to that.
  
  In general it’s very cool that such a system even exists as a proof that nothing is impractical about it.
  
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  - AliSaket@mander.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    There do exist things resembling that a bit. Usually done on the local level and mostly concerning some street/development design, where people are invited to actively participate in a workshop style event with experts and vote on the results. But yes, these are not mandates. And as soon as you go onto the state or federal level, such structures become virtually non-existent.
    
    The others are parliamentary commissions which can be instated by parliament and are formed of mainly external experts around a certain issue. These are often used on state and federal levels of government.
    
    I would love if representation was spread wider over the population and that involvement was higher. I also am baffled at how bad general civics education is here in school, especially at the obligatory level. I would welcome a far more detailed and engaging civics education where they could already get some experience right at the school. Or go and participate at some local event. This way they also see the importance of a truly democratic process. Alas, as long as they can’t vote, nobody seems to want their opinions.
    
    Another part that needs addressing is finances. There’s a lot of intransparency yes, but the way it works now, it is also very hard to get your message across without being big in a main political party or having some big private sponsor. Which limits your actual freedom before and after you’re elected. If we’re thinking radical we might severely limit campaign budgets or think about public funds allowing the same restrictive scope for everyone, no matter their background and finances. This would also limit the imbalance in outreach between capital-backed candidates and others.
    
    A third huge problem lies within the judiciary, where judges on many levels effectively also have to be party-associated to get elected. If that sounds completely compromising their necessary impartiality, yeah, it’s because it does. (Although I don’t have data on how that influences their work)
    
    And lastly: The structures of accountability for politicians. I know that some steadiness or stability is necessary, but without the fear of accountability, far too many misuse their positions without repercussions. As we see from around the world, this invites more and more brazen figures to do more and more brazen violations. Just a brain-fart: 100k signatures to force a vote on relieving someone of their immunity so they can be tried in court. And to not just wait it out. Right now, it’s parliament that has this exclusive possibility.
    
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MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

So. Switzerland doesn’t really have fully direct democracy in the necessary sense.

Yes, it’s half-direct, who said otherwise? Fully direct on a Nation state level would maybe be possible now with the Internet.
But we can still overrule them, while germans get tired of their politicians lying on elections and doing what they want. Doesn’t mean they don’t try here.

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- rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  
  Fully direct on a Nation state level would maybe be possible now with the Internet.
  
  That’s my point. It might seem dangerous to rely on the Internet for such basic matters, but it’s already being used to great effect to undermine all democracies. So there’s no choice, it’s like an arms race. (Still, probably for elections it’d make sense to have a countrywide parallel intranet, so that someone’s error in setting up a BGP router wouldn’t disrupt it.).
  
  But yeah, this system has it’s weaknesses with complicated or emotional topics. But then again, we are all humans.
  
  That’s the other side of the problem - modern easiness of propaganda.
  
  OK, I live in Russia, just rather sad to see how many other countries are slowly drifting in the same regrettable unsavory direction.
  
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CHKMRK@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

It’s still an old nation-state with laws made in the olden day when you had to compromise.

What democracy does not rely on compromise?

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- rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  None. I’m using “compromise” here in the sense of compromising between democracy and elites, with the world order normal 200 years ago. Today those compromises don’t work because of technological progress and different makeup of societies.
  
  Just like those in the USA.
  
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- antbricks@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Compromises on principles, not compromises with people.
  
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