Comment on Switzerland plans surveillance worse than US

• rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨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.

  source

  • 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.

    source
  • 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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