Comment on Itch.io apologise for "frustration and confusion" after delisting thousands of NSFW projects
Zagorath@aussie.zone 2 days agoBecause a paid library is kinda fine as a concept. A library has to function, repair chairs, change lightbulbs, pay security guards and, ahem, librarians, pay for new books and electricity and so on.
Yeah, but taxes can pay for all of that. And being able to read, to access the Internet, to do the many other things provided by library services are fundamental to the human experience or to modern society. You shouldn’t be prevented from these because you cannot afford to pay. A paid library is fine as a concept, but only if it doesn’t decrease the availability of free libraries.
And the more complex your set of rules is, the more it turns into “money buys right”
Well, no. Things being at the whim of who has the most money is what turns it into “money buys right”. It doesn’t matter how complicated the rules are, if the rules don’t permit money to play into it. If libraries were paid, that would certainly turn access to reading into a “money buys right” situation.
Simple laws are great, and you should avoid laws that allow loopholes. But sometimes a more complicated law is required because the situation is more complicated.
in too many levels of representation allowing power to affect representatives
Quite the opposite. Give too much power into one central authority and that allows power to affect representatives. More distributed power at the local level, with restrictions on the abuse of that power coming from a higher level, is a much more equitable solution.
in not wide enough participation
This thread is not about any one particular country. In fact, it’s specifically about multinational companies bowing to the pressure of one minor lobbyist. That said, compulsory voting works wonders. We’ve seen it quite clearly here in Australia. Make everyone vote, and surprise surprise, the impact of a loud minority gets drowned out! Combine that with a voting system other than FPTP and you’re well set for a much better democracy.
Politics should not end at the ballot box, however, and getting people more involved in political life in general would be a great thing. Through communicating regularly with representatives. Through joining a union. Through attending protests. Etc. I’m also quite a fan of sortition.
in there being too much professional bureaucratic entities inside the government
We’ve seen first-hand how terrible it is when someone who thinks the government is “too much professional bureaucratic entities” comes into power, in the US. This is absolutely terrible anti-intellectual rubbish.
I don’t much care one way or the other about 3, it’s an insignificant irrelevance. I have no idea what 6 is even supposed to mean. 7 might be the only genuinely fantastic point.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 2 days ago
For prices set by whom? A moneymaking machine, see? Unless libraries are nationalized.
But if you intend to nationalize everything, then there should be a damn good plan at basically building a commonly-owned corporation to maintain nationalized services.
Yeah, except there’s one country where subsidizing paid services with taxes instead of fixing laws has both turned into a moneymaking machine for cronies and didn’t make the services more accessible. The country of origin, well, of all those tech companies.
This is self-contradictory. Unless you forbid lawyers to work for money.
The situation always changes, so laws become more and more complex rapidly with a long tail of legacy that doesn’t solve its initial goals anymore.
So no, this can be solved with starting anew too. Just start anew every 5-10 years. If life requires something specific and the real world situation changes, I think one can wait that long. And this keeps the process simple enough.
And the most important part is that this doesn’t allow malicious parties to carefully build up legal traps over many decades to subvert democracy.
Just clean the house completely once a few years, leaving only the constitutional law. Accumulate political knowledge, not rituals and procedures most people don’t understand, with surprises hidden by crooks.
Like mowing the grass.
This is not exactly what I said. “Too many levels” is when representatives of one level elect other representatives, hierarchically. That shouldn’t happen (the first level might reminisce the buildup of opinions in the society, the following ones degrade to be comprised of the members of the most uniform plurality, not even the majority). I meant exactly more distributed horizontally as an alternative. Functionality-wise too.
Agreed.
Actually necessary. Ballot box is almost a scam by now, since you are offered a limited choice based on limited information and can’t just, say, press “+” and write in your own candidate. Almost the first time I see the word “sortition” used by somebody else on Lemmy.
At some point I thought that it’s good that people not interested can avoid participating, but then realized that this is the simplest way to hijack anything.
No. One can have constraints on from whom such organs are formed. Just no bureaucratic institution should be allowed to self-reproduce all by itself and have its secrets. Only that.
Couldn’t be further from truth. So, your representative is supposed to represent you, right? If they don’t do that, what’s better, wait another N years until another vote, or, if they failed notably enough already, call a vote with enough signatures and elect someone better immediately?
This also makes lobbying a far less certain thing, since the person paid might be recalled a few days after. Which is good.
Except there should be some practical limitations to prevent what Stalin did in 20s (pressuring the specific small initial constituency of his key opponents to disrupt their groups ; this was in the Soviet system with a hierarchy of councils electing members to upper councils and so on, so - with not as many levels this isn’t really a vulnerability even).
At some point it was normal in western countries, even more than unions. There’s a risk, of course, since, well, customer associations and unions might sometimes press in the opposite directions.
But when actual violence and half-legal pressure are denied by the law and the enforcers, these work just fine.