TaleWorlds News: New News Necessary for the OT Neophytes

[Sundeki]

Being able to vote politicians out at fixed intervals is sensible and democratic

Being able to vote for who barely represents you on one day every 1000-2000 days, with no recourse other than criminal proceedings, is not democratic. The most common voter sentiment I come across now (anecdotally) is nonpartisan disgruntled disillusionment with how out of touch their representative is. Whether or not you consider fixed, inflexible elections sensible is up to you, I guess.

being able to vote them out 'whenever they want' doesn't sound feasilble or desirable to me. How do you decide it is time to hold a vote? Does it need to be a big deal on Twitter or Facebook, is that how it goes?

Okay here's my very basic hypothetical example:

There is a district/constituency within a geographical location. If you have residence within that location, you are registered with a governmental body as being eligible to vote from that location (same as elections now). Have a District Hall that live streams political discussions (the same way that courts are livestreamed these days, e.g the Amber Heard - Johnny Depp case, same as how parliament is livestreamed in my country, anyway), where people can view political discussion and debate. Every voter has their registration tied to an ID that they can use to access an electronic space attached to the District Hall that allows people of the district to voice their opinions in a very simple form (yes/no to an opinion poll, or multiple choice, whatever), these being non-binding, but at the very least so that people within the district, and the representative, and the people who are physically at the District Hall, can see what the broader public opinion is. If a parliamentary representative votes on a piece of legislation that his constituency finds questionable, or even just wants clarification on, with a flat vote (similar to how in Switzerland getting a flat number of signatures, 50,000, forces the government to put a question up on the next round of referendums each year) recalls that representative to the district hall for consultation with the constituency (on the weekend, or a few days later, or whatever). If the constituency likes what the representative has to say about the bill they voted for/against, then nothing comes of it. If they don't, then with another, higher flat vote tables a district-wide vote (similar to elections now) where they can run an election between the incumbent person, and other public candidates. These candidates are decided from a indefinite list of people who volunteer themselves for candidacy, and who can put their name on the list, or take their name off the list whenever they want. Using a system similar to how Australia's Preferential Voting System works now, you list those candidates you would vote for in descending order, and after all relevant votes are tallied (all of this can happen in a second electronically), you immediately get the results, and any changes to offices are officially made.

Functionally, it's how public assemblies worked within Greek Polis', but with all the convenience of modern technology overcoming the limitations of things such as geography that made representative democracy the best thing before the rise of the internet. And the ironic thing is that it is so technically feasible and accessible that someone could participate in this, with their phone, taking a **** on the toilet at the pub, if they wanted to.

On the whole this entire process is little more expensive than a Twitch Stream, because that's basically what it is. The only thing that would have cost would be the governmental system of residential ID, but that exists now for ordinary elections anyway. You'd just be making that system more comprehensive and transparent.

Or does there have to be some sort of official censure of a politician's behaviour first? I don't see how it would be feasible to make such judgements,

I don't consider being a politician a job, but a civic responsibility. Nobody has a right to be in office. And if that representative no longer represents the will of the community they were elected for, even if they're the most honest/lawful person in the world, there's no reason I can think of that a constituency shouldn't be able to recall their representative, and replace them with someone else that better represents that community.

 

[eddiemccandless]

Thanks for the dumbest take I've read around here dude. I am not going to dignify you by even reading the rest of your post. Have a nice day.

Cool. Why answer at all then? I thought such things were beneath you. I do find interesting than when you get called for what you are you start insulting people. But sure, I totally did not hit right home.

I will agree that I am not particularly interested in arguing endlessly about this. You do you, just don't expect me to fall for the pretense.

 

[Draco Wrath]

Representative government is in itself a joke. Thankfully this form of government tends to protect most people's rights, but its hardly the only one with the capability to do so. Not that I'm clamoring for anything else.

 

[Baguette Eater]

Cool. Why answer at all then? I thought such things were beneath you. I do find interesting than when you get called for what you are you start insulting people. But sure, I totally did not hit right home.

I will agree that I am not particularly interested in arguing endlessly about this. You do you, just don't expect me to fall for the pretense.

Ah yes, the good ol' classic. He's already a fascist in your mind, so no matter what he says, he's the devil. Not wanting to argue with someone who outright assumes that and calling them out on their bull****? Nah, must be the fash doubling down.

Brings a tear to my eye.

 

[NPC99]

Saying this system as it is now, be it in Britain or the United states (or basically anywhere in the West, except maybe Switzerland to a lesser extent) is basically obsolete isn't much of an "overly dramatic self-indulgence"

True, but pretending you are as badly off as someone living under a crackpot dictator was.

IMO your ideas for holding representatives accountable won't work as you expect - the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Most voters are too apathetic or too busy to invest sufficient of their time to fully understand the details of each piece of legislation, making them ill equipped to ride shotgun on their representative. Equally, just under half of the district voted for the guys who lost and support entirely different political objectives from the representative elected. Why won't they bring your system into disrepute by attempting to rerun the election every week because they're never going to agree with the majority in their district or anything the guy they voted against does?

 

[Sundeki]

True, but pretending you are as badly off as someone living under a crackpot dictator was.

Objectively, there are a lot of people living much better lives under crackpot dictators than I am. With all due respect; you don't know anything about me other than that I am Australian.

Most voters are too apathetic or too busy to invest sufficient of their time to fully understand the details of each piece of legislation, making them ill equipped to ride shotgun on their representative.

This is an argument against democracy in general that applies just as much to representative democracy as my preferred proposition.

Equally, just under half of the district voted for the guys who lost and support entirely different political objectives from the representative elected. Why won't they bring your system into disrepute by attempting to rerun the election every week because they're never going to agree with the majority in their district or anything the guy they voted against does?

I see this as a problem with radicalized factionalism, that especially emerges under systems that inherently tilt towards two-party systems, Britain and the US are examples of this. Switzerland has over a dozen parties represented in the parliament, an executive body made up of several different people of half a dozen different parties, and all representing several different linguistic, ethnic and cultural groups within the country, and unless I've seriously missed something, their disruptive factionalism is mild at most. I think most of what you are describing comes from frustration at not being able to get anything done, which is apart of a feedback loop with unaccountable politicians fanning the flames of party factionalism, and people not feeling like they have any real say (which when you look at the quality of candidates that appear within defacto two party systems like the US, UK, Australia, etc., is a reasonable sentiment to have). Is it technically possible that factional gridlock could disrupt my proposed system? Yes, absolutely. But it's an issue that is getting worse within the current two party systems anyway, as well as basically every other political system that has emerged (yes even absolute divine monarchies). The interesting irony being that Democracy was innovated by Solon specifically as a counter-measure to the gridlock factionalism of Athenian politics in the first place. I see no reason why some checks and controls couldn't be implemented in the case that severe factionalism started to disrupt things, but I think this problem is self-solving in my proposed system outside of times of crisis.

 

[Adorno]

A thinker like Rousseau and others write of different types of government for different types of societies.
One type is not necessarily (universally) better than others. The two party system in the US (and other countries) seem to have worked - if worked is defined by stable governments keeping the union together. But implementing such a two party system in Switzerland would be a severe step back for democracy.
Too often political - and especially economic - thinkers imagine democratic governance with free markets to ideally be implemented everywhere in roughly the same way. Even seemingly comparable countries can have significantly different systems of governance. Think of the presidents of France and Germany (bundespräsident): they have very different roles. (Everyone knows Macron but few know Steinmeier )
There's a reason practically all countries define themselves as democracies (except for 2 or 3?), and I think we'd all like to see autocracies transition to some form of democracy. But it must be a system that fits that specific culture and history. Some countries are far from ready to be democracies. The culture simply isn't there. In that case it's legitimate to discuss the best possible alternative (on the way) to democracy.

 

[Draco Wrath]

There's a reason practically all countries define themselves as democracies (except for 2 or 3?), and I think we'd all like to see autocracies transition to some form of democracy. But it must be a system that fits that specific culture and history. Some countries are far from ready to be democracies. The culture simply isn't there. In that case it's legitimate to discuss the best possible alternative (on the way) to democracy.

A dogmatically biased Western perception. We have a civilizing duty to change these barbarian cultures, or put more succinctly:

It is the height of Anglo-American chauvinism to dogmatically demand every country on earth be a liberal democracy, when Europe itself was almost completely undemocratic barely even 100 years ago. This is the same colonial mindset of the 1800s.

 

[Kentucky 『 ＨＥＩＧＵＩ 』 James]

Some countries are far from ready to be democracies. The culture simply isn't there.

What did he mean by this

 

[eddiemccandless]

Ah yes, the good ol' classic. He's already a fascist in your mind, so no matter what he says, he's the devil. Not wanting to argue with someone who outright assumes that and calling them out on their bull****? Nah, must be the fash doubling down.

Brings a tear to my eye.

I am glad I am moving you, I am also not the one who started calling people intellectually challenged instead of engaging in a conversation. I am also not basing my evaluation on just that post, he has a history. I would assume you'd know this having been here so long.

 

[Adorno]

A dogmatically biased Western perception. We have a civilizing duty to change these barbarian cultures, or put more succinctly:

The phrase "we'd all like to see autocracies transition to some form of democracy" does not necessarily imply some kind of force.
Let's take an example: Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). It's literally in the name, but according to Freedom House DRC is 'not free'.
From citizens unable to exercise basic civil liberties to corrupt elections. If you ask the politicians they all say they support democracy and there are regularly protests against the corrupt government. Today democracy is not being forced on DRC from the west. The ideology of liberal democracy is there and everyone (I'm simplifying) explicitly supports it. The same thing goes for a lot of severely corrupt - not free - countries around the world. When I say "we'd all like to see democracy" it includes the populations in countries like DRC and around the world. Democracy has become an almost universal ideal.

What did he mean by this

Iraq is also not free even though a lengthy war/occupation (that I was against) tried to change that. I would not support some kind of military democracy police enforcing democracy on a country. Iraq is one of those countries where democracy has a long way to go. And again, the citizens in general, and the politicians, explicitly support democracy, although the culture of corruption makes it difficult.

 

[Kentucky 『 ＨＥＩＧＵＩ 』 James]

Let's take an example: Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). It's literally in the name, but according to Freedom House DRC is 'not free'.

Countries like the DRC and the DPRK inherited their names from USSR-aligned movements during the cold war, not the west. The type of democracy they mean is like how the 1950s Soviet Union called itself democratic, even though in the anglosphere this is not what democracy means.

This is pretty evident in how all these "freedom house", "freedom index", "democracy index", and all the other sycophant liberal NGOs are all based out of America, and all their rankings are just based on how similar countries and their systems are to the US. If any country doesn't have the same institutions as the US it gets a bad score. Meanwhile these same NGOs always base their analysis of the US on a formal ideal so that they never have to talk about the rampant corruption, press controls, or erosions of civil liberties.

Because of all this I have a hard time understanding what anyone actually means by a country being "free", other than a chauvinistic cold war distinction. Any democracy that fails to produce the idealistic results that NGOs expect gets the racist accusation of "not culturally ready" for democracy, as if the same kinds of failures aren't happening in the west right now as well.

 

[Adorno]

You are right, and I don't uncritically read Freedom House reports*. It was just convenient for this topic.
But in the case of DRC you can use immanent critique (Adorno ): violations of civil liberties, election fraud and human rights abuses go against the constitution/law. They have the ideal of a liberal democracy but don't live up to it.
So when I criticise countries for not being democratic it's not because of narrow minded, western ethnocentricsm. It's because those countries claim to be democratic but don't live up to their own constitutions/ideals. It's political double bind.

*They are politically biased and ethnocentric (what isn't?), but their reports can still point out various problems.

 

[BenKenobi]

Without "good dictatorships" as you put it, all of Africa and Asia would currently be under the thumb of american financial institutions, and countries like Ethiopia, China, Singapore and Vietnam would be desolate wastelands. It is the height of Anglo-American chauvinism to dogmatically demand every country on earth be a liberal democracy, when Europe itself was almost completely undemocratic barely even 100 years ago. This is the same colonial mindset of the 1800s.

Sundeki saying that the (i assume) American system is barely different from a one-party dictatorship is hardly controversial, the anti-establishment in America has been saying that since the 70s. I don't get how this makes him a fascist or an authoritarian.

Europe in 1922 was absolutely not almost completely undemocratic. Even in 1870s, most European countries had (some form of) elections, open competition of political parties, human rights charters, administrative judiciaries and other insitutions of a democratic state.

Beisdes, fundamental rights are a colonialist's tool is a pretty bold statement (not that there are not scholars advocating it) that, however, ultimately leads to holding different peoples to different standards. Which, one could argue, is pretty arrogant. If the western world values an individual human being solely on the basis of the being being human, it would be somewhat strange to add that this only applies to the western countries and a human being from China, Vietnam or Ethiopia is worth less than one from Denmark, Canada or Portugal.

This is an argument against democracy in general that applies just as much to representative democracy as my preferred proposition.

Not really. The difference is that with representative democracies you choose a general mindset - a very broad set of policies. You don't (generally) vote for a single policy or care for a single issue. E-democracy overrides this and allows the citizens to vote on very particular and specific issues without equipping them with all the tools that the politicians have such as expert teams, lobby groups intervention, public consultations, political deals and compromises and, rather importantly, professional cynism that allows the politicians to (sort of) distinguish important from not important.

To put it bluntly, representative democracy allows the people to decide where the ship sails and how fast, but it does not allow them to have a say in how to tie a sail to a bowsprit or how to fasten a bolt in an engine.

 

[NPC99]

but it does not allow them to have a say in how to tie a sail to a bowsprit or how to fasten a bolt in an engine.

Neither should it. Queuing for anything where there's a barista coffee machine blocking access to the till is intolerable.

隐藏

I'd hate legislation to drag out even longer to satisfy e-voter/consumer whims.

 

[Kentucky 『 ＨＥＩＧＵＩ 』 James]

If the western world values an individual human being solely on the basis of the being being human, it would be somewhat strange to add that this only applies to the western countries and a human being from China, Vietnam or Ethiopia is worth less than one from Denmark, Canada or Portugal.

My problem isn't that the idea of universal rights are applied inconsistently, but the fact that they are applied at all in the realm of geopolitics. It is only the west that elevates abstract moral concepts like human rights and democracy to geopolitics. Sure you will get stuff on Russian or Chinese state media about how badly black people are treated in America for example, but it never goes beyond shallowly dunking on them, and to make nationalist boomers feel better about their pensions getting slashed.

Ever since the abolition of the slave trade, the west has used flavour-of-the-month moral values as a cover for humiliating, punishing, or even outright destroying different countries. Even governments as innocuous and compliant as Barbados or Jamaica, where my family are from, routinely get this treatment in the press and from western politicians who visit them, and it drives me mental seeing something as patronising, divorced from reality and transparently chauvinistic as the "Freedom Index" get used to unilaterally determine whether a country should be subjected to western political pressure or not.

 

[Antoine de Saint-Exupéry]

especially in combination with something as detachedly dismissive (if not outright racist, intentionally or not) as "the culture isn't there".

 

[Adorno]

It is only the west that elevates abstract moral concepts like human rights and democracy to geopolitics. Sure you will get stuff on Russian or Chinese state media about how badly black people are treated in America for example, but it never goes beyond shallowly dunking on them, and to make nationalist boomers feel better about their pensions getting slashed.

I follow you a long way, but:
The Russian constitution from 1993 states that there is freedom of speech and a free press. That is also what the government claims.
When they close media outlets they give some bogus reason and make silly laws specifically tagetting opponents.
When this is criticised in the west it is fully justified, because it's an 'immanent discrepancy'. It's lies and hypocrisy

 

[Sundeki]

Not really. The difference is that with representative democracies you choose a general mindset - a very broad set of policies. You don't (generally) vote for a single policy or care for a single issue. E-democracy overrides this and allows the citizens to vote on very particular and specific issues without equipping them with all the tools that the politicians have such as expert teams, lobby groups intervention, public consultations, political deals and compromises and, rather importantly, professional cynism that allows the politicians to (sort of) distinguish important from not important.

To put it bluntly, representative democracy allows the people to decide where the ship sails and how fast, but it does not allow them to have a say in how to tie a sail to a bowsprit or how to fasten a bolt in an engine.

It's true that not many people vote for a person based on a single issue (I saw some study saying it was 8%, whether or not that was accurate I don't know), but voters do have certain lines in the sand(Gallup calls them "threshold issues") that if crossed will immediately turn them off a candidate. In America, Abortion is one of them. according to a gallup poll in 2020, 26% of Republicans, 27% of Democrats, and 19% of independants will outright refuse to vote for a candidate that does not support their stated position on abortion. And that's a quarter of the voting population on just a single issue. I'm guessing other hotbed topics of the same kind in America are "gun rights" and "immigration", and other countries have their own.

However, what I am advocating right now isn't technically e-democracy like you describe (I might have misused the term). The entire parliamentary system technically functions the same, the difference being only that voters within a district don't have to wait 3/4/5 years to remove an unwanted candidate, and the recall function I highlight is primarily about consultation (the representative being informed as to the position of their electorate through concrete information, and the electorate being informed about the hows and whys of the representative's voting decision). What I'm talking about now is not the option for every single person to vote on every single issue in the way of a collective, just greater and faster control over who nominally represents them.

I'd hate legislation to drag out even longer to satisfy e-voter/consumer whims.

Half of the point of this kind of interaction is to get the politicians to move faster. The current political culture is one of petty backroom deals that drag on for months while politicians have to scrape support out of as many people as they can, double check their political donors for what they want, only for it not to work a lot of the time anyway. If a politician knows that they at the very least have to pretend to represent their community on an ongoing basis, the political culture changes, and you'll get representatives who, in consultation with their electorates, are willing to move faster to the voting stage because that's what their electorate wants. You will get faster legislation, not slower.

 

[Kentucky 『 ＨＥＩＧＵＩ 』 James]

I follow you a long way, but:
The Russian constitution from 1993 states that there is freedom of speech and a free press. That is also what the government claims.

So what, you don't live there, and nothing your policymakers can do besides war will change that. If Russians are fine with living in a country with a hypocritical regime (most people are), leave them to it. All this moral language about "criticising" or "denouncing" countries you can only know via the media, and will probably never even set foot in, via your own contingent moral standards, strikes me as bizzare evangelizing behaviour.