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Comment by deathhand | Hacker News Reader

Government was always supposed to be influenced 'by the people' those people are usually aristocrats. That is fine if there are enough of them with different ideas. What has happened is the consolidation of the artiscroacy and thus the means of influence of government. This is where we are getting our ugly problems from.

What is the first step to fixing this? Bring voting into the 21ST century AND NOT HAVE VOTING SOFTWARE BE CONSIDERED A TRADE SECRET[1].

Voting shouldn't be as onerous today and things like the Sun Light foundation[2] should be a household name.

We have all met jerks in our lives. People who lie,deciet, and cheat to get ahead. How is having the government covered in obscurity good for anyone?

1 - https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190706/17082642527/votin...

2- https://sunlightfoundation.com/web-integrity-project/

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Voting is inherently aristocratic. Sortition gets you democracy.

At least according to some Greeks and Frenchmen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition#Democratic):

> The idea that democracy is associated with sortition remained common in the 18th century. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu writes in The Spirit of the Laws, "The suffrage by lot is natural to democracy, as that by choice is to aristocracy."

Greek sortition used the aristocracy as its population for selecting leaders.

Sure. They didn't practice what their preaching sounds like to use.

Sortition is still an interesting idea. Especially for filling up larger decision making groups like a parliament. So that the law of large numbers can work.

It wouldn't be that useful for selecting a single post like president.

As a slight modification of straight up sortition, I would suggest that instead of picking the members of parliament directly, we still have everyone vote for their preferred candidate, and use sortition to pick out as many votes as we have seats to fill. (With some sensible mechanism for when the same candidate comes up more than once in the votes.)

That procedure would sidestep many of the problems that come up thanks to Arrow's Theorem in more conventional procedures or citizen's commissions etc.

The problem with democracy is that you end up with mob rule.

And as soon as the mob realizes it can vote itself bread and circus, it's all over.

The founding fathers said exactly that.

And the mob in general is in thrall to the media, which is pretty much a wholly owned operation of the ruling class.

So, I guess, in the end, you get what your ruling class wants anyway, with the unwitting mob just a means to its own control.

Just as a fact check, it appears that the saying that I think you are referring to is one commonly misattributed to Benjamin Franklin.

See https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4hlaxi/did_b...

Were you thinking of another source?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anacyclosis

If a democracy wants authoritarianism Nationalist Party then there is no magic mechanism to stop this, and it might be presumptive to even assume that democracy is most morally harmonious and effective configuration of society. I believe China is seriously contending this assumption, as it races ahead of its Asian and European neighbors with respect to economic optimism.

Also, political parties appear part and parcel with democracy, but that part of the discussion is so often left unloved.

And I would say it also races far ahead of its neighbours on the number of atrocities it commits against its own citizenry.

China is certainly effective. The willingness to simply murder dissidents makes things much simpler. I struggle to see how anyone could consider China "morally harmonious" though. Their effectiveness seems to be directly at the cost of any morality.

This is 100% a rightwing talking point, pushed by the likes of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter, and I wish it would go away. Look... if we all want to get along, then we need some way of working together despite disagreements. If 51% of people want to do something, we all must agree that that's okay. Otherwise nothing would ever get done.

I’m astonished the National Socialist experiment in Germany is being ignored by this commenter. Indeed your premise is antithetical to Western tradition, which is presumably good because of its endowments to humanity. See: the death of Socrates and the death of Jesus.

You missed one piece - a limited government. The 51% can get what they want, as long as it's within the things that we let government do. If it's outside that, then they need a lot more than 51% - like maybe 3/4 of the states.

>https://sunlightfoundation.com/web-integrity-project/

Looks like they need more help: https://sunlightfoundation.com/2020/01/02/farewell-and-thank...

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