Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

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Green Parties generally.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_party

You can tell they are effective as they get regularly attacked by people here who seem to have a visceral hatred of them and very weird justifications for why (they're under the thrall of the fossil fuel companies apparently)

Anyone that advocates for increasing democracy generally, whether more representational democracy in existing democracies that have broken systens (US or UK) or spreading it further. People generally want action for climate change, the people who don't need to spend a lot of money and tell a lot of lies to hold this back. The more democracy the more they'll need to spend.

Electoral Reform Society

https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/voting-systems/what-are-...

George Soros's Open Society Foundation

https://voxeurop.eu/en/how-george-soros-was-transformed-from...

HN types might be more attracted to the business or analytical sides though. Carbon Tracker or Bloomberg New Energy Finance which proceed from the premise that climate change is inefficient and there's market based opportunities there to be exploited.

https://carbontracker.org/

https://about.bnef.com/contact/

Within big orgs like Google and Microsoft they have similar teams I believe, looking for the cheapest and most synergistic ways for them to save money and help the climate at the same time.

>Anyone that advocates for increasing democracy generally

I find this take fascinating. In my model, increasing democracy correlates negatively with increasing long term planning, which only then wouldn’t be the case if our species was acting as a collective. Aggregating individual interests doesn’t magically lead to collective interests, just to the set of actions that map on individual demand. There are no real majorities in favor of the rather radical changes required to deal with the major problems of our time, the opposite is the case. People are willing to sacrifice the stability of the future in favor of their well being in the current legislative period, especially in countries with demographics skewed towards the elderly.

Democracy is not the solution unless a culture of sanity becomes prevalent, and that’s not on the horizon afaik.

Borrowing from a german idiom, the current model is “Eltern haften für ihre Kinder”, parents are liable for their children. What we need is the cultural change in the opposite direction, that being a heavy awareness of the fact that children are de facto liable for the actions of their parents.

If you look at polling, the people are usually better than the politicians at long term planning.

This seems to be generally true in history too. That's a big reason why propaganda is a thing. Having to convince lots of people to do something not in their interests is hard work.

Democracy is messy, and imperfect but it gets attacked from both sides, the people who think the rich and powerful have too much control of it and the ones that want the rich and powerful to have more control.

It's easy to be cynical but generally every small step towards greater democracy has paid off.

With regards to old people voting, the answer is more young people voting, not taking votes away from older people.

Even many counter-examples you might think of, like early USSR and modern China, were often reactions against even more anti-democratic rule and can be considered steps towards greater democracy.

And this is not a new thing, many of the things we study in classics are the reactions against greater democracy:

> As Robert Dahl writes, "Although the practices of modern democracy bear only a weak resemblance to the political institutions of classical Greece...Greek democratic ideas have been more influential...[and] what we know of their ideas comes less from the writings and speeches of democratic advocates, of which only fragments survive, than from their critics."[9]

> Aristotle was a mild critic "who disliked the power that he thought the expansion of democracy necessarily gave to the poor."[9] Plato was an opponent of democracy who advocated for "government by the best qualified."

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