[pp.int.general] This year, I'm voting against representative democracy.

Marko Mitrovic archamond at gmail.com
Sat Oct 27 11:07:30 CEST 2012


What's his issue with attempt at direct democracy?
I'd guess it is 'failing' mainly because to successfully implement it
you need to use some sort of advanced technology. If for every law you
have referendum and you have to go to your physical voting place, of
course it will fail miserably. You need to be doing it online.

Not understand his point completely tho, he complains about cost and
influence of corporations in current legislating procedure, while it
is even worse with representative system. IMHO, he makes false
assumption that elected people are actually professionals and experts
about various issues while in fact they are easily corruptible and in
most countries probably painfully incompetent.

On Sat, Oct 27, 2012 at 4:13 AM, Charly Pache <charly.pache at gmail.com> wrote:
> "
> Bram Cohen · 10,500 subscribers
> Thursday at 7:07pm via Buffer ·
>
> This year, I'm voting against representative democracy.
> Here in California we have this ridiculous system where effectively all tax
> increases have to be put to a vote and new laws can be created by a simple
> majority of people who actually vote.
> I think both of these are insane. We elect people so that laws and taxes can
> be done by professionals, and the results of California's experiment in
> direct democracy are reliably disastrous. The state chronically doesn't have
> enough money and tax increases are at best mixed with gimmicky feel-good
> measures. Laws passed by ballot are typically corrupt and make money for
> their corporate sponsors, and even when that isn't the case they're usually
> poorly thought out and misleading. So I'm voting with the following
> strategy, as a protest against my right to vote:
> Voting IN FAVOR of anything which undoes a previous ballot measure, for
> example three strikes. There are frequently a lot of these.
> Voting IN FAVOR of anything which primarily raises money for the state.
> Voting IN FAVOR of keeping the ballot districts which were drawn up by the
> citizens commission (this year brings a new innovation in things which
> shouldn't be subject to referendum!)
> Voting AGAINST everything else. Yes this means voting against a lot of
> seemingly touchy feely things, but most of those don't mean what you think
> they mean, and even the ones which approximately do tend to be extremely
> poorly drafted pieces of legislation. Many of the descriptions of what the
> new laws will do are downright fraudulent, a predictable effect of being
> able to get possible new laws on the ballot just by raising enough money to
> collect signatures.
> My one exception this year will be voting in favor of getting rid of the
> death penalty, because it's very clear what the effect of that legislation
> is, it's an embarrassment that it hasn't been done already, and it saves a
> ton of money.
> "
>
>
> On Sat, Oct 27, 2012 at 3:14 AM, Richard Stallman <rms at gnu.org> wrote:
>>
>> I hope many of us have no Facebook accounts and can't access that page,
>> so can you show us what it says?
>>
>> --
>> Dr Richard Stallman
>> President, Free Software Foundation
>> 51 Franklin St
>> Boston MA 02110
>> USA
>> www.fsf.org  www.gnu.org
>> Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
>>   Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call
>>
>> ____________________________________________________
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>
>
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