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

[Anouk Neeteson]

As where the underlying problem is that lots of people (also pirates) live
with the impression that a conglomerate of individual opinions
and thoughts are the same as an group of individuals that cooperate with a
shared idea. (if you can notice this difference!)

anouk

On 27 October 2012 12:50, Pat Maechler aka Valio <pirate at valio.ch> wrote:

> Actually one can fetch the comments easily by wget, without having to
> register as user.
>
> Concerning the democracy questions, here's my reply to Bram
> ---
> I'm a known pirate party advocate from Switzerland.
> I highly value the direct democratic instruments here, even though I
> think they're far from perfect. But I'd say there's also an overtly
> different political culture in Switzerland concerning politics and
> such a culture is certainly *not* adapted by a society within a
> short-time span; this needs time and also a certain level of education
> to avoid demagogues.
> An example of the positive aspects: one is overtly eager to draft laws
> that are as understandable and simple as possible (but not simpler),
> as every law could be subject to a referendum. Unecessary legalese
> terms are not helping citizens to have them understand what they're
> supposed to do. So this is a good thing. There are others as well:
> e.g. avoidance of questionable tug of war legislation (rather
> concordance than a conflict democracy), the need for a good
> argumentative basis for public expenses, a broad open discussion on
> political issues among society (most people initiatives are turned
> down, but they provide the value of softening dogmas).
> What is missing IMO is that non-elected citizens are still a bit
> excluded from a structured political discussion. Only the parliament
> can provide alternative suggestions to an already handed in people
> initiative. Thus there's still a good level of corporate lobbyism and
> single-dimensioned ideological thinking. Citizens still need to push
> into political parties to add to a certain debate, even if they may
> just provide a valuable POV, which has nothing to do with common party
> ideologies whatsoever. That is why I'm currently fighting for the
> introduction of a delegative democracy ("liquid democracy").
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_Democracy
> ---
> or as Charly Pache (vice-presidet PP-CH) puts it
> ---
> The problem lies probably more into lack of information among citizen,
> corruption and corporate sponsors than into direct democracy itself.
> ---
>
> -pat
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