[pp.int.general] GA: Membership Requests

[carlo von lynX]

Thank you both for your insights.

On Fri, Jul 22, 2016 at 12:04:36PM -0400, Jay Emerson wrote:
> Here you go Carlos, I attached it to this email.

I am quite amazed by the artistic value of this constitutional
manifesto that you send us in place of legal statutes. The
formatting makes it a not so easy read. The repetition of Article
7 indicates that the document hasn't met the eyes of a lawyer yet.
Also the general absence of legalese, which makes it artistic, but
not very clear for the purposes of jurisdiction or construction of
a political party.

Title 2 with the party structure starts on page 8. Again as with
the other candidates there is no dedicated implementation of inner
justice. The "Legal" power is described as being an expert that
interacts with legislational bodies, not with issues of infighting.

The statutes suggest two key roles, and administrative and an
operations officer. The distinction is just in these words, so it
isn't really very clear who decides on which issues.

The statutes mention the existence of "members," but now how 
they enter or leave the party.

It mentions the existence of "wiki, forums and chat channels",
but without giving them a structural clear role or who is 
allowed to do their administration with the implied powers of
moderation and control.

It is specified that "veto consensus vote" is applied in election of
people into the various roles, but not who is entitled to vote.

The specified voting method is vulnerable to a simple denial attack:
anyone can impose their candidate by vetoing all other candidates.
Given two attackers of this kind, the party is deadlocked.

Worse even, the voting system is declared to be anonymous, thus
making it impossible to trace who the attackers are.

The design of the party suffers from the classic problems of
trusting people to be good rather than ensuring they will. This
is essentially contrary to the philosophy of democracy which
distrusts all people in whichever role and limits the range of
damage they can make. So IMHO the voting method is incompatible 
with the declaration of being in full support of separation of 
powers. The document essentially tries to walk two different
and incompatible philosophical paths at the same time, democracy
and the belief in the goodness of men, which is why I consider it
more artistic than legal.

Article 3 mentions the existence of "meetings" although members
have not yet been defined. Members may be ejected from meetings,
but it isn't specified by who nor who they can appeal to. The
Administrator is then granted the privilege to expel members.
Litigation outside of meetings (in the forum for example) is
not considered.

Article 5 declares that a democratic process must be used, but
it doesn't say how the democratic process works. That is the
intention of statutes! Just saying people have to be nice has
never worked in human history to ensure they will be nice.

That totals ten major flaws in your legal architecture.

Jay, this document is beautiful, but it shows that you have no
clue on how to make a political party. By proclaiming democracy
without actually defining it, your document does not IMHO describe
neither a functional nor an actually democratic organization.
Maybe you should team up with people that know that part of the 
job?

Also, if you believe so much in democracy, why did you take the
initiative on the quite interesting VISA issue before holding a
meeting to ensure anybody else would agree with you?