[pp.int.general] My thoughts at present

[carlo von lynX]

On Sun, Oct 23, 2016 at 05:18:27PM -0700, Paul Tidwell wrote:
> What I'm getting at is ordinary citizens will get better at drafting law if
> they  go with their disposition towards direct democracy.

In Germany we are currently experience the worst of bad examples
of bad use of direct democracy. The "AfD" employs multiple choice
web-based forms to poll their party base for their opinions on
things and assembles the programme this way (so I was told by one
representative - it could be limited to Berlin city for now).
The resulting programme is terrible: an obscene collection of
unreflected prejudices including racism and homophobia.

Luckily the Icelandic Pirates are well aware of these risks and
handling the thing much more carefully, also the Icelandic popu-
lation possibly has better skills at dealing with participatory
democracy than most other European nations, even including
Switzerland.

Still, I can't but repeat to be careful about the use of any
simplifying or ideological demagoguery: most good political
approaches have several ways to do them very wrong. Be rational.
Be fact-driven. Learn from http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.07723 and
similar research work when entering the territory of democratic
participation.

We think they *have* to learn, for all of us as a prototype,
but even they could fail and drop into isolationism and racism
by moving their support en bloc from the Pirates to some
nationalist Icelandic movement - this way failing to address
the problems humanity is facing, focusing on merely surviving
by themselves as the sea levels rise and pollution destroys
the preconditions for independence.

To me it also seems realistic that nuclear warfare will be
back on the menu if we don't fix world governance soon.

The responsability on Icelandic Pirates is huge. If there
wasn't a terrible language barrier I would want to contribute,
even if only by pointing out mistakes the rest of the Pirate
movement has already made and really don't need repetition.


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