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Desdinova posted:Direct Democracy as it's been done in the past has failed, and this is largely due to as another poster made - people cba with going to a local meeting to vote on what day the bins get emptied. The more likely result is that wealthy people with particular interests in the plumbing industry would flood the general populace with propaganda claiming that a given plumbing motion will have a sweeping negative impact on the lives of just about everyone, leading the actual plumbing experts to get overwhelmingly outvoted by a stampede of laymen. Since the experts are outnumbered by the general populace, the winning move will always be to try to manipulate the general populace rather than bothering with trying to convince the experts. This is a fundamental problem with modern governance, though: he who controls information controls the people, one way or another, and it doesn't really matter that much what kind of political system you want to filter that through. If you place a priority on the opinions of experts, then those who desire power will simply fund the creation of their own alternate experts while working to undermine the very definition of "expert", as demonstrated by the way the idea of liberal technocratic government is currently collapsing all over the world. If you focus on the populace as a whole, who generally lack information on specific issues, then those who desire power will take control of the channels people use to obtain that information. Overall, people are dependent on information for our decision-making, and it doesn't really matter who you put in charge of the decision-making as long as the same people are in charge of the information.
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Jun 20, 2020 15:31
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Desdinova posted:You could have just typed Reddit How do you determine who is an expert? And since you can't reasonably have every single expert post something in the forum, how do you decide which experts make the posts? As long as the companies bribe the people who ask those questions, they can effectively control the public. Once again, because the public lacks the expertise to accurately evaluate issues themselves, a direct democracy puts the real power in the hands of whoever controls the flow of information that the public is exposed to. This isn't an issue unique to direct democracy, of course - there's been some notable cases of leaders (both representatives and autocrats) where the real power behind the throne was their secretary or chief of staff, who could effectively control what information reached the leader. But an effective leader can counteract and avoid this effect to some extent, while a leaderless society basically just has to hope the system is too big to corrupt (which isn't a bet I'd take considering the sheer size of wealth inequality these days). SalamInsurrection posted:I see what the problem is here: the fact voting, for whatever reason, is seen as a right: that no matter how reckless you are with it, no matter how many bad decisions you make that endanger other people's lives with it, you get to keep doing it, no questions asked. In this case, the person who really controls the system is whoever has the authority to control whose voting rights get revoked. During Jim Crow, this exact logic was used by white supremacists to disenfranchise minority voters.
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Jul 4, 2020 20:03
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