Thinking about a more Direct Democracy.

Nicker on 25/2/2018 at 16:22

Please don't take things I say here personally. I don't intend them to be. While I am trying to be careful I am often thinking as I type. That means I may not construct points properly and may say things that seem personally confrontational, that is incidental and not deliberate. I am consciously trying to avoid doing so, even when provoked myself.

Let's try to avoid diverting to the internal details of specific side issues (Brexit et al), even as we may need to use them as examples of what works and what doesn't. To me, Brexit is about scales of political control, which is another topic but may be integral to issues of public input. Is there a scale at which referenda become ineffective or not?

I am trying to unpack all of this as we go so I beg your patience and indulgence.

- - - - - - - - -

I was making a bit of a joke about "plebs". While the term plebeians meant commoners in Roman times, to those in power, anyone not of their class who want's to share power is a "pleb". Hence the barons who took it from King John were too common to share his god given right to rule, in John's opinion.

Anyway...

As to Brexit, I brought it up because Kolya mentioned it as an example of direct democracy arriving at a bad choice, which I agree with in this case. But obviously others think it was a good decision. I certainly didn't intend it as a personal affront. It's an example of the complexity of the issue, both Brexit and democracy. As to Putin, who knows what that fucker is up to and when. If invoking him is muddying the waters, then I shouldn't have.

But it does raise a question about informed participation, especially given your example of lying ministers. Whether the lies are whispered in the ear of the king or shouted to the crowd, if they go unchallenged, they will poison debate.

The other trouble is, the Brexit majority was very slim, even with a huge turnout. Was a simple majority really expressing the public will or was it too close to be legitimate? Older voters seem to have carried the day, making a decision they won't have to live with for long. Was that fair to younger people?

Then on the other side, there was the Quebec Referendum to separate from Canada 1995. The vote to stay was 50.58%. For those of us who wanted Canada to remain whole, that was majority enough. If it had been the other way around, I would have asked for a do over.

So I am personally grappling with your question... "If it is not "everyone together makes the decisions", then you need to have a two class system. The people-who-can-vote, and the plebs. Which group do you see yourself in ?"

Am I really enthusiastic for a more direct democracy or am I a crypto-aristo when the plebs disagree with me? I guess I'll find out if this discussion continues.

Whether decisions are made by the few or the many, the results can be either glorious or disastrous. I'm not aware of any statistical analysis showing which category makes the best decisions. If the resulting decisions are basically random in their success, are they an argument for or against either option?

I would have to say, no. Which I think leaves us with an ethical decision, trust the aristocrats or trust the crowd. And as a member of the crowd, I have to go with the latter.

Holding my breath and hitting "reply".

Harvester on 25/2/2018 at 19:45

Alright, I'll respond. Watch me do this without calling people cunts and making strawmen about what other people believe. Not going to bother replying to your insults of religion and caricatures of what I believe, even though I didn't even mention my beliefs once in my post.

Quote Posted by Gryzemuis

Last week our new referendum law has been killed already.
And why ? The only argument Ive heard was: "You can't let the plebs make decisions ! They are too dumb to understand anything".

You're contradicting yourself. I just gave you multiple arguments against this system of referendums. You just accused me of only repeating what the government says. So this can't be the only argument that's making the rounds, if I'm just parroting what the government says. I suspect you might not be a regular reader of any national newspaper. I don't mean that as an insult. But in every Dutch national newspaper both sides of this referendum system have been argued extensively, using multiple arguments for both sides. In the newspaper I read, there have been opinion articles arguing both sides, using a multitude of different arguments.

As a side note, I think "you agree with the government, so you must be wrong" isn't much of an argument.

Quote Posted by Gryzemuis

While I'm at it, let me reply to Harvester's points.

Someone has got to make the decisions.
If it is not "everyone together makes the decisions", then you need to have a two class system. The people-who-can-vote, and the plebs. Which group do you see yourself in ?

That whole plebs thing of yours is a strawman. I don't want a two class system and I don't think I'm better than you or anyone else. One person, one vote, be it a janitor or a CEO, that's what I strongly believe in. I even said I'm not necessarily against more direct democracy, just not a shitty system like this. I've mentioned the Swiss referendums, and as you might've noticed I wasn't dismissive about it. I said I don't know enough about it (to make a judgment). Theoretically there can be a well-thought out system of referendums that I can support. This system, I cannot, for the reasons I've stated.

Quote:

The disaster was not because of the referendum itself. It was because of the way our politicians dealt with it. Basically they did *everything* they could to torpedo the referendum. And they succeeded. And now they threw out the referendum-law.

Because it wasn't working well, for reasons I mentioned and other reasons. As you might've heard, D66 still supports (legally binding) referendums and would vote for a well thought-out system in a second, they just think this particular system isn't working. As for torpedoing this particular referendum, the government supported the association treaty, so you can expect them to argue for it. The opposition, for a large part, argued against it, and they were given every room to do so. Groups were given subsidies to make "propaganda" material for or against the treaty, even if they did ridiculous thing like make printed toilet paper. I don't see anything majorly wrong with how it was handled.

Quote:

WTF are you implying here ? That only extremists support a referendum ? "Normal people" should all be voting for parties in the middle of the political spectrum ? Or else they are crazy and shouldn't be allowed to vote ? Wait, the middle in NL is the Christian Party (CDA), right ? Your party. The party of God, where all its voters are used to being told what to do, what to say and what to vote. Right ?

It's just a statement of fact. And I'd hardly call a GroenLinks (Green Party) or SP (Socialist Party) or Animal Party voter an extremist, don't put words in my mouth. I don't even call every PVV or FvD voter an extremist, although a larger percentage of extremists is found among them.
Ignoring your CDA jab (which I don't vote for).
D66 is also a centrist party and that party supports referendums very enthusiastically, they just want a better system. They want a solid system of binding referendums which works well, they just think (and I agree) that the current system wasn't working.

Quote:

Two very bad properties of this law. It was almost impossible to get a referendum on anything.

Holding a referendum is very expensive. I disagree that requiring 300,000 signatures is too much. If you can't even get 300,000 signatures for your topic (signing is almost no effort at all and raising signatures over the internet is easy) it's not important enough to spend that much money on. If you can't get 300,000 people to care enough to sign your petition, people in general obviously don't care that much about the topic, so IMO it's not worth the money it costs. The less people care, the less they're going to read about the topic anyway, so the votes are going to be uninformed and the turnout percentage will be very low.

Quote:

And the government could always say "fuck you plebs, we'll do what we want anyway". Which indeed happened after every referendum.

There has only been one referendum thus far. We'll see what they do with the outcome of the "dragnet law" referendum. At least on that topic I have less of a problem with the binary nature of the referendum. "Should the government have more data mining and analyzing abilities, at the expense of our privacy, for arguably better security? Yes/No" It's a national topic with mostly national consequences that works better for a referendum than the association treaty.

Quote:

Why was it important for the Ukraine to move into a more pro-European direction ? Because you think so ? The Ukrainians had just elected their own government, which was pro-Russia. You know better than the Ukrainians themselves ?

No, I said it was considered important, meaning people found it important, whether that's justified or not. My personal opinion of Ukrainian politics is irrelevant.

Quote:

Also, the Ukrainians expected the collaboration to grow into full membership. Maybe that was never said officially. But on many occaisions this was said. It was certainly the expectation of the Ukraine. If you wish, I can burrow you with links on this.

Expectations are one thing. To become a member, all current members states would have to agree, and they'd have to conform to the same standards as any other aspiring member state.

Quote:

It doesn't matter what you think, or I think. It matters what the majority thinks. If you disagree, you are not democratic.
You make it sound as if the referendum was a vote for or against the Dutch governement. It was not.
Was it a vote against the EU ? Hell yeah.
The reason is simple: our referendum law did not allow us to have referenda on any topic. We could only have referenda about new laws. The new treaty with the Ukraine was a new law, so it was the only way to vote about something to do with the EU. Officially the question was about the Ukraine only. Unofficially the referendum was also about the EU's unbridled greedy expansion. I'm fine with that.

And I'm not fine with that. The citizens of a country should not be used as a tool to voice another country's citizens' dissatisfaction about the EU. It's their future that's at stake, they shouldn't be used as pawns.

Quote:

You think we let the Ukraine join the EU because we want to save them ?
No. The only reasons are because of power and money.
And yes, sending a message to the EU is perfectly fine.

Maybe we don't have enough ways to send messages to the EU. On that part I can agree. But using another country's citizens as pawns is not the way to do it.

Quote:

And the Animal Party does have a point. Ukraine is the most corrupt country in Europe. How hard would it be to get the right papers for the wrong products ?

Then that's what they should've said. "They will be bound to EU regulations, but we believe they'll ignore that". Other people could've responded to that. Now they're just lying by omission.

Quote:

Those people are cunts.
You want to torpedo the democratic process by playing unfair ? I have no sympathy for you.

They don't want to legitimize a flawed system by voting in a referendum. You don't vote in the general election because you don't support the system. Same thing if you ask me. Or would you rather everyone would be required to vote in a referendum? Then why wouldn't they require you to vote in the general election? To vote or not should be everyone's own decision.

And I don't need your sympathy. I got what I wanted, the association treaty was passed and this flawed system of referendums is gone. Maybe one day it's replaced by a trustworthy system that works. Then I'll vote.

Quote:

I don't believe in representative parliament. I don't vote in regular elections, because I don't want to legitimize them. I think it is totally unfair Dutch politics is continuing anyway. Yeah, right.

I have no problem with you not voting.

Quote:

So when you don't play, it's meaningless. But when I don't play, I should stfu and not have an opinion on politics ?

I never said you should stfu. However, the general election result does have more meaning than this referendum result, because close to 80% of eligible voters vote. So it's a better representation that the meager 31% that showed up in the referendum.

Quote:

No, that was not the case.
The issue was: a few political parties had said in advance that they would honor the outcome. And then after the result was not what they had hoped for, they said: "oh btw, we're not gonna honor the outcome". Hypocrites. That was the problem.

Yeah I get your point here. They shouldn't have made these promises IMO. If you ask me, they should've said: "we're going to seriously consider the results, but we're not making promises as to the outcome. EU politics are complicated, we may not be able to transfer your binary decision directly".

Quote:

Please do.

I could explain why it's a bad thing that a couple of million voters from one country are able to torpedo resolutions that all national governments have agreed to, because then the EU will never be able to get anything done. If you want to go that way, you should poll citizens in all countries, at least then it's a more accurate representation of what all EU citizens want.
I could elaborate, but I suspect you're just going to say "who cares, I hate the EU, so good riddance if they fail".

Quote:

In that case, change the way the referenda are held. Change the questions they ask. Change the frequency. In any case, the solution is not: "fuck the plebs, we overlords know best, and we'll take the decisions. and we don't need to take responsibility to anyone".

Referenda are a great indicator of what the general public wants. Even if the question was limited. Even if the result can't be implemented easily. The real problem is that our referenda exposed something significant: our politicians do not want to implement the will of the people. In stead, they want to play their own political games. I find that astonishing.

So replace it with a better system that's guaranteed to produce an accurate representation of what people really want. I don't know how such a system should be designed, but I'm open to the possibility. In that case, the centrist party D66 would be right on your side and a majority for such a system might be possible. As I said, people in Switzerland seem fairly happy with their system.

Quote:

You're making this up. Link please. Dutch link is fine.

(https://nos.nl/artikel/2218311-marijnissen-als-hologram-wij-laten-ons-referendum-niet-afpakken.html) Link

In my haste, I said it was multiple people who said this. Turns out that was wrong, it was just Lilian Marijnissen of the SP.

Quote:

Yes, bad is always worse than good.
But you are arguing that sometimes no democracy is the best solution ? WTF ?

No, as I said: design a good system, think it through thoroughly, employ some experts to analyze the effectivity, etc. If the system works, I might just support it.

Starker on 25/2/2018 at 20:15

EU does not just take any country. There are strict criteria that every country has to pass in order to join. And even then some countries get rejected outright. In fact, it's the other way around -- lots of countries want to join the EU, a lot more than the EU is willing to take.

Also, the stability and the economic prosperity that the EU has brought after WW2 is undeniable. I'm baffled that people want to go back to the "good old days" when it was everyone for themselves and Europe tore itself into pieces over and over and over again.

Kolya on 25/2/2018 at 22:50

One might almost feel grateful to Gryzemuis for choosing a thread about (more) direct democracy to prove (http://thequotes.in/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Winston-Churchill-Quotes-31.jpg) that old quote attributed to Winston Churchill about a 5-minute conversation with the average voter. :rolleyes:

Seriously though, no voting app and positive attitude will get you past the fact that politics is a lot of work to do as good as possible. And common people simply don't have the time to sit through the necessary base education of the values that shall guide us, listen to all the sides, engage in endless discussions trying to moderate the interest goups and then think of the consequences and the common welfare.
That's why we delegate that shit to people who must spend their whole day with it: It's more efficient AND leads to better results than a million people making some emotionally charged snap decision.

But it's not like voting was the only way to be politically active. Join a party or a union or your local tabletennis club, take on some minor honorary post and you will soon understand that not every person who comes in from the street could do it just as well.

I'm all for everyone participating in politics. But you can't leave out the learning process. Which is what direct democracy necessarily ends up to be about.

Kolya on 25/2/2018 at 23:04

I have a feeling that humans acting as "self organizing networks" might be a part of Nickers idea, so I'll leave this hugely interesting article here: (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/may/29/adam-curtis-ecosystems-tansley-smuts)

Quote:

It is the idea of the "self-organising network". It says that human beings can organise themselves into systems where they are linked, but where there is no hierarchy, no leaders and no control. It is not the old form of collective action that the left once believed in, where people subsumed themselves into the greater force of the movement. Instead all the individuals in the self-organising network can do whatever they want as creative, autonomous, self-expressive entities, yet somehow, through feedback between all the individuals in the system, a kind of order emerges.
At its heart it says that you can organise human beings without the exercise of power by leaders.

Gryzemuis on 25/2/2018 at 23:24

Quote Posted by Kolya

Yeah, of course Churchill has disdain for the average voter. He's a hero. Average voters are nothing.

Do you know Churchill killed a million people ? Maybe more ? On purpose ?
Do British history books teach that to British kids ?

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/soutikbiswas/2010/10/how_churchill_starved_india.html)
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943)

The fucker didn't like Indians. And he thought it was better to send food from India to Greece. Probably because "geo-political reasons". Reasons simpletons like myself would never understand. So 3 million Indians died because of starvation. Which could have been 1-2 million less, if Churchill hadn't sent Indian food to Europe.

This is one reason why I don't like authorities. They get to make dumb decisions. Evil decisions even. And they will never have to show responsibility. The bigger the country, the bigger the authority. And the bigger the crimes. But the winner writes the history books. So the winners are always heroes. And "the average voter" is nothing.

I wonder how many of you belong to "the one percent".
I wonder how many of you have any power.
But please keep repeating the propaganda of the ruling class. They know best. They were appointed by god to do great things. We're to dumb to understand. We should be happy to get their breadcrumbs. Too bad all of you weren't born a few centuries ago. Back then it was much clearer who belonged to what class. Where everyone's place was.

Nicker on 25/2/2018 at 23:31

I agree that learning is critical but again, Kolya, there's no guarantee that our elected officials, even at the highest levels, are qualified or they will keep the promises they make to get elected or that they will make decisions in the public good as opposed to self interest. In fact the dog eat dog process people have to go through to get to the top, may select for or create the personality profiles of people unsuited to public service.

There is no direct correlation between the quality of a decision and whether it was made by lots of people or just a few. Until you can establish such a link, there is no argument there, just opinion.

Churchill was a great war time Prime Minister but he was ill suited in peace time. Britain got lucky. They could have stuck with Neville Chamberlain.

As far as quotes about democracy, I prefer Robert Heinlein's love / hate affair with it...

"Democracy is a poor system of government at best; the only thing that can honestly be said in its favor is that it is eight times as good as any other method the human race has ever tried."

"Democracy's worst fault is that its leaders are likely to reflect the faults and virtues of their constituents."

"Democracy can't work. Mathematicians, peasants, and animals, that's all there is - so democracy, a theory based on the assumption that mathematicians and peasants are equal, can never work. Wisdom is not additive; its maximum is that of the wisest man in a given group."

"What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it... which for the majority translates as 'Bread and Circuses'."

Trouble for Heinlein is that last one can apply equally to professional politicians too.

Nicker on 25/2/2018 at 23:47

Quote Posted by Kolya

My idea is to discuss the possibility of improving democracy. Not sure what that article has to do with it. If anything, the natural political state for humans is simple hierarchy - probably an artifact of our social primate ancestry. Feudalism seems to be a cross cultural and stable system. It is arguable that we still have it, with a thin veneer of democracy.

The Russians fought a bloody war to get rid of the Tzars. One Hundred years later, look who's back. Maybe kings and peasants is the best we can hope for.

Any particular methods I have suggested don't resemble "self-organising networks". In fact they would require considerable organisation and maintenance.

Nicker on 25/2/2018 at 23:47

Let's try and keep it civil, folks. We are just discussing ideas.

Kolya on 25/2/2018 at 23:48

Quote Posted by Nicker

"What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it... which for the majority translates as 'Bread and Circuses'."

Trouble for Heinlein is that last one can apply equally to professional politicians too.

It can apply, if politicians are so power hungry that they forgo common welfare, but we have invented rules to prevent that. In a direct democracy though it is the only result.
I'm not trying to prove here that few people make better decisions than many. I'm arguing for expertise, which is only practically achievable for few.