I believe Taleb’s title was the intolerant minority (a reference to Islam):
Regarding political correctness, wokism is not dead:
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You have put your finger on the fatal flaw in “representative” democracy. The unfortunate marks (us) get one vote every few years to vote for (usually) one of two individuals who hold views on many different issues – leaving the citizen with the worthless choice of voting for someone who has many views with which he disagrees. Or simply not voting at all – which is what the plurality of us are increasingly doing.
It is a conundrum. Representative democracy is quite clearly a failed system – unsustainable, we might guess – yet what to replace it with?
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Since people can’t quite wrap their heads around replacing votes with money (ie: property money (or, if you prefer to address TFR at the same time: Militia.Money)) and people can’t quite wrap their heads around replacing votes with voting with their feet (ie: sortocracy.org) maybe at-will revocable delegation of individual voting authority (ie: delegate.network)?
Since Elon Musk has come out in favor of “direct democracy” and he has all those wonderful Indians programming his datacenters for him, he should just sic them on:
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Lippincott has a great piece on AmGreatness today, “Selling Our Birthright”. We don’t need any of these bozos, THEY need US. Thats why the traffic is all one way. Oh please Trump, we elected you to put America First. DO IT! just pause ALL immigration including H1B until you—we—get the situation under control.
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That would be a contender – but perhaps it is too complex. There are other possibilities that might be less drastic … but effective.
- Currently elected officials being disqualified from running for election or re-election.
- Citizens who don’t vote being counted as votes for “None of the Above”.
- Winners in elections being required to get at least 50% of the votes of all registered voters.
- Elected officials being subjected to an Ancient Greek style stringent audits at the end of their term – with penalties for any self-enrichment.
But the practical approach to making any “representative” democracy work would be a Swiss-style Canton governmental structure – or maybe the original Constitutional US Federal structure.
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You missed this:
Now, imagine a candidate campaigns for a seat in the US House of Representatives with one promise:
“I will vote the way the delegate network for my Congressional district tells me to vote and refer all political negotiations to them.”
Elon Musk could finance candidates that ran on that single plank platform in both the Republican and Democrat primaries for both the House of Representatives and the Senate – and provide all the computer services using a cleaned up version of my github repo to support.
Your term “complex” must take into account the complexity of getting the existing politicians to do anything compared to getting some software deployed, which Elon can do.
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I don’t recall the him associating it with Islam. I recall him using Kosher products as an example. Although Islam is probably a good example too.
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Generally, I am in favor of the intent of the delegate network proposal – i.e. taking power out of the hands of the CongressCritters and returning it to us citizens. The complexity comes in with the organization and voting procedures in the delegate network.
How do we make sure that the delegates have enough information to tell the representative how to vote – and enough time to study that information? What does the representative do if only a small number of activists (the Usual Suspects) vote on a particular proposal? Is the representative required to vote against every proposed law unless he (more likely, she) gets positive votes from 50% of the registered voters? (Or – better – 60%? 70%? 80%?). How does the system deal with CongressScums repeated unConstitutional delegation of authority to unelected bureaucrats to pass regulations with the force of law?
Representative democracy may have been viable back in the days when the US was fairly small, fairly monolithic, with strong shared ideas about reasonable conduct, and a government that limited itself to only a few key items on which there was only a fairly narrow range of opinions. In today’s society, “representative” democracy is diseased.
None of that “complexity” appears in the single plank platform of a delegate network candidate. The Congressman can fulfill his promise by simply taking his flask of Wild Turkey and phone with him into the hallowed halls and doing as he’s told.
You may decry this as “representative” democracy – with all of its attendant diseases – but how exactly are you going to get your proposals enacted if not that very system?
Are you denying that Congress dominated by delegate network seats is more likely to pass reforms such as those you suggest are “more effective”, than is the current Congress?
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I think in that same article Taleb referred to Kosher Jews as a tolerant minority
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That might be a bit optimistic. How are his constituents going to know what laws he is voting on? There would have to be a system to alert the constituents and request their feedback. And how is that going to work unless CongressScum discontinue their practice of voting up or down on massively long bills containing a few essential items and a whole lot of pork & extraneous matters?
In a sense, the delegate network requires every citizen to spend almost full-time learning about what bills are coming up every day & reviewing them carefully – effectively becoming unpaid CongressCritters with a tiny fractional vote. The only people who will do that are the activists – who by definition are non-representative.
The delegate network might work if government was a lot (LOT!) smaller and a lot better organized. But if we had that kind of government, the delegate network might not be necessary.
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Gavin, you keep trying to pretend that I’m suggesting that this would fix a lot more than I claim it is going to fix, and then argue that it won’t fix it, therefore we may as well stick with the devil we know, or something.
Let me ask you one simple question:
How many times have you involved yourself in the political process to the point that you served as a delegate to a State primary convention?
I won’t pull rank on you regarding my 1991 role in the privatizing launch services since that could be just a one-off… but you really need to show some credentials here.
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Mr. B – we are in total agreement that the “democratic” system we have now has failed, and needs to be modified or replaced. But – if you will excuse me for being blunt – your proposal on the delegate network is either poorly explained or a poor idea.
I congratulate you on your sense of civic duty, but would advise you not to put your participation in primary conventions on your resume. To mention only the national candidates, “Joe Biden” swept the primaries – and, lest anyone on the other side feels smug, so did such worthless tossers as Mitt Romney and John McCain. Look at the occupiers of the halls of Congress, most of whom triumphed through the primary system, and ask yourself how many of them can seriously be said to represent the nation?
Your proposal on the delegate network, properly implemented, means that we could sweep all those inadequate corruptible people off the public payroll and replace them with some simple software which would tally up phone calls and vote accordingly. That kind of system would still suffer from today’s problem of domination by an unrepresentative politically-active small minority – but at least it would be cheaper and harder to bribe.
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I’m certainly not proud of my participation in a manifestly corrupt political process. I only bring that participation up as “credentials” in the current discourse because of your assertions about the practicality of the delegate network. While your assertion is quite probably true that “your proposal on the delegate network is… poorly explained”, it is also true that explaining my experience of the ground truth that underlies my “40,000ft views” is most daunting. You, for example, don’t see how various aspects of the delegate network would play out in practice and make assertions that are quite probably incorrect in my well-grounded judgement.
So I probably do need to explain the delegate network’s practicalities in more detail than I have.
Suffice for the present to say that from my earliest participation in the political process, I’ve been very skeptical of that investment except as a learning experience which is necessary before deciding to “take up arms against a sea of troubles” rather than commit slow suicide, as have so many who perceive what is going on. Every one of my proposals has been similarly motivated: The alternative is a rhyme with the Thirty Years War for freedom of individual conscience – a conflict bound to be vastly more destructive than a rhyme with the US civil war.
So I’ll just leave you with this challenge, that I’ve already made but which I repeat for emphasis regarding “practicality”:
You have proposed a number of goals that you see as somehow more practical. How do you justify the clear implication of everything you have said thus far:
It would be more practical to implement those proposals in the absence of the delegate network as a means of disrupting the current political process.
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Thank you for your thoughtful response. As to my own views – while I like to imagine possible ways of constructing a better system, the evidence of history (such as the Roman Senate) is that those in power will cling on desperately until the barbarians take it from their cold dead fingers. Any serious political reform would crack our current rulers’ corrupt iron rice bowls – and that is unacceptable to them.
We will have to go through a period of brutal chaos, and then spend several generations trying to dig our way out of the hole our rulers have created for us. My hope is that, after the dust settles on our internal disaster, the Chinese and the Russians take the same attitude to US citizens as the US did to defeated German citizens after World War II – attach all blame to the rulers, and step in with a Marshall Plan to help those who were ruled to rebuild.
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“There are no barbarians any longer.”
“What are we going to do without those people?”
“They were a kind of solution.”
“Unless we ourselves are the barbarians.”
I’m sure the Roman Catholic Church of the 30 years war period would see the Gutenberg press and Protestant thesis that individual conscience is the Holy Spirit, as “barbaric.”
I’m not prepared to say they were wrong given my views on the evolution of individuality vs eusociality.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/117987661?utm_campaign=postshare_fan
But there may be another way. My current hope is for a breakthrough in machine learning that follows on the internet to decentralize the mechanization of speaking truth.
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The force of Constantine Cavafy’s poetry continues to resonate in our times.
Waiting for the Barbarians
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?
Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What’s the point of senators making laws now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.
Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate,
in state, wearing the crown?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader.
He’s even got a scroll to give him,
loaded with titles, with imposing names.
Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.
Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.
Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.
And some of our men just in from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.
Ithaca
As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn’t have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
C. P. Cavafy, “Waiting for the Barbarians” and “Ithaca” from C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard.
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by Heather Mac Donald
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Bahahaha
Edit: “deported migrants” i.e., citizens of Mexico
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