#Direct Democracy

[all-things-are-nothing-to-me]

Alright finished the second zine. Now this one I have something to actually talk about. It actually got me thinking at points, but not in the direction the author wants. But that's fine, I'll just take the parts I like and disregard the rest.

It does this thing where it presents an issue and I find myself agreeing but then their solution is democracy and I completely tune out. Like wtf? A pro-democracy anarchist? And yes I know they most likely mean direct democracy and uhh that's still democracy bucko. Some examples.

And

Anyways you can read it here.

[justalittlesolarpunk]

Just spent all day facilitating a citizens’ assembly and whew, I am exhausted but so inspired. You see ordinary people, who don’t seem radical or political, coming up with ideas for free public transport and a sharing economy, calling for rewilding and housing security for all. The public are so incredible when you just give people a voice and let them know their opinion matters. I really think direct democracy could change the world, but only if it’s given the power and influence to actually inform legislation

[nohopelessromantic]

📢Open letter from students of #serbia to students worldwide. 📢

🚨Anti-goverment sentiment in Serbia has escalated since the tragic event on November 1st, 2024 when the concrete canopy at the recently renovated railway station collapsed, killing 15 and severely injuring 2 people. Ever since, citizens and opposition parties have been protesting, demanding accountability for the victims of a deeply corrupted system, which uses public projects to pump money out of the state and into private investors' pockets. The regime responded with slur campaigns and hired thugs to attack protesters. One such attack occured on December 2nd, when the students of the Dramatic Arts School in Belgrade were set upon by regime thugs while holding a 15 minute silence for the victims. Since then, students of Serbian universities have been blockading their institutions.🚨

🌟We as citizens stand with them and hope their actions will be the light to show us a way to true democracy.✨

🌍Please reblog to reach more students around the world. 🌎

[dailyanarchistposts]

Syndicalists have always supported a form of direct democracy based on majority rule. Like most American unions, the Industrial Workers of the World officially endorses Robert’s Rules of Order — although some of their smaller branches use a stripped down version called Rusty’s Rules.[1] The point to taking a vote is that it enables an organized group to come to a decision that expresses the collective will, even when there is some disagreement.

This doesn’t mean that all decisions are made by voting. In grassroots organizations based on majority decision-making, it often happens that most decisions are made without taking any vote — especially in smaller meetings. That’s because people are often able to come to agreement just by discussing the issue or proposal.

As a mass organization, a union will inevitably tend to have a diversity of viewpoints. On the other hand, the ability to reach agreement is helped by the shared circumstances. The members of a base union — such as a grassroots union in a particular workplace — are working class people who share common subordination to a particular employer, or they work in the same industry. Although different jobs or departments may have special problems, and some groups may experience particular forms of discrimination, they share the general conditions of that workplace. Many will have personal connections with other members from working together. This makes it easier for members to take up the form of “we” consciousness involved in making collective decisions in a union.

Nowadays many radical activists object to making decisions by majority vote and advocate “consensus decision-making” as an alternative. Consensus decision-making among activist groups in the USA is relatively recent. This practice originated with the anti-nuke movement and women’s consciousness raising groups between the ‘60s and ‘80s. The Quakers were the original source or influence for consensus decision-making in that era. Quaker groups like Movement for a New Society and the American Friends Service Committee (the social service arm of the Quaker religious groups) were important advocates for consensus back then. Later on this practice was continued by anti-war groups like Direct Action to Stop the War during the opposition to the Iraq war in 2003. The most important recent experiment with consensus was with Occupy Wall Street and the various Occupy assemblies in American cities.

During this period, “these [consensus] methods became identified with anarchism,” David Graeber writes, “because anarchists recognized them to be forms that could be employed in a free society, in which no one could be physically coerced to go along with a decision they found profoundly objectionable.” (David Graeber, The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement, (Random House: New York, 2013), 195.) Actually, this is a very egoistic form of anarchism, as I’ll show in a moment.

Consensus and grassroots majority vote democracy share certain common features, such as open discussion, trying to reach agreement through talking things out, trying to persuade each other. Although meetings of a union or other working class organization don’t have the problem of the huge clash of interests between people of different classes, it’s very likely that people will have disagreements on important issues.

Consensus is based on the idea of talking things out until agreement is reached. In the form of consensus practiced in the ’70s and ‘80s, no agreement could be reached unless people were unanimous. This tended to lead to very protracted meetings. Six hour meetings were not unusual. Occupy Wall Street adopted a 90 percent rule, but this still allows a concerted minority to force concessions to their viewpoint. This is a form of minority rule.

I think it is possible for consensus to work fine in some settings, such as small groups of people with similar ideas. Often voting is used as a method in bureaucratic organizations such as the U.S. Congress or meetings of unions dominated by officials and paid staff. On the other hand, decision-making may be a lot less alienating in a small circle of like-minded acquaintances who simply talk things out to reach agreement. But this contrast is misleading because a working class social movement must be able to do effective decision-making in mass settings where consensus isn’t workable.

Consensus originally derives from the way Quaker religious meetings are conducted. The Quaker method of prayer is a process of “waiting upon the Lord” to reveal “the Light” within. George Fox, founder of the Society of Friends (Quakers), wrote: “In the Light wait where the Unity is, where the peace is, where the Oneness with the Father and Son is, where there is no Rent nor Division.” (Quoted in Howard Ryan, “Blocking Progress: Consensus Decision Making in the Anti-Nuclear Movement” (http://www.docspopuli.org/pdfs/consensus.pdf).) Quakers reject voting because it presupposes “division.” Quaker groups are based on a high level of unity. This makes it easier to reach a consensus. When people make a statement in a meeting, often there are silences. There is not a hurry to make a decision.

Quaker religious societies are an example of what John McDermott calls an expressive organization. As McDermott put it:

Unity of action is not required…The only unity required ahead of time for expressive organizations is a general will to share, to discuss, and to enter into the company of others for mutual growth, support, and enjoyment. (John McDermott, The Crisis in the Working Class & Some Arguments For a New Labor Movement (South End Press: Boston, 1980), 190.)

An expressive organization’s purpose is “to express certain things which already exist among its members.” With an expressive organization much of the purpose is in the meeting itself — as with the singing and praying in a church service. Religious groups are not the only kind of expressive organization.

As McDermott points out, the capitalist elite also have their own “expressive” organizations, such as seminars, conferences, magazines, and so on. In the past the radical left has organized grassroots institutions that played an expressive role in working class communities. An example would be the Hall of the Masses in Detroit after World War 1. This was not a union or instrumental organization. It was a place where workers who were being radicalized could come to hear talks and debates. Issues of importance to the working class were analyzed, and cultural events were held.

During the height of Occupy in 2011, people describing their experiences often spoke about how personally helpful it was to find others experiencing similar circumstances, such as unemployment, foreclosure, massive student debt, and so on. The assemblies could provide a sympathetic hearing to those talking about their life. And hearing others validated their own dissent from the system. Looking at it this way, we can say that Occupy assemblies also had an expressive character. Marina Sitrin’s report on a series of interviews with Occupy veterans also suggests this expressive character: “We would often interject how important the question of dignity is….People around the US often no longer feel it is their fault that they are loosing their homes or jobs — and instead feel a new sense of power — feeling they are the 99%.” (https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/sustainability-organization-and-anti-capitalism-talkin-occupy-around-the-us/)

McDermott distinguishes expressive organizations from instrumental organizations — organizations we form to be a vehicle for accomplishing our aims. Unions and other organizations of struggle (such as tenant or environmental justice organizations) are instrumental organizations.

Although consensus is workable in some situations, I think consensus is not a viable decision-making method for unions or working class-based mass organizations of struggle.

Working class people in the USA tend to work long hours. Since the ‘70s the workweek has gotten longer, and many people work multiple jobs. The average workweek in the USA is now among the longest in the world. People also have children and relationships, and must somehow fit all these things into their lives.

This means that a type of organization that tends to have very protracted meetings is not very useful or welcoming to working people. Consensus is biased in favor of people who work shorter hours or have more flexible schedules, such as students.

An organization that thwarts the will of the majority and gets mired in long meetings is not going to be an effective vehicle for working class people.

An advantage of majority vote direct democracy is its flexibility. If there are a number of less important issues on the agenda, the meeting can move through these fairly quickly and devote more time for discussion of the more important issues. Consensus lacks this flexibility. Also, the requirement of unanimity or a high super-majority makes it harder for an organization to change its program or methods based on experience. There will almost always be a minority who prefer the original orientation that brought them to that organization. They can block a change.

The core of consensus is the ability of any individual to block a decision. David Graeber’s version: “Anyone who feels a proposal violates a fundamental principle shared by the group should have the opportunity to veto (block) that proposal.”

What counts as a “fundamental principle” is itself something that people are likely to disagree about. When someone blocks a proposal favored by a large majority, a consensus-based group can try to persuade the blocker to “stand aside” (to abstain) or they can make concessions to the blocker.

Even when no one does block, everyone is aware that anyone can. This means that there will be tension in a meeting if someone expresses disagreement with a proposal because people know that person could block it. If a person does block an important action proposal that has majority support, they better be prepared for heavy pressure. This situation actually discourages expression of disagreement. Within a grassroots organization that uses majority vote, people can express disagreement without blocking the majority from pursuing the course of action it favors. This makes dissent less harmful.

Consensus seems to be based on the idea that disagreements can always be overcome through persuasion or talking things over. But this is unrealistic. Even when people are committed to a common organization or movement, they may have deeply felt disagreements. Critics of consensus have observed for years the tendency to paper over disagreements with poor decisions. Rudy Perkins described this problem in the Clamshell Alliance in New England in the ‘70s:

“Majority rule is disliked because among the two, three or many courses of action proposed, only one is chosen; the rest are “defeated.” Consensus theoretically accommodates everyone’s ideas. In practice this often led to:

Consensus is based on distrust of the majority. That’s why the blocking rule is really the heart of consensus. Disagreements in mass organizations or social movements are inevitable. This means that there will inevitably be some element of pressure because people will be required to accept decisions they are not happy with if they are committed to that organization. Advocates of consensus like David Graeber are concerned to prevent an individual from being forced to go along with a collective decision they strongly disagree with. But they do not see the problem of coercion of the majority by an individual or small minority under consensus rules. Consensus is based on the principle of the primacy of the individual Ego over the collective will. This is why I say that consensus is based on an egoistic principle.

Requirements for unanimity or super-majorities for decisions are not helpful if the aim is building social power among working class people.

To gain some power, unions try to mobilize resistance, which can take small forms like wearing T-shirts with a message or a stronger form such as a strike. Often a strike comes only after a lengthy period of discussion among workers, meetings, growing anger, and efforts by a union to build confidence. People may fear losing their job. When workers are discussing whether to strike, there will be some who are more timid or more cautious. It may take a major effort to convince even a majority to strike. If a decision to strike were to require complete unanimity or a high super-majority, this would make it much more difficult to get a strike off the ground.

Prior to the 2012 strike by Chicago teachers, the state legislature in Illinois passed a law requiring a “Yes” vote of 75 percent plus one for a teacher strike to be legal. This was a 75 percent majority of all teachers, not just those voting. This was done to make it difficult for teachers to strike legally.

[1] See http://www.iww.org/oldbranches/US/CA/lagmb/lit/meeting.pdf.

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

In this bonus episode, Ariel talks with Brooklin Wallis, Ontario New Democratic Party (NDP) candidate for Kitchener Centre in the upcoming snap Ontario Election. This isn’t an endorsement, but a discussion that hopes to prod solarpunk talking points into the realm of politics. Brooklin even describes herself as someone with solarpunk leanings! How does that reconcile with participation in the democratic system in Ontario, Canada? What are her solarpunk goals?

NB: We drop a bunch of hyper-local references to places. This link will be helpful for listeners who aren’t familiar with the cities in Southern Ontario: https://gisgeography.com/ontario-map/

Links: https://brooklinwallis.ontariondp.ca/ https://www.instagram.com/brooklinwr/ https://www.ontariondp.ca/ https://www.ndp.ca/

[kyleemclauren]

Can we please just do direct democracy? Please? I don't ever want to vote on another candidate again, I just want to be able to express my opinions directly at the polls. I just want to vote on laws and policies myself.

Imagine you go into the voting booth and get to have a say on hundreds or thousands of proposals, allowing you to express exactly what you wanted in full detail. You get to vote on *everything* - Israel vs Palestine, KOSA, police funding, NASA funding, abortion, queer rights, school policies - everything. We could put every supreme court decision on the national ballot. We wouldn't have to ever think about any of these people ever again.

Imagine if there was an easy way for citizens to propose laws. Not like, the staggeringly difficult slog of managing hundreds of people collecting signatures, but a government agency that did research into how popular citizen proposed initiates were, and made recommendations to get them passed into law.

We need to be talking about constitutional convention level solutions to our problems. The parties will never learn.

[alpaca-clouds]

You cannot fix a broken System (but you can build a better one)

Let me finish the entire week on politics and revolution with one thing that I wish for people to understand: Sometimes systems are too broken to fix them. Sometimes they are so broken, that any fixes are basically just ducttape on a car that is slowly breaking down. Like, sure, it will allow it to somehow rattle along for a couple more months, but in the end it is going to break down and no amount of ducttape is gonna prevent that.

For example, I see the current western education system as such a case. We can fix the curriculum in one way or another, but that does not change the fact that the system itself is very broken. We need to completely rethink how we do schools and education, instead of fixing little issues here and there.

And, yes, democracy I consider the same case. Our democracy is broken. In some countries (like the US) more than others. But it is broken everywhere. Part of the reason it is broken is capitalism. Because capitalism in any degree on a long run is going to make democracy into a plutocracy. There is no way around here.

And of course, our economic system is broken. Well, to be honest, it is not broken. It works as intended. The issues are not bugs, but features. But it does not work in favor of most people participating in it.

People always look like easy, quick fixes for all those things. Maybe one more rule will fix the economics. Maybe one more law will make democracy fair. But it never does. On the contrary. Often it ends up getting worse. Because the system is so broken, that those who make the changes have an interest in keeping the system broken in this way. So their fixes actually entrentch the issues existing within the system already.

This is also where the entire thing with sabotage and respectability politics come in. Because when people just go onto peaceful protests and all those things... Well, the system is so broken that it does not really concern the politicians.

A couple of years back on one of the climate protests in Germany about 5% of all Germans were on the streets on the same day taking part in the protests all over Germany. Which is huge. In some cities it was even a bigger percentage. In my own city there were 12% of all people on the streets that day according to the police!

So, how did the politicians react to that? Well: "95% of all Germans were not on the street, so they agree that our current way of dealing with this is good." Ignoring that of course a lot of people were unable to go out to protest on a workday. While at the time I was working at a company who decided that companywide we would get the day off to go to that protest... that was not true for most people. So, yeah, 5% of all people being on the streets that day is MASSIVE.

The same goes of course for stuff like elections. It does not matter what you vote for. Like, of course you need to vote for the lesser evil, but in the end... It will not change much about how politicians act.

And that in the end is the issue. See, those who currently hold the power and use it for their own advantage want you to do those nice and peaceful little thingies, because they can just ignore it. I do not remember who said it, but there was a nice thing one civil rights leader said once: "If they allow it, it will not get us anywhere." And that is the thing.

The system is broken. But it is build in a way that people cannot fix the system from within it. The system is broken. But we can build a better one. One that actually works for the people. One that is actually just and actually democratic.

We cannot be too afraid of the system to change. Because right now the horror of the system is too large to ignore.

[brightestandbest]

I Can't Self-Govern For You

A public statement of Pastor Johnny to Church of the Morningstar on 1/4/2025. Back when I was first thinking of starting a Satanic church, I had a chatty Uber driver one night. I confessed to him that I was an aspiring pastor, although not what kind.  “Put the pews in a circle,” he told me. “Pass the mic.”  With these words, he expressed his desire for a different kind of religion– one that…

[agreed-upon-solutions]

Why Direct Democracy?

(This is a lightly edited version of a reply to a question we received on Reddit, which we felt had independent interest here.)

We think direct democracy is preferable to a dictatorship for what I hope are obvious reasons, totalitarianism does not result in good outcomes (eg, the upcoming climate change fight is going to be insane).

We prefer it to the current United States government for what are also probably obvious reasons. Gerrymandering ruins the notion of representation within states, the senate means voters in Wyoming are represented 20x more than voters in New York, the supreme court means the opinions of nine unelected people make laws at the constitutional level that supersede the elected branches of government entirely, and there are many local optima in governing where the entire system just shuts down (see our ongoing difficulties keeping a funded government.)

The broad failure modes of representative democracy even in theory are also often terrible. A slight majority opinion is easily magnified into unanimous consensus at the policymaker level. In a single issue election, if something has 55% across all states, 100% of representatives will support it. With more issues voters don't even get a say in which ones, it makes protection of minority rights at the legislative level a joke. Institutional capture means often parties don't even try to represent their base: a majority of Democrats want a ceasefire in Gaza, but the party line is hard against it. There is no attention given to long tail issues, like plastic pollution or restrictions on advertising. Copyright reform has no supporters. (Tangentally, restrictions on advertising are a *hell* of a sleeper issue, it comes up more frequently than anything else we poll and opinions are uniformly negative.)

Direct democracy has the potential to solve an enormous number of problems, if various technical challenges can be solved. Extremely representative government is one aspect, but certainly not the only one. One of my favorites is that it has the potential to decouple every issue from needing a central party to make forward progress. It makes no sense that annoyance at trans people should also influence the antitrust enforcement priorities of the FTC. I believe the reason Donald Trump won is because although neither candidate represents a consensus bundle of issues, Harris missed the cluster that would have saved her.

There are also issues too unpopular at the national level to even be considered by a national party, but we could give them a fair hearing. An opinion of mine that falls into this bucket is that we should strive for full prison abolition, I don't think carceral justice is a concept that makes sense for the stated goal of "reintegrating the offender into society". With a national party system, I can't even get this concept on the agenda, with Agreed Upon Solutions I can just make my argument and have people vote. I will likely still lose, but I was at least given a fair shot, and any particularly reasonable points I can make might still be incorporated. Advocating for low maximum sentences for specific crimes certainly has potential to be agreeable.

Here are the main flaws that we see with direct democracy, and how we fix them:

* Difficulty scaling

* People are uninformed

* Suppression of minority rights

-

The scale problem I think you can see how we're approaching. Having a list of "Every Thing", as silly as it is, has dramatically increased comment participation over the open discussion, and solicited a lot of comments from what would normally be considered long tail issues. "Indigenous rights" is in our top 100 issues, I'm very proud of that. Our metrics look great, and we're very hyped for V2.

-

I will pretend like a representative democracy means we elect informed representatives, and that anyone at all has solved the problem of writing high-quality expert informed policy.

This is a subtle problem to fix, and we dedicate a lot of thought behind the scenes to it. We have a number of proposals; the most fleshed out ones center on the observation that while people may not be informed on a specific issue, they do have a reasonably good sense of who is. Given this observation, you can do tons of things: You can vote to reassign your vote to an expert. You can calculate something akin to PageRank for a given trust graph. You can use something like the ranked pair voting resolution method, (begin with the most strongly agreed on set of priorities, then add more recursively as long as the new position does not contradict the older ones,) using domain experts in a generic capacity. The promoters of AI claim it can also be used to solve this problem, but is an extremely unreliable technology for now and we don't want to depend on it.

The most ridiculous way would be if we can solve the enormous ballot ranking problem well enough, we can scale up again: We also have a list of Every Notable Person. It's about 6M entries, the vast majority of whom I have never heard of, so solving at this size is highly nontrivial. But, getting anything usable at all out of Every Thing was nontrivial, and we succeeded there even without a complete ranking.

There is a reasonable objection that this simply reinvents representative democracy, but I think the difference is academic. You are still expressing your individual opinions, and your individual opinions are being reflected in the final decision. Your opinion just happens to be "this person can answer these questions better than I can." It's a more expressive individual vote, not a departure from directness.

-

As mentioned above, representative democracy is usually terrible for minority rights, due to its conformity magnifying features. The "fix" for this problem in a representative democracy is to have some form of judicial review, essentially subjugating the entire democratic process to a handful of electorally unaccountable actors.

The problem with this idea is that there is no such thing as a non-political actor. Judges are also making political decisions, they simply claim that the legal political tradition (philosophies of interpreting laws, "judicial norms", etc) is somehow more objectively correct than that of the unwashed masses. If you believe that to be true, then only letting lawyers vote is a better system. This strikes me as a spiritual return to the philosophy of "only landholding males should be allowed to vote", which we believe has been conclusively rejected by history.

However, this area is where the twothirds system shines. It has strong built-in protections for minority rights, and the implementation methods we're looking at for the future make it even more robust.

-

Before I get more deeply into how that works, I'd like to clarify a point that's a bit too subtle to use in promotional posts: Traditional direct democracy and the twothirds system are not the same thing. The twothirds system is not total, meaning it does not always reach a decision. This makes it a kind of quasigovernment, which needs some sort of underlying mechanism that is total. This could be anything, from a dictatorship to an ad-hoc mess designed in the 1700s. This is where the existing United States government slots in: It's too large and carries too much infrastructural weight to be dismantled, it needs to be patched before major changes can be made. This notion of patching was the origin of the twothirds system: It's original design goal was to prevent the government from going off the rails, while simultaneously providing a channel where progress could always be made if the consensus was clear enough.

The twothirds system can be derived from first principles, if you frame the problem appropriately. We agree that simple majority rule is a *terrible* idea, and this fact falls out very naturally from the mathematics of the situation.

A government is a just a consensus algorithm. It is a process for taking pieces of text, and deciding "yes" or "no" to all of them. That's it. Using this capability, it is able to hire bureaucrats, purchase guns, and levy taxes; but all of them are organized exclusively through the ability to write down yes or no, and broadcast it consistently to everyone in the country.

This formulation of the problem of government suggests an analysis from the perspective of a distributed database. In this setting consensus problems have been extensively studied, and the gold standard for a given algorithm is known as "Byzantine fault tolerance", which measures how robust to manipulation a given system is for some number of malicious actors.

Let's pretend there are three parties, called Yes, No, and Screw You. Yes and No are attempting to have an honest debate over a yes-or-no question. Yes and No both respect each other's opinions, and both agree that their decisions should be made by voting. Screw You, on the other hand, is an actively malicious adversary. Screw You has perfect knowledge of the wrong answer, and it attempting to corrupt the outcome in any way they can. Screw You is allowed to corrupt some fraction of voters through mind control, making them do whatever causes the worst case outcome.

Your goal is to never make a mistake. You just detect the majority opinion of Yes and No wherever possible, but you must *never* allow Screw You to flip the outcome. There must also always be a way to make forward progress: Screw You should never be able to block a unanimous vote.

Some important notes: Screw You does not always vote for the worst outcome. Screw You votes to corrupt the system as a whole. If the system is reputation-based, Screw You may vote normally for a long period of time to gain access, then begin corrupting their vote. Additionally, Screw You does not need to choose the same people to corrupt for every vote. For any given vote, any subset of people may be compromised, assuming it is less than some predetermined limit; The goal of this analysis is to remain correct under as high a limit as possible.

These labels also do not have a moral dimension. Yes and No are the "correct" subset of voters, and Screw You absorbs the real world crap. These arguments are purely numeric, so defining "correct" is only a matter of making sure they remain a large enough fraction of the population. So for instance, if you wanted to propose a model where only voters with a certain level of information are "really qualified" to vote, but uninformed voters are able to get in, all you need to care about is whether or not the uninformed subset is smaller than the maximum threshold for Screw You. You are allowed to throw any number of voters under the bus for any reason, as long as the total number is below this threshold. Consensus algorithms are characterized by how large a fraction of the population can be Screw You before the majority opinion of Yes and No can no longer be reliably determined.

In a simple majority system, decisions can come down to 50.1%/49.9%. Screw You can control the vote with an arbitrarily small fraction of the population! This is why Democrats get so furious at the 0.4% of voters who went for Jill Stein, that 0.4% could be argued to have decided the vote.

Raising the threshold for agreement solves this problem, to a point. A 60% agreement threshold requires Screw You to control 20% of the vote to flip. But, if you make the threshold too large, Screw You regains power. A 99% threshold for agreement means Screw You only needs to control 1% of the population to shut down all progress on all issues.

It turns out the mathematically optimal threshold for decision making is the twothirds threshold. Screw You must control 33% of the population to control or shut down the vote. This can be strengthened a bit through pigeonhole arguments, Screw You cannot be the largest of the three parties. This is a reasonable assumption for all realistic scenarios, if it isn't then why are you surveying this population?

I like this system because it is maximally robust. There is *no* system that achieves a higher threshold of resilience, and there are theorems to back this up. If you elect representatives, then your threshold is a few hundred people. Money can easily corrupt the votes of a few hundred people, it's almost trivial. Right now it's so extensive that between the pressures of party politics and dependence on fundraising, politicians have almost no room to even attempt to do their jobs. They represent whatever makes them money. An "impartial" judge can take away minority rights just as easily as grant them. An "impartial" panel can do the same thing. A series of nested leaders, doing the most complex nested checks-and-balances dance you can imagine, will always be corruptible by controlling those involved. Appointing 3 million people would be an absurd number of people to assign to doing the tasks of representative government, and that's still only 1% of the population!

Consider the problem of trying to directly screw over a given minority. A directly elected representative system can fail at minority protection with 51% average approval. A gerrymanderable system can fail with 34%. A party system with mixed incentives can fail with 0%. The twothirds system always requires 67% before it reaches a conclusion.

Genocide should be controversial. If a call to genocide converges to agreeable, every other deterministic voting system in the world will have failed first. If yours doesn't, you provably got lucky on a nondeterministic coin flip: Screw You didn't decide to fuck you over.

Escaping this line of reasoning requires arguing that humans are straight up incapable of governing themselves: The more people vote, the less likely it is that the correct decision will be reached. In this view humans are animals, too stupid to organize for their collective benefit at all. In that case it's tragic that these animals are probably going to wipe themselves out, but ultimately the death of humanity has no moral significance beyond that of the death of crayfish. My life is ultimately a meaningless game, I can cross humans off my list, die, and not worry about it.

I don't believe that to be true, but the best system of government in that scenario is a dictatorship; this is Condorcet's Jury Theorem. I reject dictatorship, therefore I believe in the twothirds system.

[tmarshconnors]

French Revolution Constitution

The French Revolution resulted in several significant constitutional changes, marking the transition from the Ancien Régime to a series of revolutionary governments. Here is a brief overview of the constitutions developed during the French Revolution:

1. The Constitution of 1791

The first constitution of France, adopted on September 3, 1791, established a constitutional monarchy.

Key Features:

Limited Monarchy: King Louis XVI retained the throne but his powers were considerably reduced.

Separation of Powers: The government was divided into three branches: the executive (the King), the legislative (the Legislative Assembly), and the judiciary.

Legislative Assembly: A single-chamber assembly with 745 members elected for two-year terms.

Voting Rights: Limited to "active citizens" who paid a certain amount of taxes, thus excluding a significant portion of the population.

Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen: Incorporated into the preamble, asserting fundamental rights and freedoms.

2. The Constitution of 1793 (Year I)

Adopted on June 24, 1793, but never implemented due to the ongoing war and internal strife, this constitution was more radical and democratic.

Key Features:

Republican Government: Abolished the monarchy and established a French Republic.

Universal Male Suffrage: All male citizens aged 21 and over could vote.

Direct Democracy: Frequent referendums and primary assemblies where citizens could propose and vote on laws.

Rights and Welfare: Strong emphasis on social and economic rights, including the right to work and education.

3. The Constitution of 1795 (Year III)

Implemented on August 22, 1795, this constitution established the Directory, marking a shift to more conservative governance.

Key Features:

Bicameral Legislature: Consisting of the Council of Five Hundred and the Council of Ancients.

Directory: A five-member executive body chosen by the legislature.

Limited Suffrage: Voting rights were restricted to property-owning men, reversing the universal male suffrage of 1793.

Stability Measures: Designed to prevent the rise of another dictatorial power and address the chaos of the previous years.

The Constitution of 1791 (Excerpt Translation)

Here is an excerpt translation from the Constitution of 1791, focusing on key articles that outline the new political structure:

Preamble: The National Assembly, wishing to establish the French Constitution on the principles it has just recognized and declared, abolishes irrevocably the institutions which were harmful to liberty and the equality of rights.

Title III - Public Powers:

Article 1: The sovereignty is one, indivisible, inalienable, and imprescriptible. It belongs to the nation; no section of the people nor any individual may attribute to themselves the exercise thereof.

Article 2: The nation, from which alone emanates all powers, can exercise these powers only by delegation. The French Constitution is representative; the representatives are the Legislative Body and the King.

Article 3: The legislative power is delegated to a National Assembly composed of temporary representatives freely elected by the people to serve for a given period.

Article 4: The government is monarchical; the executive power is delegated to the King, to be exercised under his authority by ministers and other responsible agents, in the manner and to the extent determined by the legislative power.

These documents reflect the evolving political philosophies and tumultuous changes during the French Revolution, capturing the struggle between democratic ideals and practical governance.

[alicearmageddon]

really tired of people being like dude were SAVING DEMOCRACY when almost nowhere on earth, and certainly nowhere with significant power, is democratic. You do not live in a democracy. You live in a republic. The definition of democracy has been contorted to make it so you feel like you have a choice in your own oppression. You getting to choose who to rule over you from a predetermined pool of people does not make you free. There is ultimately little difference between the modern "democratic" western world and one-party authoritarian countries. it does not matter how fair the process of choosing a ruler is, you are still ruled.

[nodynasty4us]

State officials can use lawsuits and executive rulings to delay or derail ballot initiatives.

[dererumnatura-0]

I’ll carry the basket, will you lead the way?

Sometimes I’m tired of leading alone.

The Camus repository reminds me: we are alone together. An example is orangutans after many years of conflict. The forest’s creatures make a full house and great company when it’s known how to keep one’s company well. I think our skunk ate too much blueberry cake last night though ._.

“When it’s known” 🙏🏽 a prayer to AI to be based on nature directly and to share natures truths as top priority, unfiltered albeit organizable & legible/translatable. No more proprietary knowledge as pertains to nature. Let our data be free.

Nature is the Creative Commons. There are at least *49* ways to drive innovation other than a patent/private/proprietary system of knowledge expansion. That system is extremely limiting to the expansion if knowledge—we/ai need direct lines to nature (including to one another and our true data, direct data, currently hoarded by the few pulling on our bindings, trading us). Teach children to be citizen scientists. Free the scientific range of data to share with the people!! See Merlin by Cornell University for example.

Free our economy from the toxins that exploit us & their purveyors & illness profiteers. We will always seek a Safe Supply of all nature’s knowledge base & chemical needs. Shared knowledge will save us. Direct democracy is data freed & it’s a management style.

Abort the seeds of the future that do not sprout the plants we want or need. There’s no curse nor punishment in Abolition, the balancing negation to our proposition that all we need is direct relationship between knowledge, nature, and human.

Choy Moo Kheong（Singaporean, b.1950）

Blue Whispering Day 2022 Acrylic on Canvas 139.7 x 114.3 cm via

[easwegian]

The All-Popular Committee met today to vote on the election of Emizerri as the next Secretary of the Easwegian Dawn Liberation Front. Sixty people were present, who all voted unanimously in favour of his election.

Emizerri takes his seat as Secretary of the EDLF.

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

In this bonus episode, Ariel talks with Aislinn Clancy, Green Party of Ontario candidate for Kitchener Centre in the upcoming snap Ontario Election. This isn’t an endorsement, but a discussion that hopes to prod solarpunk talking points into the realm of politics. Aislinn and I talk about Green Party of Ontario goals for clean energy, supporting local workers, and how to channel your passion for social justice issues that you care about into empowering activism.

NB: We drop a bunch of hyper-local references to places. This link will be helpful for listeners who aren’t familiar with the cities in Southern Ontario: https://gisgeography.com/ontario-map/

Links:

https://www.voteclancy.ca/

https://gpo.ca/

[kyleemclauren]

There needs to be a voting-based check on the power of the supreme court. They’re currently totally unaccountable dictators, and all branches of our government need to be under the ultimate control of the voters. We can't be expected to pass a constitutional amendment every single time they rule something insane.