The proposed update to Switzerland’s Ordinance on the Surveillance of Postal and Telecommunications Traffic (VÜPF: Verordnung über die Überwachung des Post- und Fernmeldeverkehrs) represents a significant expansion of state surveillance powers, worse than the surveillance powers of the USA. If enacted, it would have serious consequences for encrypted services such as Threema, an encrypted WhatsApp alternative and Proton Mail as well as VPN providers based in Switzerland.
No fucking way, but mah direct democracy …
So. Switzerland doesn’t really have fully direct democracy in the necessary sense. It’s still an old nation-state with laws made in the olden day when you had to compromise. There are many cases where the “direct” part is optional and requires interested people to assemble signatures yadda-yadda. Not good enough to counter a campaign for legal change with a goal. That aside, its system encourages it to have politicians as a thing. Which means that for some issues it will always drift shitward.
It also has separation of 3 kinds of government by degree of locality, but not separation of the “an entity ensuring food safety can’t regulate telecommunications” or “an entity regulating police labor safety can’t regulate riot police acceptable action” kinds.
(Which is why I usually refer to my preference for a kind of “direct democracy” as a revised one-level Soviet system with mandatory rotation, plenty of places and sortition to state worker roles, despite that not having very good connotations.)
Democracy is an infant still learning to walk. You plug the holes and add new institutions for oversight. You don’t shoot the damn baby and start over because you know how you’d force everyone to do it.
Kowloon wasn’t built in a day.
Bullshit. It’s older than gunpowder.
And this argument has been used for every political system in history. Even in USSR in materials approved by censors it was normal to joke about it.
Why don’t you do that with real-life mechanisms? A moving part of a machine has corroded enough to have a hole unintended by design. Go on, plug it. Oh, it’s better to replace the part.
That aside, I think you’ve missed my specific arguments, not providing any of your own. Those things about participation as wide as possible and rotation. This means that there should be as many political roles as possible (of a delegate or of a secretary or of anyone), often rotated, with the same person not being able to hold the same or similar post for longer than N months, and with sortition based on some pseudo-random mechanism (pseudo-random to be able to check the results for fraud). To reduce the power of any single delegate or bureaucrat and to make lobbying, bribing and blackmailing them harder. To simultaneously make the population more politically literate - by almost every citizen, ideally, participating in some kind of daily decision-making work. Not voting once a year (at best) from among choices given to them by someone else.
That’s what con artists do - provide the victim with an illusion of choice.
That’s exactly what you do. One consistent system does one thing by design. Another consistent system does another thing by design. Something in-between organically evolved does neither. Evolution is the survival of the fittest - fittest for survival. So an organically evolved system is approximating the optimum of power. The status quo.
What it does not approximate over time is any idea of public good. That would be nuts - so, metaphorically, you’ve built a wooden bridge, do you think it’ll become more or less reliable over time under snow and rain and sun? Is a 100 years old bridge better than a bridge just built and tested?
And the optimum of power is formed by the existing system among other things.
Which means that it becomes more and more static and degenerate.
Con artists are also known for seeding bits of truth in with their turgid morass.
There are parts of your monologue I’d agree with, but I suspect what your ultimate intent is.
Compared to how long humanity lived in absolutistic systems (dawn of civilization).
Yes, it’s half-direct, who said otherwise? Fully direct on a Nation state level would maybe be possible now with the Internet.
But we can still overrule them, while germans get tired of their politicians lying on elections and doing what they want. Doesn’t mean they don’t try here.
But yeah, this system has it’s weaknesses with complicated or emotional topics. But then again, we are all humans.
That’s my point. It might seem dangerous to rely on the Internet for such basic matters, but it’s already being used to great effect to undermine all democracies. So there’s no choice, it’s like an arms race. (Still, probably for elections it’d make sense to have a countrywide parallel intranet, so that someone’s error in setting up a BGP router wouldn’t disrupt it.).
That’s the other side of the problem - modern easiness of propaganda.
OK, I live in Russia, just rather sad to see how many other countries are slowly drifting in the same regrettable unsavory direction.
What democracy does not rely on compromise?
None. I’m using “compromise” here in the sense of compromising between democracy and elites, with the world order normal 200 years ago. Today those compromises don’t work because of technological progress and different makeup of societies.
Just like those in the USA.