Pavel Chichikov

It’s certainly an intriguing idea, but its not as good as the current system. It’s a hyperreality of voting that would simply exaggerate flaws of the current system.

First off, good luck keeping anything anonymous. And, even if you could, candidate anonymity is a horrible idea, because you’d have even less accountability and more campaign dishonesty than you have now. Without anonymity, politicians have to at least try to fulfill campaign promises if they want to get reelected. But with anonymity, I can get elected and not follow through on campaign promises because when I run for reelection nobody knows which candidate is me and I can just lie again.

You’d probably also seriously exacerbate political capture. In the interest of putting forth the best policy proposals, people like presidential candidates would certainly outsource writing to powerful lobbies that have the top policy analysists and writers. And these lobbies or other groups would almost certainly only offer services in exchange for certain favors once the candidate is in office. It would lead to massive corruption, more than we’re already seeing, because at least without anonymity we can put names to faces and prompt some honesty.

Plus, you’d cut out so many candidates. Not everyone excels at writing. Some candidates might articulate their plans best in real time and on a stage (like JFK, or Reagan, etc.). Demanding that everyone only write and publish policy proposals removes the ability to gauge how good they’d be in office, interacting with staff and other world leaders.

Combining anonymity with a bracketed system would also create an echo chamber, where candidates learn each other’s messages every round and the survivors shift to mimic the most popular message to bolster their odds of making it into office. In the end, all 3 people will sound the same in a desperate bid to copycat the clear winner and steal votes. Which obviously creates issues for voting again, like the aforementioned Condorcet’s paradox.

Also, voter engagement. We can barely get people to turnout when they are emotionally won-over by a given personality candidate, it would probably crater if voting were a purely rational process as @lifeinmultiplechoice suggests. If you take after John Adams or Rousseau, this isn’t entirely problematic because you don’t believe in carrying out the principle of “the will of the people” in a literal sense (not to say J.A. was Rousseauian, he obviously was not, but they overlap in this area of restricted voting). But if you are interested in accurately representing “the will of the people” in a non-gnostic sense, this is obviously an unsatisfactory system.

This isn’t meant to dismiss @lifeinmultiplechoice out of hand, I admire the imagination. I think they’re onto something when they point out that technology has sort of… swapped lenses on the camera of Democracy. We can seriously reinvent Democracy in ways that overcome previous hurdles due to all our technology now… we just don’t know how exactly yet.

the link you shared is paywalled, curious about it but can’t find it anywhere else. Could you link as pdf?

this is stupid too. Democracy is mathematically impossible. Condorcet’s paradox and all that.

I live to please.

this is stupid.

agreed. just for the record so nobody plays the “you never denied it” card: I’m totally opposed to antisemitism, I denounce discrimination on the basis of any ethnicity, race, or gender in the strongest possible terms.

I corrected it. I didn’t mean in an ethnic sense, I meant in a foreign policy sense (like, Trump is very pro-Israel, and I happen to think that Israel manipulates the U.S. and we need to stay the heck away from them).

Long but I think worth reading:

There’s this weird subliminal level of crime that exists among the upper echelons of society and yet remains below a response threshold, where the perpetrators put layers and layers between themselves and their victims, and disguise themselves in the trappings of class propriety, societal respectability, and commercial success. Then they all link arms, taking part in each others crimes, creating a diffusion of responsibility that like zebras herding together blends them and makes it difficult for we the lions of the people to find a target to blame. Who is to blame for United Healthcare’s denial A.I.? the CEO? the Board chair? other members of the board? majority stock holders? the CFO? the business strategist who came up with the idea? the engineers who designed the A.I.?.

They drench themselves in plausible deniability, and THEN they align themselves with the very systems of civilization - the legal system, the healthcare system, the industrial sector - in such ways that reduce the possible forms of retaliation to almost exclusively include those that exist above legal response thresholds (i.e., the only way to punish them is to shoot them in cold blood, as everything else requires too much sophistication and power and takes too long)… and they do this so that they can hold us hostage against ourselves, blackmail us with our own livelihoods, so that we won’t dare rise up because it could mean collapse of society as we know it, so that they can persecute us viciously if we try to punch up. They make themselves small, distant, moving targets, like trying to kill a swarm of bees with your bare hands or trying to spear a whole school of fish. Some of them even want to upset us, to provoke us to this violence, to use us to tear down and overthrow the bee hives of institutions and systems that bring power to their competitors.

And if we ever win, if we ever strike a blow, they adjust. They tighten security, deprive us of rights, imprison our supporters and spokespersons, and learn from their mistakes. They evolve. But they don’t repent. They can’t repent. Few and far between are the good men and women who as Rudyard Kipling said have the tenacity to “walk with kings and yet not lose the common touch”. All the remainder are numbed, warped, and consumed by the insatiable hunger that drove them into their seats of power. Like hardy weeds that break off at the stem, their roots are deep and they grow back rapidly, spreading everywhere.

This is the nature of the elite. And it is the reality we face as the common masses. And although Rousseau was right that man is born free but everywhere is in chains, so too was Dylan Thomas when he observed “I sang in my chains like the ocean”. I’m reminded of the Menu with Anya Taylor Joy where she accuses the angry masses of creating the very problem that has set them about in such a murderous fury: “you don’t cook with love, you cook with obsession”. We listen to the elites, we join their cults of personality, believe in them, we call them our heroes and we worship them with this petulant infatuation and fandom, all while failing to raise heroes that can deliver us! It is up to us to cultivate in our homes, our friends, and our lives people who can keep the common touch and who hunger to deliver us! We’d all rather be consumers. Ultimately, we are just as responsible for this mess as the elites who have entrenched themselves. We pay for that crappy healthcare plan rather than die in defiance to the despots. We vote for the doddering old carpet-bagging establishment fools that sniff the hair of our daughters on national television, and then we vote for the gluttonous lechers and foreign assets to take their places! We sit at home, we type away on keyboards, we let them shovel the social media slop down our throats.

And those of us who don’t engage in the fervor are merely pissed off, retreating into the intellectual to make up for their own social incompetence. Or they disguise their own insufficiency as “righteous anger” that they redirect at elites who don’t even know they exist. It is a chicken and the egg. We have created our hell, and we refuse to do the work necessary to transform it to a heaven. We exist in a binary, where we’re either victims or violent revolutionaries. Because we are insincere. We are wrong. And we are unworthy of a better world.

If there is a hell, if there is a punishment after this life, then surely we will be there along with the people we claim to hate so much to a point of exulting in their murder.

he literally IS the oligarchy. smh.

Removed by mod

that’s the thing that pisses me off: the tax often increases the perception of how much people are willing to spend. even if you remove or decrease the tax, the companies just inflate the price to fatten their margins. Rule #1 of capitalism: the consumer always loses.

The duodenum, actually.

The American Left and the DNC have, like, a 90% overlap, you do realize that right?

my point isn’t that leftists agree or disagree. my point is that whatever narrative a Leftist accepts exposes them to unpleasant truths. I don’t know how else to be clearer. Either the executive office has direct immediate effects on the economy therefore we should be worried about Trump (but we must also admit that in the past Democratic policies are directly to blame for catastrophes like 2008), or the executive office doesn’t have a direct economic impact therefore Biden is not to blame for the current state of affairs (but we must also admit that the current state of affairs has nothing to do with Trump). Anything else is cherry picking.

I don’t think the internet is a monolith. I’m trying to point out to leftists the inconsistency of their own narratives. I’m trying to point out that they can’t criticize the president for the economy when half their platform is defending their own incumbents on the basis that the executive branch has limited economic impact.

She said she wanted to help “normal people”… yet she didn’t list a single useful policy prescription. In fact, when asked if she would do anything differently, she said she wouldn’t change anything from what Biden did… despite Biden NOT helping normal people like you and me.

I’m not saying its all or nothing, I’m saying you people cherry pick.

facts. all their candidates suck. Kamala Harris was an embarrassment and the people who still support her after such a catastrophic failure are the exact reason she lost: echo chamber. out of touch with reality. delusional.

This is stupid.

I’ve heard people on the Left say that the “president doesn’t control the economy” but then people turn around and say these stupid things like “president rebuilds economy”. Which is it? Either the Fed is an independent body not influenced by politics and the executive office and Obama wasn’t to blame for 2008 or inflation and Biden isn’t to blame for the housing crisis or food prices etc. and therefore Republicans aren’t to blame for any latent economic issues imagine or otherwise; OR Biden has the power to rebuild the economy implying that everything leading up to this has in part been the fault of each respective person in office and therefore when the economy does well under the GOP it is because GOP policies are better. Idiots.