the world has turned and left me here

pure democracy

A while back, I tried to put my feeling of total political apathy into words, and threw in what I thought was a partial solution to the problem of disenfranchisement: a return to pure democracy. Since then I've tried the idea out on a few people and have gotten some interesting feedback.

The most common objection I've heard is that I'm advocating "mob rule." Some people append to this a statement like "and we all know where that leads." I'm not sure I know what they're talking about, but they apparently seem to, and often cite our founding father's early preference for representative democracy with reverential awe. Apparently there is historical precedent for democracy in pure form morphing into tyranny? It seems to be a common view that having some kind of power structure, but a distributed and somewhat competing one (checks and balances) is the best of both worlds, and is the way to keep tyranny at bay. I need to do some homework. Maybe there's a meager amount of empirical evidence one way or the other.

To this objection, I'd say that "mob rule" isn't likely, given that the majority of the mob can barely drag their ass to the voting booth once in 4 years, and this is after a full year onslaught of TV hype and overplayed tribalism. Take out the tribalism and the number of people casting random, uneducated votes dwindles to nill; no one really cares all that much. What's left over is people who actually do care. And they can have their vigorous, educated debate, which couldn't be any worse than what we've got now. And has the potential to be much better.

Another objection I hear is that representative democracy promotes educated voting, which the common man can't possibly accomplish by himself. After all he's trying to hold down a full-time job. So it's better for the common man to hire a proxy whose full-time job is researching the bewildering array of issues and making educated votes on his behalf.

Unfortunately, once every 2, 4, or 6 years you get to hire this proxy, and if he sucks, i.e. doesn't make the same decision you would by yourself, you basically have no recourse but to wait. You can hire him, but you can't fire him. Oh, I know, you can write your congressman. And he can send you back an awesome form letter. Gee, what a great system we have.

So to this objection to pure democracy I'll amend things a little and say ok, if you want a representative, fine, transfer your votes to him, for some or maybe all issues, you decide. But you get to take back any vote at any time. No disenfranchisement. If you care enough about an issue to cast a vote yourself, you should be able to do that. How could you possible disagree with this statement? By saying that some people just shouldn't be allowed to vote, for _insert your reason_? Listen to yourself.

The government as I envision it after all is just an open-source collaborative program, so transferring votes around shouldn't be hard. It should be secure of course (some sort of paypal transaction model), but trivial to authorize. In fact one person pointed out that a vote-buying and -selling system today would offer this same flexibility, but hasn't taken off because...well, "vote-buying," how do you pitch that one...

Then there's the efficiency objection: pure democracy involves too many people to ever convene for a vote. Maybe that was a problem in 1776, but is it a problem in 2006? No. Internet.

There's also the objection that minorites will get the shaft. I don't know what to say to this, but it's related to...

...the final objection, which is a good one. How do you decide what issues are brought to vote? Who decides the ballot language? What happens if there are several, similar issues that are all brought to vote at the same time, or worse yet, conflicting ones? You've seen it before on a small scale I'm sure, at meetings, where people just keep throwing out potential solutions until someone with some authority says enough nonsense, and calls for a vote. And people give in and say ok, time to vote, and they agree with however that one person frames the issue and the potential competing options. Most of the time everyone in the room is cool with this. How could this be procedurized though, in a way that's fair and can't be abused?

robert frost on why i never want to manage

From the latest Paris Review, some unpublished notebook scribblings of Robert Frost:

Nature is a chaos. Humanity is a ruck. The ruck is the medium of kings. They assert themselves on it to give it some semblance of order. They build it into gradations of power narrowing upward to the throne. There are periods of felicity when the state lasts for a reign and even two or three reigns or a dynasty. The people are persuaded to accept their subordinations. But the ruck is a discouraging medium to work in. Form is only roughly achieved there and at best leaves in the mind a dissatisfaction, a fear of impermanence and a relative confusion. It is always as transitional as rolling clouds where a figure never quite takes shape before it begins to be another figure. Contemplation turns from it in mental distress to the physicians. The true revolt from it is not into madness or into a reform. It is onward in the line projected by nature to human nature and so on to individual nature. It is the one man working in a medium of paint, words or notes--or wood or iron. Nothing composes the mind like composition. Let a mere man attempt no more than he is meant for. Other men are too much for him to count on organizing. Let him compose words into a poem.

silver kitty experiments

Dream in which I've got a silver cat. For some reason I needed to experiment with him. Each time, while I set up the experiment, I put him off to the side in a little cave. I wanted to see how he would react to water, so I diverted water from a spring to make a little artificial creekbed. Then I realized I had diverted water over his little kitty cave. There was a faint gurgly meowl. I brought him out and laid him on a rock. I thought any second he would wake up panting and gasping for air. He didn't, so I tried to pump the water out of his chest. There was a doctor off in the distance who looked like robin williams but it was too late. My silver kitty was dead.

opaque file sharing

Released some open source today.

i'd like to file a noise complaint against the neighbor's wrecking ball

One of the not-so-obvious downsides to living in a "hip, up-and-coming neighborhood" is that you can't sleep in on a week day.

Take this morning for instance. I am awakened prematurely by the sound of a concrete smasher across the street going off every few seconds and taking all the nearby car alarms with it. After that subsides, someone starts a floor buffer up in the hallway right outside my door (they just installed wood floors). This is followed by the sound of a circular saw. In my hallway.

I was sleeping like a log, until I got sawed in half.

grandmother who eats anything

Who else but the Ebu Gogo?

the art of subter fugue

From the wikipedia entry on Fugue: "Bach had sufficient expertise that he could tell exactly what entrances could occur simply by hearing the first playing of a theme."

Interesting language: "what entraces could occur." I.e. some entrances can occur and others not. How were these determined? By the rules of counterpoint presumably. But are the rules of counterpoint complete, and exact? Nope. They arose organically from experience, but they still have the strange scent of universal truth; when you deviate from them, Bach winces, but so does everyone else in the room. Whether we were conditioned to wince is a question for another time.

So you have this set of near-truths that grew out of experience, and they're grab bag, but so what, maybe the fabric of reality is a bunch of grab-bag rules. Maybe god is a coder. I'm sure he had some switch statements in there before he was satisfied and typed "build world."

Or maybe god is a bridge player, and the rules he uses to get the job done are grab bag and drawn organically from his experience. The things that seem so arbitrary to us seem just as arbitrary to him too. When he makes a preemptive opening, and his god partner passes. he still pauses to consider how weird and special case this one little rule is, but how it works so damn well.

Or maybe god is a contrapuntist, and we're just a minor countersubject in the grand scheme of things.

texas hold me night

91106. Collection of random stuff just like the rest of my life. I order takeout but then wander over to the bar on the corner. There are people inside playing cards to dub music. Gin rummy I am informed. Why rummy? I ask one of the guys on the side of things. It's a totally boring game. He asks me what game I would play instead and I say bridge. I'd play Texas holdem he announces. "We should have a Texas holdem night."

No I say, you should have a Hold Me night. A Texas Hold Me night. Just come in and hold each other. I can tell that everyone is simultaneously (a) creeped out but (b) amused. I suggest that once it gets going maybe they could have a Hold Me Closer Tiny Dancer Night.

The TV is on and tuned to a local channel. It's all September 11th stuff, most of it ridiculous and totally repulsive but I don't want to say anything because I wasn't here. I notice--oh my god--this year they've spun 9/11 into a logo: 9 11 06 it reads, with the ones extending upwards like the twin towers. Every time I watch TV again I am filled with horror. This is reality, carefully manufactured and airbrushed in photoshop.

They made it a logo. I just can't get over that. It's like UNL agressively defending their rights to the word "Huskers" in white cursive on a red background. "91106." Closed captioning is on but I can hear them say it: nine eleven oh six. It has a nice ring. They show some guy playing bag pipes on Long Island Beach. What could any of this possibly have to do with anything that actually happened to real people.

When I walk outside I notice the spotlights extending into the sky just across the river, two parallel beams.

josiah camp iii

It is a sad commentary on this era that, image-wise, that really really really annoying 90s MTV VeeJay Jesse Camp seems to have been years ahead of his time. Now we all look like Jesse. "Whoah."