Slashdot Mirror
A Digital Direct Democracy For the Modern Age
New submitter lordofthechia writes "Last month the White House created an online petition system through which constituents can directly voice any grievances and concerns to the US government. Any petition that reaches 25,000 signatures (5,000 originally) is promised an official reply. This weekend the first petitions will be closing, and already many have far exceeded the required number of signatures. Is this the way for the voice of the electorate to gain more weight in modern politics, or is it the web version of a placebo button? Will the President's office really consider the top pleas, which include petitions to Legalize and Regulate Marijuana, Forgive Student Loan Debt, and Abolish the TSA?"
Direct democracy is where the people are in control of the decision-making process. This is a mass-petitioning system, where the people are granted by their ruler the ability to make a plea. This is functionally no different than a king saying he will grant an audience to any mob of more than 25,000 people who appear at the castle gates (how nice of him!). There is no guarantee that the ruler will act according to the will of the people. Even calling this democracy at all is a real stretch and a betrayal of the values of the founding fathers.
Real direct democracy is possible with internet tools, but this isn't it. The options for real democracy are:
1. Mixed democracy, where we keep the current representative system, but the representatives are legally bound to act according to the input of direct-democracy-style websites. For info on this, see the E2D initiative:
http://www.e2d-i.org/
and the many national member parties:
http://www.participedia.net/wiki/E2D_International#Signatory_Parties
2. Collaborative governance, where actual decision-making is directly and solely controlled by a collaborative consensus process. This system also requires a break from the status quo of hierarchies of governing states: it is starting by providing tools to replace the governments of tiny organizations, and will scale upward from there, disrupting and replacing the current system bit by bit, peacefully and slowly. Because it is consensus-based, it avoids the pitfalls of mob rule.
For info on this, see the Metagovernment project:
http://www.metagovernment.org/
and the many constituent projects which are involved in it:
http://www.metagovernment.org/wiki/Active_projects
Writing to your representative and being ignored.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Obama has done this before. The number one question submitted was whether legalizing marijuana would contribute positively to the economy, in terms of providing jobs, tax revenue, and freeing up resources spent on law enforcement.
Obama laughed and said no. There was no discussion of any of the issues. I see no reason to believe he will take this any more seriously than he did before.
How long does he think he can keep up this charade of openness?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
That's always the question. WHO sees the petitions, the signature counts, the comments, etc. and evaluates them.
I once read a story which said that experienced people in Washington, when they're told "White House calling," know to ask "WHO at the White House is calling?"
This is inverse of the same question, on a MUCH bigger scale.
They've had mixed results on the state level. The major problem is that the majority has little use, apparently, for constitutional protections. I'm afraid we'll just see more-of-the same on a National level.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
Can't really get any blunter than that.
It's not direct democracy (Switzerland has that, and people actually vote on things like immigration policy), but it's not a bad idea.
I wish that Obama had the guts to implement a few of the top ones.
If I recall, Obama had something similar around the last time he wanted to get elected. My money is on this being a craven hollow gesture in order to recapture those whom he excited in his first Presidential campaign.
The problem is not that he's ignorant of what many citizens want (return of habeus corpus to those accused of terrorism; prosecution of CIA torturers; cessation of free trade deals and IP legislation that favor corporations over regular citizens; cessation (or reversal) of crony capitalism by Bernanke and Geithner; etc.) The problem is that he won't actually execute those ideas.
Since a petition to force government to disclose all extra-terrestrial communications gathered over 5K votes, the serious requests will probably be treated the same way.
I imagine the vast majority of the petitions submitted will be silly and drown out real ones.
I'm sure things like "Make Jedi the official religion of the US" will get more signatures than any serious issue.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Allow me to summarize how this works:
[ ] Gimme!
[ ] I'm entitled!
[ ] Anybody who earns more money than me must have cheated, so yeah
[ ] Hanging chad
I think that sums it up nicely. Or, to quote someone a hell of a lot smarter than most people:
--Alexander Tytler
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
Direct Democracy does not fix the problem that is caused by the majority of voters being poorly informed on the issues. The reason that the "voice of the electorate" does not have sufficient weight in modern politics is that too many of the voters do not put enough effort into understanding the issues and the actions taken by politicians. Laws which make it easier to register to vote were passed in order to make it so that the "voice of the electorate" would carry more weight, yet they had the opposite effect. Making it easier to register meant that people who could not even be bothered to go to the designated location to register some time before the election (length of time varied by state) were now voting in elections that they could not be bothered to pay attention to until a few days or weeks before the election. Campaign finance reform laws were passed to reduce the impact of corporate money on elections. They, also, had the opposite effect. Campaign finance reform laws resulted in making it harder for a challenger to unseat an incumbent, meaning that a company had to put more effort into cultivating those holding political office (since they would be there long enough to make life miserable for along time for any company that did not do so).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
"Direct democracy" schemes help to better display how it actually works, the fact that real power is with whoever has the money, and the elections are to lead the public into accepting, rubber stamping and whitewashing the whole fraud. In fact whoever gets elected hardly has that much freedom themselves, they just each perform their acts, right, left, center, indignant, arrogant, etc, and get a share of the money according to the profitability of their performance.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
I'm profoundly unconvinced.
While heeding the "will of the people" is one of the fundamentals of any "democratic" (all variations) government, I think we have plenty of examples where groups of people aren't necessarily smarter or more moral than individuals. For example, consider California's initiative system, which has created a mess of conflicting and impossible mandates.
Additional influences like the Dunning-Kruger effect only muddy the waters further. Everybody seems to think that direct democracy would be good for them, but bad for everyone else.
Many states have initiative, referendum, and recall, and they have real effect. Not necessary good effect, but effective. In California we got Proposition 13 (extreme tax limits) and Arnold Schwarzenegger (as Governor) that way.
As for the White House site, it's too broken to use. I'm getting a 404 error on login attempts. Somebody didn't test the error handling. There's no obvious way to send a bug report. "Contact" just sends you to the "write the President" page.
Sign the petition to reinstate Glass-Steagall here.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
I'm not a Republican or a Democrat, so I have very few meaningful ways of participating in the US political process. My congressman is a social-conservative Republican in a safe Republican district, so there is essentially no chance of ever getting rid of him. I did recently re-register Republican so that I could vote against him twice, once in the primary and once in the general election -- not that it will accomplish anything. Another benefit of being registered Republican is that I can vote against Rick Perry in the primary. And that's about it -- that's all I can do in electoral politics, and it ain't much. I'd love to have a chance to vote for a politician who was against the USA-PATRIOT Act, but I can't, because it has essentially 100% support in both of the major parties. Ditto for ending the disastrous War on Drugs, or for kicking America's habit of getting involved in multiple simultaneous wars thousands of miles away from home; all of these issues have zero traction in either of the two major parties.
So this petition thing may not be much, but I'll take what I can get. It might make it harder for politicians to claim that absolutely nobody cares about certain issues, and that would be a good thing.
Find free books.
I think California is as good an example as to how bad direct democracy can become. Simply put, I don't really think you can run anything beyond a small city on direct democracy before it starts to have serious, deleterious effects.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, if you can get 51% to vote for taking you life, your liberty, or your property -- you lost under mob rule. What I want is a rule of law, wherein government is limited by law and in practice to the domains in which it is permitted to act. You know, like a constitutional republic for example.
Neither the Democrats or the Republicans seem to be interested in this form of governance though.
"Lawl, no, gtfo" counts as a reply, right?
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Will the President's office really consider the top pleas, which include petitions to Legalize and Regulate Marijuana, Forgive Student Loan Debt, and Abolish the TSA?"
But I know of a contender in current race (with not too bad chances of winning it, IMHO), who already said that he would do first and third, and work to reign in the source of the mess which gave us second.
Seriously!
I loved the one asking the USA to help overthrow the tyrannical rule of Princess Celestia. Got taken down, sadly.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-V6NUom7FyQU/Tn56zgOhiyI/AAAAAAAAAr4/-7dAR6bjsvY/s1600/ohuguize.png
It's time for an Equestrian Spring. Winter Wrap Up is coming...
A true democracy where everyone gets a vote is a bad thing. Most people are not competent enough to understand what they are voting on ( sometimes that is by design, but the reality is not everyone understands everything, and some understand nothing ) so the theory is that you elect liked minded people that do understand a lot, and have the time and resources to work thru the details and learn what they do not.
If we went that route, it would be total chaos, and the country would be controlled by the people that had the better marketing team to manipulate the populace.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Of the 25 stories on the default main page right now,
6 are U.S. politics.
11 are politics in general.
Enough is enough!!!
Godaddy is a scam and a ripoff.
Could it simply be a method for getting the names of malcontents?
Right. This isn't that. What this really provides is a way to level the playing field (a bit) with regard to issues that have wide public support but not necessarily moneyed interests and paid lobbyists behind them, vs. those that do have paid lobbyists behind them.
One of the advantages that moneyed interests have is that politicians want access to the money for campaign purposes (either directly, or want the moneyed interest to spend "independently" in ways that benefit the politician). This doesn't affect that.
But an often overlooked advantage that moneyed interests have -- and, having spent some time working in a legislative office I've seen this pretty directly -- is that they represent a known constituency of a particular size and its easy to know what they are interested in. Its very, very hard to collate non-coordinated constituent communications to get a good view of particular proposals that have interest in the constituency that aren't being advanced by groups that have a paid lobbying effort. There's a reason that everyone says that writing to your legislator is most effective when you can assign a subject line that includes the identification of a particular bill currently under consideration with a support or oppose indicator -- those are easy to categorize.
This conceptually makes it a lot easier to categorize and collate feedback that isn't simple support or oppose to things that are already "on the table" with a convenient bill identifier. And, in that respect, its useful in making it possible for ideas that have interest to get to where they might make a difference.
Its not direct democracy, and its not a magical transformation, but it could be very useful.
Rather than electing by majority rule, I believe a representative system where each voter / citizen elects their own federal representative without regard for geographic boundaries would be more effective. Representatives would carry the weight of their backers in voting and at any time they can gain or lose backers. More engaged voters could even back different representatives for different issues or vote directly on issues (if they do so during mandatory 24 hour voting times). A representative would then require a threshold number of backers to participate in debates (to limit cranks) or propose legislation. This system would be followed by both the Senate and House but rather than voting on the same general issues the Senate would be specialized into dealing with laws, pacts and foreign affairs while the House would be specialized to deal with taxes, business regulations and federal department management (Education, Energy, Interior). The president would be elected by simple majority rule for a 4 year term, but limited to military decisions (requiring legislative approval), judicial selection and appointing department leaders in the executive branch.
Interesting how the second-highest petition appears to be to free a guy who was jailed for ripping off millions of dollars and abused hundreds of illegal workers, including child laborers; and was caught trying to skip the country when he was charged. (if Wikipedia is accurate) He has more votes than the petition to recognize the 99% !
Seems to be working for the Swiss...
The Turing petition
Smivs on the intertubes!
The Greeks did not have computers, an internet, nor collaborative Web 2.0 technologies and concepts. These change things, and Greek direct democracy cannot be compared to the new forms being developed today.
The principle behind Metagovernment is that decisions are only made when there is a consensus. This means that mob rule and tyranny of the majority is impossible. Just because 80% of the people want it at that moment doesn't mean it's right... wait until almost everyone is on board, and you know you have found something good.
Now consensus might sound like an impossible goal, but it really isn't. The reason it is so hard to achieve these days is because we have a two-party system where each side benefits from distinguishing themselves from the others: in other words, they abhor a consensus. They thrive on conflict, and play up stupid issues to keep us divided.
When we mature beyond political parties, a consensus system will not be that hard to deal with. This is because collaborative governance tools are designed to push people toward consensus by helping them to find common ground. Without the interruption of politicians, this is not only possible, but truly wonderful. Synthesis is a much, much better form of decision-making than compromise.
You may ask what do we do if we can't find consensus? The answer is obvious: nothing! There is no reason to make a law if society isn't in consensus on it. That is the road to tyranny, suppression, and everything else bad in government. Real government of, by, and for the people must be about all of the people. If something is so urgent that it must be dealt with, then people will find a way to come to consensus... or else they don't really even agree on the urgency, do they?
The projects in Metagovernment have put a lot of thought into their systems, and some of them are extremely sophisticated. As they mature and gain adoption, they will mature. The fact that there are many different projects means that the real-world marketplace of ideas will pick the best solution going forward, providing yet another check on their potential to fail.
Now I am sure you can find some imperfections in all of this, but compare it to the status quo before you judge. Can a collaborative governance system really be worse than the plutocratic, authoritarian, tyrannic demagoguery we have now?
We have a saying in France, rougly translated :
In a dictatorship, it's "SHUT UP"
In a democray, it's "yeah yeah, keep talking"
It's probably a bad sign that the first thing I thought of when I found some petitions that I wanted to sign was, "I better not because then they'd have my information."
giggity
Most people to not appreciate the role energy plays within the economy. Whether it is the fuel oil in that tanker that has brought those manufactured goods across the Pacific, or the fuel in your gas tank that has allowed you to drive to work this morning, energy plays a fundamental role in economic activity.
We have a plan to develop a special machine that will allow us to synthesize carbon-neutral petroleum replacements cheaply using nuclear fission as a primary input. With this safe technology, we can drastically reduce waste through efficiency, avoid the use of water for cooling, reduce manufacturing costs by avoiding the use of a high-pressure cooling system, and scale to many thousands of reactors over the coming decades. With this, we exceed the current world energy consumption of roughly 15 TW. We can sequester a century's worth of carbon from the atmosphere, safeguarding our shorelines for generations to come. And we can end water shortages the world over through massive efficient desalination.
This Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor is Green Nuclear, and it is THE silver bullet.
The White House petition for LFTR
More information regarding the technology.
Green Freedom - industrial scale synthesis of fuel from nuclear energy
https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions/%21/petition/develop-system-which-we-people-petitions-can-become-law-directly/PPvS53y2?utm_source=wh.gov&utm_medium=shorturl&utm_campaign=shorturl
:T:R:A:N:S:
Having seen this in action at small scales,.. it really does not work very well. You end up with that 80% bulliying, resenting, or otherwise pressuring the remaining 20% into doing whatever they want anyway, which usually comes down to whatever their charismatic leader tells them they want. It becomes indistinguishable from dictatorships very quickly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Switzerland
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Wouldn't this petition system be an ideal way for the OWS folks to coalesce, delineate and voice their grievances? At least they can use it to test the government's responsiveness.
"Crude and slow, clansman. Your attack was no better than that of a clumsy child."
Frankly I like that there's a little hurdle to vote. If everyone could vote from their cell phones or whatever there's no barrier to entry whatsoever so you'll just get yahoos voting for the first person alphabetically or other nonsense because they can do it in 10 seconds without any thought. The current system at least somewhat discourages people who don't care. I'm perfectly okay with people who don't care not voting.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
It could be that as others have said it's just a cynical way for the government to pretend to give people a bigger voice but then again maybe they honestly figured "What the heck? Let's give it a shot. Maybe someone will come up with a really good idea we actually could implement."
Minority (not necessarily racial minorities) rights will get trampled. Direct democracy is a bad idea... republic is the way to go. Now let's get to business electing untainted delegates!
Begin with the recognition that modern democracies face a new kind of needle in the haystack problem.
Say the world needs a new needle... In response, swarms of people begin throwing ideas into a pile. Unfortunately, most of those ideas turn out to be so poorly conceived or expressed that they're no better than hay. And, good or not, many are essentially similar. The result is a giant haystack.
The challenge is to encourage the best needle inventors (and their constructive critics) to collaborate in forging truly brilliant new needles, while everyone participates in picking hay off the pile while holding high their favorite needles. (This assumes that haymakers will prove vigilant at identifying other peoples' hay, if not their own.)
My suggestion for a solution is an interactively crowd-sourced social moderation mechanism.
1) The mechanism's content entry interface would force novelty, ensuring that a minimal number of needle and hay duplications are added to the pile. It would display the extent to which a proposed entry matches a predecessor, blocking any piling on of outright duplicates.
2) Needle vs. hay sorting would be applied as soon as an item is added to the pile. Anyone can help sort, but no one can add an item until he or she has already sorted an assigned allotment of preceding entries. The design would inculcate systemic behaviors that favor amplification of signal before noise.
3) The tool would provide visualizations of the sorted results that illustrate coalescence of preferences. This part of the solution is already in operation as a ranked choice voting service at various sites I've built on the Web, on Facebook, and as a mobile-optimized html interface. (Running examples include WeVote.net, Mayor2011.com, and AmericanQuorum.com)
The system seeks to provide the fairest possible method for vetting options in multi-candidate elections, and can be used to solve the needle haystack problem I've just described. I call this solution coalescent bubbling. This approach to interactive crowd-sourcing offers utility far beyond improving the quality of political discourse in the US and elsewhere. It would be appropriate for reality show contests, corporate self-governance mechanisms, peer to peer educational environments, and more.
The shortcomings of the current implementations at the links cited above are many. Most notably, the ranked-preference system now in place only allows participants to settle on a consensus, and does not yet offer tools by which they can collaboratively reflect in forging one. The haystack metaphor invites questions about the challenges of booby traps and deceptive lures being added to the pile. And this short comment makes no clear connection between the operation of the mechanism and the question of how to ensure political legitimacy and how to provide enforcement of results.
Nevertheless, despite the many open and unresolved issues, I believe that pursuit of a solution along these lines is warranted.
Ah yes, here it is!
The way you describe it, you exchange the tyranny of the many with the tyranny of the few. Consider this: in this system what if no law against hate crime existed? Lets say 80-90% wants this law passed, what happens when the rest oppose it? We do nothing? Obviously in this situation the "ideal" solution is not twiddling you thumbs waiting for society to progress naturally to an utopia of agreement and harmony.
Of course you could patch this problem by making an escape clause, but then you're just doing exactly that: patchwork on yet another imperfect governing system.
Supposing this is true (which I doubt is anything like universal), please explain how this is worse than the status quo.
In the status quo there isn't even anything like 80% consensus on anything. Rather there is usually 50% (or usually much less) which are imposing their will without even consulting the rest.
And in reality it is only the richest, most powerful, most influential, and most power-hungry who have nay (and thus complete) control.That's more like 1% imposing their will on the rest.
To answer your last question first: Yes, absolutely, and even more than that it certainly would be.
Consensus is not a good thing.
Go outside. Ask 1,000 people for directions to somewhere that they don't have a firm grasp exactly where is located. You'll get a bunch of answers. A few of them may be right, many of them will not be.
There's only one, or at most very few, right answers. There's innumerable wrong answers. Consensus would be mixing the right answers with the wrong answers. That leaves you with a wrong answer.
I imagine that an overwhelming majority of people would agree that Fred Phelps should shut up. That's already a consensus. They're also wrong. He shouldn't shut up. Some states have passed laws so that the ways in which he was exercising his free speech are prohibited, but he's still allowed that free speech -- just not at the time and in the place he'd prefer, because how he was doing things was getting him the most attention. Even if the majority decides and agrees to a thing, it still may be a violation of someone's rights.
Direct democracy is 3 wolves and 1 sheep voting on who gets eaten for dinner. Compromise is 3 wolves and 1 sheep agreeing to only eat half the sheep.
We've got a system that was designed to be democratic while also eternally preserving the rights of that sheep. It's not ideal, but compromise, consensus, direct democracy? Good fucking lord those ideas are so much worse
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
One of his openness promises was that he "will not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House website for five days."
He signed the non-emergency SCHIP program extension on Feb 4, 2009, only hours after it passed Congress.
Too bad nothing is changed on the other side. We can put all the fancy clothes we want on this matter, but in the end we will still see the same thing we've seen for a long time. The guy in the oval office changes, but the policies stay the same.
In other words, petition all you want. It won't make a difference.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Yes, we do nothing... yet.
To take your example, there are really good arguments against hate crime laws. As South Park put it, they say that it is much worse to commit a crime against someone who is different than someone who is like you. Why should the color of someone's skin make one murder worse than another?
What happens is you don't pass a law until you can come up with a new version that can get consensus. Instead of having some incredibly demagogic thing such as hate crime laws, maybe the minority could work with the majority to come up with a new kind of law that has to do with crimes of passion or something similar that isn't so racist. That removal of the race condition could then push it toward consensus and get a much, much better law passed in the end.
P.S. Now I will concede that consensus does not have to equal 100%. That may be unreasonable, since some people are truly deranged, etc. So as decisions scale to larger groups of people, the barrier for passage decreases. Metagovernment is still drafting what that formula would look like, but the latest iteration comes out to 100% for small groups and gradually declines to a flat 80% for extremely large groups. That 80% maybe should be upped to 90%, but that's a detail still in progress... the decision rule itself is still being debated. The current math is here: http://www.metagovernment.org/wiki/User:ThomasvonderElbe/draft_rules
But, that truth being said, I still wouldn't mind him as president. Right now we have the powers that be going in disastrous directions, so there's no way Paul could get all of his wishes even with presidential power. However, being president he would have the power to change the course slightly towards something more sane. A sane middle-roader could at best keep the status quo.
In a country of 300,000,000 people, any issue of importance ought to have hundreds of thousands of votes. At the moment, at least, this is still a fringe web-site, where it seems that mostly crackpots have voted. How else to explain the number of idiotic petitions among the top 20?
Even if this is just a stupid campaign tactic, sufficient participation could turn it into something useful anyway. What would happen if half of the Slashdot members were to vote? How many of us are there?
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Direct democracy is 3 wolves and 1 sheep voting on who gets eaten for dinner. Compromise is 3 wolves and 1 sheep agreeing to only eat half the sheep.
I wish I had mod points today.
We've got a system that was designed to be democratic while also eternally preserving the rights of that sheep. It's not ideal, but compromise, consensus, direct democracy? Good fucking lord those ideas are so much worse
I wish I could give you two ++ mod points that I don't have today.
Completely ignoring the political consequences of this effort, I'd like to comment on the technological implementation of the site. It's very pretty and all that, but it makes it almost impossible to browse through all the petitions. Every time to click on one to view and sign it, when you go back the list has reset itself to the beginning (and cleared any search terms you entered) so you have to click through to where you were all over again. And it will only show 8 results per page. Seems like it's designed to make things get lost in the shuffle and its users frustrated.
I do not know of a cryptographic voting system that is both comfortable, secure and anonymous. I tried to come up with one, but there are many problems arising, like how to stop vote selling and stuff. I'm not saying it's impossible but wouldn't rule out the possibility. I think the crypto guys should build a working voting system first, and only then should we start fighting for direct democracy.
Go outside. Ask 1,000 people for directions to somewhere that they don't have a firm grasp exactly where is located. You'll get a bunch of answers. A few of them may be right, many of them will not be.
Your analysis assumes a static system, where you ask people a question and get an answer. Collaborative governance is a continuous process: consensus is never achieved at the outset: it is attained by debate, collaboration, and synthesis. All original proposals get rejected, and most subsequent ones do, until some genius comes up with something that actually works for everyone. That is something actually worthy of consensus.
Direct democracy is 3 wolves and 1 sheep voting on who gets eaten for dinner.
No, what you are describing is majority rule. It has nothing to do with consensus governance.
By comparison, I would describe our current system as three wolves charged with the safety of a thousand sheep. Guess what the wolves have for dinner every night??
There's one good way to figure out if Obama takes this seriously. Everyone sign this one to convert to the metric system: https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/petition/complete-us-transition-modern-metric-system-allowing-us-manufacture-items-we-could-sell-world/7v0MQpNp The wording is bad; there's no advantage to exports because science and industry has already converted. But there are a lot of cost savings. And there's that whole Challenger thing.
My point was that there are some answers, some solutions, which are *simply right*. Maybe that's to do nothing, even, but they are just.. exactly.. right. And, sometimes, a majority of people would disagree.
That doesn't mean it's not right. That means that a majority of people are wrong.
When you have something which is simply right, you can't compromise, you can't try and reach consensus. That would only dilute the right solution and make it wrong. Wanna invade Canada? Wanna strip-search 8 year old girls who try to fly on a plane? Wanna demand that people answer their location of origin and destination when stopped by police?
There's only one single right answer to all those issues: No. Even if 99% of the population disagrees, the right answer is still no. You can't compromise. You can't plead and make concessions. There's only one right answer.
Direct democracy fucks up those sorts of things. Constantly. Continually. If you think knee-jerk reactionaryism is rampant in our government now, just gander over to public opinion polls. There's your direct democracy. Holy mother of shit god, THAT is knee-jerk reactionaryism -- damn the facts, full emotional appeal ahead! Let's all do something so we feel like we've done something and to hell with the consequences! We're all in agreement, consensus has been reached, WE'RE FUCKING BANNING GRAPEFRUIT!
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
Wait, where's the crazy here?
Legalizing, regulating, and taxing marijuana. Not crazy. Crazy would be suggesting that the status quo is ok.
Forgiving student loan debt. An extreme solution to an extreme problem. Again, crazy would be suggesting that the status quo is ok.
The TSA? Every single dollar spent on the TSA has been wasted. They have caught not a single terrorist, and pretty much spend their time harassing grandmas and truckers. You despise it for good reason, yet don't want it abolished? You're the one who is crazy.
Which one of these is not a genuine concern?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
So now we turn to South Park to justify our views? :P
The motive behind a crime is *THE* number one factor used in judging sentencing. What do you think the difference is between first-degree murder and manslaughter? It's all about motive. Did you plan in detail how to kill the person, channelling your hatred toward your carefully plotted ends, or did you unintentionally, spur-of-the-moment end up causing someone's death? You better believe that matters!
Hate crime law is all about *motive*. It's the basic premise that committing a crime because you view their whole "group" (which they have no choice whether or not to belong to) as bad is a particularly vile motive. And you know what? I agree with that premise.
As for the "tyranny of the masses", you can still have delegated voting (I've long wished for such a system) while having a strong judiciary to protect minority views. There's no reason why delegated voting must inherently disempower the judiciary any more than our current crazy system tries to. The judiciary is the of the few against the many. They have to hear in detail the facts of the case instead of relying on broad stereotypes and cursory knowledge like the masses do, and they must make judgements based on broad principles that apply equally to everyone. At least, that's how the judiciary is supposed to work; it will never be perfect, of course.
A neat bit of history: Chile's Allende government, before being overthrown by Pinochet, was working on a project called "Cybersyn", which has been dubbed "The Socialist Internet". This was back in the early 1970s, and they were struggling with the issue of how to manage a planned economy in the modern age. They basically invented their own version of the internet, where terminals all over the country would maintain bidirectional communication with a set of central servers for data exchange. The initial incarnation was designed to provide the government information about what needed to be produced, where, and when it needed to be in other locations (they got it mostly up and running only shortly before Allende was overthrown). The longer term picture, however, was to allow anyone with an ID card to fetch information from the government (speeches, laws, etc) and to vote on the issues of the day (starting with what they wanted produced, but later extending to referendums and the like).
After taking over, Pinochet's people couldn't figure out what to make of the system, and only thinking of it in the context of it being a tool for managing planned economies, destroyed it.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
The whole concept of consensus decision-making works against demagoguery and reactionism. As long as there are still enough reasonable people around, then they can prevent hysteria from ruling the day. That is nothing like the stupid forms of direct democracy we have today, such as the referendum system in California. Nothing. Here's the long form.
Now as for there being a right answer that 99% of the people can't see... let's just say for the sake of argument that you are right. How is the status quo not much, much worse? Does Barak Obama or George W Bush or your city mayor or the president of your school board know what that right thing is? Policitians are the least likely to know what is right: the only thing they care about is what keeps them in power. Period. So how can it possibly be worse to have a consensus system?
Now to take issue with the idea of there being a right answer: if nobody thinks it is right, then how do you know it is right? Hindsight? Well, that's all we have in the status quo.
I still don't see what you are saying is better than collaborative governance. Totalitarianism by Jesus? That's just not an option.
We need a button to sign and oppose a petition. After all, even if you have 100,000 signatures, that's only 0.03% of the population.
After giving Obama money and voting for him, he spits in my face and essentially says that my ass belongs in a jail cell. From now on, I will only vote for candidates who are pro-legalization and anti-war. Yes, I realize that this means I will be voting in the primaries only. For the presidential election between Obummer and the chosen psychotic Republican, I will write in my candidate "Flush them All." Wouldn't it be great if we all voted for that guy?
I'm a libertarian, leaning almost to market anarchist - and I would love to see Cybersyn implemented.
If you could assemble a large enough, voluntary group, I would be very interested to see how it works in the real world.
Learn about Photography Basics.
I would love to be at one of those town hall things, stand up and say, "Mr. President, if you had been busted for cocaine when you were younger and gotten a record from it, do you think that would have been better?".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/petition/restore-right-jurors-judge-law-itself-case-case-basis/QDyqh0Wj
A wise government will always listen to the words of the people, but only a foolish one will act on them. The reason humans choose governments to run their collective affairs is surely because most of them have neither the brains nor the time to do it themselves, and getting hundreds of millions to agree on anything is clearly a ludicrous expectation. Democracy is not the people governing themselves, it is the people choosing who does it for them. And every few years they can be slung out if they mess it up. In the meantime they should be trusted to do the job they are given - which is to lead the people, not follow them. The most important safeguard is to ensure that NOTHING, but NOTHING can legally prevent the people from directly hiring and firing those who make their laws.
This last should seriously concern those living in the EU. Despite the proud assertion by its unelected, unaccountable bosses that they have invented a 'New form of government', its 500 million people have no power whatsoever to hire and fire those who make their laws. Whatever the EU is meant to be it is not a democracy, and I feel inclined to put more faith in Winston Churchill's assertion that "Democracy is the worst form of government, with the exception of all the others." In truth, an adversarial democracy with a strong Opposition to keep the rulers in check is much healthier than a wishy-washy consensus that quietly steals away the people's rights, under the patronising guise of "You know it makes sense." Then, even more quietly, changes the law so the government cannot be sacked - "to ensure stability" or some such spurious bollocks. I think Europe has been there before, has it not?
There is. But rather than silencing the existing petition you create a petition for the opposing view.
Probably a total waste of time, plus further invasion of my privacy, since the voting is non anonymous....
But I spent the 30 minutes going through them all. I do wish I could vote AGAINST a petition as well as FOR one.
The currently #13 petition is to end software patents. Sign it now!
I believe Parent's point is that even in a consensus based system such as you speak of, there isn't actually real consensus. Parent said 80%. I'll say 51%. You asked how this system is any worse. I don't believe this system will necessarily lead everyone to become involved in government. There's always going to be people who refuse to be part of the solution. This is part of the reason our current system has this appearance of the 1% imposing their will on the rest. All the lobbying money in the world couldn't save a politician in campaign with 100% voter registration and 100% voter turnout. The reason why the rich can bully the poor is partly because the rich tend to be politically proactive as opposed to reactive. A consensus system might help us get that 100% involvement, and it might not, but this system probably has the advantage there.
What happens when a decision must be made but a consensus cannot be reached? I believe in a strong president who has many powers because I believe that the president must ultimately lead alone rather than seek consensus on every issue. How does a consensus based system work in situations where a decision must be made, but cannot be made due to a stalemate? How does a consensus based system prevent knee-jerk reactions?
Also, I simply don't trust that the average man knows enough to make an intelligent decision regarding every issue. I am a bit of an elitist, old school Republican. I believe that learned men and woman ought to lead the nation, not the common clay so to speak. The vast majority of private citizens likely lack the background knowledge to have worthwhile input, but do have the passion to form a judgment. I think that road to tyranny and suppression you mentioned can still be reached in this system if the consensus wills it. Really, doesn't a consensus system rely on the assumption that the participants are mostly reasonable moderate thinking people who are tolerant of dissenting opinions?
The motive behind a crime is *THE* number one factor used in judging sentencing.
Okay, I'm with you so far. There are cases where motive will make a difference, for example, you were involved in an accident ("accident" being the operative word) that resulted in someone else's death. If there is no intent to harm others, it's hard to argue a case for murder. You may still deserve some punishment for acting irresponsibly or stupidly, but even I am hard-pressed to argue that someone who simply didn't foresee the consequences of a particular action should be judged as harshly as someone who knew what the outcome (i.e., the death of someone else) would be.
What do you think the difference is between first-degree murder and manslaughter? It's all about motive. Did you plan in detail how to kill the person, channelling your hatred toward your carefully plotted ends, or did you unintentionally, spur-of-the-moment end up causing someone's death? You better believe that matters!
Maybe. If it truly was unintentional, like I described above, then sure, I agree. However, if you are talking about a crime of passion...well, we're starting to diverge a bit.
Look at it this way. Suppose I were to kill someone (VERY unlikely, but just suppose). Does it matter to the victim if his murder was planned out in extreme detail or if it was a spur-of-the-moment crime of passion? He's still dead. His family doesn't hurt less if I just lost my temper than if I planned out the crime beforehand; they still lost a family member. Finally, if I am a murderer, am I really any less a danger to society if I have a tendency to fly off the handle or if I plot out my murders before conducting them? I would argue that giving someone an *excuse* for murdering ("Look, don't sweat it. You caught your husband in bed with someone else. That's a crime of passion. You'll only get five years, and be out on parole in two.") rather making them face the enormity of the crime they committed is inherently a Bad Thing.
Hate crime law is all about *motive*. It's the basic premise that committing a crime because you view their whole "group" (which they have no choice whether or not to belong to) as bad is a particularly vile motive. And you know what? I agree with that premise.
That's fine, but I, for one, *don't* agree with that. "Hate crime" is a made-up label to hide the true evil behind a particular action. As soon as you start implying that it's less evil for someone to commit any particular crime on someone who shares identifying characteristics (sex, skin color, sexual orientation, religion, whatever) than it is to commit an identical crime on someone who does not share those identifying characteristics based upon the presumption that it is those characteristics that was the reason for the crime, then you are bordering on legitimizing the idea of thought-crime. And I say that as someone who has, in fact, been the victim of "hate crime" (I was physically assaulted in high school by three guys who had, ahem, somewhat more melanin content in their skin than I did, even though I had never seen, talked to, or in any other way interacted with them).
For whatever it is worth, I really couldn't care less if those guys hated me because I was white. That's their problem. On the other hand, I very much care that they decided to sneak up behind and sucker punch me. Plenty of people have disliked me in the past, and I suspect plenty more will in the future. Some probably had (or will have) good reasons; others not so much. Whatever; I won't lose sleep over it. However, I would really prefer that those people who are torqued off at me for whatever reason they have *don't* try to break my nose (or worse). In exchange for that consideration, I will extend that same courtesy to those who get on my nerves.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Policitians are the least likely to know what is right: the only thing they care about is what keeps them in power.
Actually, I think it may be even worse than that. With 540 elected officials in the Federal government alone (one president, one vice-president, one hundred elected senators, and 338 congressmen and women), I would wager that someone has the right answer to every problem our nation faces. It's just that most of them are more interested in being popular than in being right.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
A big advantage Corps etc have over us is "national influence". So maybe the local reps, *all of them*, have a new duty in the modern age to look at what the nation wants, when making ... wait for it... national policy! Because Congress is a function of groups, we have to go national. It does us no good to have a brilliant display in, say, Vermont, at which point the National Media laughs at how small it is, intimidates the Vermont Rep, and then the dangerous idea never comes to pass. But if you get suddenly 12 reps from 8 states voting for it, "the national level of Congress" has to wake up and deal with it.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Okay.
"Get your hand out of my pocket."
"If you want to force me to give you money, do it the honest way and try to mug me, instead of hiding behind the badges of the police and the power of the tax collector."
"Why is it one "man one vote", but it's "fair" that I pay tens of thousands in income tax every year while half of all "taxpayers" don't pay income tax, and you're howling that I should pay even MORE?"
"Stop demanding that I subsidize you in the same breath that you demonize me."
"Read a book, read a book, read a motherfucking book, buy some land, buy some land, buy some goddamned land, FUCK SPINNING RIMS."
"If you dropped out of high school to push drugs, or majored in Underwater Basket Weaving/Humanities/Latin Left-Handed Shaman Women's Studies, it's YOUR fault you're poor, and you have no right to demand I support you."
Clear enough?
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
National Policy is shaped by compromise on local policy. Your Rep needs to make sure YOUR local interests are represented. Otherwise, we would just hold At Large elections and no one would have a local representative.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Listening to vocal minorities is not the same as democracy. And I'm not sure whether this kind of push-button response is actually good for democracy or democratic decision making. Far more important than petitioning would be interaction and discussion among constituents, and there seems to be very little of that going on.
They tried this in the UK after the last UK election with a site collecting ideas for things the government should do. I dont think the UK government has listened to a single idea from that site (if they have, its likely something they were planning to do anyway)
The reason why the rich can bully the poor is partly because the rich tend to be politically proactive as opposed to reactive. A consensus system might help us get that 100% involvement, and it might not, but this system probably has the advantage there.
I am not arguing for utopian perfection; I am arguing for a vastly improved system. Consensus democracy is not about 100% participation. A consensus includes consent of everyone who does not participate. But one of many key differences from the status quo is that any individual at any moment can become active. You may feel that you have no need to be involved in the decisions about road-building in your community. But when suddenly people want to build a road through your favorite park, you may become interested. In collaborative governance, you can immediately step in and try to break the consensus. Compare that to your options in the status quo: 1. whine to your representative so they can ignore you or 2. vote against your representative only to find that he/she wins anyway or that the road has already been built.
What happens when a decision must be made but a consensus cannot be reached?
There is no such situation. If everyone agrees that a decision must be reached, then they already have one consensus, and they are just arguing over details of implementation. If there is no consensus about the need for action, then there should not be action.
Also, I simply don't trust that the average man knows enough to make an intelligent decision regarding every issue.
And yet politicians are the average man too. What distinguishes them from others? Only their desire to win an election and their ability to raise funds. I fail to see how this makes them better equipped to handle any decision. In fact, it makes them much worse at it.
By contrast, collaborative governance systems are deliberately designed to allow the best ideas to bubble to the top. They don't simply ask everyone to vote once and then abide by the decision. Rather, because consensus must be reached, they require that people really think hard through an iterative process about building a solution that will work for everyone. It favors the best ideas, not the most popular nor the most politically expedient.
Well said. Right behind being popular is "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" which is absolutely contrary to the principles the US was founded on. Too many people these days think that what's good for the group is good for the individual. This is rarely the case, because it puts the government in the position of picking winners and losers, which is a position the government should not be in.
Society is not government. If government wants to implement social reform, it should do so in an open forum as an exchange between citizens and government and not merely pass laws. People keep thinking government is a tool for change when it should really be a weapon of second-to-last resort (with the last being force).
Any US Citizen around that would like to start a petition to limit copyright and related rights to a maximum of 20 years?
Thanks, the Rest of the World.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
Gotta love letting people vote themselves money.
The government can't "forgive" student loan debt, since the government didn't issue the loan - some bank did. So, you can either force the banks to take a $1T loss (yeah, good luck with that since no doubt they used those loans as "assets" to borrow yet more money against and if you drop their asset base they are so leveraged that the entire economy would go down the tubes), or the government can just cut out some checks to pay off $1T in private debt. So, now the students no longer have their loans, but they get to inherit another $1T in government debt when their parents finally die.
If we're just going to make college education free we should at least have the government institute price controls, or accredit WAY more schools.
How about this - why don't we start containing costs on entitlements, institute a sane tax system, and maybe start spending less money than we take in?
Everyone apparently wants machine guns and weed.
Our current representative democracy already works like this, with elected representatives deciding to award and bailout a few closely connected banks in the financial sector at the expensive of everyone else. There are plenty of other examples although they are far more common in a dictatorships (not democracies) where dictators uses state funds as their own personal piggy bank.
The point with direct democracy for me is that it is much harder to buy off a vast electorate than a small group of powerful individuals who wield power in a society.
I don't find the quote insightful either, no form of government is likely to be permanent. I don't think there is any evidence that democracies are shorter lived than monarchies, theocracies, etc...
In any case, the idea that >50% is going to be so well organized and in agreement to actually screw over the minority is I think a lot less common than you imagine. It does happen with various minority groups, but the routine state of affairs is the tiny minority of the powerful screwing over the majority. That's because they have the power, the influence, the organization and the money to make it happen.
I went through all of them and here is a list of some of the no brainers. Obviously it's not an exhaustive list. Just convenience for anyone that wants to hit a few buttons.
So expect Obama to tell us why he can't end software patents, abolish the TSA, and repeal the Patriot Act any day now...
Consensus is not a good thing.
Go outside. Ask 1,000 people for directions to somewhere that they don't have a firm grasp exactly where is located. You'll get a bunch of answers. A few of them may be right, many of them will not be.
There's only one, or at most very few, right answers. There's innumerable wrong answers. Consensus would be mixing the right answers with the wrong answers. That leaves you with a wrong answer.
See Ensemble Learning: in theory, even if each person votes "correctly" 51% of the time, with a large enough sample size, you'll still get a correct consensus. As long as people roughly vote for what's in their best interest, the right decisions will be made. Of course, when we're talking politics and legislation, there isn't really any ground truth that defines what "correct" actually is.
As Captain America said:
Doesn't matter what the press says. Doesn't matter what the politicians or the mobs say. Doesn't matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right. This nation was founded on one principle above all else: the requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or the consequences. When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world - "No, you move."
So now we turn to South Park to justify our views? :P
The motive behind a crime is *THE* number one factor used in judging sentencing. What do you think the difference is between first-degree murder and manslaughter? It's all about motive.
I find the number one factor using in sentence is your level of success.
Failed attempt to kill somebody --> attempted murder
Successful attempt to kill somebody --> first degree murder
As soon as you start implying that it's less evil for someone to commit any particular crime on someone who shares identifying characteristics (sex, skin color, sexual orientation, religion, whatever) than it is to commit an identical crime on someone who does not share those identifying characteristics based upon the presumption that it is those characteristics that was the reason for the crime, then you are bordering on legitimizing the idea of thought-crime.
While I dislike hate crime laws, you're beating down a straw man.
Hate crime laws rest on the premise that it is more evil to TARGET a victim based on race, gender, ethnicity, blah, blah, than it is to TARGET a victim on any other criteria.
Hate crime laws DO NOT imply that it is more evil to commit a crime on someone IN a given class. If I shoot a black man while robbing his house (for the purpose of robbing his house), that is NOT a hate crime. If I break into his house with the purpose of murdering him BECAUSE he's black, and only rob the place incidentally, that IS a hate crime.
The problem you should have with hate crime laws is the provability issue--the only way to prove that a crime was a hate crime (short of a confession from the perp that, yes, he murdered that n***** for being a n*****) is to effectively criminalize hate speech made by those who also commit violent crimes. Granted, this only criminalizes a subset of hate speech (that hate speech made by those who commited a violent crime), but that's still a criminalization of speech.
And discussion in a forum like /. is the most political act of all.
No, but between themselves, they had what is the fruit of that technology - namely really good communication opportunities with your neighbors.
Your calls for consensus are not sensible. Supermajority/consensus-requirements give much stronger ability to block change than to enact change, and that may sound nice - but what if urgent change is needed? What if disaster is knocking on the door? Then a minority (under consensus, a single person) can hold everyone hostage, requiring endless concessions in order to be willing to not sacrifice everything. (You could see practical examples of such desperado-extortion in California back when they demanded supermajority for budgets).
Systems demanding consensus do not scale - this should be obvious. People advocating consensus between 10000+ people have no conceptions of scale.
Consider a historical example of decision making by consensus: The quakers. They are/were an extremely ideologically homogenous group. Yet they could only make consensus decision making work by having an extremely large excommunication rate.
To the degree that Wikipedia entertains the farce that they operate by consensus, they also have a very high "excommunication rate".
In both these communities (Wikipedia, and historical Quakers) there is strong pressure towards ideological conformity, on account of such expulsion practices. If you disagree with the "consensus", you are extremely careful about saying it, if you say it at all. Is this desirable?
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
I understand where your sentiment comes from. But it assumes a fair game with dice that aren't loaded. Here's the big news you've been waiting for: The game is not fair. Opportunities are not equal. The dice are loaded. Examples are everywhere and countless, if you only look.
I actually pay tens of thousands in income taxes as well. It's infuriating. But not because poor people want my money. It's infuriating because I want my taxes to go to world class education in my community and my country as a whole. I want strong infrastructure, public resources from parks to transportation, a world class work force making things that improve our world, cannabis smokers out of jail, foreign soil not invaded or occupied, health care for everyone (no I don't think the poor pregnant woman should have her baby on the sidewalk, nor do I think working for a giant corporation should reward you with better health care than a hard working small biz owner can get, it's a right, like fresh water). Anyway, I'm happy to pay for things that make this country better, -for everyone-. Why aren't you?
also, your attitude about people poorer than yourself smacks of willful malicious ignorance. Grow up in an inner city school, grown up with one ill parent, grow up worrying about your next handful of food, turn 18 with no outfit for a job interview and no money to buy one and parents who can't help. Such people must work incredibly hard at multiple jobs to afford a shitty life. They have no time for luxuries like higher education, networking with professionals, or even simple computer training. They have no money for things like sport coats and decent teeth or transportation to an interview or a job. They are stuck. So if you still have a rock for heart after pondering all this consider this: would you rather build up the people and communities around you or build up walls to keep them out when they come for you?
Operator, give me the number for 911!
A interesting response, esp. on the topic of people not being informed enough to make a good decision. I think we've all been involved in coding projects that were designed by committee, and know how that turned out.
However, we can't really trust only the people who know enough, because ethics is not a function of knowledge. Consensus forces a group morality on all actors, and that is really its primary benefit. No one is going to let anyone else rip the group off.
So, isn't it remarkable that our Founders understood that power must be divided, that representation must be balanced between pure democracy and elite rule, and that by building in the possibility of perpetual change in leadership, they were guaranteeing that change would happen peacefully, generally.
Some guys, those founders.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
You have to understand, the average person has no desire to think, let alone think hard. That is why the political system is so broken. It too was based upon the idea of people being passionate about their society, being willing to think hard. Today's average citizen gets about as far as pop tv and stops.
Freud might say that Intelligent Design is religion's ID.
So wouldn't it be better to have a system where people can participate if they want to, and where the best ideas rise to the top? Compare that to the status quo where politicians rile people up over the stupidest issues in order to keep their grip on power.
Case in point: almost nobody is actually in favor of widespread abortion. And almost nobody is in favor of the government controlling our bodies. And yet the politicians make up this stupid black-and-white abortion issue solely to create unnecessary emotional responses.
Collaborative governance would do the opposite: helping people to find a way to reduce abortion without totalitarian impositions. And the only people who would have to be involved in the process would be ones that really care. People who would prefer to watch American Idol can do so, and abide by the consequences.
Belgium is a country that operates based on compromise between political parties - not the same as what you're describing, but similar and at a smaller scale. Thanks to this we get appeasement politics - I'll give you this vote if you support another bridge for my constituency - and, when things fail, as they have now with reforming the state, we get deadlock. We haven't had a valid federal government in over a year and a half (beats Iraq's record), merely a caretaker government that may not make new decisions.
There are things that people will never agree on. Can you imagine a consensus on abortion, for instance? And in the meantime, is it banned or is it permitted? You'd get people screaming bloody murder if you said everything was permitted by default.
Compromise is nothing like consensus, and it is horrible. Consensus is built through synthesis, not compromise.
Yes, I can absolutely see consensus on abortion. It is the politicians and the political process that create the issue in the first place. Almost nobody is in favor of widespread abortion. Almost nobody is in favor of totalitarian control of our bodies.
It is the fact that these two ideas are put in opposition to each other that divides us. If instead, we had a consensus/synthesis system, we could readily develop solutions which remove the institution of abortion from our society without passing laws against it.
You get exactly the situation that we've ended up in today, only quicker. The majority votes for no tax, and a larger military budget and universal healthcare and a freaking pony. The best case scenario is that you'll end up with endless debate over budget line items because a deficit is focusing people's minds. The worst case scenario is that you don't get the debate, the "magic" money is just spent.
In practical terms, consensus is meaningless, it will have to be an arbitrary threshold over which implementation of a policy goes ahead because there will ALWAYS be a group that will reject ANYTHING. So you'll have a tyranny of the majority, who'll spend everything and still have a sense of entitlement and bugger the ones saying "think about tomorrow". Basically, the same as we have now, except with all the brakes off.
Rational thought is the only true freedom
If someone doesn't beat me to it, we need a petition for campaign finance reform. As far as I'm concerned, it is the one issue that affects all others. Right or left, we should all favor reversing the money race that candidates have to go through in order to stand a chance of winning.
You are making some assumptions that are already dealt with in the architecture of collaborative governance systems.
The "magic money" scenario is about the status quo, not collaborative governance, For example, the US federal budget deficit is in the hundreds of billions, on top of over $14,000,000,000,000 in debt. How can any system be any worse than that? The reason for this preposterous spending is because politicians don't get elected for austerity programs, they get elected for making stupid magic promises.
In collaborative governance, a minority of more reasonable people (such as you and I) can stop this sort of magic money spending.
Put another way: in the status quo, politicians say "I'm going to cut your taxes" or "I'm going to put people to work in the public sector." In collaborative governance, the only bills that can gain consensus would be ones that say something like "We will cut taxes by x% by cutting out these particular budgetary expenditures over this timeframe" or "we will create public sector jobs by allocating an additional $x dollars, collected from a tax on y." There's no hidden agendas, no persuasion through grandiose rhetoric: just the plain facts of the bills being presented. Because anything that doesn't meet a sensibility test will be killed by reasonable people.
As to your point of consensus being a tyranny of a majority, fine, you can look at it that way. In very large communities, there's no way to get 100% buy-in to anything. So say the threshold is a mere 90% (i.e., dissenting votes can't be more than 10% of all votes). Can you possibly say that is not an enormous improvement over the status quo? Tyranny of the 90% is a heck of a lot different than tyranny of the 0.01% who hold actual power in our current institutions.