I mean look it's mostly that having term limits on the presidency is already, when you think about it, a "restriction on democracy" and one people obviously look for a loophole to get around The people who would've voted for Obama for a 3rd term openly looking for a surrogate
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
If you think that's bad and that this is just a way to enshrine political inertia because people don't like to think and are afraid of radical change, well, that's democracy The term limits themselves are an attempt at a check on democracy that give mixed results
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I am perpetually switching between two modes of "there has to be a way to implement democracy that maximizes emphasis on issues that matter, it's just an engineering problem" and "fuck democracy. let humanity burn"
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The whole reason we have representative democracy and not Athenian direct democracy is people are busy and don't actually want to spend all this time thinking about stuff, they want a leader they think is a good person to take care of it all for them
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
It's this whole paradoxical tug of war between democracy and meritocracy, like the one exists to be a check on the other (the hope is that the President will hire actual PhDs and experts with relevant domain knowledge to solve specific problems)
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
The idea is supposed to be that having the person actually in charge of everything have to win elections keeps them accountable, it keeps experts and institutions from becoming corrupt elites It doesn't seem to work very well, is the problem
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
The whole *point* is the reason the institutions exist in the first place is ordinary people don't know anything about their job, and manipulating ordinary people to win elections becomes its own area of expertise, etc
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
This is a whole area of discussion with military stuff The Constitution is very clear that the military must remain under elected civilian authority but it seems few veterans think ignorant civilian voters are competent to hold this responsibility
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
I dunno there was an Internet phenomenon that illustrated this well for me They did a stunt after Garry Kasparov (highest rated chess grandmaster in history) played the computer, called Kasparov vs the World Could he beat a hivemind of Internet users voting on every move
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They thought this would be some kind of direct democracy experiment where there'd be an exuberant salon of discussion over the game Instead they basically "elected" one of the other GMs participating (Irina Krush) as their "representative" and he was just playing her
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
Which, you know, is the completely logical thing to do - how else would you do it - but feels disappointing Hiveminds always turn into one person getting put in charge, with the voters serving only as an accountability mechanism
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
This is one reason I’m generally skeptical of anarchism. Keeping everyone involved forever on a large scale seems… unlikely. To say the least.
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