undefined | Better HN

0 pointsxg154mo ago0 comments

That's a lot of political opinions there, in the service of "avoiding political factionism".

Another thing: People who propose theoretical systems for governance seem to have a weird fondness of lotteries. I can't really understand it.

Yes, it may be "just" in a mathematical or statistical sense, but it's also maximally intransparent (it's literally impossible to predict who will be chosen, that's the entire idea), so people may view the outcomes as unfair or arbitrary.

It's also easy to manipulate: The people who operate the lottery would be in the best position to become the new power brokers.

Has there ever been any real-life political system that uses lotteries?

0 comments

aerostable_slug4mo ago

Sortition was famously used in classical Athens (~5th C. BC) and a couple other Greek city-states. There were other examples, but I think the big issue with the historical examples is the fact that the eligible parties weren't as broadly defined as we tend to allow these days in our thought experiments.

IOW, nobody was actually selecting purely random members of the populace: there were some pretty significant qualifications needed to become eligible (much like the United States once required of voters).

burnt-resistor4mo ago

Make civic duty a component of belonging to various professional classes: professional engineers, doctors, lawyers, dentists, accountants, architects, and so on.

Without commonwealth reinvestment and respect for shared burdens, society has no future with a bunch of amoral, anonymous, transient, hyperindividualistic people all trying to climb out of the crab bucket striving to become billionaires and the few actual billionaires believing they can "hide" in their New Zealand doomsday prepper bunkers* and not feel the effects of the bullshit they caused. America has slid since the Vietnam War into becoming much like a "Russia Lite" at the present time. Chalmers Johnson expounds on the sorrows, blowback, and decay of empire in print and in video at length.

* What I do hope is these become Winchester Mystery House-like tourist attractions in 200 years.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse