Monthly Archives: July 2016

Liquid/Delegative Democracy in Practice

Politics, Uncategorized, , ,

Reading up on delegative democracy aka liquid democracy. It’s essentially selecting someone to vote on your behalf in referendums, but where your selected proxy voter can also transfer their delegated votes to another proxy voter, and so on, while you can also take your vote back, override your proxy voter, and review your proxy voter’s voting record.

This is meant to essentially replace legislatures and make voting in referendums easier, quicker and more affordable.

To break down #LiquidDemocracy:

Imagine having a vote on a ballot measure, a referendum. Unlike many, you may not have the time to do research on the proposed law or vote on it.

So what can you do?

In #DelegativeDemocracy or Liquid Democracy, you can select someone – say, a friend who is more knowledgeable about the proposed law on the ballot – to cast your vote on your behalf. You might trust this person – Person A – to have more knowledge and be more responsible with your vote than you are. Person A is your proxy voter.

But what if Person A who you select knows someone else – Person B – who has even more knowledge about the proposed law and has publicly announced that they’ve cast their vote along the same lines as Person A? In Liquid Democracy, Person A can select Person B as their proxy voter, and can delegate Person B to cast your vote, Person A’s vote and the votes of others who’ve delegated their votes to that person.

In short, Liquid Democracy is a third way of passing laws, alongside representative democracy and direct democracy. It blends the two and moves us away from both the cost of direct democracy and the isolation of representative democracy.

The issue I have is this:

  • can this function without dependency upon the Internet to facilitate the voting process?
  • Also, what are the means by which this process can account for disadvantaged groups in a population or suspect classes whose rights may be targeted by referendum?
  • This may rid us of the need for gerrymandering and of competitive elections, but what will it do for minorities?

Protests in Oakland Block Interstate Highway Traffic

Pretty bold, unsafe, but bold. Good that cars stopped for the protesters. Lots of angry opinions against blocking interstate traffic for commercial reasons. I hope emergency and emergency-motivated vehicles were accommodated by the protesters.

But playing devil’s advocate: isn’t this part of the art of protest? To disrupt the normal flow of the day and call attention to something that is broken in the city? To non-violently inflict an economic impact upon a broken infrastructure?

We don’t live in the era of bus boycotts anymore. Nonviolent, economically-targeted protests have more impact when they affect and disrupt economic venues. We live in the era of sit-ins, die-ins, occupations and the blocking of traffic. This is just as much a tactic which will not win friends, but will non-violently jar our normalcy.

I don’t understand the wishes of Facebook users to inflict bodily harm on protesters with their cars. Seriously, it’s not worth it. It says more about you than about the protesters.

My First #BlackLivesMatter Protest

I can also say that I’ve now participated in a #BlackLivesMatter protest.

It’s one thing to see it on video. It’s another thing to be there in person –

to see Black people from all backgrounds carrying children, wearing dashikis and suspenders, holding up their fists and open palms in fulsome protest under the gray, heavily-cloudy sky;

to see smiling onlookers wave and thumbs-up as you walk the pavement screaming #HandsUpDontShoot up and down the road;

to vocally worry about what’s going to happen to you when you cross the asphalt Rubicon in the face of assembled LEO cars;

to see colleagues of yours arrested by heavily-armored LEOs amidst flashing blue and red lights;

to see the genuine pain and anguish coupled with retellings of Black civilian survival tactics on the streets of Everytown, USA;

to see Euro-Americans walk with us and be in the midst of civil disobedience for Black lives;

to speak with your stutter from the top of your head on the history of the country and what is at stake –

all under the shadow and binoculars and unmarked vehicles of the militarized police force of Columbus, GA.

Get as much video and photo as possible.

Dallas Revenge

Uncategorized, , , , , ,

I had said earlier that there was going to be a Timothy McVeigh-Terry Nichols type of reaction when LEOs shoot the “wrong type of people”.

I did not expect a retaliation of this magnitude, not over LEO murders of African-Americans, not in #Dallas. The shooter in the video, who is now dead, looks like he had training to shoot at remote targets from around corners. Snipers.

With his accomplices, he was able to kill 5 officers and wound 5 others. They could have killed many, untold numbers of civilian protesters after they were frightened by the shooting, but they didn’t. Just picking off the LEOs.

This wasn’t an ordinary clapback against police brutality. This was planned, the channeling of emotion from abject despondency to stone-cold revenge. The shooters wanted to make a seething nick in the skin of that institution.

“The end is coming”, he said in the garage. Apocalyptic. No one expected this. I thought there wasn’t going to be this sort of channeling. Just more protests, more arrests, more burning of buildings.

But this. THIS. Stone-cold, planned revenge. A selective propaganda of the deed.

Interestingly enough, I read that McVeigh and Nichols were trained and stationed here at Fort Benning in the late 80s. Maybe military training? I’m as mesmerized by what happened in Dallas as I am disgusted and despondent over ALL of the unjustified deaths of the last 96 hours.

NOTE 12/28/2017: This is NOT a justification for revenge killings of police, nor of anyone at all. Stop the killings.

Free Movement and Terra Nullius

Uncategorized,

All of the colonizable places to settle are taken.

The window period to settle a place, “remove” the indigenous population by force and establish a government of people who come from the same background as you has long expired. No more Americas. No more Australias.

From now on, you will be a guest who has to integrate yourself.

But you ended up here the wrong way? Your ancestors were brought as slaves, and their earlier descendants attained belated citizenship, and then their descendants fought for the ability to integrate into employment and voting, and now you are tired of fighting for respect from an inherently-classist criminal justice system steeped in the same system which preserved slavery? You want out of this country and its status quo?

Well, at least if you leave this country for another, you’ll be doing so on your own terms. It won’t be a panacea, and you can’t expect to not face racism as a guest.

But maybe, as an immigrant to another country, the art of respectability politics might save you.