On Fri, Jun 25, 2021 at 4:00 PM Karl <gmkarl@gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 6:40 PM David Barrett <dbarrett@expensify.com> wrote:
Maybe just skipping ahead a few steps before getting pulled into a debate about the US government, do you agree with the concept of representative democracy involving different branches with checks and balances being a philosophically strong foundation for governance? Is your complaint that the US government is an imperfect execution of a fundamentally sound concept, or that the entire idea underpinning our government is irredeemably flawed?

I'm not eager to get into a conversation where you end up saying "But democracy sucks, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength."

-david

I might be a little too cognitively weak to have a single opinion that works in all scenarios,

But I believe that everything can be made to work in a variety of ways, and we're clearly not there yet, but nor have we turned all of our countries into a giant homogenous hell yet.

Cut to the chase, here's where I am this week, it'll change:
- For a democracy with schooling to work, people need to be educated or incentivised to effectively participate in it. It should be the popular video game, rather than kill-zombies, and its weaknesses and properties need to be well-known and accessible so it can be used to resolve them.
- For representation to work, representatives need to fully represent their people. This means more of them, and it means regular accessible meetings that get real results, and it means rotating them as soon as people aren't satisfied. This is called spokescouncil in the left.
- For a democracy to work at all, people need to have uncensored productive communication. If instead you have everybody staring at advertisements and voting, it's not the communities doing the voting, it's the advertisements. Good choices are made with dialog, not repetition.

This democracy can work. It relies on powerful unsung endangered heros who can influence it when something is wrong. I suspect many people here have tried to be such heros and discovered the dangers.

Something everybody should know about is Citizen's Referendum. In many areas any citizen or group of citizens can pass a new law. It takes footwork, but you can be a huge hero.

Ok that's encouraging, I agree we shouldn't give up on what we've got!

What I'm not quite following, however, is that you seem to be agreeing that the court system is *so broken* that the rest of the world should stop extraditions to us -- even though the courts are apparently interpreting a complex law that has significant (and slightly majority) support amongst the population: https://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/poll-most-want-edward-snowden-charged-092930

I totally understand disagreeing with that law, or disagreeing with the majority -- and our government is built to manage that difficult push and pull between varied interests. But it feels premature to throw out our entire justice system over something that most people agree with.

Extradition is the *start* of the justice process -- a process currently being denied its opportunity. But you seem to be saying it is such a foregone conclusion that our courts are unjust that it is *more* just to just bypass it entirely. I'm trying to figure out if you feel it's foregone because:

1) The law itself is unjust (despite having majority support of the population)

2) The law is just but the courts are not

3) The whole system is unjust because the population is advocating for something unjust

This is why I asked if you agreed with the entire concept of democratic rule, as if the majority agrees with something, write a law for that thing, and has an executive branch and court system that enforces that law -- on what basis can you claim justice isn't being served?

-david