Edward Snowden Says Assange 'Could Be Next' After John McAfee Suicide

[Karl]

On Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 6:40 PM David Barrett <dbarrett at 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.

>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/html
Size: 3104 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks/attachments/20210625/24ba8075/attachment.txt>