[extropy-chat] Politics: Transhumanist Social System

[Adrian Tymes]

--- Mike Lorrey <mlorrey at yahoo.com> wrote:
> This is statist bogosity. I don't need to understand how to clone an
> organism myself to have an informed opinion of cloning. Issues become
> complex only for those who refuse to operate under a consistent
> philosophy. Then again, all of life is complex for those who refuse
> to
> adopt rules of decomplexification.

This is quite true.  The problem is that those people exist, and it is
not practical, given their numbers, to make slaves or noncitizens of
them - to say nothing of whether that would be acceptable even if it
could be accomplished.

> The general public can understand much of even the most technical
> issues if you don't patronize them, castrate their educations, or
> work
> them so hard paying exhorbitant tax and regulatory burdens that they
> don't have the time to contribute to civic life.

Problem is, how do we get there from here?  We currently do have a
large populace with castrated educations, et cetera, and we can't
simply shut them out in the cold.  Any political system that speaks for
everyone will even have to represent luddites - unsavory though that
may sound, they are people and do have rights.

> > It is also the case that, when a deliberating body gets too large,
> it
> > essentially becomes unable to function: the sheer mechanics of
> > allowing thousands (to say nothing of millions) of different
> opinions
> > to be voiced about an issue, with each one seriously listened to,
> > would bring most legislation to a halt.  
> 
> This is a clear shibboleth. That state-wide and national referenda
> frequently pass, or not, and are held in a well organized manner by
> conventional methods means that, provided email or other
> communications
> protocols can be made more secure, newer technology should be capable
> of devolving much legislation to the individual level..

Referenda != all legislation.  Small, minute details that someone in
the government has to specify are rarely included in referenda - and
when they are, someone's massaged them into at most a few options
first.  For instance, few people have an opinion on whether the law
says if turn signals must be on 100 or 120 feet before a turn...but
someone has to decide that.  Perhaps the people could elect someone to
study the issue and decide, or elect people to appoint someone to do
so.