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A prototype of a decentralized political party

hack.ether.camp

31–37 of 37 posts

Re: A prototype of a decentralized political party

#31
post #6

Trying to end corruption in the US, I'm starting to think, is what has brought American politics to its current low state. I think the worst political decision of the past few decades was the move to ban earmarks. Whatever negative things you can say about them, earmarks gave congresspeople a way to please their constituency without reference to some particular ideological test. They could always say: "Well sure, I d…

Not sure about earmarks but for your second point, you're ignoring the possibility of the third alternative, which is really the alternative because superpacs are unlimited donations effectively. The alternative is really no unlimited donations.

Re: A prototype of a decentralized political party

#32

Voluntary voting effectively gives people with a single-issue obsession more power than everyone else, because they show up to vote. In compulsory voting systems, the outliers are moderated by the median, whose concerns are typically less emotional (abortion, guns) and more economic (price of milk, mortgage rates). Political parties are a concentrated form of voluntary voting. One of the reasons the USA's primaries s…

"Direct democracy's historical performance in this respect is abysmal, which is why we have representative democracy instead." <~ I think there have been reasons other than that, which led you to representative democracy. Can you present evidence of the abysmal performance of direct democracy? Well, may be Scandinavian tings do not scale for nations size of the US, but look, Switzerland has direct democracy since 1291, being formalized in the 19th century system of referendums and that works just fine.

Re: A prototype of a decentralized political party

#34
I think sharing control of funds is a weakness. Not just when it comes to smart contracts that will inevitably have bugs, but for organizations in general. Instead, we can create organizations without boundaries and govern them the same way we govern genres of art—if you do something that aligns with the brand, your action is part of the organization.

That's why I built Benefactory, a platform for decentralized nonprofits. We can weave individual efforts into an organization with a strong brand so it's easier to attract recognition and further contributions.

Here's an organization dedicated to making Ethereum easier to use and build on top of: https://media.consensys.net/2016/09/07/introducing-the-commo...

Join our Slack and help us build a commonwealth for every genre of public benefit. http://slack.benefactory.cc/

Re: A prototype of a decentralized political party

#35
Got your idea? Great, now you need write it up and tell everyone about it so you can find your teammates and supporters

Reads to me as: got an idea? Form a political party.

I predict internal politics will destroy this idea because any group that believes it is immune to politics is already infected but in denial.

We can't escape politics. It's what we do. It's the fundamental fractured structure of the human experience.

We need politics because it's the best and least harmless place to put those criminals we call politicians.

Also, amusing the domain is .camp. The word camp shares the same origins as the German word kamf which means to struggle. Yep, politics sure is a struggle.

Re: A prototype of a decentralized political party

#36

Voluntary voting effectively gives people with a single-issue obsession more power than everyone else, because they show up to vote. In compulsory voting systems, the outliers are moderated by the median, whose concerns are typically less emotional (abortion, guns) and more economic (price of milk, mortgage rates). Political parties are a concentrated form of voluntary voting. One of the reasons the USA's primaries s…

"Direct democracy's historical performance in this respect is abysmal, which is why we have representative democracy instead." <~ I think there have been reasons other than that, which led you to representative democracy. Can you present evidence of the abysmal performance of direct democracy? Well, may be Scandinavian tings do not scale for nations size of the US, but look, Switzerland has direct democracy since 129…

Swiss direct democracy is rather more constrained than Athens and most of it originates from elected representatives, with an option for citizen-initiated referenda.

California has ballot initiatives, several of which have removed the legislature's powers in some taxes and some spending. Possibly to the detriment of the state, especially since it has dramatically narrowed the tax base.

Re: A prototype of a decentralized political party

#37
post #3

Will have a feature to create a subparty and transfer all of parent party power into it?

I am out of the loop but since the DAO hack does anyone really trust ethereum anymore?

Yeah you're sort of out of the loop. The majority of the community believes that "a manual override is necessary every now and then on the path to building autonomous robots"

It's a platform in development, and it's made huge strides in security and governance since the hack.

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