Forum Post: A simple question from a new user
Posted 10 years ago on July 29, 2014, 9:39 p.m. EST by Drayenn
(3)
from Staten Island, NY
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
I have heard about this forum in the past, and recently, I decided to take a look at it. I've spectated various threads and noticed one thing that seems to be common among them. None of them lead to any sort of actual accomplishment. I myself have done research on different kinds of corruption, genocide, etc., and I admit that it has never really lead to anything worth mentioning. But, I intend to some day going bigger to inform the public I.E.: Public speaking, informing through writing, etc. However, in this specific forum, I've noticed nothing in regards to spreading information farther than the what, 5-10 active users on this website? What I'm asking is, what are your intentions.
The intentions are to entertain and hopefully inform or teach if that be possible. I feel a little bit of the graffiti artist in me but it is LEGAL graffiti drawn in what seems like a Venetian masquerade ball. As Alice in Wonderland was informed, "Nothing is what it seems!" Wear a tinfoil hat after putting on the CRITICAL thinking cap and you will do just fine here. Welcome!
Haha, thanks for the introduction.
This is right on. The diagnosis that governments are corrupt, because humans are corruptible, is the starting point of the Constitution, see the Federalist Papers. But what is the cure for this? What is Occupying doing to fix the failed democracy? What has always been done: talk, threaten, sit down in the street. To fix the government requires the people to take responsibility for making the laws under which they live, to be, actually, the legislature themselves: to make and vote directly on the laws under which they live. Political equality in its purest, and probably only, form. see http://www.assosactualdemocracy.com
Governments need NOT be corrupt although humans are corruptible.
Claude E. Shannon of Bell Labs definitively proved the case that arbitrarily high reliability of communication can emerge from unreliable circuitry as long as channel capacity constraint is observed. I surmise that arbitrarily high reliability of governance can emerge from unreliable politicians and electorate as long as governance capacity constraint is observed. Shannon's breakthrough papers eventually led to the error-detecting and error-correcting codes which made possible our high-fidelity world of communication.
Yes, indeed, the hisses and fades of shortwave radio no longer need to be heard because we can get crystal-clear high-fidelity communication through the internet nowadays. Similarly, corrupt governments can be swept into the dust bin of history like the hisses and fades of shortwave radio.
Our Founding Fathers had the correct approach to designing a government with checks and balance (perhaps akin to the error-correcting codes) but it is more than two hundred years old so a tune-up is necessary, especially because our political system seems to have devolved into posturing, doing nearly nothing, bickering, and non-governance even though secular problems cry out for solutions and leadership.
We can model and structure the incentives for non-corruption in line with countries which have non-corrupt governance such as Singapore, Iceland, and Switzerland.
Shannon's work focused on information transmission over a given channel and the degree to which signal to noise ratios could be maintained so bits could be distinguished. He miss used the definition of entropy but did great, ground breaking work, in giving a grounding to communication engineers.
But politics isn't a single channel, and the information is not encoded, and reliability of content is always disputed. I don't think any representative government is without corruption. It is run by humans and humans are self-serving. If they weren't we would not have survived the struggle for existence. We are also cooperative, so we have governments. The best form of democratic government is not representative but actual democracy: the people vote on the laws under which they live: Pericles, Rousseau, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, John Stuart Mill have all conceded that it is. Technology now enables us to implement it. I'm just saying we should. www.assosactualdemocracy.com
Note that the channel can consist of all kinds of people and things. In the case of governments, the channel can include politicians, lobbyists, media, and even the cosmic background radiation. Benoit Mandelbrot studied noises on communication links but even with his breakthroughs in fractal/chaos theory, he never elucidated the physical origin, nature, and kinds of noises. That did not stop engineers from creating globe-spanning networks of disparate kinds that deliver high fidelity.
If you lump all political/lobbying/media channels together, that becomes a single channel. Essentially, the encoding means that we can send messages to governments with redundancies built in. Social media have created a perfect means of building in the redundancies. If you really look at the biggest and most mysterious systems such as Wall Street or the internet, you will see that there is NO omniscient omnipotent Wizard of Oz behind the curtains. There are just ridiculous number of participants, all acting mostly by their whims and according to their interests. If the U.S. can run its economy mostly with NO ONE in charge, we should be able to run our government, too, with no one in charge. Hence, I agree with you that direct democracy can mostly work.
However, due to the U.S. media's high correlations, there are cases where direct democracy can do very stupid things. I therefore suspect that we need something more organized than direct democracy. I remind you that the Athenian direct democracy that we revere is exactly the one that sentenced to death the philosopher Socrates whom we also revere. Direct democracy can go astray and is NOT a panacea. Even the U.S. economy eventually required the creation of the (non-)Federal (no-)Reserve to apply the defibrillator.
If peoples votes don't count then people don't count. This action to bring about Actual Democracy is not headed for a Utopia, just a 'more perfect Union'. Every institution errs, but then corrects its errs and progress gets made. We need to trust the good sense, commitment, and longing for a better world that we all have and start the long trip, decades long, of getting the power of decision making back into our hands. The first point is to remember: there are no special people and there is no magic coming to help us. We need to focus on what needs to be done to acquire actual political equality, actual democracy, where each of us is as powerful as the next, voting directly on the laws under which we live.
Any finite positive number can be made arbitrarily close to zero by applying a sufficiently large denominator to it. If we vastly increase the number of referenda, we can nullify the effectiveness of the nimrods' undue influence. Having multiple referenda for the same issue can guard against hacking. Imagine a million referenda being voted on every two weeks. Where can the mush money go to interfere?
Wow! This is super good info! Thanks. It's going to take me 30 minutes to verify the sources there. Very interesting. I love this idea of high reliable communication form unreliable circuitry. And, you're right, it can easily be translated to the government. Thanks!
I see
Noted. I understand what people get out of trolling or general toxicity on the internet if there is a large number of people or an audience (still semi-sickening). But when it's this small of a community I don't see the point.
The small group who trolls here is paid by the Democrat party.
or the Republicans ... or Teas.... or kochs.... or the banks !! idiot
Unfortunately, this place is riddled with trolls who come here to soil the forum with petty infighting.
The admins are working hard to resolve the problem, but the dork trolls are tenacious.
Site recognized trolls have the "Troll" label at the end of their names. You should avoid those users.
Why do people get shut out? If we can't listen to stupidity, vulgarity, contradictions, opposition, insanity, how can we get people to listen to us? Put all the ideas in the market place and trust the people to choose the right ones. If you can't trust the people then you aren't one or your 'special'. Most likely neither condition applies, so trust the people and support your claims with logic and facts.
exactly !!
Those people were banning other users. They banned hundreds of users. Their only goal was to ruin the forum and deplete the user base. I agree with you that a plurality of ideas is a good thing.
I'm new here. How did people who banned other get to have the authority to do it? I thought this was an 'open' organization.
No, the forum is not open. It is jart's forum, but she has little time to take care of it, so she appoints moderators to do that for her. A group of infiltrators from the Democrat Party came to the site 2 years ago. They were on all the time because they were paid. They convinced jart to let them be moderators. When they did, they were banning many users each day which essentially killed our entire user base until they were basically the only ones left. A few days ago, jart woke up and banned them all on the same day. We are hoping we can get old users back. We want to get the number of users high again.
bull shit !!! dumb ass .... can't you ever talk about any specific issue ... that is about this country ?... this world ? .. or are you simply focused on causing infighting and division here ?
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maybe.... but isn't it more more factual ... that when the most active posters are arguing among themselves more than arguing issues... that the site fails....? ... that includes ... me ..you... twinkle team ... all of us
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