The good about democracy is that everyone can vote, and the bad about democracy is that everyone can vote.
Hence the need of proper education and unfiltered information, the first helping to digest and understand the second in order to know who you vote and why; if you tamper with those, you can have people vote for anyone, including a dictator.
Voting is a right, doing it knowledgeably is a duty, and so many people forget about the 2nd.
> the bad about democracy is that everyone can vote.
This is what needs to change. Recently there was a story that Reese Witherspoon was in a jury, and the other jury members thought she was a real lawyer because of Legally Blonde. These people are not qualified to serve on a jury let alone vote.
Why are we getting input from people that couldn't run a small low traffic corner store on how to run a country? It's ridiculous, and it's the reason the US is in the mess it is now.
I agree that many people are not.. well intelectually suited for voting and making important decisions.
But how do you decide who votes? The fairest is obviously to allow voting for everyone. As soon as you try to single out 'unsuitable' people, you run into a problems of how you would do so? You could try to give people a basic test, but these 'literacy' tests were historically used to supress all kinds of minorities.
That is the true problem of democracy, it sucks, but everything else is miles worse. The people voted, the people get what they voted for. If you want a different result, convince people to vote differently.
> You could try to give people a basic test, but these 'literacy' tests were historically used to supress all kinds of minorities.
That doesn't mean they would b e used to oppress minorities today. Except the minority that is deemed too ignorant to be granted a right to vote based on failing the test.
> That is the true problem of democracy, it sucks, but everything else is miles worse.
I don't think that's true, it's just that there is little motivation to come up with better alternative and people who try just get shit on for even trying as though it were an insurmountable goal.
There exists a whole discipline in political science and mathematics about optimality in decisional workflows. So: you advance the discipline as a priority, then you reform states.
> The fairest [would be] obviously to allow voting for everyone
Certainly not, you are playing on a shade of meaning of "obvious" (i.e. "apparent"): that is strongly unfair to the gifted, cultivated etc. - it is unfair in terms of merit. And it is unfair to those who want an optimal system at their residence, etc.
You introduce weighted votes. Your vote carries more weight, the higher educated you are and the younger you are. This could be as simple as adding (85-age)/100 points to a vote for age, and GPA(or higher education = 5)/5 as a bonus for intelligence.
Then, as duly, you ask "what is under scrutiny and test wrong with the draft proposal, and fix and improve, iteratively"... There are a number of clear weaknesses in the above post already.
Repeat: there is a whole academic discipline about optimal voting. But it must become a real concern...
> There are a number of clear weaknesses in the above post already.
You mean my post? I'd say the weakness in what I propose are no where near as bad as the weaknesses in the system we currently have.
> there is a whole academic discipline about optimal voting.
And I would never discard that or the results of the relevant research, but I genuinely think the system we have in place is too flawed, to fundamentally broken, to really make progress or fix things. Half the country literally considered anything from any legitimate source that clashes with their beliefs as 'fake news'.
How does academia suggest this problem should be addressed?
Yes, and that's why democracy is honestly pretty terrible, despite all the championing it gets its still a tyranny of the majority. It can only really function with a well intentioned and educated population, and half or more of the US population is anything but.
Do you think that not considering Russia a main cyber threat is a wrong decision? Why?
Article gives no clear answer to why would it will make everything worse.
It does, however, speculate on how it may be a bad decision, but no one knows for sure.
This comes just weeks after security analysts sounded the alarm on Sandworm stealing credentials and data from American organizations. Sandworm is the operations wing of Russia's Military Intelligence Unit 74455, part of the GRU, that has been blamed for waging cyberwarfare against America's critical infrastructure.
That 'graph links directly to:
"Two Russians sanctioned over cyberattacks on US critical infrastructure" (22 July 2024)
Let's dispense with the asking of facile questions readily answered within the article itself or very proximate resources. It is at best strongly disingenuous.
Democracy works proportionally to the good implementation of sub-systems that maximize the quality of decisions (e.g. checks and balances, election of the electors, education etc.).
Otherwise, it is not a value per se: that would be a "tyranny of the majority".
It's always a tyranny of the majority, just hopefully with enough checks and restrictions in place to stop the worst crowd/mob impulses from having an effect.
Read the original as "[sheer] tyranny of the majority" then. But no, given correct conditions you will manage to have decision making which is collectively beneficial and acceptable.
> given correct conditions you will manage to have decision making which is collectively beneficial and acceptable.
Only if the population is sufficiently educated and good intentioned, and even then it's still the will of the majority, but because it's not a negative result it isn't considered a tyranny.
The crucial importance of education was mentioned in the original post, and "good intention" is implied as an effect of proper education. "Tiranny" in the intented context ("tiranny of the majority") is close to the actual meaning of the term, of "unfair power" (that of the usurper: illegitimate, hence dubious).
But the point is, a proper decision system boosts optimality at most "under inspiration" from the preferences of the voters, but not bound to that. Those voters may not even be a "majority"; there are many implementations (already forms of "ranked preferences") in which the idea of "majority" largely loses its meaning, etc.
> "Tiranny" in the intented context ("tiranny of the majority") is close to the actual meaning of the term, of "unfair power" (that of the usurper: illegitimate, hence dubious).
I mean it closer to 'unjust rule'. For example, Jim Crow laws were an example of tyranny of the majority, and that power was not sized illegitimately. If the majority really wanted to restore something like that, there isn't any system in place that would stop them, not ranked choice voting, nothing - we have to rely on good education so they wouldn't want to do that, but we would need a clean slate to do that as well.
To many people are poorly educated, and raise their kids to be skeptical of education. That's such an immense problem that I'm not sure the US can really recover.
If we were starting from a clean slate, where everyone was well educated, it should work in theory, but even so I think we can have a much better system to any form of democracy we have now.