mob rule by joystick

Plato, Plato thought up, direct democracy. Not that big a deal, if he hadn’t put it into writing, the next guy down the pike would have. It’s a simple idea just sitting there on the road to civilization. I remember reading a letter to the editor in the U of I student newspaper on the subject maybe thirty years ago when computers were just beginning to become ubiquitous.

It seems like computers are what’s giving this idea it’s current popularity. It sounds so easy. If you can buy a book on Amazon why can’t you vote the same way?

Well there are problems with implementation, but the biggest problem is the one that came to Plato maybe five minutes after he thought it up, most people are stupid. I daresay I’m sure the founding fathers were well aware of this problem when they wrote up the constitution. For a guy who reveres the constitution you seem to spend a lot of time thinking of alternatives to it.

Those microchips though, that seems pretty heretical for a libertarian. Most of those guys can’t even deal with a national identification card. It’s also not popular among some of the more lefty elements of my own party. Myself I think it’s no big deal. This Snowden thing, I think he was right to expose government wrongdoing, but I don’t mind that much the government spying on us.

Back to those microchips, no matter how carefully you implemented it, there is no way to prevent them from being fucked with. Anyway voter fraud, in the sense of people voting who shouldn’t be, or people voting more than once is not a very big problem. If you have been following this controversy where the reps are trying to make it harder to vote, you know that sort of fraud almost never happens. The kind of fraud where some government group fakes returns happens far more often and is much more powerful, and doing things by computer would make that so much easier.

I can’t visualize that plan of yours, especially the part about how we can knock out congress and still have the constitution. The congress is probably half of the constitution, so if you tear that out, you will only have half left, and then you will have to change everything else around to make up for that absence, and in the end you may have some piece of paper, but it will not be the constitution.

Hah, debate on tv, bars, coffee shops, street corners, makes me think you don’t get out much.

Have you seen the level of debate that goes on in those venues? And the internet, I know you have seen the level of debate (present company obviously excluded) that goes on there.

I’ve heard that joke before of course, I’ll wager it goes back to the invention of the automobile.

There is a similar one about a bus full of lawyers going off a cliff and the tragedy was that there was an empty seat. It used to go around with a more politically incorrect set of victims.

I think your problem in short is, that you think people are too stupid to vote for congress (and I agree with you here), but you think they are smart enough to sit at home and run the country plinking on their computers (which is where I disagree with you).