ep1032

I think your game may have frustrated some people.

sayyeddy, PLEASE READ this

Should we let the police take control of the streets again despite their obvious treason to us Egyptians?

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NONONONONONONONOONNONONOONONONONONONO. This is the worst thing you could possibly do. The protests are only as successful as they are right now, because the people have literally taken control of the streets and communities back from the government. The police are an extension of Mubarak's government, which coincidentally, is why they have been so willing to attack and kill the civilians they are supposed to protect. Do you think this would suddenly change if you gave them power over your community again? If you hand your community back to police patrol, you quite literally will be handing the country back to Mubarak. You are protesting against Mubarak, why would you even consider giving him and his underlings their power back?

True democracy starts in the small communities. The armed watches you are forming to defend your suburb is exactly what you should be doing. Make sure that the members of your community have a say in your town watch, try to keep the people as involved in helping one another as possible, appoint your own force of police officers. As more and more communities follow these same steps, and work with each other to help each other out, then you will have the real seeds of democracy planted in your country.

Did I just watch a 5 second film, in text form?

I'm going to answer your question starting with a brief preface

There have always been and always will be individuals with more social sway than others, and via what is essentially a Darwinian processes, individuals with more social power than their peers will be able to grow that power over time. Historically, these individuals, families and organizations would ultimately seek to either join or become the government.

To state this another way, it is in the individual's self interest to accumulate wealth and power at the expense of their fellow citizen (in most situations). As such, individuals rarely rescind their power or wealth. Governments, being collections of individuals, therefore also have a tendency to not relinquish power and wealth.

This means that regardless of your type of government or economic system, if your goal is to equal the playing field between the most influential and the least in government, you need to discern a way of actively counter-actings this basic trend/force of human social interaction. This is made more important, as government by its very nature, is a tool that can be used to either entrench, or levy the distribution of power and wealth within a society, as it sees fit.

So to get to your question: ways that have been tried to actively mitigate the unfair advantage, by creating a competing social force?

Capitalism in a democracy or (to a lesser but still large degree) representative democracy is particularly interesting because it actually does have such a mechanism built intrinsically in. The individuals within the society who are most focused on power or financial aggregation are incentived to go into the private sector, with those most so inclined to enter similar sectors. Because modern capitalistic business practices usually result in a hierarchical business structure, this results in these individuals, largely, rarely managing to significantly public influence. While these individuals will certainly acquire more wealth that could be used on government, and results in the individuals at the top of the pyramid having significantly undue political influence, this stands in stark contrast to most historical forms of (widely authoritarian, monarchic, dictatorial, fascist, theocratic, etc) forms of government, where the most obvious route for an individual to aggregate power and money was via joining the government. So on the larger scale of things, we've built a structure that naturally diverts many who are the most likely or willing to utilize an unfair advantage in government, from actually initially joining government, at least, comparatively to the past.

Modern Liberalism similarly attempts this goal, but by a completely different mechanism. The implicit understanding here, is that government can and may/will be used to entrench the interests of those with the most influence. However, the government, in the interest of retaining this power, will seek stability by placating its populace. Therefore, if you highly educate the people in the liberal arts, the people will, over time, force the government to continually act for the people, in manners that are not in the interest of those with the most influence, regardless of the actual governmental type in place.

Communism - The goal here was to go for the endgame. Modern society is fundamentally structured so that there will always be people with undue influence, and that this is in and of itself is the problem that should be fixed. If, however, you changed the economic rules of the society completely, perhaps so that people had no need to accrue undue power/influence/money over their fellow man, then as a result, you could mitigate the effects of individuals having an unfair say in government.

Unfortunately, as your high school history teacher most certainly told you, there were a few problems with this approach. firstly, the initial wave of communistic states occurred at roughly the same time that the capitalistic states actually began placating their people in a way not seen in the 100 years previous. The golden age, and two world wars led to the rise of the capitalistic middle class, and that became and still is the benchmark for every successful, rich, society. Secondly, communism is the single most complicated attempt at government ever devised, and relies massively on understanding human psychology, sociology and economics to achieve its goals. Psychology and sociology are both forms of science that are extremely recent studies, and early attempts at communism simply got many basic ideas wrong. But by far most importantly, Marx and many others recognized that transitioning from a capitalistic state to a more utilitarian one would require in forcibly stripping many people of their power, and redistributing and creating many new social structures. As a result, they argued that following a revolution there should be a "vanguard" party to oversee this process, which would then one way or another assimilate itself back into the new classless society. Of course in practice, this vanguard party never gave up power, and either through grasps for power to combat the inability to compete with the West for material goods, or purely out of the machinations of its internal, most power hungry members, usually became an authoritarian ruling class.

The other half of the Communists, the post-collapse/revolutionary communists/socialists, and all of (modern (post 1940s)) Anarchism Not all communists believed the way previously described represented the best or even a coherent way of ending the "unfair advantage." The list of ideas and schools of though on how to achieve this goal, while not falling into the same trappings of the 20th century states, are long. My history is very sketchy here, so I'm going to concentrate on modern Anarchism, as I believe the general level I'll mention here covers this entire category.

The understanding here is that communism, whatever its faults, had at its goal mitigation of the "unfair advantage", and that should still be attempted. However, in the post-USSR world, we can clearly see that relying on a vanguard party is unreliable. As such, the population itself should be educated in an anti-authoritarian manner, as a direct check to whichever form of government they create. If the population is incited to stand against authoritarian or undue influence within their own society, to an aggressive enough level, social inequality, and thereby "unfair influence" can be massively mitigated. This usually results in a basic philosophical debate. One side points to the tendency of modern democracies to flirt with fascism as a sign that fascist leadership is intrinsic to human nature, and attempting to foster an anti-authoritarian populace may be wishful thinking (while else are the poor such stalwart supporters of the rich?). The other side generally discards this, as modern fascism only becomes politically tenable with large corporate interest. That is to say, if the inequality was mitigated first, then enough of the populace might be able to ensure utilitarianism, but it is the inequality we have now that tends towards fascism, not human nature.

Regardless, there have been two different anarchistic countries founded, one in Southern Russia (The Free Zone), and one in Spain. I believe both were conquered by the larger nation states within ~2-5 years, so we don't know how those ideas would have played out.

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There are of course many small societies that have tried many different systems, I tried to keep this post somewhat modern, and on the size of governments of the modern nation-state. I'm also just done writing : )

Why is it giving you fits? We need to stop pretending that the w3c has ever been the organization we have ever wanted it to be (remember xhtml?), and start giving credence to WHATWG. And in order to make that effective, we need to push people back towards firefox. The game is the same as its ever been. We've just slid backwards these last few years because Google tricked people into thinking that because Chrome was open source (and they'd do no evil (that promise is long gone)), that using Chrome was the same as supporting a browser / backing organization that was truly free, instead of giving support to MS 2.0.

As a result Google + Microsoft have as much combined power and are acting just as against the public interest as Microsoft had in the bad old days... the days which gave birth to Mozilla.

So back to Mozilla we must go, and to the WHATWG we must swing.