zumbrunn.com - Web Developer Extension for Firefox

Web Developer Extension for Firefox

Quite indispensable!

http://www.chrispederick.com/work/firefox/webdeveloper/

12.11.2004, 16:38

The Doom of Representative Democracy

Richard asks: Can democracy coexist with hierarchy?

"In envisioning a new democratic system, we might think we could do better than America's Founding Fathers, and design a liberal democracy with even stronger safeguards against the centralization of power. I suggest that we would be deluding ourselves. In the compromise between hierarchical government and popular sovereignty - which is the defining characteristic of liberal democracy - the tendency toward hierarchical centralization will always eventually win out. The forces pushing toward centralization - both elite pressures and legitimate concerns for efficiency - act relentlessly over time. In the contest between stone and water, the stone, no matter how strong, eventually succumbs to erosion."

"At its best, liberal democracy provides only a very limited version of democracy, and it always goes downhill from there, as regards responsiveness to popular sentiment. If we want to establish genuinely democratic societies, we need to look for models of governance that are not based the delegation of power to hierarchical institutions, and which enable people to participate directly in the process of setting the agendas of their societies."

I believe the criteria that causes modern democracies to suffer from erosion is not that they are "liberal democracies" but that they are "representative democracies". I hope Richard will use that term instead, since it is not the liberal characteristics that cause the erosion of democracy. While todays liberal democracies are representative democracies, they could also be direct democracies and not suffer from erosion.

Yes, I think it is possible to design a system that would be a direct democracy and that would not erode. The people can delegate law making to a legislature and the people can delegate the execution of decisions to an executive government. But they must not delegate the decision making and they must not delegate responsibility.

The people do not need leaders but instead must lead through initiatives and referendum. Initiatives to give binding orders to the executive and legislature and referendum to control and confirm that work of the executive and legislature.

Since in a direct democracy it's the people that make decisions, it would always be the people that decide which issues are put to a referendum. And ministers would lead their ministries and would never attempt to lead the people or make decisions for them.

I believe hierarchical direct democracies can escape erosion if the delegation of responsibility to higher levels always stays reversible. Never delegate the final decision making and never delegate responsibility.

Ultimately every people have the government they deserve.

21.06.2005, 03:01

Violence in a real democracy

More comments regarding "What is real democracy?" :

Yes, violence has to be part of the answer: Because in a "real democracy" the people have to be in control of "violence" and not be controlled by "violence".

But it can be a non-violent movement that forces an elite in power to surrender control over violence (because they cannot use it to defend it, otherwise they look like dictators in a banana republic to the rest of the world).

The people are in control of violence if they are the army. The ultimate power is military control and in a real democracy, power is with the sovereign individual. It's probably a dream to think that a society could get away without having a military force (although a very nice one). If the people do not control the army, they will be controlled by one.

To a very small extent, "violence" can be delegated to a professional police force. But any large and important security tasks cannot be delegated in a "real democracy" and have to be taken care of by the people.

Professional armies attract lunatics that will not hesitate to go to war. And they are socially unfair because they lure the economically weak to do the dirty work for an elite. Broad based obligatory militia forces ensure that the army will not be used against the people and, frankly, that it will not be used, period. After all, the best army is one where all the soldiers and officers do not want to be there.

21.06.2005, 13:42

Spamalot's will get spammed a lot

Fans of Monty Python's "Spamalot" who signed up for a newsletter on the Broadway musical's official Web site may end up getting, well, spammed a lot. A security glitch - now fixed - exposed the names and postal and e-mail addresses of more than 31,000 people to savvy computer users.

When told by e-mail message about the breach, several people who had signed up for the "Spamalot" list said they were unsurprised, given the state of Internet security and the aggressiveness of spammers. Several noted that there was something appropriately Pythonesque about the incident. After all, Internet historians say that the use of the word spam to refer to junk e-mail messages has its roots in a 1970 Monty Python sketch, in which all conversation in a cafe is drowned out by a group of Vikings chanting the word over and over. The sketch and its song about Spam, the meat product, were adapted for the new musical.

"Are you sure they didn't do it on purpose?" joked one list subscriber, Matthew J. H. Baya of Ellsworth, Me. "Talk about guerrilla marketing."

12.03.2005, 20:48

Le Conseil fédéral au Mont-Soleil

Les Sept Sages dans le Jura bernois.

Le Conseil fédéral a entamé ce matin sa course d'école de deux jours dans le canton de Berne. Après une excursion en bateau sur le lac de Bienne , les Sept Sages se sont rendus en hélicoptère au Mont-Soleil, au-dessus de St-Imier .

Les conseillers fédéraux sont ensuite montés à bord d'un char attelé pour rejoindre la centrale éolienne et solaire . Ils visiteront le bâtiment ainsi que l'obervatoire astronomique .

Ils découvriront ensuite le musée et la fabrique de montres Longines à Saint-Imier. Une rencontre d'une heure aura lieu avec la population. L'événement sera convivial et sans protocole.

30.06.2005, 18:37

The launching of launchd

Apple's Tiger brings a replacement for init, rc, the init.d and rc.d scripts, SystemStarter, inetd and xinetd, atd, crond, and watchdog to the Unix world. As slahdotted by JQuick, the new launchd "[...] the launchd plist files (short for property lists) contain a set of key/value pairs describing what to run, and when to run it. Beyond this, launchd defines keys which tailor how the program is run, all of which are optional. These include specifying: user and group by either name or uig/gid; working directory, chroot directory, a dictionary of environment variables, CPU niceness, umask. Do you want to limit how much memory or stack it uses, prevent it from wiring system memory? Do you want limit the number of children it can spawn, or treat its IO requests as low priority as urgent? Keys are available for that."

02.05.2005, 10:27