@feonixrift @freakazoid @dredmorbius @mathew @o

Democracy-as-we-know-it(-Jim), anyway.

Current implementations are tilted heavily (if not always obviously) towards protecting existing power-structures.

It's pretty easy to imagine small improvements that would significantly undercut this tendency, and not hard to design improvements that would do more than that.

@woozle @o @mathew @dredmorbius @feonixrift I think the big problem with democracy is that we treat it as if it has some magical power. Instead of fighting for human rights and rule of law, we fight for "democracy", even though the only rights democracy can protect by itself are the rights of the majority of the enfranchised, i.e. the people who least need it, and people will almost always vote *against* rule of law as long as it gets them what they want.

@feonixrift @dredmorbius @mathew @o @woozle I see democracy as a tool for implementing rule of law, because it allows succession of governments in a way that's always governed by law, whereas hereditary succession has always ended up with edge cases and conflicts. And of course can produce rulers who are so incompetent or evil that it causes revolutions where none were necessary (cf. the French and American revolutions).