Why should I believe that? Churchill certainly could not have possibly accounted for every form of government ever to be conceived of then or in the future. It’s magnificent oratory, but it’s not a considered proposition.
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@Kimmo started up a thread off to the side where we’re [discussing actual options.] (Operation Turning Scum Tide) 
Unfortunately, the alternative to democracy is some form of coercion – someone makes decisions on someone else’s behalf “for their own good”.
I don’t trust such systems because obviously there’s a lot of incentives for those empowered to make decisions to favor themselves at the expense of those whose good they are supposedly serving.
My take on Dunning’s research is not that democracy is a bad system, but that our society is too complex for most people to understand. Democracy might work fine in a less complex society. Maybe the answer is to try to reduce the complexity of society instead of doing away with democracy.
Reducing complexity has many other benefits besides potentially allowing for democracy.
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You’re sure of this? No room for discussion?
He didn’t even really say it, anyway.
Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…
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Maybe, and I intend to read it at some point, but I think it’s unreasonable to expect me to go through that whole thread right now to understand wtf you are talking about.
Could you just give me a quick synopsis of what might constitute a non-coercive non-democratic system?
So ‘other options are on the table, just not right now in this part of the conversation’.
Got it! 
No, they’re on the table, I just don’t know what they are and you’re being unnecessarily cryptic about it.
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There’s only like a dozen posts in the thread. It’s not ‘cryptic’, I was just figuring it was silly to go into a huge string of details and derail this thread when there was a conversation on that topic right over there.
Right off the bat, there’s creating a system where laws can be open-sourced. There’s also the concept of people choosing the system they’re in rather than being born into it. There are a whole bunch of other options that haven’t been discussed that don’t involve ‘some sort of coercion’ above and beyond what Democracy does.
I’m not sure how ‘some sort of coercion’ is somehow a special issue for any idea other than democracy, so I figured I’d point to examples rather than just disagreeing blindly.
It’s fascinating to me how much trash talk there is against the alt right and dark enlightenment guys in particular when a bunch of lefties here actually came up with exactly the same political system as Mencius Moldbug.
I’m using democracy (note small “d”) to denote “rule by the people”, i.e. any system where the people who are ruled are also doing the ruling.
In any system where those ruled are not also doing the ruling, it seems obvious to me that those who are ruled will be ruled by someone else, and that such a system is necessarily more coercive than a system in which those who are ruled also do the ruling.
Edit: Having read the other thread, I don’t see how what you describe there is not a democratic form of government. Also, a big part of your proposal is basically the same as mine: reduce cognitive complexity of political decision making.
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See, I still think that democracy (everyone votes to create a set of rules that everyone is supposed to follow) is pretty coercive.
Oh yeah, big part of it…but I’m pretty sure ‘people vote for the system of government they want to be part of with their feet and aren’t trapped in the same one for their whole lives’ doesn’t really fit the contemporary definition of democracy or anything else that’s been tried thus far. Plus people can choose non-democratic governance that way, they just can also choose to leave it.
Democracy is still a birth nation lottery, after all, right?
I figure I’m not qualified to pick a system for everyone, but I sure as heck can design frameworks that let people move around well. That’s been an odd trend in my work history!
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Meanwhile in Seattle the city council will happily let you build an apartment building or even a boarding house micro housing unit anywhere (except maybe right next door to their own house of course). The problem is that if you force a neighborhood like Capitol Hill to stay small i.e. prevent development, you just make it more expensive and exclusive. Keep the zoning at 4 story buildings and the cost of an apartment will just multiply by the number of units they didn’t get to build. The ultimate expression of the author’s idea is the tunnel they have been trying to build for the last few years. Even if Bertha hadn’t broken down, the cost will still top what they’ve allowed. And who will profit hugely in the end? the few developers who own real estate along the viaduct. Once the viaduct is gone they will see their properties go up by leaps and bounds. All because the public built them an (estimated) $4.25 Billion tunnel.
Even if one were to accept your premise that urban planning has failed (at what? how badly?) there’s no reason to think giving up on it would produce better outcomes.
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Not surprising, given that the folks who’ve got the time and resources to take any part in such planning activities are all clustered at the same end of the economic spectrum.
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It really depends on which rich people you are talking about. San Francisco has enough people who are both rich and smart that they can take a long term perspective and do things like encourage transit and walkability. Even Ed Lee, the most developer friendly mayor in recent history, is solidly behind high density.
Out in the suburbs filled with rich idiots, yes they tend to shoot themselves in the foot and wall themselves off from everything that makes life worth living.
Sounds like they’re not very serious or dedicated ones then.
Its really a matter of who is participating in the decision making process. Usually what happens is you get a small, wealthy but very vocal group guiding the decisions at the expense of everyone else. When that happens gentrification is encouraged as a way to displace the poorer segments of a given community. Its less democracy than it is people taking advantage of opaque local political situations.
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Agreed, but I still don’t think the answer is to try to prevent or suppress people participating in the governance of their own communities.
I looked into this for Boston, and it doesn’t appear to be true there.
Can you please provide some concrete examples, or at least point me in the general direction? If you know specifics, it will speed up my research considerably. I’ll be happy to post what I learn here.
For Boston, the wealthiest neighborhood was literally under water 150 years ago. Beacon Hill was the wealthy neighborhood at the time, but the people who lived there slowly migrated to the Back Bay after it was filled in throughout the late 19th century. Back Bay’s wealthy neighborhoods have been around for a long time – longer than I would expect, really. On the other hand, I don’t think nouveau riche are flocking to Newbury St – they seem to be buying condos in the South End which was, until quite recently, solidly working class.
So I stand by the premise that rich neighborhoods are economically stagnant and decline as new wealth moves to more fashionable neighborhoods, which are inevitably mixed neighborhoods, but I am eager to have this disproven with evidence to the contrary.
And since that’s fixed, I’m putting the rent on this discussion thread up.
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