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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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No, although I'm not sure how strongly I feel about that as it may be possible to design a direct democracy that doesn't have the problems that stem from its simplest form.

Part of making sure everyone feel represented is to structure the government to 50%+1 can't overrule the rest easily and not having direct democracy is part of how we do that. Although I suppose there's no reason you couldn't have non-representative democracy but still require a higher threshold than 50% or a more complicated threshold like 50% of every region for some definition of region (or some other way to slice the population?).

Ballot initiatives are a form of direct democracy and I do think they give a good alternative for when elected legislators fail to be representative... but they also don't provide a way to negotiate details or amend the text, so they often result in poorly written laws. For instance, for the states that voted on recreational marijuana via ballot initiative, those initiatives weren't just "should recreational marijuana be legal", they were "should recreational marijuana be regulated by rules X, Y, Z". Maybe you could have a technological solution to that looks something like liquid democracy and Git forks/pull requests on legislation... but no one has done that, so it's hard to know whether there's actually something feasible in that design space.

Well, it seems to me of the concern is about protecting minorities you do that by taking certain things out of the political process (eg bill of rights); not by how you decide the political process. Agree or disagree?

I'm not even sure what you're trying to say. I guess civil rights is a bare minimum I'd hope minority interests being represented in government to accomplish. But there's a lot more to representation than not having basic rights withheld from you.

Well, it seems you have two options.

Option 1 is remove government control of society so that minorities can rely on Beckerian economics of discrimination.

Option 2 is you have to give minorities outsized representation in the political scheme.