phil.edwards
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Commented on Remember to vote
Forgot my link. More on all this here (also, while I'm at it, here and here)....
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Commented on Remember to vote
Getting back to the OP and the illustration with three coffee-drinkers overruling seven beer-drinkers, it's worth pointing out that the winning plurality in Westminster elections has only actually been below 33.3% for 30 MPs since 1945 - a period in...
Comment Threads
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Feòrag commented on
Remember to vote
Alas, the Monster Raving Loony Party did not have a candidate in my bit of Scotland and if they did, it would have been on the regional list, along with the small party of which I am a member....
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Tangurena commented on
Remember to vote
Based on Duverger's law, first past the post voting systems will devolve into a 2 party political system - that's where the stable attractors are. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law The Tories would be interested in promoting such a system because that would effectively eliminate all those pesky little parties that they have to suck up to during coalitions. And they could get their wish of turning into America....
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Charlie Stross commented on
Remember to vote
Do any of you forward-thinking people really think democracy has a future? Contemplate what technocracy and the intelligence multiplier of increasingly omnipotent machine-man networks means for the future of political power. Technocracy, like the other great Futurist ideologies -- Fascism and Communism -- is the future of the 1930s, and always will be. It ain't gonna fly (at least not this century) because it has the besetting problem of the other absolutist doctrines: it requires its believers to approximate human beings to perfectly spherical entities of uniform density, and encourages them to chop off the irritating lumps and projections which...
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scentofviolets commented on
Remember to vote
Do any of you forward-thinking people really think democracy has a future? Contemplate what technocracy and the intelligence multiplier of increasingly omnipotent machine-man networks means for the future of political power. Technocracy, like the other great Futurist ideologies -- Fascism and Communism -- is the future of the 1930s, and always will be. It ain't gonna fly (at least not this century) because it has the besetting problem of the other absolutist doctrines: it requires its believers to approximate human beings to perfectly spherical entities of uniform density, and encourages them to chop off the irritating lumps and projections which...
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Charlie Stross commented on
Remember to vote
So what am I missing? Was it some sort of weird stuck-on bit, say eugenics or some other fallacious fad? Just the same old authoritarian shit: the idea that there's an ideology that delivers all the answers if only those pesky humans will live their lives in accordance with its demands. Humans who don't see this for the self-evident fact that it is are therefore malfunctioning and need to be whipped into compliance. See also: communism, nazism, etcetera. Technocracy was just another top-down managerialist doctrine, this time with rule by engineers rather than by the vanguard party or the brownshirts....
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