duncan.keeling

Comment Threads

• 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...
• 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...
• 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....
• phil.edwards 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 which there have been 17 General Elections, and hence something in the region of 10,000 MPs elected. Only 10 of those 30 are English constituencies, and several of them involve extremely untypical three-way contests (Tory/Liberal/Nat Lib, Green/Lab/LD, Labour/LD/Respect, etc). Most of the time the numerical difference between the FPTP plurality and the AV majority just isn't that big, and a...
• phil.edwards commented on Remember to vote
  Forgot my link. More on all this here (also, while I'm at it, here and here)....