Demarchy, revisited

Steven Pinker claims that, historically, humanity is getting less and less violent.

I don't think I buy into that. I have to at least question both his data collection and his metrics. He weighs total casualties during periods of violence divided by total population at that time. There may be other parameters involved, I would at least hope, like making sure the casualty rate excluded death by disease, famine, and other privations. How would this metric work on historical natural disasters? Would the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923, which devastated Tokyo and Yokohama and claimed around 105,000 lives, be considered more violent than the 2010 Haiti earthquake, with 300,000 lives lost only because more people were around in 2010? That's silly.

But using this metric, Pinker classifies China's An Lushan revolt and civil war with a higher violence coefficient that WWII. Is that really kosher? Well, this commenter's bullshit detector went off.

Regardless, I would have had Pinker set his group of little grad students collecting and collating data on a much more important assertion, one that I hopefully am cherry-picking by counting the obvious affirmatives and ignoring the negatives, which is that, as the Russians say: "Whether salt water or fresh, shit floats to the top". Or, more succinctly, in order to succeed, you need to be an asshole.

Is human society that fucked up? Or the laws of natural selection? That you need to be an asshole to get ahead? Well, I think Pinker and his staff need to work on this.

If true, I think I have an empirical test for a systemic utopian fix. And it goes back to the idea of demarchy. I wrote an essay on this about a year ago. And a quick re-read of this suggests, wow, I've really got to brush up on my profane deprecative skills.

Now, I am not quite ready to say the democracy doesn't work. I am willing to say that the quick fixes, the bandaids, the simplistic solutions proposed will not work.

Term limits, for example, are completely fucking stupid. What term limits will do is to select for the most virulent, vile, corrupted asshole cocksuckers for office. Easily. Since money and politics are intimately connected, inextricable, always and forever entwined and entangled, whether it is election funds or taxpayer revenues, you will always, always have people who wish to feed at the public trough at the public expense. Term limits merely sets up an environment which further encourages public servants to get theirs while they can. So, these fixes are just fucking juvenile, and should be ignored.

But! But, I think I have a systemic solution and it amounts to this observation from nature: natural selection. When you select in nature, the filter is death and the filter is permanent, but the filter is done after the facts, or rather, the performance. And that filter, at the societal level, should be voting.

Problem is, we do it all wrong. We do it ass-backwards. What we should do, under the Kurman Variation of Demarchy is to vote people OUT of office, not into it.

So, quick review, demarchy is government by lottery, just like jury duty. It's not election time, it's selection time, and you, my dear, have been chosen by lot to serve. But, the main complaint about demarchy is, what if you get some idiot chosen by lot to serve in office? No problem. That's where elections come in.

You can still have recall elections, but you also have delections. And a delection is this:

"So we got Governor Titlapper in office and he wasn't recalled for being an insufferable cabbagehead, but he still sucks in some ways. Does he suck enough for removal? Yes or no?"

If he is not delected from office, he continues to serve. Otherwise, vote the bum out, his (or her) number is tossed aside, and we re-draw from the pool.

You got to admit, government by lottery is a heck of a lot more democratic than the current system we have. And who is to say you can't find wise, competent, and qualified people who are currently collecting food stamps. Because all you have to is look at the idiot millionaires currently fucking the country up, and say, Jesus, there's got to be better people out there than these asshole cocksuckers.