Oddbean

Their point about real democracy was that it suffered tyranny of the majority. But the thing is, the system they choose is the one that suffers from this problem. The federal government will eventually eat the US, with time. Swiss democracy is the only system with no tyranny of the majority. It has referendums every 3 months and thus no group can ever win constantly. There's no tyranny of the majority because there's no majority ever. You win today, you lose tomorrow, and on it goes. - 7 Principles of the Swiss Democracy - People's Veto Power (power to deny any law at any level) - Federalism (3 referendum levels, national, regional and local) - Open Lists (a.k.a vote in the people, not parties) - People's Initiatives (a.k.a let the people start new laws) - The Constitutional Referendums (a.k.a raising taxes always triggers a referendum) - Public Recalls (everybody can be removed from political positions) - Mixed Executive Government (parties work together)

When exactly, in the US? There's no tyranny of the majority in Switzerland because of the tools listed above. In other words: Optional Referendums: Citizens can reject laws passed by the government through petition. Federalism: Power is decentralized, letting regions make their own decisions. Open Lists and Panachage: Voters pick individual candidates, not just parties. People Initiatives: Citizens can propose new laws with enough signatures. And in another more pragmatic way: There is no clear majority because we have about 14 referendums every three months, totaling 60 per year at all levels: national, cantonal, and municipal. These cover very specific topics, such as whether to build a statue for X in our municipality, invest in nuclear energy in our state, allow states to define education infrastructure, or veto a specific law. In other words, the topics are so specific that they completely bypass the usual left-right, group-focused politics. You might win one referendum but lose another. No single group ever dominates because the people interested in referendums are always changing.

Interesting. We so have, in some fashion, similar tools in the US. Prob is a scaling issue: US has 300+ million citizens of diverse cultures across a large geography, switzerland has 9 million people of mostyl european ethnicity in a small strip of land the size of Virginia.

Yes, there are already some states in the US that have these tools. In terms of scalability I don't think there's any problems at all. These tools are blind to numbers, it's just a matter of adapting the signature triggers to the population of the US. Regarding adoption, it's the same as every other political change, bottom-up and top-down. I'm a big proponent of bottom-up first, i.e implementing the 7 Swiss political tools listed above in a municipality somewhere, sharing the results with the world on the internet and scaling from there. That's the whole idea why I've created the website, Discords, etc, to get the movement going. Are you interested in this kind of ideas? I honestly don't see any better alternatives to this. The alternative is just more polarization, conflict and wars, in the really dumb, brute force system that we have today.

Haha wow bro tbh I didnt even see your profile and that you had a website and this is literally your main thing. I thought was just shootin the poop with an average nostrich. Ill take a look at your stuff.. looks cool!

eheh, I am just "shooting the poop" too regardless :D But yeah, I'm also tired of the status quo and really believe we have to elevate the state of discourse, refining our political systems using all the available technological tools such as blockchains, Bitcoin, Web3, etc, etc. What tools are we missing to truly bring the change we want to bring to the world? You know what I mean?