Category Archives: Democracy

Why Do We Give These People So Much Control Over Our Lives

In one of the most mind boggling moments in American politics ever, Florida Governor Rick Scott refused to debate his opponent, former Florida Governor Charlie Crist, because……..Crist placed a fan underneath his podium.

Scott claims that the rules forbid any electronics on stage, however Crist says that the rules didn’t ban fans on stage. Scott wouldn’t come on stage for four minutes and then after Crist ripped into him for being petty, Scott eventually came on stage.

Question is, why are we electing people who cry about fans and give them so much control over our lives?

I’m one of the original co-founders of The Liberty Papers all the way back in 2005. Since then, I wound up doing this blogging thing professionally. Now I’m running the site now. You can find my other work at The Hayride.com and Rare. You can also find me over at the R Street Institute.

Democracy != Consensus

As I’ve mentioned on several occasions, I work in the mainstream corporate world. One of the key aspects of any corporate environment is that in any decision, there are multiple stakeholders who are affected and may be responsible for implementing a decision, so there is a lot riding decision-making process.

As a result, and as it’s a large multinational company, significant resources are spent on training for both individual contributors and managers on all sorts of workplace topics. Decision-making, dealing with change, conflict management, and very simple things like “making meetings work” are all things that individuals and managers strive to improve.

And two concepts come up consistently when it comes to decision-making:

  1. Consensus.
  2. Buy-in.

Now, perhaps these sound to those of you outside the corporate world like throwaway terms, but if you’ve seen what happens when you don’t have them, you’d agree that these are absolutely key to keeping a well-running organization alive. Trying to implement a decision if you don’t have buy-in is a recipe for failure. It requires top-down authoritarian leadership, leads to resentment and infighting, and will turn a workplace dysfunctional over time. In a competitive market, these things will kill a business.

However, one of the key aspects to all of these training classes is that consensus is not borne of democracy. Voting on something might make a decision, but it by itself does not get you to consensus or to buy-in.

I’ll use an example. Let’s say someone’s birthday is coming up, and everyone (we’ll assume 11 people) is going to go out to lunch together. The question is where:

  • 4 of the people really want Mexican food and hate Korean BBQ.
  • 4 of the people really want Korean BBQ and hate Mexican food.
  • The three remaining people are lukewarm to both and don’t really care.

In a democratic choice, the decision will be whether to go to Mexican or Korean BBQ, and the decision will hinge specifically on the people who care the least. No matter what decision is reached, 4 people will be angry and will feel like they’re being ram-rodded into something they don’t want to do. It’s the tyranny of the majority, and it’s a completely dysfunctional way to make decisions.

Can you imagine that those 4 will be a bit surly at lunch? And when the bill comes due, who do you think might be the most likely to just be a “dollar or two short” or will scour the bill for their share saying “well I just had water, so we should each pay our share rather than splitting it equally.” People who do that are annoying enough as it is; bringing people who are angry to be there in the first place will only exacerbate the problem.

What’s a better way to do it? To discuss, to make sure everyone’s concerns are voiced, and to arrive at a decision that’s mutually agreeable. Often that might not be Mexican food OR Korean BBQ. It might be the hip new Peruvian joint that people have been dying to try. It might be Chili’s . But you work to find a solution that everyone can feel comfortable with, or you will have a crappy lunch despite the fact that some people “won”. That doesn’t mean consensus is easy. In fact, it’s far from it. But it’s absolutely key to keeping an organization–or a country–running smoothly.

Now ask yourself — how is our political system set up to work? Via democracy or via consensus?

Bring Reading Rainbow Back for Every Child, Everywhere.

First thing… THIS is how you do a kickstarter.

This is the kind of thing that kickstarter can be great at, and do great things with; being done by people who understand their medium and their audience, and who design their campaign properly around it.

If this doesn’t become one of the most overfunded kickstarters in history, I would be amazed.

I’ve been watching it for about 2 hours, and it’s gone from $100k to over $500k in that time.

… And this is something I’m backing… even as little as I can afford right now. It’s a good idea, and it’s something I’d like to see done. I can’t do much, but I pledged… It’s the price of a cup of coffee or a little more than a gallon of gas. You should too if you can.

Anything we can do to increase the net level of education, intelligence, and reading in this country… on this planet… we should be doing. If it’s a smart, well designed, well implemented way of doing so, even better.

Long term, I’d like to see what their fee schedule and sustainability model is, are they organizing long term as for profit, not for profit etc… but let’s get this off the ground at the very least.

Now… for my more skeptical, and more conservative friends and readers… yes, liberals, education blah blah blah.

THIS IS A GOOD THING – IGNORE THE POLITICS

This is an essentially libertarian thing, using the power of private enterprise and initiative, and the power of market preference, to fund education. Using market research tools, they can evaluate the preference share for education, find a way to use funds properly, and ignore the noise coming from politics.

WE WANT MORE OF THIS. LOTS MORE OF THIS.

There is one specific issue that I personally have a problem with… but I can get over it, because I understand the issue, and why it’s presented as it is.

So for my fellow skeptics, and numbers geeks…

Ignore the claim that 25% of children don’t learn to read in this country…

That is not an outright lie… it’s also not the absolute truth. It’s a matter of how we define literacy, and to what degree we count someone literate based on that definition.

That’s a concept that takes more than 30 seconds, and more than one paragraph to explain… so it gets simplified here as “1 in 4 children don’t learn to read”.

It a political number, not a real number. A classic example of using definitions to make things scarier, to emphasize the problem.

Don’t let that stop you from the core message here, or from supporting what looks to be an excellent idea.

Oh and, be sure to watch the video to the very end… priceless…

I am a cynically romantic optimistic pessimist. I am neither liberal, nor conservative. I am a (somewhat disgruntled) muscular minarchist… something like a constructive anarchist.

Basically what that means, is that I believe, all things being equal, responsible adults should be able to do whatever the hell they want to do, so long as nobody’s getting hurt, who isn’t paying extra

The own goal of Okcupid

The ousting of Brendan Eich from his post as CEO of the Mozilla Foundation is seen by many as a blow against intolerance. It is in fact the opposite, and if gay rights groups expand such ‘outings’ as a tool to suppress opposition, they risk deepening the antagonism and resistance by people who view them as a threat to our culture.

Let us start by examining Eich.  Eich is a well regarded software developer, one of the numerous people whose brilliant inventions have made the Internet the powerful, revolutionary tool it is.  In 1995, he was hired by Netscape to produce a tool for an upcoming release.  Rather than producing the limited implementation that his bosses had envisioned, Eich invented a new scripting language, now known as Javascript.  Javascript allowed local browsers to execute code to control browser behavior.  It revolutionized the Internet; rather than browsing through static web pages served by an overworked server, it allowed a website to push logic such as form validation to a user’s computer, allowing web pages to become dynamic entities that interacted with a user.  Javascript continues to be actively developed and is used universally to this day. Anyone who spends more than a few hours on the Internet a week is almost certain to benefit from it, and thus is the beneficiary of Eich’s wonderful invention.

Given his nearly two decades of experience in maintaining and improving a critical piece of the Internet infrastructure, Eich was a logical choice to lead the Mozilla foundation.  The flagship product of this non-profit is the Firefox browser, which traces its lineage to the Netscape browser, and Eich had been one of the people who had shepherded the project as it grew like a phoenix from the ashes of a defunct company.

Now let us turn to the OKcupid complaint that was served to people using Firefox.

Mozilla’s new CEO, Brendan Eich, is an opponent of equal rights for gay couples. We would therefore prefer that our users not use Mozilla software to access OkCupid.

Politics is normally not the business of a website, and we all know there’s a lot more wrong with the world than misguided CEOs. So you might wonder why we’re asserting ourselves today. This is why: we’ve devoted the last ten years to bringing people—all people—together. If individuals like Mr. Eich had their way, then roughly 8% of the relationships we’ve worked so hard to bring about would be illegal. Equality for gay relationships is personally important to many of us here at OkCupid. But it’s professionally important to the entire company. OkCupid is for creating love. Those who seek to deny love and instead enforce misery, shame, and frustration are our enemies, and we wish them nothing but failure.

If you want to keep using Firefox, the link at the bottom will take you through to the site.

However, we urge you to consider different software for accessing OkCupid.

Now, let us be clear: the complaint against Eich had nothing to do with his job. Firefox was not an anti-gay software platform.  In fact, I doubt that it’s codebase contains any logic pertaining to sexual orientation.

The Mozzilla Foundation produces open source tools that allow people to publish informsation and communicate with each other via the Internet.  If anything the Mozilla Foundation has and will continue to help members of marginalized groups or groups that are discriminated against to connect with and support each other.

That wasn’t going to change with Eich at the helm.

So, OKCupid wasn’t upset at the way Eich was doing his job, they wanted to fire him because they hated that he had once supported a political movement they hated. They wanted nothing but failure for him.

But what was his crime?  The political movement he had given $1,000 to that lost in the courts.  Proposition 8 cratered.  Completely.  And with changing demographics, it will be decades before something like it has a chance of winning at the polls and being upheld by the courts.

In short what the senior officers of OKCupid were hoping to do was to intimidate the opponents of gay marriage into silence.  Rather than being gracious victors who foster peace, they wished to continue fighting.  And in doing so, they will only embolden their opponents in the culture war to fight harder.

Most of the opponents of gay marriage fear the cultural upheaval that would result from such a massive change to an institution that they see as the foundation of society.  The way to get them to accept the change is by showing them that the inclusion of homosexual relationships in the set of legally sanctioned unions will not destroy society, that their lives will continue, their communities prosper, and their children will be allowed to grow to realize their potential.

Attempting to destroy their livelihoods and drive them out of civil society will go against that goal.  Persecuting them will only harden their hearts against those who persecute them.   OK Cupid did not strike a blow for tolerance.  Rather, they flamed the fires of intolerance, and who knows what those flames will consume should those fires burn out of control.

I am an anarcho-capitalist living just west of Boston Massachussetts. I am married, have two children, and am trying to start my own computer consulting company.

As Painful As Possible, For As Many As Possible

I haven’t blogged about the shutdown, because, well, I haven’t blogged much about anything. Mea culpa.

I haven’t had time because I’m, quite frankly, not personally or professionally affected. Warren Meyer of Coyote Blog, however, is very personally AND professionally affected. Warren operates private concession operations that handle all on-site activities at parks, with a good portion of his business based upon federal parks.

These parks use no federal employees. They don’t require any federal dollars to operate. In fact, they pay rent to the federal government as part of the terms of their lease. So of all things, you’d think that the Feds would want them to remain open. In fact, in all previous shutdowns (including 1995 & 1996), they have remained open.

Not this time. They’ve been ordered to close.

I can’t do justice to all the coverage that already exists for this. While I assume many of my readers are also daily readers at Coyote Blog (and Popehat), I can’t be sure.

All of Warren’s post on this topic can be found here. Check them out, please. You will not be disappointed.

As it pertains to the shutdown, I have little patience for the Republicans here. The Republicans are playing a gambit they can’t win. The Dems are NOT going to defund or delay Obamacare. This is stupid on strategic and tactical levels. You can’t win and you’re going to damage your brand in the process. WTF are you thinking?!

But what I see from the Obama administration is wrong on many more levels. It seems that the administration’s tactic here is to screw as many people as possible, to make this as painful as possible, and then hope the blame rests only on the Republicans for what the administration has done. There is no reason to close these privately-operated parks. There’s no reason to throw people out of their homes because they rest on federal land. There’s no reason to close open-air memorials that don’t require human workers to operate. While I’m not sympathetic to Republican partisans, I have to say that naming the barriers that closed the World War II memorial “Barrycades” is quite smart.

I’m still filled with nothing but disgust for everyone in Washington. Both sides are angling for a “win”. I want to see both sides lose, dammit!

Unfortunately, I know that in Nov. 2014, lawmakers from both parties will probably enjoy >90% re-election rates. And people wonder why I say that democracy doesn’t work?

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