After seven years of Brexit talks, Europe has emerged as the clear winner

Re:After seven years of Brexit talks, Europe has emerged as ... by yamtaddle on Tuesday March 07, 2023 @05:49PM (#35062424)

"The best argument against Democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."

— Winston Churchill (probably not, actually, but it's usually attributed to him)

Or just read any poli-sci research concerning voters. It's basically all horrifying and/or depressing.

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Re:After seven years of Brexit talks, Europe has emerged as ... by throw0101c on Tuesday March 07, 2023 @06:28PM (#35062895)

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." — H. L. Mencken, A Little Book in C major (1916)

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Re:After seven years of Brexit talks, Europe has emerged as ... by belos on Wednesday March 08, 2023 @03:00AM (#35066457)

This is absolutely one of my favorite quotes, because it’s both true, and points to what we need, which is better systems. I’m currently writing out a design for a better system! At the moment I’ve published some work toward it, including commentaries on some of the major problems a new design needs to resolve. Some of the key ones include the dilution of representation, which means that emotional appeals have a much easier time driving voter behavior, bundled governance, which means we get far less expertise among our policymakers, and lack of justifiable governance - we don’t have to prove that our rules do what we intended them to do.

I’d love to invite more folks to give feedback and think about some of these ideas. It is possible to design a better system, but somewhere along the way we sort of gave up on doing more than incremental reform. I'm currently still laying foundations, but hope to be laying out a worked out proposal within the next few months.

https://bestofagreatlot.substack.com/p/a-beginning https://bestofagreatlot.substack.com/p/table-of-contents

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Re:After seven years of Brexit talks, Europe has emerged as ... by shagie on Wednesday March 08, 2023 @10:15AM (#35069971)

> This is absolutely one of my favorite quotes, because it’s both true, and points to what we need, which is better systems.

To which one would reply...

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…

https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/the-worst-form...

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Re:After seven years of Brexit talks, Europe has emerged as ... by belos on Wednesday March 08, 2023 @11:49AM (#35071340)

People often use this to imply that we can't make better things. That's a really sad belief. I will agree that it's tremendously hard, and requires enormous care, but the Founders of the US weren't gods. They didn't have perfect knowledge of all possible ways of organizing things. With science we say we stand on the shoulders of giants, and I think it's possible to do so in this realm too.

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