I value having a cool head. I really do. I want wisdom and reason to prevail. But, Lord, I’ll tell you, I’m feeling hotheaded today. I’m hot under the collar and itching for action. I’m chaffing at the evil that’s happening right before our eyes.

I’m frustrated by the pundits and think tanks talking calmly about the erosion of our democracy and making distinctions between fascism and competitive authoritarianism. Today, right now, those reasoned commentaries and thoughtful discussions feel like lies.

Lies about the five-alarm fire before us. Talk when we need action.

I need to take some calming breaths.

I have two quotes circling around in my mind as I suffer over the deterioration of conditions in the United States. This captures pretty well our current state of affairs:

“When a clown enters the palace, the clown doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.”

– author unknown

If only the circus weren’t so damn dangerous.

I take comfort, however, when I think about this:

“Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while, a great wind carries me across the sky.”

– Ojibwe tradition

I think the only way I’m going to make it through this is to hold onto both perspectives and act accordingly.

TIL: Although the USA is not democratic, many of its member-states are.

Many of them have far more powerful democratic institutions than Switzerland or Republic of Ireland, and at more societal levels.

There are a few alternative voting systems to chose from, for how elections will work in democracies. Scoring seems to be the best one. But I haven't heard anybody discuss negative votes.

f people could turn up just to vote against a candidate, or against all candidates, then a lie more people would turn up to vote.

Additionally, very unpopular candidates would no longer win elections.

Take Trump vs Clinton for a good example. Both were very unpopular. Many people were not really voting for one, but against the other.

In a system with negative votes, both of them would have finished with negative totals. A third party candidate with the most broad support would have won.

This shows how a system with negative votes could lead to a better (and more democratic) outcome. But is there a flaw or drawback? Why is this type of system not more favoured?

If liberal societies are desirable because they strive to minimize coercion, parenting matters for our ability to maintain a liberal order. If we do not give kids the chance to develop the skills that come from unsupervised play, they are going to find it very difficult to generate cooperative, tolerant, and non-coercive approaches to both larger-scale institutional problems as well as smaller-scale “Ostrom moments.” So much of our interaction in the liberal order is in spaces not fully defined by formal rules nor enforced by formal mechanisms. Without practice at dealing with such situations, young people may struggle and ask for formal rules and enforcement, which will likely smother those informal spaces. More young people without the skills developed by unsupervised play might result in a severe coarsening of human social life. Changes in parenting can reduce the vulnerabilities of democracies.

The ability to solve low-level conflicts through peaceful means by the parties involved reduces private coercion, and thereby reduces the demand for more public forms of coercion. Free societies rest on a bedrock of informal conflict resolution and the skills necessary to make that happen may well be developed through forms of unsupervised childhood play. Declaring such play to be too risky is a decision fraught with risk, both to the well-being of children and to the society they will inhabit as adults.

The electorate would have the opportunity to vote on the military action, and refuse it. Or worse, if the democratic process takes several days, the government would have to turn the tanks around halfway through the invasion.

You would need to be fairly sure your invasion is justifiable (at least to your own subjects) before you start it.

It's just one of the more minor ways that democracy would improve the world.

Reading this, there seems to be a democratic process in Berlin's governance. That's great, I had no idea.

Other democracies I know about:

• switzerland
• california
• debatably ROI

Are there others?

Any thoughts about the differences between them, if one system works better than another?

This sounds to me like a good, a natural way of dealing with the major flaw in the current French constitution. France needs primaries, to function more like a democracy. And the popular parties have a strong incentive to make it happen.