Pemanent minorities

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There is an issue with democracies that I touched upon a few times: 

/2017/10/overlapping-territorial-sovereignty.html

/2017/06/middle-east-and-democracy.html

The peaceful transition of power after a change of majority in an election (or even only after different parties forming a different coalition) is at the core of any democracy. The existence of permanent majorities and permanent minorities turns this feature moot.

A minority that's so very separated from the majority that it can never form a coalition with parts of a present majority in order to become part of a future majority has little reason to consider democracy's majority rule concept anything but permanent oppression.

This happens a lot in areas with strong tribal or sectarian divisions such as Africa or the Mid East. 

The most elegant solution is to achieve assimilation by the majority, but there are some tribes that maintained their separation for thousands of years (Samaritans, for example), and other minorities are so visibly different from the majority (Chinese-origin mountain people in Thailand, Whites in South Africa et cetera) that there's little hope of present minority and present majority feeling as one anytime soon short of extraterrestrials landing on earth with hostile intent.

The Western countries typically have ideological divisions rather than religious or ethnic ones, so I was very surprised to find an example of such a permanent minority problem undermining the perception of democracy's legitimacy in a (supposedly) Western country:

boingboing.net/2021/05/20/seven-rural-counties-in-oregon-have-voted-in-favor-of-seceding-to-idaho.html

My first reaction was to think of those wannabe separatists as immature crybabies who should learn that as an adult you can't always have your way. Then I realized that they believe that others will always have their way over them.

There's no doubt that the rural people there would be just fine permanently dominating the urban people, as can be observed in more rural American states without the cityfolk turning into separatist crybabies, but this doesn't change that this is a very, very dangerous undermining of democracy's legitimacy.

A deviation from plain majority vote towards a constitution with proportional governance (some offices reserved for rural people, de facto veto powers for both factions) might help, but this is a different case from religious or ethnic separations. Religious divisions in a proportional governance would arrive at a minimum consensus on religion-affected topics and ethnic divisions would arrive at a proportional allocation of resources or no gifts to either group as policy. The rural/urban divide in the U.S. is rather a divide between people who live in fear&hate fantasyland and social democrats. Almost nothing can get done if both had veto powers over the other all the time. Government would be paralyzed, on autopilot, completely incapable of rising to any challenge.

So ideological divisions may be able to become so bad that they create even worse dysfunctionality than ethnic or religious divisions, with subsequent worse delegitimization of a republic. 

 

The worst about this is that a common external enemy is a simple fix to cover up internal divisions. Wars might be risked or even waged to fight the national disunity. This worked a couple times in history (at least for short periods), and failed spectacularly in others (see Austria-Hungary).

S O
defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

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Overlapping territorial sovereignty

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There are two secession referendums almost at the same time, a good opportunity to finally write about an old idea of mine.

The core problem with a secession is in my opinion the instinct of the central government that loses power. It loses power over its supposedly own people, which makes its insistence unsympathetic.

It would be most desirable to find a way how poorly-devised borders could be redrawn peacefully and how to govern areas with very much fractured population effectively, peacefully and well.

example: Bosnia ethnic map in 1991. There was no obvious right way of drawing a border.
(c) Milan1237

another example: linguistic map of Iran

One way how people in a fractured region can live together is that one group or a coalition of groups dominates the region, with undesirable oppression of one or several other groups. That's a powder keg if the oppressed minorities are large enough, as can be seen in former Yugoslavia, in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Another way is proportionate representation. One group always gets the head of state office, another group always gets the head of government office, another group always gets the head of parliament office and so on. Minorities could also have political privileges, such as the Danish minority in Germany close to the Danish border.

I'd like propose a different way, one that might ease it for the central government to give up (some) control:

The classic idea of a state includes the concept of well-determined borders. These may be in dispute or poorly marked, but there's always the claim of unlimited sovereignty over a certain area on this planet. It's sometimes simply not possible to draw "correct" borders on a map without previous ethnic cleansing. So we need to give up this exclusive sovereignty concept if we want sustainable political order without oppression and without ethnic cleansing in the very ethnically fragmented areas of this world.

Think about a simple model: There are the countries A, B and C with corresponding ethnicities a, b and c. The ethnicity c lives in state C, but the states A and B have a dispute about a region where a and b live intermingled.

Now my proposal is to create a shared sovereignty over this area of intermingled ethnicities. The a people pay taxes to A and have an A passport, b do the same with B. Affairs between a and a would be settled by A (civil and criminal) law, affairs between b and b would be settled by B law. Affairs between a and b, a and c or b and c in the intermingled area would be settled by AB consensus law (devised by the political system of the population in the intermingled AB area with veto right for both A and B).

An attack of C against A would lead to A defending itself with a resources. An attack of C on B would lead to B defending itself with b resources. An attack of C on the intermingled AB territory would lead to A and B fighting back with a and b resources respectively.

Additionally, there should be an effort to emphasise programmatic politics in the AB area; the people should be divided in politics by left/right or other ideologies, not by ethnic divisions.

This model can be applied in regard to a secession as well. A secession  of a region would only happen if the regional majority ethnicity isn't the same as the ethnicity that dominates the central government. Thus there would be no veto necessary to protect that regional majority ethnicity, while the region's minority ethnicity would still enjoy minority protection through the former central government's veto right.

This is far from the traditional idea of how states work, but that traditional idea serves poorly in areas with intermingled populations. So mankind should keep looking for better ways of governance.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

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"Majority of terrorists who have attacked America are not Muslim, new study finds"

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"Majority of terrorists who have attacked America are not Muslim, new study finds"

independent.co.uk, Mythili Sampathkumar

"Right-wing extremists, often white supremacists, were responsible for 115 incidents within the same period. Events like Robert Dear’s killing of three people at a Colorado Planned Parenthood women's health clinic in December 2015 for offering abortion services would fall into this category.  In terms of police action, 76 per cent of the Islamist incidents were thwarted versus just 35 per cent of the right-wing extremist incidents.  Sting operations were used in nearly half of the Islamist-related incidents, a rate four times higher than police operations on right and left-wing extremist acts."

Keep in mind "sting operations" are under criticism because they may provoke people into becoming terrorists who would not have done anything like that without such motivation by the FBI. The statistic may thus be inflated by "sting" ops.

"More people died in the Islamist incidents, a total of 90 due to mass shootings like the one in Fort Hood, Texas in 2009. However, around 33 per cent of right-wing extremist incidents involved deaths versus 13 per cent of Islamist terror acts. They also caused 79 deaths."

The notion that Islamic jihad ideology terrorism is much more lethal is actually widespread, and evidently wrong. The attention paid (most of the time, not these few days) is also out of proportion regarding the lethality.

"The evidence appears to belie Donald Trump’s rhetoric, however.  The report said that Mr Trump’s “fixation” on “radical Islamic terrorism” is “irrational”."

It is, and that's important. Such evidence reveals who has the capacity to understand the real world & its problems and potentially devise and enact solutions to problems, or exploit opportunities for progress - and who's easily mislead by prejudice, feelings and/or ideology. It's a marker for the difference between a politician who may be of great use to his people (who these people are is another issue) and a politician who's no better than the figurative drunk ranting uncle at the family barbecue.

Ideally, we get to observe politicians in positions of little power (such as sub-national legislatures, as mayors et cetera) where we can weed out the bad ones, then they gain additional experience and exposure as national-level politicians where we can weed out even more so we have a certain pool to choose from for the highest national-level and supranational offices of great power. Populists who propel entirely untested "charismatic" politicians and their followers into highest offices lack this multi-level vetting, just as do 'shooting stars' in established parties who rise too quickly due to help of some top politicians.

The aforementioned vetting by the public is far from perfect, but still better than nothing.

Even reformist / populist parties should march through the political instances slowly - there's hardly ever a crisis so bad that a slow (~4-8 years) advance would be too slow. In fact, they may have the most thorough success if they are particularly slow (~10-20 years) as were the greens in Germany, who achieved participation in a national-level cabinet for the first (and so far only) time after almost two decades. By then their original environmental protection focus had affected the policies of other parties; they had achieved most of their original aims without being in power.

They also had some extremely questionable personalities and political viewpoints in their early years, which they now regret. This went as far as tolerance for pedophiles. In hindsight, them advancing to national level power in the early 80's would not have been a good thing. They had not weeded out their misfits. The AfD (new right wing party) of today was even overwhelmed by its misfits - now the vast majority of Germans seems to be glad that the AfD missed capturing national parliament seats months after its foundation.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

*: Such as the former German minister of defence von Guttenberg, who shouldn't have made it past a town council level of responsibility.

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"Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens"

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There's an old (2014) study about the alignment of actual policy with the desires of interest groups in the United States, and I meant to write something smart about it for years. Sadly, I found no particularly smart comment in face of so much obviousness.

"Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens"

Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, 2014

Essentially, voting doesn't matter there. Money, affinity fraud, socio-ethnic group identity (old white rich men) and networks appear to be in power constantly.

It's sad that the attempts to break this system pushed hardly competent and benevolent champions for change to the better into high office. To elect a self-proclaimed billionnaire known for selfishness strikes me as the most stupid possible attempt at ending this gilded age.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

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The Middle East and democracy

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I was a lazy blogger this month so far, but for today I found a lazy method of blogging: I pull an excerpt from an e-mail conversation and simply publish it, mostly unmodified:

The Vietnam War was a tricky issue. On the one hand it may have been necessary to make a great stand against export of Bolshevism somewhere even after it was done in Korea, but on the other hand one confused a war of national unification with a step towards Bolshevist world revolution. The errors made in Africa and Latin America were similar; all-too often the real motives were ignored in favour of the simple "they're communists!" explanation (though this ultimately failed to defend apartheid in Rhodesia and South Africa).

We're doing this again. All this attention on radical Islam in regard to daesh is bollocks.

The real conflict in Syria and Iraq is a different one. They have group loyalties that are more powerful than ideologies. Sunni Arabs, Shiite Arabs and Kurds vote for their groups' parties, not for left-right parties. This leads to predictable subjugation / foreign rule of majority factions over minority factions. The Sunni Arabs may get a perfect Western style democracy and they will still feel foreign-ruled because Shiites and Kurds rule over them. There's again and again a rallying of Sunni Arabs in Iraq towards Sunni paramilitary efforts - which end up trending towards radical Islamic policies because radicals tend to dominate over moderates in civil wars.

The old answer was to have tyrannies that oppress one major faction, but these regimes crumbled.

The new answer should be proportional governance as it worked in Lebanon until war was imported to Lebanon after the PLO was kicked out of Jordan. Proportional rule like head of state is always a Shiite, head of government is always a Sunni, head of parliament is always a Kurd et cetera - and then promote programmatic ideological parties that transcend ethnic/religious factions.

They need no Western style democracy; they need old school Levant republicanism. The conflicts will cook up again and again (or be suppressed by tyrannic regimes) until they get proportional republicanism.

Now what do Europeans stare at instead? They freak out about some group of asswipes who pretend to follow the word of their imaginary friend and are world record aspirants in regard to making enemies.
"Islamofascism", the new "Communism".

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

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Political action for direct democracy in Germany

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In case any of the few Germans among my audience (we're down to less than 15%) are interested: Here are links to the pro-direct democracy initiative Mehr Demokratie e.V., including its current petition:

https://www.mehr-demokratie.de/buka2017_aktionswoche.html

https://www.mehr-demokratie.de/

The British f***ed up with their Brexit vote (direct democracy) adventure, giving proponents of direct democracy a hard time. Well, actually the irrationality of people does so, for the Americans f***ed up with Trump through their representative democracy. It's thus obvious even by anecdotal evidence that representative democracy doesn't protect against f*** ups. I suppose that many people won't see that and will instead fall for the logical fallacy of demanding perfection from a reform proposal instead of demanding a net improvement only.

Mehr Demokratie e.V. has developed a bill with legal assistance that's actually very moderate. Essentially 100,000 signatures would force the parliament to consider a bill and if said bill is rejected (I suppose that would always happen, since even a certain amount of modification would be a rejection) a million signatures would suffice to force a plebiscite with lawmaking power.

I wish for a lot more, but this would be a decent improvement.

related:

/2010/07/bavaria-creates-anecdotical-evidence.html

/2010/03/lets-improve-our-democracy-work-in.html

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

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Gerrymandering in the U.S.

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reporting made sufferable by comedy

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“I do not take my mandate from the European people.”

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When put to her, Malmström acknowledged that a trade deal has never inspired such passionate and widespread opposition. Yet when I asked the trade commissioner how she could continue her persistent promotion of the [TTIP treaty deal] in the face of such massive public opposition, her response came back icy cold: “I do not take my mandate from the European people.”

John Hilary, independent.co.uk

Sometimes politicians admit we're not really living in a democracy yet. This is particularly true about the European Union, where the commission is far removed from electoral legitimation and the parliament elections violate the principle of equality of votes' weight.

The separation of powers (between legislative and executive branches of government is rather theoretical as well, and the separation of powers between executive and judicial branches of government has been violated countless times.

The TTIP treaty is a classic case of a political decision where I say we need a plebiscite for this. There's no question about a plebiscite's democratic legitimation as long as you don't mess it up by voter disenfranchisement or are foolish enough to use voting machines.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

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Sovereignty and borders

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Many borders don't reflect the ethnic, religious or cultural majorities and are perpetual suspects whenever some conflict flares up. The Sykes-Picot Agreement is under much criticism nowadays, and the borders in all of Africa appear to be just as artificial. The conflicts in Nigeria and Mali can be considered to be consequences of borders which don't reflect the cultural divide between the Tuareg and other Muslim minorities in the North and the Southerners, which tended to have been more under European influence (religion, language) due to easier access from the coast.

A repair of such nonsense borders may indeed avoid future wars, but I doubt it would be better than a 85% solution. The problem is in many places the very same as it was in Bosnia - no sensible borders could be drawn because of chaotic dispersion of ethnic or religious groups.

Bosnian ethnic map 1991 (c) "Milan1237"

Radical changes of borders are furthermore very, very difficult and usually possible only through war because the governments have vested interests in the status quo.

The long-term solution to the problem of poorly devised borders needs to be a different one. The most obvious solution would probably be the best one as well: Make borders irrelevant; shared sovereignty over territory.

This isn't without precedent at all. The feudal societies of (at least) Central Europe had well-defined borders between the upper levels, but at the lower levels, lower nobility and monastries, the "territory" of these princes was actually defines by individual farms. There was no cohesive territory - the realm of a monastry or a lower prince consisted of a collection of ownership deeds for specific farms. 

Likewise, a modern state could be defined not by a territory, but by what matters for real; its citizens. The state would be where the citizen lives - within limits, of course. A region such as Bosnia could be home to three states with three governments - but without simplistic borders. The sovereignty would rather be dependent on circumstances instead of by geographic location. Similar to how the authority of different law enforcement agencies would be dependent on what crime happens and what criminal code paragraph was violated - rather than by geographic division.

The private and legal (economic) interaction of citizens or government agencies of different such states would require specific rules, but those could be set bilaterally just as already done with interactions across borders.

The intriguing thing about such states with shared territorial sovereignty is that despite their outlandish appearance, the powers that be would actually lose less if anything and might be more ready to accept such a system than radical adjustments of borders. The scattering of ethnic groups which makes border corrections utterly impractical in many cold conflicts would probably even make such states with shared territorial sovereignty more practical, rather than less.

An alternative is the model of the European Union, of course - the integration into a multi-ethnic super-state and government. This helps to some degree, but I doubt it has much potential beyond the degree of integration as realised in the EU already. The (perceived) costs of further integration appear to outweigh the benefits - particularly as long as language barriers and very much different perceptions of policy and politics persist (because of separated mass news media).

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

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Secrecy and democracy

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Intelligence services and government secrets have been in the spotlight for years. This probably recurred because of the scrutiny about the "WMD" paranoia of 2001/2002, but ever since Manning and Snowden whistleblowed we've been on an altogether different level of awareness that Western governments have a ton of secrets. Everybody knew that there were military secrets, of course. The novelty was in the attention paid to the fact that the government is keeping secret what it did in the people's name, but what doesn't necessarily gain the people's approval when they learn about it.

Some comments of the established media pointed at a general collision between the transparency necessities of a functional democracy and the secrecy necessities of a military and of functional clandestine intelligence gathering and processing.

I suppose this ignores the actual nature of a Western society.

The truest democracy is direct democracy - the citizens pay attention to an issue, form an opinion, vote, and the issue is decided.

This is way too much work for the almost thousand laws that Western governments pass per year. It's suitable for the big questions ("Shall we join/leave the Euro currency?", "Shall the constitution be changed like this?", "Shall these two federal states fusion?", "Shall our city apply for Olympic Summer Games in 2024?").

Representative democracy economizes on the effort required for decisionmaking by delegating the decision-making job to a small group of authorized citizens. The "democracy" in this is that the authorization has its origin in a general election.

Yet even the few hundred representatives cannot cope with reading and understanding hundreds of laws passed per year, much less over a thousand dismissed drafts and thousands of preliminary draft versions. They delegate this to an even smaller group among themselves, the comittee. he representatives are oftne in mroe than one committee and all that work of the committee is still too much for them, so the committee members of a specific party often delegate the detail work to one of their group who reports the findings later.

Still, government is way too big and complex and specific activities and judgments require specific expertise, so the vast majority of decisions are actually left to bureaucrats instead of elected officials. This is where rpresentative democracy ends and technocracy begins. Politicians may be able to influence hire or fire of technocrats (not so much in the judiciary branch usually) and can set rules and budgets for the bureaucrats/technocrats, but that's about it. No politician is supposed to judge whether a specific restaurant is too filthy - that's the job of a bureaucrat, an inspector.

Those Snowden/Mannig secrets were secrets of the bureaucracy, not so much of politicians. Democracy and Secrecy didn't collide - democracy simply doesn't extend into the realm where those secrets were held and classified in the first place.

Many citizens are now paying attention, though. This is new - and once they pay attention they wish to have influence. Most Western states do not offer them the ability to exert this influence directly through plebiscites, but the desire for the democracy to affect the bureaucracy is awake in this case.

What comes to light are typical and predictable patterns of behaviour that long-time readers of this blog have already read about. The bureaucracy/technocracy has its own interests and pursues these special interests instead of the best interest of the nation. This includes overclassifying in order to cover up bad actions or outcomes. It includes defensive responses to the public along the lines of archaic tribal or clan-centric behaviour.

Secrecy is also misused to keep the realm of technocracy as large as possible and the reach of democracy as small as possible.

The problem is not a collision between incompatible concepts of organisation. What we saw was that the citizens shone light into the black box of technocracy/bureaucracy and thus expanded the reach of the democratic culture at least temporarily.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

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About the fiction of a legislative branch

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It's no secret that even in democracies the members of parliament usually follow the party leaders' agree-on proposals for legislation. The independent member of parliament who studies a bill himself or herself and then decides based on knowledge, experience, wisdom, reasoning, conscience and full understanding of the bill is largely a fiction.

The parliament's role is stronger in countries which elect head of government and parliament separately, and weaker where the parliament elects a head of government (and is then supposed to be loyal to it). Countries with largely party-independent campaign financing and districts with majority voting have an even more strong-willed parliament, but this usually only means that the head of government needs to put more effort into influencing his party's parliament majority.

The member of parliament as a central and important block in the political system was convenient, popular - it's a fiction that the Western world maintains. A parliament, a separate legislative branch that supposedly oversees the executive branch - is still supposed to be a necessity in the separation of powers.

Yet actual top politicians are ignoring this in most obvious ways.

Take the negotiations with Greece, for example: Supposedly, Greece wants other countries' and multinational organizations' financial power to assist them in their fiscal troubles. Those in return demand that Greece changes its ways away from the path that led it towards bankruptcy; their assistance is conditional.

Greece is supposed to promise enough reforms in a paper these days.

Greece? Wait, no, the Greek gubernative, the head of government and his minister of finance are expected to promise those reforms. Yet those reforms require legislative action!

Essentially, it is expected that the Greek executive branch can promise that the Greek legislative branch will follow it. The expectation is that there is no separation of powers in Greece. In fact, it's being demanded.

Have you seen ANYONE decrying this ANYWHERE?*

Could the crisis of the parliamentary system in the West be any more obvious and official?

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

*: Except you know where, obviously.

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"Your genes help determine how much money you save"

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Researchers Henrik Cronqvist and Stephan Siegel constructed a measure of savings by essentially tracking the changes in the net worth of the twins between 2003 and the end of 2007. They found that identical twins—who share the exact same genes—are significantly more similar in their savings behavior than fraternal twins. In fact, they conclude that genetic differences explained roughly 33% of the variations in individual savings rates.

"Your genes help determine how much money you save"

Matt Phillips

Imagine a future in which such influences on behaviour, such biologically-mandated preferences, could be known about senior officers and top politicians before they they're empowered by command or office. It would be eerie in some way, but potentially world-changing for the better, too.

Citizens could almost know which politician would start a needless war because of some archaic territorial fight gene. An army could almost know in advance which officer would keep a cool head and find the right mix between caution and boldness.

Economics have begun to accept biology (neuroscience, for example) as a supporting science in the 90's as far as I know. Maybe political sciences and military theory should do the same, and embrace it fully to squeeze the maximum gain of insights out of it.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

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Interventionism and why there are no true pacifist parties

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Almost a quarter century ago the unsolved environmental pollution problems led to the founding of a new party in West Germany, the greens. Shortly thereafter, they turned into the primary and only pacifist party in Germany. The left and right wing had both led governing coalitions with liberals in the 1980's and were thus supporters of the then-ongoing Cold War arms race.

The greens pressured the established parties into creating more environmental protection legislation, but their pacifism stance was largely ineffectual.

The Cold War finally ended in 1989-1992, but the new conservative minister of defence wasn't particularly competent as his pre-pre-predecessor Wörner. He was a career politician who had been sent into the MoD office as a career dead-end. He turned creative, though - and the newly sovereign united Germany began a salami slice tactics-driven creeping movement towards interventionism.

The green's response to ever more military adventures was to cry foul. They decried the "militarized foreign policy" a lot during the 19990's.

The liberals had shed their left wing in the early 80's and Germans had become tired of conservative Chancellor Kohl, so the social democrats under Blair-like Schröder (part of right wing of his party) had the opportunity to return to power - this time with the greens. All the pundits, journalists, lobbyists and so on pressured the greens with doubts about whether they were fit for a governing coalition, and pressured them into proving this fitness (by behaving like establishment). The leading green politicians were thirsty for power and office, and the outcome was probably predictable.
 

The cabinet Schröder was formed on 27 October 1998. On 24 March 1999 Operation "Allied Force" began, the Kosovo Air War with German participation (Tornado ECR planes firing on Yugoslav troops). It took the greens less than five months for their fall of man: They had turned from a pacifist party decrying the militarisation of foreign policy to a war-supporting interventionist party. They even became radicals, as most converts. The support for the military adventure of idiocy in Afghanistan was stronger among green politicians than among others. Yesterday, they decided on a party assembly that they would support a military intervention against IS if there was a UN mandate.

_____________

One's background can coin one's interpretation of events a lot. My background includes economic studies, and thus I cannot resist interpreting these events like this:

The greens were never real anti-interventionists and thus no real pacifists. They were merely envious of other parties playing with toys the greens don't have. The military is a toy to politicians. At some point late in 1998 the greens understood they're now in power and the toy is now theirs, and suddenly it was a fine toy to play with. Parties who were in power and expect to return to power keep this attitude; they keep liking the toys of government, even if they temporarily decry their use by others.

The problem is once again a principal-agent problem. The people of Germany as a whole don't get to play with the toys of governments, and have little if any benefit from such great power games. Interventions aren't really in their interest. It's different to the agents of the people, the politicians. They get to play with the toy, and like it - at the expense of the people in the toy and most other people of Germany.

Today, the only counter-interventionism party of relevant size in Germany is the far left party; the sum of former East German "communists" and the former left wing of Schröder's SPD (the left wing deserted because of Schröder's social policies). It's all-but guaranteed that they will turn pro-intervention too once (if ever) they get to play with the toy.

The only permanent vaccination against interventionism are likely national-level, law-creating plebiscites. This form of direct democracy is the only one in which the principal makes no use of an agent and defeats the principal-agent problem by deciding himself, in his own best interest.*

There are no true anti-interventionism parties.**

related:

2008-06 The German party landscape

2009-07 Plebiscites and a Federal German myth
2010-03 Let's improve our democracy, a work in progress (I)
2010-05 Allensbach poll on Germans in Afghanistan

2011-08 German federal politicians lost their compasses

2013-03 An anecdote about what triggers intervention

2013-11 Sunk costs / Principal-agent problem / How not to

2014-02 The Principal-Agent Problem, a Politicians Edition

2014-05 Poll results on Germany's foreign policy preferences

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

*: All relevant German parties but the conservatives nowadays support such plebiscites. Now we can guess whether they will still do so when they get the opportunity to actually introduce them, for at that point they would cut into their own power. It's safe to talk about that when one is not in power or only junior coalition partner of the conservatives.  

**: In Germany.

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The NSA scandal stays below the threshold

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One of the most important German national newspapers, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, recently published an article titled "Der hat doch gar nichts enthüllt" ~ "He didn't didn't reveal anything after all", about Edward Snowden.

The author's thesis was that the NSA scandal is all about abstract activities, not about something that affects us on a gut level.

I think he was onto something here. 

The STASI outrage was so great because the East Germans were under very tight surveillance, and after the reunification they were able to read details of their private lives such as "sex at 20:00, sex finished at 20:15" (an example taken from an East German sports celebrity).

The Snowden leaks don't have such details.

So far the Snowden leaks addressed the ratio: We just intellectually know that a free peoples' government doesn't treat its citizens like that, and we just intellectually know that a free country ought not tolerate such an intrusion by a foreign country.

But it's only the intellectual self which is in protest. There's no gut-level revolt.

A while ago I wrote about how Putin manoeuvred below the threshold of forceful reaction in his empire re-establishment foreign policies, and I suppose the United States do the same with their "Global War on Terror" and whatever slipped under this umbrella.

On the gut level, the Western World has it right, is the lighthouse of freedom, liberty, well-organised government. Yet a rational, intellectual inquest reveals how Western governments are actually exploiting the freedom of action left by our complacent gut feelings.

Intellectuals have revolted against mass surveillance, but those driven by intellect are inept at inciting a revolt of gut feelings - so little comes of this political revolt.

I suppose this manoeuvring below the gut feeling revolt threshold is a common problem; it's the exploitation of complacency, rigidity, secrecy and laziness for agents of the people to act in violation of their preferences if not interests.

A common problem deserves a general reaction: We need to lower the threshold for punishment of such behaviour.

The people won't change much. Different cultures, different education, different era - there's little reason to believe that any such difference will yield a much lower threshold.

One of the ways to still lower the threshold is to allow for a reaction without much of an occasion, by bypassing complacency. I suppose if all of us had a pop-up window on our computer asking whether the German government shall kick out all real or suspected U.S. intelligence personnel from Germany because of the mass surveillance by the NSA, we'd easily get a majority "yes".

That's because the threshold for punishment can be lowered in more than one way: We can get more easily agitated (in theory), but we can also make dealing out punishments less of an effort.

And I think that's a route which we should follow in the perpetual challenge to improve the own society. It's just unlikely that our politicians who are enjoying so much freedom of action for their games will hand us this directly. We just might get the power and opportunity to correct such manoeuvring in the gray zone through plebiscites, though.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

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Enforcement of Constitutional Court rulings

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Constitutional courts can and do usually uphold democracy and civil rights against a head of state, as now superficially in the case of Turkey and its internet censorship.*

Autocratic minds know how to cope with this, of course.

One method is to rig the constitutional court by replacing or adding members with reliable partisans.

Another method is to do the same with the executive branch and media, so a ruling can be ignored or be implemented only superficially.

It's worrisome how few if any countries have implemented a countermeasure to this countermeasure. It's rarely within the powers of the court to call for special elections so the people have a chance to get rid of the autocrats. It's as far as I know unheard of that a constitutional court can assume command of police or other armed personnel of the state to enforce a ruling.

The problem is thus that the current dominant design for constitutional courts only works up to the point when the offenders are willing and capable to resist its authority. And this authority is usually only a moral one.

This defines a threshold between democracy and autocracy in my opinion. It's an autocracy once politicians have neutralised the restraining power of the judicial branch. Up to this point it's still a struggle to defend democracy, whereas afterwards it's a struggle to restore democracy.

 

I believe we should pay more attention to this threshold and build up more defences of democracy  to stop a move towards autocracy prior to the tipping point of a neutralised constitutional court.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

*: The ruling allows 30 days for implementation, which basically allows the government to keep the censorship in place till the elections. The court is thus not really serious about it.

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Spying, data collection and the coercion problem

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I think I held back for long enough; I suppose the media will indeed not go after the real problems.*

The issue of population surveillance can be divided by domestic/foreign, government/private, government/government, business/private and it's all very different.

Germans (and foreigners in Germany) have a constitutional right to not be spied upon or be under surveillance. This was established by the German federal constitutional court three decades ago in a ruling on a case about the German census.

Surveillance and spying do also incur costs, so both the situation of the people's rights and costs allow the conclusion that spying on us or having us under surveillance requires a good justification. The burden of proof is thus on the proponents of spying and surveillance.

That's the point where I actually could conclude this blog post, because the proponent's cases for any spying that's not near-consensus (such as observation of Mafia members and the like) have been utterly ridiculous and disproved with such impressive regularity that their credible is even worse than a government politician's credibility in general.

- - - - -

We shouldn't let the case rest, though. Knowledge is power, and power needs to be tamed and legitimated in a society or it will tear it apart and replace it with another kind of society - autocratic, plutocratic or other.

An agency which knows a lot on us can misuse its knowledge (or be misused itself) to political ends.

A CEO may be blackmailed into accepting a poor deal.

A bureaucrat who wants to expose a scandal may be discredited or blackmailed with information.

A rising star politician may be damaged by revelations while government politicians who did the same are not.

A member of parliament may be blackmailed into voting a certain way.

In fact, a foreign power's government may blackmail our politicians into acting against our interest and in their interest.

Knowledge is power, and to not protect this knowledge and to not deter the acquisition of such knowledge means to yield power to those who are not democratically legitimated to wield this power. A democracy yielding such power needlessly to government officials or even foreigners becomes less self-determined, less democratic. According to the German constitution, power originates from the people and is being lent to people in government based on democratic legitimation (through votes and plebiscites). Power just slipping away on another route is not constitutional. Foreigners are not supposed to be able to exert power over the German state; that would be counter to the very sovereignty. Likewise, our own officials should not wield other powers than those legitimated democratically and thus legally.

- - - - -

Domestic spying and surveillance has another, very bad problem: It's an important ingredient in autocratic governments, and to set up the laws, the public tolerance, the tools, the agency with personnel and the databases for such an autocratic government in advance is a very stupid idea. We shouldn't make it so very easy for them, just in case we fail to keep dangerous idiots away from power and turn into an autocratic society sometime again. At least make it harder for the dangerous idiots to pull off such a transition towards dictatorship, and keep them from exploiting accumulated data spanning back years or decades!

This point is one which our politicians don't get. They simply cannot imagine that they themselves could be evil or turn evil, and they wouldn't make it to top politicians if their ability to think far ahead wasn't concentrated on their career alone.

- - - - -

The business/private spying and surveillance is a different matter. This is about ripping us off. Businesses collect data not only in order to supply us with goods and services which meet our preferences better: They collect data in order to have more profitable business relationships with us. This is very often to our disadvantage, not a win-win. It also provokes a lot of annoyances. I had four advertisements of computer stuff in my mail the first week after I bought a computer sometime in the mid-90's. Even back then, the information about my computer purchase was traded and lots of companies began to annoy me. I try to avoid that companies learn about my real contact address ever since.

The problem is especially evident (and tricky) in the insurance sector, where companies have good statistical methods to predict the costs you'll incur to them if they know a lot about you. Then again, them guessing instead is not really good for the insurance market outcome either.

- - - - -

Now what should German politicians do in light of foreign spying and data collection on us?
(1) Make sure none of our government agencies is tolerant or even supportive of such behaviour.
(2) Expose any such activities.
(3) Encourage (if not fund) defensive measures.
(4) Restrict such activities domestically (= kick the relevant personnel out, including persona non grata status for embassy and consulate personnel regardless of other relationships).
(5) Consider supportive legislative changes (criminal code).
(6) Sanction the offending countries.
(7) Reply in kind if nothing else matters; retribution in kind.

None of this appears to happen. So either the German politicians don't think the issue is serious or the blackmailing already took effect and Germans already lost some sovereignty in this regard. So far I think they're too trusting.

- - - - -

One might also think about whether another country spying and collecting on us is a hostile act or not.
 
I suppose the red line is to hostility would be crossed if
(1) The activity is meant to harm us, but not benefit them directly.
(2) The activity is indeed blackmailing, an offence against our sovereignty.
Foreign government/domestic business or foreign government/our government activities are the same in this regard. Government contractors count as agents of their government and thus as part thereof in this regard..

The week after hostilities against us were discovered we should rethink any alliance with the hostile power. So far I think the activities don't meet (a) or (b), at least not (a) intentionally. Whoever does covert missions on us does most likely expect some benefit from it.

- - - - -

The typical German discussion on espionage and data collection focuses on the experience of the private individual or on the example of the East German state and its Stasi's domestic surveillance and oppression. I believe we should pay more attention to the vulnerability of our democracy through the "knowledge is power" venue; blackmail and denunciation.

The question whether all companies and governments of the world know what messages I personally sent through the internet is in my opinion negligible in comparison to the prospect of another power exerting illegitimate influence on our top politicians. This holds true at least till we get federal-level plebiscites for direct legislation on important matters.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de
 

*: I was curious and waited and waited and waited, but the mainstream media appears to be utterly disinterested in these aspects.

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"Obama's Choice"

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"Obama's Choice"

by Acemoglu / Robinson

The first possibility is that after moving to the White House, Obama became aware of information he did not have as a senator, and this information convinced him that it was futile to worry about civil liberties, and led him to conclude that the intelligence community should receive carte blanche.

The second is that Obama’s scruples were about somebody else having the power to violate others’ civil liberties. Once he came to control that power himself as president, albeit indirectly, he became much more willing to tolerate it even if this meant jeopardizing civil liberties. [...]

The third is that Obama did not abandon his concerns and sensibilities wholesale, but is a victim of a typical case of “career concerns”. [...]

Though we don’t know for sure, the first possibility seems a little far-fetched. The most likely explanation is therefore a combination of the second and third possibilities.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is yet another powerful reason why we should have plebiscites. It's not enough to have the possibility to vote someone in office who says he thinks what you think. He can change his opinion (or be a skilled deceiver).

A plebiscite can create exactly the law the majority of the votes was for. No intermediary, no detour. Plebiscites should be available for important issues.

The smallish routine legislation and executive branch work are for politicians who can allocate much more of their time on the issues than the average voter. But the big issues should be decided by plebiscite - at least it should be an option if the voters are dissatisfied with how the politicians decided.

 

Those who distrust the voters and think they would make bad choices at plebiscites shall either explain how voters are supposedly able to decide on entire parties and election platforms if they're unable to decide on a single clear issue. And in case they cannot explain this, they shall be considered secret authoritarians who distrust democracy generally.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

P.S.:

I think the second possibility mentioned above is very, very visible in regard to German top politicians and their stance towards civil liberties, spying, internet censorship and similar topics:

Sure, there were evil people in power sometime and here are evil people in power somewhere else, but now we are in power and we would really not misuse this power.

The example of the U.S. shows us that they probably wouldn't wake up even after it becomes public that has already happened on their watch.

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The point of having a state and government

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Many political differences can in my opinion be traced back to different ideas of what a state and government is good for.

My idea is that governance for a group (nation) has to serve the group as a whole. The exact meaning of this still depends on the philosophical stance concerning the weighing of interests of different people. I prefer to accept the ignorance about their preferences and to let them express their preferences through plebiscites and elections. This is basically the "rule of the majority + protection for the minority" thing, except that I suppose the majority or its representatives should still attempt to serve the whole group because majorities are changing. People from countries with locked-in majorities (Southern United States, Africa) are unlikely to have this same idea if they consider themselves as part of this majority.

Another idea is partisan; politicians and their followers strive for power in order to strip the defeated minority of what it wants and take or establish what they want instead. The majority gets the perks, the minority gets to suffer even when it's obviously unfair. This partisan approach does usually not pay much attention to neutral scientific conclusions, and does often not respect ethnic or religious minorities. I also think they're more prone to radicalism (politicians seek to mobilize their followers instead of winning over undecided voters) and less respectful to foreign powers. The latter may be an extension of the domestic 'us vs. them' attitude to the rest of the world. 

A country with a generation of hyperpartisan politics may easily lose its way because the strategists behind these cynical policies* leave the stage and their successors are naive true believers who were stupid enough to actually buy into their partisan propaganda themselves. This is one way how a country could transition into the next category:

There is in some countries the idea that the state or governance should serve an ideology. Most ideologies are simplifications of reality, meant to more easily convince and fire up the masses rather than striving for accuracy. Theocracies and feudal or monarchic rule with much focus on dynastic succession and accumulation of power belong into this category as well, but are rare nowadays. The problem with ideology-serving governance is plain and simple that ideology is but an illusion, and the governance all-too-often doesn't serve the people much, if at all.

Some governments which insist on the appearance that they're true to an ideology don't really serve the ideology, though. It's usually stupid anyway. Such states do instead serve only the powerful, and this may be one patriarchal absolutist ruler who doles out favours in exchange for the necessary support of this governance. Oppression and propaganda are often most extreme in such regimes because the population would otherwise be difficult if not impossible to rule. This kind of rule coupled with a relatively powerful country yielded the most troubles historically, and was usually contained by a concerted effort of multiple other powers (example Napoleon, Hitler). Small countries with such a rule tend to be of little concern for their neighbours, of course.

________

 

It's a mess with these different ideas of what a state is supposed to do: The "right" and "wrong" of a policy depends on this idea, and some seemingly "right" moves only become "wrong" because the idea of government is "wrong". Or so you think.

You may encounter elaborate reasoning and justifications for an action, and it may be comprehensive and make perfect sense - within its own framework of what a government is good for. You may even debate someone else on a topic and both you and the other person are right in the respective opinion and reasoning, but only within the respective framework. This makes for very boneheaded debate behaviour.

Preferences may differ to the extent that someone may actually prefer to serve an ideology or get great psychological relief from oppressing a despised minority. Preferences in themselves require no legitimacy; they simply exist, and are themselves the source of legitimacy of actions (or determine their illegitimacy). Preferences may even be the sole source of legitimacy there is, but more religious people may consider their deity or deities as an equal if not superior source of legitimacy.**

Anyway; whether a policy is "right" or "wrong" is often subjective and based on one's preferences. There are few outright nonsensical, incompetent policies which are wrong on every account. Such accidents happen, though.

_______

The usual notion of democracy vs. dictatorship (or tyranny) is much too simplistic, but most Westerners know this. What's lacking in my opinion is awareness about how countries at times slide from one idea of governance to another. Both hyperpartisanship (an affinity towards policies of "us vs. them") and ideology (a usually codified extreme simplification of reality, giving the impression of sufficient knowledge where there's none***) are most troublesome.

 

The way to go is a strict pursuit of the common good. This doesn't mean that a policy must not leave anyone left behind as a loser; it rather means that not only constitutional minimum requirements, but also fairness in general should be observed by the rule of the majority.

 

A domestic political culture of this kind does in my opinion not tend to produce aggression against other countries any more, since the common good can rarely be served through the voluntary entry into an orgy of destruction such as modern warfare. And this political culture helps domestic freedom, of course.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

*: related

**: This is in my opinion impossible to settle with reasoning until one or some of the thousands of deities known to mankind shows up in some decisive way (again). Right now I don't even know how exactly the various monotheistic religions determined which prophet was real and which was fake.

***: The intellectually lazy path, quite similar to conspiracy theorists: They make up bullocks or adopt it and then get the feeling of superior knowledge on the cheap. Then again, we all need to make up our mind without knowing everything about a subject; there are merely degrees of ignorance, everybody is at least partially ignorant on everything. Some of us are more easily satisfied with their level of ignorance than others, though.

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Protection of liberty - a question of attitude

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The seemingly never-ending NSA spying scandal* and German political establishment's reaction to it are again displaying a specific and troubling attitude:

Our politicians (and not only they) appear to have developed a tolerance for the instruments of oppression as long as they trust the people who control them. As long as these people are some of their kind, as long as they feel affinity to them.

I assert that all politicians holding federal office or Bundestag seats in Germany (or did so during 2013) would readily agree that a tyrant's domestic intelligence service helping the oppression of the people is evil.

Yet I also assert with great confidence that the majority of the very same group can be talked into supporting many vital components and assumptions of such an intelligence service today, here, nominally under Bundestag oversight.

The authors of the (West) German constitution followed a different approach: They were more sceptical about the good nature of politicians and top bureaucrats (guess why) and wrote a constitution which distrusted them as well. Our politicians don't distrust themselves or their own demographic like that.

And it shows.

The FDP (liberal party) - good for very little other than having a minister in the cabinet who blocked domestic surveillance and spying bills et cetera -  was for the first time thrown out of the federal parliament in September's Bundestag election. And the old pro-surveillance, pro-spying bureaucrats and ideologues came back and are pushing for more surveillance, spying, data-gathering.

________________

Make no mistake: This spying stuff isn't about errorists, even though pointing at evil errorists is still a fashionable and sadly effective PR schtick. These are the very same folks who loudly claimed that the very same kind of more police powers, more intelligence agency powers are needed to fight organised crime (and then rarely used the new powers which they received on organised crime). Sometimes people just yawned when organised crime or errorism was used as bogeymen. They didn't despair, for they had their alternative bogeyman "child pornography". They assumed quite correctly that almost nobody would dare to call their bullocks out, since there were enough fired-up people who would pounce on any such critique in the name of defending children or something.

Errorists are only yet another bogeyman.

reasons for phone surveillance in Germany 2009:
Errorism and child pornography ranked last,
drug trade first (source)

These people want surveillance, they want more power than the police actually needs, they want the tools of tyranny. And it's other peoples' job and in all peoples' best interest to push back and keep the tools of tyranny away.

The problem is that we can't keep them away if people don't take the scenario of dangerous idiots in positions of power seriously any more. Politicians trust themselves, and seemingly cannot imagine that their own group would turn ugly sometime and misuse the tools of tyranny for tyranny.

The people who lived through much darker times had no difficulty imagining such a scenario, they distrusted politicians and they did set up an system of government which distrusted politicians to some degree and did not empower them to flip the country over into a tyranny, having all necessary tools and ideas in place already.

I agree with them. 

We should not install the laws, hardware, procedures or attitude vital to a tyranny, especially not in a chase after bogeymen. Our politicians need to learn more history, need to wisen up and stop pretending there's no need to put a leash on the beast because they're still in control of it.

related (foreign blog): Die Anti-Terror Lüge

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

*: Didn't write much about it, as obviously others already do so. I am flabbergasted how one aspect of the scandal never appears to be mentioned anywhere, ever. I'm still waiting for someone, anyone, to mention it (and me seeing it). Still, I'll write about that particular aspect sooner or later.

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[Deutsch] Kein Koalitionsvertrag ohne JA zum Volksentscheid

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Für Interessierte:

Es gibt eine Petition auf change.org zum Thema Volksentscheid auf Bundesebene.

(About an ongoing petition for direct democracy on the federal level in Germany.)

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