From: avatar (avatar@renegadeclothing.com.au)
Date: Tue Jan 21 2003 - 16:47:05 MST
I did make a mistake in my figure: 6,000 members in a proportionally
representative house of a world body would mean each seat
reoresents 1/60th of a percent. Sorry
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Mike Lorrey's comments:
> It seems you don't understand the American system. Weakening the
> executive would only retard the checks and balances of the American
> system, leading to a judiciary that is held hostage to majoritarian
> tyranny in the legislature.
I'm in favour of a weak executive head, a moderate judiciary and a strong
representative body. This is better for a postmortal situation. Countries
where the executive and legislature are more mixed, like Australia, I find
less democratic. They can be more autocratic, which is why you often
get Prime Ministers remaining in power for long periods.
> Executive power will crop up naturally. If it is not the President,
> then it will be the Speaker of the House or the Senate Majority Leader.
> People will always look for one person to be ultimately responsible.
I thin postmortals will be more independent minded and empowered.
psychologically.
> So: no property rights, no rights of free transit (which are different
> from immigration rights) with internal passports much like the old
> Soviet Union.
I'm in favour of free movement anywhere. But you're right, the issue of
property rights is crucial. Currently you can own property and exclude
others from it. Fair enough. In a postmortal world we have to re-examine
the issue of property rights since we then exist in the post-Assembler
world.
What form this re-examination should take should be up for debate.
I thought an ancillary area-based representative house of 6 million, with
areas
of 1,000 persons each, would make for some form of strong local input where
people
could have a real impact on their environment by consensus. I guess one
modification of this that might be more postmortal and alien to our way of
thinking would be to allow for "areas" to be fluid and move. Thus all the
lesbian separatists could congregate together physically in clusters of a
thousand, pushing (?) or negotiating other smaller areas to the side.
Alternatively you could retain a non-European Western (US, Canada,
Australia)
notion of an osmotic nuclear family system of land ownership in urban areas
and corporate ownership of country estates, as currently exists in those
countries. However, "urban" in its fixed sense loses its meaning in the
post-Assembler
world, where cities and houses are capable of moving fluidly, to the extent
of
houes walking around on spiderlike stilts. And "corporate" loses its present
bases
of capital management and becomes more based on voluntary associative
groupings.
It should be very interesting to see what happens.
I am not particularly in favour of anything relating to the Soviet Union,
since
it was undemocratic and genocidal and besides which my mother and her
family lost all their property to Stalin and were war refugees and
onlyavoided
execution by chance. I wasn't thinking so much of area passes as the ability
of a group
of 1,000 people to unaminously freeze their property "rights" in a coherent
block
(thus excluding incomers) for example.
While there may well still be "parks" and "farms" (to some extent) I doubt
the notion
of private country estates will last long in a postmortal context. People
really gung ho
about such things will probably go to other systems. Of course, there are 40
Earths
worth of material in the Oort cloud and Mars has water and Venus will be
easily
terraformed (indeed the whole solar system becomes putty over millenia even
without nanotech as we all know)... But given the numbers, these issues
arise even
within virtuality and computronium substrates, within this Solar system, on
a scale
of millions of years. If you don't leave the Solar system, under our current
understanding
if you are postmortal you are going to have to have wide breaks between
traditional
children.
[Other factors may interfere with the above projections of course. Perhaps
there will be
some overwhelming developement, like teleportals/traversable wormholes or
multiverse
gates or TARDIS-like effects. Who can say, as yet...]
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