I saw it linked here on the site just a few months ago. Really sad if so.

Agreed, this bit is too good to give up.

It’s just parody at this point.

The extra history on Indonesia tells a very different story about how botched the Chinese intervention in Indonesia was. They ended up helping the original “usurper’s” son back to the throne because of several misunderstandings and deceits. Unless they are also oversimplified things.

And regarding the hospital example… I think in many well-planned cities there is probably going to be an ideal location near the primary public transportation hub to put something as important as that. If there are two large but disparate population centers in one city, then hopefully the democratic will says build two hospitals, not one shitty one in the middle away from both population centers or simply the one in either center that gets the most votes. Of course I agree choices will need to be made, I’m just interested in balancing these choices with optimal planning. So, if something is better than RCV that’s great, but I remain unconvinced that RCV isn’t already a good enough improvement to immediately jump all FPTP systems to in the interim.

TANS is exactly what I was thinking of. I’ll take another look at what he recommends direct democracy for.

I do think these weird elaborate examples of a city choosing where to build a hospital (or see above for the Mars colony thing) are a huuuuge red herring. Determining where to build a hospital and all other essential public infrastructure is not a question of democratic political will. The political will demands to make the hospital high quality, free at the point of access, etc. But optimization of those systems are best carried out by city planners coordinating with public transport access etc in collaboration with and overseen by citizen councils. Perhaps on a rare occasion, there really are two equally good choices, but I find that to be very unlikely most of the time with regards to these kinds of hypotheticals.

TLDR: Planning is good and can and will solve a lot of these problems. Democratic will is best imposed as oversight over a scientific planning process and through the setting of social goals. Direct policy votes probably will be appropriate in some circumstances, but I think what exactly will be learned during socialist construction.

I agree that figuring out ideal voting systems is an exciting endeavor, and different systems can be more or less appropriate. However, I completely fail to see how the Wikipedia examples represent a “failure” of ranked choice voting.

Most ranked choice voting systems can suffer from a crazy effect where getting more votes makes you lose

For the first election: you’re making it sound like Bottom receiving the plurality of votes (45%) in the first round is causing it to ultimately lose. This is not true, Bottom loses because the majority of voters (55%) prefer Center to Bottom which is made clear in the second round after elimination and transfer of preferences from Top. This is good, this is the point of RCV and why it is vastly superior to FPTP.

Now for the second election: claiming that Bottom is all the sudden unpopular and therefore them winning is a bad thing is doing a lot of heavy lifting here to try to make ranked choice voting look bad. Why did all 6% lost from Bottom go into Top but then Center is split exactly down the middle in terms of preference? Those circumstances seem artificially contrived to me and not very reflective of how overlapping ideologies between parties would actually interact, especially as in the previous election the entirety of Top goes to Center as their 2nd preference (not calling you out but the sus wikipedia example). Again, the result is that

The reason I’m going kind of hard here, and I might be going a little crazy, is because I really feel like all this sudden RCV hate is very suspicious. I’ve had several otherwise “woke” and more-progressive-than-not friends sharing TedX videos giving similarly contrived situations to show that RCV is actually really bad and can totally be just as undemocratic as FPTP (their example was literally about where to put a refueling base for 4 weirdly spaced out Mars colonies). Then there was the recent Veritasium video about how voting is imperfect and can never be solved!!1! (So why bother, right guys?) And yeah, I get this weird feeling that even this incredibly simple reform that could bring a trifling of more authentic democratic representation to our Bourgeois Dictatorship of Capital that we call American Democracy is somehow getting psyoped against in order to maintain the two-party dictatorship. Like, all the big pop science entrenched youtube channels creating these kinds of videos just seems like a PR campaign to specifically dissuade those bazinga types that at least should be able to understand on a logical/mathematical level that RCV is much better.

Anyways, my main take is RCV is good and quite literally always better than FPTP. It’s the simplest reform that should be default on any liberal party’s platform if they weren’t deeply unserious. Whether we end up even having direct elections of representatives or multi-option direct ballot initiatives in socialism I don’t feel as strongly about, I’m open to all kinds of ideas. But don’t let the RCV hate spread uncritically. If I’m totally off base than someone explain below cause I do feel like I’m going a little crazy here.

yikes, didn’t catch that on the first read

Probably? That’s a guarantee

Story of my family.

GOOD post

… was the greatest proletarian revolution in history and led to almost totally equal redistribution among the peasantry.

How did I do

Must have been it! Thanks!

Do you think The Weird and Eerie is still an enjoyable read for someone who is only aware of like 1/4 of the works he discusses?

Ugh, that first sentence makes me pretty much incapable of even watching.

This looks really interesting, thanks.

A really great article actually, was it only ever the article and not a book? However, I got to say that there still seems to be a lot of anticommunist priming in nearly every sentence. And calling women in communist state positions advocating for liberation “cultural imperialists” is a little over the top. I forgot what it’s like to be in the weird in-between zone where you recognize socialism as a successful system that has already achieved great success for worker libration but still have to do the anticommunist song and dance to be “taken seriously”, maybe even from your own perspective yourself.

I didn’t even know this was in State and Rev, is it near the end? Is the critique regarding ex owners and all that?

I’ve read TANS and thought it was really nice and digestible too. I’ve been in the process of working through How the World Works for a couple years now as well, it’s great for when I have the time to focus on something a little more academic. Too bad Cockshott is such a reactionary shithead.