This has dick all to do with the current conversation. I disagree with the supposition that you can force people to think. Period. Agree to disagree blah blah blah.
Do political parties exist in the world of STAR TREK?
- Thread starter dswynne1
- Start date
It has everything to do with the conversation.
By having more free time in society, you allow the citizenry to have as much time as needed or as much as they want, to do research on their candidates come election cycle.
That's the entire point.
Agree to disagree.
Wow, 39 instead of 40. So, what, on one day we only work seven hours instead of the usual eight?
Read the rest of my post.
It's very flexible how you want to allocate your 39 hours.
Chicago, New York, and most major US cities have nonpartisan elections. Nebraska has a nonpartisan state legislature. They're instituting jungle primaries across the US where party affiliation does not effect ballot access and is not always listed.
These politicians are almost universally partisan figures, but the info for their affiliation isn't readily available at the ballot box, and people won't just be ticking the Ds or the Rs or the Gs. This is what I assume Kamen was getting to. Historically, this was pretty much the federal norm until the 1860s or so.
Basically this, but I'm going one step further and disallowing organize political groups of any sort.
Similar to how we disallow organized crime under the RICO statute, Organized Politics via Political Parties has done alot more harm than good IMO.
Politcal Parties in general allows alot of "Laziness" in terms of getting a Representative Democracy to have it's constituents think about who you're electing.
If every candidate has to be an individual and representing their own personal values in politics and you just happen to vote for them because they represent similar values, that's closer to how Representative Democracy should be.
Not just blindly voting for ___ Political Faction because they're "Your people".
Too much negative influence, legislation, and corruption has happened because of Organized Politics and Political Factions.
Imagine a life where the Democrat, Republican, Green, and any other Political Party in existence would not be allowed to exist.
You'd have to choose on a individual representative basis every election cycle.
And since there won't be the "Incumbent Effect" where you see the exact same constituents run each time back to back for consecutive terms, you gotta think about who you're voting for.
40 hours split between five 8 hour working days is easier for my brain to comprehend.
If that works for you, then so be it.
Some people work on different schedules or are more amenable to different ways of allocating their hours.
Obviously, I'm basing the 39 hours on a University Level study, so you can have 4x 8-hr days and 1x 7-hr day of your choosing.
Then change how they are listed. You don't need to outlaw parties to achieve that. It's a baby out of with the bathwater solution, rather than just assuming if people have no parties they're going to think for themselves. As assumptions go that's a large one.
Speaking as an (admittedly nonpracticing) political scientist, outlawing political parties would only achieve one thing: it would remove yet another slice of political decision-making from the public sphere right back into the smoke-filled back rooms. It is the very nature of politics that people will seek to associate with others for political leverage, for the simple reason that you have a better chance having your way if you have allies. And people will naturally seek allies with whom their interests align on a consistent basis. If political association was banned, that would only make this coalition-building informal. You'd still have groups that would vote together but you would no longer be privy to why they're doing that.
Also, people won't actually start reading political programmes just because there isn't a party written next to the candidate's name. The majority of people simply don't care that much about politics. Their choice would still be based on the few memorable soundbites floated in the media during the campaign. Removing political parties altogether would just turn elections into even more of a beauty contest based on personal charisma and little more. And we're lucky that the Federation doesn't seem to have a monetary economy because without parties it's practically guaranteed only the wealthiest people could afford to stand for an election and run a campaign - or more likely, field a candidate of their own who would then act as their mouthpiece. Political lobby would stop being a dysfunction and would become an overt requirement for electability.
Also, people won't actually start reading political programmes just because there isn't a party written next to the candidate's name. The majority of people simply don't care that much about politics. Their choice would still be based on the few memorable soundbites floated in the media during the campaign. Removing political parties altogether would just turn elections into even more of a beauty contest based on personal charisma and little more. And we're lucky that the Federation doesn't seem to have a monetary economy because without parties it's practically guaranteed only the wealthiest people could afford to stand for an election and run a campaign - or more likely, field a candidate of their own who would then act as their mouthpiece. Political lobby would stop being a dysfunction and would become an overt requirement for electability.
What does an 8 hour day mean on a planet with a 40 hour day night cycle, or a 40 our week to a culture that never really had much use for the concept of week, preferring months. What if the UFP shifted to a metric time and calendar for official use (similar to the French Revolutionary Calender) and did away with all of that? Any attempt we have to think up political factions and improved rights of federation citizens is by default not only human-centric but Earth-centric
So we need to monitor all our elected officials for corruption and collusion then. Make sure to have the government run their telepaths and routinely inspect every elected official and their staffs for Secret Political Collusion and using a OverSight board to monitor every elected politicians communications to make sure that they aren't colluding with other politicians.
So we need to neutralise appearances and any form of charisma from all potential representatives then to balance things out. We also need to regulate media from making "Memorable Sound Bites" and provide only long & deep documentaries about issues for every politician.
Good Info, thanks!
Might as well.have machines decide.
No, we the people must decide.
You will not be allowed to give up and just throw away your vote mindlessly because you're lazy.
If I have to go Australian Style and incentivize/punish you for being lazy, then so be it.
Punish away.
Mandatory voting, legal duty to keep yourself educated enough to make informed political decisions, and a blanket ban on political association enforced by a literal Thought Police... Pardon me, but I find all this just a little bit too Orwellian for my tastes. Not exactly something I would like to see in a Federation that's supposed to be utopian. This sounds like something straight out of a Black Mirror episode, to be honest.
EDIT: To avoid posting twice in a row
The moment you have to force people to do something, even if to exercise their own rights, it ceases being democratic. If you want to eliminate the supposed evils of political association and voter manipulation, or basically human emotionality altogether, it would be technically easier to just ban elections altogether and replace it with a census where you query the political viewpoints of the entire population and then have a computer appoint a legislature replicating the exact political composition of that population.
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The difference is that the "Thought Police" is ONLY on the politicians and their staffers, "NOT on the citizenry".
Austalia's Mandatory Voting has a great 97% turnout in 2019 alone. That's far better than what we have in the US and many places around the world. It is a system that I think many countries should look at for getting such high participation in their democracies.
Do you consider Australia "Not Democratic"?
That system of census you suggest has ALOT of rooms for more flaws, hackery, and manipulation than a distributed democratically elected representation system.
I guess this is a TNZ thread now.
I'd have done something for the 23rd Century too, figuring out roughly how the political balance might have shifted every four years there, but it doesn't give us enough information over a sustained period of time like the 24th Century. And there are lots of gaps unaccounted for, unless I go into non-canon.
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