this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2025
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What is extremist about that?
Without elections you get to have kings and emperors. Unless you go full on direct democracy which actually is becoming more feasible thanks to the Internet I guess?
The point is that a system where you just vote for a guy every four years won't change anything because the rich are in charge and have all the power.
Without having the people in power there can't be democracy.
And what's the system where people are in power without elections?
Ancient Greek democracy, where they used https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition (picking representatives at random).
If you're USian, your jury is like sortition.
I'm not a USian, but I do know how their jury duty works. Yeah, it's been over a decade since I last went to history class, I'd completely forgotten about this system and I guess I don't think outside of the box enough to come up with it myself. There are some negatives I can think of, but some few positives too.
Here's my biggest concern, and I'm hoping that maybe you have an answer: Outside of the US, MOST people who get into politics are at least decently educated. MOST voters prefer intelligent and well-educated candidates. Most of them, not all of course. If everyone is eligible and there's no filtering happening, a bunch of honest to god dumbfucks might be chosen by random chance. You COULD give it an education requirement, but then a lot of otherwise intelligent and well-meaning people who didn't finish school for one reason or another, are disqualified. IQ tests can have unwanted cultural, racial and socioeconomic biases. How do you make sure that there aren't too many ridiculously unqualified people chosen, without outright imposing requirements that could be unfair?
No. You're romanticizing. From east to west, north to south, all democracies fall to establishment and "families", or "parties" and vote on candidates from those. And then enshittification ensues.
There might be singular exceptions on local level, but every country I checked trends to establishment protecting families (or parties) in power and growing it's own ruling class.
Let's start with admitting that elections don't solve for that. When was the last time you saw someone in power and though "yup, they're an expert and they will make all of our lives better"?
Now if the people were randomly chosen from general populus - that incentivizes highly educated in ethics, morals, well read general population, or you will be ruled by dumb dumbs and your country will make very costly mistakes or implode.
Having said that, your Senate or officials in power don't have to be extra smart. They can hire smart people. The point of sortition is to create a system where wealthy don't rule everyone else and create laws unfair to everyone except current nobility.
Apparently it worked, and it could work again because we're not really being taught that in school. In fact, we're lied that ancient Greeks used elections in their democracy.
If you go to wiki page you'll be linked to multiple pro's and con's, critiques of sortition, critiques of elecotralism etc. if you have time, sink into that instead of asking a random on the internet like me to assay your doubts.
Direct democracy. We have the infrastructure and tech to enable this with liquid democracy platforms.
That's what I actually said 2 comments up too. It would also eliminate over 500k EUR a month in MP salaries in my country, so we could just use that to fund science or culture or something. Or just have more buffer so there's less need to raise taxes again.
Yep. We need direct democracy, using an auditable digital liquid democracy platform.
Yearning for a dictatorship is generally considered an extreme opinion.
Wanting the 99% in charge as opposed to the current 1% is the opposite of yearning for a dictatorship. That's yearning for its destruction.
I yearn for direct democracy and self-rule.
If you were classically educated, you'd know the meme is about Sortition vs Elections (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition). The idea is that you can't have democracy when you have to vote for your representative, because rich families will manipulate the election process. The better solution to pick your Senate would be to randomly select group representatives and have them cooperate.
And that was what Greece philosophers like Aristotle thought ~2300 years ago. Actually all sources we have suggest that Greeks from that era though that elections are undemocratic, and only sortition can provide true democracy.
Seems to be true today when we vote, we pick between turds, and nothing changes for the better. <- and that's what meme is about
Side note: Carlin was right, you get educated only enough to be able to work for your masters.
How many people looking at that meme even knew about ancient Greeks shitting on elections in favour of sortition and went there, instead of thinking "elections bad? You must want to have a king, you authoritarian swine"