Winston Churchill is credited with saying - something to the effect of - "democracy is a truly wretched form of government, but it is the best one humanity has come up with to date".
On this, the election day in the US, allow me to publically consider the ways in which the beacon of freedom and democracy has fallen behind the times. I hasten to disappoint mr. Churchill's ghost - half a century later we have not chanced upon anything superior; however, we have tried many different forms of democracy, and some of those contain sparks of brilliance.
As I have already mentioned on this site, the problem with America's political system is that it is an antiquated wreck which its subjects refuse to consign to its rightful place on the scrapheap of history. The American mentality is characterized foremost by its religious fervor; even the brave souls who dare to be openly atheist are often hopelessly blinded by civil religion, an equally unjustified deference of judgement to an authority beyond reproach. And while churchgoers can at least partially be excused by the fact that their gospel is ostensibly sourced from a being of omnipotence and infinite wisdom, civil religion is based on the deliberations of a group of men, by definition fallible. They may have been revolutionaries as much in thought as in action, but their vision must be considered in the context of period and intention.
The union of states conceived by the founding fathers was to be a loose confederation, brought together for the purposes of foreign policy and joint security, and little else. At its most centralized it could be what Europe is today - unified in many measurable ways, but with every component distinctly unique and confidently independent. The trace of this vision in today's American civil religion is the fiercely defended, but rarely practiced, concept of states' rights. Certainly there is a significant degree of cohesion in American society - a black WalMart checkout clerk in Louisiana has more in common with Hillary Clinton than with a teenager in Ghana - but as the hysteria around today's election shows, the USA is today indeed a nation divided upon itself. (The tragedy of America is not that the Bush administration is in power, but that it is in power legitimately, through a democratic process; much like someone else mr. Churchill has had a few words to say about... but I won't continue on this tangent for fear of Godwin's Law.)
The political system built up in the late 18th century was well-suited to the peculiarities of the age, but today it is outdated; and reform seems impossible because those it hurts believe blindly in it, as the manifestation of the divine will of the Founding Fathers. American democracy needs to be dismantled and reconstituted. As I have touted the success of my nation in creating a superior (in a number of significant ways, at least) constitution when given the opportunity to start anew in recent times, I shall present a set of suggestions; elements of what I believe to be the best implementation of democracy possible with current knowledge.
The first thing to go is the institute of the President in its current form. I consider it a triumph of democracy that in 15 years of the independent history of my country, no leader has served a full term. A constant, visceral threat to the ruler's position - the inevitability of him being removed in case of failure - is a marvelously effective stimulus. A nominal ruler, like the monarch in Great Britain and the president in Estonia, is necessary; his job is to be above political infighting. Ours is a figurehead, elected by the parliament or college of local council representatives for a five-year term, and employed mostly as the pincushion for foreign dignitaries, is nevertheless endowed with the power of the veto; any bill passed by the parliament may be refused authorization by the president, and returned for augmentation. The veto can be overturned by a constitutional majority.
Which is not likely, since Flasher's Republic is not a two-party system. Unlike Britain, the best-known parliamentary republic, the Prime Minister is not automatically assigned from the one party with the most seats, with a cabinet of followers. I believe greatly in the good of the coalition. The leader of the country must be the one who can count the majority of lawmakers in his ranks. If this means dealing with minor players, wonderful. A small party, just barely over the entrance threshold, gains significant bargaining power by offering its services to the major contenders; in return it requires support for its own Big Idea. This neatly sidesteps the problem of a two-party system, where one is forced to vote for the lesser evil while disagreeing with a large part of their platform. Normally apathetic voters can be stirred by the one issue they care about; and if the one-issue party makes it into the coalition, the vote will have been used in a highly efficient way. The power of radicals is, on the other side, limited by the abundance of small parties for the coalition-makers to choose from; the Jews for Hitler party may even make it past the five-percent barrier, but the PM hopeful will much rather get the same seats from the Green Party, pacified by an inoffensive increase in national park financing, something that voters who would never vote for the tree-huggers anyway cannot find an objection to.
I am, however, quite impressed by another British element, that which is unique because the Parliament itself predates the concept of political parties. My own parliamentary republic is blighted by the inadequacy of proportional representation; the Prime Minister is kept in check by the everpresent possibility of his coalition falling apart, but individual lawmakers are protected by the anonymity of the party list. Local elections here are subject to a clause whereby a party must fill its seats with the top performers by individual vote count, and not at the arbitrary discretion of the whips; parliamentary elections do not have this safeguard. The British first-past-the-post arrangement, whereby each parliament seat represents a quantity of population and contains the arse of the person that specific quantity liked best, goes a long way to ensuring an MP's personal accountability.
There are other issues - primarily ideas of what should constitute a fair wage for a lawmaker, etc. - but they are details. The ideas above are the significant ones, the concepts that I wish to seed in the consciousness of at least the small community of Antyx readership, and possibly in those who may find this article later via an obscure Google search. As I return to the greater Internet to see who's actually winning the US election, I urge you simply - to think about it.
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
Saturday, October 21, 2006
Antyx@Flickr
Even though I am fairly distrustful of Web 2.0 hype, I finally got a Flickr account. Click on the title of this post to see some of my shots, and a particularly weird picture of myself.
Thursday, October 05, 2006
A tale of treachery and terror
That kid's name was Ofir Rahum. He lived in Israel, in a town called Ashkelon. Some time in 2000, he met a girl online. They hit it off. Gradually he fell in love - and it looked like so did she.
The girl called herself Sally, but her real name was Mona Awana (correct spelling unclear, transcription from semitic languages is always ambiguous). She was a Palestinian, educated in an Israeli university, with a degree in psychology. She was also part of Fatah, Yassir Arafat's organization.
After a while, the two agreed to meet. Ofir went to Jerusalem, where he and the girl got in her car. She drove him to Ramallah. Once they were in Palestinian territory, she got out of the car, and three gunmen started firing upon it.
When Ofir's body was handed over to the Israeli authorities, 36 hours later, it contained no less than 15 bullets.
The gunmen were later killed by Israeli special forces. Mona was arrested, convicted of accessory to murder, and sentenced to life in prison.
A Russian-language Israeli newspaper managed to interview her in April of this year. Their first question, of course, was whether she has any regrets about getting the boy killed.
'Of course not. In two years he would have been conscripted, and told to shoot at Palestinians. So he's an enemy. Any Israeli is an enemy to us - both boys and girls serve in the army.'
According to Mona, Ofir was silent all the way from Jerusalem to Ramallah. How come? Did he suspect anything?
'Most likely he was just scared, but didn't want to show it. I'm a psychologist by training, and in my opinion Ofir had two conflicting feelings in the car on that day. He still believed me, but already had some doubts. Ofir was a strong kid, he could've grabbed the wheel, turned the car off the road and saved himself. But...'
Is she afraid now, in jail? Does she have nightmares about Ofir?
'I'm not afraid of dreams. I'm strong. I have a life in jail. I can watch TV, listen to the radio, read newspapers in Hebrew, Arabic, English. All inmates are allowed three hours a day out in the courtyard. Once every two weeks I see my family. I have plenty of money that different organizations transfer in my name. I get up to fifty letters a day. Some of them are love confessions. A few years from now they'll have to release me, and I'll get married...'
Why am I writing this post? So far I've approached the entire Middle East thing from what I like to think is a detached, reasonably objective perspective. Probably I just need a copy of the story that I can refer to, the next time I get into an Israeli-Arab flame war and people start talking about all the Palestinians imprisoned in Israeli jails.
That, and as an example of the difference between war and terrorism.
Friday, September 15, 2006
The One-Click-What? Phenomenon
Nearly a year ago I marveled at the design of Rapidshare, which bills itself as the world's biggest 1-click file hoster or some such rubbish. The same applies to documents.
It's easy for technical writers to get caught up in the marvel of formatting. When you're writing for utter fucking morons (and the canonical presumption of end-user documentation is that they are), you want to break down the information into chunks as small as possible and feed these to your reader individually. So you avoid long sentences and long paragraphs, use plenty of screenshots, all sorts of pretty colored fonts with dropped shadows and plenty of whitespace - to differentiate conceptually separate items.
But if you're not careful, at some point you'll end up with a page that looks like the front page of Rapidshare, and that makes your document unuseable. People have a specific expectation of how information is presented. It may be difficult to find your spot again on a page of uniform text after you've looked away, but it's a skill that anybody who has ever read a book in more than one sitting possesses.
The basic dichotomy of documentation is that of a manual versus a help file. People are meant to read a manual, and look up a help file. Naturally they won't actually sit down with your manual in front of a cozy fire one winter's evening (unless it is to ceremonially convert the printout to kindling), but there's a method to the madness. Manuals are things people look up when they have no other choice, and if they're that stumped, you might as well force them to read through more than half a paragraph and learn something useful. They're sufficiently open to it at that point. Of course, it is possible to make a manual useless by neglecting effective navigation (of which markup is a part), but it's a fine line that you will simply have to find, by talent or skill.
But a page full of needless whitespace, seemingly arbitrary indentation and drop-shadow fonts is a greater crime still. Finding data on a sheet of plain text is difficult enough, but ask the human mind to parse an overly formatted page at a glance, and it will shut down due to insufficient computing resources. This is the One-Click What? Phenomenon, or, if you wish, the WTF effect.
I'm probably over-simplifying, and I know my boss (who reads this blog) will kick my ass for saying this, but if you can't make your page readable using MS Word's default headings 1 through 3 and paragraph breaks, then you're simply not trying hard enough.
It's easy for technical writers to get caught up in the marvel of formatting. When you're writing for utter fucking morons (and the canonical presumption of end-user documentation is that they are), you want to break down the information into chunks as small as possible and feed these to your reader individually. So you avoid long sentences and long paragraphs, use plenty of screenshots, all sorts of pretty colored fonts with dropped shadows and plenty of whitespace - to differentiate conceptually separate items.
But if you're not careful, at some point you'll end up with a page that looks like the front page of Rapidshare, and that makes your document unuseable. People have a specific expectation of how information is presented. It may be difficult to find your spot again on a page of uniform text after you've looked away, but it's a skill that anybody who has ever read a book in more than one sitting possesses.
The basic dichotomy of documentation is that of a manual versus a help file. People are meant to read a manual, and look up a help file. Naturally they won't actually sit down with your manual in front of a cozy fire one winter's evening (unless it is to ceremonially convert the printout to kindling), but there's a method to the madness. Manuals are things people look up when they have no other choice, and if they're that stumped, you might as well force them to read through more than half a paragraph and learn something useful. They're sufficiently open to it at that point. Of course, it is possible to make a manual useless by neglecting effective navigation (of which markup is a part), but it's a fine line that you will simply have to find, by talent or skill.
But a page full of needless whitespace, seemingly arbitrary indentation and drop-shadow fonts is a greater crime still. Finding data on a sheet of plain text is difficult enough, but ask the human mind to parse an overly formatted page at a glance, and it will shut down due to insufficient computing resources. This is the One-Click What? Phenomenon, or, if you wish, the WTF effect.
I'm probably over-simplifying, and I know my boss (who reads this blog) will kick my ass for saying this, but if you can't make your page readable using MS Word's default headings 1 through 3 and paragraph breaks, then you're simply not trying hard enough.
Estonica: Presidential
The term of the current President of Estonia is running out soon. They're electing a new one.
There are currently two contenders. The incumbent is a familiar figure who used to run the country in the Soviet days, and was then involved in the liberation movement. The other is an American expat, son of WWII-era refugees, that came back to Estonia after 1991.
The Soviet guy is supported by the party that controls the capital and the biggest single chunk of the popular vote. The American guy is supported by the ruling coalition. The smear campaigns have been in full force for weeks.
Here's the kicker: not only doesn't the President of Estonia have any political power, but he's not even elected directly. The parliament had its chance, but the coalition fell three votes short of the necessarity majority. The opposition simply didn't show up for the vote, afraid of renegades in their own ranks. Now it's up to a caucus made up of representatives from local governments. The opposition carried the capital and gave no delegates to the coalition; the coalition carried the second biggest city and returned the favor. Some local councils were deadlocked and failed to elect any representatives at all.
Estonia is a multiparty parliamentary republic where prime ministers don't make it from one general election to the next. It's small enough that the politicians are kept in check more or less effectively. There isn't really a significant difference in platforms, and a voter's choice comes down simply to who you dislike less.
As a result, politics in Estonia is an inconsequential soap opera, with a familiar cast of fumbling characters. You can observe it with curiosity or incredulity. Or even annoyance.
Estonia's national football team has a specific pattern for home games: they look really good, have a bunch of feasible shots on goal. Ocasionally they'll pull off a nil-nil draw against Croatia or a noble 0-1 loss against Portugal, off an interdimensional fluke in their defense. You always feel like they're about to pull off something awesome, a brilliant flash of competence. And then they inexplicably crash and burn.
Estonia's political scene is much the same.
There are currently two contenders. The incumbent is a familiar figure who used to run the country in the Soviet days, and was then involved in the liberation movement. The other is an American expat, son of WWII-era refugees, that came back to Estonia after 1991.
The Soviet guy is supported by the party that controls the capital and the biggest single chunk of the popular vote. The American guy is supported by the ruling coalition. The smear campaigns have been in full force for weeks.
Here's the kicker: not only doesn't the President of Estonia have any political power, but he's not even elected directly. The parliament had its chance, but the coalition fell three votes short of the necessarity majority. The opposition simply didn't show up for the vote, afraid of renegades in their own ranks. Now it's up to a caucus made up of representatives from local governments. The opposition carried the capital and gave no delegates to the coalition; the coalition carried the second biggest city and returned the favor. Some local councils were deadlocked and failed to elect any representatives at all.
Estonia is a multiparty parliamentary republic where prime ministers don't make it from one general election to the next. It's small enough that the politicians are kept in check more or less effectively. There isn't really a significant difference in platforms, and a voter's choice comes down simply to who you dislike less.
As a result, politics in Estonia is an inconsequential soap opera, with a familiar cast of fumbling characters. You can observe it with curiosity or incredulity. Or even annoyance.
Estonia's national football team has a specific pattern for home games: they look really good, have a bunch of feasible shots on goal. Ocasionally they'll pull off a nil-nil draw against Croatia or a noble 0-1 loss against Portugal, off an interdimensional fluke in their defense. You always feel like they're about to pull off something awesome, a brilliant flash of competence. And then they inexplicably crash and burn.
Estonia's political scene is much the same.
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