What Political System Best Suits a Rebuilding Society on a Distant Planet?

[rootone]

After seeing credit rating and eBay stars, I started to think about gov provided citizen rating.

Ebay stars are well known to be manipulated by people using multiple accounts, and there are services out there who offer to do this for a fee, the same is true of facebook 'likes' and similar.
I think a govt approved merit rating would reduce most of politics to arguments about the rating system and allegations of corruption.

 

[Czcibor]

One more idea - how to run a parliament in the most effective / high tech way? I think about making the decisions informed and avoid turning debates into a cheap theatre. How to really enforce discussion and not just posturing?

Design parliament so MP can use powerpoint slides as part of their speech?
Rules against filibustering / obstruction? (time limit, in case of flood of amendments just selecting - "none of above" on computer screen)?
Hire a few boring experts / people who can just use google-equivalent whose job is to run a fact check on anything that was said?

 

[GTOM]

Recently i read that many greek thinkers didnt really liked democracy... Aristotle said that good government should have mixed elements of monarchy, oligarchy and democracy.
Maybe in your setting, the monarchistic part should be the guards of constitution, with the sacred duty, of preventing that anyone could have absolute political, economical or media power? (And also prevent tampering the system, so it will be always like less qualified, poor people arent stripped from their rights, but more qualified people votes count more?)

 

[rootone]

'Democracy' in Aristotle's time meant a majority vote of the land owning (and sometimes slave owning), males only.
('Slaves' in ancient Greece were not too badly done by though, A slave could pay off some kind of 'debt' through working and in time become a free man.)

 

[Czcibor]

Recently i read that many greek thinkers didnt really liked democracy... Aristotle said that good government should have mixed elements of monarchy, oligarchy and democracy.
Maybe in your setting, the monarchistic part should be the guards of constitution, with the sacred duty, of preventing that anyone could have absolute political, economical or media power? (And also prevent tampering the system, so it will be always like less qualified, poor people arent stripped from their rights, but more qualified people votes count more?)

Aristotle mentioned VIIth part of VIth book of Politics, cavalry goes together with narrow oligarchy, heavy infantry - to more inclusive oligarchy, light infantry and navy is related to democracy. So how to extend that? What about total warfare with total mobilization of all economy - don't it require totalitarianism or democracy? Then the sinister part starts - if you fight a war using a small group of professionals and most of your firepower comes from drones - do you need democracy any more to be able to draft your citizens? Wouldn't there be an incentive to lean towards technocracy?

'Democracy' in Aristotle's time meant a majority vote of the land owning (and sometimes slave owning), males only.
('Slaves' in ancient Greece were not too badly done by though, A slave could pay off some kind of 'debt' through working and in time become a free man.)

More complicated, in Athens one needed a citizenship (were peoples who were foreigners living there for many generations, or even in some era it required both parents to have citizenship), has to be free, male and over 20/30. Actually could be poor, there was even payment for poor citizens for performing their civic duties.

 

[GTOM]

Aristotle mentioned VIIth part of VIth book of Politics, cavalry goes together with narrow oligarchy, heavy infantry - to more inclusive oligarchy, light infantry and navy is related to democracy. So how to extend that? What about total warfare with total mobilization of all economy - don't it require totalitarianism or democracy? Then the sinister part starts - if you fight a war using a small group of professionals and most of your firepower comes from drones - do you need democracy any more to be able to draft your citizens? Wouldn't there be an incentive to lean towards technocracy?

Well maybe that should rather go to the other topic, but since automatization of assembly lines is easier than developing and producing robots that can fight in fuzzy environments, when enemy has weapons that can disrupt long range communication (jamming, target balloons, sats whatever) I would send out lower qualified people as snipers (quite effective in mountain areas) and drone controllers.
So there should be enough reasons for them to fight for their country.

 

[Czcibor]

Well maybe that should rather go to the other topic, but since automatization of assembly lines is easier than developing and producing robots that can fight in fuzzy environments, when enemy has weapons that can disrupt long range communication (jamming, target balloons, sats whatever) I would send out lower qualified people as snipers (quite effective in mountain areas) and drone controllers.
So there should be enough reasons for them to fight for their country.

Two independent issues:
-having enough weapons to give to each citizen
-really expecting from such... Volkssturm ;) effective combat

There is one serious problem with starting guerilla warfare in mountains and forest... the capitol is on alluvial valley surrounded by shrubs, roughly counting 1000 km from places where guerillas could thrive. So in order to launch such strategy, they would have an enemy who is both so powerful that they can only flee in mountains, but not so powerful enough to cut them such transport route. So far I have not figured out a strategy under which it could work.

I assume that the communication system would be rather resistant to damage, as it would require to destroy hundreds of baloons, radio relay stations, cut dozens of redundant optic fibre cables and jam ad hoc radio nets between drones. I'm not saying impossible, I'm rather saying whoever would be able to do that easily would beat them anyway.

As drone controllers? Yes, I thought about it. Just military had to allow using its simulators as computer games...