On Sat, Jan 03, 2004 at 10:08:23PM -0500, Anthony DeRobertis wrote:
> On Jan 3, 2004, at 20:42, Andrew Suffield wrote:
>
> >Good grief, could you have made it any more unreadable? I thought I
> >already demonstrated that you could do it in about five lines and in
> >plain English. What's with the simulation of a 19th century
> >government?
>
> Well, e.g., Raul Miller complained about the lack of a rationale. So I
> provided one. Feel free to only include the part after "it is resolved
> that."
I think you are permitting yourself to be distracted by people who
appear to be opposed to the very idea of voting on this.
In rereading the Constitution, I cannot see why letting Mr. Suffield's
proposal go through the Standard Resolution Procedure is anything other
than perfectly in order. It can fail to gather enough seconds, it can
fail to meet quorum, or it can be defeated by the Condorcet method --
there are plenty of opportunities for the Silent Majority to squelch it
through regular procedure if it is premature, ill-advised, or simply
insufficiently popular.
The filibuster is not a parliamentary technique countenanced by our
Constitution, and I confess I am not sure why advocates of the GR, and
people who simply want to see the issue voted on are tolerating it.
Perhaps they are excessively agreeable. :)
We have been hearing from certain quarters that this proposal is "not
ripe" for over three years. It's been talked to death, resurrected, and
talked to death again. At least with a vote we'll have some concrete
data we wouldn't otherwise have, and since the ballots will be public,
people who oppose the removal of non-free can be asked directly what
they feel needs to be done before it can be removed. If opponents of
this GR would actually participate in the process properly, for instance
by proposing an amended version that can appear on the ballot ("Hell no.
We must not remove non-free. Not now, not ever."), we will learn even
more.
Our Project is organized such that matters which are best handled by
meritocratic methods (practically all technical decisions) are reserved
to those with the merit to make them. Those which aren't, such as the
election of the leadership, are handled democratically. Some people
claim that the fact that this is a philsophical issue is what makes the
GR defective. On the contrary, that's what makes it most appropriate
for democratic resolution.
These threads always end up the same way, with the same people rehashing
the same arguments with each other and, seemingly, no one being
persuaded to change their minds in the slightest. Let's put it to the
rest of the Project, and at least move on to Chapter 2 of this damned
thing.
--
G. Branden Robinson | For every credibility gap, there is
Debian GNU/Linux | a gullibility fill.
branden@debian.org | -- Richard Clopton
http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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