Sound Off: What do you Hate about RL Government?

I have a hunch that a lot of the things that make us dislike RL government have no analogy in SL. Those that do can be useful in designing in-world governments that are more successful and liked. What features do you find least desirable about RL governments and would they exist or could they be mitigated in SL?


Me first:

Personally, I loathe how 50% of all taxes paid in the U.S. goes to the military. The U.S. currently outspends the number-two military spender by a factor of five, an amount that exceeds the military budgets of Russia, China, Japan and all the NATO countries combined!

In SL this has no analogy as militaries are not necessary.

~Ulrika~

This is off-topic. Sorry, couldnt resist. But really, and I think you agree, there are not a lot of similarities.

Actually, I'm probing for dislikes and fears (irrational and rational) to help understand people's aversion to government in a virtual world. Given that player-run government doesn't exist on a large scale in SL, people's fears must be coming from RL. In order to eliminate the aversion, I have to understand it.

For instance, I hear that a lot of people specifically do not want player-run governments. Yet there are many members of LL who are long time players. What is it about a player with power in LL that a player with power in SL lacks? Additionally, do people fear oppression by cruel, uneducated, or flippant public servants? If so, would allowing a recall election solve the problem? What benefits would one have to add to a virtual society before taxation became acceptable?

Simultaneously, I was asking players to question whether or not their particular dislike even had a virtual analogy, in the hopes that that in itself would reduce their aversion.

So, ... um ... yeah. What was I thinking?


Shall we just make this the official pecan pie thread or wait it out a couple of days?

~Ulrika~

a) Not enough hot chicks in it. Ulrika for president!
b) WAY too wasteful, and mysteriously unconcerned with its own efficiency.

the department of motor vehicles

the people
if there were no people there'd be no need for government.
unless the cockroaches were feeling feisty, i suppose.

Mostly Ulrika - sorry, but you did ask.

Bureaucracy and politics.

Whoops - guess I just threw out the entire thing.

Yeah, the US does spend a LOT on its military.

But we can kick anybody's a**.

--Inevitable corruption from the bottom up
--Egregiously inefficient bureaucracies
--Disproportionately dominated by special interests with the biggest wallets

I am casting another vote for inefficiency. Also, I can't think of any facet of my life where I say "boy this would go much more smoothly if the government were running it". Going to my bank will always be a more pleasant experinece than going to my post office or (*SCREAM*) the DMV.

Though you can tell from my posts I am not anti-SL government. I am pro-whatever makes SL better and I am willing to give anything a try, even if only for fun. I just don't see how SL government (as a whole) would ever amount to anything more than a complex system for submitting suggestions to Philip.

I dont really like the fact that only people with strong financial backing get elected to positions of power, which effectively hands the keys to the rich.

I dont think it will be any different in SL. The rich will bankroll the politicans who will act on their behalf. it's good for the rich but kinda undermines the purpose of governement dontcha think?

Ya... we did real well taking out that guy.... oh, what's his name... oh ya: Osama. Yep, we sure can kick anyone's ass.

I'll leave this thread here, but be sure to keep discussions in this new forum on SL Politics and not RL politics! Comparisons of the two are of course permissible, as long as they related to SL. Thanks!

"I like the idea of politics, but politicians kinda ruin it".

Seriously. Political parties where its members are often expected to toe the party line instead of trying to figure out what's *really* best, for example. I'm looking at *both* Republicans and Democrats here, considering I think both parties suck in various ways and degrees of hypocracy. (I've had people compare me to libritarians and that's probably the closest to what my beliefs are but I have no party affiliation.) Politicians that tell people what they want to hear, fanatic but powerfull lobby groups...there might be some exception when it comes to, say, the Supreme Court where the concept of the "rule of laws, not of people" seems to still hold.

Some of the mess, of course, is plain old human nature: tribalism, the "mob mind", etc. It's not *irreprable*...there's just no one on Capitol Hill with the power to do it.

On the other hand, I have a *lot* of respect for political science/theroy, particuarly Enlightenment era thought and thinkers (at least untill the French started seperating "reason" and "rationality" and thought from "the real world", starting with Descartes and a lot of stuff that later turned up in Kant too. Reason and rationality seperated from the real world...aren't. This kind of thinking picked up quite a bit of sway in the French Revolution.
)

I'm not totaly against government in SL...as long as there are no politicians. I would not want a parliment and taxes and political parties and all sorts of beauricratic stuff like N-berg has, but I would like to see binding contract law with the ability to *enforce* it, and more tools for neighborhood associations/zoned sims to be made avalible (think of them as microgovernments) and viable dispute resolution. I don't mind the benevolent Linden dictatorship as long as its residents reserve the right to complain loudly when they do screw up. For although it's not always evident, they do hear us. And should that right ever be recinded, I would not be much longer for Second Life. In the meantime, he who hosts the server makes the rules. Philip's talk of SL being like a small country asside, we're still essentialy guests on someone's private property...albiet paid guests who expect services, like in a hotel.

I agree totally with this post.

I don't see how adding a middle man to a process can create anything but another bottleneck further down the line. Instead of the Lindens being bogged down with problems an elected official will be bogged down. Elected officials will probably have a job outside of SL as well. This outside job will limit the time they could put towards responsiblities. How is this efficient or desired?

I personally don't see a need for a SL wide government , but it is the topic a few people just won't let go away. Now we have a main forum promoting the discussion of this minority interest. I just don't get it.

Well, those aren't really bureaucratic condiments that we squirted onto our government hotdog for fun. They all serve purposes.

The parliment (Representative Assembly) is the democratically elected part of the government (you have to call it something). The taxes exist to help pay for the city (cities aren't free). The political parties exist to protect individuals (undue personal scrutiny) and to mitigate strategic voting (ranking opponents low).

~Ulrika~

-one thing I don't get... loads of $$$ spent on questionable scientific studies -- you've heard of plenty, already, I'm sure (and I do believe in legit sci research but some of this stuff sounds so obvious and unhelpful)

-government "fat cat" abuse like big-toed politicians getting loads of dough for personal expenses like luxury vacations at the cost of the taxpayers

-a generalization, but a pet peeve of mine is the lack of comprehension of technology on the part of certain politicians who introduce and ratify tech-based bills and whatever, even if they don't know how to use email that's just blind judgment! Ewww!

-HIDING BEHIND POLICY... BOOOOOO!

what do I hate? hmmm I'd have to say the way they boil it down to 2 utter f*cktards and say 'ok - now choose!' by which point the most rational choice I can make is to take to my scrotum with an anglegrinder while shoving knitting needles into my eyes.

Yep... that about sums up what I hate most.

Siggy.

Um, this is the kind of Amero-centric post from a socialist that makes me loathe RL governments and RL factions that want to overthrow RL governments. Russia can appear to have a lower military spend rate because it disguises it, the parliament is weak and can't find out the truth, it uses the old state-socialist Soviet industrial base which is built upon the backs of slave labor, murdering millions, and it doesn't pay its soldiers anything near what US soldiers make, nor provide them with anything near the living conditions, killing 10 times more of them in non-combatant areas through negligence and hazing than American kills in a war zone. Not to mention China and its oil sales to mass murderers like Sudan...it's not the American military killing people in Darfur, it's the Sudanese government abetted by Russian weapons and Chinese oil sales.

Now, how is that related to SL, you say? Well, if I were to tell you, not only would I be opening myself up to a deletion for a "person attack" or "racism" or what have you, everyone would say I was "negative".

So..let's try to boil down the essence. The real evils of the world, not committed by one country, are masked because the people in that one country can't see past the ends of their own shores. In the same way, companies, groups, individuals related to SL tend to be centric to their point of view, and usually that ideology involves suppression of dissent and an unwillingness to believe in objectivity obtained by a multiplicity of subjectivities.

This becomes even more exaggerated in an online, anonymous, flying, cybery environment where you can evade responsibility. Therefore, it's impossible to really find the consensus and the social contract you need for a government, which inflicts a lot of stuff on you in exchange for you to get a bit of service and security.

The worst thing about governments in SL is always the people pushing them on others, usually with themselves at the head of an advance guard or a security team. They never seem to start with some kind of basic common interest like "all land owners" or "all members" or "a constituent assembly". They never seem to start with the basics of any government or transitional team, which is to hold lots of sessions with lots of big groups of people who have lots of opportunity to speak. Instead, they try to micromanage them with full-blown toy versions of governments in RL.

In RL, when you are trying to change a Soviet Union to a Russia, or change an Iraq pre-invasion to an Iraq post-invasion, the stuff you do is not create a subsidized social democracy toy. The stuff you do isn't pretty, I grant you. It's never a democracy. But that's why so many players are right to keep it simple, and just opt not to have a government, but to have some governance kept at a very low minimum.

The fact that we dont vote for our own Prime Minister.

what do I hate about RL government?

well, have you seen the cheesy american 1980's mini-series, now on dvd, called "V", well, if you have you can see the similarities between the evil lizardmen who wore human skins and took over the world but secretly ate human flesh and the current governments...

Power abuses

and in the specific:

- Mass media abuses. Governments don't inform their people, they MAKE information, wich is always in favour of the government's politic (Bush's mass destruction weapons in Iraq, Berlusconi's media egemony). In SL, maybe, an in-world tv streaming official channel of the government would see the light very early and I would fear that voice.

- Police abuses. Look at the G8 facts in Italy to have an idea. All the policemen that were accused by hundreds people of force abuses during the G8 days, were processed and declared innocent. I don't know if in SL a government would be possible without a police.

- Privilege abuses. Like clientelism and similar. An SL government would not be immune.

There are more things like these that I dislike, Ulrika. No, they aren't absolute values, vary from country to country and to be more exact, they are neither proper parts or concepts of a government. In fact, if I were you in search of a "why not?", I would better start a discussion on the BUGS of RL governments and a way to avoid them, than one on their wanted or less wanted features.

Hi Pleze. If you check out the SL Polysci forum description and read through a lot of the other threads in this forum, you'll note that a main topic of discussion is not SL wide government but self-governing sims, ie sub-governments within the LL wide TOS/CS (eg a communist sim, a conservative sim, a Discordian sim etc).

As Chuck Beckett put it:



Having said that, Pleze, I disagree with your particular criticism of possible SL wide resident governments. There are lots of possible government models that could overcome the limited man-hours problem you have described. In theory you could have a system of government that spreads the workload throughout any number of the 25,000+ residents of SL (whereas Linden Labs has a limited budget and (currently) only a small staff). For example, you could have systems with elected representatives, petitions, or SL-wide voting models similar to those experimented with in A Tale in the Desert. There is also a surprising number of residents who are able to spend maybe 8+ hours per day in Second Life.


Having said that, personally I am mainly interested in self-governing sims etc and would probably oppose the SL wide government models I have just mentioned (for a variety of reasons I won't go into here). In terms of SL wide changes, I would just prefer to see LL make the TOS/CS more permissive (see Herald post on this and other comments here).

-- Neal Stewart

Laughable. Osama is way too hyped.

He got one jab in and since - nothin. Cept his Taliban boys in Afghanistan lost their power.