Corruption

Traditionally, how has a corrupt system of government been dealt with, and what are the best ways to handle one?

>>1

there's two ways; you don't, or some people kill other people.

The main thing that usually concerns people immediately is not whether a government is corrupt, but whether most of the people are employed most of the time, and there's order in the streets.

>> 2

A hypothetical third way would be to remove the mechanisms which reinforce corruption. You could move to a cashless, post-demand economy, where anything you need you take (ala star trek), or you could move from a top-down hierarchical power structure to a bottom-up flat power structure, where every single person's opinion is valued equally on every single issue.

While these ideas may seem far fetched, they have had some implementation: in Sparta, there were no possessions, not even food. Everyone ate communaly. The only thing a person owned was their spear, which they had to make themself. I would surmise that the Spartan system was corruption free. It was also evil, what with the whipping cripples off of cliffs and enslaving millions. But I don't think this is a necessary consequence of a non-monetary society.

Or the New Guinean system, where-in there is *no* hierarchical power structure, there are "big men", but this is a non-hereditary description (not a position), which only indicates that the person is charismatic. Every decision made by a New Guinean tribe is decided by sitting in camp for hours, days, or weeks (Jared Diamond records spending 2 weeks, 3 days, 6 hours sitting around discussing whether or not the tribe should allow one of their members to go off on a scholarship to Oxford), and no decision is made until everyone either agrees or decides they don't really care. Imagine every decision made via multiparty fillibuster. The New Guinean system seems inefficient, but they have survived continuously on a difficult small island without changing their system of governance for at least 2.800 years, a feat no other society can claim.

>>2 because they are a small society. What's the size of the population?
>>1 Pay government officials more money.

>> 4

I think that even large societies are easily placated when their basic needs are met. The Roman system was incredibly corrupt through-out almost its entire history, yet "bread and circuses" kept things together for longer than almost any other modern government has been running continuously.

the point is that the New Guinean system works because their society is incredibly small. <Inst#cspell>

>>3
>>4
>>6
NG style could work, but you'd need a higher technological level than what's currently around, plus a more tightly knit society. Probably impossible in immigrant-heavy US, unless they somehow get over the infantile racist BS. (yeah, right.)

>> 6

New Guinea had a population of millions of people on it when modern peoples first visited. It's the worlds second largest island, second only to Australia. It is bigger than any of the islands in the Japanese archipelago by a significant amount. It supports almost 1.200 people per square kilometer, which is one of the highest population densities of any pre-industrialized nation in the world. New Guineans are the human race's experts at getting along, and I'd bet that their system would be invulnerable to corruption too.

I think the main thing that makes their system invulnerable to corruption is the extreme dilution of the individual vote, combined with the fact that since everyone has to argue their own pov, it would be more difficult to represent a view you don't actually believe in.

I'm not saying I'd want to live there of course... for whatever reason, the place continues to be an ultra-primitive shithole, characterized by ultra-conservativeness. Jared Diamond notes that when given pencils, they refuse to use them for writing, they instead prefer to use them as jewelry in their pierced septums. Yes, they stick pencils through their noses. Furthermore, they practice silviculture to a great degree, so they're always chopping down and planting trees... but when given steel axes and shovels, they take off the axeheads and shovel blades and use them as sharpening implements to make more rock axes and shovels. It doesn't matter how many you give them, they never get the idea to put away their rock tools and use the steel ones. Not stupid, just insanely conservative (in the literal sense, not the political sense).

A system of arguement where both sides have to say something?  Not something justified by the guy with the loudest opinion?  What they hell is wrong with them. 

HELLO! 1 MILLION PEOPLE ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY! HOW DOES THAT WORK OUT?
obviously, New Guinea is split up into smaller tribes, and such systems only work for individual tribes.

>> 10

I wasn't claiming that the New Guineans didn't break up into smaller groups, but I was correcting the statement "their society is incredibly small." Their society extends over millions. Their decision-making units are of a variable amount of people; anyone who feels that they are affected by something can have their say on it. There have been "sits" which involved, at their beginning, thousands of people, sitting around fires for weeks, taking turns talking about their view of the crux of the decision while the others patiently listened. Usually the groups boil down to only a few dozen pretty quickly, because once someone hears someone say exactly what they feel, they feel that their piece has already been said.

Also, it's not "Athenian democracy", because no-one, ever, gets to vote "against". If someone is adamantly against something, then it doesn't happen, ever. Everyone else must compromise until they reach something the person isn't adamantly against, or until they don't care and decide to do nothing instead. In fact there is no process of voting at all, per se... instead it's more like a couple dozen people sitting around a camp-fire saying "well, I feel x" and "I feel y", until all the variables of individual opinion become positive, or until all the people who aren't positive decide they're bored and walk off to do something else.

>>I wasn't claiming that the New Guineans didn't break up into smaller groups, but I was correcting the statement "their society is incredibly small." Their society extends over millions.

No, it extends to the limits of the tribal group. Human population of New Guinea != Society.

>> 11 p.s.

The obvious question is, don't a lot of discussions end in stalemates where nothing gets done?

Yes, this is the default position. An interesting, though perhaps apocryphal, anecdote: while Europeans claim to have encountered New Guineans first, they did so after exploring the island without seeing a human being for literally decades. How is it that millions of people were on the island yet never seen by the Europeans? According to New Guinean tradition, they saw the Europeans first and avoided contact (New Guineans only build their villages in the deepest jungles on the highest mountains, and their gardens look a lot like natural groves, so it's hard to find them), because they were having a sit to decide whether or not to talk to the white people. According to tradition, the sit lasted 2 generations, probably 4 decades.

>> 12

They don't divide into tribes though. New Guineans call their island "Papua", and they call themselves "Papua", and if you ask them what their tribe is they say it's "Papua", and if you ask them what they call human beings they say "Papua". They're all one tribe, with one culture, it's all one society. Their different villages are large familial units, this is evidenced by the fact that they don't marry within their villages, it's against their incest taboo.

If you want to claim that native New Guineans aren't all members of the same society, then by extension you have to claim that your family is one society, my family is one society, and everyone else in America's family is a seperate society. I think that's silly; rather, instead, work within the New Guinean interpretation and accept them as the monoculture they claim to be.

BUT IT"S WIKIPEDIA SO IT DOESN"T COUTN!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Papua_New_Guinea

The isolation created by the mountainous terrain is so great that some groups, until recently, were unaware of the existence of neighboring groups only a few kilometers away. The diversity, reflected in a folk saying, "For each village, a different culture," is perhaps best shown in the local languages. Spoken mainly on the island of New Guinea, about 650 of these Papuan languages have been identified; of these, only 350-450 are related. The remainder seem to be totally unrelated either to each other or to the other major groupings. Native languages are spoken by a few hundred to a few thousand, although Enga, used in Enga Province, is spoken by some 130,000 people. Most native languages are extremely complex grammatically.

>> 15

I'm pretty alarmed that Wikipedia would be so far from what I've read... but then again I haven't read a wide variety of sources.. everything I've been quoting is from just 3 books, Diamond's "Collapse" and "Guns, Germs, and Steel", and Clarke's "Remembering Papua New Guinea". But they're both fairly well known ethnographers... so I'm surprised that there'd be such tremendous variance between their descriptions and the Wiki description.

<Inst#cspell> But I'm not quite sure, but didn't Jared Diamond in GGS say that there's ethnic tensions between various groups in PNG? See page 335 Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond, I've read, and it seems to be properly detached towards PNGers. maybe it's Clarke's "Remembering Papua New Guinea"?

>>16
Then fix the Wikipedia entry, and list the books as references.

PNG sucks.  Stick with JPG or BMP

>>19
Nice fail there.

>>20
ya PNG does suck. It's full of slants and the filesize is too large.

>>21
Lossless compression motherfucker, do you understand it?

>>22
no sense of humor \=

attempt #2: ya, PNG does suck. It's full of jungle hillbillies and the filesize is too large.

Dell gives money to Republicans, Apple to Democrats. Microsoft to both. Now, that's what we call fair and neutral, amirite?

Stopping corruption 100% is utopic. Harder punishment may help but it also leads to less transparent societies. The key is the election system. Winner-takes-it-all in the First-Past-the-Post version leads to a two-party system where "investments" are likely to be successful. Proportional representation reduces return of investment, of course.

But single-winner systems that reduce the spoiler effect help, too. Take for instance Approval Voting. That is the most simple rating system. You either give a thumps up by making an [X] or a thumps down by not giving a mark. So the only change is that you can mark as many candidates as you want, the one with most marks is still the winner. That means while you may have a reason to vote a compromise on the same level as your favourite, you never have a reason to put a compromise above your favourite. Since you also have no reason to mark your most hated candidate (also true of First-Past-the-Post but not every system) the following is true of Approval: If there is a Group 1 that thinks A is the best and B is the worst and a smaller Group 2 that thinks B is better than A, B can't win. I'm sure that method will stop 2-party domination.

Another important thing is to have some direct democracy elements. Yes, it's true that people are sometimes stupid. But manipulating the opinion of millions of people is more expensive than manipulating the behaviour of some politicians -- politicians that also rely a lot on manipulating people. So you can either have a system that has a bit stupidity and some corruption or one that has a bit stupidity and lots of corruption.

Another problem is that political parties tend to be quite hierarchical. So while some politicians may start as idealists, they have to swallow a lot. There are election methods that weaken the party effect and some methods go so far to blur the line between representative democracy and direct democracy. Search the web for "proxy voting" or "liquid democracy".

So who's for rising up against our oppressors in a blaze of gunfire and home made explosives?

Three more China oil officials probed for graft

A HIGH-LEVEL government probe into corruption at China's leading oil and gas firm, the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), widened on 27 August 2013, with three additional senior officials at the state-run giant being investigated over alleged wrongdoing.

   The announcement by the State Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, which oversees China's state companies, followed a notice the day before on a probe into another top official at CNPC, parent of Hong Kong-listed PetroChina Co.

   The three senior officials have been put under investigation for "severe breaches of discipline", the commission said, employing the shorthand the Chinese government uses to describe graft.

   The investigations, which come amid an anti-corruption campaign by Chinese President Xi Jinping, were announced shortly after the close of the trial of Bo Xilai, once a rising political star who is now awaiting a verdict on charges of corruption, bribery and abuse of power.

   The commission said CNPC group deputy general manager Li Hualin, PetroChina vice-president Ran Xinquan, and Petro-China chief geologist Wang Daofu are all under investigation. It did not detail the accusations against them.

   A PetroChina spokesman said the company "does not tolerate any official involved in corruption or other crimes", but said the investigation would not affect the company's operations.

   Shares of PetroChina were suspended from trading on 27 August 2013 pending the investigation. - Reuters.