Random ideas (again)

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wellis
Posts: 97
Joined: Thu Jan 16, 2014 11:54 am

Re: Random ideas (again)

Post by wellis »

Destructionator wrote:idk anything abotut 17th century pirates so I can't say anything about that.... but here's what my butt has in mind...
Booted Vulture wrote:How would that work?
It depends on how the crew wants it to work :) The important thing would be that mutiny isn't a crime - if the crew decides they don't want to do something, they don't have to. (An individual might need to obey orders; mutiny needs a group, and so does a democratic decision.)

From there, all decisions could be made through consensus, a kind of direct democracy. You could have elected captains with recall possible at any time. Or something else that I'm not thinking of. Each ship department might do their own strategy - the captain is picked by the crew and the lieutenants picked by the departments.



Limits on the practicality would come from a lot of external factors. Staff positions is probably dictated by training. I guess you could democratically do that too, but surely they'd decide to put qualified people at the posts. So this is a question of crew selection which happens outside the ship itself.

There's also a question of fleet actions. Suppose the admiral says "go to planet X", but the crew doesn't want to. Could the rest of the fleet punish them for not joining the group? I think it would only have any importance if the whole fleet was democratic.



So, you join starfleet. You then automatically get to sit in on meetings and participate in the decision making process - listen to the arguments, make your own, have a vote in the end.

When you get an assignment, you then are eligible to do the same on issues relating to your job. So suppose you're assigned to cleaning the poop deck on the USS Shitty Ass. Now you can make decisions relating to the Shitty Ass itself, taking part in the captain level elections, you get to make decisions with the local poop cleaners union - choosing the poop lieutenant, for instance, deciding on if you should go on strike, and also, you'd be a part of the fleet wide committee of poop cleaners who might make decisions on things like investing in new mops, making sure there's enough replacement buckets at the various bases, etc.


Direct democracy might be a pain on the fleet level... but might not, using an internet. Each individual is entitled to take part in all the meetings that affect him. Easy enough on a ship, you can all get physically together.

For the higher level, suppose you elect representatives. What you do is let them vote and speak on your behalf.... but to keep direct democracy, you can take this back at any time.

Suppose 100 people all decide to vote for Rep. Y. Rep. Y's vote now counts as 100 votes. But, if you're watching C-SPAN and don't like how he voted, you can just still place your own vote online and change one of those representative votes.



Huh, I like this in general.
Sounds like bad system in reality but one you could spin a lot of stories out of.
Maybe, but that's the fun anyway :)
Except isn't there a danger of crewmembers possibly refusing to do things that might be required to run a ship well? Some tasks really can't have a democratic process applied to them because bickering about some tasks might put the entire ship in danger. Space is dangerous and ships are dangerous as well. Just outside the thin walls o the ship is an extremely hostile environment and one screw up by a crewmember could possibly doom the entire ship. In such conditions, wouldn't a democratic decision-making process possibly be too slow to work well in such an environment?

There's a reason why many communist nations that attempted to make militaries more "democratic" soon reverted that process, because it led to inefficiencies in military matters.
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