[EM] it's pleocracy, not democracy

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 06:00 AM 3/5/2007, Jobst Heitzig wrote:
>Do you mean to say that the will of a consistent faction of 49% of the
>electorate, who will never get their way under a majoritarian system,
>is "noise"??

No. But that condition is essentially impossible. There is *never* a 
consistent faction of that size in a majoritarian democracy, indeed, 
I think I wrote, there is no faction of *any* size of which this is 
true, since the vast majority of choices made in real societies enjoy 
almost total consensus.

Let me put it this way. I've worked as a prison chaplain.

Even thieves believe that theft is wrong. I never met one who thought 
it should be legalized.

They may think that they, personally, were justified in some way, but 
that's another matter.

So when you are talking about a faction which "will never get their 
way," you are talking about a narrow subset of the choices that the 
society makes, those which are controversial.

And there is no consistency about this. Everyone wins sometimes and 
loses sometimes. Everyone.

The "noise" was introducing some random process whereby collective 
decisions were sometimes made against the will and without the 
permission of the majority. That random process is the noise.