This is starting to make sense. I thought of villages as the base unit but couldn’t see how to make it work. Just don’t tell anybody it would be similar to traditional Aboriginal society…

As for AI and King Rupert, we need to rearrange our systems to remove the incentive to misinform, and start working on ways to rebuild a consensus on reality; the latter sort of follows from the former to an extent, but I imagine the process needs some help somehow…

I’d say start by divvying folks up into local groups, according to Dunbar’s number; 150-200. That way everyone gets to know everyone in their group, and the mechanisms we’ve evolved to regulate each other’s behaviour can apply.

Perhaps these groups can then have a rotating draft or something to come up with, I dunno, say 1 – 5 representatives to participate in another group of similar size higher up the chain, and so on all the way up?

I’m pretty damn sure we haven’t spent much effort so far exploring the space of possibilities of how to organise ourselves, particularly the space informed by a modern understanding of human nature informed by science.

That’s the best option for everyone, whether they believe it or otherwise.

Every issue voted on by everybody (who’s interested) on the net. No reps needed. But then who raises the issues? Everyone would raise at least five, making possibly a million issues – every day? every week? So there would have to be a central organisation of some sort to decide what gets voted on. The agenda.

A real democracy would result if we all had a vote on every issue, which is already possible. But with AI now loose on social media it’s hard to see people being correctly informed. We could always ask Rupert for the truth.

The best option for First Nations people is the Greens or an Independent that uses the community model used in Indi.

Likewise, Bolivar diGriz. I rationalized putting aside that very contradiction by saying to myself that our First Nations people were asked what they wanted to address their disadvantage and came up with the Uluru Statement – a wonderful response – so give it all the support one could. Arguing in its favour though meant on one hand saying that it gave them a say on issues affecting them – when addressing what does it do – and then arguing, as well as that the Voice didn’t infer any power to legislate, that the government of the day could ignore the advice if it wanted – when addressing it was giving a particular group powers that others wouldn’t have.

Furthermore, at the time there was an issue of water usage somewhere around Alice, and the prospect of fracking in Beetaloo, both of which it looked, to cynical old me, as if Labor were ignoring what the impacted First Nations groups were saying.

Labor will roll First Nations every time their interests clash with those of its donors – that, imo, is the reality. The only difference with the Coalition is that the Coalition will brag about it.

While I voted in favour of the Voice to Parliament, I was always cynical about it for the reasons pointed out in Ms Sharma’s article.

In our system of government, any advisory group’s reports or recommendations get swiftly buried and ignored when they hamper a lucrative donor’s ambitions.