“He despised you, and everything you stand for,” he adds

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[–] 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 child)

In some ways, their democratic system made a lot more sense than ours, TBH. They didn’t elect people to positions, because they thought that would lead to popularity contests dominated by the wealthy (🤔). Positions of power were assigned randomly by sortition (lots) amongst all the male Athenian citizens, they only voted on policy.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 week ago

    Yeah, that makes much more sense.

    Especially because it was random, so in a room with 100 people, you're very unlikely to have a member of the 0.1%, so it's easy to decide that tax policy should be to tax the ultra-rich.

    PBS did a special a while back where they actually rebuilt the machine used for selecting people. It was a lot like a modern dice tower where you'd pour things in the top and the machine would randomize it. But, instead of using dice, they used black and white balls, and one colour meant people were selected for the position, and the other one meant they didn't get selected.

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