Quote of the Day

[autographedcat]

Seen in officialgaiman:

If pressed to pick a political system, I think that some country or other ought to try jury duty as a way of picking its politicians: if your name gets picked, and you can't come up with a good enough excuse, you'll have to give up four or five years of your life to helping run the country, which avoids the main problem of politics as I see it, which is that the kind of people you have to vote for are the kind of people who actually think that they ought to be running things. If you have a country and want to try this as a political system, let me know how it works out.
--Neil Gaiman

Comments

[smallship1.livejournal.com]

Well, yes.

I envisaged a two-tier system. On one level you have a very large, very complex bureaucracy you can choose to go into, with lots of elaborate titles and orders of rank and annual examinations rather on the Chinese model but more practical: and on the other you have this squad of black-clad horsemen who occasionally gallop around the streets snatching up people at random, ostensibly to be carried off and tortured unspeakably for undisclosed offences, in fact to form the secret council that tells the bureaucracy what to do.

Or you could do it like jury duty, I suppose...simpler, but not nearly as much fun...*sigh* And there would need to be checks on the "jury" to stop them garnering wealth and power for themselves while they were in. In my system the bureaucracy would do that: how much wealth and influence does a prisoner being tortured need?