Wuzzy, thanks for giving us a good amount of information to understand your position. Would I be interpreting your tone correctly, if I put down as a Nay? I only ask because some people have deferred from voting and your views about the invalidity of voting and leadership in general could indicate perhaps if you felt more along that line. Anyway, if you could just clarify for our sake that would help.
Regarding where authority, such as mine to send out such a nomination and hold a vote comes directly from those who vote. Similarly, any authority granted to selpa'i to manage integrations comes directly from those that support him in doing so.
And that comes back on what exactly is the consequence of such an appointment. Your words expose a fear to me that selpahi will some how be solely responsible for the creation of proposals let alone their integration. This just isn't the intention. Lojban will still be accessible to everyone who wishes to think deeply and creatively with the aim of improving the language. Furthermore such proposals do not go straight from their author to selpa'i's approval. That would be impractical for sure. I hope that I can clearly convey that what is going on here is giving all the people who have an opinion on things that should change, a venue for advertising and seeking consensus on changes and mostly important a generally agreed upon mechanism for finalizing that consensus into the language. This is the role selpahi will be taking on. Its so very important for us to be able to distinguish between selpahi having the responsibility of merging changes into the language, and selpahi having the sole responsibility of managing the languages creative process.
Finally, to respond to the question of just what percent of respondents much vote positively for this motion to be actualized I would to say a couple things. Let's consider the situation now. We don't have any means through which to fix cludges in the grammar or lexicon. We do have many people thinking about how to improve these cludges. Some say that we should orchestrate a massive formalized tome detailing how to implement a direct democracy, explicitly delineating protocols and how hearings and so on should be carried out. I applaud those people for thinking so grandly. However, I and a number who already agree with this motion that the reality is that such a clinical simply is not practical in the modern community of lojban. Those who have the fortitude and strength to spend large amount of their time thinking creatively and critically about lojban do so because they are passionate about the thing itself. Lojban. To ask them to gate their efforts behind the willingness to architect, orchestrate and carry out a large bureaucracy just isn't realistic as far as one can tell. This is synonymous to the nature of this poll. We are polling for a general attitude of the community. Contingent upon a momentum in either direction of self-evident magnitudes the motion will either be carried out naturally or not. Nothing will be done if this completely divides the community. Who could desire such a result after all? I know that I am safe speaking for all who are helping to organize this campaign and those who have already spoken in favor of it, the intention to help Lojban directly. It has nothing to do with selpa'i's ego, anyone else's ego, power, authority or anything. I hope I have framed this appropriately and respectably.
On Thursday, May 15, 2014 8:38:52 AM UTC-7, Wuzzy wrote:
The actual question to me is weather Lojban *needs* some kind of
leadership.
To give the leadership as you described to a single person also has
I disagree with the voting in itself and I think it’s nonsense.
It is completely meaningless to me. Even if selpa'i gets elected to
… well … the leader of Lojban xD … I won’t neccessarily recognize
his authority. Simply because nobody can tell me how to use any
language! :P
(But I try hard to stick to standards, so I can be understood.)
Accepting the voting process
in itself would mean I first recognize YOUR authority to cast out
a vote and to claim success or failure of that vote afterwards.
When do you think is the vote successful, anyways? Over 50%?
Over 66.666%? When does the vote even end? Which votes do even count?
Etc. etc. etc.
Hey, even I could start a vote today and get major support, but
that does not neccessarily mean the voting result is reasonable.
Any kind of democracy is based on a logical fallacy. Just because
many people are in favor of X, it does not mean X actually makes sense.
And before you ask, no, I also never recognized R.L.Powell as a leader.
Maybe selpa'i will flesh out some good proposals or improve existing
ones. Maybe I will support them or not. I don’t know, I haven’t looked
into many of them. Maybe I shoulod change that?
But no matter the proposals, I accept selpa'i as a Lojbanist, but
I don’t accept him as a leader.
I value proposals on how good they are, not solely on where they come
from. It is true that selpa'i has a long history in Lojban, but this
alone does not justify as him or anyone else being a leader.
In my eyes leadership is irrational. You suggest that way to go to
resolve dispute is to install a leader. But in reality, a leader
would be simply just another party, possibly arguing for another
position. But the leadership position is somehow accepted as “more
valuable” as the other positions. Sorry, but if you want to convince
ME that <INSERT PROPOSAL HERE> is good, you’d have to bring better
arguments than “<INSERT LEADER HERE> said it!”. This is the reason
why I think it is irrational.
And even if that leader has a long commitment to a topic, that does not
necessarily mean that leader would continue that way. Humans make
mistakes, that’s normal. But if a leader makes a mistake, the impact
is large.