Democracy is Wonderful!

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But what is Democracy? Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner tonight.

ruveyn

Democracy is choosing your own dictatorship.

i tell people that, and i was planning on saying it here. damn you!

another way of describing western democracy is "rule of the stupid"

western democracy is becoming more and more commercialized politics. in theory you could just throw out the same imagery of other ads, lightly dressed chicks, the whole commercial deal, and win more votes. several such stunts have allready been done.

but yes, once youve picked your leader, he rules you as he damn well wishes, for 4 years.

Last edited by ZEGH8578 on 16 Aug 2009, 5:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote. -Benjamin Franklin

Actually it's voting on what to have for lunch.

"It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything."

Of course, the guy who said that was Josef Stalin.

that is because Democracy is equality between dictators
and family is a bond based on the most egoistic interests
i'm a king and u r my queen
that's why together we are rubbish
everybody want to rule the world so nobody will wast his time listening and seeing and caring about no one else but himself

nowadays even the people at the "top" doesn't have much say about what's going on as social and technical systems are becoming to involved to be managed by centralized approach
more channels and options are added each day
the world diversify
all systems are accelerating toward anarchy which is the best method there is

institutionalized mob rule, where the minority can say what they like and the majority gets to do what they want anyway.

The educated citizen being able to make the choice and - yes - take responsibility themselves when it doesn't work. The problem is we've shattered the links too much in our republican form, not that republican democracy is the problem, if anything its a great buffer, but the grass-roots structure has been torn to bits for years and only recently with the types of problems we're starting to face with our elites ripping it right from out of us that we're starting to actually get the concept again that we need to be involved. Ideally local matters should be most important, then state, then federal, not the opposite.

Of course that's the inherent weakness with representative democracy - took Rome a while to get decadent but as we're seeing the human condition really doesn't change all that much over the millennium (ie. we need to figure out a form of representative democracy that keeps people more tied into the process rather than cut so loose as to wander off, not pay attention to the issues, and then go that route en mass to pass the baton to the elites).

I always hate when people try to pretend that things were better in the past and it's always gotten worse and worse. Think smear campaigns are bad now? Go and read what Andrew Jackson's opponents wrote about his mother. Think political corruption is bad now? Irishmen in the New York political machine would grow their beards out, vote in the morning, shave, and vote again in the afternoon. Think politics is shallow and people vote for trivial, greedy, or materialistic reasons? The political parties used to actually live up to their names, passing out beers to the voters and throwing raucous celebrations to bring out the vote.

Ideally,the local matters should be important as the global or then federal.
it's the balance between the samlest detail and the widest picture that makes a good system that works for the benefits of all
that's why i think that the information infrastructure is so crucial for the much needed social change as it is leveling the influences and forces and create a structure where the center and the periferial have the same influence on the common proceccs

Whereas now they don't spend time doing anything so banal as buying the common man (since we're talking about the past with limited suffrage). Now they just sell out favours to those who matter.

Imperfection remains in the system, its just of a different sort.

For more recent memory as well all you have to do is look back to the early 1960's with JFK, RFK, Marilyn Monroe, the mob ties, whether Marilyn was 'dealt with', and our early founding days still may not hold much of a candle to the dalliances in the royal courts of the the 17th and 18th centuries.

As opposed to...

Autocracy: One wolf deciding which lamb to have for dinner.

Oligarchy: A council of wolves decided which sheep to kill.

Anarcho-capitalism: "Three wolves competing to be first to 'add value' to the sheep by slaughtering it and sell it to the others." [Huben]

Oh, boy, producing nauce-less, oversimplified, bumper sticker analogies on complex political systems is so much fun!

In the beginning of the states the founding fathers had in their heads to keep national level politics as limited and trivial as they could - mainly to keep it from becoming the sought-after or consolidated place of power. We have a central tendency as a race, people have a tendency toward preferring to abdicate their responsibilities to someone else and blame those who then make the choices. I agree that the federal gov't needs power to deal with interstate disputes and national issues but if we ever rewound things we'd likely want to stack the cards at least a little bit in the other direction just to hedge against that central tendency (though yes, too much could possibly just about cause local tribalism - that would be a great ill also and something to be guarded against).

I find it strange that you didn't mention Bleeding Kansas.