USA Bashing

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Fair enough. You still have not brought up any objections to the idea of a limited monarchy.


Most Germans were not aware of the scope of the Holocaust, to be fair.


No, a person who proves to be popular can get reelected. That's not necessarily the same thing.


No they don't, now you're just being ridiculous. You can spout the feel-good crap they use to propagandize the perfect egalitarian democracy where anyone can grow up to be President, but that doesn't make it true.


I didn't vote for Bush. I didn't vote at all, being a minor at the time of his two elections (dubious though they both were). But I am still affected by his moronic policy decisions. So it doesn't look like democracy has any real advantage here.


Yes, I am, because you have contradicted yourself.

I don't wear blinders. Where social action is required to protect individuals, then it should be taken, as in keeping a clean water supply and proper drainage for waste. We don't live in little cells. We live in a society where people bump into each other and breath on each other. My concern is still selfish, but rational selfishness requires that the context be considered.

ruveyn

OK. That's why we pat taxes (which you consider robbery) so that these things are taken care of.

I have already stipulated that tax for the police, courts and the army is a necessary evil. It is robbery, but there is no alternative except chaos like Somolia or Haiti.

Taxes we must have, but let us have as few or little of them as is feasible.

Taxation for the purpose of income redistribution is outright robbery and just plain bad.

Taxation for the provision of necessary services is a different story. No workable alternative has been found yet.

ruveyn

I have already stipulated that tax for the police, courts and the army is a necessary evil. It is robbery, but there is no alternative except chaos like Somolia or Haiti.

Taxes we must have, but let us have as few or little of them as is feasible.

Taxation for the purpose of income redistribution is outright robbery and just plain bad.

Taxation for the provision of necessary services is a different story. No workable alternative has been found yet.

ruveyn

Yes I have, anyone sitting at a position of power for life will sooner or later try to gain more power.


Oh no, of course not, under the condition that people never talked to each others. There were tens of thousands of guards and members of death squads. Hundred of thousands of Wehrmach witnesses. And no one knew... and they all hid jews, if you asked them.


True, yet people who are successfull becomes popular. People who are idiots don't.


Yes they have, but it's slim at best.
You don't think anyone can suck up to enough people to get elected? But can do it to get reelected... Hmm... Keep explaining please. And you fail to consider the fact that if a chief of state is useless, the better ones will use this against him to win support.


But you learned something didn't you? A bad king can be followed by by countless more, and all you can do is endure or rebell.
In a democracy you can atleast do something within a lifetime. How can you fail to recognice this?
There are two ways things like this can play out:
-All of you suffer because most of you were stupid. Trial and error. New chance in 4 years.
-All of you suffer because one of you were stupid. Bad luck. New chance when he dies. (This might take a while...)
Or:
-All of you can do well because the majority was smart. Good choice. Reelection awaits. Let's keep him as long as he does his job well.
-All of you can do well because one person was smart. Lucky you, hope the next one will be that too.

Your entire life in the hands of luck...?


Really, where?

This is as true of Presidents as it is of kings, and the intended safeguards are the same. The office needs to be kept within its clearly delineated bounds, regardless of who occupies it and for how long.


This is not necessarily true.


Will they succeed in the PR battle if they try? Maybe, maybe not.


Because it is patently false. I personally have no more power over government as a full citizen of a representative democracy than I would as the subject of an absolute monarch. The same goes for any other individual.


You say that to keep a people united, you must quash divergent or opposing thoughts. Then you go on to say that you don't support doing that. Then you make a random non sequitur attacking monarchy on baseless grounds. So, you evidently are opposed to keeping a people united (are you an anarchist perhaps?) and you are still laboring under the delusion that monarchy and civil liberties are mutually exclusive.

In defense of the cherry picked queen..

My ancestors lived under her and her heirs. We are not Russians though.

My ancestors fled a fledgling democracy of sorts. They were ethnic Germans living in what is now the French province of Alsace-Lorraine. In 1789 they fled the approach of the French army and went to Switzerland as refugees, where they were also not welcome. From that unstable situation they attempted to return home, but their land and possessions had been claimed by the French.

Catherine the Great extended an offer at the time for Germans to settle the lower Volga river. The edict was that they were to be provided towns, freedom of religion, freedom from military service and even freedom from taxation for 30 years.

A lot of hardship did result, but it was more to do with graft and corruption. All indications are that her intentions were pure(she was a German princess that married the Czar), and eventually my ancestors became quite affluent and comfortable. It was only in the years approaching the coming of the communist revolution that things became difficult.

Fearing(and suffering) the loss of those freedoms, they packed up and headed to America around the year 1900. Attempting to settle in Kansas proved futile; it was heavily populated. They then came to Canada.

Both Catherine and her son were outstanding in their treatment of the Volga Germans. It was only later monarchs that repealed her offerings.

Well, I think we can all agree on that very few democratic states has a president who's been in office a lifetime.


Example please.


One of our longest sitting Prime ministers was in power for ~10 years, then he became old, useless and stoped listening to us, so we change. Easy as pie.


Epic fail once again. As a democratic citizen, your power is 1/X every four year. In a monarchy your power is 0/1 all the time.


Yes, it's a fact. Just look at Yugoslavia. It is no more. The basic thought of a people is their national identity, it's very hard to change, but as long as that's the same, the country is united. When not, you have a civil war or a new state.
The degeneration of rulers is a well documented fact. When it happens, they start to safeguard their power. Care to take a guess at who's expence?
So why didn't this happened before? Simply 'cause no state has had the freedoms we have now.

Perhaps you are the one who skipped out on the mathematics. lim1/x=0 (Does anyone know if it's possible to use LaTeX code in WP posts?) For large values of x, 1/x is basically zero. A large democracy, at any rate, is absurd. Even if there were only a hundred thousand voters, my "power" would be 0.001%. The last presidential election had 131 million voters. That makes any individual voter 0.00000076% of the total decision (ignoring our electoral college system, which distorts these values).

Warning: Violation of the laws of Nature!
Correction. lim1/x >0. Please don't do that again.

And to again compare it to the monarchys 0. Let's chose now, >0 or 0.
But of course you can ignore voting, but it gives the other votes more weight.

The hell? No, that's mathematics, not a violation of the laws of nature. Would you like to see a proof? The limit of 1/x is zero. If you deny that, you just have not studied math beyond a very basic secondary school level. Do you know what a limit is? If you say the limit of 1/x is greater than 0, can you give me a value for it? Can you give me a proof demonstrating that it is greater than zero?

Please don't do what again? State basic mathematical facts? Call you out on obvious BS? I'm not sure what you're objecting to.


Well, 0=0. What's the difference between 0 and 0? 0, of course.


With x number of voters, each vote would be worth 1/x of the total decision. If one person decides not to vote, than each of the remaining x-1 voters gets an additional (1/x)/(x-1) weight added to their vote (the absent voter's power is divided evenly amongst the remaining voters), that is, the power of a vote is now 1/x + (1/(x*(x-1)). lim1/x=0 and lim1/(x*(x-1))=0, so lim(1/x + 1/(x*(x-1)))=0. ie, 0+0/(x-1)=0

With finitely many voters, there is a measurable positive value that can be assigned to 1/x. In practice 1/x is always negligible for sufficiently large values of x. A voter in a large democracy is like air resistance on a car traveling 30mph- not important enough to matter.

For crying out loud, have you ever seen an election in a country with 0 inhabitants? That's what we're talking about, remember?
Here's the proof: 0 people = no government = no election OR monarch. Any questions?


Need I say more...?


Yupp, and more than 0 will allways be more. From the smallest seed you can grow a tree, but no seed, no tree.


But it still has an effect. No matter how small.

Really, and

OK, so you obviously have no idea what a limit is. The Wikipedia article can get you started. There are a number of free calculus textbooks available online (just google "free math books"), but I would recommend a paper textbook. I'm rather partial to Stewart: Essential Calculus myself.

1/x, you said, is the amount of power an individual voter has in a democracy containing x voters. Now, consider x=10. Each voter's power is 1/x=0.1. That's pretty good. At x=100, each voter's power is 1/100=0.01. Not too shabby. At 1000 voters, 1/1000=0.001. Getting a bit low, but still probably not worthless to cast a vote. At 100,000, 1/100,000=0.00001. Now each person is looking pretty powerless. As you can see, the larger x grows, the smaller 1/x gets. This makes sense, yes? The more voters, the less power each individual voter has. As you can see, as x grows large, 1/x approaches 0 (ie, it gets closer and closer to being 0). We say lim1/x=0 to mean that 1/x can be made arbitrarily close to 0 by choosing a sufficiently large value for x.

Get it now?


You could if you want. It's great comedic value.


And negligible is still negligible, and counted as 0 for all practical purposes. The "seed" analogy you try to use doesn't work.


Not a measurable effect. Newtonian mechanics is actually wrong because it fails to account for the time and space dilation that we know (from quantum mechanics) occurs when things are moving. But for everything that happens on Earth, physicists and engineers still pretend that classical mechanics is correct, and no one can tell the difference in the results that are obtained.

The only way voters matter is if they aggregate into large blocs, in which case you no longer have anything like individuals exercising their best judgment and choosing a candidate that matches their ideals. You have a mob mentality where people just follow along unthinkingly. I don't think that's what the proponents of democracy really imagine.

Or that the idealists behind the concept could fathom.

What Orwell said is correct. What is possible in math at such small scale is wholly inaccurate when applied to the real world. When the contribution of a data point is unmeasurable, it is ignored - Zero.

I don't mean to rudely jump in on an argument Orwell, but you seem to apply democracy to only the presidential level. An individual can have quite a significant effect on a local level. Democracy is more than just a pull on a lever once every four years and calculus is not intended to represent human impact (and I do have a BS degree in math and science so I do not need or want further technical explanations). It's wonderful to be intellectual and to pursue a higher education, but it's also important to sometimes take a step back and look at the whole picture. Perhaps it's been a while since you've read "Horton Hears a Who." The spec matters.

Indeed our current system here in the US needs a lot of work, but I certainly prefer it to a monarchy.