USA Bashing

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They are used correctly.


Um... that's what I've been saying the whole time. One voter has no power in an election. It "contributing" is meaningless because then you are viewing people as aggregates, not as individuals.


No, neither you nor history have done any such thing. The means you and number5 have listed as ways for people to change government do not involve voting and are thus available to people even without a democratic system being in place. If you are acting outside of politics, then the political system is irrelevant.


No, I will not affect it. The last time I voted, not only did my vote not affect the outcome in my state, my state did not affect the outcome of the election. You are right only in that no one has more voting-power than anyone else (in theory at least, in practice this is false at least in the US). So everyone is equally impotent. I don't see how this is a good thing.


No, it is objectively true. One vote is one vote is one vote. It does not change. It is always one vote. The seed and hail analogies could work to describe community action, like starting a grass-roots organization where your initial small contribution could snowball into something significant, but they certainly do not apply to voting.

Orwell wrote

You seem to make the principle of aggregate judgment in democracy a fault in that one person cannot determine the outcome whereas you find it laudable that in a monarchy some random individual who could be easily an egomaniac or totally insane as well, it should be conceded , as being competent. The principle of democracy, of course, is that a large number of people must believe a decision is worthwhile before their mass opinion becomes effective. Why is that not a good thing? Why should one vote overwhelm a general decision?

The point is largely that I don't think the advocates of democracy understand this aspect of it. An individual does not matter in a democracy. If one wants to defend this state of affairs, it is certainly possible to do so. I disagree with the notion that what the majority of people believe must be true. And I also have tried to point out that when an individual has little to no influence, they are less likely to find it worthwhile to exercise that little influence responsibly. Thus, the bulk of votes will be from grossly uninformed voters, because it is not worthwhile to keep up to date on all relevant political issues.


Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already. (Henry David Thoreau)

And the point you make is that a grossly misinformed public defeats the purpose of democracy. No question about that. So the problem then is to inform them properly. Perhaps a single individual could do something about that. Obviously a functioning democracy requires a dynamic citizenry that is well informed.

well, if enough individuals feel the same way, their vote does affect elections.

You can change the facts
you change points of view
you may change your vote
you may change the world...

My criticism of democracy is that, as you said, it requires a well informed electorate, and yet the structure of the democratic system gives no incentive for people to be informed. When an individual has very little power, they also have very little incentive to be careful using that power. So you have a lot of people casting careless votes. For example, in 2004 most people who opposed the war in Iraq voted for John Kerry, who repeatedly stated that he was going to escalate the war in Iraq by sending more troops over. People simply don't know what they're voting for much of the time. If there are fewer people who hold power, then the importance of an individual becomes clear and each person who has power will take pause to consider whether they are making the best use of that power.

Again your criticism of democracy boils down to a badly informed public. The events in Iraq are totally confused by no one really knowing what the USA is doing there in the first place. From establishing a democratic regime to controlling the oil to securing the whole middle east militarily the confusion boils on continuously and no one seems to know. Democracy becomes potent when the public is personally affected by policy and Iraq , aside from the financial fiascoes, has no personal effect on the US public. Loss of jobs and incomes and health problems are affecting people and their interest in these things is high and is causing democratic political efforts.

I'm just going to laugh at that statement for a while.

...

"If there are fewer people who hold power, then the importance of an individual becomes clear and each person who has power will take pause to consider whether they are making the best use of that power."?
You mean people like a president and his advisors? Or a monarch and his puppets? No, people only makes decisions who gains them, and the benifit with democracy is that if the person want to stay in power, it had better benefit the people too, since it's them he's answering to.

I can merely say that it seems that you lack faith in american people, and there for rule out democracy all thogether. And all your arguments are a screen to hide that.

Only if you believe that "the people" are keeping close tabs on those in power.


I lack faith in people in general, not just in American people. There are a few other problems with democracy, but a good portion of my arguments are based on a lack of faith in people.

It's obvious from the antics of the recent Bush regime and the wildly variable public response to its policies that your strong doubts about democracy are fully justified. Nevertheless your adherence to the archaic and highly faulty monarchist systems seems, at least to me, to be over trusting in a system that has proved, time and again, to be, if anything, worse in the long run. There is a faint but real possibility that the democratic faults can be rectified. I don't see any way of fixing the basic faults of a monarchy.

OK, so monarchy has plenty of skeletons in its closet. Still, I would prefer some non-democratic system. The question then becomes one of how leaders are to be selected.

I would be delighted to hear your suggestions. If leadership is to be determined by competence then it seems obvious to both of us that maintaining it within an elite family seems very faulty as does the choice through mere popular approval with little or no secure standards to indicate future performance. The danger of setting up a formal procedure to accede to leadership is that it becomes corrupted in favor of a powerful elite which is what has happened in the USA at present. I have only very vague ideas about what the procedure might be.

I am also at a loss for a realistic way to choose consistently good leaders. Some sort of aptitude test? Standardized testing obviously has its own downfalls, though it would be nice if we could find some use for an analog of ancient China's Civil Service Exam. Maybe a limited democracy, with suffrage restricted to those who can demonstrate a strong understanding of economics and political thought? Of course, the qualifying process in such a system would be open to abuse. And limiting voting by educational levels would result in a massive liberal bias. By lot, like jury duty? Clearly suicide.

It occurs to me that the system used by successful businesses to determine a successful CEO has some potential but examples of businessmen getting into government and screwing up does not seem encouraging. Perhaps what is needed is some sort of formal preparation for leadership and then cautious provisions for those who get through that to be put in actual control of small political areas to prove their capability. But that somehow is not too different from what now exists and there are obvious problems of corruption and old boy networks. I have no good ideas at the moment.

That's the issue most of the ideas I'm thinking of run into. Of course, our current allegedly democratic system is very much an old boy network, so demanding that a new system resolve this particular issue may be asking too much.


I'm not sure any good ideas exist.

No need for close tabs, it's enough with a general picture of what's the person is doing. And that's reflected by society. Mayby you need to get out more.


Tell me, who many non-americans have you meat and talked to? WP dosen't count. (We aren't really prepresentative for our nations. ^^)