Democracy is ostensibly majority rule (don't nitpick). The majority of people are poor. Therefore, democracy is the rule of the poor (Aristotle). We do not live in a democracy.
If the poor were truly in charge, why would they choose to remain poor?
You can fool some of the people, all of the time
91–100 of 229 posts
Re: You can fool some of the people, all of the time
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The only two benefits of democracy..." In my opinion the one major benefit of democracy over all other forms is that a terrible leader can be voted away within 4 years. It's a political system with garbage collection :)
If only it worked that way. Under democracy you optimize for just a single metric - popularity. If leader is terrible and popular no garbage collection will occur. Rise of populism is inherently built into nature of democracy itself.
I mean this is essentially how it works now but it didn't have to end up this way in the US. As-written we actually have a very nice electoral college where the people don't directly elect the president but instead choose someone (hopefully?) qualified to evaluate the candidates and vote on their behalf. And the states have the freedom to impose requirements on the elector nomination process so you get qualified people.
But a consequence of the states being able to independently decide how those electors are chosen lead to every state basically having a law that says that "you vote for the candidate instead of the elector, and the elector's don't actually matter and must follow the popular vote."
I really dislike the system as it exists now because the people directly electing 2/3 of the government in a checks and balances system kinda ruins the whole thing.
Re: You can fool some of the people, all of the time
#93My pet theory is that democracy is more tolerable because it alternates between incompetent people fast enough to keep people's hopes alive.
But on the other hand, hereditary monarchy allows a smart person to be at power every once in a while.
And if you do hit on a good one, you'd get forty or fifty years out of them if you were lucky.
You'd just need some Bene Gesserit types keeping the bloodlines, so you don't end up with the grandsons of Victoria or Charles II of Spain.
Re: You can fool some of the people, all of the time
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Compared to ruling by force, yes, democracy is inherently good for the people I don't understand why people here see democratic system as a replacement for ruling by a force. Democratic countries also rule by force in the end. Democratic countries also need polices, guns, armies, prisons, tax inspectors, prosecutors etc. Those same institutions are also the tools for dictatorships, they are just governed in a diffe…
The relevant word isn’t “force” it’s “consent”. All forms of government to some extent or another have to maintain a monopoly on legal violence and use force. The distinction with democracy is that the government secures and maintains the consent of those being governed.
How is that consent measured?
Re: You can fool some of the people, all of the time
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Democracy is nothing more than a system that replaces swords/bullets with votes. That's it. The fight for power (aka. resources) it inescapable and the only thing that democracy did, was to change the field that this fight is fought on. Democracy is more tolerable because no people die (in the open) when the landscape of power changes. The only two benefits of democracy to "the people" are: (1) the fact that they hav…
> Democracy is nothing more than a system that replaces swords/bullets with votes. That's it. > (...) >Democracy is more tolerable because no people die (in the open) when the landscape of power changes. Leaving rebuttal of your other points aside, can you see how that is not the same thing at all ? It's like claiming "a plane is nothing more than a system which can move through the air the same way a boat can move t…
I'll preface this with my bias. I'm a bit of an anti-authoritarian moral reductionist, an anarchist of the unhyphenated sort. I believe that you can express all moral statements that convey meaning solely in terms of the imposition of will, that the imposition of will for any reason other than to resist a greater imposition is the only immoral act, and that any framework which attempts to ascribe moral meaning to reality must either reduce to this or invalidates itself by contradiction.
I find the post you're responding to be an amusingly phrased and more reasonable interpretation of democracy than most, and will with the remainder of my post attempt a proportionate defense from the imposition of will you intend in representing your self-interest as moral truth.
> can you see how that is not the same thing at all?
I believe this phrasing is unnecessarily dismissive of the viewpoint you are responding to. A micro-imposition, if you will.
> [Democracy] also opened up the field for consent on all sides
Democracy does not transform or create consent, consent existed in the same form prior to democracy. If you do not resist an imposition of will, you consent. There is one point of the original post I will disagree with: the vote does not impose on the governed in democracy, the people with "swords/bullets" who find that vote to be an agreeable imposition and resistance to be a disagreeable imposition do. Voting may often be an adequate proxy for the use of violence to coerce, but it is nothing other than a statement of one's willingness to use violence or see violence be used for coercion towards a specific end.
> Democracies with minority protections (aka one of the ways we differentiate democracy from mob rule) make true win-wins possible
I disagree. Democracy enables aspects of reality to be classified by criteria which do not convey moral meaning, and for those classifications to become parameters in the function that allocates violence for the purpose of coercion. The closest approximation of a "true win-win" within the constraints dictated by reality is when all parties minimize their imposition. Voting in regards to which arbitrary classification of reality shall be imposed on in the interest of some other arbitrary classification is a statement of violent intent which is so far detached from moral meaning it amounts to a random walk in that metric space.
> There is not way to wage a war in such a way that all sides win, a way to fight in a way where noone gets hurt.
It is not possible to exist in such a way that all things which do exist or could possibly exist win. Physical reality is inherently adversarial: conservation of energy suggests that a quanta of energy released by one process can only and will only be consumed by exactly one process. One may strive to maximize the entropy of reality, to allow the largest number of contending states to be occupied, and this is moral. Democracy, again, moves with no discernible direction in relation to moral meaning.
> The first sentence describes the removal of democracy. The second claims that this is evidence for democracy not always being good for the people. Compared to ruling by force, yes, democracy is inherently good for the people
Democracy is exactly ruling by force. Resist the imposition of the will of the majority, or something which is fraudulently misrepresented as the will of the majority unopposed, and you will be coerced by violence. The only thing that is inherently good for the people is for every individual person to minimize their imposition to that which is necessary to survive and seek truth, and only then if that does not require a greater imposition than they would resist. Anything more is an immoral act of self-service.
Re: You can fool some of the people, all of the time
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Historically, monarchy’s seem to be more stable and result in less open warfare (civil wars). The US did not even last 90 years before the first civil war. A rather large number of democracies have fallen and been replaced with dictatorship. Democracies have other benefits, but stability does not seem to be one of them. PS: I am ignoring assassinations and power struggles as we have lost 4 sitting US presidents witho…
> Historically, monarchy’s seem to be more stable and result in less open warfare. How did you come to that conclusion? It seems like ahistorical nonsense to me.
Plenty of research supports this, for example this trying to find why so many new democracies result in civil wars:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/20752195?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co...
By comparison England lasted from 886 to 1642 without open civil war. At the extreme Harappan civilization seems to have lasted 2,000 years without an open civil war or really any major wars.
Re: You can fool some of the people, all of the time
#97My pet theory is that democracy is more tolerable because it alternates between incompetent people fast enough to keep people's hopes alive.
Democracy is nothing more than a system that replaces swords/bullets with votes. That's it. The fight for power (aka. resources) it inescapable and the only thing that democracy did, was to change the field that this fight is fought on. Democracy is more tolerable because no people die (in the open) when the landscape of power changes. The only two benefits of democracy to "the people" are: (1) the fact that they hav…
I don't know to what extent this adversarial definition of democracy is true. Democracy literally means the power is with "the many" instead of "the few", and in recent centuries it reemerged due to the rise of the urban class who could no longer tolerate centralization of power. In ancient times, democracy was largely ensured by allotment, in our times it's almost exclusively through majority-election. The principle though remains similar.
Re: You can fool some of the people, all of the time
#98My pet theory is that democracy is more tolerable because it alternates between incompetent people fast enough to keep people's hopes alive.
I have a similar theory, the right and the left each get to alternate so we stay sort of in the middle.
It didn't work well enough.
Re: You can fool some of the people, all of the time
#99Is it too much to ask the author to define his terms? The nature of truth is subject to an ongoing epistemological debate. The author's unspoken presumption is that fallible humans can even approach truth. Is it not more honest in a way if a politician or a criminal accepts that he can not do truth justice, and proceeds with the sausage making? Like an actor winking into the camera, self-irony becomes an important pa…
Really an honest politican is technically possible but only if and only if the inputs are guided to such via demands. A voter base which accepts the truth or honesty. It is just that it is expected and career suicide to be anti "anti-rhetoric" blunt with unsexy qualified stances and truths. Saying "I will agree to just about anything for farm subsidies because despite less than 10% of the population working in the ag…
In the US today the fraction of the population working in agriculture is about 0.6%[1]. Agriculture is one of the most mechanized and corporate industries we have.
Re: You can fool some of the people, all of the time
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Democracy is nothing more than a system that replaces swords/bullets with votes. That's it. > (...) >Democracy is more tolerable because no people die (in the open) when the landscape of power changes. Leaving rebuttal of your other points aside, can you see how that is not the same thing at all ? It's like claiming "a plane is nothing more than a system which can move through the air the same way a boat can move t…
> Compared to ruling by force, yes, democracy is inherently good for the people I don't understand why people here see democratic system as a replacement for ruling by a force. Democratic countries also rule by force in the end. Democratic countries also need polices, guns, armies, prisons, tax inspectors, prosecutors etc. Those same institutions are also the tools for dictatorships, they are just governed in a diffe…
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