Progressives - the people whose ideology is based on lifting up minorities above all others - are coincidentally also the ones who shout the loudest about "preserving our democracy". The cognitive dissonance from this is only possible to reconcile if you either lack the ability to think about it rationally, or you have no integrity to get in the way of your double-standard.
It should be a narrow body of eligible voters.
Honestly the best scenario is probably something like county councils are the voter pool for Federal elections. That might work.
democracy as a Venn diagram is a circle that fully encapsulates republic. direct democracy is another circle fully within democracy but with no overlap with republic. there's also federalism etc which I guess could overlap with direct democracy. we are where republic and federalism and democracy all overlap. going on and on about how we're not a democracy makes me think you don't want lots of people to have a say in government. which from the comments above, I guess you don't.
Ad hominem doesn't suit you. Nor does redefining terms mid-discussion in order to make your argument look less fallacious..
@threalist
"The only way Democracy works is if you disenfranchise anyone without a vested interest in the long term and set minimum standards around wisdom.
It should be a narrow body of eligible voters."
where did I misspeak?
in the Federalist papers, the first two times they mention democracy, they use "pure" before it. And they go on to describe the diff between democracy and republic. But to your credit, the rest of the time they use democracy as a reference to the pure democracy they previously described. And contrast it to republic.
I don't see anybody recommending a pure democracy today, whatever words we use. I see many wanting to take away voting rights from some and advocates for no govt.
@Meachamus_Prime @ryan @threalist
aren't you advocating we go from a wide body of voters to a narrow body? wouldn't that do what I wrote?
I think having county councils vote for ALL federal representatives is a step too far. Have you seen how stupid some of these councils are? The councils are often voted in by the most available voters, not the hardest working or most intelligent voters, and they well represent those who voted for them. I do like the original constitutional plan, though, of citizens being represented by the House and states by the Senate.
There are 350 million people in this country. What is your definition of "a lot?"
@Meachamus_Prime @ryan @threalist
I think the difference between what we currently have and what he called narrow is a lot. maybe I misunderstood. I seem to do that endlessly. another clarification please. is a statist somebody who thinks we should have government at all or somebody who thinks we should have lots of government? (again what's a lot)
200 million is lots of people.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/266807/percentage-americans-owns-stock.aspx
https://www.statista.com/statistics/184902/homeownership-rate-in-the-us-since-2003/
Assuming 100% overlap in these 2 statistics, you have 227.5 million voters if you have nothing more than a stake requirement for voting rights. Assuming you maintain the requirement of age you will probably reduce that by a few million. Exactly what percentage of voters would be good enough for you?
Sounds great!
Even centrists should like it because it would result in more moderate swings in leadership
@Meachamus_Prime @ryan @threalist
You legally live here. You're old enough. You should also try to understand things and think critically and understand other perspectives. But you get to vote imo.
So for you, a Chinese member of the Communist party who is not an American citizen, a Russian student who is not an American citizen, a North Korean diplomat, and an American Homeowner should all be able to vote in American elections.
"Democracy is 2 wolves and a sheep voting on what is for dinner. A republic is a well armed sheep contesting the vote."
This is why the founding fathers implemented proof of stake in voting.
@Meachamus_Prime @ryan @threalist
I'm not counting non citizens as living here legally.
Being a republic doesn't imply anything about who gets to decide our reps, how voting is handled or gun rights. And the Founders weren't infallible as is obvious by their change to the Constitution from the Articles of Confederation (and much else). We have a complex system that evolved over time for lots of reasons. We can and should argue over that but it's not sheep vs wolves. Everybody is both.
The fact that someone is a here legally doesn't mean they have stake in America. Consider Chinese birth tourism.
Say all that again after you've been personally attacked by those wolves and your word will carry more weight. Unfortunately, at the moment you show an extreme lack of perspective in this discussion. That naivety is the attitude that led to places like the USSR, the CCP, and the current government in Venezuela.
@Meachamus_Prime @ryan @threalist
I know. I shouldn't trust the American people. You're very concerned re creeping commies while we don't even have universal health care and tax the wealthy less than we did in the 50s. Establishment/woke Dems say I'm not afraid enough of Russia controlling Trump, social media influence games and MAGA racists (while of course we're much better on social issues than ever). Or maybe it's Adam's witches everywhere hypothesis.
I think it's greed. Always has been.
Yes, I'm so greedy for wanting to be left alone and wanting only the people to have a vote in the United States who want the United States to prosper and who have a reason to want the United States and its citizens to prosper. So greedy of me.
Come back when you're interested in discussing this seriously. Without "It's current year!" like some slightly less racist, slightly less goal post teleporting, John Oliver.
@osc3r @ryan @Meachamus_Prime @threalist
would life w/o any govt be better than life under any possible government? I don't think so. but life with no govt would be better than life under some govts.
I was not calling anybody here greedy, except to the extent we all are. we are all both selfish and empathetic. my point is that the problem is everybody's competing interests and understandings, not commies or govt or racism etc. govt exists largely to manage that. it's also hard to manage govt.
people are greedy, government is made up of people, therefore government is greedy. Complain about taxes and who is tax and how much, government makes taxes, government is made up of people taking money from companies to change taxes. Government allows companies to give government employees money. Government is a snake eating its own tail. we shall embrace AI as the one true leader.
@osc3r @ryan @Meachamus_Prime @threalist
an AI programmed and managed by greedy people?
the US govt was specifically designed to allow competing interests to balance each other for the good of all. not perfect. never could be. built to be revised over time. but imo it's less broken than the wholesale alternatives I've seen proposed would be. and I think most people don't have actual alternatives but are forwarding this "broken" narrative cause they just don't want to have to play fair.
@wjmaggos @osc3r @ryan @threalist
You weren't calling any specific person greedy, just every person who believes in a limited voter base, which just happens to include everyone here who disagrees with you. No big deal. Just par for the course when debating someone who doesn't like to back up their argument with facts.
@Meachamus_Prime @osc3r @ryan @threalist
I don't think you're greedy. you're elitist. you think the lessers are fucking up the country by voting poorly. I think the fight to make our country better than it is, is fundamentally always about most people recognizing that we have more in common than we think. and that we don't get that because the very rich (who own the media etc) propagandize us so we won't recognize that the economic system could be better for most people and worse for them.
"you think the lessers are fucking up the country by voting poorly."
Everyone thinks this. Just wear a MAGA hat to a bookstore.
@amerika @ryan @osc3r @Meachamus_Prime @threalist
everybody thinks most people are voting poorly. I don't think they are lessers. you do and the left who thought Hillary had a point do. that's the propaganda winning imo. hate is good for your goals and ratings. but bad for DEMOCRACY.
I think it's inherent to humanity.
As far as voting goes, no one seems to do too well with it.
I mean really, both monarchy and voting for a representative involve a bunch of people getting together to decide who's going to be the next king, it's just that in one case it's a war contest and then another case it's a popularity contest...
The one upside of not having regular war contests is war actually sucks a lot and only really shows who's better at killing the enemy. Of course the downsides are that the cities end up crowded with all the wannabe elites because living in capital cities isn't so dangerous as it might be otherwise.
The upside of making it a popularity contest is that you never have anyone that's that unpopular for that long. The downside making it popularity contest is that there's absolutely no reason to believe that popularity even remotely relates to any practical skill.
To give the devil his due, the ability to wage war is much closer to a practical skill required in statecraft, and constantly infighting has the benefit of giving the elite classes something to go kill themselves in, helping to keep it from getting to oversized. Also, if you go back to Rome, the Roman empire was constantly being overthrown by people from within its own military because those people were at least competent in one thing. It was actually once an era of relative peace arrived that the caliber of people overthrowing the Roman emperor just weren't high enough to effectively rule...
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@sj_zero @amerika @ryan @osc3r @Meachamus_Prime @threalist
having people around who know how to do stuff well is what the permanent state is all about (I separate them from the deep state whose oversight is severely limited). executive agencies and long term staff etc. they tend to regulate the mega corps and rich people who would fully control the world without any democratic government. but you guys hate them. me thinks you didn't come to that position naturally.
The regulatory state is a bad method of doing this. Ironically, it involves less accountability in Congress.
@amerika @ryan @osc3r @Meachamus_Prime @sj_zero @threalist
clear rules written by a well informed Congress that can work together and wants a functioning government would be great. the first two parts are not what political media wants today. the last part is opposed mostly by conservatives who want to continue to paint DC as dysfunctional, but both sides play this game when the other party is in power. it's why we must fix the media and why I want to break the duopoly w/ #RankedChoiceVoting.
Can you change your name to hellthread monster?
@wjmaggos @osc3r @ryan @threalist
"...you're elitist."
That's rich (pun intended) coming from someone who has said on multiple occasions that only those who have papers saying that they are smart should lead.
In reality, merchants are typically at often odds with royalty and nobility.
The ming dynasty in china restricted trade because they were suspicious of the rising power of merchants. The tokogawa shogunate after the sengoku period in Japan locked down merchants. The Ancien Régime of France before the french revolution locked down on the merchant class. The English clamped down on the merchant classes in the Tudor period (though admittedly the English was the most democratic country in the world at the time). The Venician republic had a powerful merchant class before the goverment of the time decided "oh, we're the ones in charge and we want to keep it that way" and so essentially locked everything down into something closer resembling a nobility.
I should also mention that corporations are a strictly state construct, so just as the state introduced them about 400 years ago, it could just as easily abolish them. The corporations cannot by themselves abolish the state. The power dynamic is clear, especially in a monarchy or other autocracy where there is no discussion over who is in charge.
Contrast with the many ways corporations can influence the permanent state and democratic republics. It's well known that regulators often get jobs in the companies they regulate (or come from the companies they regulate), so contrary to a permanent nobility, the powers of government employees can be influenced by the companies they regulate. It's well known now that especially in places like America, politicians spend far more time making phone calls to solicit campaign contributions than they do on ruling, and so if megacorps can arrange to either get its employees to donate to get past campaign contribution limits or just fund stuff like superpacs that get around campaign finance laws, democratically elected officials cam easily be bought.
So it isn't remotely reasonable to assume that democracy is required or even preferred if you want to limit the power of the rich or corporations, and the permanent state under democracy may be just as effective as a method for the rich to exercise government power as a method to limit the power of the rich. In contrast to a democracy that the rich can buy out from under the voters or a permanent administrative state that can be bought out from under the state, having an opposing faction of autocrats who don't need the merchants to maintain their power.
I don't want to make it sound as if corruption goes away under an autocracy. Instead, corruption changes. Nobles jockey for position within their hierarchy, and they pick favorites among the rabble, they try to empower their relatives and build their legacy, and they can be selfish on a level that mere capitalists can't imagine, and they can abuse power on a level you can't imagine -- A rich capitalist typically isn't legally allowed to kill people (though they might use their wealth to try to get away with it, it isn't like an agent of the state like a Samurai who may immediately cut down any commoner they please without repercussion.
Ironically, one of the things that's different between an incompetent rich person and an incompetent autocrat is that the rich person can't bring literally everyone down with them. An autocrat can destroy everything in a nation, and if they make bad decisions then they'll drag everyone into destruction with them. By contrast, a rich person can only own so much of everything, and at worst all they can nominally destroy is their own property. Look at Meta, where Zuckerberg is going all-in on the Metaverse, a virtual reality world that most people who have ever strapped a VR helmet to their heads can tell you isn't a great idea. Meanwhile, our fearless leaders have gone all-in on many different projects to the point that the nation will likely have many crises within the next decade because they couldn't keep their wallets shut, and that won't affect one rich man's wealth, but everyone trapped under the boot of the state.
We got to see the weakness of (even representative) Democracy in this regard, where the banks all did bad things that caused problems for people in 2008 and the government stepped up and did what it needed to do -- it gave a trillion dollars to the richest people on earth. Something that affected rich shareholders ended up everyone's problem, starting an era of big spending and big debt that has sold entire generations into debt slavery. Oddly enough, largesse with other people's money and racking up massive debt is exactly the outcome of Democracy Plato predicted in The Republic.
I think with all this being said it's important to not I'm not anti-democracy, or anti democratic republicanism or constitutional monarchism. There's a good reason why democratic republicanism or constitutional monarchies with elected MPs have led the world for centuries, and democracy plus capitalism is ultimately a meritocratic system that gives the best chance for someone without any ties to the state a chance to succeed. It's just that it's very important to understand the realities of governance, and that people who consider other forms of governance aren't just loons without any basis for their opinions -- there are things that could be better under autocratic or monarchic rule, particularly if the autocrat or monarch was a benevolent and wise one. Singapore and North Korea show different ends of a spectrum, both ruled by autocrats, one is one of the most developed regions in the world, and in the other kids pick up poop off the ground to help fertilize the fields as everyone starves (at least according to stories from one North Korean defector I listened to).
DC is not dysfunctional once we consider its self-interest. It takes in money and makes careers.
As a leadership body it's worse than useless of course.
Very important with DEADS (democracy, equality, atomization, diversity, and socialism/subsidies).
@sj_zero @wjmaggos @amerika @ryan @osc3r @Meachamus_Prime @threalist Great post. Thank you!
@sj_zero @amerika @ryan @osc3r @Meachamus_Prime @threalist
but with government, you have to compare it to the alternatives. same with voting.
As long as you compare what it does versus the theory about what it does, you should be okay.