[Drunken Monkey]

[Jimmyjimjim]

[Drunken Monkey]

I believe you. And saying that the best you do is go vote is an innacurate statement... so don't know what to tell you. Thats very cool that you do more than fill out forms in booths. Based on what you said above you painted the opposite picture.

[Jimmyjimjim]

[Drunken Monkey]

Go ahead. And thats hardly an insult.

Now - You are a gaylord. Thats an insult. (Of course I am not insulting you, i don't think you are a gaylord.)


The masses will vote more but what will they vote for? Who lobbies the reds and the blues? Its the same financiers. With same agenda. If their candidates don't do what their sponsors say they should - money is diverted to the opponent. It doesn't matter who is in the office we always go kill brown people and want to take their oil. Or prevent some 3rd world country from going into first world through CIA gov overthrows.

And then you have Murdoch whos Fox spews hate towards anyone who disagrees with Bush and his euro branches spew hate against USA... Republicans give power to the corporations, democrats take away the guns... slowly together they chip away at any independence public has.

I think change will come when we actually start holding gov officials liable for their lies and crimes. I am talking prison time, capital punishment. Same treatment they dole out to the rest of the world. When we completely remove corporate influence from the government - starting with that fascist travesty called Federal Reserve.

And i don't think just motivating people to go vote is most effective. To educate someone about the wide spread corruption is way more effective. Then they vote and they do more than vote (they get pissed off and angry and thats a great motivator).

p.s.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qD5CEBQC-TY
_________________
"A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity" - Sigmund Freud

[Jimmyjimjim]

I'm going to keep this short because I need to keep working (and so should you- it's nearly Week 13!)

[Affected]

Voting... I do it, but it just makes me feel I've lost some part of my integrity each time. We had a parliamentary election here just recently, I tried to find a candidate that I could feel good about voting for. Not much luck. There was one guy, but in the wrong precinct. I voted for some young guy with the right opinions but no chance in hell of getting elected, and whom I didn't really know anyway well enough to really trust. At least the guy I couldn't vote for got elected.

Anyway, my point is, the administrative units we have are too large. I live in a country of 5,000,000 people, and I know a lot of my opinions are pretty marginal. Even assuming representative democracy enables the people to actually govern themselves, it's still just mob rule when you are born into citizenship of a state and have no way to find likeminded people and set up your own state. From what I read in newspapers' letters to the editors etc. I do not hold my "fellow" citizens in very high esteem with regard to several key issues, and I can't really think of anyplace better to move either. Being born into a so-called free democratic state is all good and fine as long as your opinions don't stray too far from the mainstream. If you're not so lucky however, you find that there's a crucial freedom that has been ignored: the freedom of association.

And hell, mob rule sounds good to me compared to what we have now. Parliamentarism is a system where, ideally, we elect the people most competent to comprehend the complexities of the modern political system, nationally and, increasingly, internationally. The question is, if you need special competency to comprehend the system, does the voter have a chance in hell of forming a coherent picture of where the world is going, and of evaluating the actions of their elected representatives? The complexity is not decreasing - far from it. (I speak from my perspective in Europe here.) Politics seems to be becoming more and more abstract and distanced from the people it affects. The aim should be to keep decisionmaking as close to the people affected as possible, yet the current trend is the exact opposite.

You can blame lazy citizens for not making the effort to figure out what is going on around them, but ask yourself is the political system not arranged in such a way that most people will not do that? The message is: vote to be important, when in reality it should be: get involved to be important. Voting is passive, it is the bare minimum a person can do, because when you vote you are just choosing from a set of options given to you from above. Everything about this system tells citizens to just keep their heads down and vote every few years. Ideally, everyone is responsible for their own level of involvement, but realistically, revamping the system to require more involvement from citizens (Referendums, anyone? Getting rid of the free mandate for representatives maybe?) would get a lot more people involved.

Anyway, 20 years from now, the way things are going now, we'll be in such deep shit it's not even funny. Anyone got any ideas for making a few million in the space of 5-10 years? I'd like a private island.

[Gort]

[Affected]

It was an exaggeration to make a point, I thought it would be pretty clear from the rest of my post that I do not favour mob rule. All of your criticisms can be applied to any form of government, though.

[Gort]

Sorry for the generalized response.

Regarding applying my criticisms to any form of government:
I would have to disagree with you. The last I heard, I was able to paint what I wanted, read what I wanted, express what I wanted . . . how I wanted without endangering the physical well being of my fellow citizen. Is that not the same where you live? Maybe in some smaller degree they might be applied . . . maybe . . . but I've never encountered that restriction. It's typically when expression is funded by privatization that the case for suppression grows wider (as is the case of late where an exhibition of a chocolate cruxifiction was canceled; the gallery was part of a hotel, and the hotel reserved to the right to impede any activity they felt a detrimental offense to their customers). Regardless, that still doesn't restrict the artist from creating what he/she wants to through expression.
_________________
- Tom Carter

"You can't stop the waves but you can learn to surf" - Jack Kornfield

[Affected]

The criticism applies to any system because government is only as benign as those who govern are. If you have a nice "mob", they'll likely be pretty permissive. If you have a bunch of assholes in parliament, you're going to see some nasty laws passed. Any system of government is one in which people exert power over others, which necessarily means some type of restrictions. Most societies usually considered "free" have constitutions outlining basic rights, but ultimately the level of freedom in a society depends on the mindset of the people in power, not so much on the type of political system that is in place. Spreading power wider alleviates the risk of oppression, but you get no guarantees. Compare your own country, and, say, Turkey, a secular, parliamentary country.

[Drunken Monkey]

Affected its interesting that you see the same problem libertarians see with US - ballooned government. Its too big. It has way too much power, way too much say, too much control over peoples lives.

What you are describing sounds like a form of elitism, a buffer of complexity designed to remove power from the populace. Here in US they use the same thing except instead of complexifying things our gov just lies and then lies some more.

We have this idiotic polarization of the political parties - where majority of people just vote down the list be they democrats or republicans without really looking at what or who they are voting for. You get out to vote to get your team to win and there are only two teams - red and blue. Every election everyone�s goes around saying the same thing - "which is the lesser evil?". Is that really choice?

This coming election the war in Iraq is going to be the big issue. Its going to be about democrats who are going to save us from this tyrannical republican rule. But is that the problem really? I think the problem is that corporations have so much control over our government they literally fabricate wars just so they can extract the revenue from the public. They can't really crank up the tax they have to do it indirectly - create a problem (Iraq) then provide a costly solution and we get to pay for it. Very clever.

[Jimmyjimjim]