Summations Only

I don’t disagree but, again, why would mob psychology apply in the voting booth? Also, is the intelligence of a group of people not proportional to the freedom of it’s members?

Yeah ok but we are not children. Why should the free adults of the world be treated like children? You can eat your broccoli and live to be 104 and spend the last 7 yrs of your life waiting to die. Blind and bed ridden and costing the rest of us a fortune. Can I not choose to smoke and drink and check out at 72 with a massive heart attack? Wisdom and intelligence are just as relative as everything else. That is the whole strength of democracy. All of them.

quote:

---

Can I not choose to smoke and drink and check out at 72 with a massive heart attack? Wisdom and intelligence are just as relative as everything else. That is the whole strength of democracy.

---

Not exactly a strength as I see it. Why would the fact that people are uninformed and make bad choices depress you if you think letting the majority drag the planet into the abyss is an okay outcome?

In my analogy, the child was the country, not an individual. You are right, you can choose for yourself what you will eat and how you will live, as long as it does not affect others. However, we are talking about decisions within government that affect everyone.I am not wholly convinced of my own argument, so it will not be hard to push me away from it. However, I do have this gut feeling that we feel it necessary to buffer ourselves from the decisions of government. That buffer is a representative democracy. We need a proxy to make the correct decisions, even if they are unpopular.Here is another example of what I am talking about (it is admittedly weak, but worth some thought). Have you ever not wanted to go some event, but a part of you still kind of wants to go? What if your BFF calls up and asks you to go? At least for me, I hem and haw for awhile. I want to be "forced" to go, if you get my drift. The conversation usually ends with "Fine. I'll go. But you owe me one." The funny thing is that I usually end up having fun in the long run.This is sort of how I see this working. We want someone to make the tough decisions. We want someone to make us take the bitter pill and eat our vegetables. I don't know if a direct democracy could make this work. Perhaps it could. We can not pass laws that contradict each other. We can not have open access to abortion and ban the practice at the same time. We can not have unfettered access to firearms, and pass laws which limit that same access. There are simply ideas that can not mix.

It starts off a little slow, and it's a multi parter lasting 50 mins. Most of the talk is about how the most powerful people are now 'above the rule of law', how they are granted immunity or shielding from the consequences of explicitly criminal behaviour that would result in prison sentences for the common person.He believes that this is the key to why OWS is maintaining its momentum. It isn't just that the rich are rich and the poor are poor. It is that the rich are getting vastly wealthier in illegitimate ways. It is no longer a level playing field with equal opportunities, and consequences, for all.The talk is a damning criticism of the American Government's evolution since Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon, leading to a new public face for the USA. We can imprison you, torture you, and we can do it almost entirely out in the open and nobody is going to do anything about it - so step in line and blow that whistle if you dare....Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

Yet, you don’t think all those who are being affected should have an equal say in those decisions? That seems to me like treating those individuals as children. When we do this, we get technocrats telling us that things like a Structured Investment Vehicle is a good idea. Hey its complicated, they say, trust me, I am a professional.Of course there are professionals who know more than most about their particular subject and for the most part we listen to them. However, if a doctor tells me that I should take 3 Oxycocet tabs every day instead of smoking a joint for pain relief perhaps I should question his wisdom. No we cannot go in 2 directions at once. I meant that we should simply count all of the opinions and then decide on the most popular course. So if the people decide that they want to end legal abortions then we end legal abortions and live with the consequences. Like adults. I am not saying that everybody gets what they want only that they get to say what they want.CAUTION: ANNECDOTAL EVIDENCE > I used to manage a crew of about 30 people. When I saw that one of them was not performing up to par or had some beef we would flesh out the problem. They would give me their excuse or reason and I would address it. With the excuse removed they had to perform or find another excuse. Eventually, they were happy workers and my boss was happy because productivity went up as did quality and general moral. They felt less like workers and more like people because they had a real voice. Even though I had veto power, it was just the fact that their opinions actually mattered that made the biggest difference. Incidentally, some people not much smarter than a bag of hammers occasionally come up with some really good ideas.

The depressing part was accepting that the citizens of a democracy are good for nothing more than choosing the flowers for the president’s lawn. My point is that the majority will not drag the planet into the abyss any faster than it is being dragged now. The strength of a democracy is that it allows the free expression of ideas be they good or bad. They are deemed good or bad by the way in which they affect the people. It really should be the people who decide how they are affected.

I don't think you can necessarily draw that link quite so simply. As you point out, the top 40 does include Qatar, Brunei, and the UAE, which are not democratic, but simply oil-rich. Most of the rest are European, which share a lot more economic and cultural history than simply the fact that they're currently democratic states - it's assuming something to ascribe their wealth only to one factor.Looking at the few non-European countries in the top 40, they include Hong Kong, which wasn't particularly democratic as a colony and isn't particularly democratic now; and South Korea which, though now a democracy, achieved the great economic growth which brought it into the leading industrialised nations whilst a military dictatorship.Looking outside the top 40, I'm not sure a correlation between democracy and ranking holds, which further supports the idea that the link could be something else to do with being a European country. If you look to Africa, only one of the four countries which ranks in 'High Human Development' is a democracy (at least until this Arab Spring business), which a country like Malawi still languishes as one as the least developed counties in the world, despite its democratic government.The argument in favour of democracy, I think, should be based around the fact that people have the right to a say in their lives, not whether this will necessarily lead to better outcomes.

I agree. They are 2 issues and the right to a say is primary.I do think, though, that it will lead to better outcomes because it more closely matches the natural evolutionary process of all living systems. Try everything and keep the things that work.

Representative government gives you a say in what is going on. If direct democracy results in premature death for all of us due to self-indulgent excess (your example), then what advantage does it have over a representative system.

I see students with linked arms taking no action at all.Then I see cops start assaulting the students with batons.Apparently this was an attempt to "disperse" a crowd of students who had erected tents on school property in violation of school policy. The police were there to dismantle the tents. They should have simply instructed the crowd to disperse, and then arrested them one by one until the tents had been removed.Instead, they whipped out the batons and started beating nonviolent protesters.I don't know about you, but when I see a bunch of cops wailing on a bunch of kids because they were standing with their arms linked, I get upset.Edited by Rahvin, : No reason given.Edited by Rahvin, : No reason given.

I agree! It makes me sick to see police using force against non-violent protesters. Those police should be brought up on assault charges for their actions.

They won't be. The worst that will happen is paid leave.....maybe.

Not even that. It's actually an accepted tactic for forcing a crowd to dissipate: beat them with sticks and force the line back until everybody goes home. Or to a hospital, whatever.They won't face disciplinary action at all.

The blue bars will jump for days, and the street girls will be busy with freebies demanded by the machismo generated by that action.There's no adrenaline like the adrenaline of whacking people you don't like with sticks...unless it's shooting them in the head with tear gas cannisters.I've seen the videos. Some of those baton thrusts were forceful enough to rupture kidneys and spleens. That's not what they are trained to do.I smell promotions.