Somehow, on the scale of B12, I don't doubt that could we all reach into the deep pockets of our thought without tainting the message with perspective, labels, flawed vocabulary or some other egotistic BS, easily 75% of issues could be resolved in total consent. Representative democracy is a pitfall as it leads to discuss about people, not policy nor politics in the strong sense (weak sense hear partisan shenanigans). It's high time for proposals to be made by scientific entities, and voted by anybody who cares to connect to the onlineportal with their true ID. Don't worry we can keep all those functionnaries in bread and butter because somebody has to do the explaining and the simplyfying and the dumbing down until it's spun into unrecognisability, and don't worry human endaveours will still be fundamentally doomed to failure as we collectively fail to sharpen our linguistic tools to an adequate degree.
Direct democracy has it's own issues. Often it leads to a "Tyranny of the majority" where the minority on issues simply gets completely trampled over rather than negotiated with. While a representative democracy isn't perfect and can still be subject to such problems, it's typically much harder for it to happen. That is, unless we let it get to the situation it's in now in the US where a 1 vote lead in a house of government is taken as just cause to implement any number of extreme policies over the cries of the other 49%.
And, I hate to say it, but honestly, watching how referendums tend to turn out, people are, as a whole, far too uninformed to make decisions for themselves. Direct democracy only works properly when the group governed is small enough that everyone can be actively involved in the discussion, or when you don't have universal citizenship and the pool of citizens voting is much smaller, and each one typically has more at stake in the political process and thus stays more informed.
Hell, sometimes when I hear people beg other people they trust "Please tell me who to vote for". I start thinking maybe we should rethink voting in general. Far too many people simply vote for whoever their spouse, parent, boss, head of their church, or face they saw on tv tells them to vote for without putting a single extra thought into it. Not that I have a better idea to replace it with, but it's depressing how little people seem to value their vote that they either can't be bothered to inform themselves, or often simply can't be bothered for vote at all.
Author
Topic: AmeriPol thread (Read 4465052 times)