That’s kind of what I mean. If the political parties were actual partys. The right would be a backyard with a keg, axe throwing and live band with fireworks and strippers. The left would be a book reading in a damp living room where the the host served canned mini sausages and everybody wore wool sweaters.
But isn’t it amazing the right was able to convey all that with “fake news” the left always makes it sound like the right are a bunch of morons never realizing it was all well crafted.
Right. You say it like its a slight against the right. They by far much better funded, equipped and actually doing what works every single day and the left are so far behind the times in the new social media world. The ground already given up will never be recovered.
Democracy is incompatible with power concentration. Excessive wealth easily translates into power, thus, it breaks the balance of any democracy.
There’s also a saying that “Democracy cannot exist while people are hungry”, because a common complaint is that “poor people vote with their stomachs”.
Let me use an example. Let’s say you’re my partner, and it’s movie night. I give you a choice between two movies: Star Wars, and Harry Potter. However, if you choose Harry Potter for movie night, I will actually break both your hands with a sledgehammer.
I say I’m giving you a choice, but do you actually have a fair choice?
People choose policies that might be beneficial in the short term, but very harmful on the long way. For example, restricting immigration might have a favourable short term impact on wages, but in the long term it will stagnate the economy and pensions schemes, and make people even more poor.
So… People who are hungry will vote for whatever brings food to their table today, so they don’t really have a choice, because those policies or politicians are not actually on their side, they are just benefiting from the misery of others.
True democracy would be filling at least one branch of government with randomly selected citizens. Career politicians are psychopaths and don’t represent us.
Two terms for each position seems reasonable so you can be asked to continue or asked to leave. This allows you to run on a policy, implement it and then fix it or things that need to be tweaked and then get out.
Think that issue gets resolved quickly as no one really has the power in tenure anymore. If everyone only has a few years a cycle or two of stalemates will eventually lead to both sides having to work together or try and win the entire house.
This leads to another problem. Everyone will make policy to suck up to industry in order to secure a job after their term limits.
It’s already a problem of politicians swapping in and out of politics and into industry. Today they “represent the people against car manufacturers”, tomorrow they are a car industry lobbyist.
It’s funny and sad at the same time that career politicians are allowed to exist because they tend to be the ones voting for their own restrictions and benefits.
Term restrictions? Fuck that
Increase our own salary even though we haven’t passed any new laws actually helping society? Let’s goo
The New Brandeis movement opposes the school of thought in modern antitrust law that antitrust should center on customer welfare (as generally advocated by the Chicago school of economics). Instead, the New Brandeis movement advocates a broader antimonopoly approach that is concerned with the structure of the economy and market conditions necessary to promote vigorous competition.
Capitalists hate capitalism. They don’t want to compete with other firms, they want a monopoly. So it’s like you’re saying to the monopolists, fine, you want to do capitalism? Well then we’re going to jam so much capitalism down your throat you’ll shit free market competition.
I’ve seen plenty of terrible Facebook memes where they changed the words in Peanuts comics into political propaganda. If they can make Snoopy a racist then we can retcon Dale into a socialist.
He literally scraped a Confederate Flag bumper sticker off his pickup truck when a Black Woman told him why it was offensive to her. Dude was capable of listening, empathy, and change, something we need alot more of in today’s day and age.
Not really the point here. Also a lot of these people flying the flag is not racist to them. They don’t fly it because most I’ve met don’t associate it with that racism part even though they should. To them it’s their version of an anarchy flag. They fly it to say they’re rebels. People against the government. They pick and choose what it stands for but if the intention isn’t to be racist, I don’t see how it is.
I don’t track it enough and don’t care. Clearly a large about slavery. That doesn’t change anything I said though. Many people don’t know jack shit about fuck all.
But I do know people who flew the flag. Two are even embarrassed today about it but they’re younger and i know most dig in when told they’re wrong or that they’re something they are not. Sunk costs right.
Now knowing that people dig in rather than repent. Why do you not know its flown as a rebel flag and insist on trying to educate people on the akshual meaning.
Humans are not robots so what is your intention by arguing its historical impact as if that changes that many non racist people saw it as a rebel flag.
There are plenty of rebel flags whose literal stated purpose is not slavery. The red and black anarchy flag comes to mind. If anarchy is what they want to symbolize, why not fly one of those?
More to the point, we started this conversation because you said that repenting rather than digging his heels in was why the racer in the original post got canned. Do you think he was right to be canned? If so, are you saying that repenting is a bad thing?
"Plutocracy" is the term for "Financial Oligarchy" BTW. Worth knowing the term if you live in the U.S. since that's kinda what we have here these days :/
Well consider the fact that there is currently no conflict and no evidence that one is going to start. The Roman republic went on for 700 years with both a republican democracy and what most historians describe as a highly unequal and oligarchical distribution of power and wealth. Perhaps it fell eventually due to class struggles between the working class and the aristocracy but if it was truly incompatible, then fine it existed in a state of “incompatibility” for literal centuries and there’s no reason to believe the USA and other capitalist countries will be any different. And no reason to believe something better will come along after.
So if democracy and financial oligarchy are incompatible, why does it matter? And btw there’s probably a ton of “incompatible” things that depend on the eye of the beholder. We had racist laws enacted by statute, foreign wars, internment camps, espionage, immoral scientific experiments done by the government all could be described as incompatible with democracy. The reality is that democracy is rule by majority (nothing more, nothing less). Whatever the ethos or the common morality is will be compatible with democracy. Anything done by the elected leaders of the 51% is compatible with democracy.
Don’t get me wrong democracy is better than any other option but we need Democracy+ to really guarantee a just and equal society.
How would you describe this conflict? A bunch of lemmings shit-posting and getting fired up behind their keyboard?
We’ve had riots, insurrection and mass civil disobedience on countless issues in the last few years. When is the last time there was even a local protest against wealth inequality? It’s not really a hot button issue outside of online communities like Reddit and Lemmy.
There are constantly protests for various issues, and an armed attempted coup happened… however misguided and fascistic that event was, it was, like all others, a manifestation of the class cobflict that is going on every day.
It doesn’t have to be a literal communist uprising to count as conflict. Though I admit that is by far my favourite option.
My point, there is palpable class conflict ongoing at this very moment, as people struggle more and more, and the rich get richer and more powerful.
The problem is that most people are sadly not given the knowledge of how class works, and are fed misinformation about the causes of their problems. At best, this leads to a hyperfocus on individual issues (which do need to be addressed, don’t mistake me) and at worst, leads to fascism.
Sounds like you would support a dictatorship of the Prolitariat! Communism is pretty much Democracy+ when you think about it with at least a modicum of intellectual honesty.
I’m not even trying to go down the capitalism vs socialism debate route. All I’m saying is democracy isn’t like this perfect system that is only compatible with the most perfect and utopic principles.
Hitler was elected by a democracy in case you forgot.
i guess, but only as much as any other oligarchy. you can have democracy where the only people who can vote are people with doctorates in stem fields, or who’re land owning white men, or who have their patents of nobility, or who have at least a million USD in their bank account. but really it’s not particularly in keeping with the ideal that people are usually talking about when they say ‘democracy’.
A technocrats actually makes sense. But that isn’t practical. People always at some point end up hiring their friends and putting people they know in positions of power. Nepotism and cronyism are just natural progressions, even when systems of governance start out with good intentions. Eventually someone always ruins it for everyone else.
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