Nicker on 20/1/2022 at 21:38
Quote Posted by june gloom
A concept that you and the other reactionary types around here have very weak, distorted understandings of.
Distortion, eh? Let's see...
You are conflating a particular struggle, in a particular country at a particular time in history, with the overall beneficial performance of democracies throughout their short but critical history. Waiting for the perfect system rather than using the best one available, warts and all, is defeatist.
We hear this rhetoric all the time around the current scandal in the USA;
well the DEMS are crooks too!! as if that were sufficient reason NOT to pursue justice.
You can't pin the inherent criminality of humans on democratic principles. In fact, democratic methods of governance are overtly designed to counter criminal abuse by tyrants and minions, to limit their power and enforce common standards of conduct. So insisting that democracies are corrupt to the same level and in the same way as tyrannies is a basic category error.
Because what is the alternative to democracy other than some form of autocracy?
Every political method is vulnerable to criminality. That's not a political issue, it's a psychological one. Democracies are vulnerable because they presume another inherent quality of humans, social responsibility. In fact it is the marginal triumph of this instinct over our selfish natures, which made humans such a successful species.
And what dema said...
june gloom on 21/1/2022 at 07:51
Quote Posted by lowenz
"
deflection" -> right wing buzzword detected
Please, stop following right gurus like Peterson & co. It's pure "anti-left sentiment" tele-guidance bullshit dedicated to market-system failed individuals to involve them as political soldiers (see Trump supporters but you can get something worst and more extreme), how can't you understand?
Don't mistake me for some of the other weenies in here.
Inline Image:
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/932/336/b46.jpgQuote Posted by Nicker
Distortion, eh? Let's see...
You are conflating a particular struggle, in a particular country at a particular time in history, with the overall beneficial performance of democracies throughout their short but critical history. Waiting for the perfect system rather than using the best one available, warts and all, is defeatist.
We hear this rhetoric all the time around the current scandal in the USA;
well the DEMS are crooks too!! as if that were sufficient reason NOT to pursue justice.
You can't pin the inherent criminality of humans on democratic principles. In fact, democratic methods of governance are overtly designed to counter criminal abuse by tyrants and minions, to limit their power and enforce common standards of conduct. So insisting that democracies are corrupt to the same level and in the same way as tyrannies is a basic category error.
Because what is the alternative to democracy other than some form of autocracy?
Every political method is vulnerable to criminality. That's not a political issue, it's a psychological one. Democracies are vulnerable because they presume another inherent quality of humans, social responsibility. In fact it is the marginal triumph of this instinct over our selfish natures, which made humans such a successful species.
And what dema said...
Another one thinking I'm some kind of right-wing chud as if I haven't alienated half the people here with my social justice rants. If you don't know me, let me fill you in: I think Trump is a rapist monster, the Republicans are fascists (and more than a few are pedophiles,) and the Democrats are in bed with them because it's easier to be controlled opposition for that sweet, sweet lobbyist money than it is to have principles that might make centrist libs not vote for you. I think you cannot be a politician and not have blood on your hands. Yes, that includes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the two AOCs that Libertarians get upset about. Yes, that includes Bernie Sanders.
And I think democracy is self-defeatingly coercive. In what world is a government system where a majority of people -- or rather, the majority of people who vote, and excluding the ones who are barred from voting in one way or another -- make the decisions for everyone else
not autocratic?
I look at the sea of mostly white faces in Washington, in the state capitol, in the city government, and I think,
I didn't vote for any of these losers. If their name wasn't on a ballot in a state I lived in in the last, oh, say, 10 years, they never got my vote -- and often, even if it
was, because I voted for the
other loser because I thought he was less of a blithering idiot. (I'm usually wrong: they're both equally blithering. It's just that one's openly a fascist and the other's just a polite capitalist. Both will send police to punch my skull in if I complain.)
"Democratic methods of governance are overtly designed to counter criminal abuse" is just an out and out lie. The opposite is true: Democracy exists to legitimize criminal abuse, so long as the majority does not see it as criminal abuse.
I reject the notion that I should be ruled by anyone. I reject the tyranny of the majority. I reject a system I had no choice in being born into, and I reject the fallacious argument that I could always just leave. (Leave and go where? Authoritarianism is everywhere, some places just dress it up.)
But rejecting hierarchies, class, and coercion means little, doesn't it? I'm still bound by the laws of the failed state I exist in. Sure, I could burn a bank or go full Ted Kaczinski or something (probably not, I like the internet) but what good would that do? I'd just be one person, and I'd be dismissed. Everyone else is too busy being stomped in the face by the same system to even think about how fucked up it all is. So I have no voice in this hell world, no agency. The best I, or anyone else, can do, is try to live in the machine, cooperate with small groups with mutual interests to achieve shared goals, and hope nobody tries to "democratize" us.
nemyax on 21/1/2022 at 08:23
Quote Posted by june gloom
I reject the fallacious argument that I could always just leave. (Leave and go where? Authoritarianism is everywhere, some places just dress it up.)
Try Botswana.
june gloom on 21/1/2022 at 08:52
Okay, I'll bite: why?
nemyax on 21/1/2022 at 08:59
Democracy doesn't really work there, and it would solve your mostly-white-faces problem.
june gloom on 21/1/2022 at 09:23
Democracy doesn't work here. It doesn't work at all. You can't even make an argument that it's the only alternative to autocracy because democracy is autocratic by nature. I thought I made that clear.
nemyax on 21/1/2022 at 09:32
Quote Posted by june gloom
It doesn't work at all.
What does?
june gloom on 21/1/2022 at 09:42
Mutual aid, voluntary cooperation, the abolishment of hierarchy. Read Kropotkin sometime.
nemyax on 21/1/2022 at 09:49
Any real-world examples of this fiction working in large populations?
june gloom on 21/1/2022 at 09:58
If it's fiction then maybe you should read a book about it. I suggest The Conquest of Bread.
