On 23 Sep 2015, at 21:24, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 9/23/2015 3:15 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 22 Sep 2015, at 23:55, John Mikes wrote:
Bruno, I am at a loss with your explanation. I lived the active
first 50 years of my life in Europe and never heard about such
'liberalism' (for a short time was even connected to the Hungarian
Liberal Democratic Party).
In my counntry the right party has the name "parti libéral", for
example. Liberal means "open to free markets".
May be that is only in West Europa.
"Liberal" was in no connection with right/wrong, or even right/
left, only pointed to some freedom of action in the political
arena. And the other thing:
Democracy IMO is an oxymoron, the full "demos" cannot exercise
it's full "cratos" for ruling,
Democracy means, for me, presence of election. It can be partial,
like in the beginning where woman did not have the right to vote,
or like in the antic greece were election was for the educated
class, and not for slaves, or it is "universal", meaning everyone
can vote. In some country it is "everyone *must* vote (in Belgium
election are obligatory).
Then a democracy can be corrupted, and/or under the influence of
corporatism, and/or sick etc. Democracy is not the final state of
politics, it is the prerequisite of having a representative
politics. If the main powers (mainly justice and press) are not
independent, a democracy can be de facto a tyranny disguised into
democracy. I think that is the case today (since prohibition).
It is the like the Islamic bill or right, which is a copy of the
universal definition except that they have added "as long as it
verifies the Charia" for each principle (which of course changes
the very idea). The same with Obama who signed a text which respect
the human right except for a category or people, but something have
to be universal to make sense. The human right applies to all
humans, or there is no more human right at all.
Democracy is necessary but not sufficient for good government.
I agree.
Supposing that democracy is enough was the mistake of George W. Bush
and the neo-conservatives.
That mistake, but also the mistake that we can impose democracy to
others, or the even more naïve idea that by eliminating a dictator
will make people opting for a democracy.
A democracy needs a lot of generation of thinking people.
And just one generation of people can make it disappear, or weakened
so much that it "stays" as a democracy only for a part of the
population.
They thought that if we just held elections in Iraq all would be
well. But there must be limitations on government, constitutional
restraints and traditional restraints. Otherwise whomever has the
majority assumes that democracy means they can oppress the minority.
The case of Egypt is quite remarkable in that respect. They made a
successful revolution to set back a military dictatorship. They
succeeded in making a democracy, that is, organizing election. They
vote for the Muslim Brotherhood, and when they realized the Muslim
Brotherhood was killing the democracy and imposing a religious
dictatorship, the people made a second revolution to re-install the
military dictatorship, and even to fight the Muslim Brotherhood
(courtized and encouraged by Obama, by the way). They have understood
that a secular military dictatorship is far better than a religious
dictatorship. Somehow, they understood they were not ready for
democracy. too much people still believe that they know the truth and
impose it to others.
That was a bit of a relief, and it is sad this occurred only in Egypt
although in Tunisia some bit of reason to hope remains.
becuase every person has different aims, goals, interests, etc.
Those, who call a "majority-rule" a democracy are establishing a
minority whose interests are trampled down by the so called
"majority" which is not even so sure, to BE a majority indeed.
Voting is cheating, candidates LIE in the campaign and the voters
compromise their (real?) interests for the least controversial
lies. What is even worse: the "elected" persons don't even follow
their own lies later on in practice. They go after their
(untold???) interest. Impeachment is difficult.
Yes, but that is because our democracies are sick. It is not
because a car is broken that a car is not supposed to be driven.
And I wish the minority having no power, but a problem with more
than two parties is that the minority can have tremendous infuence.
Indeed the minority will often makes the difference when the
majorities disagree. But the french Condorcet has already studied
the impossibility of satisfying everybody by a voting procedure,
and democracies can evolve, and we can change the rules, ... unless
the system has been corrupted.
It is not because we can die of cancer that we are not alive. It is
the same with democracy, they can get sick, and the election might
no more represent what the people desire.
I am opposed to referendum and participative democracies, because
this can give all the power to the media.
One word about 'capitalism' - with a caveat not to fall into
Marxist traps:
it is the open exploitation of the power of wealth over the have-
nots, be it by employment, marketing, or production policy. Not
the "haves" - mind you, but the oligarchs, super-wealthy owners,
political donors, etc. etc. established since Adam Smith.
I disagree, even if in practice, some facts can lead to the
perversion. But the non-democratic ruling consist in putting the
perversion right at the beginning. Free-market is a win-win game,
when it is not perverted by a minority (like today). The rich
needs, in that case, to enrich the poor, as they have interest to
make the poor into clients. It works, in the sense that most
democracies have much less people starving than tyrannies. Now,
when the rich exploit the poor, it means that the democracy is not
functioning.
Growth is NOT maintainable with the limited resources existing.
Computer science provides a non limited resources.
And a
(cut-throat?) Competition as life? thanks, but no thanks. .
I would defend the universal allocation, and the right of laziness,
but for this, we have to be lucid and realist on the economical
difficulties which can rise in that case.
We also have to have a lot of resources and considerable inequality
so that taking from the richest to give to the poor and lazy does
not significantly burden them.
We need a difference of potential/richness to make the economical
engine working. But when people play honest, the rich enriched the
poor, and themselves. the difference between rich and poor is
maintained, but the poor is still less poor today than yesterday.
Sometimes, a poor from a rich country is richer than a rich from a
poor country. Universal allocation is a sort of right to be "poor",
which can be explained if you have a passion. You will paint all your
life, and may be somepeople will get rich, or not, soon or later, with
your painting. or you do research and just find nothing, but again,
even in that case your work can be useful, like showing the path that
it is preferable to avoid. A right of "poorness" would allow a better
long term perspective, and that can help to "enrich" people much more
in the long term.
The problem, now, is that when your amount of money is such that it
makes it *much* more profitable to use the money to corrupt people and
stole their money by using lies and exploiting the fear created by
those lies, then bandits can take power. Such lies are usually person
(like the jews, or the homosexuals, or the atheists, or even the
"terrorists" etc.) or products (like alcohol, medication).
I personally hate competition, but it is right, and without
progressing in politics, instead of regressing, it is a necessity.
Do you mean cooperative and collaborating goodwilling people dead?
On the contrary, without a democracy, cooperation is quickly
impossible. It leads to the ruling of the strongest, like with
mafia. democracy, I think, is the main tool for cooperation. people
do my milk, and I teach math to their kids. That is win-win.
The hard problem here is that after a long productive cooperation,
some people or group of people can multiply the gain immensely by
cheating, and up to some amount, they can hide the cheating by
corruption. I have no definite solution for this, but I don't think
that is a reason to abandon the democracy, by which I mean a voting
system (I recall). We can try to have laws making corruption
harder, but there is no absolute vaccine against that.
I don't think that stopping prohibition will restore automatically
a sane democracy, but I am sure that not-stopping the prohibition
will perpetuate and aggravate the sickness of the current
democracies. So stopping prohibition is the first thing to do. It
is the main engine of corruption and terrorism of all kinds.
So you think the 9/11 attack was because Bin Laden because Islam
forbids drinking alcohol? the Iraq war was because W. couldn't
legally buy marijuana?
I have no certainty, and I am still trying to understand. But there
are evidences for something like that, although it does not concern
alcohol, which is legal, nor marijuana, which is cultivated mainly in
America (South and North) but of opium (heroine) (without mentioning
petrol) coming from Afghanistan).
The Taliban seemed to have stopped the production of heroin, and it
looks we have gone there to restablish the culture of opium and the
production of heroin, perhaps for the American and European markets.
Yes, that is possible (to be franc, I do have contradictory evidences
on this, so I have not yet definite plausible conclusions).
About Irak I have no clue at all of what did happen. Saddam Hussein
seems to be a secular, "installed" by the US to protect us from the
madness of the Ayatollas in Iran.
I would have been in position of Bush Senior during Gulf war 1, I
would have said to Saddam that if he go out of Kuwait, and sign a
serious peace treatise with israel, I would offer him an atomic bomb.
Of course that is easy to say after the facts, and for the second Gulf
war I did swallow for a time the lies on Irak. (Despite I already knew
at that time that Bush senior and junior (like many) were
prohibitionists (making them into liars).
Marijuana is still schedule one, despite 75 years of debunking of the
proofs of dangers, and 75 years of discoveries of therapeutic benefices.
Also, schedule one means that the research of benefits is forbidden,
but research for dangers is allowed, which is a total nonsense.
An exercise that I give often on facebook (!):
5 years of prohibition of alcohol has given Al Capone. What can give
75 years of prohibition of Marijuana?
Bruno
Brent
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