On Sun, Sep 27, 2015 at 10:24 PM, Brent Meeker <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > On 9/27/2015 12:55 PM, John Mikes wrote: > > Bruno, it seems I cannot shake you out from the 'classical' format that > -WHOEVER (Nominative, not: "whomever" which is Accusative) *lies* > himself into getting the (questionable?) majority of the voting population > (and THEN can do WHATEVER his interest dictates - in the name of such > majority - ) > means *D E M O C R A C Y *. NO, it does not. You may call it a > distortion, or any political malaise, but democracy (the cratos of the > demos) is the rule of the (entire) population, not a select majority only, > leaving any size of minority suppressed in the system. > It is not timely, to implement such system in our (ongoing) World. - So be > it. - I try to keep the vocabulary clean and do not compromise for ongoing > corruptions. > > > That's not even a system. Rule by the entire population would require the > entire population to agree on rules. As Lyndon Johnson once said, "If two > people agree on everything only one of them is doing the thinking." A > democracy necessarily must have some way of deciding rules that people do > not all agree on. Majority vote seem to be the only workable one; although > there are many variants to deal with multiple choices (plurality, ranking, > run-offs...). The way to avoid suppression of minorities is to limit the > range of action of the government. Define individual rights which are > beyond the reach of majority vote. > Right, but who does the suppressing? The common approach in the West seems to be to have a constitution, that we respect for historical reasons and make very hard to change. So, at this level, there's democracy with a lot of drag built into the system, so that brash decisions and appealing to the sensibilities of a narrow point in time is almost impossible. In practice, this has been hacked. The trick is not to change the constitution but to re-interpret it or just operate in secret. The first trick grants immense power to special courts and a very small priesthood, that gets to decide that words mean the opposite of what we thought they meant. The second trick is executed under our noses, through "trade agreements". We are in the midst of the largest of such attempts, TTIP. Trade agreements essentially work like this: your democracy can decide whatever it wants, but my corporation can then go to an arbitration "court" and sue for loss of profits. Guess who these arbitrators are? Layers from the same top layer firms that big corporations employ. Mainstream media mostly does not report on this (naturally, they are owned by the same corporations), Of course these trade agreements are illegal in light of the constitution of most countries, but there is really little we can do about it except going to demonstrations and perhaps telling more people about them. Check this talk if you're interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fDCbf4O-0s Best, Telmo. > > Brent > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
