<snip> > > I am against policy being made by uninformed voters in a Mob Rule > > setting. 2 wolves and a sheep voting on tonights menu. > > > >As am I.
That's what you've got now. Why would direct democracy mean a majority of wolves over sheep? If that's so then there's no case for any kind of democracy - that means most people are predators, majority rule will be predatory, not beneficial in any way, not even for the predators in the end. If it were true that the majority is predatory then none of our societies would have survived at all, nor ever evolved into societies or communities in the first place. Wolves do not prey on each other. This metaphor makes no sense to me, though I often see people using it. It seems to me they aren't thinking straight. No species predates on itself. Humans do, you'll say. Not really, not at the community level. Conflict between communities might be another matter, but traditionally, such conflict is usually not lethal - it's function is optimum distribution of population according to resources, as with other species. When city-states and "nations" (whatever the hell they might be) get involved, it's an aberration, a distortion of a natural mechanism that applies to all species in nature. "War" is not meant to be lethal, unless you're an ant. Democracy is a move towards correcting such aberrations. In fact, what people do all the time, the individual members of communities and societies, going about their daily lives, is cooperate with each other. It's so ubiquitous that nobody even sees it anymore - and when you do start seeing it, the idea that we're predators, all the Reaganite-Thatcherist-Friedmannesque cant of the virtue of greed and selfishness, is preposterous nonsense. As with competition, in a warped social ethos that now would have "aggressive" behaviour as a Good Thing. These things exist, in society and in the jungle - but even in the jungle, competition is rather a minor phenomenon: symbiosis is far more important. As cooperation is in society. The problem with the current model of democracy is that it's been purloined by a bunch of predators: exactly two wolves and a sheep voting on tonight's menu. People - individuals, citizens - have been marginalized. Vested interests, huge, undead corporate bodies with totally spurious rights of citizenship, make the decisions, have all the access, spin everything their way: and spin consent by the majority to the travesty they've made of democracy with nonsense that _real_ democracy would be tantamount to two wolves and a sheep voting on tonight's menu. Why would voters in what you call "Mob Rule" (which I say is what you have now), your label for direct democracy, necessarily be uninformed? One aspect of teledemocracy is how very easily information can be provided, sought, verified, and delivered. Why would such voters be any less uninformed than voters are now, and not better informed? There's a whole series of non-sequiturs in this "Mob Rule" thinking that just don't withstand the light of day. Keith Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuels list archives: http://archive.nnytech.net/ Please do NOT send Unsubscribe messages to the list address. To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
