Sun 23 Oct 2011
#Occupying the High Moral Ground
Posted by anaglyph under Politics
[35] Comments
OK, I gotta confess. I have a real problem with the #occupywherever thing. Hang on – put down the stones. It’s not that I don’t agree that it’s undesirable – evil, even – that 1% of the world has most of the wealth in its pockets, or that corporate greed is a huge problem and needs to have a chainsaw taken taken to it. Indeed, you won’t find many people who are as critical of Big Business practices (and even Little Business practices for that matter) as I am. Gee, I’m even up for a protest march every once in a while, if the situation benefits from it.
The thing is, as I see it the #occupy process is just not really a productive way to address what’s wrong in this particular case. More than that – I think it may even be a bad way to do it. ((I don’t know if anyone else has noticed, but it seems to me that every nutjob and his dog is attempting to use these protests to further their on agenda. If it’s something that pisses off The Man, there’s someone at #occupywoop-woop on a megaphone about it. This is really counterproductive, as any protest organizer knows. What you need with a protest is a clear, easily graspable focus. Protests are not about doing anything per se, but about getting lots of coverage in the mainstream media. If you get that coverage and no-one in television land can tell what the fuck you’re on about, your protest is a waste of time and energy.))
Think about it for a moment. What does the #occupy movement hope to get done? For the most part it doesn’t appear to have any goals as such, other than a fairly general ‘It’s broken and we demand someone fixes it!’ manifesto. Evidently the reasoning is that if you get enough people to get together and shout that loud enough, then something will happen. Well, duh, it IS broken, and it SHOULD be fixed, but stamping your foot on the ground, chanting slogans and incurring the wrath of the conservative authorities is unlikely to achieve much. Sure you get footage of the police being brutish and stupid, but for what? A sum total of howling righteous indignation for being treated badly? The only message to be taken away from that is that the police, when instructed to move obdurate people on, will likely hit them with a stick if they resist. Again (sadly), duh.
If you do a Search™ on “goals of the occupy movement” you’ll see exactly what I mean. You get a whole bunch of links essentially discussing what such goals might be, but nothing much that defines those goals in any concrete terms. There’s stuff like this blog, ranking high on the search, that opines: ‘…the Occupy movement does not need to release a list of demands. Their demands are the demands of the majority of the American people.’ Sheesh.
According to abovementioned blog’s writer (who appears to be fairly representative on a quick scout), among these demands would be:
…raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans , universal health care, corporations are NOT people, money should not equal free speech, and we need to get the big money interests out of our politics. [sic]
In short, we could easily simplify this to be a call for the rectification of imbalances that favour the rights of the few over the rights of the many. In effect, then, the #occupy movement is objecting to a general level of injustice that has existed in human civilizations from the beginning of recorded history.
A protest highlighting such disharmony could be an extremely useful thing in the right circumstances, but the #occupy phenomenon in the democratic Western world is quite unlike the uprisings of the Arab Spring (with which it aligns itself) because many of the governing bodies of the Middle Eastern countries where that particular movement arose don’t allow their populations to have a say in the handling of inequalities. In America (like Australia), though, there is already a way for ‘the majority’ of people to address these kinds of issues: vote anyone who is in favour of a particular inequality out of power. In fact, we’ve nearly ALWAYS had that option, yet the fact is that we don’t exercise it! It is a simple idea and it works like this: if Obama doesn’t agree that there’s an inequality, vote him out! If George W doesn’t agree, vote him out! But – and here’s the crux – DON’T THEN GO AND VOTE FOR SOME OTHER IDIOT WHO ACTS THE SAME WAY! If you do that, you’re not voting to fix the problems of inequality, you’re voting for something else.
What, then, is wrong here? If, as the #occupy bunch contend, the majority of Americans agree with them, why isn’t that majority using their democratic power to change things, as they surely could? This problem is not new. It didn’t suddenly happen last week.
As I understand it, the #occupy movement seems to invoke conspiracy to answer this question: the governments are in on it; they want to keep the people poor; it’s Big Business itself that runs things. ((I’m basing this observation on my readings of the Twitter streams of various #occupy campaigns, which I’ve been tapping into over the last week or so, and on blogs I’ve read. It may be a misrepresentation, and if so, I’ll gladly take on any thoughtful commentary.)) As is usually the case when anyone resorts to conspiracy theories, I think the actual answer is much simpler. I think the answer in this case is that the ‘majority’ of people are stupid. Well, I guess that’s harsh. Let’s say the majority of people are not properly educated, and don’t know how to wield the power they have. They also don’t understand (or don’t want to know) that to get the things they say they want, they’ll have to lose some of the things that they take for granted as ‘entitlements’ and some of the things that make them comfortable. The ‘majority’ of Americans (and Australians) are pretty damned skittish around that prospect. To give you some examples: an inequality of universal healthcare is not fixed by voting for a politician who offers you a reduction in your taxes. An inequality of rich people paying less tax than anyone else is not fixed by not-being-bothered-to-get-off-your-fat-ass-and-vote-in-the-first-place. Inequalities arising from having to deal with the planet heating up are not fixed by racking up your air conditioner to 11, driving a 6 cylinder 4WD and voting for a government that buys that vote with cheaper fuel prices. You get the drift.
What we have here is a situation where 1% of the population may have all the money, but the #occupy movement just represents a different 1% of people who want to get up on soapboxes and shout about how unfair that is. Yes, it sure is unfair, but to observe that is nothing more than a schoolyard no-brainer. The real problem is the 98% of people in the middle and their enormous apathy combined with selfishness and a frightening lack of acumen. It is partially because of them that the wealthy 1% are there in the first place, because they could, if they really wanted to, change that.
I suggest that this is the goal that the #occupy movement should be seeking (in democratic countries, at least): to teach people how to use their democratic power in an effective manner, and to educate them to understand that the change that ‘the majority’ wants, will come at a cost to more than just the wealthy 1% (who SHOULD be taxed more, don’t get me wrong. That is certainly something that needs to be addressed, but they are not the biggest part of the problem – they’re mostly a symptom and an easy target). Unlike much of the Middle East, we have system in place that could effect the kinds of changes we want if we only had the will.
As I write this, police have been called in to disperse #occupymelbourne, the demonstration in my own city. There is a sense of outrage and disbelief, which I share, that this kind of heavy-handed tactic should be implemented here. But I find myself kind of agreeing with the Lord Mayor of Melbourne when he said of the eviction:
Well, we’ve given them a fair go. We’ve allowed them to make their point.
Because, realistically speaking, what were the protesters hoping to achieve, if not this kind of outcome? Were they intending to stay there until the problem of societal inequality was fixed? If not, then what? That they got some kind of guarantee, perhaps, (by… whom?…) that things would be made better? Or were they intending to hang around so long that people got bored with them being there and ceased to notice their presence? You see my point, I trust.
It seems to me that if you can’t clearly outline what you hope to gain by your presence in such a demonstration and there is no definite outcome to be had, you can hardly be snitty about being told to move along after a reasonable show of solidarity (I want to emphasise here, in case it isn’t plain, that I don’t think sending in the police was a particularly sensible thing to do, and I certainly do not hold for one minute with any heavy-handedness or violence from them. ((And that goes for all the #occupy protests.)) I think the whole thing could have been handled with a lot more diplomacy, but that it unraveled the way it did just adds further weight to my assessment of the protest as an ultimately unproductive mess. Take note governing bodies: using police force is possibly the worst thing you can do in this instance. It’s just pouring fuel on a fire.)
The #occupy movement is painting itself as a revolution, but a revolution to achieve what, in the end? A fair system of government? We already have one of those – it’s called democracy and it is, to date, the fairest kind of governing system we’ve ever been able to devise. If the complaint is that the democracy we have isn’t working so good, then, sure, maybe that’s right. And it’s completely true that we only have the government to blame. But in a democracy, the government is… us. All of us. In a democracy, if the system is broken, then we are all to blame.
35 Responses to “ #Occupying the High Moral Ground ”
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[…] a problem. This a NO BRAINER. Just as I pointed out on my piece on the Occupy Movement over a year back, a great many people (myself included) are unhappy that things are broken. But I said it then, and […]
Let’s address this point by point.
1) “a protest march every once in a while,” – people have been doing that since rope was invented. It stopped doing much good, though, when they replaced the rope with placards. Bring back lynching, I say.
2) “What does the #occupy movement hope to get done?”
Well, mainly, draw attention to the problem, and get people to care and to agree. I think it’s achieving that better than any previous campaign ever has.
3) You grumble that there are no concrete consensus of goals, ignoring the fact that governments, with considerably fewer people involved, take considerably more time to come up with specific goals. Then you quote rather a good consensus of those goals, without actually saying what you feel is the matter with them. Not really sure what you wanted to do there other than proving yourself wrong.
4) Then you rephrase these goal proposals to a less specific, non-concrete strawman (“In short, we could easily simplify this”), and then attack the generalised strawman for being too general (“In effect, then, the #occupy movement is objecting to a general level of injustice that has existed in human civilizations from the beginning of recorded history.”)
So (though this might be a strawman rephrasing of your own strawman), this looks to me like a claim that we’ve always had this problem, so shut up and stop whining about it.
This ignores that this campaign is against corporate overreach. Corporations haven’t been around that long.
It also ignores that at least in the US, the problem has been getting significantly worse in recent years. In the US, CEO pay is well over 300 times that of the workers, and rising: in real terms it has gone up several hundred percent in the last 20 years, while average employee wages have remained constant.
http://www.businessinsider.com/what-wall-street-protesters-are-so-angry-about-2011-10?op=1 has a bunch of graphs that say it all: right when regular people are getting more roundly fucked than they have since WW2, the fat cats are making their biggest profits since WW2 (and probably ever).
This sounds like you’re just misinformed. I mean, you go so much as to state exactly that: “This problem is not new. It didn’t suddenly happen last week.”
It’s not an old, existing problem that people have just woken up to: it’s a new emergence. The divide between rich and poor has never been so wide in living memory. That’s why Obama was voted in: it failed, but it was the reason. Since that was tried, and has clearly failed, people are trying other stuff now.
5) Then there’s an idealistic rant about how people should shut up, get off your streets, and go fix it in the voting booth. Because voting makes stuff better like a magic bandaid and mother’s kisses.
Newsflash: they tried. The system doesn’t work. And the only people who can fix the system and impose checks and balances on themselves are those in government. Obama is the first black president. He promised change, hope, and to fix the “revolving door” between corporations and government. He didn’t do any of those. Instead, he didn’t. He gave fat no-bid contracts to people who funded his campaign.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/240/tougher-rules-against-revolving-door-for-lobbyists/
So if you think voting for change and hope is such a magical panacea, then find me one person, please, just *one person on earth* that you think people could vote for that would not pull this kind of crap.
Who is this magical Messiah that will deliver us from evil? The one that all the people who are “properly educated, and know how to wield the power they have” should be voting for? If the black son of an immigrant can’t escape the system of backhanders and fistfuls of lobbyist cash, then I reckon there’s simply no such animal as an honest politician.
You can’t even get into the presidential running unless you are in the 1%. That’s the truth of it, and no fairytale you spin about the magical power of voting can change that.
6) “As I understand it, the #occupy movement seems to invoke conspiracy to answer this question: the governments are in on it; they want to keep the people poor; it’s Big Business itself that runs things.(ii)”
That there is the “poison the well” fallacy: call your opponents conspiracy theorists, then anything they say is ignorable. I’ll fix it for you.
“The #occupy movement invokes a broken system to answer this question: the governments have no reason to address the problem; they want to keep their funders happy; Big Business has too large a say, and small businesses and regular voters get none: even voting is worthless.”
7) “to get the things they say they want, they’ll have to lose some of the things that they take for granted”, followed by a bunch of nonsensical “group A wants X, group B does Y, these things are not compatible” stuff, which doesn’t appear to have any actual point, other than distraction.
Everyone understands that there needs to be tradeoffs. If you think otherwise, you’ve not been watching the news much.
For example, most people take for granted the ability to walk about freely without assault. The protesters are willing to risk beatings and incarceration. That’s the tradeoff they’re willing to accept in order to get the issue heard.
However, the goals that you quoted: what tradeoffs would you like in return for them? Think some up. Propose them. Wahey! Now we’re negotiating! Trading demands! In diplomatic circles, this is called progress. Well done.
8) More claims that voting is a magic panacea, and all it needs is for more people to vote.
Voting does not work.
Lobbying does work.
No president has ever won by one vote. Spend the time you would have spent on voting, on lobbying and campaigning instead.
If you can, in that time, convince two people to vote as you would have done, you made a profit… but you still didn’t make one whit of a difference, because the winner is not going to be decided by a majority of two.
If you convinced two thousand, you might have affected the vote in your constituency. Which… still didn’t make one whit of a difference on which party has a majority.
But if, somehow, your campaigning managed to affect enough constituencies to affect the positions of the party, by moving one party up or down by a slot or two in the rankings… you still didn’t make one whit of a difference, because the top parties are all much of a muchness.
But if, somehow, your campaigning managed to COMPLETELY UPSET THE APPLECART, (pretty much never happened in history without violence first, but hey, you’re the one who believes in the magic voting pixies, so I’ll run with it for the time being), and get millions upon millions to vote for a minority party, right across the country, so that it wins the election… you STILL didn’t make one whit of a difference, because every single group’s policy is decided in negotiations with interested parties (ie lobbyists), not by an election every four years.
If you want change on this issue…
VOTING SIMPLY CAN NOT WORK.
At best, it’s an assistive tool towards change. It cannot be the only mechanism.
9) “Because, realistically speaking, what were the protesters hoping to achieve, if not this kind of outcome?”
See #2 above. This sounds a good result, to me. They got attention, and will get much more, now your local retard is sending in the cops. If your lot really want change, they won’t leave.
Campaigns with 400,000 people in are not uncommon for many issues. You won’t have heard of many of them.
So how do you get an issue noticed, and talked about? By voting? No. Voting doesn’t work, and that’s not even what it’s there for. By blogging? By making an internet poll? Or by actually getting off your ass and making news?
How many people are you willing to support in jail with your taxes, before you decide to go out and join them?
10) “Were they intending to stay there until the problem of societal inequality was fixed?”
“Addressed” would be a start. “Fixed” is too much to hope for.
11) “A fair system of government? We already have one of those – it’s called democracy”
Would you be kind enough to do the following:
A) Define “democracy”.
B) Call for an ambulance.
C) Explain how what the system in the US (or australia) at the moment can be considered anything close to your definition.
D) Explain to the paramedics how you came to choke from trying to perform step C. You are likely to get a stern warning that only trained political apologists should try to swallow that kind of thing.
12) You see my point, I trust.
As far as I can tell, your point is “I don’t think this method will work as well as the magic vote-pixies, and I don’t see the point in campaigning for very long, so I think they should shut up and go away.”
Maybe also with the rider “while I claim to agree with them a little bit, actually I’m in that 98% I mentioned that’s apathetic and doesn’t give a crap about the issues, but I’m getting bored enough hearing about them on TV that I care enough to post a blog complaining that they should take it up with the nonfunctional ‘proper channels’ and stop making a scene in public.”
Might not be what you meant, but it’s how you came across.
And just because I suddenly got worried after posting that…
In case it’s not obvious, when I post long argumentative comments on your blog, it’s NOT a sign that you anger me, I hate you and all your opinions, and I think you’re an idiot for holding them.
I do it because I love the way your posts get me thinking. You argue your case well, and make me want to elucidate my own PoV, and see if it can hold up.
I find as I age, my opinions become less flexible, but I do try to listen to disagreement and change my opinions if necessary. Not sure how well I do there.
So yeah, if long argumentative comments bug you, just let me know and I’ll try to stay short and witty in future :) I don’t want to be “that guy” who trolls someone else’s blog.
Comment below (in an attempt to avoid the ever-narrowing threading)
Let’s open the fuckin’ canned peaches and form a fucking government!
That, indeed, is where the problem started. Everyone should watch Deadwood to understand why the United States has compromised political systems…
Actually, up here in America, we can’t simply vote people in with whom we agree. It’s that thing called the electoral college, and has gone against the majority in 3 of our past 50 or so elections since the inception of this nation. Just wanted to bring that up, the money and power do actually control a fair portion of that here as well, even if the big money likes to pretend it doesn’t. Also, we can’t just vote him out (impeach) without him doing something illegal. This is the same qualm people had about Clinton and his affair. Look at Watergate even, the president wasn’t voted out, he resigned. Then it still raises the issue that the power goes to the VP, who is always of the same party as the president, because that’s the way our system works.
Also, these folks tend to just want to argue that the other party should be in power, not that a third party should be in office. Again, I don’t know much about Aussie politics, but up here, a third party candidate cannot win (I mean, Ross Perot got 14% of the popular vote back in the day, but not a single electoral vote, for example). In effect, this eliminates our ability to vote someone other than the two parties who have been in power for nearly 200 years now.
Another facet of this is that the majority of people can’t influence most of this because it is done by the elected representatives. Just like the healthcare bill or the bank/car bailouts, the populace has no real say in it.
Although, as you point out, these protests aren’t aligning themselves along those points, it is not a moot point either.
Aside from that, I agree mostly with what you are saying.
“I think the answer in this case is that the ‘majority’ of people are stupid. Well, I guess that’s harsh. Let’s say the majority of people are not properly educated, and don’t know how to wield the power they have.”
I have to agree and disagree here. Back in the day of the founders (as so many of these people on both sides like to talk about), education was not available for the masses. This goes back to why we did the electoral college in the first place. Jefferson wanted free education for everyone at the taxpayer expense, but people like to pretend he wasn’t socialist. The electoral college is there to rectify those populist, uneducated opinions. The main difference between today and then is that, back then, one person spoke for around 700. Nowadays, it is closer to one person for every 700,000, or somewhere closer to that. That these smart people can organize for such a loose, dumb set of non-ideals is amazing in its daftness. Americans aren’t dumb, per se, they are just people of exceptionally strong (and sometimes wrong) convictions. I was debating with a cousin, for example, who still believes that the communists are going to overrun the country if we stop being so conservative, but that is an issue for another time.
The populace doesn’t have a say in the tax code, either. Therefore, all the tax breaks that the wealthy have (Warren Buffet pointed out that he pays a lower tax rate than secretaries, and wants that issue fixed. He is a mastermind of economics, and he make the money he wants to pay more taxes from. Is he the 90% then…?) come directly from the tax code, which is formulated by those very politicians. Protesting it is all we can do, actually, without tearing down the entire system.
I agree, certainly, that the occupiers have no real clue what they are doing, and that they aren’t really protesting anything other than what the individuals (not the group) believe, which makes it less of a protest and more of a way to argue individual points over any kind of reform.
To Dewi’s points:
Lynching is primarily what the KKK did to the blacks early on in this country’s history. Jim Crow and all that. Lynching isn’t a good idea up here anymore. Besides, even the way you meant it, it is still a mob mentality, rather than our fine democracies. I must disagree with you there.
Yes, they are trying to draw attention to problems, but they are contrary problems that the protesters complain about. Some complain about one problem, and others in the crowd complain about exactly the opposite things. They have no unity. The Westboro Baptists at least have that much.
3) Yes, but they aren’t presenting any ballot issues, these occupiers. What do they want? Where is their manifesto? Where are the plans they wish to enact? Where are their referenda? They don’t have any. After a month, the government can pen an actual issue for people to vote on, is the difference. Even the Tea Partyists could do that.
4: “This ignores that this campaign is against corporate overreach.” Nay, it is about tax reforms. Nay, it is about people making too much money. Nay, it is about small businesses being tied to the owner, but not big business. Nay, it is about more government making the rich kids share. All these are occupy movement arguments. Corporate overreaching isn’t possible in the true capitalist society these occupiers want, because the corporations would have then ‘legitimately’ made all that money.
5) see above. We can’t vote on most of the stuff they are protesting, either because they aren’t government issues (if you want free trade, then don’t ask the government for it) or they are issues the government decides on its own. From this perspective, protesting is fine, but we can just as easily protest the protesters, is the point, and that is what we are doing. Protests go both ways.
6)They keep calling the system broken, but they don’t have any solutions for it, and they aren’t really showing that the system is broken either. It’s like saying ‘My computer doesn’t work, so I blame the man, when I simply forgot to charge its battery. Why won’t the man pay for my electric to put in the battery, and why won’t they charge it for me?’
7)Yes, the will have to compromise, just like they want the people with loads of hard-earned money to do, when the people complaining for the compromises are in no position to compromise. This country is still a capitalism, right? I don’t really care if it becomes socialist, that isn’t my point. Why do the occupiers think that the rich should be the only ones to compromise? My own opinions I am leaving out here purposefully, as I am trying to argue just your points. I don’t disagree, for example, that the rich should be as off-the-hook as they have been in the past, but sitting around and not working for a month in a park isn’t the best way to show work ethic, either.
8) and again, many of the things they are protesting, I agree, are not ballot issues. Voting works great for other things, but not these.
9)But then again, they only get taken in if they are obstructing or soliciting or loitering. A protest is one thing. Holding up traffic in Brooklyn is another. If you resist a cop, they can use whatever means necessary, even up here in America, to subdue you. They can’t use excessive force, but a tazering for an unruly mob isn’t exactly a bad thing, especially if that mob would turn into a riot like in London, or after an OSU game.
10) So you want Wall Street to address the issues of welfare instead of the government? Then this isn’t a political protest, is it? Then it isn’t protected by the Bill of Rights. That is the issue. Are you protesting wall-street or the government? If you believe what Anaglyph says, that these people believe the conspiracies, then you can tie them together and argue that they are both the same, as you have been consistently doing.
Conspiracy isn’t so far out if you are supporting it.
11)Not all democracies allow the American Constitutional rights. You can vote for whatever you want. That is the democracy part. The rest falls under other stuff, perhaps capitalism, perhaps socialism, perhaps fascism, etc.
Again, the right to protest is great, but both sides have it. Peaceful protests are seldom remedied by violence on the part of the police. If they tell you to move, however, and you refuse, then you have engaged them. Just because it is a public place doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want for any amount of time in it. The ones who aren’t protesting have the same right to assemble. Here in America, anyway.
Excellent article.
And just to be clear, I am not arguing the actual substance of either side’s argument. I am arguing the actual act of protesting, and the media through which they are acting.
There’s a lot there, but I just want to address a couple of those things. This first because I think it’s core to everything else:
and
But, as long as you’re interested and informed and educated, you CAN control all of those things. Not directly, but these systems are set up by a process, and that process is controlled by voters. Here’s how it should work:
When you make your simplest political choice – voting for member on your local council, say – you vote for someone with social principles, not for the guy who’s the nicest or the most popular or who will make sure you always get a seat at his restaurant. This requires that you make yourself informed about what is valuable in your society. From there, you apply those same principles to your local candidate for government, your mayor, your board of directors – anyone for whom you exercise a personal vote. I do this EVERY time I vote. I am very concerned about social justice and fairness and ethical behaviour. If you start your political process at this level based on principles of creating a good society, I don’t see how you can fail. It requires everyone do it though. Whenever you encounter corruption, for whatever the reason, get rid of that person. If everyone tried to do this I can’t see how we could fail to have a good system. We would not need to know the workings of the tax system or the healthcare bill or the banks because we’d have done out best to put responsible people in care of those things. THAT’s why we have a problem now – we can’t vote it away because we’ve structured the corruption into the system ourselves. A democracy is a reflection of the way that a society invents itself. If this is not so, then you’re inventing a fanciful scenario where politics is corrupt, but the rest of us are not, and I don’t buy that for a moment. Politics IS US.
Ross Perot would have won if he’d had 90% of the popular vote though. And even so, if he can’t win that way, he could’ve won through voting influence on the electoral college, if people had the strength of will to do that. I don’t buy the argument that you can’t change these things through voting. You sure can’t change them if you’re a coward, but we could if everyone showed some cojones. What stops people from making brave voting decisions is selfishness and fear.
In a true popular vote, however, one only needs the majority, even if that majority is only 14%. If the votes were actually set up for popular vote, the highest vote getter wins, not the person who gets 51% of the votes. Then again, Bush Jr won the electoral vote twice even when he had a lower percentage of the popular vote. Again, that’s just up here. No candidate wins with 90% (I don’t think it has ever happened, anyway), and most win with 45-48% of the popular but usually over 55% of the electoral. That is all I was getting at there.
Local elections are different, sure. Then again, local politicians don’t influence Federal law. Federal law is done by the nearly 500 people in the House/Senate/Congress. Also, in line with the electoral college, the President appoints his entire cabinet, who also have some say in various affairs. 45% of the populace can effectively control the other 55% this way.
Local and state laws work differently than federal, and most of the stuff the occupiers want to see changed falls either at the federal level, or not within the scope of government anyway (like how corporations should spend their money – the government can’t typically control this anyway).
That is what I was getting at. State laws are usually passed through the people, and it is much easier to get a referendum when a governor screws up than to get a federal law changed when the house and senate have already voted on them.
I would prefer to stay away from local and state politics, since they are completely different machines. For now I was just referring to Federal things, since that seems to be the issue the occupiers are taking exception to. Most of the occupiers aren’t trying to get rid of bike lanes in NYC, for example, which would be a local law by comparison.
At the federal level you also have lobbyists who attempt to persuade the elected officials (supposedly on behalf of the supporters of the lobbyists). Part of this is also campaign contributions. I think that is one of the main issues the Occupiers take exception to, but then again they aren’t addressing it directly, and they are clearly supporting one side, so I don’t think they want to really control that aspect as much as they put forth.
And again, the whole inability to change certain things through voting is at the federal level, not the state, as the federal is most likely the one in question here. You guys don’t really have states and a separate federal government, so it is not a clean comparison at all between your occupy movements and our own, I think. This is perhaps part of the disparity.
Yes we do have separate state and Federal governments, but we don’t have an electoral college system like yours. I totally understand what you’re saying about the federal voting system, but we really only have two alternatives here: either the #occupy movement gets their aims ratified under the existing government system – which I think is highly unlikely – or we have a reform of some kind. A reform won’t come about through shouting at the the system to change, in my opinion. That’s giving the democratic system even more credit than I do. Occupiers (and Dewi) see it differently, but I I don’t see an argument for a mechanism here.
I’ve offered a mechanism. It’s not a mechanism that I think will be easy, or even achievable, but it’s better than not having a clue about how you think change could be engineered.
And to be clear, voting our way out of the problem at a Federal level this late stage is the hardest way to do it. Now we really do need the kind of voting numbers ‘that have never happened’. As I said – it’s revolution. Just revolution of a different kind.
Ahh, I didn’t realize your government worked like that. I was also alluding to the fact that your entire country only has about a million more people than New York state (or only about double my state of Ohio, or 2/3 that of California). You don’t have 50 states totaling 1500% of your population bickering about the federal stuff. It would be more fair to compare Australia to California strictly on the basis of population and government (as every state has Congressmen and Senators and Representatives, and their own state Constitutions).
I don’t know anything about constitutional monarchies, but I do know that you guys are still tied to the crown somehow, and that they also have at least a minor influence. This is something else we don’t have. We don’t have to worry about pleasing your queen, or answering to another nation, or even NATO if we didn’t want to, I suppose. I think this also plays into our base mentalities somehow, and perhaps the way policies are done? I would like to be further enlightened in this aspect. Even being a federalist nation, I still get the odd sensation that it just isn’t the same thing. Then again, our ‘states’ aren’t really states, like with the EU, and we don’t have commonwealths.
I guess I just thought your government worked a bit more differently from ours than you are proffering it to. ‘The more I know,’ I guess, as the PSAs go.
We have governments for each of the States and Territories – essentially 6 States and 2 Territories. Each State government holds its own elections, but the makeup of the States does not influence the makeup of the Federal Parliament (aside from the fact that each State is represented in parliament by an equal number of members). Until recently we had a situation for a while where all States had liberal governments and the country itself had a conservative government. I’m not sure if that can happen in the US.
The Queen has several kinds of representatives at State and Federal levels but they are really nominal positions and don’t exert much, if any, power except in some extreme circumstances. We’re more or less a republic in that respect, though saying that in some quarters is sure to cause disagreements.
In effect, our governing system takes some of the English Westminster system and integrates it with influences from the US Congress.
@Dewi:
First of all, I don’t and would never, consider you a troll. Trolls are just idiots who make no sense and like to hear the sound of their own voice. Your arguments are always refreshingly challenging, and if I post a highly opinionated piece like I just did, I do so fully understanding that people may challenge me. Indeed, it took me some deliberation about whether I should publish or not, for fear of being misunderstood. And I do feel that, unfortunately, you misunderstand what I’m getting at here.
I’m going to jump around a bit so bear with me. I’ll try and make this a little clearer. First, to your direct questions:
Leaving aside your picturesque call to emotion, I think we are in agreement that the concept of democracy is broken. I said as much. Our democracies are not working – this is in fact the secondary point of my post. You say that voting ‘does not work’ and is a ‘magic fairy’, and I disagree. You say the only way to get things done is via lobbying, and I disagree. First, I need to be quite clear: I do not think democracy is a panacea and I’m pretty sure I made that point in the post. But democracy is the best system we’ve been able to think of to wrangle an unwieldy population in the many millions. If you can think of a better system, I would certainly like to know what it is (it’s certainly not, in my opinion, a democracy with lobbying, as I think you are suggesting). That being said, the major flaw of democracy is that it’s only as good as the way it’s wielded. A democracy full of uneducated people is going to produce the kind of country that a few million uneducated people want. I don’t see that the logic of this is hard to understand.
You’re trying to tell me that lobbying is the best way to get things done, magnificently ignoring the fact that the reason so many rich people are able to influence politics is precisely through this mechanism. Lobbying is a VERY BAD way of dealing with problems. It’s particularly bad for dealing with a problem that involves money’s influence over politics. Loud voices might manage to achieve things occasionally, but money is much more persuasive. Loud voices will never lobby financial interests out of politics.
There’s an additional problem with lobbying, that also seems to me so clear that I’m surprised you champion it, and it is that it is not necessarily in the interests of the majority. It’s fine to support lobbying if it is in favour of a cause that most people agree with, but what about the kinds of lobbying that impose their minority views on the many? I’m talking here about religion, for instance (and there are numerous other instances – let’s not start on the NRA). In Australia we are influenced disproportionately by religious lobbying – which achieves political influence not in the interests of the larger secular community – and I object to that. If your answer is that secular people should also be lobbying for their rights, you get into a situation where everybody is essentially voting, only they are doing it with loud voices, placards and money. To me that seems merely primitive. Why not just have a fist fight in the town square and sort it out like that?
Lobbying is nothing more than a system designed to get around democratic process. It is particularly effective if you have money.
Jumping backwards:
People already ‘care and agree’ that this problem exists. The most that anyone in their lounge room is doing when they see these protests on tv is to say ‘Yeah! Right on! I care and agree!’ The campaign is not ‘achieving’ anything unless those people who are ‘caring and agreeing’ have the power to do something. What are you suggesting is the empowerment here? That they go out and withdraw all their money from the bank? That they stop buying goods from Apple because they don’t want their dollar to go into some rich guy’s pocket? That they gang together en masse and raid the coffers and throw the gold into the streets? Or are you saying, maybe, that those legions of people ‘caring and agreeing’ out there in tv land are somehow going to frighten politicians into doing something? How?
What we have here is a broken system and we need to repair the system. Which I say we can do, but not by waving placards and having a sit-in.
Ignoring the argument from Spurious Similarity (I’m not arguing about what governments do. Governments do stupid and annoying things all the time), I have never said there’s anything wrong with the many goals put forward under the #occupy banner. They are all admirable goals. What I was illustrating was that there is no easy-to-assimilate message, other than a generalized ‘everything is unfair because the rich are rich and we are poor’. You then go on to characterize this as a straw man, but it is not: you find me the succinct #occupy message, if you can, and tell me what it is, if not that.
The goal proposals in that snippet (it was the most succinct precis I could find, and I think it’s clear that it’s an illustration) are diffuse:
•…raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans ,
That one is clear. Great!
•universal health care,
Also clear, but a completely different issue.
•corporations are NOT people,
Well, they are, actually – where are we going with this?
•money should not equal free speech,
True enough. Unfortunately that is a different issue again to all the above.
•and we need to get the big money interests out of our politics.
We sure do. But how does that relate to universal healthcare and raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans, or corporations ‘not being people’?
All those grievances, plus numerous others that seem to be legitimate under the #occupy banner, are different messages. If the #occupy thing is about all those fragmented messages, then, as I said, it seems to me pointless to attempt to air them in a demonstration – it will just confuse people. If attempt to find some theme in them, though, a message, then you need to generalize to the degree I did. And, I didn’t even disagree with the sentiment of the generalization – I just said that it was an age-old problem. I’m not arguing about the principle here, just the method of disagreeing with the problems.
The key to what you’ve said above is in the word ’emergence’. The problem, however is eons old. Within living memory, at least. Time for a cartoon break example:
Calvin & Hobbes, decades ago.
You can’t possibly argue that no-one saw it coming. Geez. I saw it coming. I’ve argued for thirty years that a political system supported by moneyed big business will eventually reach the point of catastrophe. It’s as inevitable as a political system supported by religion (and I’m warning you right now that one’s coming too). If it was in popular press cartoons twenty years ago, it was already barrelling down the pike. What’s happened (as I argue will happen with Global Warming) is that it’s the consequences of the problem that are now blossoming into public consciousness. These issues can always be ignored until they hurt you. When they get to that point, everyone is suddenly an activist.
Your line of thought here is beginning to get very confusing to me. Obama, by your own argument elsewhere, attained office by giving ‘fat no-bid contracts to people who funded his campaign’. This is the excellent technique of lobbying that you are advocating. In any case, it would have made no difference at all which way people voted in this particular case, if their vote was uninformed. If McCain had been elected into office, we’d still have had the subprime crisis that has brought all this to a head. This was a train that had left the station way back in the Reagan era and has its roots in the Savings & Loans shenanigans of the 1980s. (Don’t misconstrue this statement as ‘voting wouldn’t have made a difference’. I will elaborate below).
No ‘one person’ will fix a broken system that has been engineered for generations. You yourself are creating a straw man argument here by implying that I said that. I did not suggest there would be a magical Messiah who would have all the answers, or say that it would happen instantly. I don’t think that, and I didn’t say that. In fact, you are, quite illogically, implying a magical solution in the same way you say I am; what you have said could easily be similarly construed as suggesting that the #occupy strategy will fix this problem with pixie dust too, and I think if you thought about it for a moment you could see that it won’t. See below for my elaboration on this.
Ah, such idealism! I’ve watched every election since I was a teenager speak against that assertion. People (the ‘majority’ of people) vote for their own selfish interests. They certainly don’t vote for trade-offs. Sometimes this is glaringly obvious, as when they vote a party in on the promise of a tax cut here, or the alleviating of an irrational fear there, and sometimes it’s a lot more subtle.
That’s another call to emotion, and a changing of the subject. Yes, the protesters (and many others probably) realise the problem. But they are essentially a small, better-educated proportion of the community that, as I said, wants to make a point about how unfair the situation is. They are, presumably, understanding that their actions will have consequences. I’m talking about people who don’t think like that, who I assert make up the ‘majority’ that is being waved around. They most certainly don’t understand about trade-offs, otherwise we wouldn’t be in this predicament.
See my outcome breakdown below. Maybe they won’t leave. But they won’t get change either. They’ll get tired or bored. The attention they got is useless if it doesn’t effect a result other than having footage on the tv of them being moved on by cops. I’m sorry, but I don’t see, and you haven’t made it clear, how this will provide a mechanism by which something productive will happen. This is not a situation that is analagous with demonstrations for a moratorium on Vietnam, say, or women’s rights, or getting troops out of Iraq. In each of those cases there was a point to making an imbalance known to a wider community. In the case of #occupy, the imbalance is already known and understood by ‘a majority’ of people. The #occupiers go to lengths to tell us this is the case. So to what end are they trying to get their ‘result’ on tv? So the rich people can see how they feel? Good luck with getting sympathy from that quarter. It makes no sense to me.
Hahaha. Again, your idealism is admirable. So here you’re saying that if the politicians – the same politicians who are implicit in creating the problems in the first place – ‘address’ the issue (how?) that you think this will make a difference? See my outcome breakdown below, again. I say it will not. I say that until you remove the kinds of politicians we have, that you will just get the problems recycled. Come on – you MUST see this is so. You really think that because a lot of people express their unhappiness on the street with placards that a rotten-to-the-core political system will respond? Come back here in a year and show me how that worked out (no, really – I would LOVE to see this work. I just don’t have that kind of idealism. I think we’ve enabled a political structure that is so riddled with the kind of corruption that #occupy is trying to address, that it is entirely symbiotic with it.)
I’m totally disappointed that you characterise my argument in this trivially polarized way. I don’t believe it reads like that unless you’ve already made up your mind to read it like that. As I pointed out numerous times in the post, I am in complete agreement with the dissatisfaction and even anger that the #occupy movement is plainly expressing. I didn’t think I needed to put it in so many words, but perhaps I do: I am one of the people who thinks that the system is intrinsically corrupt, does not favour social equality and, in short, doesn’t work. I’m not getting ‘bored’ with seeing the protests on tv – I’m getting frustrated by seeing such a vast waste of energy on something that I think is minimally productive. I think I made it abundantly clear, also, that I think the ‘proper channels’ as you put it, are dysfunctional. I’ll try and make it as succinct as I can:
Democracy is inherently a good system. Not a perfect system, but a good one. It is, however, an organism that is only as smart as the cells that make it up. So, the Number One priority that we should be addressing is getting the democracy smarter. This won’t happen very quickly, but I think it is the best strategy for approaching a solution to this problem. Let me attempt to show you why by making an assessment of possible outcomes of the #occupy movement and see if you agree (I’ll talk about America, here, although we face almost the same situation politically in Australia):
•Outcome #1: The #occupy movement causes politicians to have a sudden epiphany that yes, people are unhappy, so they’d jolly well better get their asses into gear and tax the rich, fix the healthcare and stop taking handouts from influential businesses! They put legislation into effect immediately, all the #occupiers are satisfied, pack up their tents and go home. The rich take their beating and exit from politics (for the first time in human history). Healthcare and all the other pressing problems of an unjust social inequality are fixed from the taxes levied on rich people. Everybody lives happily ever after.
•Outcome #2: Obama promises he will do all the above things if you vote him in again. When he’s in, he does what he can, but you know, things take time, it drags on, nothing much changes. Everybody is still unhappy.
•Outcome #3: Rick Perry promises he will do all the things above if you vote him in. Everyone is pissed off with Obama because he failed so they vote in Rick Perry instead. Kiss your asses goodbye.
•Outcome #4: There is (somehow) a revolution. The Government is overthrown and ‘better’ people are put in place.
•Outcome #5: Nothing at all happens and #occupy tents are still #occupying city squares this time next year.
Is there a ‘possible outcome’ I missed?
Of these, I’d call #3 and #5 the most likely. #4 is probably the one the #occupiers desire most (I think we can reasonably discount the total fantasy of #1). The thing is, once again I am in complete agreement with the #occupiers. I think we do need a revolution, just not one with beheadings and other forms of corporeal violence. Assuming ‘the majority’ of Americans want a change for a better government they can do it at the next election. Like this:
Don’t vote for the Democrats. Don’t vote for the Republicans. Vote for someone who has some principles. Now, I will switch here to Australian politics because I don’t know the territory so well for the US: here, I would say to people: Don’t vote for either of the two entrenched, conservative, monetarily influenced, heavily lobbied parties, Liberal or Labor. Vote for the Green party. This is a party that endorses the principles you say you want. It is not immune from the flaws of the two major contenders, but it is much better than either of them. In fact, it doesn’t really matter who you vote for (as long as they are not fringe lunatics) because the object here is to put the fear of God into all the other parties; Shit! People are are voting on principles, not because they want tax cuts or ‘more jobs’… Then, when the Greens get into power, and another election comes, vote again for the party that offers the best social justice, the best medical care, the best education (above all, the best education), whoever that may be. Keep on voting like this and in a mere few voting cycles you’ll have a good government. IF THAT’S WHAT YOU REALLY WANT.
There is no magic pixie at work here – if the #occupy movement is right, and this is what ‘the majority’ wants, then it’s totally possible to achieve the equivalent of Outcome #4. This is the very same revolution they’re seeking, only a lot less bloody and a lot more achievable than a physical revolution. This is what I said in the post above: the effort being squandered on public picketing could have been much more usefully employed by getting people to understand this idea. What I can tell you for absolutely-fucking-sure is that no message of this kind is coming out of the demonstrations.
It seems to me both of you keep saying something like (or rather, explicitly):
“Well, mainly, draw attention to the problem, and get people to care and to agree. ”
‘…the problem…’
Singular. Both sides keep acting like the occupiers are arguing a single, mystified point, but somehow come up with (as anaglyph alluded to in this reply) whatever ‘problem(s)’ they want to attach to it.
Dewi can’t simplify (like the occupiers are doing) the argument like this anymore than Anaglyph or myself read it and see it that way. We did not compile these points, the occupiers did. How else can we read them, is my question? If we, the folks who don’t want particularly to be associated either way, can’t understand what you want, and you are unable to simplify it in a coherent message, what option do we have but to believe that the whole thing is incoherent in the first place?
That is ultimately my point. Again, where is thy manifesto? If you want the impact of Marx, you need to do things like Marx.
My point is, since I ultimately forgot it, which problem (again, singular) are we seeing and agreeing with? Do we want bigger government to collect those taxes on the rich and to provide for the common defense and welfare, or do we want a smaller government that is harder to corrupt and creates a truer democracy?
That is my question. Can either side tell me which one the occupiers want?
Not even going to start in on the similarities between the Obama campaign/term and the Bush one. As I have been saying for the past several years, if you want real change, vote for someone other than democrats or republicans. They have run things for 200 years with little efficacy. A third party would, at least, change the party structure, and that is a guarantee.
And one last thing, I know this is a lot of posts. If people really wanted the government to create more jobs and boost the economy, they would only have to agree to more government jobs. A good public works project (say, fixing and improving the infrastructure) would fix half of the stuff they are complaining about, and would make our country nicer in the process, by actually creating jobs. Of course, that is too socialist an idea to work in our highly polarized society right now. Compromise is a joke, really. Both sides think compromise is getting what they want when the other side gives in. My nation may just fall into civil war in the next 20 years, but I hope not. My country puts out some of the brightest minds in contemporary anything, but we sure as hell aren’t electing them to office for some reason. It’s like that movie Idiocracy, but right now.
The ‘fear’ of socialism/communism is what motivates a huge number of Americans to vote stupidly. But is that not, ultimately, what the #occupy movement is calling for: more social conscience in our society? The subprime crisis is an inevitable consequence of capitalistic greed. You structure your society on the idea that capitalistic ideas are more important than socialist ones and that’s precisely the outcome you should expect. People are surprised by something that has always seemed to me completely inevitable – it’s just that until it bites them on the ass, they can’t be bothered thinking about it. Ignorant democracy in play.
But we don’t particularly value the capitalist ideas above it, at least in practice. Fire, EMS, Police, Social Security, Welfare, Medicare/medicaid, public schools, et cetera. We like to pretend that people work for whatever they achieve, and some do much more than others, but that isn’t my point. Most people demand Social Security and the military, both socialist up here (regardless of how much the right would like us to think otherwise, and I can get into that later if you like), but no one wants to pay to keep people healthy. We want to give away free education to every student, but we don’t want to make sure they are well enough to benefit from it. That was the whole dichotomy I was driving at. You are right, they do want more social conscience, which means ultimately that they want more socialism, but they want it funded (funding socialism?) by the rich people. I just want everyone to pay their fair share, which is why I support a flat tax on people, instead of the current system. We need mills for everything is my thinking here, but mills on income, so to speak. Everyone pays x percent for public safety, x percent for schools, etc. Half of that issue of taxation, however, comes from a system that isn’t corrupt, but just broken and old. I pay rent, so in a roundabout way I pay property taxes. Thus, I pay taxes into a school district where my house sets, regardless of whether my theoretical kids would go there or not. Landowners pay to the schools regardless of whether they have kids or not. Hell, the Amish pay taxes for schools they don’t use, for example, because they build their own within the requirements of the law. Parents who homeschool still pay taxes to the school district. This sort of pure brokenness is part of the issue, and has nothing to do with corruption, despite what the #occupiers might say. These logical fallacies exist in greater exaggeration further up the chain as well. I just happen to be familiar with this particular issue, as most people are up here. And this is an issue that each state handles differently, on top of that, so we in Ohio fund our schools entirely differently than those in New York or Nevada or California or any other state. And on top of that, the money goes to the state but is spent by the districts when the state gives them their ‘fair’ share.
Well, another part of being an educated democracy is that you understand that politics is complicated. Like most things, you can’t think in black & white – there are numerous shades of grey. People, as a rule, are not good at thinking like that.
There are problems, however, with having your society underpinned by capitalism. Let’s take education: most governments know that education is necessary, but the ‘product’ of education is very hard to assess. If you put in X tax dollars, it’s hard to say that accounts for Y value. It’s not the same for other things that the government might invest in, like utilities, or gambling, say, or even public transport where you can see a result from your invested dollar (that result might not be in the black, but you can still see a dollar result – makes it easier to deal with on a ledger). Personally, I think governments should operate completely outside commercial interests, but neither your country nor mine works like that.
The ramification is that things like education and healthcare are just big money pits to governments – you put money in, the money gets sucked up, and the money pit asks for more money. Thing is, these are necessary money pits, and as a government you should be throwing money it because that’s your job. The payback is a healthy educated society, which is something that ultimately benefits you in a dollar sense.
Unfortunately, long-range thinking is another thing that our voting public are not good at.
That was mostly my point. Any democracy is socialist in nature, regardless of our capitalism that lies beneath. I think both can live together, if done properly.
For example, everyone who votes within a district can vote for the school levies. Levies are millage (1 mill is $0.10 per $1,000 of property value), and by definition only landowners pay them. Thus, I can vote for a 5 mill, 10 year levy, and if it passes, every landowner in the district pays for it. This is ideally how the stuff should be done, and it is at the local levels, and even some at the state level. At the federal level, however, we don’t have any say in it. Everyone pays sales tax (but they pay it on different things in different states- I can buy clothing in Pennsylvania with no sales tax, but not food, and it is the opposite here). This is the way taxes ought to work, but they don’t above the local level. This is how a capitalist society can provide for the common welfare, the common socialism. If we don’t want to spend anymore on school, we simply vote only for the renewal next time, rather than the increase. The problem is, we don’t have any of this power over the federal government, and I think that is part of what gets the occupiers worked up so much.
The bigger point being, the people actually already decide how much to spend on schooling, not the government. County governments set the sales tax rates, I think, so we don’t actually vote on those, but those go to pay for services that everyone uses anyway, and we aren’t paying the ‘outrageous’ sums of sales tax that, say, the Canadians are. Ours in the states range from 0-10%, but Canadians pay anywhere from 7-15%, and higher income taxes too. That was just a point of comparison. They also have free healthcare and other benefits we don’t, but we can cross the border and get as non-citizens, too. It isn’t as though higher taxes are a bad thing, is what I am getting at. I mean, the Danes pay something like 70% taxes on income, but have free healthcare and free schooling as far as they want to take it, and no one complains (supposedly, they are the happiest nation in Europe, according to a study I heard about on NPR).
I don’t think either side knows really what is going on, but I think any system must allow for corruption. A system without it does not exist. There are people who sap from Welfare and Disability just as there are those who pay lobbyists to buy votes from senators. Is one inherently more ‘evil’ than the other? I don’t know. What I do know is that I wouldn’t mind paying a bit more in taxes to help everyone get that baseline education (to make a smarter democracy) and help everyone stay healthy. For perspective, I only make around $20k per year, so I am not exactly wealthy.
I simplified some of the many agendas put forward by the #occupy movement for this explicit reason (and this is what Dewi criticised as a straw man) – I think all the fragmented issues of the #occupy movement point to ONE single problem – that our governing system is borked and it’s not acting on our behalf any longer. This is why I keep saying that fundamentally I agree with the Occupiers. That’s a very clear problem in my mind – I just wish they’d frame it that way. Then a path to the solution is much more obvious.
Also, the occupiers up here aren’t occupying the government. They aren’t sitting out in front of the White House or any state houses or any of that. They are occupying Wall Street and financial institutions. They are walking around in front of rich people’s houses. Perhaps it is different down under, but up here it is blatantly protesting the wealthy people. It is not, in any direct way, attacking the government, or really even the politicians, except to say that they must be taking handouts (which is odd, since these people want free healthcare and other handouts to begin with… isn’t that a bit contrary?).
um, I read the cartoon. I liked it.
If I was any good at cartooning, I’d try and synopsize my argument in one. I’m sure everyone would be a lot happier.
Furtunately, you’re good at wording, and that’s just as effective! :D
#ocowpie
HA!! Over me head. I don’t get it.
I like it!
I believe democracy is the problem. The majority is not always correct. Probably not even half the time. The largest pool of voters are high school grads or drop outs. A politician panders to the majority in order to preserve his cushy job and retire with the golden handshake. Not to mention the thousands of dollars in lobbying for special interest groups.
If a politician were to completely tell the truth, and never prevaricate or never talk ‘poptart poptalk politically correct verbal poop’ he would not, that’s NOT, get re-elected, and likely tossed out of his party.
Democracy is a good system IF everyone is making informed decisions. Certainly, in a stupid democracy, which I think we have, the majority is not always correct (depending on what your notion of ‘correct’ is, by the way. That’s why we have a democracy – George W’s idea of ‘correct’ is certainly not my idea of ‘correct’). As I said above, a democracy full of badly educated people is not likely to come up with a smart government – just a cunningly self-interested one. Funny that that’s what we have, eh?
The best possible system of government is a benign autocracy with a very smart and compassionate leader. Kind of like a family having a really good dad. Unfortunately, the major problem with autocracies is that they have a bad habit of handing power to the idiot son.
If politicians told the truth, they wouldn’t be politicians, now would they?
I mean, sure, fascism is a great idea if people have no particular value, right? Socialism is fantastic, if everyone actually works. Same with communism, as long as people do their jobs. At some point, the jobs might run out, and there goes the system. The problem I see is that people don’t like balance. The majority don’t have to know what’s best. If that’s the case, then we certainly don’t want a king who makes all the decisions, or a dictator, who may be among that majority, appointing people from that majority, etc. At least with voting and democracy, we have a say in the matter. Look at our protests against Vietnam back in the day, or against the ‘wars’ in the Middle East today. For the most part, our right to assemble is not infringed upon, it just happens that idiots are out trying to demonstrate that point in the worst way possible. If they protest in an illegal way, such as part of the occupiers have done up here, then it is only logical that they should be met as such. As my country has pointed out anyway, just because you have the freedom of speech does not mean you can simply shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. There are rules for how you can use it. Otherwise we could just be anarchists and do whatever we wanted without laws.