democracy

Democracy, do you believe it? Do you believe that elections are clean where you live? Do you have any real reason to believe so? Do you believe that the current prevalent political system can be realistically improved or do you think it's all downhill from here on?

>>78229 >Do you believe that elections are clean where you live? Do you have any real reason to believe so? We have factual evidence they aren't clean across western countries. Its rare but now and then you see articles with mayors losing elections with 0 votes when they voted for themself and everyone knows its fake. You can infer they are not clean on country level likewise because you see regional votes with a common ratio between parties and then suddenly a region where one party got 0 votes. The likelihood of not a single person voting for the underdog party is essentially non existent. tldr: you can argue about the level of manipulation but its certain it exists.

Winston Churchill (noted REPUBLICAN) famously said that Democracy is the worst form of government, and who am I to disagree with such a guy as that.

>>78229 I am anti-democracy. >Do you believe that elections are clean where you live? I know they aren't. >Do you have any real reason to believe so? Yes. Even if we ignore the sheer volume of election fraud for the last 50+ years alone. Let's look at how many people vote: Our best voting outcome is significantly under 30%. >Do you believe that the current prevalent political system can be realistically improved or do you think it's all downhill from here on? It can be improved, but it won't be improved. No one has any incentive to do so.

I don't believe in democracy but I also don't believe there's a reason they would need to cheat their own system. Democratic elections serve their purpose. They're mass advertisement campaigns in which power battles power in one worthless public manipulation act to see which can get away with more misinformation and brainwashing to eventually get the cattle to their side, writing their own doom (so they can't complain). The system in its mass scale is not so much about offering rational solutions to problems or even managing chaos to guarantee outcomes as it is about riling up the mentally weak by bombarding them with (pretty expensive) lies and behavioral manipulation to get them to vote certain representatives into power and in turn see a return on investment, less on overt corruption and more on preferential treatment, both for government projects/grants (so essentially to rob these same mindbroken slaves out of their tax dollars) and laxer laws guaranteeing your success as part of "industry" and making sure you don't need to answer for human rights violations or any other pesky bullshit like that. You already price out grassroot movements and organic sentiment. You pull rationale straight from the root. You let madness and stupidity reign under the excuse of universal rights and equality. You breed misinformation and hate. You make sure nothing ever goes out of control and whoever succeeds is ultimately under your beck and call. Why would you ever cheat a system designed to keep you in power?

Depends on the country, kind of. The most crucial country for consideration is America, as it has the power to destroy the governments of other nations, and it has done so repeatedly throughout the last century. A country's form of governance is not at issue here (America will gladly work with a country that commits egregious human rights violations), what is at issue is where the government stands in its relations with America. Is it opposed to the US government? If so, does the country also possess valuable resources that the US government+corporations would like to harvest? Does this country's government agree to give America a piece of the action, that piece really being the majority of the trading? If not, then the country is gonna get ransacked directly by the US military, or more covertly by the CIA funding a farcical revolution. Any truly free country governed by a democracy that should oppose the agenda of the cabal with its power situated in America will be destroyed. Can America's "democracy" be changed from within? Probably not. Why? Because it has been tried before by JFK, and MLK, back in a time when some independent candidates (people not controlled by some shadowy cabal) could actually get into office or gain real influence, like JFK and MLK. JFK got his head blown off in broad daylight in a completely botched assassination, the narrative riddled with as many holes as the presidential limousine, and the proceeding coverup perfectly illustrated the levels of corruption of America's institutions, throughout government, and media, all of these shadowy scumbags came out of the woodwork to cover everything up to the best of their ability so as to muffle public outcry. And MLK got shot down as well in his own suspicious assassination. JFK was the last _somewhat honest_ American president. There will never be another within the current system. As for what "the cabal" is. It is a shapeless organization composed of power-hungry, extremely wealthy, psychopathic, morally bankrupt people, who are all connected with one another, working with one another, defending and ensuring the prevalence of each other, all being situated in government and industry, who manipulate the masses in order to gain themselves (cabalists) more power. They are found in both industry and government, and these two entities defend one another reciprocally. Say a company steps out of line, posing some kind of threat to the cabal's power structure in a free country like America, but in such a way that disallows the US government from shutting the company down. Well, all the other compromised companies and banks can just decide to ostracize that bad company, and starve it out. They can go further to demonize it in the media. Often times these two entities, government and industry, will share their personnel about. You'll have a guy from the CIA go on to make a company to data-mine on behalf of the US government. Then you'll have guys working at the CIA-formed company leave to join the US government, and so forth. Or some guy works in a company, say a weapons company, he has some stake in it, he joins the US gov, say congress/senate (these individuals themselves can have some ties to companies), or the presidential cabinet, and starts a war, this war greatly profits the weapons company, and so he too profits. Once they've all retired they'll go on to join private think-tanks composed solely of shady ex-government spooks that get bankrolled by corporate entities like the Rockefellers. Where do you even go to make some kind of case against the current system? You're not gonna get inside the system on your own. A disproportionately high level of influential American politicians are former members of secret societies located in Ivy League universities. To get into such secret societies you must have familial ties to it, be rich (how do you become rich?), or both. You'll need to create a movement of sorts. So then you need to find a way to form a movement, using what? Social media. Which is controlled by the cabal. You can all get censored, and derezzed, and you will be persecuted if you actually threaten the cabal. You'll realistically need some kind of legally experienced persons to assist in making a case against certain American policies like the ability for corporations to bribe American politicians and parties, or even amending the American Constitution in a way to prevent any private companies from restricting people's freedom of speech (both of which would undoubtedly result in your movement being swiftly disincorporated if it even managed to form on Big Tech's compromised platforms). Then these legally experienced people, ideally lawyers, come with their own problems. Do they even believe in your cause? Do they have some hidden agendas? Can they be bought out and betray you? (happens all the time). I mean I can't even conceive of a way to begin an attempt at producing change from within the system, because the system has been designed to prohibit us from doing such a thing, there's nowhere to even get a foothold nowadays, we're all so poor, dumb, and divided. All of the stuff with voting is just feel-good nonsense, it's a scam designed to keep people docile and inactionable. Oh, here comes corporate/deep-state backed politician, but this time he's indian/black instead of orange, surely he will save us. I know the American Election of 2020 was rigged, but it didn't matter anyway because Trump is a deep state stooge, they're just trying to further divide Americans with the left/right political dichotomy.

>>78234 please stop assuming the money people are in bed with one another instead of looking to backstab whoever they can at every step of the way because what they really want is more power/money their soykafty rules apply to their own games too this is where every conspiracy theorist fails

>>78235 That isn't an argument against anything I've said, nor have I ever denied that there are people whose evilness plays into the hands of the cabal, they do. Somebody doesn't need to be a willful participant in their game.

>US >using first past the post voting not one of the various runoff voting systems like STAR which any idiot could understand how to do so no excuse for not implementing it >gerrymandering slows progress of any kind to a crawl since elections switch periodically based on their rigging >legalized bribery known as "lobbying" >no upper limits on campaign spending >no limits on ad campaigns >news networks care more about sensationalist money making than actually giving people useful information so attention goes to wrong candidates >they get unfair airtime in debates based on what candidate gets better profit for them in viewership >in presidential elections each state votes on entirely different days which screws up results by swaying the public to copy others >even though congress represents the states the votes of the people for president are still unfairly called only toward a state vote and small states have far more power than they should >obsolete system of the electoral college >voter suppression >election days are usually on a weekday and not declared a national holiday >only the president, governor, mayor vetoes laws not the people >cant even decide to not go to war

Democracy is a nice buzzword, a political tool to embellish a speech in order to justify one's personal agenda. It is used by virtually every political figure in attacking the opposition. The word itself has lost all meaning; hell, even the literal, etymological meaning conceals another trick: we say it means that power is in the hands of the "people", but who is the people? At best the current democratic systems make half of the population happy and the other half, unhappy. As such, democracy only serves the interests of no more than a fraction of the total population. The whole process of "voting" is merely a ritual of mass compliance to the system. The message is clear: you are either with A, or with B. Of you don't vote, you have no right to complain. If you voted, you have no right to complain either.

liberal democracy is just another 20th century totalitarian system like Leninism and fascism. Its built on an illusion of choice. You get to pick one out of two prescreened political candidates from two parties that are virtually identical. Why else do politicians lean on the culture wars so hard? Because beyond identity politics there are no real differences between any of them. Most don't even do policy. They get elected and delegate that to bureaucrats. Look at whatever happens when a third candidate runs in the US. The democrat aligned propaganda machine come out blackmailing and shaming people for not supporting their candidate. They work up a boogeyman and guilt trip people into voting for someone they don't like to stop the evil boogeyman. In the US there is no genuine diversity of opinion. Everybody is flattened and forced to think the same thing. Unlike Russia or China, this system doesn't require violent force or repression to work. People are manipulated into identifying with the system by being fed an illusion of freedom and living a credit fueled consumer lifestyle where they see themselves in things and are more interested in the next Apple product than important questions of life and death. They worship tech giants who take away real freedom. They identify with savior politicians who have blood on their hands and pray to officials that violate their rights with mass surveillance. Its the ultimate totalitarian dystopia. Liberal democracy isn't the only form of democracy (that's just ideological propaganda) so maybe there is a form out there that can work? We need to get over the liberal democratic brainwashing to make it happen.

>>78241 >this system doesn't require violent force or repression to work. doesn't it? I don't have the numbers because I'm not a nerd, but I'm confident the united states has the highest per-capita spending on (both external and internal) security in the world. from the outside, it is crazy the absolute disregard for (underclass) human life the american police seems to have. the prison population per-capita is also high iirc zizek is always careful enough to not make any real point, but you can also read it in the other direction: they have internalized state violence to the point that they don't even perceive it as such democracy by sortition would be definitely better for the common man, but etc.

>>78243 thats for the multinational melting pot egalitarianist society, not for the political system. seperate issues, a little tricky to seperate out.

>>78243 A lot of that spending is thanks to 9/11 and the endless GWoT. Bin Laden gave us a bloody nose and cost the US economy billions. They don't want a repeat of that. Our secret police (FBI) aren't afraid of cracking down on subversives or inventing subversives to justify crackdowns. But major violent crackdowns are rare. Occupy Wall Street, the Ferguson riots, and entrapment schemes on fringe right wingers and jihadis are all that come to mind. The word "crackdown" is never used for these incidents, but if the Russians or Chinese do it we immediately call out for what it is. >they have internalized state violence to the point that they don't even perceive it as such Most Americans don't face state violence or non-violent repression. We murder, maim, and torture people in far away countries where the public doesn't have to see it and when we do see it we cheer it on. I've taught in China and seen the mandatory Marxism classes people have to take. Everyone there is bored and try their best to get out of it. Ordinary Chinese know their government is authoritarian and are pretty skeptical and cynical about it. There are no illusions there. But the average American sees himself as free and thinks he lives in a free country. In China, people who are autistic flag wavers who really look up the government are seen as retarded and people avoid them but in America the same behavior is just seen as normal as long as it doesn't veer into Fox News territory. That's what makes it so effective. You don't have to beat and imprison people on a regular basis like Russia and most people at a basic level just passively accept the system and don't challenge it beyond putting their faith in a savior politician like Trump or Bernie Sanders.

>>78243 If you mean military spending, it's massive for the US. Yet then again part of the reason for this is because the US has a fetish for privatization so the private market prices make things cost far more than they need to be. The US also relies on private contractors in order to circumvent the freedom of information act.

>>78245 >Bin Laden That's a funny way to spell George W. Bush

>>78246 Yeah, but remember the US is engaged in military ops in multiple countries for decades e.g. Operation Juniper Shield, Inherent Resolve, and other GWoT soykaf. Then you have to pay for NATO and respond to the Chinese and Russians. When your the world's biggest military superpower and you have bases everywhere that comes with a massive price tag. When the Cold War ended, the US downsized its military-industrial complex by allowing monopolies to form in the defense sector. These monopolies now overcharge the government by marking up costs for everything and have lobby groups on Congress so they can keep getting away with it. This is also a classic example of how the American democratic system is actually dysfunctional. Nobody in congress would actually go against the defense establishment because the news media and other politicians would accuse them of being unpatriotic so they just let it continue. You see this kind of brainrot everywhere now. Notice how congress does very little decision making? It just hands off its powers to the executive because congressmen are too lazy and would rather debate transgender pancakes or something. The separation of powers is a proven failure. >>78247 Bin Laden did it alright. There's video of him bragging about it. A lot of AQ leaders used to have blogs and they brag about in on their forums and sites all the time.

>>78248 >When the Cold War ended, the US downsized its military-industrial complex by allowing monopolies to form in the defense sector. funny the same thing happened when the cold war was starting

>defend democracy Which is usually code for democracy not going the way someone wanted. All it seems to be doing is to shield the people who're making bad decisions from repercussions. While a king would have been beheaded for what has been done, under a democracy you just wait four more years to get another shot at electing your favorite ineffective literally who into one of some hundred seats and all the nonsense is going to be undone, just you see!

Any system is bound to fail, because humans are too flawed. If humans were good, any political system would work. >Democritus and Heraclitus were two philosophers, of whom the first, finding the human state vain and ridiculous, never appeared in public except with a mocking and ribald expression. Heraclitus, on the other hand, felt pity and compassion for this state of ours, so that his expression was always melancholy and his eyes full of tears. >I prefer the first humour, not because it is pleasanter to laugh than to weep, but because it expresses more contempt and is more condemnatory of us than the other. I do not think we can ever be despised as much as we deserve. Wailing and commiseration imply some valuation of the object bewailed; what we mock at we consider worthless. There is, in my opinion, not so much misery in us as emptiness, not so much as malice as folly. We are not so full of evil as of inanity, nor so wretched as we are base. >Diogenes valued us so little that contact with us could neither disturb nor affect him; he gave up our company, not out of fear but of contempt for our society. He thought us incapable of doing either good or harm.

>>78252 Democritus invented democracy, then died laughing! Snot even its creater believed that anyone should take serious "direct mob rule as a system of governance". I believe the description of such was simply provided for completeness. Everyone of greater wisdom knows floozy none of these philosophers were real men, they are thought-forms (egregore) whose solid incarnation (as opposed to incarnations as Platonic forms, i.e., their alleged works) are the collective minds of the group-thinking human host for the information based symbiote. Plato's Cave is his anus, the "men" within are turds, he hoped (being constipated) that the lump/man that was turtling would free the "others" as it went back into the recess of his "cave". Apply one recursive layer to represent the occult itself, and you've got the self referencing Allegory of Plato's Cave (babies sometimes play with their poo if left unattended, this is "play dough" AKA Plato). Of course, now that you know this you can not go back to your university professor or their pupils and explain Plato's Bought With Constipation... they have neither eyes to see nor ears to hear such a thing: That is the "nature" of Plato's Cave. That said, read Plato's Republic; It most closely resembles the governmental designs that this world's plebians are made to put up with. Yep, Democrats are literally the butt of a joke; Re-pube-lickin's, Moan-Arch-ists, etc. are not much better off. All The World is a Stage, and we are merely players. There are greater systems of power and influence at play, none of the "official" pubic facing gov systems are presented in the actual way ruling is really performed. We are all really connected and visited upon by shy silent gods, like Lain represents. These beings make governance feature-fit into designs dreamed up long ago. Like George Carlin said, if voting did anything they'd have outlawed it a long time ago. Let's All Love Lain!

>>78259 >>78262 Also not that anon. Was just scrolling /mega/ and apparently interjected into a conversation.

>>78267 >the masses hate freedom even more than our corrupt leadership does. "Freedumb" is another buzzword just like democracy, but yeah, this is an oft-overlooked reality.

I think today's democracy is truly retarded as the ignorant masses can easily be deceived by countless false promises. Look at how Trump acts like a patriot and yet unstoppably keeps aiding Israel, or how Biden promises peace but then says "We have plans to build a railroad from the Pacific all the way across the Indian ocean.". And yet in no means there must be instead a dictatorship. I don't have a clear andwer of what should there be instead of it, but I think Jeffersonian democracy was far better. Today people don't care about the Constitution anymore, and I fuarrrking hate it.

>>78275 well many of the people who don't care about it simply weren't here when jefferson was around, never voted on it, and did not participate in the war that permitted its instatement. Whats it to them ?

>>78275 >Biden promises peace Uh-huh? What alternate reality do you live in?

>>78278 >Biden promises peace In one of his early speeches maybe his inauguration he said some stuff about unifying the country and whatnot. Of course he didn't follow that up with any meaningful actions and here we are 3 years later and he's trying to imprison the opposition leader just before the next election starts. Lol democracy. >>78229 >Democracy, do you believe it? Half the country thinks the 2000 and 2016 elections were stolen and the other half things the 2020 election was stolen. I don't know how anybody still believes in democracy at this point.

>>78267 This would only make sense if liberalism proved to be successful in promoting good governance but this hasn't happened. Liberal individualism actually encourages dangerous policies which are destructive in the long term because liberals cannot understand collective social interests. They are happy to cause massive environmental damage just to secure short term comforts for selfish individuals. Historically, kings and emperors wielded powers of debt relief to ease economic burdens and get things moving. But because liberals have a fanatic cult-like obsession with private property, they shoot down debt relief measures. Liberal societies end up producing ecological disasters and creating a huge mass of people so burdened by debt they can't start businesses or purchase and their lives go to soykaf. Liberal democracies are just oligarchies of the wealthy run by ideological zealots hopped up on soykafty 18th century ideas that are incoherent nonsense. >>78275 People forget that when the constitution was first rolled out, ordinary people protested and rebelled against it. Virtually everything the antifederalists warned of ended up coming true. People like Jefferson, Madison, and Washington never really liked the idea of a real democracy. Washington was so greedy he was unwilling to pay his own troops. This caused Shays rebellion and the "founding fathers" realized they needed a stronger authority to reign people in or control them with armed force. The constitution actually disempowered states and local constituencies and was designed to stifle bottom up political change and make the American system more top-down. The constitution was the beginning of the modern American oligarchy. Remember, the bill of rights was a concession to critics of the constitution and the constitutionalists didn't want a bill of rights to begin with. The whole "founding fathers" soykaf is a Soviet style personality cult. >>78279 This is another huge flaw of liberal democracies. It relies on both sides playing ball. If you have elections that are 50/50 or 50/40 a politician can just claim the other side cheated and throw a tantrum. The whole system becomes dysfunctional as each side tries to bring partisan politics into everything and sabotage the government. Ask a senate committee to decide on new paint for the White House and it will descend into Republicans calling the Democrats unpatriotic for not choosing red, white, and blue and the Dems accusing the GOP of being goosestepping Nazis for not painting it rainbow color. In swoop in the commentariat and late night comedians and they hype up the drama as if it matters. "Red, white, and blue are Russian colors this is clearly all the work of Putin" etc. and people who watch this soykaf will be waging wars over Twitter and yelling at each other in the streets like it actually matters. Liberal democracies fail because voters are selfish and therefore easy to manipulate and prone to racebait or being bought out with freebies. They also vote for the most visually appealing candidate. Its turned government into a high school popularity contest except the winner gets nukes and aircraft carriers.

>>78248 The US at the very least should remove it's bases from Japan. The Japanese have been demanding this for quite some time now after various incidents of plane crashes and soldiers going around harassing and raping. >>78279 But Biden isn't behind Trump being on trial, the law itself is and his own inability to not incriminate himself every time he opens his fat mouth. It would be a good thing if Trump were held accountable because then other current US presidents and past presidents can pay for their crimes too.

>>78287 if japan didn't want US military bases then maybe it shouldn't have lost the war. The germans got raped too. >>78279 you're giving him too much agency. he's a piece of a large machine doing these things, I'm sure hes happily along for the ride but that doesn't mean he has the power to stop them lol. >>78252 And for this reason cultivation of a decent breed of humans is the first and perhaps only step in cultivation of a decent society and decent government.

>>78288 >if japan didn't want US military bases then maybe it shouldn't have lost the war So you support US military bases in countries that don't really want them there? >The Germans got raped too I'm not talking about wartime but recent news over the years. >decent breed of humans Society is a big part of what influences who someone is. >>78252 Humans are flawed but they are more prone to empathy and altruism than selfishness by nature in infancy before society has a chance to really influence them. Well at least the majority do anyway, there still is born psychopaths and autists.

>>78291 You still aren't really making any point though. What of it? I know there are bases in Germany too but was using Japan as example since I specifically remember incidents of complaints so it is an easy case to make for a broader issue.

>>78296 m8 i am just some soykafter dropped in the thread not the other guy hold on, i'll make the joke more obvious: https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/8-rapes-per-day-recorded-in-germanys-most-populous-state-in-2022/

>>78303 sure ok maybe they japs don't 'need' the US bases. but the US bases never were there for the japs own good. "Haha sorry we just incinerated your capital and a few other cities, pulverized your fleet, decimated your army and just about killed all your good pilots. Smashed their planes up too. Sorry about that here borrow some of our army for your own protection" t. harry truman never. Japan was an important base for all the asiatic wars of the late 20th century, assuming this role almost immediately after the end of the Pacific War and that remains the reason for US bases to be there. Its just a good base, and its not in gun range of mainland china like formosa is. >>78289 germans did get raped after the war ended as well, and murdered. but sure ok. >society is a big influence on who people are and who people are is a big influence on society. I guess its chickens and eggs all over again, but breeding is a well developed practice and uhh, nation building, society structuring, etc etc, I think these have had less successes.

>>78303 Its politically motivated but probably not a huge financial conspiracy. Its just party politics. Biden is using Trump the way Hitler used the Reichstag fire: "I will be the savior to deliver you from this madman give me unlimited power." Trump supporters think there's a huge deep state machine conspiring against Trump, but in reality he just upset establishment Democrats. Trying to have your rivals knocked off the ballot or arrested isn't new. Its a tactic that goes back to the Roman republic. If Trump could do the same to Biden he'd do it in a heartbeat. It doesn't really matter anyway because every president since Bush has been an imperial presidency through a mix of extraordinary war powers and sheer congressional laziness. Congress no longer does its job and the executive has loopholes to get around congressional oversight. The US president can launch wars, kill US citizens abroad, order assassinations, and use the FBI as his personal secret police. The US was modeled on ancient Rome and you can see some of the same flaws come up. Japan doesn't need the US military. But the US needs Japan. Okinawa is key to Washington's plan for regional hegemony. Let's say your an isolationist and want to pull out all troops? Well the problem is when you have a massive global empire you can't just withdraw. Doing that will create a messy power vacuum and it would encourage other players to see you as weak and easy to attack. So its a catch 22. Its like the Roman empire. Its so huge its actually damaging itself through over extension. >>78284 You can be both a monarchy and a liberal democracy, look at Britain or Belgium. Simply saying liberalism is flawed doesn't mean embracing the opposite, some kind of neo-reaction or conservative monarchism. In a way, both are equally flawed because they are top down models of social order thought up by intellectuals and imposed onto society with little regard for what's actually going on at the ground level. They will end up reproducing the exact same problems or worse ones.

>Democracy, do you believe it? No. Democracies can only work until everyone figure out he can live at other people's expense. You can blame individual politicians like Trudeau or Obama for exchanging public money for votes but they are only playing a game by it's rules. If it wasn't possible to exchange public money for votes, their career would have been different, perhaps they would have adapted and tried to act for the public good. Blame the game, not the player. Bedside, why should they care about public spending? Someone else will have to deal with it, someone who may be their opponent. Democracies can't cure their addiction to public spending. Public money is free. Now get ready for the worse part of democracy. Democracies can only work as long as politic is the main divider in the population. As soon as something else (religion/ethnicity/gender/age/manual or intellectual job/being on public money or paying massive taxes/ whatever), everyone vote for "their" party against the common good. Look at Iraq: the Sunni vote for the Sunni party, the Shia for the Shia party and the Kurds for the Kurd party. The Shia win because they have more people and they begin to oppress the Sunni and the Kurds. The Kurds know how to keep the government in check but the Sunni used to have Saddam rooting for them against the Shia and the Kurds, they call this joke of a democracy what it is: a colonial power placed here by the American occupant and start a civil war that have killed one million people. When 100 guys with AKs come from Syria, the army didn't even fought because every soldier know what they would die for, so they abandon their tanks and planes and Iran have to come to protect the Shia part of the country while the Kurds keep doing what they always did. Democracies can only exist if all citizens are united in spirit, capable to have their own opinions instead of aligning with the current consensus and willing to use their vote not for their gain but for what they think is best for the community. We can agree this is not our case. >Do you believe that elections are clean where you live? Yes. I live in France. It's illegal to vote if you do not show a public ID with a picture, we all get it for free. If in your country you can vote otherwise, massive red flag. It's illegal to vote if you don't show in person in the voting station. The only alternative is to register in the town hall so you can give one person the right to vote for you. He still need his and your ID card. If in your country you can vote otherwise, massive red flag. It's illegal to make professionals count the votes or to move a ballot. Citizens count them, then move to another table and count them again. It take two hours to get the result, if you need 3 hours to count the votes, massive red flag. And voting machines are only used to the experimental level, even that is too much. If a corpo make a voting machine, then the corpo vote, not you. You just give your vote to the corpo and hope they are honest. >Do you believe that the current prevalent political system can be realistically improved or do you think it's all downhill from here on? Young men are the only demographic that can change things, which mean it does not matter what political structure you have, you need to keep them in check. The way it is done reveal a lot of thing about the nature of your country. -You can send them away, it's the obvious solution if you are a horde in central Asia, it's what the crusades were for, it's why Switzerland encouraged its youth to become mercenaries then they either die or come back calm and rich. -You can reward them with a small corner of the world and a women if they work hard. It's what created all the great movement in history like the industrial revolution. Why would anyone would willingly go in the coal mine? Why would anyone accept the notion of a draft? -Brutality. This is the only option left if the others can't be used. When your culture allow rich men to have 4 wives, you don't have much choice. When owning a house and having a stable marriage for life isn't an option, you simply don't have a choice. There is a reason why Trudeau or Macron used level of violence against the protestors that not even Putin use. Democracies are dying of clientelism and nothing can stop the momentum now.

>>78241 Because you voted, even if you had no real choice in the outcome, same soykaf different colour, it feels like it's your own fault when the government does something you disagree with. It sometimes feels like democracy is just there to cheat agreement out of you. The medieval peasant, in all his terrible suffering, could at least wash his hands clean of fault when it came to the ruthless acts of the ruler. Meanwhile today, we are all involved, feel all at fault, when whoever is in power inevitably starts a war. Not to say any of this is deliberate, like in soviet eastern Germany, where you had "elections" where you had the "choice" to vote yes for the party. This current situation seems to have develepod naturally, one of course favourable to the powers-at-be, who therefore see no need to intervene. Personally, I still have hope in our current values (if they haven't been forgotten), but see where you're coming from.

>>78426 > I see lots of news articles about riots and protests Some agriculturist decided to blocks a few roads for a few days. By French standards, this is unimportant. All it would take would be to either bring back competition in the middleman between producer and distributors because the price we pay in shops are 4 time the price that is paid to producers or to impose the same regulation on imported food than for the national production. But the job of the government is to serve the interest of the uber wealthy so the first one isn't an option and to apply the will of the commission so the second isn't an option either. They allowed them to use the chemicals that make the greens rage so they will have a political counterweight against the agricultors. >as well as a mass influx of foreigners If it was in the news, it's probably about Mayotte. It's a island near other islands who are near Africa. Basically, everything went out of control 20 years ago and every single day is worse than the previous one. Now they have gangs of highroad warriors that force the people to pay a toll to pass, extortion, stealing is out of control, the police don't even try to catch criminals anymore, they only run from one emergency to another, nothing work on the island anymore, but don't you dare mentioning that you would be labelled a racist even if you are a native of this island, and that mean black. Macron removed the fact that the nationality is automatically given to any baby which is born on the island which give the right to ask for the nationality to the full extended family. That mean 8,5 month pregnant women won't try to cross anymore.

>>78441 france&germany are murdering their farmers simply put. Local farmers suffer increasingly stricter laws while importing food from regions with zero regulations which means they cant compete vs cheap imports. And now they cut off tax breaks too. I cant put this as anything but intentional destruction of local food production.

Democracy is a self destructive system because a smart public is a threat to the rulers reign. So rulers aim to dumb down the voters to solidify their power which weakens the nation in return. A bit later you get statesmen recruited from the dumbed down public leading to a nation of trained morons led by elected morons easily manipulated by evil advisors. And i think this is the stage we are at now.

Different political systems are suited to specific situations. Yhey work very well in those situations and not so well in other. For instance, democracy works well when a general population is adequately educated, has good judgement, and is firmly in contact with physical reality. In that situation, voters can choose capable leaders and vote wisely on referendums. Example: Switzerland and the Nordic countries. When a general population is ignorant, unmotivated, incapable of sound judgement, and easily indoctrinated with some ideology or other, a benevolent dictatorship can be a suitable form of government. When the population is sparse and the environment provides all that they need, anarchy can work well. In this situation, it's pointless to try to heard wealth or take power over others. Every political system eventually falls apart when the conditions it is best suited for change. This isn't because the system is inhernetly "good" or "bad". It's just the way the cookie crumbles. The trick is to keep the state of the general population appropriate to the type of government desired. All it has taken for Western democracy to start to crumble is persistant, multi-decade media campaigns by various entities to fill voters' heads with nonsense, confusion, lies, and fanaticism. Paradoxically, freedom of speech has become the Achilles' heel of democracy.

>Paradoxically, freedom of speech has become the Achilles' heel of democracy. You dont have freedom of speech online, i would rather say its the lack of freedom of speech that creates issues as it leads to ideological bubbles that radicalize because perception is steered by extreme ends and cutting of one side leads to drifting to the other. That biggest issue however was probably the introduction of "soft sciences" in 70s. Universities decided to modernize and open up new fields. So eloquent scammers who couldn't make it in existing fields fabricated nonsense degrees to get a free ride. This created a class of people with degrees without real use and these people then became a new priest class making a job out of preaching because that's all they could do. Institutionalized dead weight dragging it all down.

>>78574 I have a question: how do we ensure the dictatorship stay benevolent? >Paradoxically, freedom of speech has become the Achilles' heel of democracy. That would explain why it isn't here anymore. >>78582 The lack of freedom of speech and the fact that journos think they have a morale duty to only show an artificial consensus to make the majority of the population share their ideas and the fact that most voter have the opinions that they think are socially acceptable instead of looking for truth.

>>78596 >how do we ensure the dictatorship stay benevolent? how do you ensure democraship to stay benevolent ? Answer to both: Governments, like fruit, don't stay good forever. Liberty tree must be periodically watered, true in both democracies and dictatorships, and all the other forms which have been tried.

>>78596 > I have a question: how do we ensure the dictatorship stay benevolent? We don't, of course. Benevolent dictatorships easiy and often become malevolent. But if the people become too agitated, like a population with no food to eat, they tend to revolt and overthrow the government. When the tinder is dry enough, all it takes is a single spark to set off a raging inferno. See: French Revolution.

>>78599 The tree of liberty is long dead. When some people did what the founding father wanted, which is going where the politicians are and pointing muskets at them, the country went mad and a standing army that we have been told to not have because otherwise they would be placed between the militias and the politicians have been deployed all over DC. Honestly, I understand whoever is in charge and whatever the political structure is, human history will always be a boot walking on an human face. I just want the people who are in charge to not be a clown and to not have dementia. It is too much to ask it seem. >>78626 The French revolution, like every revolution, made everything worse for the common folk. It simply replaced a government that tried to appease social tensions by one who murder everyone who might not be on their side. Power is the capacity to apply violence.

>>78229 Everyone who is interested in democracy (or any political topic for that matter) should read fuarking academic philosophy and not some internet schizos (Moldbug, Hoppe, or idk who's influential on the left). The topic of epistemic democracy has a rich amount of books with cons (Brennan, Caplan, Somin) and pros (Goodin, Landemore).

>>78708 >read fuarking academic philosophy and not some internet schizos >read old shizos who needed big word count to fill books not modern shizos lmao at your life

>>78708 You should always judge a tree by its fruits. I do not force myself to follow many rules and this is one of them. I don't care at all about the metric ton of theory about communism, only about the reality of communism. The beauty of the philosophy behind this ideal is breathtaking, but what matter is what happen to the real people in real life. The reality of communism is breathtaking but literally and that's what matter. I do not care at all about what Proudhon or Bakunin had to say about anarchism, only about the reality of it and that's a gang of Cossack who stole, sacked, burnt and killed as they please, some dudes in Spain who stole, sacked, burnt and killed as they please and Somalia. And arguably some angry French people who have been abandoned by their government and didn't liked when the Prussians stole the cannons of their town. Yes, your dream is just perfect and everyone is happy and we sing songs but it's not what happen in the real life and as much as I love those endless political debates they don't matter. What happen to the people matter. It's the same for democracy. Yes, it's just so good in theory but I don't have one second of my life to give to works of fiction. In theory, both Russia and Ukraine are democracies, does the theory matter or the reality? I wanted to post this old article that explain what are the red flags of a fake election. It have been made for the de facto dictatorships in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

>>78730 well we should judge fake democracies by their fruits, as well as real ones. Are fake democracies eminently worse than real oligarchies or gerontocracies or whatever else ? If you think mere honesty is a merit, then I suppose a dishonest system is necessarily worse than an honest one, but apart from that....

>>78730 Are they that good in theory? Communism and democracy both seem completely repulsive to me, even theoretically. Conversely, I can somewhat admire the attempts at them, as the attempts speak towards an earnestness and capacity for action that far exceeds to the theory. Everyone seems to judge these systems by their capacity to maximize some notion of social utility (i.e "human well-being", "Economic Growth", "Sustainability"). Well, what if I have no regard for social utility, and have fundamentally different concerns?

>>78734 What are the values you think matter most for a society and what political structure do you think would serve them best? You must not forget that Darwinism apply not only to biological population but to social ideas as well. The capacity to survive the trial of time and to turn other societies like yours is the only fundamental truth in politic. If your social structure allow conscription and the establishment of an economy of war in time of need, it have an advantage over others and it will force other countries to imitate it. If your country produce more tanks and planes, it will force other countries to imitate it. This is the only objective truth about politic.

>>78737 the roman empire was generally speaking still the republic in form to a large measure. If the USA followed the same path there would still be a congress and a president, the later of who might or might not be important or even the leader, still the constitution, perhaps amended more or less, perhaps only neglected more or less. I suppose you mean to say that fake democracy is fine and good ? (I am not sure the post caesar government was truly non republican but it certainly was functionally different than the pre caesar one.)

If you take an honest look around at the real world today, you will see that the countries with the highest standards of living, civil liberties for the average person, public happiness, and strong economies, while maintaining strong militaries and stable governents, are all social-democratic welfare states, with a blend of democracy, socialism, and regulated capitalism. When either the socialist element or the capitalist element becomes too powerful, the countries start to lose all of these nice things. So it's the right blend that's important. And as long as concerted propaganda campaigns from anti-democratic sources are not allowed to poison the minds of voters, democracies remain real, effective democracies, not parodies of democracy like Russia.

>>78742 are these places nice because of this governance or do they have this governance because they are nice.

>>78740 You might as well argue that Great Britain is still a monarchy. Fake democracy is what we have, I am saying that if we had an honest dictatorship that saw the people as a tool and wanted to keep it efficient, it would be an improvement. >>78742 But that's untrue. Only Nordic states are social democracies and in the case of Sweden it isn't even fully true anymore. Exchanging public money for votes isn't social democracy. Highest standards of living are found in the monarchic or emirate states in the Saudi peninsula. Ours aren't impressive anymore, even heating our houses in winter become hard. We have no civil liberties. Our press is corporate propaganda and you can't really create your own, you can't even protest being locked inside your home without becoming harassed by the cops or having your bank account frozen. I have been beaten by the cops for protesting and they shot flashballs at me. Basically, we are not more free than the Russians. We do have gay marriage, that's a bone thrown at a specific community so they won't bite the hand of the master. Our public happiness is so high that we have 3 drug crisis at the same time and a good part of the population have to take antidepressant just to not become an hero. And strong economy? Are you serious? Strong militaries? America just lost two wars and haven't won anything since WWII. They lost in Yemen, they lost everywhere. And the entire west have dumped their armies because everyone rely on the US. Simply giving ammo to Ukraine have depleted the arsenal of many country. France could not sustain a high intensity war for more than 3 days. Sweden have less than 7000 soldiers. If you are interested in capitalist economies that have strong social program, you may be interested by fascism. Social democracies require a specific culture that isn't found everywhere. >nd as long as concerted propaganda campaigns from anti-democratic sources are not allowed to poison the minds of voters, democracies remain real, effective democracies And as long as it does not fall into clientelism. You are part of this segment of the population? Vote for me, I will give you more things at the expense of others. Debt is the problem of the next president.

>>78739 I don't know, but there is political structure yet which I do not feel deeply repulsed by. I believe in direct involvement in the struggles and labors of my personal life, and if I were to elucidate it too thoroughly, I would thereby destroy the purity of the experience. To me, history doesn't really exist, and I simply want to pursue my own moral ends - ends which are themselves unclear to me. Whatsoever allows me to do so, I will naturally gravitate towards.

>>78747 No political structure yet*

>>78747 Okay that was unclear. I think I can explain why every ideology is soykaf, this is why I believe in solving issues one by one and constantly improving the situation rather than making a revolution that would try to apply yet another utopia. We had enough of them. >>78746 Life is not so great in the west and it is not that bad in the rest of the world.

>>78229 I do not believe in the sustainability of modern societies. Democracy was a brilliant system in ancient Greece when it was effectively implemented on a city scale. However, I do not think this model can or should be extended to the national or international level for several reasons. Firstly, it is naturally difficult to prevent internal corruption when representatives have less incentive to keep their promises to citizens. We live in a hyper-connected environment with social media and a few companies have the ability to reach the whole population using technology to potentially influence political actions. Secondly, A national government does not face the same issues as a local government. People's interests may not emerge at the scale of a nation, unlike a city where politicians can align their actions more effectively with the issues faced by citizens.

>>78229 >Do you believe that elections are clean where you live? Yes. I am from Czechia. The way our voting system is set seems pretty straight forward and difficult to false. People counting votes are nominated by various political parties, but they are common people. (Often seniors, students or disabled, because they get paid and it's nice one-off job for them - employed people need to be at work.) But the point is, there are nominated by various competing parties, which means it would be difficult to perform systematic fraud. (I don't doubt there ARE isolated examples of fraud - that aren't statistically relevant in the end.) I am somewhat concerned about recent attempts to implement distance voting though. >Do you believe that the current prevalent political system can be realistically improved or do you think it's all downhill from here on? Honestly, I am not sure. One one hand, the modern communication technologies could allow for more direct control, which could mean less intermediaries between the people and the power. On the other hand, the more complex you make it, the more it gets vulnerable to attack. And what is even worse - you loose a lot of transparency. Like... I don't understand asymmetrical cryptography enough to explain it. I can understand guy counting paper ballots while other guy is checking him. I would need to Trust The Experts™ that it is implemented correctly and properly. And you know how calls for Trusting The Experts™ worked few years ago.

>>78817 >when it was first effectively implemented on city scale a) those cities were very small by modern scales, and their franchises rather smaller, and b) its possible the only reason that we don't have earlier examples is because records are extremely scant and the greeks were pretty much the first to start histories.

>>78831 That post was too sane and rational for lainchan. GTFO! ^_^ Another place where politics and education have a lot less corruption and distrust than usual is Finland.

>>78229 I think it exists and has existed in certain places over time, however mass democracy on a societal scale where the electorate is as broad as it can be (men and women can both vote, rich and poor can vote, old and young can vote) then democracy is lost since the forces that underpin human psychology and facts of economics and biology decide rather than the consciousness of a selective elite. Athens was a democracy, North Korea is not a democracy - both have elections however in Athens it was a direct vote on genuine policy choices by a few patronistic elites whereas in North Korea the whole population votes but only has one choice (communism).

>>78834 >Another place where politics and education have a lot less corruption and distrust than usual is Finland. Don't worry, it's undergoing a slow but noticeable decline in here too: educational levels have been plummeting and the standards have been lowering for a while now, which will be followed by incompetence and laziness of public officials in the future, which will lead to segregation and preferential treatment of "our kind" followed by a widespread adoption of an attitude which stresses the need "to be looking out for our kind's mutual interests" within the elites and public officials, and it won't be long from that point onwards until we've reached the kinds of levels in stupidity, paranoia and an outright hatred and suspicion of all manner of scientists, politicians and officials that we can see running rampart in the US of A today. It's all only a matter of time. A mere matter of time, my dear lainon.

>>78831 >Like... I don't understand asymmetrical cryptography enough to explain it. I can understand guy counting paper ballots while other guy is checking him. That's the important point. The fact that people or machines count the votes isn't important, the fact than any citizen can come to check if everything is fine is. Not because there will be a fraud or not but because there will be the suspicion of a fraud, and then the entire basis for the power of the state is questioned. Worse: if a private for profit company who is owed by people who are interested in politics count the votes everyone will assume the election wasn't fair, wherever it was or not. Obviously, paper ballots are cheap, asking civilians to help is free labor and there is no legitimate reasons to not do it this way.

>>79216 Well I mean I can think of better ways of doing it, the ancient greeks had several. A very significant part of the problem in any modern large country is that you have millions or tens of millions or maybe hundreds of millions of plausible voters, and no one is entirely sure how many or where. Because of this, even if one understands the mechanical process of voting and counting one cannot personally in any way hope to verify more than a drip in one of the several very large buckets which must be counted for an election. Cities, counties, states, parties, factions within parties, all have competing interests, and elections are frequently arranged such that important choices are made on narrow margins, such that if one or a couple cities defect, perhaps in such a fashion as to advance an interest that the city almost uniformly approves of, they can cause fairly significant effects. On small scales you can pretty much entirely remove trust as a requirement for ballot counting. On these scales one must trust more people than one could ever hope to know.

>Democracy, do you believe it? Yes and no. In terms of the ideal of democracy no, I don't think that has ever existed and its function was much more that of an overpromise. In terms of democracy as something that was understood anthropologically and then constructed in the series of revolutions which the USA and many other countries were born from, I think that we've progressed far past this: the early United States was a slaveowning society where women did not have the right to vote. American Democracy, as we know it, might have began in the 1920s with women's suffrage, however it may also have began in 1965 when the voting rights act was signed into law - these of course being legal protections that already existed in many other countries. In 2013, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Shelby v. Holder ( https://web.archive.org/web/20220219051016/https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/12-96_6k47.pdf ) that counties with historical voting restrictions no longer had to get clearance from the federal government before changing these laws. following this, a considerable wave of voter-restrictive legislation was passed in these areas. So by this political logic alone, democracy in my country, as we know it existed more between 1970 and 2000 than any other time in history. in the united states, this period was characterized by the cold war, a moment of censorship and repression in the states, while the US grew militarily as it evolved into the world's maintainer of what's called liberal democracy and capitalism. Meanwhile, communications technology rapidly advanced, triggering fears that our way of life might become subverted. This however is only one way of looking at it - a way that prioritizes legal enshrinement as the ultimate guarantee of rights and liberties. I think this is a more government-trusting way of seeing things than most or I think, however, the court case must clearly have meant something because it had obvious consequences. my issue is the same as >>78232 - only 30% of the population in my country vote, and while most nonvoters seemingly agree with the policies of liberal or conservative politicians, albeit lean more "independent", they also largely feel like their interests are not represented by any party. those being elected and the constituencies that elect them largely benefit from the status quo, like Incognito said, and so there is no reason to keep them going. To answer the other questions in the OP, I don't think that elections are clean where I live, but I tend to believe more in the knowable logistics of how difficult it can be for some people to vote and how finances / party loyalty is directed and orchestrated, down to the way that laws are passed being accessible to the average citizen. there is a direct democracy where I live in which propositions can be voted on at elections, however, the laws can at times be highly technical and the same language is used to argue for them one way or another. Without dedicating hours of research, all I can really base my decisions off of are assessments of the character of the organization promoting each law, which winds up being very murky and inaccessible. Many powerful people in my area have used this confusion to argue that the government should be usurped undemocratically, calling for things like military coups. I think that this claim has some consequences because they make up a donor base and constituency to major celebrity-politicians that then shape their concerns into rhetoric, which is then used to sell themselves as representatives who vote for and write policy. the actual writing of these policies are typically outsourced to 3rd party organizations and lobbyists, my understanding of the political process is that even when politicians keep the policy-writing in their own camp its typically a dedicated staff member and not the candidate writing it. Of course, the power brokers calling for a coup have the least reason for it, the fact that what they're saying aligns with the actual policy and rhetoric of politicians indicates that the system is servicing them - in the case of power, if a concern of powerful people is not being widely discussed it is only because they are choosing to do so, preferring to hide it behind layers of narrative confusion and not because their voices are being silenced. perhaps this is because they remember the 60s and 70s, or observe revolution in other countries such to become authentically scared by the prospects of people taking action against them. rather, they talk about these things with their peer groups - others who are catered to - or what they perceive to be, if they feel like they're in polite company. the talk is about persuading wealthy people to donate to political causes, that is, to fashion themselves power brokers in some capacity or another. But all this is only what has not yet been discussed. Voter suppression occurs in myriad other ways, for instance the 2013 court case mentioned prior only happened after 12 years of the war on terror, which itself was only the out-loud part of the prior 20 years born from the united states cold war against communism. to say that all of these things eroded democracy is to forget how they were done in the name of democracy, something that only some really had access to in the first place. Others in the thread have also correctly pointed out a number of additional undemocratic mechanisms that are codified in the way the country is run, or are contemporary developments albeit with their own histories. Too the fixation on American Democracy as the only system was touched on, but all these little reasons why democracy might be a shame are used to construct small portraits missing the point of the big picture - for instance, many do not "believe in democracy" because they believe most people do vote, and that their votes are being directed in ignorance, while others focus on this failure as uniquely American and unnecessary. The reality as I see it is that the shame of American democracy keeps the world running, as does the actual undemocracy of the country and its free market policies. post-libertarian elitists ITT - for instance those advocating for monarchy - fail to realize that the lie of democracy we experience, neoliberalism, is the exact friendship between their favorite authors and the politicians who constructed this state of affairs. this is not a conspiracy but a publicized occasion - you can go to wikipedia, for instance, for a citation on murray rothbard bragging about the claim of the word "libertarian" historically from anarchists and syndicalism by his camp, and not far you can find the neoliberal cabal calling his and other Austrian School works their new manifesto. So too ignored is how the claim that fail monarchs are executed in revolution was the exact promise offered by the architects of the United States. After all, it was philosopher Thomas Hobbes who first articulated the social contract as an argument for civil society, that, as it would be later re-developed by liberal advocates of republican democracy, it was necessary to give up some freedoms in order to avoid the war of all against all - the alleged state of nature from which barter, and then economics developed. this too of course is a convenient myth to the (neo)liberal status quo, something any collegiate economics class would later revise, or as understood in anthropology (and by most anarchists) not actually reflective of what happened. there are many places where anarchy exists uncontroversially, as well as historic periods where statelessness was peaceful - in fact the conditions of hobbesian-liberal anxiety instead occur in places where state actors, typically of established but decaying empires are attempting to have power. Barter only exists after finance, as prior to becoming colonized people generally operate with a greater sense of trust that makes financial systems unnecessary. Alternatively, they are aware and do not care, merely intending to proliferate their political identity - Austrian Economics, Monarchism, revisionist libertarian capitalism. Just don't ask the hoppeposters about the defectors of their own camp in SEKIII and agorism. >Do you believe that the current prevalent political system can be realistically improved or do you think it's all downhill from here on? It can in many ways. but your framing posits the "current prevalent political system" as basically something inadequate that could be improved upon, against ruin, it becomes obvious to frame an answer to that question outside of the dichotomy. But revolution and social upheaval don't take the form we might have been told the United States became independent from England - there will be no singular or finalizing war of good against evil, there will be many little wars and revolutions, as there have been, and surprising moments of freedom within them.

>>79290 >s understood in anthropology (and by most anarchists) not actually reflective of what happened I might point out that this is because anarchism isn't especially natural and does not exist in the state of nature, for humans. >democracy as we know it existed between 1970 and y2k I'm sorry m8 I have trouble parsing a few of your sentences. Concision and maybe another read through would probably help. Still I find it interesting that these prevailing conditions between 1970 and y2k were both created and destroyed by not especially democratic means. Democracy may be well and good, but it is not real power. Rather real power must be used to defend democracy if it is to long survive.

>>79291 >I might point out that this is because anarchism isn't especially natural and does not exist in the state of nature, for humans. it depends on what you mean by "anarchism". but most anarchists argue well that statelessness is a natural part of human history. many examples can be found here: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-anarchy-works in fact, the Renaissance / Enlightenment claims about human nature posit a pre-civilized, animalistic condition in which humans were "pure" akin to the Christian Garden of Eden. liberals in this state of affairs argue that humans would "naturally" form states and commerce, which if you read my post more clearly you'd see how this is simply a matter of convenience and not historicism. Another angle on this is that this condition was also defined as primitive communism by major economists. Personally, I would argue against the idea that there is a natural human condition, which seems in the way its discussed to emerge from or be equivalent to the intrinsic quality of humans, human nature. while there are some things that can generally be said about human beings, these don't entail a complete state of being that can then be used to make claims about a pure context for them, which is also somehow equivalent to how humans behaved pre-historically. what i mean is that even if it were true that humans were logical entities - in the sense of being completely determined, logical constructions - this does not give you insight whatsoever into history, and in fact these assumptions contradict the historical record. >Still I find it interesting that these prevailing conditions between 1970 and y2k were both created and destroyed by not especially democratic means they weren't especially democratic, either. it was during this time that mass surveillance was developed, militarism was ramped up tremendously and there was a hegemonic chill on freedom of speech due to the fears of communism spreading. all led by the country which, using its monopoly on violence, wrote and claimed the meaning of all of these things in the first place. in a country which "exports democracy" - that is, through imperialism made itself the authority on what democracy even is - anything that goes against its allowed forms of power is undemocratic. for instance, if the right to vote was considered the only form of democratic expression, then it would be impossible to expand it democratically. nowadays this seems to be what liberals and reactionaries are claiming alike - forgetting that the freedom to assemble was meant as a check against tyranny. > Democracy may be well and good, but it is not real power. Rather real power must be used to defend democracy if it is to long survive. "real power" as you put it is an interesting psychological construction to me, because it seemingly contains the severity of potential violence, or other coercive or authoritarian-seeming means. It gives the impression that certain forms of power are seen as soft, weak or feminine, and that masculine violence is needed to protect them. in reality, power can be reduced to a simple equation: the distribution of work over time }:^]

>>79295 >in reality, power can be reduced to a simple equation: the distribution of work over time }:^] I am sorry but the capacity to apply violence or to control the spread of ideas is always going to give you more power than the capacity to get things done.

>>78229 Democracy isn't so remarkable. Just look at Job Trunicht and how someone like him could possibly hold power to decide who lives and dies. If that isn't a flaw of democracy I don't know what is.

>>78229 Aristocracy is always better than democracy. Aristocracy is actually about merit and biology AKA reality. Democracy is about popularity contests and even without voter fraud, you still have 51% using elected thugs to bully the other 49% presuming the politicians are even honest. A person in most cases know what's best for himself/herself but not what's best for someone else. The Bill of Rights is suppose to be anti-democracy in order to defends personal/individual rights which derive from your own natural existence. The USA was originally a constitutional republic and not a democracy. I'd rather have an elected king similar to how kings were elected in Iron Age Germania with a Bill of Rights.

>>79491 Having an issue with "one guy" is more manageable than having an issue with a labyrinth of bureaucracy and agencies. You can always snipe the one guy or make him have an "accident." Also, aristocracy means "rule of the best." It means those who are best in a certain field should be in charge of it even if it means overseeing a general manager who handles the administrative work.

>>79536 >Having an issue with "one guy" is more manageable than having an issue with a labyrinth of bureaucracy and agencies. You can always snipe the one guy or make him have an "accident." OTOH when the one guy is constantly worrying about his own personal safety rather than, you know, governing, he'll tend to be bad at governing. Additionally, all the best autocrats (Caesar Augustus, Justinian, probably more I can't think of now) were considered good because they built efficient bureaucracies that allowed the nation to run on its own like a well-built and well-maintained vehicle. >Also, aristocracy means "rule of the best." It means those who are best in a certain field should be in charge of it even if it means overseeing a general manager who handles the administrative work. "best" in this context means people who are nobility, or exceedingly rich, or otherwise are "better" than everyone else. The transliteration of a word from another language is not its definition. >>79543 Seems you'd like China's system then. They have a different ideology but ultimately same style as you want, it seems.

>>79544 China is quite literally the opposite. What are you talking about? The great benefit of monarchy is that the monarch owns the country and cannot reasonably sell it. It is only logical therefore that he develops his greatest asset. And since risky decisions could ruin it, steady long-term development is the only logical choice so that the next generation can inherit. China, meanwhile, is dictatorial. Xi Jinping is by no means certain of being able to appoint a successor, much less a biological succession, (and the benefit of ourselves and our family is a biological imperative common to nigh-all humans that aren't severely mentally ill). His incentives are the same as any democratic politician: Be as corrupt as possible and get out of dodge if things go really wrong.

>>79547 >They can absolutely enter into a treaty or enact policies that personally benefits them while impoverishing their country The country is their greatest asset. Ruining their greatest asset is not going to enrich them. >bad policy Yes, due to the occasional bout of incompetence. Not due to incentives being aligned wrong. I'd rather have an incompetent occasionally making a mistake rather than a competent malicious actor constantly fuarrrking me over, like democratic politicians are incentivized to do (which is also how it turns out in practice). The incompetency issue then gets solved by the monarch being a corporation's CEO. Corporations, on the whole, need a high level of competence to stay alive, and that usually works out fine. >The party would select a successor Hence, Jinping isn't incentivized to care because his family doesn't necessarily benefit from it. In Moldbug's idea, the shares in the corporate monarch are transferable, thus the owners and their family benefit from a well-run country, just like any stock corporation today. And caring about our family next to ourselves is in our biological makeup.

>>79560 >The country is their greatest asset. Ruining their greatest asset is not going to enrich them. Maybe so but a country isn't very liquid, and sometimes it can be a tough thing to hold onto. Many opportunities to cash out and leave, this thing happens in certain types of places fairly regularly. Lots of ex haitian rulers for instance, but lol haiti.

I'm surprised by the civility of this thread and agree with most people here. Democracy is fake and a sinister political tool to justify those in power.

>>79560 >The country is their greatest asset. Ruining their greatest asset is not going to enrich them. Only assuming they identify with said country and aren't a spy/plant in first place. What happens on every level is that hostiles help you climb the ladder for you to sell out the company/country to your investor. And childless fuarrrkers often don't have a future outlook because there is no future for them to worry about. They plan to minmax their current entertainment and happily sacrifice a country which shouldn't be too surprising. Just compare profit margins selling out vs for how little money many people will murder.

>>79560 >The country is their greatest asset. Ruining their greatest asset is not going to enrich them. It very well could. A very direct example: the monarch has no reason not to tax the peasantry as much as they will stand, even though it may depress the kingdom's economy. Keeping the peasants low on cash has the added benefit of securing the king's position, by making them unable to buy armaments. In general, if we view the king as the owner of a country, then the best thing for the thing to do is to figure out how to extract as much value from his possession as possible. This is not always (in fact I would argue, rarely) the same thing as what benefits the common man or the nation as a whole. Even if you take good care of your car, you're still using it as a means to an end, and you wouldn't sacrifice your comfort for the car's well-being. >occasional bout of incompetence Lmao, you mean "typical" >Corporations, on the whole, need a high level of competence to stay alive, and that usually works out fine. Small corporations that aren't just pumpndump schemes need competent management, and even then I would argue that collectively the average competence level is quite low. Once a corporation is large and old enough, its executive wing will inevitably be infested with scumbags and idiots, and it will be riddled with incompetency at every level. Like whales, they survive mainly due to their size. I have yet to see any counterexample. >Hence, Jinping isn't incentivized to care because his family doesn't necessarily benefit from it. His family presumably lives in China, correct? In fact, his family is probably integrated all pretty high up in the hierarchy due to nepotism. They would directly suffer if he left the country in shambles(probably paying with their life if it was bad enough) No, I just don't buy that the only way to ensure that a country has value-aligned leadership is to have a person or entity own it outright. Doubly so if ownership is transferrable -- that would seem to completely negate all of your points about biological mandates anyway.

>>79576 Its not about 'identifying' with it, its about ruling it. Most countries have armies, territories, coffers of pretty significant size. As an actual ruler you have a lot of power and freedom afforded by virtue of your position. I don't really 'identify' with my car but its still a pretty valuable asset, both expensive as possessions go and practically useful. If I identified with it it might actually limit what I'm willing to do with it, reducing its value from a certain point of view. Its quite possibly good to have a king who does 'identify' with his country as that disincentivizes some of the abuses people are discussing here, as does merely breeding an aristocracy which is noble and resistant to corruption. One thing I wonder about is what actually is good for a country ? Its probably good to avoid domestic war, if disarming peasants prevents this then perhaps that is a net good, provided it doesn't lead to certain unintended consequences. There's a lot of basic disagreement about what a good government actually ought to pursue or maintain in terms of real results. ~~ CEOs, it should be pointed out, are not necessarily majority owners nor even owners at all, and frequently serve at the discretion of the board and owners, which generally somewhat overlap.

>>79601 >A country needs to attract high-skilled knowledge workers Or just have lots of slaves and rent them out to international industrialists. >killbots are a prerequisite to Moldbug's vision, and they make personal peashooters irrelevant for insurgency purposes. Okay, so they can't afford computers to hack the killbots with or IR-blocking paint to throw on their sensors, whatever. >In a short term-view, yes. No, in the complete-term view. Regardless of how long a time horizon you are thinking of, you are trying to extract as much profit from the country as possible, and that is not necessarily the same as benefitting the people of that country. To bring it back to slavery: when you own a slave you want them to have a long and healthy life, so that you can extract as much labor from them as possible. But you've still kept them in slavery and subjected them to a miserable (though perhaps tolerable) existence for their whole life. >A lot of what you attribute to incompetence is a sign of inertia common in any large group. I didn't attribute anything in particular to incompetence. I just said that incompetence flourishes in large corporations. I have trouble believing you've worked a day in your life if you've never come across it. >They can simply pack up and leave and use those huge wads of cash to nepotism into a prominent position in another country in a way a king cannot since a country can't just be sold. Have you never heard of a government in exile? Regents leave their home country behind all the time. >Ownership of large corporations, stock, is more usually used for dividends and inherited by the next generation rather than daytrade mooning. Most of it is owned by whales that are in it to make big bucks off market fluctuations.

>>79602 >extract as much profit from the country as possible Yes. >not necessarily the same as benefitting the people of that country No. They're two separate things, but to have a maximized ROI, you need well-educated, motivated employees. You won't get high-skill immigration if you oppress the people. Nobody moves to North Korea. This means you're stuck with your own population's offspring, and they won't be particularly well-motivated - again, North Korea isn't flying to Mars. There's a reason we don't use slaves anymore, and it's not because of some morals spook. See: Singapore. Authoritarian, yes. Wealthy, very much yes. Why? Because it doesn't enslave workers. Because it produces a safe, pleasant environment with taxes that aren't crazy that attracts valuable people. And renting out slaves isn't particularly profitable - none of the countries where the cheap industrial production happens are all that wealthy compared to Bezos and such. Menial labor is cheap, barely above what's needed to keep the human living. You can't make all that much cash. >I have trouble believing you've worked a day in your life if you've never come across it. I work in management. It's common that the lower levels attribute things to incompetence when it's just natural institutional inertia or the occasional bit of interdepartmental powerplay or attempt to get a higher budget. Much the same as in the military, the guys that die in a diversionary attack may well think the victorious general a buffoon. >government in exile Getting forced out by war or a revolution isn't the same as moving voluntarily. The modern politician that leaves his country has lost nothing, maybe a house. The king in exile has lost a country. See, the former Austro-Hungarian Emperor that died from pneumonia from a damp house. >market fluctuations I tried finding stock market data on the average portfolio turnover rate of fortune 500/bluechip stocks and wasn't successful. I'll concede this point, but it seems doubtful that swing traders would make big bucks off fundamentally stable stocks (compared to other stocks). Bigger swings, bigger wins, no?

>>79617 >high-skill immigration immigration is playing the short game. The long game is growing your own high effectiveness population. >singapore rich because no slaves, instead it attract valuable people and treat them well yes but slaves are generally not particularly valuable people, so you don't need to do the same things to attract them. Singapore certainly appears to have a fairly large, largely foreign, underclass. https://www.ft.com/content/4c63dea0-9ebd-4170-b978-5dce0c5e7f99 Other relatively wealthy countries also have interesting circumstances for so called migrant labor such as the arabians https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/25/revealed-qatars-world-cup-slaves https://www.humanrightsresearch.org/post/modern-day-slavery-in-the-united-arab-emirates I imagine these people could maybe escape, but so could a very large number of so called slaves throughout history. Attracting skillful foreigners is an entirely separate problem from attracting gullible foreigners to do cheap labour, and you can do both at the same time just fine.

>>79617 >to have a maximized ROI, you need well-educated, motivated employees. I mean, if you can pull it off then becoming a "knowledge worker" country is great. But tons of cities and countries have sunk millions of pesos into making themselves attractive to tech startups and educated yuppies and failed, when they could have just opened a coal mine and surely lined politicians' pockets. >Nobody moves to North Korea. But *a lot* of people move to places like China and Arabia, where slavery is practiced. North Korea doesn't let anybody in or out and doesn't participate in international trade, they're a failure for many reasons that have nothing to do with the way they treat their people. > See: Singapore. As another poster said, singapore relies on a huge class of people that are basically wage slaves. Same goes for the US and pretty much any fancy tech hub you can think of. >none of the countries where the cheap industrial production happens are all that wealthy compared to Bezos and such The owners of those countries sure are.

>>79617 > big bucks off fundamentally stable stocks (compared to other stocks). Bigger swings, bigger wins, no? predictable volatility > high volatility. The first one will guarantee profit while the latter is just gambling.

>>79617 >none of the countries where the cheap industrial production happens are all that wealthy compared to Bezos and such bezos lives at the mercy of the U.S. Government, which stole half his fortune to give to his wife when she abandoned him. Rulers of more minor countries at least are free from that sort of harassment, and often reasonably wealthy, too.

>>79640 Splitting your assets when you get divorced is basic common law. Bezos barely even tried to keep that half of his fortune; it doesn't make much of a difference whether you have 10 billion of 5 billion. He should have signed a prenup if he wasn't gonna be faithful anyway.

>>79617 >to have a maximized ROI, you need well-educated, motivated employees Your mistake is assuming the government gives a soykaf about "ROI" or "the economy" or anything like that. If they did then there would be no such thing as unemployment benefits or minimum wage laws or state mandated healthcare or visas or state protected unions or any of the other socialist soykaf everybody takes for granted now. It's not the 1800s anymore, the mustache twirling industrialists don't have anywhere near as much power as you're been lead to think. >>79632 >Same goes for the US and pretty much any fancy tech hub you can think of. The US has the biggest military in the world and since WW2 all foreign central banks back their currency with dollars. And dollars and just scraps of paper the US government prints and gives to itself whenever it wants to buy something. That's the secret behind america's wealth, they trade worthless stacks of paper for real goods exported by other countries. The fact that politicians throw around the idea of a $15 or $20 minimum wage is all the proof you need that manufacturing and labor are completely irrelevant in the US economy. Or the fact that they are taking in millions of migrants and then letting them stay in 5 star hotels instead of putting them to work. >The owners of those countries sure are. Zelensky is the one who just bought a £20.000.000 mansion in the UK not a Vietnamese factory owner.

>>79688 >Zelensky is the one who just bought a £20.000.000 mansion in the UK not a Vietnamese factory owner. Vietnam has five billionaires, at least one of which (and probably many of them) are factory owners. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Vietnamese_people_by_net_worth

This is stupid, zelensky's situation is obviously rather different, his country is in the middle of a sort of nasty proxy war, the result of which could lead to him loosing it all in a number of completely different ways. The situation with these vietnamese business leaders is entirely different. Also, please, don't merely assert they aren't buying expensive foreign properties if you cannot back this up.

>>79694 plus the Ukraine is basically the Vietnam of Europe...

I don't believe in democracy, as I see it as "tyranny of the majority"

>>79699 >tyranny of the majority dumb meme honestly because it implies agency. There is a 90% correlation between campaign funds & outcome. Voters are essentially no different to gtp bots. Their output only as good as the training data and the training data is propaganda distributed through media.

>>79718 Yeah, nevermind, you're right.

>>79698 > the ukraine How many rubles do you make to lie for your daddy Putin, Vlad?

>>79699 >>79718 >>79747 Why are Americans always this stupid? Maybe its the education system that corporations have been undermining for so long? If you live in a corporatocracy, and your news is owned by corporations, and your senate bills are decided by corporations, then why the hell would that be the fault of "democracy" instead of the corrupt officials and industrialists who broke the system to begin with? They're the ones telling you democracy (that thing they ruined) doesn't work anyways, because they know they benefit from taking what little voice/role you have left in this all. They want technofeudalism, and you're gladly giving them what they want.

>>79750 you are a fool indoctrinated to worship democrazy. The system eats itself because the way to retain control is to dumb down the voters and anyone in power will aim to retain power so they all walk that path. A system that can't sustain itself is a failure by design.

>>79764 “The way to retain control” for the plutocrats is indeed exactly as I said. You undermine democracy by undermining peoples capacity to engage in it. Democracy is the only political system that gives people their voice back. You can’t appreciate it because you don’t know what it is. All you know is that your thought leaders must be right. Go ahead and give them what little autonomy you had! Be a good boy and roll over for the people who stole your birthright! Kiss their boots and give thanks for the lashes they give you, “for the greater good”, “for our great leader”. Enjoy those silver manacles and rotting excuse for an education! Democracy does sustain itself when not undermined by wannabe dictators. Those same guys will whine about the fragility of a system they worked decades to undermine and offer their autocratic power as some kind of “solution”. The true fools are those poor saps why fall for the con of these dictators. The true fools are those saps who give away their freedom for false promises of strength, prosperity, and security. Saps like you.

>>78267 This thread reminded me why I left lainchan. What used to be a cult of lain and cyberpunks has devolved into an echo chamber of wannabe fascists

>>79766 The solution to the tyranny of the majority issues with even direct democracy isn't more authority, that's not what's necessarily being proposed when democracy is criticized.

>>79766 the real name of what you have is elective democracy. You never had democracy because you never had the ability to vote on issues directly. All you do is vote on middleman. And the middleman are at their peak of obsolescence due various institutions deciding important issues like finance for your gov. Not to mention that EUssr is same soykaf as soviet union fuarrrking its satellite states- your local gov is getting told what laws to implement and whatever you voted for is moot. Oh and the leading guy who came up with eu? he's former nobility that did currency union between kings. You are factually still getting wrecked by the same old group of people.

>>79749 ... is there a new name for the region that I haven't heard of?

>>79771 Ukraine, rather than the Ukraine, I guess.

As mentioned in the constitutions or in the journalistic media, of course not, I'm not retarded. But the system itself exists and has a very expensive maintenance cost, and I'm not talking about money. The truth is that most people have no idea what freedom is or why humans need it, they are both slaves by choice, but they also have no other option, it is an ongoing paradox that needs to suppress its inconsistencies through lies. The God Narrative, which merges with modern history, are the limbs of the Atlas that sustains the world structure as we know it, and when it loses strength, the structure is shaken and vice versa. What we call democracy is more like an international ecumenical complex of Fabian society, which can be easily adapted to each country in the world. They said America is responsible for this, but I think they are just patient zero, and yet they lost all control ATP.

>>79770 Direct democracy or demarchy, all those good forms of pure democracy instead of this sham. All this talk about the “dumb masses” and “mob rule” is intentionally misunderstanding to justify a ruling class, kind of like how the CCP, USSR, NAZIs, monarchies, and every other form of authoritarianism try to justify their bullsoykaf. But I get the feeling you don’t care about democracy and will just grasp at any straws to justify some fuarrrked alternative like every statist has. I write this in the hope that maybe you’ll surprise me. I miss pre-8kun lainchan…

>>79775 the original cutoff was land ownership. A simple financial litmus test. Has also the bonus of excluding people who dont even live in the country but can flip voting results in favor of parties exploiting locals since it has zero detriment to them. Either way i dont think thats sufficient. Eu parliament members have been quoted to cost merely 10k to bribe. Since the cost of buying decisions is dirt cheap its financially mandatory for business to use instead of playing honest and taking L's from profit killing laws. The only real counterplay is let people vote directly no. Like start of this year they legalized adding insects into pizza and other products as flour replacement. I believe people would have told them gtfo if given the chance. And while the concerns on people being retarded are valid i think letting people have the power to vote on anything themself would be an interesting experiment. I suspect longterm people will not have the energy to actually participate on every vote and if they limit themselves to involving where it matters to them it might actually create a self organizing system. You only need a robust safety system that prohibits banning voting on past decisions / creating any new permanent laws that cant be redacted with some safety clause if anyone tries to go that path get rid of them.

>>79800 >And while the concerns on people being retarded are valid i think letting people have the power to vote on anything themself would be an interesting experiment. I suspect longterm people will not have the energy to actually participate on every vote and if they limit themselves to involving where it matters to them it might actually create a self organizing system. You only need a robust safety system that prohibits banning voting on past decisions / creating any new permanent laws that cant be redacted with some safety clause if anyone tries to go that path get rid of them. alternately have a quorum requirement and/or builtin delays that make it very difficult to get small groups to pass major changes. this must of course be balanced to not make the system totally dysfunctional in the event time critical circumstances.

>>78730 This attitude of "who cares about theory only what happen to people matter" is self-defeating because if you say that what happen to people matter, you have to specify what kind of happening matter, in what ways, under what conditions etc... So you're back at theorizing.

>>79766 >Democracy is the only political system that gives people their voice back. Does it feel like your voice matter to you? You elect one president or another and nothing change. In China, they have a saying: In China, you can't change the ruling party but you can change the policies. In the west, you can change the ruling party but you can't change the policies. All our press is captive and it is at best entertainment and at worse propaganda. Read one year old newspapers and you will see. >Democracy does sustain itself when not undermined by wannabe dictators If one middle crisis is enough to end your political system, then it was unsustainable from the start. Beside, look at which politicians are destroying democracies: the one who exchange public money for votes. It's people like Trudeau who destroy it, not people like Harper.

The problem is that people confuse "democracy" with "representative democracy" There is no point in arguing if no one is speaking about the same thing The modern use of the adjective "democratic" implies a "representative democracy" which can be misleading

>>78229 >Do you believe that the current prevalent political system can be realistically improved or do you think it's all downhill from here on? Well, we have not yet exhausted the vast pool of possible arrangements in human governance. I would be optimistic in the long term if it weren't for the fact that a couple critical assumptions are being challenged atm, namely that human beings are at the top of the intellectual hierarchy and that the fury of the people is sufficient to destroy ruling regimes. >Democracy, do you believe it? The most meaningful thing I know to say is that if I were given the task of constructing the best government I could conceive of without further research or consulting of others, I would build it as some kind of republican system (i.e., a system characterized by an elaborate distribution of powers between interest blocks) where the "people at large" had enshrined mechanisms of influence and there was a protected conception of individual rights and liberties. Proper implementation is a proven issue, but I don't see a good reason to abandon these three critical features for a different kind of scheme. It seems to me that enlightened political discussion at this point in history should take the form of "What are the features of a good republic?" rather than "Should we have a republic or something else?" There might be legitimate criticisms though in the department of whether top-down design can ever be thought of as efficacious in the long run. Mm...so I guess really it's appropriate to say that I'm more a republican than I am a democrat, per se, which is in itself a way of saying that I like the idea of government crafted through the lens of system design with an eye toward upholding certain ideals, including the limitation of powers and the curtailing of predictable abuses, but "power to the people" does not in itself sound good to me. Wow, this is hard to talk about meaningfully! I do wonder whether republicans shouldn't talk about "democracy" in the way that socialists talk about "communism." Do we need a vanguard party to pass power slowly into the hands of an increasingly enlightened and informed populace? When I type it out, it sounds like a terrible idea! Too many ways that goes wrong. I don't know the answer.

>Do you believe that elections are clean where you live? Yes, but I don't think that there are any meaningful choices to make in our elections. Most of the time you get to choose between in-your-face fascism and pinkwashed fascism, with a surprisingly small range of policy and ideological differences. If you're lucky, one of your choices is a milktoast liberal. All three choices are ineffectual at best. The people running the show are not elected officials, and with very few exceptions the elected officials are incredibly corrupt anyway. >Do you have any real reason to believe so? I read the news from time to time. >Do you believe that the current prevalent political system can be realistically improved or do you think it's all downhill from here on? Democracy officially ended in the United States six days ago. The president of the US is now, officially, a dictator. fuarrrk this place.

I think we're just monkeys that can't handle being apart of a society greater than 25-100 people. I don't know if it's possible for democracy, or any means of large scale civilization to satisfy the needs of most people without modifying the human brain's chemistry. As nice as countries like America, Switzerland, Japan, Norway, etc. may seem, they can only exist through needless bloodshed that is only guaranteed to benefit those at the top of the social hierarchy. Even in ancient greece, industrial centers functioned by means of specialization that increasingly stripped away people's individuality for a supposed common goal at the cost of absurd injustices, commonly abstracted away or justified by the system. This specialization also keeps people reliant on said system, leaving citizens very vulnerable in the event of systematic instability. Please criticize and critique my opinion.

>>82646 I guess this is known as deliberative democracy. I've been thinking about this a bit recently. Random selection raises a few questions, like with the election process itself, competence in governance, and identity-motivated conflicts in society. There has to be a highly publicized and extremely convoluted random selection process to ensure that nobody can meaningfully influence the election process. Depending on the scale of the government this election process was to be applied to, this could pose some serious logistical issues. Say for example, every position in the United States Government was to be served by individuals randomly selected from the entire population of hundreds of millions of people. With massive governments like those of the United States there are positions in government that are specifically intended for people who are experts in certain fields like economics, medicine, agriculture, national security, transportation, etc, that a normal person would likely find difficulty in assuming the duties of for lack of experience in those fields. Some of these people end up as advisors for people like the President. In local politics, a person doesn't need to be an expert in a specific field in order to govern effectively, truthfully I think a fair amount of states could be governed solely by normal citizens considering how stupid some elected officials are, how little they achieve, and how corrupt they are. And certain places like Congress and the Senate I think would be fine if they were full of normal citizens instead of the current people that are completely detached from the problems commoners suffer. I also think that to some degree the need for experts in certain fields could be eliminated by a switch in policies of governance, for instance, if America was to ditch interventionism the need for "national security" officials could be greatly reduced, as there would be less angry terrorists who want to kill "us", though there would still of course be concerns about spies of other govenments, and military threats, of course. Perhaps instead random people could be selected to serve the duties of the experts, and then be advised by experts in the fields, updating the thread I now see a lainon has mentioned this. Perhaps experts could be randomly selected, this then creates problem of determining what an expert is, opens door for exploitation. Without a random selection process there is absolutely no reliable means of preventing the subversion of governance by secret societies. All other modes of government are rife with modes of subversive exploitation, subversion is an inevitability, and a government's subversion can be assumed to begin with its birth. Aside efficiency and sustainability, we can to some extent rank government's off of their vulnerability to subversion which does tie into their longevity. Without a random selection process you cannot reliably prevent power-hungry psychopaths and narcissists from gaining power, whom may form secret societies to maintain their power, nor conmen seeking to scam the masses for the sake of profit generated through bribes given to them by secret societies. These kinds of people have taken positions of power all throughout history, but have now come to occupy the most highest positions of power in society at a level of influence unprecedented due to the control granted to them by technology. A fair bit of our progress in governance has been for the sake of preventing these kinds of undesirables from governing us through our prevention of them to dictate certain aspects of our life that they would once come to control in their ceaseless conquest for power. I've seen people raise concerns about racial conflict being produced by random selection, with minority groups being more likely to be underrepresented in governance. I don't think this is a really good reason against random selection. This kind of issue is intrinsic to a multiracial multicultural society and has little to do with any one system of governance. Might some systems be more inclined to exasperate this issue? Sure. But I don't think random selection, a system that inevitably permits literally any kind of person to potentially enter into governance and make changes, is one of them, especially if we're to come from the perspective of a racist conspiratorial system keeping minorities from wielding meaningful power. The other question of racial conflict would not necessarily be spurred solely through the actual demographics of the government, but of the ways in which government officials serve the citizenry, with concerns that a predominantly white government may be less inclined to solve problems that plague non-white communities due to a lack of empathy rooted in racial tribalism or racism. I think this is also a pretty weak argument to set against random selection, as again, it is not intrinsic to random selection, has existed in all governments forever, and can be mediated through the same means as it currently is in government. It is not as though a randomly selected government cannot be criticized or spoken to by the masses and made to recognize the plight of the populace like the current forms are. There could of course be some system in place to try and ensure that each racial group is adequately represented in government but I think this is a terrible idea, once this is done, inevitably different ethnic groups will then seek equal representation, just because someone is of the same race as your own does not mean they necessarily represent your own interests, say religious values, and so then assumedly measures will be taken to represent them, but this is literally not possible, particularly for any nation that permits immigration, as it will continuously see new groups arise within itself, and also with the internet, limitless access to information, the ability for people's identities to change is endless where it once wasn't, pre-internet you couldn't sporadically have Muslims pop up in a part of the world never graced by Islam, leading to the formation of Muslim communities. There will be a neverending conflict in attempting to adequately represent these groups. Inevitably, other groups will seek representation, like various LGBT sects, of which there can also be never be adequate representation due to the fact that there will always be new groups formulating within that banner whom find themselves significantly different and poorly represented from people seemingly similar to themselves. And then government will fall victim to identity politics. I can infer this to occur because this is exactly what has happened with our current forms of government. It is my opinion that the best idea is to go with purely random selection, so as to avoid a neverending conflict of identity that will serve to convolute and hinder a government's ability to function. I'm just spitballing here. At the very least, I'd support random selection of local government officials.

>>82649 you think a society of 25-100 monkeys is going to be free from violence, coercion, war and non self-reliance ? I dont think you know anything about monkey societies >minority groups being more likely to be underrepresented in governance under random selection incoherent, assuming actual random selection. They'll be represented according to their actual rates. If racial divisions are prominent in a country, naturally they could be one of the axis upon which representational groups are chosen. Instead of being a representative from califnornia, gerrymandered geographic district number 12, you can be representative for the sons of jewish expatriates of the soviet union and eastern europe who arrived in california between the years 1901 and 1980, or something. You can draw these lines down many axis, individually or all at once, if you choose.

>>82651 >you think a society of 25-100 monkeys is going to be free from violence, coercion, war and non self-reliance ? I dont think you know anything about monkey societies I admittedly don't but I can say for certain that nature is very violent, and so are humans. We however have the self awareness to limit it to where it's only necessary. The mass civilizations of today and centuries ago use violence and colonialism for the sake of accumulating capital to further grow the system in seemingly irrational ways. I don't really get everything else you mean desu

>>82652 sorry bottom half was to another poster >The mass civilizations of today and centuries ago use violence and colonialism for the sake of accumulating capital to further grow the system I think you're trying to frame the people societies you don't understand in familiar motivations without actually trying to grasp anything about them. Monkeys have a lot of sim(ian)larities with us, but you'd find it laughable I assume to accuse a chimp trying to assert control of his triboid is attempting to amass capitol and further grow The System. Should a Crusader, or a Trojan, or a Danish pirate or Rwandan Tutu genocider all be framed in this same way ?

>>82651 yes and they will complain of being poorly represented because of this, since they will have a smaller representation and thus lesser power

>>82647 I think some of the problems are solved by requiring a super majority or a consensus to be reached depending how many are elected through lottery. This is more realistic than expecting every citizen to reach a major agreeable. >>82650 It goes by sortition, selection by lottery, selection by lot, allotment, demarchy, stochocracy, aleatoric democracy, democratic lottery, and lottocracy. The idea is if everyone knows they may be elected they will more likely try to be knowledgable. Though one problem is if it is totally random then you might not get enough representation of different backgrounds so they still would need some sort of team of advisers themselves randomly selected.

>>82654 and the lazy will complain that food isn't spooned into their mouths, what of it ? >>82655 > Though one problem is if it is totally random then you might not get enough representation of different backgrounds so they still would need some sort of team of advisers themselves randomly selected. what, randomly selected advisors lol. why not just count on the randos to have their own friends ? everyone smart can do a decent job solving problems he doesn't immediately understand by his own existing advice system if you want more even representation, then get more random selectees >>82650 >With massive governments like those of the United States there are positions in government that are specifically intended for people who are experts in certain fields like economics, medicine, agriculture, national security, transportation, etc, that a normal person would likely find difficulty in assuming the duties of for lack of experience in those fields is it not possible that the existence of these positions is merely to give these people employment ? maybe these positions are spurious and really ought to be removed. USgov could be 10% as large easily. Likewise your post could be 10% as long without any real loss of meaning. >Without a random selection process there is absolutely no reliable means of preventing the subversion of governance by secret societies well obviously the first thing to subvert is the random selection process

>>82657 > what, randomly selected advisors lol. why not just count on the randos to have their own friends ? everyone smart can do a decent job solving problems he doesn't immediately understand by his own existing advice system The average person is not very knowledgable in specific matters nor knows well informed people on every matter. Just give them the raw info from experts and they can decide from that. It isnt really different from how things already are done just better representation by taking political games out of the picture.

>>78229 I believe in democracy, the people always have to be relevant, and give their vote to any law and project that is presented, and no vote can be worth more than someone else's. That is why I do not like that the vote of deputies and senators is worth more than that of an average citizen, since in practice they are nothing more than corrupt parasites who vote according to their interests. >Do you believe that the current prevalent political system can be realistically improved or do you think it's all downhill from here on? In my country we had governments that called themselves liberal, militaristic, left-wing progressive governments, or right-wing conservative governments, but in practice the worst of both systems were always used to destroy the nation. With liberal governments that raise taxes, and emit in an uncontrolled manner, or "progressive" governments that attack workers without penalty or punishment for deregulated work. Dictatorships do not work in this country since they are managed by foreign governments, representative governments do not work since the candidates who run are influenced by the same oligarchs as always, direct voting can work in a certain way, since the people are silly, but not that stupid.

>>82658 >still important that the average person makes decisions just have to have experts spoonfeed him exactly what to decide idk fam sounds like you want some sort of oligarchy of 'the experts' wearing a democratic skinsuit and not real democracy at all. You can't really randomly choose 'qualified' 'experts' without a wide open avenue for the selection by opinions. This is a silly system and it doesn't take political games out of the picture it merely changes the rules.

>>82657 >is it not possible that the existence of these positions is merely to give these people employment ? maybe these positions are spurious and really ought to be removed. USgov could be 10% as large easily. Likewise your post could be 10% as long without any real loss of meaning. Sure I actually stated a change in policy could have the potential to do that and gave what would be a minor change in policy. I don't think those government positions exist solely to give people employment, I think as a whole they are necessary in order to manage a government at a scale the United States runs at. To eliminate the necessity of those officials is to shrink the size of the government, in which case America could overall be expected to be governed by smaller federated states, far-reaching actions would need to be coordinated between various states. There'd be a diminished global military presence, and military capabilities, with a greater emphasis on one's immediate surroundings, probably a simpler lifestyle overall, a lot of amenities we have now may be less common, but it'd be up to the individual to decide if it really mattered. A further concern would be of America's vulnerability to invasion by larger centralized powers, fear of this would probably dissuade people from considering smaller scale governance.

>>82660 I dont think opinions are helpful if political matters, i was just talking the actual information needed to make a properly informed decision in relation to such things because of the basis for a decision is not based on reality then it isn't useful. I was only suggesting for particularly specialized related topics where itisnt even an opinion thing. Also no that wouldnt be an oligarchy, closer word you are looking for is a technocracy but since they arent the final deciders it isnt even that.

>>82662 >not technically an oligarchy oligarchy is rule by the few. Aristocracy is pretty much a type of oligarchy, but a good oligarchy. Optimistically, a technocracy is also an aristocracy but its always an oligarchy. This will only work if the population is reliably smart, virtuous and homogenous and will care about the problems and be capable of solving them even with true and accurate information presented to them. I used to tutor some topics at a definitely not below average highschool, and man a lot of people are pretty uncomprehending. You'll probably get a lot of people coming in from this or that political alignment that has an opinion or agenda and your new selectee might just do that thinking its right, without understanding the situation in depth at all. If they're not virtuous and largely sympathetic with their fellow countrymen, even a comprehending selectee might just use this as a chance to benefit themselves and those about whom they do care, or even punish their enemies real or perceived.

>>78246 well we pull more missions and our tech's just better

What the fuarrrk is democracy anyway? It's anything except the soykaf they claim they represent like freedom of speech and equality. Even in ancient Greece, the country that gave birth to democracy, slavery was a thing, women weren't allowed to do stuff that men were doing and gay people were at same level with slaves. Democracy at its current form is a global oligarchy but with fancy name. As about elections, they're useless as fuarrrk and they only exist to give you the delusion of choice. Elections are rigged most of the times, the politicians never keep their pre-elections promises, all of them follow the same global agenda (and the ones that don't either get retired immediately or murdered), all of them work for Jews etc. If you still insist that voting matters and that voting is a "democratic right", keep in mind that Hitler rise in power because people voted for him and he was taken down but not from voting the opposite side.

>>82715 You are conflating liberalism and democracy Liberalism is the idea that all individuals are citizens with rights. Democracy is the idea that that the vote of the citizens (whoever they may be) determine what policies are implemented by the state. There is nothing contradictory about a democracy that enslaves non-citizens or even citizens, if there is some legal mechanism that allows for it.

>>78229 Democracy is the tyranny of the Majority. The majority can easily be persuaded and driven by fear. The Rule of law and inalienible rights are a must in reguards to liberty. Democracy leads to Socialist crimes such as Fascism and Communism. The people must be free from the grips and contstraints of state power. Democracy is the biggest illusion and ALWAYS leads to corruption. There is no such thing as Democracy without corruption.

>>87291 Show me your best argument that (i) fascism is socialist, (ii) democracy leads to such crimes and (iii) alternatives such as autocracy and ochlocracy don't, or admit you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about and had better shut your yaphole next time.

>>87291 >Socialist crimes such as Fascism Found the retard...

>>87295 Fascism was invented by a former socialist and later changed into an autistic ethno something made by a guy who liked socialist ideals but not the ideology in itself. To be clear, if some negative aspects of fascism are found in socialism, like nothing outside of the state or the idea of creating a new man that would create a better world it's because those are negative aspect of socialism that have been kept to make the fascist ideology. >>87294 Not him but I will answer you. i: the goal of fascism is to end the class warfare. They saw how Lenin failed to force everyone to live in a classless society, they noticed it was still a class society anyway, the politburo simply took the place of the aristocracy and the saw what was anarchy in real life in Ukraine and Spain. So they had to find another way. This is how they eventually got the idea that the state should be a syndicate and defend the rights of the workers, this way the capitalist could exist and get rich if they were an asset to the nation but not at the expense of the workers. They got the idea to unite all the class as one body. That's where the name came from. Yes, it's different from socialism and yes, there is no shortage of idiots who call everything they don't like either communism or fascism, so you are not wrong to say that they are different (after all they disagree on many key points) but it's really two variant of the same soykaf. ii: Democracy can only exist until everyone discover that he can live at everyone else expense. To say it otherwise: the destiny of democracy is clientelism. Democracy can only exist in the very specific case where the main divider between the people who vote is how to organize society. As soon as taxes and redistributions become important, voters will be driven to ask for more public money which is free by nature. The politicians know they won't be in power for more than a few years and have 0 reason to not leave their opposition with some heavy debts to pay. And voters aren't the only ones who will drain more and more money out of the state. Bureaucrats will, as well. As the government snowball out of control, bureaucrats will reproduce, so to say, their number will increase and their productivity will sink. You may expect a savior to come and save the day like Harper in Canada or Orange man now but nobody like when free money run dry. Canada immediately elected the man who wanted to give free money to everyone ans the same thing will happen in the US. Democracy lead to a bureaucracy that control everything, and where the state control the majority of the economy, like in France. It lead to a planified economy ran by bureacrats. Ho, and take a guess at what corpos do in such an environement? Look at how fast Mark and Jeff have turned their vest and trade favors for favors. Not doing the iii.

>>87297 >Yes, it's different from socialism So fascism being a "socialist crime" was a lie. Glad that's settled. >Democracy lead to a bureaucracy that control everything, and where the state control the majority of the economy, like in France. It lead to a planified economy ran by bureacrats. Show me those legions of French companies seized by the state. If you can't, concede there aren't "socialist crimes" going on in France. >Not doing the iii. Yeah, because best-case autocracy leads to fascism much more clearly than worst-case democracy, and you know it.

>>78229 Democracy is the dictatorship of society, unfortunately it is the dictatorship of the ignorant, because most of every society is ignorant. But we have to have democracy, the whole system depends on it, what did John F. Kenedy say? 'Democracy is not perfect, but we didn't have to build a wall so that our people wouldn't flee our country.' (He said this referring to the Berlin wall.) Democracy is imperfect, but in practice it is the most sensible at the moment. But of course meritocracy, technocracy, etc. There are better systems to try and implement than democracy, but we will see democracy in the current state system and in a future anarchist order without authority.

>>87347 US voting right used to require land ownership. So you actually had a basic iq filter keeping poor idiots out. The appeal to old times is invalid because the founding state was different to present state.

>>87349 No, it had nothing to do with perceived IQ it was just the norm during the time and they thought landowners had more at stake so they thought their decisions would be more careful but this was a flawed logic because policy could effect different landowners differently anyway and if people who do not own land do not get to be involved they are more likely to revolt.

>>87349 That's a personal take but I think that's an imitation of the Holy German Empire. Just with more electors. And the only reason why all men got the right to vote was because the armies were made of conscripts.

>>87343 >So fascism being a "socialist crime" was a lie. Listen, I am not into metal music. The people who are insist that death metal and black metal are completely different. I am not into that and it's the same to me. >Show me those legions of French companies seized by the state. The electrical production ones. The railway operator ones. The health insurance once were nationalized without compensation. Furthermore, there are so many regulations that most of the "free" market is basically controlled by the state and have a minimum margin of maneuver. The majority of the GDP is the action of the state, and the money is wasted because public money is free. >autocracy leads to fascism Fascism is one very particular kind of authoritarianism. Now, let's compare them to our countries, which are far from being the worse democracy can do.

>>87352 glory to XY separatism , may we ascend from filthy hedonism

>>87350 Point is if you act stupid you likely also gonna lose your wealth = no land ownership. So a requirement on land ownership set a basic competence bar for voting. Right now we have nowhere any competence requirements which equals more power to media owners steering retards.

Without reading the thread, I want to comment that this current German government was the most democratically elected since decades. A good mixture of parties that had only one fuarrrking job - to talk with each other and to enact new laws best on everyone’s interest. What actually happened was that the elected parties had too much differences and couldn’t decide on anything as the parties cockblocked each other due to gang mentality. In my eyes this government was one of the most democratically elected and it didn’t fuarrrking work because the party system and representative democracy cannot work. This was the evidence.

>>87343 >best-case autocracy leads to fascism much more clearly than worst-case democracy, and you know it. evidently you've made a typo as well we all know most republics today arose from monarchies and the poster child fascist governments all got elected.

(My understanding of it. Feel free to discuss or inquire) No No No: To say given how different everyone at present connected in the branch of mankind as a species is completely different even on a biological, psychological and cellular level. Little what one wants now matters. discussions of democracy is insignificant. in terms of freedom the future will inevitably be one of the Theatre of Cruelty transformed into a soft hand and they'll have no idea they are even being manipulated (Pluck the flower's bud while its young and it will know none the wiser). No: As a result the human construct is insane and cruel and every single regime is tyrannical and corrupt that can be thought of, so the best way to improve the system is to reduce the overall tyranny to only affect a small amount of population which will eventually either cave to technological reliance and enslavement or a movement or purposeful technological stagnation known as Project 2000 where Mankind will become Tame and cute while the slaves work away. So we are left with a few different options: March into technological Reliance no longer being human and remove the uncooperative genes. Or into a controlling Dystopia which will bring about the cutesy "utopia" to be left in purposeful stagnation for the species survival. If you are from The New generations you will see it. A lot will change soon. All that we are seeing at present are failing regime's across Earth being choked.

An intelligent, well-informed, practical, productive populace can have a real democracy that works. An example would be one of the worlds' few real democracies today, Switzerland. It requires a general population that can tell bullshit from physical reality, especially in the media. Media accuracy is one of the most important factors in maintaining a real democracy. Without a well and truthfully informed populace, a real democracy is not possible. That's why you see so much disinformation being pumped out constantly by enemies of real democracy. You will even see it happening right here in this thread.

>>87370 >The first serious republics in the 18th century arose from tearing down monarchies altogether, not through said monarchies' proper channels. Try again. the operative term was 'leads to' and there's no suggestion there of correct or incorrect channels. Driving while incredibly tired often leads to accidents even if the intent of the system is to get you where you want to go same as normal!

>>87367 But it isnt just state propaganda to worry about these days it's every idiot out there can just make things up and someone will believe it. What maybe needs to be done is transform major news platforms into non profit by legal requirement. Then their financial motives disappear.

>>87394 this is incoherent. If in a democracy he who controls the media controls the state, then profit from a media entity is beside the point, at best icing on the very delicious cake of governmental power.

>>87394 Germany had the same idea - there is a media tax that's supposed to fund independent state media. Worked for a while but politics being politics started simply controlling who gets hired into the state media to control what they publish. The ruling parties are known for fraud & insider trading so of course they will corrupt the state media too. Right now almost everything is either stupid entertainment or propaganda news with the last remaining resistance preserving some truth hidden in comedy format and they still get shadowderezzed on yt for being critical judging by comments saying subs dont get notifications. That aside nonprofits are often a scam. nonprofit doesn't mean you make no money. It just is not a goal for the company itself, often its framed as a charity but the leadership takes 300k salary and the charity is primarily for their own pocket. Its also used to tax evade - you let your relative start a nonprofit and donate to the charity writing off your donation while they go shopping with the nonprofit for company assets that in reality are just things for yourself dodging both vat and wage taxes. I think the only way to run a truly independent media is have public finance it. You cant have them be reliant on advertiser money stemming from the people they supposed to report about. People have to pay a sub to their newspaper instead of netflix and there needs to be more than 1 outlet so you can switch in first place if some outlet sells out. Free news = propaganda since someone else is paying for it.

>>87370 >Irrelevant to whether it's socialism. Okay, let's call it a planed economy then. Once that have been ruled by the socialist party since 2012. One where the entire electricity generation and railroad systems are controlled by syndicates full of communists. Today's Sweden make today's Russia look like a paragon of civilization, yes. They now have daily grenade attacks, bombings left and right, everything is out of control. A bit like France but with more explosives. We had a 14 year old hitman. The dude killed for 50 grands. All of that while public spending is out of control and yet, nothing get done. I would rather live in the fascist countries. >>87395 There is the problem of the guy who own the media, and there is the problem of the journalists themselves. Political activists are attracted to these positions like if it was a magnet. In the US, Jeff told his press to not endorse a candidate, which was described as an attack against free press. >>87409 France and Germany coown a media, ARTE. You can go take a look, it have the same level of neutrality than Salon. The French state also fund the AFP and here is the thing; they are not allowed to change it's budget. This, in theory garantee that the press is free. In practice, the AFP is relatively neutral but still partisan. For instance, the first half of their article about the LA fire is spent bashing Trump and Elon. Jurnilasm.

>>87349 said poor idiots being too busy surviving, unable to get richer - not like the land owners wanted them to be smart anyway. sound familiar?

Read The Republic by Plato! >https://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.html >>78229 Consider this... If I want to have a ship built for me, I will go to a specialist who knows how to build ships. But in democracy we choose the the most popular candidates to lead the government and the nation. And absolutely anyone can become a candidate and/or vote. But your Average Joe is not a specialist and doesn't know how to govern or be a leader. Therefore, why is my personal ship (just 1 ship!) more important than how the government is run?

>>87419 land owner meant owning your home as that comes with owning land. Didn't require rich factory/plantation owner. And it was way more common than now with people getting priced out. Either way information quality > ability to think. People have the same issues as AI trained on bad data. Thats why I think the midwit theory actually holds true. The dumbest are immune to propaganda because they dont even understand it. Its the midwits that form the clergy of every social movement as they are receptive to media and easily manipulated.

>>87419 The US always had a fast social mobility. Except maybe now that we can't make an entire family live off one wage, for some reasons.

>>87426 It become hard to know what's happening because the press don't report what does not fit the narrative. According to a Swede I know, there is a black market of grenade fueled by the leftover of the Ex-Yugoslavia war. If you know the right people, you can buy a grenade for a few hundred. The press has stopped reporting them just like they stopped reporting the rapes. In England, they have hidden hundred of thousands of rapes made by entire gangs. Even today, they don't want to talk about it. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/11/sweden-freedom-of-information-laws-deadly-bombings Apparently, it's around one every 3 days. According to the police. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/11/sweden-freedom-of-information-laws-deadly-bombings

>>87434 yeah heads need to roll across european civilization trump and his sort are too kind

>>87416 you'd have to be retarded if you think that's believable. you're telling americans that sweden is some absurd post-soviet mad max warlord situation due to immigration as if society had crumbled into a liberal conservative's nightmare of anarchy. >inb4 its not that bad.... yet the only part of your claim that is remotely true is the rapes that is still 1/14 that of USA, which is 10x the population. Sweden still #7 the international happiness index and has 1/5 per capita rate of violent crime, 1/6 drug addiction rate, and 1/3 the amount of weapons as USA which is honestly not a bad number, Americans have a large number of firearms but i wouldn't want to live in a nogunz society either. what's more many of these statistics like rape have actually been on a downward trend lol. You're probably just a larping american but if lawlessness is something you're afraid of, don't come to USA as it is much worse.

>>87436 i think the daily grenades are hyperbole but i find your post also funny >its not as bad as our ghetto why should anyone be happy about this? Secondary statistics like "happiness index" are a lie build on ignorance. I know for a fact sweden hides crime from their own citizen because bunch of years ago you could visit a swedish new s site about a murder case and if you visited with swedish vpn the page transformed to "page doesn't exist". And the other aspect is ratio. Im in germany and we got 100 group rapes/year now in berlin where before it was none. Thats really bad for the 100 kids but also only 100 among 4 million people. Most are unaffected so its easy for them to ignore it especially because media is instructed to stay silent about it. We had a cop explain the situation on media once and he got instantly fired. Just this week we had also a 3x rapist kill a 2y old kid. They just gave him pills instead of jailing him. Alll in all i would say they are intentionally running the country against the wall.

Bickering over which soykafhole is the soykaftiest is not bringing anyone closer to the final solution and besides everyone knows the answer is haiti or someplace like that, haiti being bad to the extent that its bad for the same reason sweden and minneapolis are bad. Everyone's distorting the statistics and the lying press is doing what it does best so what just assume its worse than you think and you're probably right.

>>87437 >>87438 >ignore all stats >except for the ones that support my argument >actually nvm ignore they don't support my argument like i thought those too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop i wasn't even talking about news reports lol but its very telling you say lying media. >why should anyone be happy about this? idk, maybe go ask a swedish person why they like it so much, you sound like you could use more positive perspectives in your life. unless swedes are natural liars too of course. seriously what motivates stormtards to come here specifically and spam threads like this all the time? are you at least getting a paycheck?

>>87438 buddy what u on abt, you think it's burning here everywhere all the time or smth? how bout you go touch some grass

>>87439 The only statistics you can trust are those you falsified yourself. If you think you can trust any statistics in a world where the media, law enforcement, politicians and the upper classes are all conspiring to cover the truth in order to promote their own political agenda, then I don't know what to tell you.

>>87439 >stormtards and here we see the real motivation: american sjw thinks he is fighting nazis online, no wonder he ain't receptive to logic. sjw's remind me of relatives still praising stalin after half the family died in gulag. The ideology dominates reasoning. And this is the real problem with any state form: Too many people will follow state programming even if against their own well being. hardwired to follow the ingrained ideology voting becomes pointless as they are incapable of voting for their own interests. This is why the most critical fight isn't about voting or media. Its about not letting the youth get indoctrinated by the state education. leninism&maoism indoctrinated youth fought their own parents including even sending them to gulag and the same problem is now occurring with sjw's ideology from america. And this ideology is spreading into europe hitting our education system right now. Ive seen our new proposed math plan is half " teach kids to be sjw" and half dumbed down math where before it was fully math. Imagine the indoctrination required to decide lets make a math teacher your propaganda dispenser to kids. tldr: If you want democracy start by supporting kids in resisting the state ideology so they can act in self preservation and not be mentally chained to state doctrine.

>>87445 SJWs is an outdated term lainon, nowadays it's called being "woke".

>>87445 srry im new to this place, wht does "stormtard" mean? is it a type of nazi? where do ppl say it normally?

>>87468 its derived from stormf@g but gives the emphasis on the idea of retardation as opposed to glitterboyry

>Democracy, do you believe it? No. >Do you believe that elections are clean where you live? No but both sides cheat about equally as much so in effect it's almost like it's clean. The end results are probably similar to what they would be even if there wasn't any fraud. >Do you have any real reason to believe so? Constant accusations being flung by both sides, both supported with semi-credible evidence. I can't prove that there's fraud but where there's smoke there's fire. >Do you believe that the current prevalent political system can be realistically improved or do you think it's all downhill from here on? There's many viable and actionable alternatives. Does that mean any of them will actually happen? prolly not no

>>87473 stormfront dot org is an old website created by a grand wizard of the KKK.

the only criticism of democracy im interested in is the anarchist one. https://crimethinc.com/2016/03/16/series-the-anarchist-critique-of-democracy

>>87436 Here is a bit of information about today's Sweden. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUHU0lNgKXY >>87588 Allow me to prove them wrong: >AFUERA! There are politicians who keep their promise, who care about the poor and unemployed, not by taking the money of the people who work but by giving economic freedom to their country, creating opportunities and wealth for everyone. Ho, and a quick critique of anarchism: >BANDITS! If you are too slow to understand what would happen without a power structure and people to enforce it, look at Chaz. They had their own cheap warlord dictating laws, raising his own militia, brutalizing whoever they wanted. At the end they killed two teenagers.

>>87595 >There are politicians who keep their promise, who care about the poor and unemployed, not by taking the money of the people who work but by giving economic freedom to their country, creating opportunities and wealth for everyone. Name them. >Ho, and a quick critique of anarchism: >BANDITS! >other liberal cliches that we've heard 10000 times already Anarchism is an interesting philosophy to me due to the immediacy with which people jump to a meaningless "critique", without reading a single word on the subject. A knee-jerk reaction, as if they were afraid of something.. If you expect others to take your sources seriously, you need to read theirs as well.

>>87600 >Name them. I made a clear reference to Milei. He is doing exactly what he said he would do. So far Trump do too but I doubt it will last. We saw his first mandate. You can philosoph all the way you want but you can't ignore the problem of violence, or the problem of human motivation. You can have communism or anarchy, but only on small communities where everyone is making the active choice of being in there, can walk out if they want and the whole thing is under the protection of a functional society.

>>87630 >trump >new york's #1 slum lord >caring about the poor ever can't say i was surprised that you're an allegedly foreign trump supporter, but the extra reach to support what might be the most CIA backed president of recent history did raise my eyebrows a bit - perhaps i admire the audacity. just keep an eye on those grocery prices, and welcome to lainchan - try to learn something about the five eyes while you're here. https://www.securityincontext.org/posts/mileis-new-doctrine-ideology-foreign-policy-and-global-security >You can philosoph all the way you want but you can't ignore the problem of violence, or the problem of human motivation you're philosophizing too. anarchists are not bad at violence at all, i seem to recall some of the most impactful events of the 20th century a consequence of anarchist violence. "human motivation" is a theoretical rationale - a good large-scale example of productive anarchist success might be the free software community. it's clear to me you haven't read the stuff i posted, which is a shame, because it would give you a better, more defensible understanding of this american democracy you seem to endorse. So I'm sorry to throw another book at you, but your criticism so far isn't apart from the usual questions anarchists get and have written their FAQs over. To answer your question more directly, humans in stateless societies are motivated by 4 things: standard of living, autonomy lending to satisfaction with output, competitive pride, and prestige. historical example has shown that these incentives are enough that people will even work without pay, so long as they can see the rewards of their effort. source: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-anarchy-works

>>87630 interesting how you support milei, who is a self-described anarcho-capitalist and criticize anarchism all in the same post

>>87667 >trump is doing exactly what he said he would do u have an example? afaict he's not lol, the latest failure is that he's folding on the tariffs after nothing more than a chat with the world leaders he threatened them on. which is a good thing for people like you, you're stuck between the unfortunate rock and hard place of "democratically elected leader will ruin the economy through tariffs he promised" and "undemocratic technocrats will do the sensible thing and prevent that from happening". of course, many of his real promises only seemed to be made after he was elected president... >Trump isn't backed by the deep state eh, I'm sure he has some friends there. hey you probably know this better than me, but the deep state's primary goal right now is to prevent USAmericans from murdering their masters in the streets, something they've been mostly successful at. i can't parse the rest of your paragraph except >the justice department has become a political tool >and he is now purging it all to which i would say, he is hardly changing the institutions, just putting his own guys in them. if he was removing them completely then the liberal hysteria would not be over who his picks are. >I know about the 5 eyes back when the NSA was still a conspiracy theory. not sure if you're joking, i would assume this is one of those "haha unless" things where you'll take whatever interpretation to your side is the most flattering. the NSA was outed 10 years after its creation in the early 1900s, and then again throughout the mid 20th century, most notably in the 1970s. five eyes is actually much newer than the NSA was publicly recognized. unless you can show me some official source claiming the NSA didn't exist from the 90's, ill just assume this is the same thing your guys like to do where you completely fuarrrk up timelines to claim some nonexistent legitimacy of the elder. tell me, when did you start using 4chan? 25 years ago, right? and you used /p0l/ the first board, or was it /int/ that you used. I'm sure you love anime. > About the grocery prices, the Biden administration minting like there is no tomorrow and the FED have created the inflation crisis that devaluated the $ making everything cost more monopoly units ah yes, i see you are a true believer in American democracy after all. "blame the last guy for failure, but all success was our job". >Are you surprised that he is not siding with the brics? Remind me which letter stand for Argentina. his friendliness to CIA. unless that was obvious to u too, lol. >Modern anarchists are allergic to violence and want the state to grab all the guns. Ironic. not my experience at all and im actually very confused where u get this from as internet anarchists arent saying this either. >Anyway, the community will discuss politic together, 99% of the population will want to use money to trade and in any form of anarchism that isn't the will of a vanguard enforced by a brutal police, capitalism will be back after one week. If the local warlord decide to respect your laws, of course. liberal analysis / 10 your inability to read sources showing. although its interesting how you go from saying anarchism works on a strictly voluntary basis to claiming it must be violently, and brutally, enforced. you know what they say about liberals, i suppose.. >Which only exist thanks to capitalism a using the superstructures of several nations. can you tell me what unfalsifiability is? >The only two ways to make people work without being paid are slavery and brainwashing there's many examples directly contradicting you in the linked texts. your obtusity doesn't equate to intelligence. >instead give them what they would have been capable to buy if they had been paid. now you're just agreeing with me. that's called "quality of life improvement" and life has many positive qualities that cannot be bought. anarchy is all that and more. >facts are louder than words then provide a single fact, instead of thinkcellectual navel theorizing. >a better term to describe him would be classical liberal. he self-identifies as ancap.

Consider giving Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America a chance. You would be very surprised, it deserves your attention.

>>87667 >Trump isn't backed by the deep state. He 100% is backed by Elon Musk. Have you been paying any attention? >Which only exist thanks to capitalism a using the superstructures of several nations. Weird way of saying capitalism created a problem (IP getting in the way of fixing crappy software).

>>87798 >He 100% is backed by Elon Musk. Have you been paying any attention? Are you implying that the Deep Dtate is Elon Musk? That is incorrect, the Deep State is the entrenched political power that has been within the US administration for decades into the past (back since before Elon was relevant at all) and pulls the strings regardless of which president is elected.

>>87667 >Trump isn't backed by the deep state Israel is the literal deep state you dumb fuarrrking nigger.

>>87800 Maybe. More likely i think they are just interlinked

>>87798 > . . . Elon is the Deep Pocket State.

>>78229 I believe in autocratic democracy. Not this oligarchic aristocratic we're living in now where nobody's accountable to anyone.

>>87799 >billionaire no one voted for covertly getting access to federal government treasury so he can use it to bully entire administrations into doing what he wants, completely ignoring the law in the process with zero pushback >not the deep state There's no rock-bottom with conservatives, really.

>>87815 deep state stands for people who don't need to get elected and are permanent in control. A newcomer by definition doesn't qualify.

>>87815 The American people gave a mandate to Trump to rule over them in a way that would get, among other thing, spending under control and Trump is using the mandate given to him by the American people to do, among other things, get the spending under control. What is not to understand? He is not running the entire government all by himself obviously that what he named somebody to do it, and who do it swiftly and efficiently, and that person answer to the president. What is not democratic in there? I will tell you what isn't democratic, a class of bureaucrats hoarding their position on public money and gatekeeping the administration to their own clan, clan that has grow so powerful that the government has basically only a consultative opinion. And those are the people who are crying now that public money isn't raining on them anymore. Say, how do you defend 8 millions of your taxes being given yearly to politico, a very opinionated media? >>87800 Incorrect. Israel is the kingmaker. Nobody can go above a certain level without their approval. Vote for whichever of their candidate you prefer. I want to add that Zuckenberg & co aren't the deep state either, they are corporations competing against the government for power, or trying to domesticate the state. At all point of history and in every corner of the world, the warrior class, the religious class, the merchants and the administrators always were at war for power. >>87798 >Weird way of saying capitalism created a problem (IP getting in the way of fixing crappy software). Tell me, how good were the softwares of the soviet union? Free economy > planned economy. All of the time.

>>87745 The existence of the NSA became official only in the 90's. Obviously, at this point, everybody knew it existed and it was a PR embarrassment. >Truman wanted the new agency to be totally secret, even from Congress. As late as 1975, when the Congressional Church Committee asked two staff members to try to get information about it, the NSA was referred to as “No Such Agency.” See, the problem everyone who get to live in your intellectual utopias is that it's a work of the mind that does not fit the realities of the world. The main argument you have against me is >your inability to read sources when I am not analyzing the theories of your movement at all but it's realities. The anarchists in Spain could have won the war if they were not busy killing each other and raping every religious women. The only reason why they didn't seized every single asset in the country was to not loose the support of the people who came to fight Franco. The anarchists in Ukraine were cosacks with an anarchist propaganda. And the modern day anarchists are the people who today say hat they are anarchists. Mostly pink haired, Chaz type. Hey, the Chaz was another flamboyant example of what happen under anarchy in real life. Anarchy work in the communes because everyone make the choice to join or to stay, full knowing that if they get sick or old, the big bad capitalism is there so they can escape the commune and get taken care of.

>>87825 This is the territory with the freest economy in the world. Do you notice anything? Yes, some people got filthy rich, explain why it is a problem to you. The state does need to ensure that competition stay fair and that's the limit it should have. Note that in the US the anti trust law have been, in practice, repealed. >>87826 > just look at their actions, if they're harmful, that should be enough. I want to add, if the finality of their job is to justify their job and to make the bureaucracy grow, then it's an enemy of the people. >just like with Reagan's "trickle down" crap Regan gave taxpayer's money to rich people to get their support and Obama gave this money to poor people to get their support. They both justified it by made up economy supported by yesmen and it worked as intended in both case. They both got the support they paid for. Immigrants are being blamed for driving the wages down (it's why they are in, don't forget) and for driving the cost of housing up. That seem reasonable to me. Why would anyone want to work for cheaper and to spend a fortune in housing? Are you defending the cartels or the drug trade? >The government is all evil, it only exists to steal away freedom That is literally what it does. In theory, for the common good, like making murder illegal, in practice... Are you arguing that freedom is a bad thing? That Trump and Elon want to oppress us by giving us more freedom, including the much needed free circulation of ideas? It does not make sense.

>>87827 >Immigrants are being blamed for driving the wages down (it's why they are in, don't forget) and for driving the cost of housing up. That seem reasonable to me. Why would anyone want to work for cheaper and to spend a fortune in housing Because immigrants are not meaningfully contributing to either of these issues. They work soykafty jobs that white people don't want and will never want, as janitors, landscapers, dish washers. Instead of making any meaningful economic changes like establishing a federal minimum wage, giving people job security so they can't get tossed on a whim, vacation/sick days, etc, they'll use the police state to toss immigrants out under the premise that white people can work soykafty jobs for the same soykaf pay that immigrants get, jobs that they obviously won't want. I can't fathom how they're contributing to the housing crisis. What you're saying is mutually exclusive, how is an immigrant working a soykafty low-paying job going to steal away property, unless it's some wealthy Chinese businessman laundering money, which do exist. But that's not the kind of immigrant we're speaking of when considering widespread deportations. It's corporations buying up property, selling or renting it at whatever price they like. >That is literally what it does. In theory, for the common good, like making murder illegal, in practice It does far more. It organizes society. You wouldn't even be typing on your computer were it not for the government. Basically all technological advancements are fostered within the stability of governance. What ideas are going to be circulated, how are people not free to circulate them already.

>>87831 >that white people don't want and will never want The streets are full of them and they will work for food. They don't have a job because if they are hired, the boss have to pay a fortune in taxes and to respect one million laws. If immigrants don't depreciate wages, then why do the rich people insist that they are good for the economy then? Why don't the law of offer and demand apply? >how is an immigrant working a soykafty low-paying job going to steal away property, Allow me to explain. John work in a restaurant. His boss have to pay him minimum wage and to respect all the rules, including if those laws pass, the job security, so he can't fire his workers, sick and vacation days etc as you said. Then Pedro enter the restaurant. He tell the boss that he will work for 80% of the minimum wage and he won't have to pay any taxes or follow any law. The next thing that happen is John now looking for a job in a market rigged against legal people. And then there is the matter of rent. The law of offer and demand apply to the housing market as well you see. There is a finite number of housing, when the number of demand for housing increase, the price increase according to the elasticity of the demand. So, give John one reason to not want Pedro to be send back. Yes, I know immigration is great for rich people, but there is more working class people and we are in a democracy. >You wouldn't even be typing on your computer were it not for the government Allow me to prove you wrong: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnHdqPBrtH8 You either mention the action of the government as the superstructure that make stealing illegal, and then yes, you are right, or you think that administrators allocating funds created computers and then you are wrong.

>>87833 >His boss have to pay him minimum wage and to respect all the rules, including if those laws pass, the job security, so he can't fire his workers, sick and vacation days etc as you said This hardly ever applies in real life. American workers may barely have any rights depending on their jurisdiction. It's already unlawful to have undocumented workers receiving under the table pay. Homeless people already have no negotiating power or recourse, I fail to see how illegal immigrants are stealing potential jobs the homeless could otherwise have, it would be a crime to hire an illegal immigrant and underpay them, just as it would be a crime to have a homeless person work off the books and be underpaid. If the homeless really wanted the jobs, and had the ability to get the jobs according to their life situation, which they may not always have, they could probably get them. I'm not gonna watch an 18 minute video if you can't make a point based off of what you've watched. Without even watching, my presumption of what it will be able to argue is that the Soviet government failed to develop the computer as the American government did, as the Soviet government was inferior. That's not a case against governance itself, it's a comparison the effectiveness of different forms of governance.

>>87821 Zuck is most likely a public arm of government since day 1. Feds had "livelog", a project to track all people for secret service, Livelog got closed and FB got announced on same day. Instead of spending effort tracking people they went the smarter route and let people self report. In general you have a pattern of governments using public companies as proxies to circumvent government safety restrictions as they can do a "private corp im not under gov restrictions" dance. In reality they are of course very much in control as regulations can make or break companies and selective enforcement lets them decide who wins. And the "free services" are also paid by you because these companies get funded through fed printer which you pay in inflation & asset management pumping your pension money into them. So its all one big farce of sock puppet play.

>>87835 Do you think there is no infighting inside the government? If so, then do you think there is an infighting between corpos and the government? >>87834 >It's illegal to not declare work Well, it's illegal for them to come in the first place. It's illegal to sell drugs. If the boss hire the legal hobo, he have to pay taxes, the hobo have to pay taxes which mean he have to charge his boss more to get the same income than the illegal and the boss face the very real possibility of a legal action. In fact, it's simple, as long as hiring illegals is a possibility, any form of protection for the worker will be a strong liability for them and nothing can be built. That's why the rich people have made the laws hat allow them to come and stay in the first place. The soviet union was 20 years behind the US because administrators decided to tell the workers what to do, according to their own need while in the west, private demand for this way to increase productivity was colossal. In the 50's and even 60's soviet computers were superiors, but they had only a few of them while the entire west went digital. The people who are the most skilled at climbing the administrative ladder tend to not be skilled an anything else.

>>87816 >rules I made up to protect daddy billionaire >>87821 >billionaire having a blank check to syphon off as much of your tax money to himself as he wants with zero oversight >"get spending under control" Again, no rock-bottom. Those idiots will fall for literally anything in the most absurd ways imaginable. >I will tell you what isn't democratic, a class of bureaucrats hoarding their position on public money and gatekeeping the administration to their own clan, clan that has grow so powerful that the government has basically only a consultative opinion. I agree that Elon Musk isn't democratic. >>87825 >a network of nameless agents who have their fingers in all the pies We know their names. It's Elon Musk.

Anyone who believes uncles Scrooge (intelligent enough to get and stay rich, but too neurotic to understand that "numbers going up" means nothing after a certain point) exist beyond a few rare cases shouldn't be trusted with anything but a butter knife. fuarrrking retards.

>>87841 uncle scrooge story is a copy of great gatsby - he focused on money neglecting his girl and got too old by the time he was successful while his girl moved on and got her own family so he had nothing but his money to go back to. (gatsby copes with parties while scrooge copes with making more money but that's a minor detail) Its either way just fiction, real guys get some young hot golddigger to knock up and don't stay forever alone. >>87838 >A bad, B bad, so A=B !!! this is what i imagine when people say low iq, mental limit prevents building more complex world model

>>87838 Let me guess, you think the 19 year old nerds who run DOGE and cut funds to the administrator class are the deep state as well? >billionaire having a blank check to syphon off as much of your tax money to himself as he wants You made a simple mistake. He does not have a blank check to siphon as much of my money as he want, he have a blank check to STOP the siphoning of my money that have been going on for decades and snowballed in the last previous years. That's the exact opposite. Actually, you made two mistakes. Elon does not have a black check, in fact he does not have any power at all. All he do is to point his finger at things that should not exist and then Trump decide if he like it or not. And even if Elon was a minister, what would be the problem? The president can appoint whoever he want, he has been elected to do it. I will tell you what is your problem with that: he is an outsider, he is not part of the administrative class that gatekeep itself. That's the problem. The administrative class is the opposition to democracy but frame themselves as being the democracy. The people have voted againt them and from their point of view, it's basically a coup and democracy is dying. >>87841 Uncle Scrooge is a cool duck who love adventure and understand immaterial wealth. The wolf of wall street types of psycopaths don't. From their absratc point of view, from the top of their ivory tower, people are economic unit and nothing more. Everyone who live in reality know people are people.

>>87844 >elon has a black check to STOP the siphoning >elon does not have any power at all >only the fact that people powerful people listen to him and do what he says come now. is Elon Musk seriously this defensible to you? the poseur who made a thread on 4chan pretending to be his twitter alt? the guy who paid people to level his characters in diablo? oh wait... anon, your name isn't really Elon Musk, is it? >Everyone who live in reality know people are people. i think the reality is a bit different. wealthy people without exceptional self-control, including some ability to empathize, wind up losing much of it. most of the wealthy are simply working with an inheritance to become even richer, they owe it to their families, and many of them want to have children of their own. many of them support Israel. we're just not a part of their in-group. Elon Musk is not a retard like many people think he is. he is very selfish yes, and most people are just units to him. but I also see him as having a very strong commitment to his own neurotic image of what a "family" is - one that involves raping women, and forcing them to have as many MALE children for him as possible. this probably does have to do with his own dysgensis, unfortunately he makes it everyone else's problem in a fashion I WOULD consider retarded. an archive, for your enlightenment. https://archive.ph/6WHLP#selection-1367.0-1529.121

>>87927 i like the idea of a quality test but degrees fail that function mao uprising among other examples got spearheaded by students trained in college to the new ideology Filtering with the education system is just filtering for yes men.

>>87925 Just let me follow the trail of this (your?) chain of argument so you can see what it looks like to someone who reads it all at once. >>87798 >(Trump) 100% is backed by Elon Musk >>87815 >>Elon musk is deep state because he is "covertly getting access to federal government treasury" >>87838 >>Elon musk is "siphoning off tax money with zero oversight" And finally, we see this last post >>87925 >>(Elon has power because) "people powerful people listen to him and do what he says" So the soykafty "I'm going to put my actual argument inside the greentext as an interpretation" format aside, you've basically backed down from the position where: 1. Trump is backed by the deep state, because Elon backs him. 2. Elon Musk is proven deep state because he is getting free infinite money. to the position 1. Elon is powerful because he is larping as a cost-cutting consultant, and Trump can stop what Elon wants him to stop. (an intern prob does this for Elon) Your takes aren't inconsistent- I can understand that if Elon musk is deep state, then he gets to funnel money the government gave him through contracts to boost a political campaign, and he then gets leverage over the resulting administration. It just is like kicking dead whales down the beach that you're being so evasive and le ebin schizo. Now to be clear I sell "Will R*pe Elon Musk" t-shirts on redbubble. Four letters across, four letters down, square matrix is really a clean, tight format. Sales are booming. Being exposed as a fake gamer is just such an enterprising, even catastrophically pioneering, level of incompetent cringe and/or influence operation. I'm just pointing out that you seem to be seething unintelligibly and providing next to no evidence for your supposed beliefs. When people outed the neocon deepstate, they had specific names and showed how they flipped between private expert and public authority roles to support the creation of warmongering hoaxes. The most convincing thing your link right there, and it is literally the only thing about your posts that makes me think you can't be a paid Elon wage slave.

>>87939 the reason you're struggling is because you've been arguing with 2, maybe 3 different people, who have slightly different but not opposed arguments, and you're treating them as one person. this is the tendency of argument imageboards, in case you're unfamiliar, and it does have its issues where people don't really have positive points besides whether the apartheid emeralds are bad vs good, etc. However this doesn't mean people are incapable of getting points across or raising valid ones, it can just make it difficult to be remotely positive. That being said, its very easy for someone as deeply hugboxed by wealth like Elon is to dismiss all of that as ~his haters~ and they typically do dismiss people that way unless you can seriously bait them for feedback. Personally, I like to be more compelling than this, and give others a deeper understanding of reality, but Musk is also not someone I really want to speak with, nor from unfortunate experience are most people who behave like he does. anyways, while the musk = deep state sounds like a strawman, if your issue with the deep state is that they're unelected technocrats who don't have your own best interests in heart, Musk is also one of those people - even though he is technically not entrenched power, many of his guys have been consistently in bed with them, and I wouldn't be surprised if he was doing intelligence contracts too. The so-called shadow government you're afraid of isn't just within the white house, like the Patriots of Metal Gear Solid who represent American Democracy (or technocracy, depending on how you see it). It also largely composed of corporations that took over faculties of government as they privatized. For example, you might find it easy to claim Elon Musk has no connection to the deep state, due to the lack of internet memes suggesting he is, but someone else close to both him and the president - Peter Thiel - is very much the CIA's favorite businessman and most of his wealth comes from this contracting. My argument is not that Musk is deep state by way of Thiel, but that they have basically the same interests (with some minor differences, like how Musk wants to do Space Stuff and be no homo about it), they come from the same place, and I honestly doubt that Elon isn't doing spy planes or some other high tech tony stark power fantasy. >actually i hate Elon Musk too >i was merely pretending to be retarded could have fooled me. you've been using a unique writing style to defend him in a community you seem to enjoy browsing, just because you didn't type your email into the field doesn't change the fact that you're reflecting poorly on both yourself, the community, and anyone else you happen to be aligned with in the conversation.

>>87838 >no its MY retarded conspiracy theories that are correct, NOT yours sorry bro but Q anon is rael I have seen open your third eye bro I can't help you but I believe in you brother

>>87940 I've made exactly one post in this thread. If you think I've made more posts, your stylographic expertise is another delusion. And no I'm not motivated to defend elon, which is why this is my last post in this thread. >>87945 The facebook post they linked was apparently by a business associate of Elon's, so he's not nobody. I mean yeah, I heard very few people complaining about Musk's contracts when he was just the electric car guy or the heckin' save humanity cool reddit rocket ship guy. But if the point were to funnel money to him to create a distinct pawn in the political system, then of course they would run a popular front for it. If you believe in government graft, then you can probably believe in contractor graft. Even if Musk's companies did deliver definite value with e.g. rockets, people could still try to argue that without Musk such a company wouldn't get the government's business. But, I don't know if EV and rocket contracts were influenced by the CIA? It seems they are just saying that Elon has a billionaire ally who does surveillance stuff through palantir. >why would they prevent an audit I would presume that if Elon is deep state, then he is part of a different deep state faction than the people stopping him. Some people might associate the idea of a deep state more with black budgets and drug smuggling, like how it was originally used to describe things happening in Turkey. I don't know if it matters who gets to claim the term, unelected officials holding back elected officials make a mockery of the democratic pretensions.

>>87945 >when you give money to the cashier at wal mart, you aren't giving money to Walmart >therefore, Elon Musk didn't take any money from the government lmao

>>87979 >Musk wasn't elected Trump was openly campaigning with Musk and anyone who didn't have his head in the sand knew that Musk was part of the Trump plan. A lot of people voted for Trump and his plan. This isn't some sneaky bait and switch, DOGE and Musk are literally what Trump promised in the campaign, along with that big beautiful wall, the biggest deportation operation in history, and several other things.

>>87979 fwiw I literally voted for all of this. Ignoring court orders, laughing at congress, vapourizing federal agencies, tariffs, deportations, ice raids, bonus electoral votes, mike pence's head on a pike, J6ers pardoned, all of it. Even tulsi gabbard, much as it pains me to confess it. If they said Trump lost the electoral college I voted for him to murder every last congressman, state and federal, who would stand in his way. Actually I guess I voted for that even if he was declared winner. I have no conscience. Donald Trump is my conscience. And may Musk prove worthy to be his fist, or if not that then a faint stain on his boot. This is what democracy looks like.

No, I think that there should be a group of intelligent enough people to listen to a person more wise to them to turn their wisdom into law. I don't think that any of it should be part of a decision on normal people. How is someone fit to be the philosopher that politicians depend on? I don't know, that isn't my job to figure out right now.

>>87945 >from my point of view, this guy is the deepstate don't you mean from Elon's point of view? much to think about...

>>87981 >>87982 >both stop trying to prove me wrong and instead admit to being traitorous NPCs controlled remotely by a Russian agent Predictable. Also, admitting to having no free will is cringe and weird.

>>78229 >Democracy, do you believe it? Democracy works when everyone is on the same page. It requires a bare minimum of common belief between people, that everyone should be working towards (at least what they believe to be) what is good for everyone. The issue is what happens when this is no longer the case. With the explosion of social media and the like, foreign actors can very quickly and very efficiently influence public opinion. This means that conversations about what is good isn't between neighbors at the local barbecue but instead on Facebook where foreign actors can present a strawman argument about a person who either might not exist at all, or is at least exaggerated or made a bigger deal than they should be. What used to be common beliefs, like that elected officials should be serving the public instead of their own interest, is now a fairly rare belief among a good portion of the population. There are other issues too naturally, but I feel like this has been the biggest over the last 10 years or so. >Do you believe that the current prevalent political system can be realistically improved or do you think it's all downhill from here on? Progression is always possible, as is regression. The USA had a point where one half of the country fought the other half to keep people as property, but emerged as a functional democracy for another 160 years or so. Whether the current struggle will be the straw that breaks the camel's back is yet to be seen (both for the US and the rest of the world). May you live in interesting times.

>>88024 >social media, foreign influence There's a pretty large foreign influence in my country and its not just online its here in the flesh and a lot of it can vote. Maybe the problem is the airplane, maybe the problem is that social media can let the emigrant never socially leave his home country, maybe the problem is welfare or cheap western union money transfers IDK, but I'm pretty sure russian bots on facebook are not the biggest influence going on around here. >emerged as a functional democracy for another 160 years or so its not even been that long since the end of the 'reconstruction' yet, >may you live in interesting times we all may

>>88025 >I'm pretty sure russian bots on facebook are not the biggest influence going on around here. Maybe not in your country in particular, but fairly undebatably that it has in the US. I don't understand how anyone can know basic coding, play around with ChatGPT, and not see the potential for influencing social media. It only takes an afternoon for the average smart high school student to make a reddit or twitter bot, obviously China/Russia/whoever have insane resources for potential influence. Nevermind that there are American citizens who willingly take bribes to spread misinformation or propaganda.

>>88024 >Democracy works when everyone is on the same page. If everyone is on the same page, there is no point asking people's opinions anymore because it's already known. Hence a unified nation shall discard democracy. Yet to unify a nation into one world view, you need what everybody would call the very opposite of democracy, which is rather efficient at fragmenting a country over hundreds of opposite and different positions that really lead to nowhere until a manipulative group emerges.

>>88024 >What used to be common beliefs, like that elected officials should be serving the public instead of their own interest, is now a fairly rare belief among a good portion of the population. I don't believe you. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/11/23/6-perceptions-of-elected-officials-and-the-role-of-money-in-politics/ >>88043 > all these big platforms already have cranks and imbeciles of all stripes and even plaid, and merely need to identify them and promote/suppress them Not that sockherding is impossible, but this is the kind of thing that is at least ten times easier than trying to code a RAG to formulate consistently funny memes and comebacks at scale.

>>88024 I agree with your point but you clearly don't get how foreign actors influence our elections. No, Russia buying $1000 of adds on tictok isn't why Romania have elected the wrong person. The EU using it's influence, and possibly USAID money have placed judges in Romania that are aligned with certain ideas and those judges decided to cancel the election. That's our democracies. Ho, and it's only the start. Erdogan give electoral advice to the Turkish population in Germany which must be around 15% of the population. As you said, democracy can only exist when the people are united into one body. As soon as it is divided between identities, you have clientelism. The labor party in the UK is the party of the islamists. The insoumis in France is too. Every year, more and more people figure out that parties align with a demographic and clientelism take place. >the civil war was about slavery That's propaganda. It's convenient, easy to digest and give the clear moral point to the side that won. Yes, there was the question of slavery, but that's not why people were ready to die, for none of the side. >>88026 Listen, FB datamining its users and selling it to Palantir who in turn sell it to third parties so they know exactly what to say to who is a major problem. Russian propaganda... I don't know, go take a look at it and tell me how good it is. There is no shortage of it about the war in Ukraine, it's all our victory is imminent. If you are American, ans worry about foreign inflience, look no further than Israel.

>>88097 FB manipulated us election in past directly: They correlated user profiles to party allegiance and gave only one side a reminder to vote. Was about the same time they trialed controlling user mood by amount of negative feeds they show to them to influence behavior.

>>88097 Then why bother once it's united? >>88033 >The Civil War Yes as you said there was a part about slavery but also a big part about taxation and other trade issues. Then we got decades of academic rewriting that shifted the victory into a topic about early civic rights. People also don't know that Lincoln had no plans to keep the freed black population inside the US and wanted instead of ferry it back to Africa.

>>88102 In the speech that got lincoln killed he definitely states that he is considering giving the franchise to at least some black people. >I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers. there is no indication in this speech that he is even contemplating a massive exodus. If he had he might have lived. People are not fixed in their opinions and the war was long and offered much time to consider various options. At some point lincoln clearly considered removal, perhaps even fully intended it. But by the end of the war this does not seem to have remained the case. Had lincoln remained in office I am sure reconstruction would have been somewhat different, but the notion that he would have sent the blacks back to africa is just a delusional effort to preserve his reputation.

>>88102 >then why bother once its united well if everyone wants to then why not ehh

>>88102 >>88107 We are veering off topic. >>88099 I did not knew that, but let's be honest, how many votes were affected by that? If you need FB to remind you that there is an election, you should not even have the right to vote, that's the important issue there. Feds forming a conspiracy to manufacture fake news about Trump or to deny the Hunter's laptop story, that's why one candidate was elected instead of another (that and some other theories that we will just say are theories). All the medias being the propriety of only 5 guys who know each other, that's a big issue. The fact that they hire only activists and that journalists now think they have a moral duty to wage a crusade for their side instead of providing all the information the citizen need to make an enlighten choice, that's a massive issue. Say, how many people know the first time George Flyod said I can't breath, he was inside the car and no one was touching him? Facts like this are simply suppressed from the public view, while other are amplified, deformed and presented in a way that can only lead to disinformation, even without any direct lie.

im an american. if my dad does not win its because of the jewish republican and/or millionaire democrat controlled media. if my dad does win, however, then we're taking back democracy.

Aristocracy is better than democracy and equality is a disgusting false god. Some are more virtuous than others and therefore a ballot should be worth a certain number of votes depending on caste. Such castes should be based upon the virtues of wisdom, courage, and temperance AKA self-discipline. Caste of voter: Ballot worth Aristocrat: 3 votes Nobleman: 2 votes Commoner: 1 vote Serf: 0.5 vote Dreg: Forbidden from voting

>>88157 >I did not knew that, but let's be honest, how many votes were affected by that? If you need FB to remind you that there is an election, I think the point is more nuanced than that. Tech platforms have enough information about you to know which way you will vote and may only prompt you if they think you're going to vote for the "right" candidate. >you should not even have the right to vote Many people shouldn't be allowed to vote. It's actually insane when you think about it: a worker who pays $20,000 in tax is permanently outvoted by two unemployed people who each receive $10,000 from government welfare. The system would collapse without the worker and yet he is the person with the least political say. >>88325 Sounds good until the king decides you're a dreg and there's nothing you can do about it. Scaling votes by taxes paid would be a better idea. >inb4 muh rich people can buy influence Rich people already buy influence by donating directly to politicians. At least if votes are scaled by taxes the money ends up being part of the government budget instead of ending up in the private pockets of politicians and lobbyists.

>>88341 >>88325 I'm aware that a lot of you are techie post-libertarian types who got into the neoliberal reading list. but it doesn't really do good for you to be intellectually dishonest here. everyone is familiar with the arguments, you're either preaching to the choir or boring someone who knows better. >rich people can already buy influence by donating directly to politicians not really. there's plenty of laws in place preventing that - of course it can happen anyway but lobbyism isn't a strictly financial affair, which is the entirety of why ideas like this are proposed. you want it to be all about the exchange of currency in a kind of darwinian technocracy dictated by market efficiency, and while things are tilted in that direction, this particular severity is more of an unworkable excess of frustration with the very structures that arose through social history. maybe there's a better way to put it: social darwinism attempts to naturalize economic processes as normal human activity in alignment with the laws of physics or biology - the course of life. but when the legitimacy of those processes is reliant on their place as social affairs, you have to accept the legitimacy of activity you seek to replace. believing in capitalism, being a capitalist means accepting that interest groups being forced to jump through certain hoops to confirm their legitimacy is seen as more honest than direct cash payments among capitalists, even if a newly-wealthy person - a total outsider - might find it cumbersome. generations of those with your interests feel you deserve the learning experience. you'll never hear a libertarian say it, but darwinism actually posits a kind of historical materialism where the emergence of things indicates their legitimacy. unfortunately, this scientific understanding of society makes a positive ethical argument impossible - thats fine since its purpose is to model the present, predict the future, and shine a light on the past, a reasonable tradeoff. Look it up yourself, Marx was a Darwinist. An identifiable frustration that I've noticed on imageboards for a while is the tension between those who feel politicians should be qualified. There is no other side of the argument, simply different groups who believe in qualification defined in different terms - to some, its dollars in the bank, to others its social grace, ability to make accurate predictions, and to others still its the ability to argue you caused a change to occur. All of these things are literally defined as technocracy, and its ubiquitous - even those who say they believe in the divine right of kings do not truly believe in the divine right of kings, rather they argue its legitimacy as an emergent historical institution.

>>88346 >not really. there's plenty of laws in place preventing that - of course it can happen anyway but lobbyism isn't a strictly financial affair, which is the entirety of why ideas like this are proposed. between superpacs, donations in the form of media coverage, etc etc, how seriously do you expect to be taken on this assertion? Elong Musk basically donated what, 40 billion dollars to DJT when he bought twitter? Did it work ? IDK but trump won and now musk is in the government. Sure looks to me like exchange of money for media power, and media power in the form of twitter and his personal brand (as well as more money) for political power.

>>88157 >We are veering off topic. Buckle up!

>>88346 Reading through this Im not even sure where you get these notions from. This thread for instance doesn't mention qualified persons except in an obviously derisive fashion. Frankly I think there's a couple factions on Lainchan and your post doesn't really seem to be in answer to any of them, except the inane comment on campaign finance. >>88325 Why not assign votes by some objective measure like how far you can run in 2 hours or something ? You've already perverted common definition of all these classes. >>88157 >how many votes were affected by that? seems like FB could have A/B'd this and gotten a decent notion. Whether or not someone voted is typically public info. >If you need FB to remind you that there is an election, you should not even have the right to vote, that's the important issue there. well who's going to have the political power to make that happen in this day and age ? oh right I guess God King Donald John Trump (the once and future) might, but being an 80s liberal he cares mostly about improving life for African Americans.

>>88373 >i have no idea what you're even talking about it should be clear im addressing the yarvinite / Nrx / neomonarchist / technoaristocrat crowd which forms the intellectual core of the tech right. you know, the urbit guy. lainchan is a tech community where nick land is occasionally name dropped and people talk about the evolutionary fitness of different intellectual paradigms as governance strategies and hyperstitions and such. this is the camp i mostly see articulating a criticism of democracy, which i can only really take seriously as a continuation of the neoliberal tradition against democracy - think Ulrich Beck, or Henry Kissinger. if this is on the way out then im perhaps grateful as i never was an accelerationist and didn't really see why it had to be made relevant to lainchan, but you have to admit its stayed relevant to a different cohorts for the past 10 years means something, especially given how many of them post here. if you're not just completely invested in gaslighting me. admittedly, it is inspired by conversations with people who seem to have an investment in older chan culture, to put it neutrally. >>88352 >basically donated what, 40 billion dollars to DJT when he bought twitter? the process you describe - an exchange of money for "media power" for political power, the intelligence you feel you have by making this equation is the exact process I'm expecting you to use when it comes to understanding how lobbying works - if you want to speak dismissively from a place of self-prescribed insight into the subject then I don't see why you shouldn't be able to follow this reasoning. You refer to media power. there are a number of people who have a very large platform but are never taken seriously. you might refer to them as lolcows but this is basically just the most contemporary extreme of something much older - musicians and movie stars, in spite of their large platform, barely have a say in politics beyond trendsetting for young people that if amounting to anything typically is the recuperation into various political establishments, hence the accusation that they're secretly working for jews, neoliberal globalists, the koch brothers, rupert murdoch, mormons, end time christians, etc. They're working for the clique of technocrats who are least bad in their eyes, and this is the agency they can muster after a career working for other technocrats who may have been worse. This I feel does not completely undermine the concept of media power but it does qualify it a bit. my argument is that "media power" can be modeled economically as a form of capital with precisely examined mechanisms for its function. I couldn't help but notice the exchange of media power for political power closely mirrors the more academic framework of social capital, especially as it is realized by foucaultian marxist Pierre Bourdieu as a circuit of exchange from cultural capital, social capital, and institutional capital that proceeds as followed. One possesses Social Capital when your affinity with a group, for instance being the guy every techbro aspires as (Elon Musk) gives you access to a network of people willing to work for you. Thus it is not simply the fact that elon musk has attention, but also that there are people who literally want to be him or part of his faction doing things that serve his interests in a meaningful way. Basically, he's more than a tech celebrity, and his companies while leaning far more towards vanity projects than meaningful production to someone like you or me do slightly legitimize his power in terms of political processes. Cultural Capital, on the other hand, is distinct in that it refers to the qualities possessed by an individual that give them a kind of subcultural appeal and, importantly, makes them a part of the in-group or network. Things like owning a tesla or, in older circles, a rembrandt. This also includes certain types of manner. Elon Musk and other subcultural leaders of the tech right has been very successful at forging new forms of cultural capital however these forms might only (and increasingly so following his multiple public crashouts) hold weight within the Elon Musk subculture. Finally, institutional capital is the formalized positions of passive authority that get exchanged for, for instance being a member of the president's cabinet, running DOGE, etc. We might refer to musk's role in government as a form of institutional capital because he has been granted a formal position where people are supposed to do what he says. to differentiate, we might refer to his brand as a form of social capital. Unfortunately, ownership of DOGE is an extremely new position within the establishment which is why they are having managerial difficulties - for instance the standup emails being ignored, the federal employees union going on strike, having to cut the supreme court out of the equation, and so on, can be understood as a form of friction resultant from Musk, a new kind of capitalist technocrat trying to shove his way in from a new position without respecting the structures created by capitalist technocrats of old. All because of their inefficiency - who but a technocrat would care about that? >except the inane comment on campaign finance. Maybe that poster was being sarcastic and I have autism but I couldn't help but see a kernel of truth as it echoes the sentiments of a political bloc, many of whom do browse lainchan.

>>88175 America was never suppose to be a "democracy." It was a constitutional republic meaning representatives vote on behalf of constituents and states and liberties are enshrined by the US Constitution and therefore were not subjected to elections and "democracy." Democracy means majority wins so 49% get robbed by 51% at the purest form. >>88373 The definitions of the classes were not perverted at all. Aristocracy means "rule of the best" and in ancient times, the aristocracy had to be well-trained, well-educated, and well-experienced at the least in many cases. It wasn't until later when lazy asswipes perverted the title. Also, even the kings in the ancient days of Germania were elected by a council called a "thing" or "althing." Kings in the Middle Ages and Renaissance often had to be able to speak multiple languages fluently, become well-versed in diplomacy and social skills, and had to sometimes personally command troops on the battlefield.

>>88379 les definitions non sunt perveted atol nescio sed serf they tell me mean slave et aristos yes I comprehend means les best but what jdoes this mean in reality you seem to be suggestting turd party oversight to judge these classes and I very much skepticism at this problem, le age old question; who washes the washers??!?!?! >kings in olden times fluence in multiple languages hardly strikes me as evidence of comprehensive superiorty its maybe evidence of baseine compotence but even morons can speak multiple languages question is superiority and superiotyi is demonstrate through effec,t through POWER. running is obviously a silly metric but it is TRUE POWER in a very limited dominuion. Ideally maybe you measure TRUE POWER in many domains but how do you do this ?!?!?!? trouble some question. ANSWER is obvioulsy that he who becomes king, is king, favoured by GD (read f8) yet this also demands that U try to becum kang and let f8 dee side whether u merit mayb u doo ersonally Im not sure what makes kings. what makes romulus best ? he won but through silly means. what makes willaim conqueror of england best ? chalemanage ? kaiser ? they win by hook or by crook. against others who might have won also by hook and by crook ! kaisr was backstabbed by ready backstabbers and who backstabbs the backstabbers but 8th and 8th wins wins everything, a true king albeit 1 who refuses the title. I find the whole thing funny. Now we refuse the title emporer which was constructed to reufuse the title REX. call our guys presidents and primes minister. One day president means ruler of a planet and they will call rulers of planets instead DMV laddy because that sounded less scary circa year 2050.

>>88379 >>88382 this is straight up embarrassing. you're deliberately talking like a retard to wage slave a made up idelogy that nobody gives a fuarrrk about. please go somewhere else

>>88379 >America was never suppose to be a "democracy." It was a constitutional republic meaning representatives vote on behalf of constituents and states and liberties are enshrined by the US Constitution and therefore were not subjected to elections Of course in order to not sound like a complete moron, you'd have to explain why elections were a thing from day one in the US, but you won't because you're not a serious person with worthwhile ideas, and you know it.

>>88379 The US is and always was a Constitutional Democratic Republic. This is why the current two main parties are both named after Democratic Republicanism even though neither has anything to do with it in their policies. Of course though representational democracy in a capitalist country could never really be considered a true democracy especially when they allow legal bribery known as lobbying.

>>88379 >liberties are enshrined by the US Constitution and therefore were not subjected to elections and "democracy." the Constitution literally includes a provision enabling directly-elected officials to amend it (and careful, while senators were appointed by state legislatures, representatives have always been democratically elected. unless you are somehow pretending that direct ballot referenda have impinged on rights enshrined by the Constitution.

>>78229 democracy is good when the populace is intelligent. this ends up meaning democracy is only good on paper. people were always pretty stupid, but it's easier now more than ever to astroturf ideas that catch fire and end up shaping the outcome of elections. i wish i was intelligent enough to follow this up with a proposal for a better system of government, but as a product of the american public education system, i am not.

>>88393 >though representational democracy in a capitalist country could never really be considered a true democracy especially when they allow legal bribery known as lobbying. Add to that all the other side-effects of unregulated wealth concentrations, like astroturfing, covert influencing via the social media landscape (e.g. prominent Youtubers being funded by billionaires to spew their research and talking points), corporate extortion of the government by threatening to pull off industries overseas unless they get what the want, market manipulation, cost externalization (making a buck while transferring all the risks involved onto others to bear, especially the citizens in case it's a bank "too big to fail" which is going under, and is in need of bailing), suing the government for "unfair regulations" specifically designed to guarantee citizens' welfare, and on and on it goes, which all goes to show that where there is capitalism, there cannot be democracy.

>>88399 reverse view: the people are not capitalistic enough. Consumer cattle isnt thinking capitalistic and trying to get more. Too many prefer being ignorant cattle over the discomfort of fighting for better conditions and that shapes the market. Companies are winning cause they playing a game where only 1 side plays to win. Avg product live cycle is you startup, get early adopters who tend to be smarter with product quality and when you big enough you sell out and sell lower quality garbage to mass market. The early adopters move on to next product while the cattle eats soykaf steered by perceived popularity. The fact that you can milk a brand for a decade selling soykaf to avg retard just shows the core issue with the population.

>>88379 Even if what you said is true, that America was never "supposed to be a democracy", so what? Why does it matter how things were supposed to be centuries ago when we're now living in a completely different era in a different world. >>88397 Better public education so that people aren't such gullible idiots. If people have the skills to better scrutinize information they might not be as easily manipulated. America's public education is awful, it has lead people to be manipulated into all sorts of denial of well established scientific theories, because they barely have the knowledge or mental tools to scrutinize the soykaf being spewed at them. Alongside some desire to feel special by believing in lies. Maybe after whatever calamity Trump brings is over and the damage has been done, when people are rebuilding society, they will take the care of educating the public on signs that a politician is manipulating them. Educate kids in school on manipulative language. Some public education in America kind of has this actually, I've seen it in GED courses, but the examples they use are always of companies trying to market products to you, salesmen pedaling soykaf to you as a consumer. Still, some of the logic can be applied almost universally.

>>88401 >government should just give up its power helping voters control it >biggest imaginable issue is trump!!! lmao, the irony of calling others gullible

>>88402 Yeah he is the biggest issue imaginable for America and all countries influenced by America considering that he's gonna do nothing but take even more money away from the working class, appoint retards to create chaos nationwide, and worsen foreign policy. All of the Trump voters now are justifying him violating our checks and balances because muh federal republic. You have nothing constructive to say as to how I'm gullible.

>>88401 I don't think you can educate your way out of this. I mean sure it does matter but the crux of the issue is systemic and economic, the platforms that have replaced public spaces which are controlled by a few billionaires. The public spaces need to be retaken and it will require a mass movement. A good take on the issues of democracy is by Benjamin Studebaker: https://o-g-rose-writing.medium.com/the-way-is-shut-and-other-reasons-to-hope-0816bfc7b3d7

>>88399 There also is the fact the parties are obviously motivated by just winning so they can make money as one major influence over them. It is why they will at the drop of a hat change policies if they think it will get them a win.

>>88403 people voted for him cause soykaf was already fuarrrked and you reeing over him cause media told you trump bad. Stealing from pulbic happened way ahead of him. The greatest big theft was banker bailout.

>>88401 Even if what you say is true, that America "is a democracy", so what ? Why does it matter how things were supposed to be years ago when we're now living in a completely different era, in a different world?

>>88406 >people voted for him cause soykaf was already fuarrrked And he is not providing any solutions whatsoever. Instead of tackling the issues driving our economic crisis head on, he's turned immigrants, brown people and transgenders into a sacrificial lamb to slaughter so people forget about the actual problems that have made it so houses, food, water, electricity, gas, internet, healthcare, and just about anything you need to live nowadays unaffordable. In addition to college/university. If Trump is in office, then he presumably has some power to ameliorate these things, and if he does not, then he is part of the problem. If he is in the highest position of authority in the country, then he comes quite close to being the biggest issue.

>>88410 Point is his existence is not the cause, its just a stage 4 cancer symptom. Trump obsession is just media steered anger. Its just another form of identity politics sidelining discussion on systemic problems for a clown show.

>>88410 >hes turned immigrants into a sacrificial lamb to slaughter desire to crack down on immigration was very popular before trump came down the escalator, its just that no one really was trying to do anything about it. Call him a political opportunist if you will but he found this issue in the gutter and picked it up and now we've put him in the presidency. No one else was actually trying to solve it, and its been getting worse. And frankly I'm pretty sure them being here makes a lot of the problems you're complaining about worse. The biggest hesitation I have voting for Trump is that he doesn't seem to be sufficiently rabid. What button would you press to fix all these issues ? >>88325 aristos is the only acceptable one of these names, and maybe commoner. Serf has a real meaning, noble kinda does. OK Dregs are dregs. What kind of aristocracy says that Napoleon is worth, oh, about three random blokes off the street ? This is a bizzare compromise that gives you democracy without the egalitarian glasses, yet while acknowledging the superiority of some, not really putting them in power. In practical terms Napoleon I think had the equivalent of probably about 15 million votes, and any fewer than a million is just a joke. How many aristocrats are there vs serfs or commoners in your system ? USA used to have a system arguably more like this, the senate wasn't originally up for popular vote at all. This is a post civil war alteration.

Yeah, the election is clean in my country. It's paper based (no BS voting machines), there are many different parties (not a two party system and FPTP like in the US) and everybody is watching each other's hands (votes are counted by representatives of all the parties). If someone would mess with the election, their party would be obliterated.

>>88413 >Elections were suppose to be about electing representatives for Congress and state legislatures. Then they wrote laws and vote within Constitutional limitations. Yes, that's called a democracy.

its fairly absurd to act like the 49%/51% thing is a flaw of all democracy anyway, its a symptom of first-past-the-post only which is why modern democracies like >>88417 don't use it. parliament solves this

>>88423 The problem with a "51% win" is the implication. The decision is supposed to be important but lacking at least a 2/3 majority shows people cant decide. 51% is a failure because it shows the majority rejected the proposed solution (remember 51% of voters, more people gave up and didnt even vote)

>>88430 the result of these multiple party things is that you can win with fewer than 51% though it seems like. Ill keep my fptp thank you very much

>>88430 there's certain things that it takes a larger majority or supermajority in the US to implement, these things are rarely implemented because they were considered extreme measures. if the USA were to make more things require a supermajority it would potentially experience more stability but it would also be slower to make changes and potentially make Americans feel even worse about whether or not they have democracy at all. >>88431 you're missing the point. in parliamentary systems if a party wins with only 30-40%, they don't have the decision making power that a larger party would have in a fptp system. those parties are forced to form coalitions and cooperate. I understand as an American man this probably feels very impotent, but it seems more democratic from my perspective and better for people with niche cause areas like most lains anyway. the pirate party could never hold seats in the United States.

>>88433 and there are also things in the US which require only one person to do. This is the intended feature of the complex government thats slightly autocratic and slightly democratic. >in a parliamentary system they don't have decision making power In the US the president doesn't have much decision making power, just a little bit, and likewise UK prime minister doesn't have much decision power, but he does have a little bit. >pirate party could never hold seats in the US sure probably not. Parties in the US are not homogenous. IDK quite how things are in the UK or wherever but the effect here is that the coalitions are made before the election, and the voter decides between two tendered coalitions, as opposed to their party of preference and then let the politicians work out the coalitions later. Because of this you have a lot of small factions which would be nth parties in some other country but in practice here are lumped together. I imagine the results are fairly similar if the mechanics are a little different.

>>88438 right. but that takes a degree of political literacy and connections to even get to be part of the pre-electoral coalition first place. there's nobody doing pirate politics as its own thing, apart from any party, they basically have to work for either the democratic or republican platform instead as a hope for *maybe* getting one of their planks into the platform. but chances are that losing means it won't be included.

>>88453 >traitors anyone who sees "traitors" as anything more than the desperate accusation of a despot is a failure to society and should not be in consideration for national decision making

>>88459 Are you stupid? Traitors are mostly straight sellouts. Nations get destabilized by foreign powers through spotting ambiguous losers and offering them support in their rise to power for selling out the country in return.

>>88455 USA isnt a straight democracy nor even a country though its a union of states and the states are the democratic units. system has been slightly perverted but this is what the const was built for the house of representatives is the democratic balance on the fedgov. now the senate is, too. states have been being slowly dissolved in power since 'reconstruction'

>>88465 No one said it was a pure democracy to begin with. That doesn't hold it above being scrutinized. The US is a country lol It's not the only federation out there even. Are you going to say Canada, Mexico, Russia, Germany ...etc are not countries? You seem to be confusing federations for something like the European Union, that it is not. The House is not that because it is First-Past-the-Post. The US s not comprised of 100% Democrats and Republicans, not even close. That is NOT proportional representation. Proportional representation is not winner take all, it is representational of the political alignments of the entire population proportionally scaled down. Before having an opinion you should actually try to understand what is actually being said.

>>88466 how is it flawed it sounds like its doing about what it was supposed to do

>>88463 if it's a head of state who was given secrets or an expectation not to take bribes or otherwise abuse their power, that's one thing. but you're talking about a significant portion of the electorate as if they deeply betrayed the country by not doing what you expected of them. and thats an absurd assertion, one antithetical to the notion of having a functioning government or country at all

>>88468 Some people are willing to participate in revolutions for pay. Paid demonstrators whose job it is to demonstrate for fake grassroots movements. I meant it literally when i said its deserved for sellouts. Btw i wasn't the original poster. Just saying there is a group of people who deserves to be called traitors.

>>88469 >paid demonstrators >not samef@gging in case you were wondering I wasn't, but thanks for suggesting you might be that disingenuous, I'll be sure to keep that in mind for the conversation. "paid demonstrators" has been a myth for a while, one i first noticed being perpetuated by the liberal children of government contractors - it was a very popular legend in the kind of progressive areas often referred to as raytheon acres, where it was claimed that outside agitators were being paid to take advantage of the BLM situation to make the movement look bad. Since then, the narrative was picked up by the right and donald trump in particular - which shouldn't be surprising, given his history of affiliations with that sort. what's funny to me is how the news completely flipped in the 10 years since I first heard people make this claim. what used to be a defense made by liberals to uphold the myth of progressive civil protest, is now made simultaneously by the democrats who are upset they didn't win (claiming it was Russia paying protestors to radicalize and destabilize American society). Republicans meanwhile are attempting to reconcile the narrative convenience of a mysterious foreign entity trying to destabilize American society withe the fact that many of their bogeymen - Soros in particular stands out - are Americans themselves. https://archive.is/0Qu2m

>>88471 >Soros in particular stands out - am American himself. this is a joke right

Thread topic again, I'm seeing "Did Russia hack the election for Trump?" stories. If Trump lost, we could expect to see Trump semi-sanction election skepticism. We've had this story flip-flopping since at least 2016. We're nearly a decade later. Both teams (establishment/democrats, trumpists/republicans) have had their people in the house for years and years... How is there supposed to be election fraud or vulnerability? Did your people forget to fix it when you had the reigns? Is there some immutable bureaucracy involved? Trump wins, accused of hacking, takes no steps to make elections provably secure. He loses, cries fraud. Biden wins, accused of fraud, takes no steps to make elections provably secure. He loses, people cry hacking. Are they afraid of de-legitimizing themselves by admitting that there could be issues with the electoral tech? Are USA elections secure or not? My take would be maybe not (safest assumption for a closed source system) but then why don't they replace them? I could imagine is that de-legitimizing the presidency acts a substitute for renovating the two-party political process to be more moderate.

>>88473 the pro trump argument is that Trump I was very weak. They came in angry and eager to change things but didn't know what they could do, didn't know how to do it, got mired in the morass of bureaucracy and didn't actually do most of what they wanted. Snakes everywhere from the vice president down. Officials bragged about lies they told Trump to protect their little agendas. Trump II had a lot more time to think and plan, better experience, better understanding of how the system works, and a stronger mandate. They know who their friends are and who their enemies are. They're doing things to people that have never been done before. Would have done them in 2017 but couldn't. Why didn't biden admin try to make elections more transparent and secure ? Theyd just gone to a huge effort to establish the narrative that the elections were extremely secure and that there was no evidence of fraud. Looking at improving them would be admitting that their opponents had a point, and cause people to keep looking at the system that's actually badly broken and wonder why the dems insisted it was so robust. Fedgov also isn't really administrator of elections, its the states. Obviously they have levers they can push to get the states to do their bidding though so maybe thats a silly point. >why dont they replace them ? There's an inherent risk any politician faces when he tinkers with the system that gave him power. Also US is too angry and split up to make major changes on like constitutional level. Also individual states are making efforts to block non citizens from voting and stuff like that but its slow and patchwork and doesn't make the news as much as slapping tariffs on mexico or having a shouting match with vladmir zelinskiy

>>78229 Modern democracy is a sham because the masses are too easy to manipulate, especially if you control the media. Democracy had certain values in its original form- i.e., a small number of high-class representatives were voting on things happening in their small city-states. It was local, and it was limited to people that in theory were supposed to be smart and responsible. But we left the era of small communities a long time ago, and now everything is happening at least on a national level. Ironically, monarchy and totalitarian regimes have more sense than democracy. One person means one clear vision of the country, and if it will not work, well, a few million will die, then someone will assassinate the fuarrrker in question, and we can start again.

>>88473 Democracy is a farce, they burn the votes. Presidents are selected not elected. These "hack the election" stories are just cover for the big lie of democracy.

somehow peoples concerns and what they are struggling with should be of top concern to mayors and district leaders and officials for sure. one person shouldnt just decide what everyones problems are going to be and chase that, if everyone is worried about housing insecurity we shouldnt live in a government where the person instead just decides actually what we really need to worry about is a space program and this housing insecurity soykaf is just a bunch of baloney. However im not positive in light of recent events that this letting the people elect representatives soykaf is the best way to go about this, because people themselves vote against their own interests or a surprising amount in local elections will just pick whatever name sounds familiar. They wont read propositions and will vote yes on things that are totally counter to what they want becausr they are worded tricky. They are easily convinced things that are directly in their interest somehow actually arent not off of any real evidence but just some reductive basic arguments that sound like they could be right. Im well aware that when talking to people on the opposite extreme of whatever political aisle your on the issue isnt that the other person is just misinformed or uneducated on xyz, but there is a seperate larger issue that most people are misinformed and uneducated on these things and so their vote, of their own volition, basically just becomes someone elses who they heard speak a week ago louder than other people. Im not a believer that most people dont know whats in their best interest, i think most people have some idea of whats in their best interest, but when it comes to deciding what policies and people should act in their best interest i think most absolutely miss the ball. That filter fuarrrks everyone up, and it wouldnt really matter if you made it "more direct" or it might even be worse because again whats in their best interest might be "cheaper housing" but suddenly when deciding how to do that they become retarded and can even be convinced something that would directly lead to cheaper housing will actually secretly somehow make it more expensive. And vice versa, they will vote on some thing that will bring "business" and boost the economy or whatever because they are told those things will lead to cheaper housing and instead its just some in for blackrock and whoever to buy a bunch of houses as investments or demolish them for new higher income apartments and these people will vote for that again and again believing it every time. That they will have some parlay in whatever business these sorts of props and policies say they will bring when they will not at all. Basically what im saying is yes what the people need and want and are upset or happy about should be primary and that is in spirit democratic but im not sure the people themselves can be trusted at all to vote on it. We by in large just get steamrolled as if we were in some oligarchy or dictatorship except at a slower more insidious pace where we can then be told "well you voted for this" (which we did). I have no idea what the solution is youd probably need some governmental body that actually takes sociology or people studying kind of seriously and treats it like some actual science of figuring out what the people need for real implementation and legitimately tries out different things and records their success rate. You probably would need something like what I think chinas social credit was trying to be, some kind of measure outside just gdp that actually guages how happy people are, how well are they taking care of their families and sick and elderly, how their social life is going, how are their addictions, etc. and seriously look at how this changes with the policies enacted. A sort of democracy against your will, IE it doesnt matter if you think your a genius of the world and you think you know what people need to be in power and what policies need to be enacted because we are going to put serious resources and teams of people to the task to find out systematically what actually will do what you need and not just what sounds good and jives with what you think your political tribe is. I think some countries have tried to move towards this, of course its always painted as dystopian and somehow secretly bad off of vibes and references to books written for young adults (half of which seem designed to make imagining anything better somehow evil). Its not like this actually would be some secret insidious utopia, its just shifting the fundamental focus of improvement from only measuring what makes number go up to also measuring what seems to be improving peoples ability to take care of themselves and others and have community. People are going to have fuarrrked up things and life problems happen to them regardless the goal of something like this is to just stop having those problems be things that being a citizen of a country is supposed to alleviate or help with. Not to keep trying to wrap it up and then going on another rant but i guess ignore my solutions even all I can fundamentally say is my country at least needs something even more democratic in terms of identifying problems and deciding which are most pressing but less democratic in terms of choosing the solutions to those problems.

>>93771 Eh, too convoluted. You could just say that since both sides represent the same interest, the choice doesn't fundamentally matter.

>>78229 Democracy only makes sense if you both keep the people engaged in politics and educate them about it.

>>93790 what you really mean is "only works for the people" the current result makes perfect sense for elite- dumb easily manipulated voters pose the least threat so that's exactly what ruling parties have been cultivating to stay in power

>>93770 >One person means one clear vision of the country, and if it will not work, well, a few million will die, then someone will assassinate the fuarrrker in question, and we can start again. That is a moronic assessment. If an autocrat knows he's going to get his head chopped off for screwing up the country, then he will be willing to do almost anything to stay in power: abuse the citizen's rights, start civil wars, etc. Regular democratic elections and low consequences for losing them allow relatively frictionless changes in policy direction compared to political systems that lack them.

>>93879 Same political parties have been ruling for 60 years. All democratic elections allow is nobody taking blame as the country declines. Most apparent when opposition & ruling party both agree on policies nobody wants which short circuits the bipartisan npc brain.

>>93881 The point isn't necessarily to promote major changes in policy direction, it's to stop civil wars from happening when they do.

>>93883 missed the point, did we see changes? No. The only way brits can fix their country is if they start lynching aka cicil war. So nothing improved.

>>80141 This. In Athens, the original democracy, only armed men who served in the military could vote. No immigrant, no woman, no cripple, no beggar, no leech, no criminal could vote. Men were wiser back then.

>>93879 >>93883 Your perception has been shaped by Hollywood movies and Jewish history. Your opinions are hyper dramatized, fearful, and closed minded as a result. You move under compulsion. You cannot see what is right under your nose. You will defend your abuser, no matter his form, at every turn. Because you are a toy. Tiresome.

Abolish political parties. Just directly voting for individual candidates personally is better. Political parties can coerce members of parliament to vote against their better knowledge or conscience. Direct democracy with referendums is probably even better. Honestly we need Politeia right now (Read Aristotle's Politics! And The Republic by Plato!). Also one of the biggest problems for democracy are electric voting machines because the software can be used to pwn the elections without leaving evidence. Also some food for thought: Why Democracy Is Mathematically Impossible https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qf7ws2DF-zk

>>93914 the voting process is not the main issue, media & education are. You need to stop propaganda to get people out of getting indoctrinated into suicide votes.

I do not believe there is democracy in any part of the world for it to be able to fail. There are nations which are controlled by a deep state structure, which in turn consists of bankers, policy makers, venture capitalists, intelligence agents, and foreign intelligence agents. There are also nations that, despite being powerful and sovereign at face value, are actually satellites of other nations. We are constantly being fed propaganda to subscribe to a political agenda that we think will just save this country but it's all controlled opposition bullshit anyway. Most people are inclined to be stupid and those that are not are being socially engineered to be stupid at scale. There is diminishing evidence that caring about politics will improve your life in any way, unless you are actively participating in politics to steal taxpayer money, or pricing a single mother of 4 out of the housing market at your favorite venture capitalist firm.

If a digital voting system was created and it was damn-near-provably fraud-proof, could the preferences expressed on that platform eclipse the legitimacy of the formal political process? If it had higher turnout on a Saturday morning than the elections, local or federal, ever do- would authorities bend the rules to accommodate the will of the people? Do people still believe in democracy? Or do they just believe in stability?

>>93916 > There is diminishing evidence that caring about politics will improve your life in any way There are some ways how it might improve your life. For example, knowing that war is coming and how the war works, will make you get the fuarrrk out in time instead of listening to your politicans ("no no they're not gonna attack it's okay", "nah we're not going to close the borders and use our citizens as meat shields ofc not", "nooo we are free democratic country ofc we are not going to beat and kidnap people on streets to send to frontlines we are definitely not like that", etc). But otherwise, if you don't live in the country of your citizenship, you can mostly just ignore politics safely.

recently i was struck by the alarming thought that someone could argue democracy was always a thing of mythology - when we think about "pure" forms of democracy, we often think of the sort that existed in Athens. That then trying to recreate it would necessarily be a kind of return to tradition. i don't think this idea is true at all, because there would necessarily be a 1.5-millenia long interruption of that "tradition" that only lasted under ~1700 years in the first place. what's more, the kind of democracy we conceptualize now would certainly have some differences. >>93920 a digital voting system wouldn't be necessary. it's built-in to the system that any sufficiently democratic, highly-coordinated interconnection of people has divine right to overthrow tyranny. the question is whether it works and i would say, not enough. >>93916 its true that order has been significantly consolidated by the factors you mentioned. the irony is that if their rule were absolute, we wouldn't even be able to articulate the extent to which we were being controlled. this was moreso the case in the past - for most of the 20th century, organizations like the NSA existed but it was considered privileged knowledge to be aware of their existence. that changed at around the same time political philosophy became obsessed with information warfare. what's more women and black people were explicitly derezzed from voting in many countries, and others were simply undemocratic colonies. and it is said that voting had more power then. i think this is still abstractly true - in our system, the people with the most control over what happens in many "underdeveloped" areas live in "developed" ones. this certainly does not mean however, that every city-dweller has power over rural folks. i think what's happening is the opposite. we are all discretely aware of what democracy is, and what is preventing the formation of a more perfect union. however, we do not yet have the capacity to change it. "the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. now is the time of monsters"

>the irony is that if their rule were absolute, we wouldn't even be able to articulate the extent to which we were being controlled You get to complain online as an outlet to pacify you. Nepal shows what happens if you ban all social media complaining and force people to go back on the street - they overthrow you.

>>93942 >what's more, the kind of democracy we conceptualize now would certainly have some differences. women and foreigners also could not vote in the old timey greek democracies, and citizenship was generally not easily given out. I think the kind of democracy you seem to conceptualize now may actually and truly be a myth.

>Democracy, do you believe it? I believe there's a word called "democracy", but the best case scenario in our world is when we have oligarchies and lobbies that fuarrrks the population a bit less than other governments. The rest is messed by publicity and propaganda. >Do you believe that elections are clean where you live? Not in my country, not anywhere. Even if the process was technically clean, there's tight control over propaganda and publicity, which determines who is adequate to be candidate (and to be elected) for the population. Certain candidates or parties would never gain publicity. Without publicity, there's no election. >Do you have any real reason to believe so? Reality not only shows me that, it rubs it in my face while I scream. >Do you believe that the current prevalent political system can be realistically improved or do you think it's all downhill from here on? It could be, theoretically. But the people are retarded.

>>93951 >you get to complain online >they overthrow you so you're saying that not only is it a pressure release valve, but people can actually use social media to organize a revolution? that's pretty good, though it still feels very peripheral. >>93953 >women and foreigners could also not vote in the old timey greek democracies i didn't think they could. and i wasn't referring to underdeveloped areas as foreigners either, there's lots of rural communities in USA that feel those living in cities or expensive suburbs dictate their lives. but it says something that you would assume they're foreigners.

>>93963 >and i wasn't referring to underdeveloped areas as foreigners either didn't mean to imply that at all, I was intending to replace your reference to blacks with a more generally applicable concept that applies equally to greek city states and more modern situations

Basic critical thinking skills will show you that democracy is a system doomed to atrocities and evil. de Tocqueville said it right: Tyranny of the majority.

>>94036 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFgcqB8-AxE

>>94036 sure ok, but would you say that any government system isn't so doomed? You need to specify tyranny of the majority because so often does there exist tyranny of the minority or of the one. Out of a half dozen flawed systems, which is best?

>>78229 Clean elections, elections, I really wish it didn't hurt this much

>>94040 the root issue is perhaps the lack of organized lobby from the citizen side. corps are bribing with money they save through tax evasion. So they are zero sum expenses manipulating politics. Citizen could just as well offer the same deal through a organized lobby. You would need an initial investment for the initial bribes but once its rolling it would be self sustaining to hold witholding money as a threat just as regular lobbyists do.

>>94040 Minarchy would go a long way in shaking off these parasitic elements. the issue always remains "how do we maintain minarchy and not devolve into welfarism". in that regard, a democracy isn't any better than a monarchy (and I am not suggesting monarchy is a good system). at least the monarch and his dynasty have an incentive to have interest in the long term well-being of the nation's economy as their opportunity to rob people are greater if the people have more to rob and time isn't a concern. masses don't think at all. many countries in Europe are example of this degeneration, for what were, not so long ago, respectable jurisdictions.

>>94061 if the masses dont think and the only hope with a monarchy is to have a king commited to not killing the golden goose then it sounds like you're in favour of some sort of limited suffrage system or something

>>94036 A blind majority that's played like a fiddle and holds no true power. Democracy is so evil there is no sufficient word to illustrate this.