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I thought I'd share my thoughts on here since this site seems to be quite libertarian friendly.

Does democracy provide real choice because you get to vote every 4 years?

What if you take that concept for anything else, let's say cars. There is only 1 car company in the world, Ford. You get to send Ford your suggestion every 4 years "I want SUV" or "I want fuel efficiency" or "I want a convertible" or "I want a pickup truck". And whatever suggestion was most popular, Ford would do that for the next 4 years.
Do you still call that having a choice?

Yes, it's a choice. The question is: is the choice a good thing? What is the good thing, anyway?

This could be a good thread.

I think you being a bit to generous in your ford analogy. I would replace "I want" with "You can have" .

I think that the current voting system acts more as a blunt accountability measure. Preventing a minority group from pursuing their agenda indefinitely.

The choice is whether to vote or not.  All the other bullshit is designed to misdirect your attention from this fact.

Democracy implies you are forced to be a member of the group. If an action is voluntary, by principle, there is no need to vote about whether taking it or not, only those interested would partake in it while the rest of the audience would move on. Now, some prefer that to a single guy making all the decisions, but to pretend that democracy is somehow legitimate because it is the "will of the people", as opposed to the will of dictator, is a farce. If the dictator is illegitimate because he enforces his decisions on the group, then so is democracy for enforcing its decisions on the minority. As such, unless your choice aligns with the majority, you ain't got bananas. Another case of "you're free as long as you do what I tell you".

It is certainly a choice, just not a free one. The voting booth is simply a suggestion box for slaves.

So no one likes the simplicity and clarity of my analogy?
I've used it on statist and it worked like a charm. Everyone understood exactly that it would be silly to have a business run that way and call it choice. Hence the statist was having a hard time defending his "voting = choice" position.

I just thought I'd share. I'm not sure whether any of you agree with my analogy or not d:

To me, democracy is the idea that having a choice between slave owners makes one less of a slave.

But do you have a choice? To me, democracy is a weighted random number generator that decides between slave owners where I have a 1 in 5 million chance of modifying the outcome.

Democracy is the cows in a field voting on which farmer will raise them and milk them.

I'm gonna try to play devil's advocate.

Of course it is a choice, it is the citizen's obligation to demand that the candidate they elect will create the governance structure that allows the citizen to have additional choice in other aspects of society, not just the election. No one is forcing anyone to be a slave explicitly or implicitly. The citizen has the choice wheather to challenge the status quo or not, and accept the consequences of that choice.

That's ironic since, by some interpretations, voting is considered "challenging the status quo".

It was directed against the notion that "it is a choice between slave owners". If there are only slave owners standing as candidates, then stand for something other than being a slave owner. Otherwise accept the consequences of your vote.

The citizens cannot make the informed choice and it is impossible for politicians to be informed.

In our jobs and day-to-day life, we all specialize in some kind of knowledge and field. Beyond that, we are ignorant, so to speak.

I don't know medicine or how to build houses. I just know how to make website.

The knowledge of humanity is distributed. The bigger the population, the more knowledge you can store in our civilization.  However, our civilization becomes far more complex than for any puny human beings to understand.

[rant]
I was talking about this with a friend recently. We basically said for a society to survive it must be able to deal with information about the environment, relating to problems that threaten that societies existence.

As the problems become more complex and varied, requiring individuals to become more specialized and orientated to specific problems, then the ability to transfer information between sectors of the society will become less. Now this by itself is not an issue, it becomes an issue when information about an external problem can not be disseminated to those who face danger from the threat. So far this is only relevant to external problems, not political.

We postulated that one reason political threats occur, threats that arise from agents within the society, is because there is not something that links the welfare of all agents within society to each other, we defined "link" as what is felt by me is felt by you and vice versa. This is apparent in all ideologies;

capitalism -> basically a free for all, theres no link between those with capital and those without.
communism -> theres no link between the people who do something for the collective and those who don't.

It is just a fact of human nature, a fundamental deficiency of human intelligence. At this point in the discussion we think; "Given the way the world is, how do you link the welfare of all agents in a society?" So we said how should a internal political threat be dealt with?
Using the logic outlined above this meant that all agents within a society would need to have a understanding about relevant political threats. Now this becomes impossible if the information related to these threats can not be distributed and processed by all agents. This is where I put your statement.

Now what about external-political threats? Lets imagine that there is an external threat of some sought. This threat is so complex that it requires a small group of individuals to develop amazing capabilities to handle and understand this threat. These methods are beyond the reach of any individual outside of this small group. This threat is going to destroy a significant part of society, including these individuals, but this threat is a conscious entity, a god of some sort, and if the small group co-operates with this god, they will survive but a larger part of society will be destroyed. Now what would happen if the welfare of all agents within the society were "linked"?  Or what would happen in a society with agents that could transfer and process more information, thereby spreading information about the "god threat" and "political threat"?

To me this demonstrates two ways to mitigate this risk: an increased welfare linkage between individuals or/and agents transfer and process more information. Simply more empathy and greater education, by force/mandatory.

[/end rant]


So the premise of your argument is that there are so many problems faced by civilization, that it is impossible for politicians to make the right decision and consequently citizens?
Why do politicians need to know about all problems? We don't need some pseudo-oracles, we only need to gauge the intentions of other agents as humans generally lack empathy. Once you gauge the intention of agents that problems are delegated to, then you need to gauge the skill. And then you need an ongoing structure to manage both, i.e transparency and accountability.

I wonder if anybody has ever calculated the chances of a vote making any difference in elections. I bet the chances are compared with those of winning a lottery, if not worse. You probably have much more chances of dying in your way to the voting center than of having your vote making any difference.

There are some math people that proved that Democracy actually do not work perfectly ever.

For example, we have candidates, A, B and C.

If they get: 45, 35, 20 percent respectively, the 45 percent guy wins.

But then, you will notice, that 55% of the population still do not want that guy.

In Brazil for example, in the last elections, we had Dilma Rouseff (ex-terrorist, communist), José Serra (socialist with right leanings), and Marina Silva (green party, european style of green party...)

Most of the people you asked, clearly did not wanted Dilma, and preferred Marina, but knowing roughly how crap math work, a good amount voted for José Serra, believing he had more chance of winning than Marina

In the end, Dilma got less than 50%, Serra second place, and Marina a close third. Dilma won, and is our current president, but if you ask people around, they regretted voting for Serra instead of Marina (that still surprised with the amount of votes she got, people were expecting much lower, considering how irrelevant her party is).


So you ask around: Do you voted for Dilma? Do you like Dilma?

People usually, will say no. But Dilma still won, because she had the most solid voting base (thanks for her vice-president being of the most powerful party, and her party being popular too). The anti-Dilma people could not organize to vote on a single person.

In the Bush-Gore election of 2000 I think it came down to a thousand votes or so. That's a pretty tiny number considering all the people who voted.

There's no real democracy in the states. I mean, democrats or republicans, are you joking? what kind of option to choose is that joke???

In other countries, they at least have smaller parties with seats in congress.

voting is actually a choice but in today's politics individuals are not allow to make there choices.

The Jones Plantation
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/vb8Rj5xkDPk/hqdefault.jpg?custom=true&w=246&h=138&stc=true&jpg444=true&jpgq=90&sp=68&sigh=R4MCJpdmebaeuIfj1vwST4XzuLw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vb8Rj5xkDPk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vb8Rj5xkDPk)


8)

Democracy is not perfect. Some would even question if it truly is possible to have a democracy. IMHO, still better than having no say at all though.


This is also the issue here in the Philippines. We never have majority presidents, and then they wonder why people are always hostile and never contented.

This seem to be more a problem of the voting procedure rather than being a democracy. Winner-take-all just give the position to who ever have the most votes among candidates rather than who is liked by majority. Maybe they can just have run-offs to solve this, though the problem could still be present on 1 vs 1.

Given the awareness of the current population, I think the choice of candidates that run (I assume you're referring to the US Federal elections) make perfect sense.  Most of them are candidates that are heavily supported and financed by special interests.  As the population is not yet united, they can be played and manipulated by political candidates.  The population isn't ready for an honest politician.  Ron Paul was an honest libertarian candidate that didn't have a chance in hell of winning.  Even Bernie Sanders is honest, with a more socialist approach.  Both don't take funding and don't support corporate/banking interests.  But we ended up with Hillary vs. Donald...two selfish people that show many traits of being sociopaths that are able to lie day in day out.  And that's what the people voted for and accept.

When the awareness of the population is ready to scrap personal and special interests for the benefit of society as a whole, the type of politician that makes it to the top will be very different.

"There are no political solutions, only technological ones; the rest is propaganda".  Politicians are absolutely useless, and when we understand that and they become obsolete, leadership can turn to tech innovators.  The people that can solve issues with technology.

A great video, this is how a modern government machine works. The rules say you have to pay taxes, when you do, you're contributing, when you don't, you're stealing!
When you take from the government you're send to jail, when the government takes from you, it's all fine.
Democracy is a great coverup. We think something will change when we vote and all things stay the same.

I believe that democracy is not the best choice for a country today. It may be good when there's a less number of people but today with countries having 10mil+ people, it's kind of hard to satisfy everyone. Also the situation can be stupid as it is here, majority of people vote for the one party and let's say that that party get's 40% votes and some underdog party gets 5%, not enough to cross the census but they enter a coalition with the major one and bam they're in regardless if min % for census. Democracy is failing.

In a society where the majority of idiots that always came to power will come the same idiot. Or the clever who deceive the stupid. This is the essence of democracy. Probably for this reason, it may occasionally happen that revolution. But you will agree that democracy is better than autocracy.

How is that a choice? It is not even a choice, you are saying that the people are saying what the president will do? The president can't do anything the people ask him, or tell him, and we know how people think nowadays, when the president didn't do what the people want, they will be bashing the president.

Well, the thing is always going to stay the same when it comes to politics, the people are there in power because of money from huge multinational companies to be able to fund those really big campaigns that they must run to be able to run seats. You may think that the smaller parties are going to make the difference here but in reality, the 'smaller parties' are also going to be present in both the RNC and the DNC as well.

They might not be as prevalent, but different Caucus' such as the Freedom Caucus in the Republican Party make a big difference when it comes to the GOP having enough votes to pass items through Congress. So that argument is pretty invalid but, and it's an overall waste.

Voting is a choice, and if you want to participate in the democracy fully as you should then you'd be voting for people that you think are competent for the position.

I totally agree.The problem is not  that you vote every 4 years (there are exceptions that there are elections going sooner) .Indeed politics is structured in a certain way that is predicted and predifined.I speak for my country Greece which Is an example of that, as there have been many and different politicians last 15 years  and the results remain the same.

No, democracy is just another bullshit, so the politics say, ok, there you have, you have a choice to vote, but only shitty candidates, where is obviusly no choice, ohhh better not to talk about that votes are fixed too, and we vote candidats who will obviusly only screw country even more, in our country, they steal and they are still free, on loose, I mean, if I would steal such ammount I would be imediately in prison, and now, same people who stole from country, is back, and now we vote them again, just to steal from us again, and if any other democtratic party want in, it cannot, because the mayority of people in our country are old people, who believe everything as they see it on TV... ohh and one more thing, offcourse when the country was broke, we got higher taxes, and still are, tax for allmost everybullshit we know, except Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencyes, that's is why I love bitcoin so much....

I don't know whether this has been discussed here or not but does anyone know the real name of North Korea.?
It's Democratic republic of Korea, yes, there will be an election every 4-5 years and everyone votes for a single person, you know who.
For those who didn't know this, Google.

There are still many countries that practice democracy as their system of government. And so far, I like how our country is a democratic country because we can do whatever we want to do, say what we want to say, and express what we want to express as long as we abide by our country's law and we are not doing anything wrong that can ruin one's reputation or being.

NO it's a complete sham. Democracy is vulnerable to a 51% attack. It's time for a revolution I mean hard fork.

In the US there is no ranked voting system nor allowing multiple votes in an election so 3rd party candidates don't even have a chance. Even if they did the 51% problem has already occured and those 51% percent will vote for whatever the media tells them to so it's controlled by the media not the people.

Not always... Especially if those you can choose from isn't exactly aren't exactly the best out there. It's even worse in other countries where you basically get to choose from people who are all related in someway.


You think what happened to the US was crazy? You know what's even more infuriating? When someone win with just 38% of the total votes. Ridiculous.

And close to 92% of the people do not vote in the local elections. To have your vote count the most you vote in the smallest elections. Real reform starts at the bottom and moves up. That right there shows how far gone things are.

Voting is a choice, an assessment on who's worthy of leading the whole country, into improving its economic state and helping it to rise up from poverty though the choices are only limited and sometimes not that well thought. We just have to pick one out of the candidates that are given. We didnt get to choose who's worthy but rather we are given the chance to vote on who's presented to us.

obviously is a choice . but what influence it will cause?

Its actually a system so we are left with no choice. Even if we will not vote other people will say they will exercise their rights.

I would say that voting considered as limited freedom, you can not choose your representatives, you will only choose what is already chosen by the government, that is why in my opinion voting is limited freedom.

yes, it is still having a choice because you have to choose on who do you want to be a leader on your country.

Yes that is. But the outcome might not be what you voted for but will the the outcome majority of people voted for.
It's not about the company, it's about the model everyone (larger of them) wants.

This is a nice example, I will use it myself. The choice between the different colored or flavored versions of the same product.

I think it's not about the choice of just yourself but the choice of the majority.  It will not be elected or released(like the cars)  it it wasn't the choice of the majority of users. Thus, every vote counts. 

Democracy means a system of governance by the whole population. Unfortunately, none of the currently practiced forms of democracy come close to the vision of democracy and what we have is a greatly perverted form of democracy. This is especially so where it creates various new classes of rulers (i.e. politicians, political parties, bureaucrats and too big to fail corporations), to replace the dictators and monarchs, etc.. that democracy is supposed to replace.

That being said, enabling a whole populace to have their say in governance, setting policy, etc., was rife with practical difficulties.. that is until now. Today we have the technology to put the power of governance in the hands of every individuall citizen. And yes - it involves using crypto and blockchain technology.

This is precisely what we are working on (https://www.noblenation.net).

Implementation of true direct democracy would create a paradigm shift in governance, economics and society, by enabling every individual to take control of their destinies. It has the potential to end corruption, end wars and eliminate poverty. Please check us out and join the effort - Noble Nation (https://www.noblenation.net).