So now I'm a coward and am indecisive. Well, thanks, I guess. You've never met me, have no idea who I might or might not be, so logically any commentary you pass on me personally, would inevitably be inaccurate.
The discussion was on whether LOGICALLY, democracy is or isn't a flawed system of government, and there is a logical argument that says that it is. I have yet to see it refuted.
"Pragmatically", democracy has killed millions upon millions. The world's strongest democracy has waged over fifty wars since the end of the second world war, toppled governments all around the world. There are a dozen "rich" countries that consume a tremendous amount of resources. The dozen countries used to outrightly colonise and subjugate much of the world, and that led to wars where even people from the "rich" places died and stuff like that. Now, we don't have colonies, bu the exploitation is still there, in a much more effective and efficient system. Billions of people have to slave off everyday for very very meager wages making shoes for Nike in Vietnam or clothes in textile mills in India, so megacorps from the "rich" countries can raise their bottomline. They earn salaries to the tune of $1 a day(<= $365 a year, as people get sick, etc), and if they ask for better working conditions, they get replaced by others desperate to scrape a living. And the average person in the US is also a victim of this, they're forced to compete with the poorest of the poor from around the globe. They are sold on promises that are never fulfilled and are manipulated in so many ways... the education system, the taxation system, the healthcare system, the military/warfare system.
The education system, when reforms were rolled in democratically to make student loans easy, the concept people were sold on was that alot more people would be able to attain higher education. Instead, universities just raised their prices by 3x or more because people could get loans to enroll, and then work it off for a decade. Many tragedies in the taxation system, people who had everything taken by the IRS, because it's a big corp and they don't really count for much in a democracy, just one vote, faceless in "mob rule". Healthcare system where parents are forced to decide which eye they want their infant child to keep, because the insurance company won't cover treating both. The military/industrial complex, where they start wars based on engineered events(have been doing so for ages, like the Gulf of Tonkin incident half a century ago that provided a pretext to start the Vietnam war) and send off sons and brothers to die in foreign lands, just because it is profitable for the military industrial complex and politically easy to achieve.
There are many pragmatic flaws in democracy, this type of society is not something to work towards. Eastern cultures typically have had low suicide rates, lower divorce rates, almost no serial killings or school/college shootouts every one or two years. So I don't buy into this, that the whole world has to be more like that. People say that we should give democracy time, and in time we'd get to something like western democracy. I look at the victims of western democracy, and it is just tragic.
The discussion was on whether LOGICALLY, democracy is or isn't a flawed system of government, and there is a logical argument that says that it is. I have yet to see it refuted.
"Pragmatically", democracy has killed millions upon millions. The world's strongest democracy has waged over fifty wars since the end of the second world war, toppled governments all around the world. There are a dozen "rich" countries that consume a tremendous amount of resources. The dozen countries used to outrightly colonise and subjugate much of the world, and that led to wars where even people from the "rich" places died and stuff like that. Now, we don't have colonies, bu the exploitation is still there, in a much more effective and efficient system. Billions of people have to slave off everyday for very very meager wages making shoes for Nike in Vietnam or clothes in textile mills in India, so megacorps from the "rich" countries can raise their bottomline. They earn salaries to the tune of $1 a day(<= $365 a year, as people get sick, etc), and if they ask for better working conditions, they get replaced by others desperate to scrape a living. And the average person in the US is also a victim of this, they're forced to compete with the poorest of the poor from around the globe. They are sold on promises that are never fulfilled and are manipulated in so many ways... the education system, the taxation system, the healthcare system, the military/warfare system.
The education system, when reforms were rolled in democratically to make student loans easy, the concept people were sold on was that alot more people would be able to attain higher education. Instead, universities just raised their prices by 3x or more because people could get loans to enroll, and then work it off for a decade. Many tragedies in the taxation system, people who had everything taken by the IRS, because it's a big corp and they don't really count for much in a democracy, just one vote, faceless in "mob rule". Healthcare system where parents are forced to decide which eye they want their infant child to keep, because the insurance company won't cover treating both. The military/industrial complex, where they start wars based on engineered events(have been doing so for ages, like the Gulf of Tonkin incident half a century ago that provided a pretext to start the Vietnam war) and send off sons and brothers to die in foreign lands, just because it is profitable for the military industrial complex and politically easy to achieve.
There are many pragmatic flaws in democracy, this type of society is not something to work towards. Eastern cultures typically have had low suicide rates, lower divorce rates, almost no serial killings or school/college shootouts every one or two years. So I don't buy into this, that the whole world has to be more like that. People say that we should give democracy time, and in time we'd get to something like western democracy. I look at the victims of western democracy, and it is just tragic.
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