Here in Germany there are constantly scandals where politicians sign off illegal deals with the industry, and when the word get’s out, the contract is kept secret to minimize the damage to reputation. Whistleblowers are hunted and politicians that did blatantly illegal things are protected under “immunity”.
In that case i’ll give the Netherlands the title of actual democracy. Let’s hope it lasts for a long time.
I was thinking about the time before the internet, like 1980s, not like the more distant past
For me democracy means rule of the people.
Of course you can define words as you want, and say that only direct democracy is rule of the people, while representative democracy can be oligarchy dressed as democracy, but for me using such a definition makes the word democracy meaningless and undesirable.
Let’s say i put myself out there and say people should vote for me if they want world peace.
Let’s assume the people vote for me, because they want world peace.
Now that i am elected, a lobbyist from a arms company visits me and asks me to grant them an export license to sell weapons to an agressor (let’s assume i have the right to sign such deals).
Are there laws in place that allow me to prevent my voters from finding out that i granted that export license, like a law that says i don’t need to report publicly that i signed this? Or maybe even a law that prevents journalists from reporting on this even if they find out, because the contract (or it’s contents) are considered secret and publishing it would be illegal?
Is it a representative democracy with secrecy laws? Then no.
There is no democracy on this planet because all democracies are representative democracies. In representative democracies the politicians are not representative of the people, but they promise to do things a certain way, and if people elect them for it, that’s like indirect representation. However this breaks down as soon as secrecy laws are put in place, because if the government or private companies can decide which knowledge will reach the people, and which will not, they will simply declare information that will upset their voters to be secret. This breaks all representative democracies.
Personally i think we would live in a utopia if people consumed cave-art and stories by storytellers rather than this book-slop which is easy to mass produce and distribute.
That’s sarcasm. Don’t worry.
There is no democracy on this planet because all democracies are representative democracies. In representative democracies the politicians are not representative of the people, but they promise to do things a certain way, and if people elect them for it, that’s like indirect representation.
However this breaks down as soon as secrecy laws are put in place, because if the government or private companies can decide which knowledge will reach the people, and which will not, they will simply declare information that will upset their voters to be secret. This breaks all representative democracies.
Then there is the issue of corruption, which is generally legal under the guise of lobbying.
And because all democracies that i know of have secrecy laws, they can’t be considered democratic.
With the liberal part: A person can only be free if they feel safe. But in all countries (that i know) there is a large part of the population that works most/all of their day because they are (rigtfully) afraid they can’t pay for their daily needs if they don’t. And they don’t like their job.
So how can any society claim to be free, if a (large) part of their population is not controlled by their ambitions, but by their fears? If you dislike your job, but do it anyways because if you don’t you die, that’s not freedom. That’s the definition of slavery.
Absolutely not. Here a list of problems that could (all) be solved by diverting some funds from the world’s militaries:
And here a list of things that can be fixed literally for a negative cost. People would be richer while fixing the following problems:
And these are just a few of the worst problems. All of them fixable. Many for free.
Knowing that all of the problems are easily fixable, and the people around me are not only not working on them, but actually making things worse by dedicating their live to emitting CO2 (SUVs, Meat-Eating), supporting (Wage-)Slavery (Being against UBI), and making more babies so they may suffer under these manufactured conditions makes me sad (and angry).
I would say the first step in fixing these problems is realizing that things are absolutely not OK. That earth is closer to hell than to paradise. The next step is realizing that no sane person can (or should be) OK under these conditions. And the final step is implementing a solution, ideally with the help of others.
I agree on all of this, but were books different (except for surveillance)?
Also that’s not really the point the article is making. They say that simply reading books makes you smarter. As if people read physics books in their freetime back then. No, they just read entertaining stories, and now they stream entertaining stories. Nothing has fundamentally changed. Back then Oil made you part of the owner class, now it’s IT and the owning of marketplaces.
Tldr: New tech (audiovisual media) bad, old tech (reading) good.
They even say that good reading skills lead to liberal democracy. Which is ironic because there is no government on this planet (that i know of) that is democratic (or liberal).
Personally i think we would live in a utopia if people consumed cave-art and stories by storytellers rather than this book-slop which is easy to mass produce and distribute.
Makes sense. What ideals are more german than racism and ehnic clensing which logically follows? They were willing to give their lives to enforce those ideals all over the world.
And if you reject those fundamental ideals, can you ever really be a german?
I agree that the Gentoo wiki is almost always better than the Arch wiki (and would recommend it to any user), but i really doubt installing complicated packages is remotely as hard as on Gentoo.
While i have never used Arch before, i did use Manjaro, and there stuff was always just install the package and be done. I never had to alter the Kernel config, and all program features were just there. I also had VMs on Manjaro, and i do not remember any manual configuration (though that was many years ago, so maybe i misremember).
Recently i wanted to encode a video in ffmpeg, but it didn’t work. After a bit of searching i found that the codec requires a use-flag to be set. Classic Gentoo moment.
It’s not that i dislike Gentoo. In fact i do not consider returning to Arch (but i might switch to NixOS if my Gentoo install breaks). But i wouldn’t switch to any other distro.
It’s just that Gentoo is configured in a way that is so minimal by default that even basic use-cases require changes in the Kernel config: systemd? Kernel config. Bluetooth? Kernel config. LUKS? Kernel config. Amdgpu? Yes, exactly. BTRFS? Yes. Blender? Yeah OK, that goes without kernel config.
And the worst about the Kernel config: You don’t know which values are set by default. You might just end up in nconfig realizing that the values were already set.
Then there is the instability in the distKernel (which i use). I think i started with Kernel 5.10LTS ish. Every upgrade went well until like 6.1 LTS, when Emerge complained about i think module ordering or something. It would not emerge a newer Kernel any more, which made me reset my Kernel config and redo it entirely because i thought Kernel 5 and 6 configs might be incompatible. That worked (somehow) until 6.6 LTS, which i wanted to install at version 6.6.6 LTS. But emerge complained it could not install it. I waited and ignored the update, and eventually got trough at version 6.6.20 or so. After that it refused to update again, which made me blacklist all non LTS kernels. I am now on 6.12 LTS, even though i am not a LTS guy, simply because i don’t want the hassle.
And still, after all of this effort for being minimal, it boots in like 20s, while Arch does it in like 3 or so. Gentoo hates me.
The problem with Gentoo is that you can’t install anything in a hurry.
Run VMs on Arch:
Run VMs on Gentoo?
Yes, this is an extreme example, but many large packages are a bit like this.
That’s why you will tripple-check if you really need sonething before installing it on Gentoo, or you are like me and install Boxes in a Flatpak instead.
Personally i like Gentoo more than Arch because of all the buttons and knobs, and once it’s set up it does not need more time than Arch, but installing stuff is sometimes hard.
So yeah, you are right. A representative “democracy” is not a democracy. It’s a monarchy with more than one ruler.
A gummy bear is as much a bear as representative democracy is a democracy.
I didn’t know that, because i was taught in school that a representative “democracy” is a form of democracy. And the name makes it sound like one. But it isn’t. It’s not even supposed to be in theory. I am sure 99% of people living in a representative “democracy” don’t know this.
I hereby encourage everyone to abandon the word representative “democracy” in favor of polyarchy or maybe oligarchy. This makes it much clearer what we are talking about.
Also i doubt the authors of this article know this, because they imply that representative “democracy” is desirable, but it is obviously undesirable.