The flaw is inherent in the design

Posted Jun 27, 2009 4:15 UTC (Sat) by drag (guest, #31333)
In reply to: The flaw is inherent in the design by ncm
Parent article: Digg, Dug, Buried: How Linux news disappears (ComputerWorld)

Ha.

You never were taught early democratic history have you? The greeks were the first ones to identify the weaknesses inherent in democracy.

And the biggest weakness is, indeed, it all starts falling appart when the regular folk realize that they can vote themselves raises and are swayed by skillfull polititions who promise to fullfill those desires.

The other major weakness, is of course, a fully democratic nation is easily directed by mass histeria.. that is a country will typically go huge, rather temporary, swings in political opinion that has more to do with emotion then reason. For example: 9/11 or the stock market crash. Then again, skillfull polititions can leverage this temporary lack of reason to rush through laws and garner more power in a short time.

Thats why the USA (with the longest lasting democracy so far) was originally designed with a very weak and ineffectual central government. The designers wanted to have a way to counter the negative effects of democracy and prop up the positive effects. The way it's designed with a 3 branch system is designed to slow things down and make it hard for people to rush through legislation and pass laws.

After 200 years or so those limitations have, unfortunately, been largely forgotten and in the past 30 years people have been happy to give huge amounts of power to the central government for all sorts of lets-get-boogyman-now-before-they-get-us reasons. (economic paranioa, terrorism, war on drugs, environmentalism scare tactics, religous wackiness, its-for-the-children, etc etc)

The flaw is inherent in the design

Posted Jun 27, 2009 4:18 UTC (Sat) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

To put it another way:

The 'elites' get their power by promising people those 'plebs' "bread and circuses".

Corporate power is one way, but it's much more limited then the power people obtain through holding high government office. The sort of the people that get the high corporate power and the same sort of people that get high governmental power. Same types, same ambitions.

The flaw is inherent in the design

Posted Jun 27, 2009 13:20 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Thats why the USA (with the longest lasting democracy so far)

That is extremely debatable (and this is completely off topic but it's Saturday and I'm bored). For the first fifty-plus years the franchise was decidedly limited, so it's questionable to what extent it was more a democracy than, say, Britain, which banned slavery on its shores earlier but had rotten boroughs and very strange voter eligibility criteria to contend with.

I suspect the case of the English Parliament makes it very hard to say what the age of the 'oldest continuous democracy' is, because its democracy was not designed but emerged over a very long period of time. Parliament could perhaps be considered to date back to the witenagemot, which vanishes into the mists of history but has written evidence surviving from the 600s, and was probably an old insitution then. I'm fairly sure that's older than the US, but I'm also fairly sure it wasn't what we'd today call a democracy. When did democracy in England start? Probably sometime in the 12th to 15th centuries, but there wasn't one moment you could point at and say 'here begins democracy', and so you can't say whether England (or its descendant states) or some other nation wins this contest (though it would probably be unfair to disqualify England merely because of temporary disruptions like Cromwell, or on the basis that the Act of Union saw it replaced with the UK Parliament, a body with a similar name, membership, and traditions sitting in the same building). Sorry if this torpedoes your quest for an unambiguous 'oldest' to point to.

The flaw is inherent in the design

Posted Jun 28, 2009 20:19 UTC (Sun) by job (guest, #670) [Link]

Thats why the USA (with the longest lasting democracy so far)

I hope you are joking. How long have you even had equal rights and votes for all in the US? It wasn't even early by international standards. But democracy in the western sense is a fairly recent invention. It took even longer for all to get the chance for education etc. to actually make use of it. If all that is required is that some people get to vote, democracy in many countries predate even the founding of USA by at least a couple of hundred years.

A modern democracy also requires that more than a few owners control media (fail), that media is not censored (fail) and that the juridical system works with medieval measures such as capital punishment (if the US was a European state this alone would be considered too undemocratic to join the EU).

There are many democratic predictor values that can be used in the political sciences. How different nation states scores at different periods in history makes for some interesting reading.