This thread is pretty straightforward, change my mind if you can.
Subject material: Democracy isn’t real.
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when there’s just one person, democracy is real
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Democracy can happen for an individual under only one condition: a vote of his on a matter happened to be a tie breaker, so his vote actually made a difference.
So, whatever the probability is of you casting a tie breaker vote is the probability of democracy happening for you. Otherwise, it’s semantics.
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Democracy is only real for the individuals bribing, threatening, and blackmailing themselves to power. This is the great trick and swindle of democracy. From those tactics stems all of its power politically along with a population host of imbeciles.
Democracy is a political system of tyrants and mobsters pretending to be virtuous.
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Why?
Plus, you seem to be confusing democracy for something that seems like democracy. Not the same thing
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I’d actually second pseudoai in a sense here. Be specific, probably to the U.S. Otherwise we are arguing in the air. Then explain why you think the U.S. is not a democracy. I don’t think so either. I think it is an oligarchy that pretends to be a democracy. There are a lot of reasons (problematic campaign finance, lobbying, Wall st. and banking interference in democratic processes, centralized media and so on) why I think it is not a democracy and is less a democracy than it was 40 years ago. Though even then it wasn’t a democracy.
Unless you are saying that democracy cannot work (at the nation level? in general?) But what system, then, has worked?
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Yes, when we look at the US politically through the lens of oligarchy it becomes apparent that is the real underlying reality behind the democracy that is always pushed as the image of the political process. In reality, there is voting and it does have some consequences but that has been minimized because voting will not overturn or really even threaten the established oligarchical system. We saw that with Trump.
Trump won in 2016 because a majority of Americans wanted to basically overthrow the existing political system. And Trump essentially promised to do just that. What actually happened? “The Empire Strikes Back” and Trump did nothing but further enhance and solidify the existing oligarchical order.
The only way voting (democracy) could make a real change would be if enough people woke up to the truth (everything I just wrote above, for example) and decided as a huge group of the vast majority of citizens to do one of two things: either 1) vote for totally new, write-in candidates who are authentically outside the political-oligarchical system, to the point where the entire political elected apparatus changed hands back into control of real non-corrupted representatives of the people (and the odds of that even working out in the end are slim, you would need a lot of people who are essentially incorruptible and we know that goes against human nature) or 2) collectively refusing to vote at all and thereby casting a tacit but very intention vote AGAINST the established political-oligarchical system.
However, in either of those two outcomes, I don’t see a new system really coming into being. All that would happen is some kind of managed control and manipulated outcomes via media and military tech to keep the powers that be in power, one way or another. That is the thing people miss: ‘the people’ lack military and technological power relative to the established oligarchs. This is not 1776 anymore where the people might potentially organize into large ad hoc armies and be more or less on par with the establishment in terms of firepower. Those days are never coming back, at least not until after a total civilizational reset.
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No, I am talking about all of political democracy even going back to ancient Athens.
Although I will admit some democracies are obviously more unreal compared to others.
It’s true here in the United States democracy is more unreal than anywhere else as it is a more obvious answer to the subject material here, however, nations that call themselves democracies elsewhere have the the same or similar problems to the United States even if it is in lesser degrees.
I would argue all democracies are oligarchies pretending to be otherwise.
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As I said about the US. But we have a problem. Is there a good functioning government somewhere in the world? Is there a good functioning communism? What if nothing works with humans? What if some other kind of shift has to take place and any form of government will be corrupted?
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What’s interesting is, what is the political act of voting if the superwealthy hand picked all the political candidates well in advanced for themselves?
You get the illusion of options, choices, or political free will where in reality none of that really exists at all. In democracy you get the illusion and pretense of freedom serving the people’s free will where in reality there is none.
You get the benefits of enjoying a carefully crafted, managed, and scripted lie.
No doubt human beings manage to corrupt everything as we are imperfect beings barely evolved past the existence of primitive primates.
You’ll get no argument from me on that.
Still, democracy is a style of government that pretends to be something it really is not.
Everywhere we politically attack dictators of the world when our own nation is beholden to superwealthy dictators that dictates our own government. The hypocrisy of liberal democracy has no shame.
So you say that nowhere ever was democracy actually performed? Like voting on what food to order?
I think you are trying to say that things that look like democracies aren’t. That’s a different thing. One thing is to say that Santa is not real, another is saying that all the people posing as Santa are not Santa.
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I am saying that democracies everywhere are not what they pose to be publicly and that they are indeed false.
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Ok, you are not saying democracy isn’t real, you are saying that what most of the time poses as democracy isn’t democracy. Different stuff
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If democracy is always contrary to what it publicly says that it is that to me would make it not real and instead a deceptive false fabrication. You’re being a tad bit semantical here.
You are confusing something not existing with something posing as another stuff. That is semantical in itself. If I’m to blame, you are too then, from the first post.
People are interested in deceiving others in order to pass non-democracies for democracies. That doesn’t mean democracy doesn’t exist. For example, when you get together with friends and vote for where to go, that’s democracy. You may want state democracy - that’s entirely different, but there has been democracies. You may say those are short-lived, but they do exist.
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If an ass claims to be a unicorn but later is discovered that truly it is an ass having never been a unicorn we can say the unicorn isn’t real. We can also say the unicorn was never truly real to begin with.
Likewise we have here oligarchies pretending to be democracies, a long standing historical phenomena going on since the times of ancient Athens.
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You are not talking about ‘that democracy wasn’t real’ (which would be that), you are saying there doesn’t exist democracy. It’s different. There’s no shame in being more precise in order not to be wrong
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