USA Bashing

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An individual is still irrelevant at the state level. At the local level, few (if any) important issues are really decided. It's more a matter of choosing one petty bureaucrat over another to do the same thing. And the proponents of democracy also tend to focus at the presidential level, so you can't claim it's a bias I'm introducing into the debate. Besides, monarchies have historically allowed some degree of local self-governance, which may or may not have been democratic.


My initial argument was more economics-based than calculus, and economics is intended to represent human action. I wasn't the one who decided to represent an individual voter's influence as 1/x and then compare that value to 0. You must admit, that was just asking for a notation that lim1/x=0. The calculus is useful to demonstrate why voting is futile.


It hasn't been that long. I like Dr. Seuss. And perhaps I sometimes miss the forest for the trees, but that's common for Aspies. In this case I don't see what "big picture" I'm missing. If you are using the tiny community that Horton protected as some sort of analogy... well, that just fails, much like silvervarg's seed. If you're going to make an analogy, use one that actually applies.

The essential difference between monarchy and a republican form of government is that in a republican form there is the possibility of trying to change things with the difficulty being the inertia of the public which is not a positive force. It makes things difficult but not impossible. Trying to change a monarchy is an actual revolution and will quickly be met with forceful aggression. And stability is not the be all and end all of government. The environment and attitudes move and change in unexpected directions and a good government must be agile to meet them. Monarchy is one of the least agile forms of government dependent upon whatever chance provides for leadership.

Why does the seed, spec, grain of sand, etc. analogy fail? I spent a whole semester studying air particles. It only takes one particulate, high up in the atmoshpere, for ice to form and collect and before you know it, a large hailstone just cracked your windshield. You could argue that the single particulate was not needed to form the hailstorm, but without it, you wouldn't be at the repair shop.

Voting is not futile, nor is it the only way to excercise democracy. My mother was able to get my uncle out of Vietnam by writing a letter to Nixon, and my brother was able to get sidewalks in his neighborhood for the kids by organizing with his taxpaying neighbors. Single people making relatively significant differences to their own lives. Of course I do not believe that one person alone makes much of a difference by simply showing up to the polls. It's more about being involved in the process. Participation in and of itself can be contagious. Should I look at my children and say, "Eh, don't bother because you can't make a difference anyway," or should I encourage them to put forth the effort and fight for what they believe in. I try to lead by example. Besides, it wasn't too long ago that women died for my right to vote. I take those sacrafices seriously and believe disenfranchisement would be a real slap in the face.

The only way to guarantee that you won't make a difference is by not participating.

I dont favour a monarchy. I'm just defending the argument because its fun to play devils advocate.

These grassroots actions that you speak of are also available on monarchy and even feudalism. My colonial German ancestors sent someone to plead a case with Catherine the Great on several occasions with a happy effect. If I recall, they didnt speak directly with her, but with her majordomo? The point is moot though; they took their case to someone able to effect a difference. Its often easier to plead your case with an individual that a committee, like you often must do in a democracy.

City council is a good example. You might have reasonable request, but alderman Tim is bitter that Alderman Susan opposed his pet project, and so when she votes for your idea, he opposes. Perhaps he is looking for a concession for his vote and nobody is giving him what he wants.

Oddly, as we speak, my uncle is upstairs. He used to be a mayor of a town. Anyone have any questions I could ask him?

#5, you seem to be falling back on generic platitudes. I've heard them all before, and I have not found them convincing. Only an analytical, fact-based argument is likely to convince me to change my views.

Voting is not the same as forming a hailstone. The analogies of the seed and the hailstone work somewhat better if they are in reference to the grassroots action you talk about later in your post (but the seed analogy was not). The speck analogy, if I am right in believing it to refer to Horton's little community, just makes no sense in the context of this debate.


Voting is futile. To say otherwise is to ignore the math. You're better off buying lottery tickets.


See Fuzzy's comments. Petitioning the government is possible under monarchy as well. Same goes for the rest of the grass-roots stuff. People can try to make a difference in their communities, with varying degrees of success, but the jump from that to a large democracy is nothing short of delusional.


Sometimes people need to fight a lost battle. There is something noble in doing even what little is possible, fighting on against seemingly insurmountable odds. But you are sadly misinformed if you believe that the way to do this is through the democratic system. And yes, democracy consists of voting. Anything else that you have referred to is just part of living in a society. I have not, for the most part, promoted complete political apathy. (Aside from commenting that refraining from politics entirely is a perfectly rational decision to make, and not one that needs to be criticized so excessively as this thread set out to do)


Here we go with the "sacrifice" rhetoric. Well, consider yourself slapped in the face because the vote doesn't give you any power.



More empty rhetoric.

You can guarantee that you won't make a difference by voting, since individual voters are irrelevant. You can even further guarantee that you won't make a difference if, as I once did, you spend hours sorting out an administrative error in order to cast a vote and then do the same to help someone else vote for the opposite candidate you did, thus canceling out your own vote.


See Fuzzy's post.


This criticism surprises me, Sand. Monarchy is a good deal more agile than democracy, and this is one of its main advantages. When there is a sudden change in situation or some emergency, what will react faster: a centralized government whose course is determined in large part by a single purposive individual, or a consensus-based system where you have to let people debate and then get people to agree on something before you can do anything? Which is more decisive, the decree or the referendum?

I read that two years ago, if I go to my bookshelves I'll find the next level book. It's still not the point.
In a democracy your 1/X power in always >0 (if you vote). Anything els breaks the laws of nature.
What you are saying is that a democracy is useless because one person has no effect. It's wrong and inaccurat. Look below.
The point of a democracy is that it's the collective will that is represented. Not the single mind of one person.


Either you don't see the point, or you just realised you lost and are trying to take some points in an unrelated matter.


Really? (I feel like I say this very often.) So if I call my little seed Ghandi, you don't think it can grow into a tree?


See above.


See above.

Face it, you have lost.

Orwell

There is more to agility than speed. It involves skill, correct strategies and tactics. A representative democracy (a republic, if you will) involves choosing the correct man and throwing out the bumbler as the situation demands. A monarch rules by force and heritage and heritage is no guarantee of any kind of competence whatsoever. Neither is a bad republic but we are not discussing the best or the worst, we are discussing the mechanics which permit a government to operate properly and the mechanics of a monarchy have no inherent flexibility whatsoever. The modern world is very fast moving which is why monarchies are out of date and kings are ceremonial figures only.

Last edited by Sand on 15 Sep 2009, 9:54 am, edited 1 time in total.

The effect of the few is not measured, just in votes, but by how the influence the thinking of the many. There is more going on, than just vote count.

ruveyn

Thomas Paine once asked a question concerning kings. What, he asked, if the Lion begets and Ass? There it is.

ruveyn

This is exactly my point. It's not merely a numbers game. Each vote is an important part of a collection. If blacks had not been given the right to vote, we would not have black candidates and the same goes for women. All are free to excercise their right not to vote as well. I have no problem with someone choosing not to participate, however, if you don't vote - don't b*tch.

Orwell, if you feel that we should instill a monarchy in this country, then by all means gather your petitions and start your movement (a democracy encourages such actions). Just please do not sit at your desk and do nothing other than complain. That sort of non-action is guaranteed not to change a thing.

Last edited by number5 on 15 Sep 2009, 4:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Silvervarg, you amuse me.

Stop referencing the "laws of nature" without describing what you're invoking. 1/x is counted as 0 for large values of x. You know the word "negligible," right?


Actually, my initial point was that democracy doesn't work because one person's effect is negligible, and yet the cost to them of making that effect is non-negligible. This is clearly an inefficient system, and the rational (utility-maximizing) decision for an individual is almost always to opt out of it. The debate later went into whether one person's effect really is negligible. I have demonstrated rather unassailably that it is.


And yet proponents of democracy like to emphasize the individualism that they claim comes with democracy. You sound more and more like a fascist with such talk of the "collective" over the individual. See, this is one of the contradictions of democracy. It claims to be individualistic when in reality it is collectivist. And what if I take issue with the fundamental assumption of democracy, that what the majority of people want must be right? I see no reason to believe this is true.


You're the one who brought math into the debate, not me. Don't jump in the lake if you can't swim.


Your analogy has absolutely nothing to do with democracy. Gandhi did not achieve Indian independence through the ballot box, but by nonviolent direct action. This is just as possible in a monarchy as it is in a democracy. It's just a feature of living in a civilized society, not unique to any particular system of government.


I was using an analogy to demonstrate the concept of something being negligible. You didn't understand the previous one (about air resistance) so I tried a different one. Evidently physics is not your forte either.


Rather, you keep bringing in delusional assumptions and sloppy reasoning which I repeatedly refute.

Seriously, I'm disappointed here. Arguments can certainly be made for democracy, but I haven't seen very cogent ones presented here. Sand has come closest, #5 has been hit or miss in places, but you've just been so far off the mark that I actually find it comical.

I have already stated that voters only matter when they aggregate into blocs. In America, for instance, Blacks and Jews vote Democrat, Cubans and evangelical Protestants vote Republican. (There are other voting blocs, of course, but those are some of the more reliable groups) But talking of collective action is meaningless to me. I am not a collective. I am me, one person. I can control only one vote- my own. This vote is worthless. The only way that changes is if I choose to give my vote up to be part of an aggregate. At this point, I am no longer a participant in some democratic process. I am a cog in a party machine. That is what advocates of democracy fail to realize.


Empty rhetoric.

I ignore such comments because they indicate the writer is falling back on generic, pre-readied one-liners and has given up on original thought. If you want to convince me, you need an original point.


I have already recognized that the age of monarchy is over. It would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to move from our current system to a monarchy. It is like the dozenal base system- yes, it is arguably a better system than we have now, but the difficulty of switching to it almost certainly outweighs the benefits. Same goes for Qwerty vs Dvorak, or UNIX vs Plan 9. A "good enough" solution has enough momentum that it is not going to be dislodged. So in practice I would work for whatever cause I favor within the existing pseudo-democratic system we have, rather than trying to scrap the system entirely and start afresh. In theory, I still like the idea of monarchy.

Ehh... hello...? No people = no goverment? Something is always more than nothing it does not matter who much you want to count it as zero, it's still something, otherwise you can just say that democracy don't work because all they get is a lot of "nothing" and no result can be produced.


Non-neligible = eligible? And to continue... what? It's too expencive for the government to let people vote?


Ok, you don't see the point.


They lived in a monarchy, you know that right? That was the major reason they didn't vote. Then the entire people "voted" for a democracy. And now they're there. Not my point however.
The point was that one person can make a difference. If his/her actions reflect the peoples wish. Mayby I should have called it Steve Biko instead.


How was it different from my tree or the hail? (Exept for the fact that it was used against you.)


Is he completly missing what I'm saying, or am I translating my arguments incorrectly?

Except the bulk of the difference comes from 'the peoples wish'.

one person = negligible
the people wish = the most of the energy.

In your words, stop denying physics.

By your argument a man sitting on a raft in the ocean, attempting to paddle, has more effect on his direction than the action of the waves. Wrong.

Or, perhaps, you are saying that the man should take the credit for his excellent velocity.. even though he is paddling in the same direction that the waves are pushing him. The leader gets all the credit for everyones hard work? Dont you believe in Janteloven?

A quick study of "Le Terror" in France's revolutionary time will illustrate this point. Robespierre thought he was guiding society but when the 'tide' shifted, he was helpless to even save his own life. In fact, he tried to shoot himself, but only managed to blow his jaw off and died in agony days later.

But they would have chopped his head off in any case.

Nobody, absolutely nobody, is in total control. No Queen, no Dictator, and certainly not The Leader Of The Free World. The mob rules always, and our various forms of government are all about social constraint.

What in the world do they teach you in those Swedish schools? Can't you even keep track of the variables you've declared? 1/x is referring to an individual's power, x would be the number of people. If x is big (a lot of people) then 1/x is effectively 0 (each person has basically no power).

This is why democracy is a bad idea. Why would I trust you and legions more like you to participate in governmental decisions when you lack such basic numerical comprehension?


Non-negligible = not negligible = significant. As to the rest of your comment, :facepalm:. You haven't studied economics either, have you?


You haven't made a point.


They were a colony of a parliamentary democracy.


It's different in the sense that it actually relates to the point I was making. Your analogies do not.


Honestly, I don't think it's either issue. I think it's more likely that your beliefs are just outright foolish and uninformed. It would be difficult for you to mistranslate basic math, along with your other claims, so badly (and repeatedly) and I am more than capable of understanding what is put in front of me, so the most likely conclusion is that you simply don't know what you're talking about.

I don't believe that I've got my larger point across just yet. The benefit of democracy is not specifically in the idea of "one man - one vote," but rather the power an individual has on bringing forth change. For example, if Orwell wanted to create a monarchy representation in our current system, he would be free to start his own agenda by creating a party for which he would find x amount of members. If enough people were interested, they would gain recogition and have potential to make significant changes to our system. Of course there would need to be a large enough (or loud enough, wealthy enough, etc.) group to get it done. We all recognize that voting power exists only with great numbers, but the power of the people does not lie solely within the vote. We each have the right to start our own party and agenda if we like. Obviously in practice, it's not easy. The mob may rule, but that same mob was started by an individual.

I still don't see any sense or purpose in complaining about something in which you have no intent on changing, or no belief that it can be changed. Either change what you cannot accept, or accept what you cannot change. No whining allowed.