On 03 Jan 2015, at 16:21, Alberto G. Corona wrote:
Neither the USSR was democratic neither democracy means freedom. I
said to you that democracy is a bad name, a wildcard that each one
fill with underserved and unjustified attirbuted, a symbol of
freedom that does not deserve it.
It is like If i insist to call alcoholism as the proper name for
euphoria. The same happens with democracy and freedom.
If truth and freedom were the result of the decission of the
majority, then herds of sheeps would have painted the Chapelle
Sixtine and they would be exploring the galaxy.
So hard is that to be understood?
Did I ever said that democracy is freedom? democracy is not a symbol,
it is when people agree to vote. It is a progress because non
democracy is automatically coercion. Now democracy is just the
possibility of more freedom, but it can take a lifetime to wake up the
politicians to some ideas, and freedom needs a constant high
vigilance, encouraged or discouraged by (mis)education, etc.
Truth needs science which has no need of votes, it needs only modest
doubting researchers.
Only decision about the city and the possible conflicts with the
neighbors and the environment needs vote.
I am not saying that democracy solves all (social) problem, but it
gives the ground to start talking about the problems (instead of being
tortured because you dared to mention a problem).
And the democracy can derive into a totalitarian system very easily.
There is no magical formal trick that avoid to derive a rule of the
majority into a totalitatian dictatorship, as Godel demonstrated a
few posts ago with the US constitution.
And a living tissue can derive into a cancer very easily. That is the
"biological or social consequences" of Gödel (stretching the things):
no complex system can guarantied its own consistency. Shit happens.
But deciding to avoid democracy because it can leads to Tyranny, is
like avoiding life because it can lead to death.
That happened again and again. The nazi case is not an exception,
but the rule. Only something external to the formal political
system, the beliefs and values of the people can slow this
evolution, since democracy erodes the pre-political (moral) bases
upon which the liberal system is constructed.
The difference between germany in the 30 and the US in the same
years was so little, that probably, without the nazi germany and the
II world war it is possible that some form of socialist dictatorship
would be now ruling the US and still we would call it democracy. Or
perhaps popular democracy.
Perhaps. Democracies are living being. Fragile, in need of constant
vigilance, and we have been sleepy.
All countries in which cannabis is illegal have sin, and they have put
criminal elements at the top, but again, it is not because a democracy
can be sick that a democracy should not be valued better than non-
democracy. Even sick, we have more ability to, correct this than in a
dictatorship. Copare North and South Korea.
Bruno
2015-01-03 15:29 GMT+01:00 Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be>:
On 02 Jan 2015, at 21:01, Alberto G. Corona wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_democracy
First, a reference to wikipedia is everything but an argument.
Second, it looks like the athenian democracy". I just said that this
is not "democracy" in the modern sense of the word.
From my own research, the USSR has been one of the hardest
dictatorship in human history. Only after the fall of the berlin
wall could many refugees (from USSR and its satellites) see their
family again, when still alive.
Religion was also forbidden and christians, jews and others have
been deported or executed, in mass. All people I know from there
confirmed: no elections, except at the top of the hierarchy, like in
China. Those were atheist dictatorships.
If you believed that the USSR was democratic, I understand better
your critics on the democratic system!
Bruno
2015-01-02 12:38 GMT+01:00 Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be>:
On 01 Jan 2015, at 22:28, Alberto G. Corona wrote:
2014-12-30 14:15 GMT+01:00 Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be>:
On 29 Dec 2014, at 19:27, Alberto G. Corona wrote:
The Soviet union can be formally considered a "democracy".
I disagree. Democracy is when there are election, with secret
vote, every four or five years. It allows a formal opposition with
some representation is some parliament or equivalent.
The soviet union had elections and a other parties. It had a
parliament . At least in most of the comunist parties there were a
"formal" opposition. The constitution of the URSS was ok according
to liberal standards. All that you mentioned were meet as well as
it is met by almost every modern regime
You might give reference. I have never heard of the people being
able to vote.
A leftist friend of mind was so naive on this that he asked to the
USSR to accept him as political refugees, during a visit there
(well before the fall of the Berlin wall). He get imprisonned,
suspect of being a spy, but eventually succeeded to hide in an
embassy, and escape. His opinion on the USSR "democracy" changed.
Just give me a reference of one vote of the people (not just at the
top) in the USSR. Thanks.
Bruno
http://books.google.es/books?id=kNfBCKFB8WMC&printsec=frontcover&hl=es#v
=onepage&q=soviet&f=false
By looking for a true universal classification for political
regimes, It is necessary to raise the level of analysis to
metaphysics and theology, since definitions need to be more and
more abstract and precise at the same time. There is no way to
use the external (formal) neither the internal (self reported)
data.
Basically the only possible forms of governments are the ones
defined by the greek phylosophers.
Actually I disagree on this, despite my appreciation of the greeks
philosophers. Plato, and even Plotinus, tried to implement cities
governed by "sage", but this does not work. Cities are better
governed by opportunist egoists, hoping they are clever enough to
take into account the suggestion of the people (if only to be
reelected later).
There is no others possible. The names used in each age vary
depending on the ideologies that support the state, but that does
not change the underlying nature. And the ideology that support
the legitimacy of the regime is a form or religion. That is in
what is based the branch of political theory called political
theology, the deepest branch.
In machine's theology, invoking religion in politics is already a
blasphem.
Theology cannot be political, no more than physics or biology.
Politicians can take into acoount their beliefs and faith, but not
in a public way. Democracy separates religion and state.
Marxism is close to Islam.
I do agree with this, with Islamism instead of Islam. I am
astonished how much the leftists defend the fanatical Islamists
and even the antisemites and the antichristians, those days.
And The soviet Union close to an oriental empire with the King-
Priest that has the unique power to interpret the true meaning of
history.
Yes. But that shows how much it is not democratic. Russia has made
progress though. More than we realize in West Europa. But they
have still big progress to do. In the West, we have regressed a
lot, and the more I study how and why, the more I link this to
prohibition.
Exercise:
5 years of prohibition of alcohol has given Al Capone.
What has given 75 years of prohibition of cannabis?
Bruno
2014-12-28 11:57 GMT+01:00 Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be>:
On 27 Dec 2014, at 23:40, Kim Jones wrote:
On 27 Dec 2014, at 11:44 pm, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be>
wrote:
On 27 Dec 2014, at 03:11, Kim Jones wrote:
Democracy is a concept. It can be implemented in various ways. I
like Liz's conceptualisation of it as communist-style sharing of
astcronomical wealth and resources among the elites with
cockroaches and urine for breakfast for the rest of us (that's
what prisoners in North Korea get given for breakfast according
to QC Geoffrey Robertson.) No one who gets jugged hare and Beluga
caviar for lunch around Pyongyang feels like they exist in
anything other than a perfect democracy.
Bruno: I doubt this. I am sure that all dictator knows pretty
well that they are not in a democracy. They fight democracy by
all means.
So why do they call this place "The DEMOCRATIC People's
Republic of Korea (DPRK) ?? Is this some kind of joke or
insincere label?
Typical insincere label of a non-democracy. By democracy I think
it is usually meant that people can vote, regularly, with a
representation of opposition party, and some level of education
(without which voting does not really work).
The secret of the vote is imperative. Voting with hands does not
count (for obvious reason).
Oh, that's right - they have simply misunderstood the true nature
of democracy, because they don't subscribe to this list, silly me.
?
We might have a problem of definition. I think it is just the
definition of the term. Democracy is just when we have the right
to vote.
They have defined "democracy" the way they choose; just as does
every country who finds this a useful concept. As I said:
democracy is a concept and concepts have many many ways of being
implemented or delivered.
I am not sure. Democracy is mainly the right of voting. The east
european countries could not, before the Berlin wall felt, and
are democracies after. Tunisia, Egypt, even Russia are doing step
toward a representative democracy, which obviously is hard to
implement due to the conflicts of interest.
Clearly, the trick they employ in the DPRK is to define "the
people" differently to other countries. That something like two-
thirds of the "population" of the DPRK don't even officially
exist (ie no birth record kept) appears to be the magic trick.
The DPRK is not a democracy at all. Nobody would believe it is a
democracy, not even the leader Kim, except for some tyrannic
purpose.
The kernel concept of democracy is government by the majority.
Not always. This is complex according to the number of party.
With multi-partism, sometimes we are governed by a tiny party
which can influence between two bigger parties which are close to
50%. That is the case in my country now: we are governed by a
party which is not representative of the majority. In Israel
also, very often, little minority parties get a lot of power.
This is the main reason why I favor bi-partism, although this has
some problem too. If the politics go too much on the right, you
can vote on the left, and vice-versa. This works, unless the
parties are manipulated by non transparent powers, like in
America today, at least for for some political questions. This is
a failure of a sick and old democracy. We can think about how to
correct that, but democracies, like living being, are fragile by
nature. They can die, like in Germany in the thirties.
So, all you have to do to have a workable majority is to erase a
sizeable part of the population.
Voilà. Government for and by the majority.
If the majority is erased or impeach to vote, the democracy is
faked. You cannot criticize the heart by pointing on people
having heart disease.
Bruno
K
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