• adrianmalacoda@lemmy.ml
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    5 months ago

    Arrested Development was literally a satire of the Bush family/administration, whom are now being rehabilitated by usonian liberals.

  • 🍉 Albert 🍉@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    keep in mind that Socrates might not have been as nice as you think, his students ended up doing a coup and their government collapsed in 8 months, their reign was so violent that ended in about the death of 10% of Athens. The tyrants run away amd they put Socrates on trial, and in his defense, Socrates refused to denounce his disciplines and just said it was a whitch hunt because they are mad that he is smarter than everyone else.

    So, Socrates might have been more of a Reactionary grifter like Peterson than a wise kind humble man.

  • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    5 months ago

    Communal society: Electoralism is cringe.

    Slave society: Electoralism is cringe.

    Feudal society: Electoralism is cringe.

    Liberal society: noooooo, electoral democracy portents the end of history elections are based nooooo

    Socialist society: Electoralism is cringe.

    Communist society: Electoralism is cringe.

  • altphoto@lemmy.today
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    5 months ago

    Let’s not muddy the waters…the orange turd we can’t name is the type of ism we don’t want ever again. We also don’t want George Bush or another repeat of any of the political families currently in power or their friends. We want direct vote not college vote. WTF is an electoral college doing now that we have communication technology? Its an old and stupid idea.

  • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
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    5 months ago

    Democracy has as a necessary precondition that people are intelligent enough to differentiate good candidates from bad candidates.

    The real question therefore is whether the people are intelligent enough. That decides their fate.

    • narwhal@mander.xyz
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      5 months ago

      I think your capacity to think is irrelevant or even played against you when the elites pour obscene amounts of money to change your perception of reality. Even the greatest minds can’t escape this.

      • turdcollector69@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        I feel like the belief that intelligence somehow grants immunity to propaganda has utterly devastated media literacy and subsequently our political landscape.

        When people started taking memes and blogs as legitimate sources of information we were cooked.

      • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
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        5 months ago

        If such discussion takes place – an increasingly rare thing – there is no need to individually ”differentiate good candidates from bad candidates” and each voter’s intelligence certainly isn’t of consequence. In a functioning democracy, who to vote for, should follow naturally from your participation in public discourse.

        yeah that’s what i meant. still, people have to be engaged in a way that i don’t see them being engaged in. And that’s still the central issue, i’d say.

    • 小莱卡@lemmygrad.ml
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      5 months ago

      Democracy has as a necessary precondition that people are intelligent enough to differentiate good candidates from bad candidates.

      This is just fundamentally impossible, 99.9% of people only relation to candidates is what they see in social media or other ads. People really have no idea who they’re choosing and its entirely a vibes based decision, i.e. candidate A speaks elocuently, candidate B is charming, etc…

      • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
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        5 months ago

        I have come to dislike the word “education” as it refers to plato’s cave analogy in such a way that somebody else leads you out of it.

        “Education” is therefore not something that you do yourself, but that somebody else does on you. It is therefore objectifying and puts the humans in a passive position.

        Meanwhile, “insight” or “inspiration” is something that you do yourself as it is you who brings up the interest to learn something. Therefore it is a much better word.

        • mad_lentil@lemmy.ca
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          5 months ago

          Yeah I kind of didn’t like that word as I was writing it. Similar to how “tutoring” literally means to “straighten” or basically to inculcate to normativity.

          Meanwhile, “insight” or “inspiration” is something that you do yourself […]

          Good edit, this is a better word choice.

  • PearOfJudes@lemmy.ml
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    5 months ago

    ngl I do hate this kind of nhilism in terms of democracy. Like I agree with that one quote from that greek guy which says that a democracy needs smart people, but democracy is the best system we’ve come up with that to a small extent, makes politicians meet the peoples needs.

    • Homosexual sapiens@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      5 months ago

      The ancient greeks did not consider electoralism to be democracy. They used a combination of direct democracy and sortition. And it should be apparent now that they were right, and we’ve been played for fools for 200 years by the capitalist class who holds all of the true power in our states.

      • PearOfJudes@lemmy.ml
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        5 months ago

        The ancient Greeks are by no means someone to look for in terms of democracy. Aristotle believed slaves were naturally less human and needed masters, and they didn’t let women, or those who didn’t own land vote.

    • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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      5 months ago

      The problem isn’t democracy, it’s democracy under capitalism, and the idea that we can actually transition to socialism via electoralist means.

      • PearOfJudes@lemmy.ml
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        5 months ago

        But its about working with the system we have. We can always advocate for the system being not broken, but intentionally taking advantage of minorities and increasing wealth for the rich whilst doing the opposite for the poor.

        Even though I agree that any democracy in the west isn’t truly democratic, with outright bribery in the form of lobbyist, and a two party duopoly. Even though I acknowledge this, everyone must vote for the less bad party, whilst also spreading the word for what they would truly want.

        Even if the system is inevitably going downhill, slowing it down and pushing every means, through voting for the less evil option, and protesting, spreading word about socialism is the best option.

        • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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          5 months ago

          No, the best option is to organize directly and agitate against the system. This historically has protected marginalized groups far better, it’s how the Civil Rights movement passed. Simply “spreading the word” about socialism does absolutely nothing about the existing levers of power we can and cannot pull, we must do so in the context of broader organizing.

  •   We are sometimes inclined, I think unwisely, to treat democracy and dictatorship as two mutually exclusive terms, when in actual fact they may often represent two aspects of the same system of government. For example, if we turn to the Encyclopedia Britannica, to the article dealing with “Democracy,” we read: “Democracy is that form of government in which the people rules itself, either directly, as in the small city-states of Greece, or through representatives.”
      But the same writer goes on to say this: “All the people in the city-state did not have the right to participate in government, but only those who were citizens, in the legal and original sense. Outside this charmed circle of the privileged were the slaves, who had no voice whatever in the making of the laws under which they toiled. They had no political and hardly any civil rights; they were not ‘people.’ Thus the democracy of the Greek city-state was in the strict sense no democracy at all.”
      The Greek city-state has been cited time and again by historians as the birthplace of democracy. And yet, on reading the Encyclopedia Britannica, we find that in fact this was a democracy only for a “charmed circle of the privileged,” while the slaves, who did the work of the community, “had no voice whatever in the making of the laws under which they toiled.”
      The classical example of democracy was, then, a democracy only for certain people. For others, for those who did the hard work of the community, it was a dictatorship. At the very birthplace of democracy itself we find that democracy and dictatorship went hand in hand as two aspects of the same political system. To refer to the “democracy” of the Greek city-state without saying for whom this democracy existed is misleading. To describe the democracy of the Greek city-state without pointing out that it could only exist as a result of the toil of the slaves who “had no political and hardly any civil rights” falsifies the real history of the origin of democracy.
      Democracy, then, from its origin, has not precluded the simultaneous existence of dictatorship. The essential question which must be asked, when social systems appear to include elements both of democracy and dictatorship, is, “for whom is there democracy?” and “over whom is there a dictatorship?”

    —Pat Sloan, in the Introduction to Soviet Democracy

    • ShinkanTrain@lemmy.ml
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      5 months ago

      Two more quirks of Athenian democracy: Only males were allowed to vote, and soldiers, mostly lower class salarymen, couldn’t vote if they were in service.

  • Chapo_is_Red [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    5 months ago

    It depends what you mean by “work”. While he certainly didn’t see it as sufficient, Marx wasn’t categorically against involvement in electoral politics, so he must’ve seen some “work” in it.

    • Dessalines@lemmy.mlOP
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      5 months ago

      Participation in the electoral pulpit as a platform for agitation is a larger topic, but Marx advocated for the revolutionary overthrow of bourgeios republics his entire adult life.

  • VoxAliorum@lemmy.ml
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    5 months ago

    I really like the idea of randomly elected representatives. Sure, they will try to better their situation for afterwards but with enough corruption control (which is probably easier to implement), this will only ensure that they support their kind of workers a bit more than the rest.