Guys, referenda *can* be great, but imagine trying to use those to pass a yearly budget?
Funny events in anti-woke world
- Thread starter Agema
- Start date
Has any politician ever, short of actual lynching, faced any liability for any bad policies ever? Not being voted back in is not really an accounting.
That's always been the most irritating thing to me about Conservatives; "Think for yourself, don't be a sheep and listen to THEM. Be an individual and obey everything OUR talking heads tell you! THEY know better than those "experts".
You state this as a criticism of conservatives, but it equally describes the concept of "woke". "All those people believing the lies are asleep to the real world, listen to our talking heads and you'll be awake instead."
If people have trouble with specific items in the budget, they can vote on them. Also, I guess what I really wanted was more direct democracy, with the end goal of being pure direct democracy. But right now I would argue we don't have an educated populace, most people don't go to college, and there are lots of people with just a high school education. I would argue that's not good enough.
Also being voted out means a lobbyist gives you a job in America. Oh no a larger salary, the horror. If you go left, or even somewhat left you don't get a lobbyist job, and have to start a radio/youtube/podcast like AL Franken. So you are penalized for serving the needs of your people, and not the rich.
If you vote bad shit too much, your nation could face hard times, or cease to exist. If you vote for a very small military, and diplomacy/state department budget, the nation you are living in dies. Vote for bad laws, guess who has to live with them. Vote for your ingroup against the outgroup, good luck attracting immigrants to your country. Troll voting means you will face the consequences.
Damn right.
It ain't the "woke" crowd telling me to take dewormers and accusing me of being in league with Satan and communists for getting the vaccine, homeboy.
Really ?
You want to vote on every single point of the budget and research its necessity and listen to varios opinions/lobbies about it every year ? Because every point will be important to some people.
The main problem with people wanting direct democracy for everything is that they imagine to get to vote about issues they are interested in but they don't imagine to have to decide all the thousands of little things they are totally indifferent to, have no knowledge about and no interest in obtaining some.
Sure, you can try to bundle stuff. But then you lose the opinion to decise everything and have to take the good with the bad if people bound it together. And to be honest, that is already half the way to party programs.
Or you could try to have only people with some opinion/interest vote on stuff, but then you will be ruled by interest groups because those are best able to mobilize for issues.
My guy, I barely have my budget under control, and micro economics doesn't translate to macro economics. Our civilization is at the point where you can't just be generally good at it, you need specialists. That includes bureaucracy.
That said, I'd agree that a lot of the bureaucrats we're electing are dangerously unqualified for the job. Business is micro economics, nations are macro economics
Broadly, politicians that create bad policy suffer the same fate as anyone else who screws up their job: they lose that job. Sometimes immediately via getting sacked or resigning from certain elevated duties such as ministerial posts, and sometimes by being voted out of office entirely. Also just like happens in other professions, sometime they screw up and keep their job: we would have to accept that politicians, because of the somewhat unique nature of politics (e.g. safe seats), can be unusually good at keeping their jobs after they screw up compared to most professions.
One might consider that a little low on accountability, but there is a considerable hazard going any further. If we make politicians terrified of making "honest" mistakes, the result will be that they will be inclined to do nothing. Which includes not doing a great number of things that could be beneficial.
The other factor about politicians is that their primary reason to do something is arguably public will. If the public vote in representatives to enact bad policy, to a large extent those politicians also need to be absolved of substantial personal blame for that bad policy.
We wouldn't have the NHS. Absolutely.
There are plenty of progressive reforms done through direct democratic votes.... within representative democracies. In which the people have been given a broad-strokes question of policy in principle, and then the actual practicalities, detail, implementation etc has been handled by elected representatives.
I have no issue with that approach. But that's not full direct democracy as a system of government.
I'm going to throw in my lot with representative democracy.
Yes, direct democracy can play a role in referendums, but consider Brexit for instance - a nation-changing event left to national plebicite. I don't care what you think of Jack and Jill in the pub, if you don't have a background in economics or whatnot, this isn't the kind of decision you should be leaving to popular vote.
Yes, direct democracy can play a role in referendums, but consider Brexit for instance - a nation-changing event left to national plebicite. I don't care what you think of Jack and Jill in the pub, if you don't have a background in economics or whatnot, this isn't the kind of decision you should be leaving to popular vote.
That extra step has at least prevented some of the worst excesses. We would be refusing refugee settlement (given that the UK population is convinced immigration is many times higher than it is, and also conflates immigration with refugee status). We would be flouting international law, because the population is broadly chauvinist and doesn't give a shit about international law or forward-planning. Our supply chains would utterly have collapsed because people have zero appreciation of the detail or minutiae of that side of things.
And also means everyone who didn't vote for those measures suffers, too. To life and death proportions, on a mass scale.
On one hand, you're happy to signal boost idiots to make yourself look better.
On the other hand, you didn't even actually succeed at finding something that correlates to what was said.
How am I signal boosting idiots seeing as they aren't identified?
And are you really going to fucking pretend that conservative brainrotted worms aren't saying that the vaccine is communism and satan and a whole bunch of other bullshit? Wake the fuck up.
"I identify as a conservative, and I must be a good guy; therefore, conservatives can't ever do anything not good. If that ever were to (impossibly) happen, either that bad thing must really be good or the people who did it aren't really conservatives."
Have you considered that the complex of corporate media interests that encourage those opinions could be weakened or smashed by democratic vote as well? The very same people that set the news agenda in its right-wing frame pull the strings of your supposedly salvatory representatives.