lederhosen

*Unfortunately* you're still a democracy?

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You're surprised? I'm sure

cerebrate has expressed his disdain for democracy many times before.

Me, I take the Churchillian view of democracy, with a dash of H.L. Mencken.

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ex-cerebrate131.livejournal.com

Yes, unfortunately.

Democracy is the charming belief that a million people acting collectively will somehow produce better decisions than one person acting alone. Well, now, it doesn't take me more'n a half-minute of introspection to discover the fallacy in that one.

(In fact, among the reasons I prefer the US system of government is that it is in fact by design *less* democratic than the UK one, and as such provides less opportunities for the People to screw things up on the whim of the moment. In fact, on that count, you can list me among the people who believe that the Seventeenth Amendment was a Really Bad Idea.)

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shadow-5tails.livejournal.com

There's an old version of the Cinderella tale in which the prince is so enamoured of his lady's perfection that he has Cinderella encased in diamond and placed on her throne, never to age, never to fade, her flawless beauty preserved for all time.

Why do I feel like we're "saving" the democratic ideal in about the same way?

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ianthefira.livejournal.com

Wow, that's a really creepy version of the tale. Any links available to that one, assuming online copies exist at all?

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djfiggy.livejournal.com

Something about that eerie rendition seems familiar, yet I'm sure I've never read it.

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ambitious-wench.livejournal.com

I knew it. I frickin' KNEW it. I predicted it, and now it may very well come true.

Anyone wanna offer odds that Osama bin Laden is "found" in October?

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http://www.osamafromahat.com/

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silmaril.livejournal.com

Get in line and get a ticket, I think there's been an informal pool for a long time. I don't know who's keeping the book, though.

Also, I am sickly angry at the moment.

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malada.livejournal.com

If elections are cancelled you will see me standing at my polling place with a sign saying:

PRES. BUSH -

LET ME VOTE!

-m

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For discussion of why I'm just not scared about this, see also
this thread in

ambitious_wench's journal.

This is America. We're heavily armed rednecks who obsess about our rights. Bring it on!

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Yeah, but this is a lot like my opinion regarding Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale --the good news is, it would never happen. The bad news is, the *reason* it would never happen is you'd see a civil war fought with cruise missles and nuclear warheads, first...

I certainly would prefer to die free than die as a slave. It would have been nice to not die at all, but frankly, as I wrote once before, the way I look at it; it's not so much that things come to a close now, but that we've had almost twenty-five good years. That's not bad.

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Bah. I don't believe we'd fight a civil war of MAD, for the simple reason that I know my opponents, and they are not insane. They follow a different ideology, but they desire temporal power, not glory in the afterlife. It's the precise same reason we haven't nuked anything in Iraq.

Anyway, nobody's going to die anytime soon, except maybe in another 9/11 (which is supposed to be targeted to Houston, at least according to low-quality intel services). You're worrying too much.

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Soon, perhaps not.

If you told a German citizen in 1920 that 25 years later their nation would be a hell-on-earth of firebombed cities and death camps they'd tell you you were nuts, too.

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I continue to hope that humanity has learned from that particular mistake, and that there are sufficient dissimilarities between the modern American psyche and that of Weimar Germans to prevent a repeat. Perhaps this is unduly optimistic, but I prefer to hope for the best, because the alternative is to grow out my beard and head up to the shack in the hills to snipe at passing hikers.

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and that there are sufficient dissimilarities between the modern American psyche and that of Weimar Germans to prevent a repeat.

Milgram's work on obedience suggests otherwise.

(Well, I don't think anybody's been allowed to repeat the experiment recently, what with the ethics criteria applied to psych experiments nowadays, but when he compared a wide range of nationalities and other demographics back in the '60s and '70s the results were uniform enough to make it look like a constant of human nature.)

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I view Milgram's work as relating to a later stage of the same process, when the people have accepted someone as a legitimate authority. My hypothesis here is that Americans will not accept an indefinite postponement of elections and will see it as an illegitimate use of power.

It's a funny thing. People don't usually exercise their right to vote or speak up or organize, but they also get really annoyed when you try to take it away.

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I view Milgram's work as relating to a later stage of the same process, when the people have accepted someone as a legitimate authority.

Ah, fair point. I hadn't thought of it that way.

But I wasn't looking so much at an indefinite postponement of elections, which I agree would probably spark open revolt, as at more subtle abuses. Timing is important in election campaigns - when to run ads, when to dish the dirt - and a government with the power to postpone elections could easily allow the opposing campaign to peak on the scheduled date, then call a last-minute postponement. Even if you can only do that once per election, and only for a month or two, it's a huge advantage in unscrupulous hands.

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Mmm. Interesting point, and that *is* entirely possible. On the other hand, as was pointed out by a friend in another forum, what if the attack happens in a swing state or a major Democratic stronghold, suppressing turnout? Then we *want* elections postponed, because otherwise Bush would grab more votes.

It's very unpredictable and dangerous to try to sway elections with even limited postponement, though. The electorate, although predictable in some ways, is not a linear or stable system. I just think that if I were Bush, I wouldn't want to play with that kind of fire, unless the polls already showed me certain to lose.

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On the other hand, as was pointed out by a friend in another forum, what if the attack happens in a swing state or a major Democratic stronghold, suppressing turnout?

Then the election goes ahead on schedule, because postponement would mean the Terrorists Have Already Won. I wouldn't trust *me* to be able to apply such a power even-handedly, let alone the Bush administration.

The electorate, although predictable in some ways, is not a linear or stable system.

Sure, and this sort of trick would never provide a certainty of victory, but IMHO just being able to influence the odds in this fashion is way too much power.

I just think that if I were Bush, I wouldn't want to play with that kind of fire, unless the polls already showed me certain to lose.

Yeah, but if you were Bush we wouldn't be in such a godawful mess right now. Come to that, Dog-Or the Wonder Spaniel would have been hard pressed to screw things up as badly.

That's one of the things that really scares me about Bush Jr. Bush Sr. was IMHO a nasty piece of work, but he was smart enough not to foul his own nest. Bush Jr. is dumb enough to be dangerously unpredictable.

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This is a common mistake. He is *not* stupid. He is wrong, and in certain ways he is a Very Bad Man, but he is *not* the idiot the rest of the world makes him out to be. He is very shrewd at knowing what he can get away with and doing precisely that, and he knows how to play to the public. He is an example of the phrase "Anyone capable of getting themselves made President should on no condition be allowed to do the job."

Calling him stupid, however, is intellectual laziness on the part of the left, and is a good way to get beat a second time.

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Agree and disagree. I do believe Bush is stupid, but in a different fashion from that commonly ascribed to him. And I'm quite willing to concede shrewdness on some issues, be it in Bush himself or in his handlers.

IMHO, the popular caricature of Bush as an illiterate and clumsy buffoon - the man who can't pronounce difficult words and looks dumb on camera a lot - is largely spin. Anybody who has as much camera time as Bush is going to provide a certain number of dumb-looking shots, and there are any number of people happy to score the cheap points that way.

Which is a grievous mistake, because Bush has quite deliberately appealed to anti-intellectualism - cf his speech at Yale (?) in which he happily plays off having squandered the educational opportunities he got there. He plays dumb because everybody can relate to a C student, and it works - I know people who think of him as a 'regular guy', while they work 80-hour weeks and pinch pennies to get by. In that light, mocking him for a lack of book-smarts is playing right into his hands.

But there are other areas where his stupidity seems to me to be genuine, because it doesn't seem to benefit him. His miserable business record; his use of the word 'crusade' to describe war on an Islamic nation. Paul O'Neill's 'blind man in a room full of deaf people' description has been supported by several other White House insiders; while it's probably unfair to lay the blame for all the tactical blunders of the Iraq war at Bush's feet, I think he has to take at least some of it, and the consequences of that don't exactly help his cause.

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That's not stupidity. That's faith. There *is* a subtle difference. I am quite certain that he believes he is on a mission from God to make America safe and restore moral order, and that he will do whatever it takes to carry out that mission.

Now, whatever God is speaking to him is clearly not the same one that speaks to me, or to Turnberry. Nonetheless. It is, if anything, mere arrogance and pride that sources the things you're describing.

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(wry grin) Worrying too much was what my Nader-voting friend told me the night of the election back in 2000. Of course, given his family lives in the Middle East, the price he pays for his own mistake is vastly higher...

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