Creating 1500B € out of thin air to build killing machines: Whatever it takes to protect the country!

Spending 50B € to actually protect the people from poverty/malnutrition/starvation: Nooooo we can’t afford that.

Humanity at it’s best: Limitless effort to create suffering, 0 effort to reduce suffering.

In political science, the term polyarchy (poly “many”, arkhe “rule”) was used by Robert A. Dahl to describe a form of government in which power is invested in multiple people. It takes the form of neither a dictatorship nor a democracy. This form of government was first implemented in the United States and France and gradually adopted by other countries. Polyarchy is different from democracy, according to Dahl, because the fundamental democratic principle is “the continuing responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its citizens, considered as political equals” with unimpaired opportunities. A polyarchy is a form of government that has certain procedures that are necessary conditions for following the democratic principle.

So yeah, you are right. A representative “democracy” is not a democracy. It’s a monarchy with more than one ruler.
A gummy bear is as much a bear as representative democracy is a democracy.

I didn’t know that, because i was taught in school that a representative “democracy” is a form of democracy. And the name makes it sound like one. But it isn’t. It’s not even supposed to be in theory. I am sure 99% of people living in a representative “democracy” don’t know this.

I hereby encourage everyone to abandon the word representative “democracy” in favor of polyarchy or maybe oligarchy. This makes it much clearer what we are talking about.

Also i doubt the authors of this article know this, because they imply that representative “democracy” is desirable, but it is obviously undesirable.

Here in Germany there are constantly scandals where politicians sign off illegal deals with the industry, and when the word get’s out, the contract is kept secret to minimize the damage to reputation. Whistleblowers are hunted and politicians that did blatantly illegal things are protected under “immunity”.

In that case i’ll give the Netherlands the title of actual democracy. Let’s hope it lasts for a long time.

For me democracy means rule of the people.
Of course you can define words as you want, and say that only direct democracy is rule of the people, while representative democracy can be oligarchy dressed as democracy, but for me using such a definition makes the word democracy meaningless and undesirable.

Let’s say i put myself out there and say people should vote for me if they want world peace.
Let’s assume the people vote for me, because they want world peace.
Now that i am elected, a lobbyist from a arms company visits me and asks me to grant them an export license to sell weapons to an agressor (let’s assume i have the right to sign such deals).

Are there laws in place that allow me to prevent my voters from finding out that i granted that export license, like a law that says i don’t need to report publicly that i signed this? Or maybe even a law that prevents journalists from reporting on this even if they find out, because the contract (or it’s contents) are considered secret and publishing it would be illegal?

Is it a representative democracy with secrecy laws? Then no.

There is no democracy on this planet because all democracies are representative democracies. In representative democracies the politicians are not representative of the people, but they promise to do things a certain way, and if people elect them for it, that’s like indirect representation. However this breaks down as soon as secrecy laws are put in place, because if the government or private companies can decide which knowledge will reach the people, and which will not, they will simply declare information that will upset their voters to be secret. This breaks all representative democracies.

Personally i think we would live in a utopia if people consumed cave-art and stories by storytellers rather than this book-slop which is easy to mass produce and distribute.

That’s sarcasm. Don’t worry.

Democracy

There is no democracy on this planet because all democracies are representative democracies. In representative democracies the politicians are not representative of the people, but they promise to do things a certain way, and if people elect them for it, that’s like indirect representation.
However this breaks down as soon as secrecy laws are put in place, because if the government or private companies can decide which knowledge will reach the people, and which will not, they will simply declare information that will upset their voters to be secret. This breaks all representative democracies.

Then there is the issue of corruption, which is generally legal under the guise of lobbying.

And because all democracies that i know of have secrecy laws, they can’t be considered democratic.

Liberty

With the liberal part: A person can only be free if they feel safe. But in all countries (that i know) there is a large part of the population that works most/all of their day because they are (rigtfully) afraid they can’t pay for their daily needs if they don’t. And they don’t like their job.
So how can any society claim to be free, if a (large) part of their population is not controlled by their ambitions, but by their fears? If you dislike your job, but do it anyways because if you don’t you die, that’s not freedom. That’s the definition of slavery.

Am i OK?

Absolutely not. Here a list of problems that could (all) be solved by diverting some funds from the world’s militaries:

1. Startvation
2. Malnutrition
3. Homelessness
4. Climate Change
5. Wage Slavery fixed by UBI/Scary Communism

And here a list of things that can be fixed literally for a negative cost. People would be richer while fixing the following problems:

1. Mass animal torture fixed by Veganism.
2. War
3. Any disease, physiological or mental including aging fixed by Antinatalism

And these are just a few of the worst problems. All of them fixable. Many for free.

Knowing that all of the problems are easily fixable, and the people around me are not only not working on them, but actually making things worse by dedicating their live to emitting CO2 (SUVs, Meat-Eating), supporting (Wage-)Slavery (Being against UBI), and making more babies so they may suffer under these manufactured conditions makes me sad (and angry).

I would say the first step in fixing these problems is realizing that things are absolutely not OK. That earth is closer to hell than to paradise. The next step is realizing that no sane person can (or should be) OK under these conditions. And the final step is implementing a solution, ideally with the help of others.

I agree on all of this, but were books different (except for surveillance)?

• Back then those authors that wrote books with messaging supporting the owner class received loads of coverage from their media andtherefore spread their propaganda far and wide. While the average Joe could write whatever they want, nobody was able to see it (until now with social media), because printing is timeconsuming and expensive, and marketing even more so.
• Back then fascists spread their ideas in books, today they do on social media. In both cases supported by the money of the 1%.
• Back then only politically active people were surveilled, now it is everyone. This is a big change.
• Back then entertainment was inexpensive, now it is basically free.

Also that’s not really the point the article is making. They say that simply reading books makes you smarter. As if people read physics books in their freetime back then. No, they just read entertaining stories, and now they stream entertaining stories. Nothing has fundamentally changed. Back then Oil made you part of the owner class, now it’s IT and the owning of marketplaces.

Tldr: New tech (audiovisual media) bad, old tech (reading) good.

They even say that good reading skills lead to liberal democracy. Which is ironic because there is no government on this planet (that i know of) that is democratic (or liberal).

Personally i think we would live in a utopia if people consumed cave-art and stories by storytellers rather than this book-slop which is easy to mass produce and distribute.

But that would infringe on my God-given right to own a car, eat meat, fly once a year and replace my 50" TV with a 20% larger one every 4 years!

How dare you?!?

I would rather have black people far away starving than living like THAT!

As someone who is cautious on stairs, and has fallen on stairs, i can tell you that every second of worrying is worth avoiding the fall.

I’ve been self-hosting it for about 10 years now. It’s a castle built on sand (PHP): It’s hard to install, hard to update, and becomes slower by the day, but once you have learned Docker, Apache, SSL and a bit of SQL, it works mostly reliable.

If you just want file syncronization you could just buy a hosted instance, and use Cryptomator for protecting your privacy. Then you can have Nextcloud in under 30mins.
If you want to store large amounts of data, or you also want to use Calendar, Collabora, Talk,… then self-hosting will be cheaper/more private. But it will require lot’s of learning, far more than the ordinary person can do.

Innovation and competition at it’s peak: You get to choose the color of your noose.

But (presumably) no cash or crypto because someone has to take a 3% cut.

Now it’s even more depressing because that means humans have been using children as a tool to create social security, knowing full well that most of them will suffer and die at an early age.

It’s a pyramid scheme played with (literally) innocent people at the expense of an insane amount of suffering and death.

The only thing Evil (aka. suffering, disease, war,…) needs to exist is that ‘good’ people continue to have children.

Not true. Humans always reproduced to the absolute limit (set by their agricultural technology and the bodies of women). The reason why this didn’t wreck the environment is because that limited population was too small to turn 50% of land into farmland, they didn’t know how to burn large amounts of coal and they didn’t have the technology to produce harmful chemicals.

But i agree that humanity (or any other species) has no value. Saying humanity has value is like saying the white race has value. It’s pure aestethics, it’s not worth it to make anyone suffer for that.

Sadly election results prove every few years, that you are the only one seeking radical change.

~30-50% want extreme conservativism/capitalism. ~20-40% want everything as-is.
~30% want mild improvements like a really low UBI.
<5% want to get rid of oligarchs.
<.1% want to eliminate suffering.