Idea of perfect democracy?

[Good Kisser]

Do you think would it be a good idea if let's say US was changed so that every citizen gets some sort of voting device so that everybody who has it can vote which law should be passed on or refused so that the people do the job of the president and politicians?

I mean we certainly achieved that kind of technological state that at least from tech point of view this would be possible.

[Freeski]

Do you think would it be a good idea if let's say US was changed so that every citizen gets some sort of voting device so that everybody who has it can vote which law should be passed on or refused so that the people do the job of the president and politicians?

I mean we certainly achieved that kind of technological state that at least from tech point of view would be possible.

Pass.

http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=63298.msg326963#msg326963

"Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.” - Oscar Wilde

“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide.” - John Adams

“The one prevailing evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.” - Lord Acton

"The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots." - Elbridge Gerry - Massachusetts, Signer of the Declaration of Independence and Member of the Constitutional Convention

“It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.” - Alexander Hamilton

“Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” - James Madison

“Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.” - James Russell Lowell

"As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy." - Abraham Lincoln

“Democracy passes into despotism.” - Plato

“Tyranny naturally arises out of democracy.” - Plato

"Democracy is more cruel than wars or tyrants." - Seneca

“Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

[Good Kisser]

So you're putting bunch of quotes of people saying democracy does not work but even on paper today's democracies are not democracies. They are just democratic in a way of choosing the leader who will make choices for the people but real democracy would be if people would make all the decisions. And when did that ever happen? Maybe in old Greece.

+ most of the qutes come from politicians who who are afraid of total democracy because they would be jobless there. I mean we now have this society in which elite, politicians or aristocracy or whatever you want to call them makes decisions and where did this lead us? Only people who are happy are the ones that made those decisions because they made them for themselves but if you wide the circle of decision makers then it seems everybody would be happy.   

[egypt]

It is a "Republic" that is wanted, not a "Democracy."

A "democracy" is about a simple majority (51%) "ruling."  Alex likens it to a situation wherein two wolves and a sheep are voting on what's for dinner.

A "republic" has certain tenets, as have already been laid out by our fine Constitution that cannot *ever* change.  They are not up to decisions and votes.  These tenets protect the lives of All who live under them.

Love, e

[Freeski]

I prefer a society that's governed by the rule of law rather than the rule of uninformed whims.

Great 10 minute video from JBS that compares five forms of government: monarchy, oligarchy, anarchy, democracy and republic. It concludes that there are only two stable forms -- oligarchy and republic -- and that democracy always transitions to oligarcy, then anarchy and back to monarch/dictatorship.

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhNobpG_4fQ&feature=related
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htTnD_Zl0bs&NR=1

^ from this post: What does democracy mean?
http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=176500.msg1065408#msg1065408

[Good Kisser]

I prefer a society that's governed by the rule of law rather than the rule of uninformed whims.

And what war in Iraq, Afghanistan etc was decided by informed people?  Or closing of the industry in US was also decided by informed people?

[Dig]

So you're putting bunch of quotes of people saying democracy does not work but even on paper today's democracies are not democracies. They are just democratic in a way of choosing the leader who will make choices for the people but real democracy would be if people would make all the decisions. And when did that ever happen? Maybe in old Greece.

+ most of the qutes come from politicians who who are afraid of total democracy because they would be jobless there. I mean we now have this society in which elite, politicians or aristocracy or whatever you want to call them makes decisions and where did this lead us? Only people who are happy are the ones that made those decisions because they made them for themselves but if you wide the circle of decision makers then it seems everybody would be happy.   

Watch "Century of the Self". We can debate "democracy" all day long, but the fact remains that until you have unalienable rightd, there is no such thing. The idea of a "democracy" allowed Freud and his twit nephew Berneys to work with the most powerful elite in devising a system of controlling perception. In the past 100 years that system has been perfected on a granular level and will soon be perfected on a nano level. All of the issues you speak of (wars, economy, etc.) are created because of perception management and control via the democratic process.READ THIS DOCUMENT FROM 1990 - IT LAYS OUT THE WHOLE AGENDA

Everything you will be able to do on your computer will be regulated by role-based access control - what are YOU allowed to access, and at any given time they can revoke those rights. And this will count for EVERYTHING - not just your Internet, not just your computer, not just your access to data at work - it means your money, your social security, everything. They can make you just not EXIST. Think of The Net.

http://www.nadir.org/nadir/archiv/netzkritik/societyofcontrol.html

Society Of Control - Gilles Deleuze (1990)

I. Historical
     

Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first the family; then the school ("you are no longer in your family"); then the barracks ("you are no longer at school"); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment. It's the prison that serves as the analogical model: at the sight of some laborers, the heroine of Rossellini's Europa '51 could exclaim, "I thought I was seeing convicts."

Foucault has brilliantly analyzed the ideal project of these environments of enclosure, particularly visible within the factory: to concentrate; to distribute in space; to order in time; to compose a productive force within the dimension of space-time whose effect will be greater than the sum of its component forces. But what Foucault recognized as well was the transience of this model: it succeeded that of the societies of sovereignty, the goal and functions of which were something quite different (to tax rather than to organize production, to rule on death rather than to administer life); the transition took place over time, and Napoleon seemed to effect the large-scale conversion from one society to the other. But in their turn the disciplines underwent a crisis to the benefit of new forces that were gradually instituted and which accelerated after World War II: a disciplinary society was what we already no longer were, what we had ceased to be.

We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure--prison, hospital, factory, school, family. The family is an "interior," in crisis like all other interiors--scholarly, professional, etc. The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It's only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door. These are the societies of control, which are in the process of replacing disciplinary societies. "Control" is the name Burroughs proposes as a term for the new monster, one that Foucault recognizes as our immediate future. Paul Virilio also is continually analyzing the ultrarapid forms of free-floating control that replaced the old disciplines operating in the time frame of a closed system. There is no need to invoke the extraordinary pharmaceutical productions, the molecular engineering, the genetic manipulations, although these are slated to enter the new process. There is no need to ask which is the toughest regime, for it's within each of them that liberating and enslaving forces confront one another. For example, in the crisis of the hospital as environment of enclosure, neighborhood clinics, hospices, and day care could at first express new freedom, but they could participate as well in mechanisms of control that are equal to the harshest of confinements. There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.

 
II. Logic
     

The different internments of spaces of enclosure through which the individual passes are independent variables: each time one us supposed to start from zero, and although a common language for all these places exists, it is analogical. One the other hand, the different control mechanisms are inseparable variations, forming a system of variable geometry the language of which is numerical (which doesn't necessarily mean binary). Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point.

This is obvious in the matter of salaries: the factory was a body that contained its internal forces at the level of equilibrium, the highest possible in terms of production, the lowest possible in terms of wages; but in a society of control, the corporation has replaced the factory, and the corporation is a spirit, a gas. Of course the factory was already familiar with the system of bonuses, but the corporation works more deeply to impose a modulation of each salary, in states of perpetual metastability that operate through challenges, contests, and highly comic group sessions. If the most idiotic television game shows are so successful, it's because they express the corporate situation with great precision. The factory constituted individuals as a single body to the double advantage of the boss who surveyed each element within the mass and the unions who mobilized a mass resistance; but the corporation constantly presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation, an excellent motivational force that opposes individuals against one another and runs through each, dividing each within. The modulating principle of "salary according to merit" has not failed to tempt national education itself. Indeed, just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination. Which is the surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation.

In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything--the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation. In The Trial, Kafka, who had already placed himself at the pivotal point between two types of social formation, described the most fearsome of judicial forms. The apparent acquittal of the disciplinary societies (between two incarcerations); and the limitless postponements of the societies of control (in continuous variation) are two very different modes of juridicial life, and if our law is hesitant, itself in crisis, it's because we are leaving one in order to enter the other. The disciplinary societies have two poles: the signature that designates the individual, and the number or administrative numeration that indicates his or her position within a mass. This is because the disciplines never saw any incompatibility between these two, and because at the same time power individualizes and masses together, that is, constitutes those over whom it exercises power into a body and molds the individuality of each member of that body. (Foucault saw the origin of this double charge in the pastoral power of the priest--the flock and each of its animals--but civil power moves in turn and by other means to make itself lay "priest.") In the societies of control, on the other hand, what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password, while on the other hand disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords (as much from the point of view of integration as from that of resistance). The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become "dividuals," and masses, samples, data, markets, or "banks." Perhaps it is money that expresses the distinction between the two societies best, since discipline always referred back to minted money that locks gold as numerical standard, while control relates to floating rates of exchange, modulated according to a rate established by a set of standard currencies. The old monetary mole is the animal of the space of enclosure, but the serpent is that of the societies of control. We have passed from one animal to the other, from the mole to the serpent, in the system under which we live, but also in our manner of living and in our relations with others. The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network. Everywhere surfing has already replaced the older sports.

Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society--not that machines are determining, but because they express those social forms capable of generating them and using them. The old societies of sovereignty made use of simple machines--levers, pulleys, clocks; but the recent disciplinary societies equipped themselves with machines involving energy, with the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage; the societies of control operate with machines of a third type, computers, whose passive danger is jamming and whose active one is piracy or the introduction of viruses. This technological evolution must be, even more profoundly, a mutation of capitalism, an already well-known or familiar mutation that can be summed up as follows: nineteenth-century capitalism is a capitalism of concentration, for production and for property. It therefore erects a factory as a space of enclosure, the capitalist being the owner of the means of production but also, progressively, the owner of other spaces conceived through analogy (the worker's familial house, the school). As for markets, they are conquered sometimes by specialization, sometimes by colonization, sometimes by lowering the costs of production. But in the present situation, capitalism is no longer involved in production, which it often relegates to the Third World, even for the complex forms of textiles, metallurgy, or oil production. It's a capitalism of higher-order production. It no-longer buys raw materials and no longer sells the finished products: it buys the finished products or assembles parts. What it wants to sell is services but what it wants to buy is stocks. This is no longer a capitalism for production but for the product, which is to say, for being sold or marketed. Thus is essentially dispersive, and the factory has given way to the corporation. The family, the school, the army, the factory are no longer the distinct analogical spaces that converge towards an owner--state or private power--but coded figures--deformable and transformable--of a single corporation that now has only stockholders. Even art has left the spaces of enclosure in order to enter into the open circuits of the bank. The conquests of the market are made by grabbing control and no longer by disciplinary training, by fixing the exchange rate much more than by lowering costs, by transformation of the product more than by specialization of production. Corruption thereby gains a new power. Marketing has become the center or the "soul" of the corporation. We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world. The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters. Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous. Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt. It is true that capitalism has retained as a constant the extreme poverty of three-quarters of humanity, too poor for debt, too numerous for confinement: control will not only have to deal with erosions of frontiers but with the explosions within shanty towns or ghettos.

 
III. Program
     

The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant (whether animal in a reserve or human in a corporation, as with an electronic collar), is not necessarily one of science fiction. Felix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one's apartment, one's street, one's neighborhood, thanks to one's (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person's position--licit or illicit--and effects a universal modulation.

The socio-technological study of the mechanisms of control, grasped at their inception, would have to be categorical and to describe what is already in the process of substitution for the disciplinary sites of enclosure, whose crisis is everywhere proclaimed. It may be that older methods, borrowed from the former societies of sovereignty, will return to the fore, but with the necessary modifications. What counts is that we are at the beginning of something. In the prison system: the attempt to find penalties of "substitution," at least for petty crimes, and the use of electronic collars that force the convicted person to stay at home during certain hours. For the school system: continuous forms of control, and the effect on the school of perpetual training, the corresponding abandonment of all university research, the introduction of the "corporation" at all levels of schooling. For the hospital system: the new medicine "without doctor or patient" that singles out potential sick people and subjects at risk, which in no way attests to individuation--as they say--but substitutes for the individual or numerical body the code of a "dividual" material to be controlled. In the corporate system: new ways of handling money, profits, and humans that no longer pass through the old factory form. These are very small examples, but ones that will allow for better understanding of what is meant by the crisis of the institutions, which is to say, the progressive and dispersed installation of a new system of domination. One of the most important questions will concern the ineptitude of the unions: tied to the whole of their history of struggle against the disciplines or within the spaces of enclosure, will they be able to adapt themselves or will they give way to new forms of resistance against the societies of control? Can we already grasp the rough outlines of the coming forms, capable of threatening the joys of marketing? Many young people strangely boast of being "motivated"; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It's up to them to discover what they're being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines. The coils of a serpent are even more complex that the burrows of a molehill.

[EvadingGrid]

Stalin had elections, did that make Soviet Russia a True Democracy ?

The abuse of the term Democracy simply proves will live in a world of illusions created by propaganda officers. These propaganda merchants manipulate the population into thinking they are running things, when in fact it is the hidden hand of the manipulators influencing the masses.

[Good Kisser]

Watch "Century of the Self". We can debate "democracy" all day long, but the fact remains that until you have unalienable rightd, there is no such thing. The idea of a "democracy" allowed Freud and his twit nephew Berneys to work with the most powerful elite in devising a system of controlling perception. In the past 100 years that system has been perfected on a granular level and will soon be perfected on a nano level. All of the issues you speak of (wars, economy, etc.) are created because of perception management and control via the democratic process.

Actually I watched "Century of the Self" and from what I remember after WW1 Freud came to conclusion that people are very violent beasts and that they should be strictly governed which was also Hitlers point of view that why "he" created Nazism as a perfect way to control people.
And wars, economy were created long before democracy so they were not created via the democratic process because also there has not yet been real democracy. Not to mention that US government for decades now is being criticized as tending toward fascism. The decision makers are the one who are corrupt and they are just a handful of people. Even during the wars no matter under which regime either totalitarian or democratic majority of people are always against the war but it is this few people that is making the rest 99.99% to go into war and be miserable.
Look at the war in Iraq how many people beside the politicians are for it? Not many. If you made elections about should today the US army be retrieved from middle East people would vote yes but who asks them.

Sure you could argue that such people could be manipulated by fear but if such a society could be in the hands of the people then maybe they could prevent it from happening because you must remember that people that shape the news and this even comes from Chomsky are bribed by money that comes from the deficit, from politicians who are governed by people with money and that is mainly army industry sector.

"Economy is created via the democratic process" - come on what about that 'bail out' swindle. That was no democracy that was pure nepotism and oligarchy.

[ekimdrachir]

Though only a small percentage of the population were citizens, all citizens had a vote in Athens. It was direct democracy, where blood was sometimes spilled during debates and all men were by law required not to shrink from controversy. We have a society of imbeciles and idiots, unfit to participate in the great halls of ancient greece. Its a sad mess but true. I believe these days it is the implementation of local production based economics, where local groups work to manage projects for the well being of the community. The federal government is incapable of making any meaningful changes for the local level. Incapable.

[Dig]

Actually I watched "Century of the Self" and from what I remember after WW1 Freud came to conclusion that people are very violent beasts and that they should be strictly governed which was also Hitlers point of view that why "he" created Nazism as a perfect way to control people.
And wars, economy were created long before democracy so they were not created via the democratic process because also there has not yet been real democracy. Not to mention that US government for decades now is being criticized as tending toward fascism. The decision makers are the one who are corrupt and they are just a handful of people. Even during the wars no matter under which regime either totalitarian or democratic majority of people are always against the war but it is this few people that is making the rest 99.99% to go into war and be miserable.
Look at the war in Iraq how many people beside the politicians are for it? Not many. If you made elections about should today the US army be retrieved from middle East people would vote yes but who asks them.

Sure you could argue that such people could be manipulated by fear but if such a society could be in the hands of the people then maybe they could prevent it from happening because you must remember that people that shape the news and this even comes from Chomsky are bribed by money that comes from the deficit, from politicians who are governed by people with money and that is mainly army industry sector.

"Economy is created via the democratic process" - come on what about that 'bail out' swindle. That was no democracy that was pure nepotism and oligarchy.

Now watch this and see what is being created as the "perfect democracy"


All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yq0xVuRG4ng

[JT Coyoté]

Do you think would it be a good idea if let's say US was changed so that every citizen gets some sort of voting device so that everybody who has it can vote which law should be passed on or refused so that the people do the job of the president and politicians?

I mean we certainly achieved that kind of technological state that at least from tech point of view this would be possible.

I believe it was that great lover of earthly utopia, Joseph Stalin who said, "It is not who votes that counts, it's who counts the votes..."

You may want to think this thought of yours through a little further, since this utopian idea has been around since day one... With every advance in technology, some idiot society or another tries it...AGAIN, with the same disastrous result. 

The latest group of attempts came in the wake of the telegraph, the telephone, then again with the advent of radio... it grew again with the TV/Computer, and we are still in the throws of this one... "Oh, let's all cheer, computer enhanced World Democracy!" As *Imagine* plays in the background... (sic)

I'm amazed at the number of folks in America who wish to change the government of this country are merely putting forth systems that will give the federal usurpers even more power to further undermine our sequestered Republic.

LIBERTY and equal JUSTICE, requires work, people...!  It requires an understanding of what the founders created here, that will promote it, against the growing filth of global greed and avarice... you see without Liberty and Laws borne of Justice, the only alternative is called TYRANNY. Oh and Democracy throughout history has been the preferred government they introduce... just before they drop the hammer.

Please read Federalist #10 by James Madison, the #45 and #51

JTCoyoté

"I have never met anyone who did not support our troops.
Sometimes, however, we hear accusations that someone
or some group does not support the men and women serving
in our Armed Forces. But this is pure demagoguery,
and it is intellectually dishonest." ~Ron Paul

[donnay]

I believe it was that great lover of earthly utopia, Joseph Stalin who said, "It is not who votes that counts, it's who counts the votes..."

You may want to think this thought of yours through a little further, since this utopian idea has been around since day one... With every advance in technology, some idiot society or another tries it...AGAIN, with the same disastrous result. 

The latest group of attempts came in the wake of the telegraph, the telephone, then again with the advent of radio... it grew again with the TV/Computer, and we are still in the throws of this one... "Oh, let's all cheer, computer enhanced World Democracy!" As *Imagine* plays in the background... (sic)

I'm amazed at the number of folks in America who wish to change the government of this country are merely putting forth systems that will give the federal usurpers even more power to further undermine our sequestered Republic.

LIBERTY and equal JUSTICE, requires work, people...!  It requires an understanding of what the founders created here, that will promote it, against the growing filth of global greed and avarice... you see without Liberty and Laws borne of Justice, the only alternative is called TYRANNY. Oh and Democracy throughout history has been the preferred government they introduce... just before they drop the hammer.

Please read Federalist #10 by James Madison, the #45 and #51

JTCoyoté

"I have never met anyone who did not support our troops.
Sometimes, however, we hear accusations that someone
or some group does not support the men and women serving
in our Armed Forces. But this is pure demagoguery,
and it is intellectually dishonest." ~Ron Paul

Well said, JT!

[EvadingGrid]

Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized.

Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. In almost every act of our lives whether in the sphere of politics or business in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.

Edward Bernays


Give it some thought before hastily concluding that democracy actually gives power to the people instead of the illusion of power to the masses.

After all, if the mob can not see the walls of the prison . . . .

[Scarbo]

It has to be a republic. I've known a lot of people who literally would LOVE to have slavery again, and the public is too easily swayed this way and that.

Mob-rule is dangerous.

[donnay]

I vote to ban Good Kisser out of this forum....



Not really...but if the majority agreed with me, then Good Kisser would be history!

That's what a true democracy is all about!

Your rights do not count when the majority vote!!!

One of the many reasons the founders warned us about democracy and standing armies and why the Anti Federalist insisted on the Bill of Rights!

[EvadingGrid]

Democracy killed Socrates.

[EvadingGrid]

I vote to ban Good Kisser out of this forum....

Do I get to count the votes . . .  ?

ROFL

[Optimus]

Do you think would it be a good idea if let's say US was changed so that every citizen gets some sort of voting device so that everybody who has it can vote which law should be passed on or refused so that the people do the job of the president and politicians?

I mean we certainly achieved that kind of technological state that at least from tech point of view this would be possible.

I pass on any such notion or idea about "democracy", perfect or not.

A perfect Democracy = Two wolves and one sheep voting on what will be for dinner. It will ALWAYS be mutton for dinner.

This country was Founded as a Republic and that is what I want restored.

[Constitutionary]

And what war in Iraq, Afghanistan etc was decided by informed people?  Or closing of the industry in US was also decided by informed people?

In a way yes cuz Americans fail to make the Bilderberg/Globalist connection with the Democrat and Republican they are electing to office.  If Americans elected 3rd parties then the Globalist's agenda would not be so far along as it is.

We could be where ICELAND is now forgiving the debt of its citizens brought on by the banksters and their Globalist cohort politicians, had we elected Chuck Baldwin and Darrell Castle of the Constitution Party.  America instead came down with a case of jungle-fever and elected Obama despite his lack of citizenship and his Bilderberg connections.

The fact that the states are successfully blocking the un-Constitutional Globalist laws passed on the national level shows that our Republic is holding fast. It may not be in great condition but the North American Union plan has failed and they haven't sent out the FEMA Trucks yet.