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Democracy debunked?

Spindrift said:
And most everyone else ends up with someone nobody deserves.
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WTH does that mean? If people end up with the leaders they deserve (which they do IMO), who are the "everyone else"? Pets and domestic animals?
 
It would be awesome if at every political debate and speech there was a game show like mechanic where every time a politician began to use any of these following tactics, a buzzer would go off with the word fallacy, rhetoric, hyperbole, etc. They would be allowed to appeal to the buzzer once per buzz, but could be buzzed in their appeals.
 
Halfcentaur said:
It would be awesome if at every political debate and speech there was a game show like mechanic where every time a politician began to use any of these following tactics, a buzzer would go off with the word fallacy, rhetoric, hyperbole, etc. They would be allowed to appeal to the buzzer once per buzz, but could be buzzed in their appeals.
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If it could be done fairly, yes it would be awesome! Moderators in current debates are usually ravaged for perceived biases all the time though, so I doubt it would be different in your buzzer system.
 
mike3 said:
Hi.

I saw this:

http://politics.slashdot.org/story/...ugh-for-democracy-to-flourish?sdsrc=popbyweek



(original article HERE: http://news.yahoo.com/people-arent-smart-enough-democracy-flourish-scientists-185601411.html, and the guys who did the study are none other than Dunning & Kruger of the famous Dunning-Kruger Effect and this is apparently even related to that in a way)

But what can be done? After all, it would be impossible to educate everyone to the level of expert on all the different fields required. Note that even, e.g. an expert of "tax politics" is not going to be an expert on every issue of politics. Like science, politics has many complex fields, and one simply cannot master it all in a lifetime and so must specialize to a single field or small group of fields. So it seems there is an insurmountable problem here.

Someone else quoted the following in a reply:



So is that it, then? There simply cannot be any system better than democracy? And I'd also point out that the mentioned mediocrity is impossible to alter, for as mentioned, one cannot be expert in so many fields, thus must be mediocre in the vast majority of them. If there is really no better system, then how can democracy be made to work as best as possible -- how can the problem mentioned, if perhaps impossible to solve completely, at least be mitigated to the biggest extent possible? (Since obviously, training everyone to expertise in a ton of fields is an impossible job)
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Sure there is a better system. It's called "freedom", as in freedom from government.

Probably the single biggest thing for a person to adjust in their mind when becoming a skeptic is learning to reject the "sounds good to me!" argument. At least as synonym for evidence and science and proven, reproducible experiment.


So...with freedom, you don't have to worry about someone else's theory of how to behave economically being rammed down your throat. That's what it's all about -- the freedom of people to succeed...or fail.

If a leader and a hundred million of his closest friends wanna create this or that system, go for it. But don't tell me I have to join, or the people down the street.

If your system is so great, I'll voluntarily join.




All that article was stating was just re-stating one of Ayn Rand's most famous sayings, "There should be separation of economics and state, the same way there is separation of church and state, and for exactly the same reasons."
 
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