The Problem With Democracy..

stop being faster than me :(

You'd be surprised what's possible.

Look at France, they're ready to impose a ban on muslim scarves, headbands and burqa.

Not FOR safety reasons, for easy identification, but because they deem it unfit for equality and propose it's hurting the dignity of women.

You tell me it's impossible for anyone to ever set up standards for voting but you will ignore the fact that France is playing with the rules of democracy as easy as anything else?

I can come up with a few more examples if you don't get the gist yet.

You need to look outside the box a little more, anything is possible.

waaaayyy late on this, but if it was directed at me, i agree that the system of democracy practiced in ancient greece isn't very practical today, i was just telling tousou that ancient greece was the closest working system to true democracy that i'm aware of.

Actually, and I may be wrong, but I thought there was something along the lines of a Voting Rights bill in the 1960s that basically gave all citizens the right to vote.

LOL...I am an atheist liberal in favor of gay rights...I think I'm pretty good at looking outside the box. 8D

In any case, nowhere did I use the word, "impossible". I simply spoke what I believe to be the truth, that imposing such standards on voters would be opening up a Pandora's Box. I read about that business in France quite some time ago, and I strongly disagree with it...for the same reasons. 8)

i think you're referring to the Civil Rights Act of 1960. that's hardly the constitution, though. We also had the Sedition Act of 1918, and prohibition shortly thereafter.

Actually, I did some research, just out of curiosity (knowledge is power!)...it was called the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and was originally designed to make sure blacks could vote.

And with regards to the topic of this thread...one of the things it was also designed to prevent were "literacy tests"...

In any case, I apologize for my earlier "The Constitution" statement, it was flippant and off-the-cuff. But I still stand by my statement that the right to vote has become a truism in this country, and that is largely the foundation of my "sense of entitlement". 8)

ah. they were both intended to do fairly similar things. My earlier point still stands though. We've passed plenty of laws that, when revisited with the wisdom of hindsight, proved to be pretty bad ideas. I understand why that law was necessary at the time, but i think that at this point, as long as the tests were the same along all races, sexes, and creeds, a current events/intelligence test would be a pretty good idea.

Of course, as you say, it will never happen. Stupid people outnumber reasonably intelligent ones about five to one. In a vote-based system, such a measure will almost certainly never pass.

Should be a system to rate awareness on current events. A short quiz with 9 questions.

If someone goes in and flunks all 9 questions (these would be written down, no chance for multiple choice) then that persons vote would be worth 1.

If someone goes in and is correct with every question, the vote should be worth 10.

If someone gets 5 questions right, the vote should be worth 6.

etc, etc.

The opinions of people who have no opinion due to lack of knowledge should weigh less.

Sounds like it would be one big pain in the rear to find who voted for what and how much they scored.

Erroneous.

You can tell by how the right to murder people has been off the table in most countries for quite some time, true story.

In fact that entire argument has holes throughout it because it's entirely variable on what you consider a right. If it's the green-light to act on a desire, see the above, "Can't murder people" line. If it's simply an action to help define your government/society/etc, I'm pretty sure there's been many countries who have never had a Tyrant, so it's a broad over-generalization at best.

Really really silly when you think about it.

That being said, if they allowed only informed people to vote, it would probably cause problems for the politicians in the long run instead of knowing half your voters are swayed by pretty words.

tl;dr - Why the *** is stuff like this on a FFXI forum? People should know by now there's always going to be some negative *** attracted to threads like this.

And by the no tyrant example I mean they have laws without being completely without rights, before someone doesn't get the connection.

LOL...well, first of all, it's in the Politics and Religion category. That means discussions about politics and religion are acceptable. 8)

Second, if you're referring to moi as a "negative ***", I would love it if you could point out where exactly I was acting like an "***" by having an opinion, stating it, and debating it with others. I was not rude, I didn't call anyone names (like you just did, which is kind of an "***-ish" thing to do), I pointed out where my "sense of entitlement" came from, and even apologized for making a flippant remark.

If you're not interested in these types of discussions, simply don't visit them. It's really -just- that easy.

And with that, I thank all of you (with the exception of the last poster) for a thought-provoking discussion, and wish you a goodnight. 8)

I never said they weren't acceptable, and actually, I wasn't referring to you as being a negative ***.

More so, if the thread lives that long, someone's going to come in here saying Bush/Obama/Whoever is keeping everyone down or something else HELP I AM TRAPPED IN 2006 PLEASE SEND A TIME MACHINE and it'll turn into a flame war.

So that would be a misunderstanding/my not clarifying/you not reading. The logic is still highly flawed though behind your argument.

I haven't carefully read every post in this thread, so excuse me if this point has already been adressed.

Imposing knowledge restrictions on voting may improve many of a country's decisions, but it also has the potential to worsen the wealth gap. Hopefully I can make the assumption that wealth is correlated with knowledge (since more money can afford better education, and less urgent need to make money means more time for education). With this pretty basic assumption, wouldn't the poor have (relative to now) less say in the country's decisions than the rich, thus allowing the rich to swing the laws even further in their favor? Obviously, this is not universal - there would be some hobos well-informed enough to vote and some millionaires who couldn't vote - but overall, the favor would swing to the rich.

Well, obviously sometimes poverty causes ignorance, and sometimes stupidity causes poverty. But even if we assume that all poor people are stupid, this simply allows the intelligent and informed citizenship to pass rules that further dehumanize those of lesser intelligence until they become little more than animals.

Perhaps I've exaggerated my points a bit, but I don't think that you could pass a voting restriction like this and expect to see nothing of this sort. The wealth gap would invariably widen and the unintelligent would inevitably have their (other) rights infringed upon.

As a solution, you might be able to impose voting restrictions on some matters, but not on others. This, however, would require more thought than I'm willing to commit to at 7:10 am on Monday.

ITT:


VS


Sorry don't have time to actually give my view, maybe later...

If knowledge of political issues is the most desirable quality for having political power, the people best equipped to run the country would be government and business insiders. How's that working out so far? Why bother having a contest of opinions between people who have some of the facts, i.e. intelligent citizens, when the people who know the most about an issue, i.e. bankers and bureaucrats, are all of the same opinion?

Democracy is more about what the majority wants, they don't really need to be educated. It just gives them a chance to go with what they think is right.

What exactly makes someone too stupid to vote?

I bet Liberals would say Conservatives are too stupid and Conservatives would say Liberals are too stupid.

what exactly makes someone too stupid to pass high school/college?

we take a number, those on one side of it pass, those on the other side of it fail.

Imperfect? yes. Better than giving every single person a degree/diploma and sending them out into the world? yes.

can't really do that with a democracy

Nah, was only replying to Tousou.
Sure you can. It would be a modified democracy, but a form of democracy nonetheless. Nobody ever said everybody's vote had to matter in a democracy.
^ issues I mentioned concerning oligarchy. It's a point worth making though - ideally those in power would provide for those who aren't, but when you insert human nature into the equation you realize it doesn't work that way.

Somewhere along the line, i think the intelligent/informed wires got crossed. I'm not proposing something that would require a lot of intelligence. Nightfyre asked me on the first page of the thread about exactly how exacting my standards would be, and i linked to a specific example.

I'm not talking about Mensa members only, or requiring a deep, fundamental understanding of the international situation. Even people who are below average in intelligence could read up and pass the Pew Research test i linked to if they felt strongly about voting.

I'm not asking that you be a genius, and i'm not asking that the person agree with me. I just want him to have the same set of facts to base his/her opinion on that i do.

If someone votes for McCain because they believe Obama's economic stimulus package went against the principles of a free-market economy and his health-care plan will send us spiraling further into debt, i respect that.

If someone votes for McCain because they think Obama is a muslim terrorist who isn't an american citizen, well, i feel like that's a problem.

We already have a test to determine if you know enough about the country's history and politics to vote. It's called the Citizenship Test. So clearly at some level, we already only want people with a minimum knowledge set to vote in our elections.

The real question is why citizens don't have to take it like everyone else.

yeah except the citizenship test isnt exclusively for determining whether or not you know enough about history/politics to vote.

your question is fail.

I kind of laughed at this. Can you imagine the uproar if that was actually required?

The test is actually not that bad, pending you actually know a few things about your country. I can't speak for the states, but we did ours as a test in history class in high school.

Mostly it was to show how difficult it is to people who don't have to take it, but that point kind of backfired when the majority of the class passed it easily.