(Part 2) Top products from r/PoliticalHumor

> Is maximizing democracy always a benefit? If it were, a democracy of one would be ideal. Yet generally people recognize that there are problems that can't be solved without covenants of responsibilities enforced by an organization with the ability to override an individual's preference when it serves to ameliorate those problems.

A complicated question. There are tons of problems associated with democracy. In a democracy, with the right to vote, we are all capable of making binding decisions. In other words, I can force you to follow a law if I got a majority supporting me.

That is a pretty big deal. At the very least, you and me should demand that every person with the right to vote must be a competent person that knows to a reasonable extent what they are voting on. But that is not the case.

Then there is deliberation. In a mega democracy, debates and media play a vital role. They give us the information of which we make our choices. But the media does not give every opinion a balanced chance.

You point out that progress is a result of humans solving problems in groups, that would be impossible to solve alone. Therefor, most have recognized that individual preferences must be overridden by a system of law. The common answer to democracy relies mostly of the assumption that humans have an intrensic value, and from there we can gather what rights and values protect the intrensic worth of a human, and then see that a system which protect all rights and values of a human is likely a democracy. At least that is roughly what we gather from Robert Dahl. (From here, here and here, if you have access to any of them I can help finding relevant chapters/pages)

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I recognize that democracy is a functional system to drive human progress, we cannot all have our way and democracy given that the system strives to follow the 5 democratic criteria of Dahl seems to do a good job of sharing burdens and boons among its members. The problem comes when you mix dictatorship and democracy. Let us say for instance, that the position of minister of health was auctioned off every fourth year instead of voted on. Who would be in charge? I'd wager it would be tobacco interests every period. I claim that a system where you auction off positions of power in a democracy would taint it and make the democracy dysfunctional. That is a problem today, because some of the most powerful positions are not within the government, but rather in the private sector. And there are no democracy in the private sector. We are all blinded by the fact that the government can issue laws over the private sector. In practicality, it hardly can. This mix of two worlds, one where power is given by capital and another where power is given by convincing large masses of people to vote on you (which often costs capital) gives us the tainted modern mega democracies where the tobacco industry is one of the largest lobbyists in the EU and two persons from the upper class ran to be the representative of the people.

But there is a reason not to include democracy in the workplace, or at least a reason for the wealthiest to resist it. Democracy will over time eventually lead to socialism (worker ownership, the proper definition of socialism, not the 'the more a state does, the socialester it is definition) which is why our system must not be fully democratic.

Or.......... ClusterJones is 18, just moved to somewhere his parents doesn't control the internet and is reading beyond his home-skoolin. (Good job dude) Because somebody's post and comment history says that all over the dang place.

Try "A People's History of The United States" first. It's a good read and far more relevant to modern politics than Marx. Or Iain M. Banks Culture novels if you want to read what Elon Musk reads. If you want to know what the Google founders were thinking read "Snow Crash" and "The Diamond Age" by Stephenson. These are far more relevant to the world you live in today than Marx.

Here's the book on Amazon US

I just got it, thanks for the referral.

Albion's Seed is a good overview.

It takes more than just 1 opinion article by a neuroscientist to make a sound judgment on something; it takes more like 50 research publications on different aspects of the same topic.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2827455/

http://www.cogprints.org/619/1/Emot_Decis.html

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/media/library/decisionbrain

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrationality

https://www.amazon.com/Against-Empathy-Case-Rational-Compassion/dp/0062339338

For anyone interested, my favourite book on Gander and 9/11

Don't be lazy. There is a lot at amazon selling this. Move your a$$ to here No wall in Colorado Tshirt

She mentioned it last night while they were reading a book about how Hillary was cleared while trump was being smeared. I said “ I hope for your sake they don’t gut social security”. They changed the subject as always.

The book:
https://www.amazon.com/Russia-Hoax-Illicit-Hillary-Clinton/dp/0062872745

It’s insane the mental gymnastics they will go to

source: https://www.amazon.de/Great-Crash-1929-Kenneth-Galbraith/dp/014103825X

Here, why don't you read a BOOK

https://www.amazon.ca/Myth-Missing-Black-Father/dp/0231143532

The MYTH is perpetuated because they measure absentness by marriage and cohabitation, rather than ACTUAL INVOLVEMENT.

See:

This CNN article which includes data from THE CDC.

https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/20/opinions/arnold-black-fathers/index.html

Even though The Prince is referenced in the book, the book is actually based on this one. It is the more scholarly book that the authors wrote. The Dictators Handbook is the layman version

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Brave-New-World-Aldous-Huxley/dp/0099518473

Where did you get this definition of polyarchy? Unless you're definition comes from this then I don't think it means what you think it means.

edit: I guess to clarify, it's a term used in political theory that may deviate from any definition you devise from its roots.

https://www.amazon.com/Crucible-Command-Ulysses-Robert-Lee/dp/0306822458

Two books of note:

[Black Hills, White Justice] (https://www.amazon.com/Black-Hills-White-Justice-Present/dp/006016557X)

The Lakotas and the Black Hills: The Struggle for Sacred Ground

The Google will also point you to loads of newspaper and other journalistic coverage of the long-running dispute.

I’m in the middle of reading this book, based on postwar interviews with ten Germans from a rural town that, like most of the country, was unaffected by the murder machine. Most of them seem still to buy their own propaganda that it wasn’t really a murder machine. They excuse Hitler as beset by conniving zealots. The excuse themselves as mere citizens who never believed any of the wild propaganda but were in no position to challenge it. As before, they rely on selective memory, vague double standards and, more than anything else, unending stories of their heroic victimhood to evade direct conversation.

Which sounds really familiar. From adults looking back on the people they helped murder.

The seminal work on this might be Alex Lamis' The Two-Party South which describes in detail, state by state, the translation from the South voting so monolithically Democrat to voting for each party.

Not only is it real, but it's clear from the evidence the reason Republicans won so readily is because of racism. In the decades around the fifties and into the eighties, the reason so many Republicans won a number of elections is because they had candidates who were pro-segregation, and anti-busing. I think Lee Atwater's statement sums it up nicely.

>  You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.” ^^[1]

This is wrong on multiple levels, built the most galling one is that somehow you're suggesting that radical Islam is a direct result of Western involvement in Muslim countries.

That's incomplete at best and dangerously ignorant at worst.

First off, some of the biggest state sponsors of terrorism are allies with the US (re Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the UAE) and have experienced fuck all in terms of bombing and aggression. There's a lot of money to be made in warfare and chaos.

Also, the main cause of radical Islam is the religion itself above all else. You're insane if you think otherwise. This isn't a bunch of ragtag fighters battling imperialism and defending their innocent families from Western bullies. These are bloodthirsty scumbags who cross borders and slaughter civilians in an effort to spread their monstrous ideology and attain power.

And finally, if the West is so oppressive, corruptive, and murderous why do so many Islamic governments cry out when we threaten to cut off revenue streams and support?

EDIT: Here are some suggestions:

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2015/11/17/10-must-read-books-on-terrorism/

http://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Wars-Afghanistan-Invasion-September/dp/0143034669

http://www.amazon.com/Imperial-Life-Emerald-City-Inside/dp/0307278832

http://www.amazon.com/Hatreds-Kingdom-Arabia-Supports-Terrorism/dp/0895260611

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contents_of_the_United_States_diplomatic_cables_leak_(United_Arab_Emirates)