I never really believed in democracy. Oh, I believe it exists all right, just as I believe that Catholicism exists, but you won’t find me kneeling and waiting for the wafer. It’s the metaphysical claims that I doubt. Sometimes I suppose an electoral process delivers something fair or just or of human value. Sometimes praying coincides with the remission of your cancer. Let’s just say that I wonder how the statistical package would handle the troubling multicollinearity of chemo and intercessionary prayer.
Anyway, democracy and its advocates make a very specific and very weird claim. They claim that through an electoral process, it’s possible to distill the general will of huge human populations into a series of practical applications. Let’s call them policies. You might note that the whole thing has lot in common with magic. Or homeopathy.
Well, another memo “leaked.” It says that the President can kill you. This in and of itself is nothing new. It might be fairer to say that it’s now easier than ever for the President to kill you. It’s the same old Tide, but now it lifts 55% more stains per volume. The timing of this little press release suggests that the main concern was alienating the President’s more fickle lefty followers, if such exist, during an election season.
In reality, of course, those votes are inalienable. What are you gonna do, vote Ron Paul? He said something racist this one time! And that Mitt Romney, why, he’d have strapped a 16-year-old to the roof of his station wagon!
Democracy proposes itself as a choice model, but it doesn’t deliver any choices. Ah, but the choice couldn’t have been clearer between Obama and Romney on domestic matters, you cynic! For all the evils of the American empire abroad, at least we got the ACA. But that’s precisely the point. In the guise of narrow distinctions on strictly circumscribed and wholly “domestic” issues, you get no choice at all. You can have assassination and endless war with federalized dental coverage, or you can have assassination and endless war with lower marginal tax rates and maybe a slightly bigger take-home paycheck. Either way, some poor Yemeni gets incinerated on his way to the wedding.
Jacob Bacharach 
home opathy ,gentle knees, remission .. ,
If you don’t participate in the alchemical process, you got no right to complain about it.
place bo .. , are you suggesting that jacob doesn’t stay at home.. preparing enough, ..or that he doesn’t wipe up after… ,said with lentils
“Democracy proposes itself as a choice model, but it doesn’t deliver any choices.”
There are plenty of choices. You actually can vote for Ron Paul, or Gary Johnson, or Jill Stein or you can simply stay home. The problem is that people want more than just choice; they want their choices to “mean something.” In other words, they want to get the chance to root for a contender. Voting for the Green Party is about as much fun as rooting for the Pirates.
even if democracy did work as advertised, how is it right to allow the majority to tell the rest of us what to do?
Is democracy really a choice model in the way described? Democracy’s conceit is that everyone gets a participant ribbon. Actually getting to create the laws and enact the policies is the trophy. Just because you’re not Usain Bolt doesn’t mean the men’s 200 meter is perfidy. And I have very little doubt that to distilling the general will of a vast majority of angry Americanotards into a series of practical applications doesn’t rightly manifest as liquidating random Muslims in far away countrystans. This in and of itself is nothing new. It might be fairer to say that it’s now easier than ever for the the collective will of teeming hordes of angry violent humans to pinpoint their whitehot inchoate rage in the form of a laser guided Predator missiles against a singular target. The Pope used to have to months to receive word back from the expeditionary warriors of the glorious carnage they wrought. Now the Droner in Chief can report back instantly from the bunker in Langley when Al Qaeda’s new #2 on the Teen Beat: Al Qaeda’s New Cuties, Ranked list put on ice and the masses can gather in front of St. Peter’s chanting “USA!” within hours of the event. It’s the same old Tide, but now it lifts 55% more stains per volume. The problem here isn’t that democracy gave you false choices. It’s that when your fellow humans go detergent shopping they always chose stain removers.
meso — the clear causality between popular will and government policies that you descry is, let’s say, challenged by the fact that such popular will usually only translates into policy when it also happens to be what the rulers already desired, no?
I bought my ‘I voted’ button from the Salvation Army. It was in a dingy, plastic dish drainer with a Breakfast Club maxi-single and a bunch of empty, broken jewel cases. I feel like I’m a part of something.
Meh. I’m kind of over drones. Or maybe drones are over me.