Flame — HabitableZone

Flame » in reply to re: You're still not making sense

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Robert — (archived)

You're not making sense either, Tech1. I think you're trying too hard to emulate your alpha. The US is a representative democracy, which is a republic that chooses its leadership through democratic processes. Which does not come within a lightyear of addressing my request for Tom to clarify his apparent position that democracy is not a principle, but simply a side-effect of laissez-faire capitalism, or lower taxes, or smaller government, or any other plank in the Republican platform.

Lower-case "d" democracy's been around for a long time, and in that form it's just the process of casting votes to make a decision. In Greece and Rome the small elites voted on how they were going to divide up the spoils of their societies. Upper-case "D" Democracy is something far beyond that, distinguished from simple snout-counting by one essential feature: The franchise is as nearly universal as we can make it. Yes, we "disenfranchise" certain people using reasonably objective criteria such as age. It's demonstrable that larval-stage humans are not just smaller humans, but also qualitatively different humans, in that certain neurological structures don't begin to develop until the cocoon starts to open at puberty. It might be reasonable to have a graduated scale of electoral competency from about 16 to 21 to account for different developmental rates, but beyond the point where you can prove genuine incompetency, Democracy means universal suffrage. Conservatives who don't recognize the oxymoron in "limited democracy" are tragically unclear on the concept, and rather presumptuous besides to wrap themselves in the mantle of "patriot".

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