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direct democracy is complete poo poo, all you have to see is Switzerland nearly torpedoing their entire economy because joe bloggs on the street doesn't understand that voting to ban free movement with the EU also means all the equivalent treaties you've got with the EU that allow your country to function at all will also be torn up at the exact same time because of the reciprocity arrangements. You need to elect people to understand the bigger picture and understand the effects. the average person on the street is too dumb, lazy or don't care enough to do that research. Which is why we elect and pay other people to do it for us.
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Jun 18, 2020 00:39
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Desdinova posted:The UK voted for Brexit by a narrow margin. While I agree with (hopefully the majority) that lack of freedom of movement is a bad thing, if people chose to discuss this important issue and discuss it on a forum designed to decide a country's response to an issue, a lot of people would comment, discuss with others, and then vote. Popular viewpoints on both sides could be displayed with common responses both positive and negative would cut down on repetition and getting lost in a sea of billions of posts. Similar to another debate forum, forgot the name atm. This would deal with the valid issue DrSunshine mentioned. We had literal 24 hour coverage of brexit, with the people championing remain explaining all of these problems. said people were then told they were out-of-touch, didn't understand the average englishments problems (racism and a huge chip on the shoulder) and additionally were sneering down their wine drinking noses at the common people by the equivilent of your mate barry down the pub, which of course worked completely in a lot of cases because of a growing distrust in the UK's political system. Direct democracy simply doesn't work unless you're going to train everyone in the country to be as informed about the macro effects of things as politicians, (alledgedly) are. It's not my job to understand how leaving the EU will upset the UK's cabotage rights and end up with an EU enforced quota, hence decimating the UK trucking industry and resulting in food prices shooting up for several years, for instance. And trying to explain this to people is a waste of time because they have better things to spend their time on, such as their lives.
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Jun 18, 2020 23:18
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representative democracy is only poo poo in the states (and the UK) because of the two party system, you realise. First past the post leads to massive voter disinterest and makes a lot of people reconsider voting or caring about voting because their votes won't matter anyway, particularly in cases where neither of the parties on offer represent the persons views. People can't even vote honestly ("I wouldn't vote democrat *because* they're democrats, I'd be voting them because they're *not republicans*" for instance in most cases because neither of the parties are actually who'd they'd willingly vote for. Honestly a big part of the democrats 2016 defeat and arguably their 2020 one is that they're running on a no-policy platform of "you should vote for us!! we're not trump!! that's better!!". Proportional representation has it's flaws but fundamentally people feel a lot happier with their politics when the people they vote to represent them actually represent their views, even if they don't necessarily win. Also means coalition politics are a lot more open, which at least leads to coalition governments where people understand who's making up the government, as opposed to here in the UK where the conservative "party" who currently runs the country is made up of an insane mix of free market liberals, insane europhobes who want to slobber on churcills dick, hawkish militants who seemingly only want to be in government to give contracts to BAE to bomb brown people and then finally, racists who simultainously hate foreigners and immigration but also don't think they should be stopped from living in france for tax reasons. In PR these should realistically all be seperate parties, and would make the discource in this country much more healthy. The tories have been basically trying to appease the 15% of their members who hate europe so much they want to stab themselves in the head repeatedly over it to prevent any kind of deal with europe, so now take that as a party policy, dragging the entire country into this garbage fire which in reality there is no political or public will for. The only real reason they get anything through is because they don't vote on the party line they'll get the party whip removed which basically means they'll not get any funding for their campaign in the next election, and hence will obviously lose.
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Jun 20, 2020 01:54
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