Comment by CamperBob2
11 years ago
I understand a great deal about those particular countries. I understand that in Switzerland, the People have decided that it's reasonable to hand out $1 million speeding tickets. [1]
Pornography was illegal in Norway until 2006 [2], while the US (not a direct democracy or even close to one) has had its First Amendment since 1791.
In Iceland, you must pay a "congregation tax" to the church of your choice[3]. Those who do not belong to a church pay the same amount to the state, according to Wikipedia, but the Church of Iceland receives funding beyond the congregation taxes paid by its members.
Also in Switzerland, professional fisherman must attend classes in compassion, and special chemicals are issued for putting goldfish to death. [4]
A government that can do these things to you can also do much worse, and history suggests that it eventually will. Democracy is no guarantee of liberty and rationality, and neither is a secular population.
But yes, you're probably right, I'll pipe down now and move to Somalia (which I'm sure will be your next suggestion.)
[1] http://jalopnik.com/the-eight-biggest-speeding-tickets-ever-...
[2] http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_tax
[4] http://scienceblogs.com/zooillogix/2008/04/28/swiss-governme...
>Pornography was illegal in Norway until 2006 [2], while the US (not a direct democracy or even close to one) has had its First Amendment since 1791.
Is your claim here that pornography was legal in the United States since 1791, or something else?
>A government that can do these things to you can also do much worse, and history suggests that it eventually will.
All of the states you've mentioned have had that power and ability for at least a century. None of them are dystopian hellholes.
(Shrug) My invocation of "mob rule" was called a straw man. I responded with concrete examples of policies that make no rational sense, and that could just as easily have arisen under a dictatorship or other harsh regime. If I hadn't identified the countries in question, it wouldn't be unreasonable to guess I was talking about Pakistan or Saudi Arabia.
And yes, in the plain language of our Constitution, pornography and every other product of the "press" has not been subject to legal oversight since 1791. We haven't always lived up to that ideal, but we do a better job of it than essentially anyone else including the supposedly-enlightened Nordic democracies.
Here's my recent favorite act of humanist, secular "democracy": http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objecti...
Like I said, I don't see a qualitative difference between that and dictatorship. Feel free to mod me down if you disagree... but please do it with a mouse, and not a gun.
It is a straw man, here's why. There is no case in history where the decision of majority would be significantly, from the moral perspective, worse than the decision of the elites from the same culture. The problem of your argument is that you compare real democratic decision with some moral ideal. But in real world you have to compare democratic decisions to decisions of elites inside the same culture (because these are the options you have).
It was studied and we know, normal people will be more conservative than elites. But they don't make worse moral decisions, quite the opposite. People also tend to spend less money in government than elites, for better or worse.
I don't downvote or upvote in threads I discuss in (that's Slashdot habit). Btw, I was downvoted, I suspect because someone thought I attacked personally. And I did, because the person is fair game - saying majority is making life hell-hole is a personal attack on 3.5 billion people.