cage Community Group
group for people with some depth who enjoy debating theories. if you have an opinion on anything, throw it in - works better with some good arguments to support it though :P
Yes, we all know the quote " Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely". I agree!
I worked with this Sudanese guy who told me that you don't hand power to those who want it and that we must examine their motives. Instead, we must give power to those we choose and trust. I was struck by this and still don't know whether this plea was from his Muslim or Sudanese upbringing.
The lesson is that our political systems are designed to aid those who seek power. Is there another way?
I worked with this Sudanese guy who told me that you don't hand power to those who want it and that we must examine their motives. Instead, we must give power to those we choose and trust. I was struck by this and still don't know whether this plea was from his Muslim or Sudanese upbringing.
The lesson is that our political systems are designed to aid those who seek power. Is there another way?
So why not have an absolute leader and stop claiming western democracy is anything different, after all, arent we just deluding ourselves if we believe otherwise.
Instead of a coronation, we have the election trail, both are designed to convince the citizen they are involved in decision making, involved in the fate of their nation.
As for politician losing ideals, could it be that they too are deluded into thinking they are making a difference whilst unwittingly falling into line behind the rest of the puppets? We assume that the power corrupts when it could be the institution the power resides corrupting its form. The British parliamentary system is a bastardisation of the greek demos. It is still the social elite that form governments however they view themselves. Most have had a private education and a privelaged upbringing so while they may not be lords and ladies they occupy the trappings of that old order. The same education systems set up by governments are never good enough for their own children
Sorry, really cynical today.
Are most politicions fit to run a country? I know the party leader is just really a figurehead and the party does most of the work...but are the figure head themselves fit to run a country. Well aparently mine is.
You know a true democracy would be great for cutting out the powerplay....but that would only work in very small villages. Full countries are simply too big and to be honest the public hate voting once every 4 years for a leader why would they want to vote on every issue?
Though it would be nice to meat somewhere inbetween. Voting on things "big" things and leaving the rest to the party you vote in.
Party voting involves the compromise I spoke of before so not sure. And what are big issues to some are irrelevant to others.
Ho hum!
small scale democracy - is an interesting idea, used to actually work on a model based on this but seemed a bit too simple and at the time didn't have anyone to test it with so forgot about it over time. that model basically revolved around a multi-tiered democracy in that you start with election of smallest scale representatives, lets say as an example, a neighbourhood. then these representatives select the next level within themselves, maybe council level. and then continue this selecting of next level representative by the ones below it, all the way up to national and then global..and yes, i strongly believe that any system has to be global to work effectively and fairly... unfortunatelly, the main problem with this model remains the same as the one for standard democracy; ignorant people voting based often on bigoted views :(
while on voting, should also point out, our system already has a voting system for 'big' things, its called a referendum.
absolute leader - this returns to the heart of this topic, if we had an absolute leader, they would have absolute power and that leads to absolute corruption. and no, we couldn't just kill them - how do you kill someone who has absolute power?
importance of education - absolutely. and it has to be a well rounded education as every issue effects everything else. this is most notable when it comes to economics as most of the world operates under capitalist economics and although its not a 'perfect' free-market capitalist system (that can't happen in reality as such a system would collapse in on itself), economics still determines every factor of our lives. and once people really understand how the capitalist system really works, i'm sure there will be a hell of a lot more people demanding change as its horrifying to realise the injustices of the system such as; people getting insanely rich without actually producing or contributing anything to society while others are barely surviving working 2-3 jobs 7 days a week!!
the only way out is a complete change of social and economic systems on a global scale. although i'd love to see a peaceful transition to such a system, doubt it very much as those in power benefit from the current system and will not give it up without a fight...could maybe do it if the armed forces and police joined in with the community for such a change but unfortunatelly they're usually brainwashed into following orders without question as part of their training :( ...at the end of the day, its all down to public awareness reaching a critical level but many tools are used by those in power to prevent that awareness so be interesting to see how things turn out.
ok, now that i've expressed my views on the generic, ideal situations. time for local stuff for mummy23 :
the current government is actually one of the best we've had in terms of economic management - keating was THE best, can't get better than an economics professor to manage the economy - but i'm afraid we might loose them next election before they can fix things, because of public ignorance of economics, as was the case with keating. some simple facts (simplified even further here) about economics:
- in a capitalist system, the government does not have direct control of the economy. all the government can do is try to stimulate or retard economic growth through taxes and its by-product, public spending. the rest is up to the reserve bank (a body independent of the government) which in turn makes its decisions based on the private market, mainly the inflation rate produced as a result of that market.
- the private market does not consist of independent 'issues'. its a interconnected system of economic forces that sits in a state of equilibrium. any changes to one part of that system will change the equilibrium and produce different results all over the system. although we have an understanding of how this cause and effect process works, it is dynamic and complex so the final results of any action or its intensity can only be guessed at. on top of that, every action will take some time to produce reactions that will rebalance the quilibrium. the amount of time taken is usually based on the strength and period of the action.
- the private market is global, any actions in one part of the globe will create effects in every other depending on the strength of the economy where the action takes place.
now, with those facts in mind, lets look at our local situation:
- we've had 11 years of the liberals with their entire focus on economic growth, those years were some of the most stable economic times throughout the world and as i explained above, any action takes time to register so initially we were doing well. but, as soon as the global economic situation started to deteriorate, that mistake started to cost us dearly as inflation skyrocketed, raising the cost of living and forcing the reserve bank to increase interest rates repeatedly in an effort to reduce that inflation. This problem with excessive economic growth has been acting for a long time now and people expect the new government, which as mentioned above only has the power to 'nudge' the economy through public spending, to fix everything overnight?! they actually have done remarkably well in the short time they've been in power, managing to slow down the economy enough that the reserve bank has now refrained from a few interest rate rises because the inflation is starting to come back under control. now, that might sound like a simple thing to do that we want more of, but we need to consider what would happen if the government slows down the economy too much - yes, interest rates would come right down (after a while as usual) but we would also have a massive increase in unemployment, which in turn would cause a reduction in all wages (more strongly felt by working class), which would reduce consumer spending, which would slow down the economy even more and this time out of control, and we end up with everyone's favourite, economic depression!!...thank you, but i prefer the government to play it safe and take small actions and wait for market feedback before they do anything more.
- next, the government gets blamed for fuel prices as it does at every news...all i can say to that is; hello! does anyone else realise that there is a global oil price crisis!!....and my favourite is dr.(how?)nelson's comeback that the government should reduce petrol tax!...lol...as if he would be that stupid if he was in power, its easy to throw stuff like that around when you don't have to deal with consequences...our petrol tax is there to provide the income to maintain and improve our transport infrastructure (roads etc) which is already struggling. you cut those taxes, the infrastructure suffers, which is not only annoying to the person who has to wait in stand-still traffic for 2 hours to get to work, but also means any new transport projects would need to be privatised, with us ending up paying large tolls to go anywhere, as well as the economy going to complete ruin as it is dependent on transport infrastructure!!
- foreign relations: now that's something where the current government has been just what we needed!. howard's regime had its entire focus as being one of the 'cool western countries', regularly snobbed our asian neighbours who were also alienated by constantly being told how they should do things by australia. not to mention the racist image australia gained through the liberal party's 'white australia' policy. as you seem to already know, asian countries are quickly becoming the most powerful economies in the world and its only since the new government gained power that we've started improving our relations with them.
- as for increased taxes on alcohol - hadn't notice much of an outcry but all i can say to that is GOOD and TOUGH. alcohol related problems cost a fortune to the tax-payer in areas such as crime and healthcare, not to mentioned people loosing their lives from its effects either directly or indirectly! don't see anything unfair about making people pay for the problems they cause. why should a non-drinker pay to incarcerate an idiot who got drunk and stabbed someone, or the cost of looking after the victim, or any economic or social damage caused by drunks?!...and i find it quiet disturbing that you see alcohol as a family cost issue?!?...drinking is not something essential to families, it's something that frequently DESTROYS families!!
apologies if i come across a bit aggressive in some of those points but they are extremely important issues that effect us all and i find it extremely disappointing and irritating every time i'm confronted with less then knowledgeable views on them. as we all seem to agree on, better education for all is needed urgently till we can come up with some better system.
our 'liberal' party is actually our conservatives and as such operate on the same religious, nationalistic and minority unfriendly agendas...although, the nationalistic bit is a contradiction too as conservative nationalism in australia is about loyalty to the english crown rather than to an independent australia...
my economic arguments however stand on their own without the need for these negatives.
ok, back to zzzzzzzzzzz
Perhaps it will take some enormous catastrophe for our leaders to 'wake up' but I doubt it - they will be too busy saving their own skins.
So, who's the cynic now??
The problem is, even intellegent people can be stuborn and vote for a party for the wrong reasons. So testing isn't going to work. Also intellegent people can be swayed by their idiot counterparts views.
Now onto local....to carlify. I'm not toally against it really. Just why the hell would you lower land prices to fix the house industry? That doesn't solve a bloody thing. sure 1st home buying can get land, yay for them. the building market than sees the land is so cheap and therefore charges more. Not only this but if you devalue land you devalue the land that people already have, therefore people end up with houses that cost less than they were brought for. Now I ask....who has the smartest primeminister in the world?
As for there beer and wine tax....It has been proven in studies (can't reference off the tope of my head) that people won't stop spending on drinks. Our culture enjoys drinking. They will cut down on food in order to drink. So to stop people buying so much alcohole we are going to raise prices, even though we ALREADY know that they won't stop buying it? I know it destorys families but unless we adress the culutre that questions someone when they are not drinking nothing but the amount spent of it will change. If they are concerned withthe money they are spending on it they will just buy cheaper drinks. If I go to a birthday party and don't drink, I hardly ever do, I am questioned and singled out for not drinking. And this isn't just because of my age because my friends are older than me 20s-40s.
The ermergancy room here is filled with drunks every weekend and through most of the week. over half the beds are taken by people who have been drinking. But the fact is we live in a country that likes to drink and until we address THAT nothing will change.
People can have hardly enough money to buy food and yet they will still go out drinking for the night.
Now I understand they don't control petrol prices, or interest raises but what they do in other areas is what I care about. Though I understand that they are making great improvements with our relations in Asia and that the lib government wouldn't have. Which is why I voted for them, that and Howard was leaving.
Though the one thing I get really upset about is promising something you cannot deliver. They cannot help with the cost of living and they therefore shouldn't have made it one of their main points to do so. Though that entire campang was....pathetic really. As for the Lib pointing out Lab "flaws" well....I am a huge whitlam fan. Give the guy a break, give me a country that has a stable economy whilest in a major war.
But I guess this just points out that everything is dependantant on the interpritation of facts.
I don't dislike the lab patries values...I just dislike the presant labour party.
- actually, none of the parties make actual promises about what they will achieve, they know better and the veiled promises are usually more along the lines of "we're better at controlling the interests rates, living costs etc" rather than "we will control the interest rates, living costs etc" as that would be a plain lie - politicians don't lie, they twist words - the only person to ever claim that they WILL have control over the economy was howard a couple of elections ago and even then they pulled that ad off tv within a couple of days when they realised the mistake.
that's it for the labor/liberal stuff!
now, going back to the real issue at hand which is the entire system being wrong regardless of who is in charge...the labour party - its just a name these days, blair's labour party in UK was the first to abandon true labour values and the rest of the world followed, the left has stopped being left and turned into center-right :( ....and even before that, the whole concept of unionism which labour was based on was the death blow to true socialism which was pretty much the best idea we ever had :( ...even though it was unworkable in itself :/ ....so we end up with 'they all suck, some just suck more than others'...lol
agree on your point regarding the drinking culture being the main problem. but also still think more taxes on alcohol are a good thing, if only to recover the cost of damage alcohol does...basically the same thing as cigarettes, every time i buy a packet, about 70-80% of the cost is tax which i find fair enough, if my stupidity results in me getting lung cancer, i would've paid enough taxes to pay for my medical treatment by then :/ ...not too much booze bashing tonight, got drunk the first time this year and was more than happy to pay $25 for the bottle, was good stuff :)
now, this response might seem a bit confused - and its not just the wine ;) - i seemed to have fallen into the "what's the best way with what we got?" thinking and forgotten my original point, which is that we're not going to make the world a better place by selecting a different party into power. we need a complete change of system! and even more importantly, we need a complete new way of looking at life!...going to go back to an example i presented before; bhutan pre-capitalist democracy...those guys operated as a monarchy which is about as corrupt a system as you can get (basically same thing as dictatorship), but they still had it right! how? all down to good education...and i'm not just talking about languages or science (although those are extremely important as well) - what they had was a system where every kid was educated in how to be a good human being as their main focus...when you have people raised in such an environment, even the dictator is an uncorruptable good guy who works solely for the welfare of his people as that's what makes him/her happy as a human being...their weakness was that they were a small country and got swept away by the world :( ....if we could just achieve that at a global level...if only!!!
no ideas on how right now...me drunk...lol...i'll think about it again tomorrow ;)
Your suggestion that our education system needs to change is a good one but I am not sure how we start? My children went to a non-denominational school (good idea if you have no religion!) My husband was brought up a Catholic and our nieces and nephews went to a Catholic school. My impression was that their MORAL education was better than that my children received. On the other hand, I hated the guilt thing -hell and damnation and all that. We all make mistakes. The important thing is to learn from them and, for those around us, not to be so quick to judge. Now, I have only touched on one aspect of education. I used to have very strong feelings on all of this when my kids were young and I wish I could sound really clever and refer you to those whose philosophies I agreed with (so frustrating but perhaps it will come to me at some totally inappropriate moment!)
What I will say about our current education system is that it was developed by those in power to control the masses and be selective in who succeeds and who fails (the need to compartmentalise again?). In Britain, our system is more inclined to favour the upper and middle classes, particularly if you go to certain schools! I am saying no more on that matter (for now!)
So, cagedDreams, do you think the first step lies in education?
And, coming back to the tiered system, I have decided that, in practice, it would not work beyond the first level! As soon as our local representatives select representatives to work at the next level, that layer is not just working for their own community but a wider community with different agendas! So, we still need to look at bodies like the United Nations to police from the top down? Sorry, I have not been drinking (just home from work early because I am not feeling my best) but perhaps my rambles may inspire other rambles?
Oh, and just one final word for cagedDreams re Blair...............you are SO, SO right but the party had to change to be electable! My biggest problem with our present day labour party is that it took us to a war in Iraq.
Enough!
....not too sure about the answer at mo, i've been in a zen mood lately and that's not useful for revolutionary strategies, it just says "be good and help others using compassion and wisdom, there are many doing that or on their way to it. and each person following this path will cause even more to join till a day comes when the wise and compassionate will outnumber the ignorant and greedy and all will be well" :)
i'll probably laugh at that when i'm back to my rational state of mind and give you a better answer :)
I know it may sound somewhat cynical, but i dont think enough people r ready right now for there to be any major change in the way things r set up. the people in power arent really doing anything to make changes and the people who support the people in power (they seem to be in the majority) are happy with their positions. and then, or course, theres those people who r just sort of floating through life and not really standing for anything and those r the main people (in my opinion) who got the world the way it is today.
ok, lets get into it:
"i think that the whole thing about power corrupting is not entirely true. i think it has a lot more to do with the person who is being given the power" - the first sentence could be argued to a stage but what makes it completely untrue is the second. and this is a big part of where the problem comes into it really. noone is given power, people take it! we are given the illusion that the political leaders decide on their own agenda and we get to give power to the ones that deserve it but nothing could be further from the truth.
and the truth is, politics is possibly the most cut-throat business out there. people move up in the business world by playing internal politics, people move up in politics by playing politics with every breath they have. and to win such a game, they have to grasp onto every opportunity and be as conniving as they are capable or the ones that do this better will end up winning. in order to gain enough votes to win, politicians support and gain the support of as many lobby groups or sub-cultures they can get their hands on, and to achieve that, they have to follow the agendas of those groups. so their agenda is basically just a combination of the agendas of the groups they're linked to. on top of that, all sides have to appease the most powerful groups such as religious institutions and major lobby groups such as the NRA in the US. doesn't it seem strange that in a supposedly secular country, EVERY politician flaunts their christiandom and NOONE says "hey, we're the only 'civilized' country on the planet where there are no weapon restrictions and we also happen to have the most murders...maybe they're related?". that would be the end of their political career! as for obama, he is obviously the better choice between the two but he's far from being a 'great' guy. are you aware that his foreign policy involves full support for one of the biggest human rights abusers? the zionist lobby group will get him a lot of votes for that!
now, that was their end of the equation. when we come to voting, how many options do we really have? 2 here and there and maybe 3 in UK. how different are the major policies of those choices? does anyone else with a better policy have a chance? what percentage of the voters would know and understand the policy choices? what percentage would just vote a certain way because its the way their family or their church or some other group they identify with votes? if we consider all these factors, a picture emerges where there is no 'giving' of power at all. it is taken through manipulation that only gives us an illusion of choice.
to finish off on the topic of uncorruptibility of some, i'll give you a sad example from this part of the world. don't know if you heard of peter garret or his band midnight oil? he and his band used to be pretty legendary on the environmental and human rights activism front. might have seen them play during the closing ceremony of the sydney olympics wearing black shirts with the word 'sorry' on them. that was about treatment of indigenous people here. so basically more of an active idealist than most. he was elected last year as the minister for environment, heritage and the arts with the labor party who're better than the alternative. one of his first decisions? give the go ahead for the dredging of our bay so bigger container ships can enter our port and more money can be made...at the cost of loss of habitat for many marine species there :/
so, if you're an idealist and want to get into politics without getting corrupted, i'd recommend doing your thing through lobby groups where you can pick your agenda yourself.
and i don't think politicians are ever going to be for real change. why would they when the current system works fine for them and their backers? the change is going to have to come from the people but, unfortunatelly, you're right in saying that most are not ready or even want change. the majority of the population are ignorant puppets constantly manipulated to have the opinions they have by those in power...pretty bleak, i know :/
...but, i'm still hopeful. one source of that hope is the 'spirituality' that seems to be getting more and more infectious. yes, we're always going to loose some to dogma and romanticism in there but for many, it is opening their eyes to what life is really about. and secondly, the free flow of information thanks to technology is making it possible for more to educate themselves or be educated by others..again, we'll loose some to brainwashing there but once a person starts seeing the truth, its hard to take it from them again :)
we'll get there one day...and even if we don't, its just a ride so doesn't really matter at the end :)