Daily chart: A new low for global democracy

"Israel is not a state of all its citizens, but rather the nation-state of the Jewish people and only them." - Benjamin Netanyahu, 2019

You are deliberately excluding the passportless, subjugated people who are forced to live in permanent poverty because of Israel's brutal and illegal occupation. Your rich colleague doesn't mean those people don't exist.

I know nothing about the Palestinian conflict but I have to say that a lot of what you are saying is repeated by Europeans about Roma people and about other Europeans who happen to be a sizable minority in another European country. It almost seems like it's better to be a minority than a majority.

I don't know if that's factual or not, but it doesn't seem that way, the simplest answer would be that is just pure tribalism.

I don't see anything in your comments that justifies apartheid. You could say many of the same things about South Africa.

Time Immemorial? You must mean the book From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters. While that's perhaps the single most common narrative people believe, it's full of myths that most historians have dispelled back in the 1990s. The author attempted to “prove” the laughable proposition that the land was uninhabited before Zionist immigration created the jobs that attracted Arabs from other regions. Much worse were the claims that the exodus of indigenous Palestinian people was due entirely to the orders of advancing Arab armies, who invaded the new Jewish state of Israel. The sad reality is that almost half of those expelled (300,000) were driven off their land before the war started (my parents included).

One would be much better off reading actual historical accounts the region: The Hundred Years War on Palestine (Rashid Khaldi) and The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Ilan Pappe).

I've been to NK, and it's as bad as they say. I still think US democracy is abhorrent. It's not a perspective or relativistic thing. Democracy is not a competition.

It's not a dichotomy, and just because someone else has it worse doesn't mean one shouldn't strive for better.

I don't think it's as simple as either/or. I think we're headed towards Belarus exactly because our current system is performing so so poorly.

I'm 37, I've never missed a vote except for 1 for London Mayor. I almost didn't bother last time. I'm just done with the whole system. Theres never been an election where the new government actually did anything for people like me (and I am very average). My vote has never counted (I've lived in three different safe seats). And I think our government is so poorly run, that frankly, a randomly selected general who happened to seize power could do no worse.

That's how you end up with Belarus: Run democracy so badly, so undemocratically and produce such poor governments that people just stop believing.

That's my complaint here: it's not that I think we're too democratic, it's that we're neither democratic nor effective but because we occasionally hold "elections" people just blindly accept the undemocratic shitshow.

In the sense that some people treat it as perfect, yes. But, as they say, it's the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried.

They gave a couple of ideas: breaking up the media and increasing the number of viable political parties. Reforming the voting system would greatly aid the latter

I am looking forward for a day where policy making is aided by AI or some advanced modeling that estimates impact over long time spans.

The reality is that a lot of terrible policies have been applied over the years due to short term gains (e.g. being re-elected) and no one thought 20+ years down the line. For example, the Italian phenomenon of the so-called baby-pensioni (people that retired when less than 50y and some even 40). At the time it was great, unemployment drop to ~0% overnight and everybody was happy. 40ish years down the line Italy has a crippling debt also because we are still maintaining millions that have been unproductive for almost 40 years now.

Someone or something looking at long term repercussions could have avoided this altogether. The same can be said for subsidising travel industry, ... . True, not applying these policies will slow down economic growth in the short term, but if they create such an outcome they probably were never sustainable to begin with. And it's better to have 40years at 2% growth than 15 years at 5% and then 0 for 25.

I won't pretend I know an answer. But I do think we need major reform.

I'd like to see:

* A Ban on political parties at least on their names on ballots (so you have to at least know your MPs name, no one can just vote Labour/Conservative) and funding for local campaigns (so local MPs rely on the local party not national donors to get elected).

* We need to break up foreign owned and corporate media (newspapers and TV are mostly controlled by the Murdoch family here, the person he blesses wins most elections).

* Scrapping FPTP and constituencies or at least making constituencies bigger and getting them to select multiple reps. Right now, you can win a seat with 30% of the vote and 70% of people are not represented. It's even worse when you know you'll get 25% just because of your party, so you desperately chase about 5% of voters who might "swing" to you. 95% of people might as well not exist.

* There is a good argument to divide reps based not on head of population but on groups like we used to (commoners vs lords etc). But to do it based on age. Right now, the UK hasn't had an election NOT decided by one demographic bulge for about 50 years. When they were young they demanded (and got) free university, housing and healthcare. Now they're old we have scrapped all that and we're just enlessly throwing money at pensioners and closing everything else. Maybe we should have 100 employees elected by voters 18-30, 100 for 30-40s, etc?

* If I were really radical, I'd scrap voting for most people and replace it with the equivalent of jury duty: pick 1 person per 1000 like for a jury (over 18, not in prison, not insane, eligible to vote, not related to a candidate etc that would be about 250 people for my borough), taken drag them to a hall somewhere 9-5 mon-fri for 6 weeks, and give all the candidates a day or two each to speak and answer questions. Let them request experts or further info etc. Then those 250 people can vote to pick the MP. Right now, there is zero incentive to know anything before you vote and most people have no idea what is going on. I arrogantly consider myself well informed, but I'd be a lot better informed if it had been the equivalent of a job for a few weeks before polling day.

* Maybe even replace our (messy, unelected but also full of failed politicians) second house with experts or even a random selection of citizens.

Again, these are just my ideas (mostly stolen from others, none original). But I think right now our governments are failing both practically (bad policy) AND democratically (they're unpopular and cannot secure the support of 51% of adults).

They are the the product of a very complex system that includes the occasional flawed vote BUT doesn't really make them democratic IMHO. The danger here is that eventually the majority of people will get so pissed off they will abandon the whole thing and we'll "elect" a strong man like Putin who is at least effective. Then there will be no more elections and his kids won't be effective and we'll be stuck with them...

Brexit is a good example of how democratic processes need improvement. Regardless of the outcome it's embarrassing that such a poorly regulated process with ill-defined outcomes, misinformation, and fraud, has led to a dramatic change in direction.

Also worth noting that the mainstream parties having a position does not somehow make it more democratic. Cameron's government was facing a lot of criticism at the time and there's a strong argument that some of the pro-Brexit votes were in protest against the government.

I think Brexit is a perfect example of what I am talking about.

People think Brexit was democratic because there was a vote.

But only something like 37% of eligible people voted for it. over a third didn't turn out (in part because no one expected it to pass?).

And the vote was very regional: Scotland and London wanted to stay. But we're getting dragged out.

And the people who voted for brexit didn't vote for brexit, they collectively voted for one of at least 3 different, mutually exclusive things all called brexit, so they are mostly disappointed.

So you have less than 10 percent of voters getting what they actually voted "for". And that's for a permanent change, not a government who's policies can be reversed next election.

And that's without getting into the fake news, lies, impossible promises, broken promises, etc.

You may be a brexiteer, or a remainer like me. But we should all agree, the only thing democratic about brexit was that there was technically a vote. Which is about the same as North Korea or China manages...

I want to believe a dictatorship by a good guy could work, but that's probably not realistic. I mean what even is a good guy? It's a philosophical question, I'm not very good / learned in that.

Netherlands still have proper, independent courts. Poland doesn’t.

Inferring data based on youtube videos is quite tricky, as the algorithm favors more sensational data points. Protesting in the Netherlands is great as long as you ask for permission (which is not difficult to get) and don't go rioting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLNnK5q9pfQ

Arguably democracy is tyranny of the majority against a minority. Sometimes this gets people riled up enough to start an illegal protest, which the authorities try to snuff out.

I don't think videos of protest say much about how democratic a country is. It just demonstrates a shortcoming of democracy.

In Belarus, citizens are put in jail literally for a smiley, let alone private chat messages. Before they are jailed, they are beaten up and are forced to present public excuses on camera. These public excuses are then aired on state TV, Telegram channels and published on Youtube as advertising.

Some things are better in Belarus than in North Korea, some are worse, but politically, the regimes are similarily totalitarian.

Thank you. I know more about Myanmar than I do about Facebook now. And what a long upsetting read that was. There are hardly words to describe such total failure of humanity. I wonder if I may have offended you by understatement. I am sorry if that is so. In place of "sectarian conflict" I should have said:

A colossal hell-hole boasting almost a century [1] of uninterrupted brutality, millions of dead, hundreds of thousands of refugees, an intractable death-spiral of poverty, disease, natural disaster, religious division, foreign arms dealers, corporate profiteers, military maniacs, mercenaries, poisoned land, torture camps, rape as a systematic weapon of war, child soldiers, land mines, opium farmers, and.... Facebook.

Admittedly the last of those is the least of their worries.

Still, for the sake of brevity what phrase like "ongoing civil war" or "ethnic divisions" might succeed, because there are no few words that can describe such a situation or would be acceptable language on this polite board.

[1] All those articles seem to suppose things went bad _after_ the British left. Being British, I am supposing they may have started sooner.

Last time in Denmark was in 1920 [1]. It almost abolished the monarchy at the time. Since then no other monarch have dared interfere with politics.

Today all political interactions are purely ceremonial. The monarchy is still part of the power elite, and of ceremonial importance in domestic and international relations, but they have no direct power over political decisions or elections.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_X_of_Denmark#Easter_...

I can think of a few recent examples.

The 1975 Australian constitutional crisis, where the Governor General (granted power by the Queen) dismissed the Prime Minister.

In 2019, when the British PM suspended Parliament - a provision that would not exist without a Monarchy, as it was technically done by the Queen on the PM s advice. This was later ruled illegal but there was no way to right the wrong.

Recently, Queen's Consent was exposed as a secret process where laws are changed in secret before coming to Parliament to gain the Queen's approval. One example being that the Queen can hire without complying with laws against race discrimination. She also has exceptions from environmental and COVID legislation.

Checking Wikipedia, it looks like Queens Consent was withheld in 1990 preventing debate of reforming the House of Lords. Probably the world's least democratic legislative chamber of any democracy.

Uhm, if I remember correctly the UK removed an elected prime minister of Australia (on basis that he was a leftie) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Australian_constitution...