Thursday, January 15, 2009

Methinks we are SO f*cked...

Again, courtesy of the Constitution Club:

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

If only there was some way to make every member of every state and federal governing body AND every member of the general public WATCH THIS and absorb its truth. Before it's too late.

January 22, 2009 at 3:33:00 PM MST
pplr said...

An interesting video but it has some flaws.

The right to left description of the political system is based on if and what ideology the ruling people/power groups base (or justify) their actions.

So there is a described rational for how communist governments are left wing and fascist are right wing.

It is actually quite debatable if defining government type by government power is more accurate or not.

The US is a democratic republic (something else the video fails to describe so far). We have limitations on what a majority can do but we still have political power organized by/based on majority consent/choice.

Moreover it would be fair to say what the founders made was not a democracy. It was not a proper democracy because the political voice (voting rights) were limited to people who were generally white, male, and land holding. This means political freedoms were limited to a minority of the population (closer to an oligarchy than the video acknowledges).

Over time voting rights were expanded to include minorities/non-whites, women, and people who aren't landowners. The US became more democratic by expanding these rights to excluded groups.

I would like to see how doing this was limiting freedom. Moreover a large-scale government seizure of property came with liberation of slaves/the ending of slavery in the USA. In this situation the government took private property (the slaves) from slave owners and turned it over to another group of people (the slaves themselves).

Also the talk of the development of Rome into an oligarchy ignored the way continual militarization of Roman society pulled it away from various republican traditions.

The video also ignored the possibility that oligarchies can develop based on economic rather than political power. This economic power can even attempt to overtake political power by limiting a person's political freedom via threats to economic status (someone's job being threatened because it was learned this person intended to vote for a specific candidate or political party).

The scale of the situation can even be expanded where we have discussions of if economic powers have bribed their way into political power via campaign contributions or payments (the typical understanding of bribes) to political officials themselves.

The video seems stinted towards a libertarian ideology. That in itself isn't a bad thing because various ideologies can be used to come up with new ideas or different perspectives on how to deal with a situation. However those same ideologies can also be limited in how they understand reality and this can hamper responses to it.

March 30, 2009 at 9:23:00 AM MDT

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