- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
But then why not bring a communist dictatorship, purely and simply. At least them, you'll believe when they'll tell you it's the people who has the power. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
They should decide military strategy too, and of course have a veto right on the Red Button - its use will most obviously affect workers' rights and benefits.
Well, yes, every major social interest group should have veto rights on the red button. Pushing the red button would be a crime against humanity on a scale not seen since the Great War - doing so against the wishes of a significant minority of the population (nevermind an outright majority) doubly so.
I don't think that unions are necessarily the best fora in which to discuss military strategy - but if they can give compelling arguments for this or that strategy, I see nothing wrong with that. And if some strategy is so anathema to them that they are willing to deploy all their political guns - up to and including the general strike - it would probably behove any prudent politician to ask himself why this strategy has so antagonised a majority (or, even in the most de-unionised countries, significant minority) of the population.
But then why not bring a communist dictatorship, purely and simply. At least them, you'll believe when they'll tell you it's the people who has the power.
I'll assume that this is snark. The unions are hardly the only NGOs that attempt to influence public policy. They're not even the most odious of the various NGOs that do so.
Unions' legitimate interest is about work issues, not army or foreign politics - unless it somehow affects workers.
You're simply asserting this artificial distinction as if it's true, and you've ignored the reasons you've been given which show that it isn't.
What could possibly be more ideological than repeating the same point over and over, and ignoring extended arguments against it?
We cannot extend the "workers interests" at what actually is people's interests. Or people's interests are represented by parliaments and other elected instances in democracies.
As a general rule, mixing genres and then claiming a hold on truth won't bring us anywhere.
Exactly the same kind of false reasoning was made on another diary about women who are paid less because they work less because they're supposed to care for children because of the society-imposed roles - and so on.
This kind of line of thought only shows lack of rigour.
In the end, everything is dependent of anything, so we pick our favourite victims: workers (as if we're not all of us workers, as if we don't have a democratical system), women (as if they wouldn't want children, as if they wouldn't like caretaking) and so on.
In short, you may protest that the democratical system bases on parties, parliaments and governments for general-interest issue, and unions for precisely labour related issues. That may make you a revolutionary-in-waiting, but won't make me an ideologist. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
A last one for the road, straight from one of your links :
Powerful and influential doctors continue to express fears that the increasing proportion of women in medicine will lead to a loss of power and influence and professional status.
As to your quote, I had seen that phrase. SO what's the problem? Did I deny that? Did I ever even comment that? Is anything I said contradicting that?
An ideological will always bring unrelated arguments to decredibilize an opponent. For him, winning is the important thing, not finding the truth or learning something new.
I hope at least you read well your own links on the other debate and learnt that there are a lot of unexplained or arbitrary factors regarding gender differences in pay, other than Male Oppressors. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
I hope at least you read well your own links on the other debate and learnt that there are a lot of unexplained or arbitrary factors regarding gender differences in pay, other than Male Oppressors.
Which you decided I had denied, despite I having not done so. And the sentence I linked is hardly unrelated to the topic. Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères
Bun then, that book is probably full of ideology and sloppy reasoning itself, I suppose. Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères
This is a bit like free speech you know, no matter how many laws you make, people will always find a way around them to pass the message they want (see the recent Christian Vanneste's trial decision). Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
Those are not extended arguments, but utopical thinking typical of the hard left. The comment about civil society vs formal democratically elected organisms is relevant of this.
Come on, you can't be serious.
There is a healthy and ongoing debate about local vs. centralised and direct vs. indirect democracy that goes back at least to the French and American revolutions and continues to this day. Different countries have settled upon different - mostly viable - solutions for various reasons. Spain, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland - to name just the ones I know - all have varying degrees of devolution of power from the central parliament to more local units. Hardly a case of utopianism run amok (and I note that Switzerland isn't precisely a hard-left country either...).
The best example is the European Union. Most left hardliners are of course against more integration, because they claim it to be an instrument of the bad wolf (capitalism). So they call indirect democracy undemocratical (in spite of the fact that the EU Parliament is elected directly and the Commission represents the democratically elected governments, not the Evil Billionnaires and Multinationals).
So they play the Poll Chord ("polls all over Europe are against Europe") and demand "direct democracy", as more democratical. Which leads to the EU constitution, an opaque, technocratic document of hundreds of pages, being submitted to referendums, attacked with populist slogans, and being, logically rejected. Goal attained! 1-0 for the Direct Democracy! Tomorrow we'll vote to Give More Money to the People! After tomorrow, we'll vote For More Sunny Days! Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
Is it that the voters are stupid? That the politicians aren't representing the best interests of the voters? That the decision-making architecture of the EU has fundamental design flaws? That state-level public debate fails to consider the federal issues? That the voters deem the federal level unimportant? All of the above?
But whichever our answer to where the democratic failure originated, there is no denying that a political class that's 90 % pro-EU and a public that's 40 % pro-EU and 20 % don't-know-don't-care signals a failure of democracy somewhere.
I just wanted to point out that "Brussels" is our own elected, not some bureaucratical class parachuted from planet Mars.
Voters are not stupid, but (I think Frank said that already) the constitution is too technical. Referendums must be made on simple questions ending in yes, or no, not a 200 pages cryptical diplomatic formulations + annexes.
So this is where the difference between the public and the political class comes from, IMO. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
