Non-US citizens may be allowed to vote in NYC elections. - Polidicks

[QUOTE=JustExtreme;40666680]When you reduce it to a choice between candidates rather than deciding on an actual issue it all just deteriorates into a popularity contest circle jerk. I'd like to think some kind of decentralized direct democracy based decision making process would work better but that would depend on the implementation and whether capitalism inevitably continued to interfere with it's prick waving power grabbing contests and corruption.[/QUOTE] even in my high school, where student body elections were mostly ineffectual, the students still organized to petition for stuff like healthier food and less vending machines. although the petitions fell on deaf ears.

[QUOTE=yawmwen;40666681]because the private sector is more concerned with profits than allowing people to make their own decisions.[/quote] Those aren't mutually exclusive. In fact a great way to make a profit is to facilitate people making their own decisions by providing for their wants and needs in a free market. [quote]some would say humans act tribal and ingroupish regardless of whether we have elections or not.[/QUOTE] Well of course, there are ways to mitigate it. The mark of a strong ruler, lost in our modern times, was that he was able to keep the various factions of the realm under control, to prevent them wrenching everything into chaos and anarchy.

[QUOTE=BrickInHead;40666721]direct democracy would overwhelmingly favor the upper class, the working class hardly has the time to invest in deciding on an issue by issue basis, especially not in any informed capacity[/QUOTE] so instead of working class people choosing directly because it overwhelmingly favors the upper class, they should instead choose someone from the upper class to "represent" them in politics?

[QUOTE=Neo Kabuto;40666711]Well, there are shareholder elections, but they're kind of meaningless.[/QUOTE] Those are different because the share of the vote a person has is in direct proportion to how much of the company he or she owns.

[QUOTE=DainBramageStudios;40666731]Those aren't mutually exclusive. In fact a great way to make a profit is to facilitate people making their own decisions by providing for their wants and needs in a free market.[/quote] not in a workplace though. [quote]Well of course, there are ways to mitigate it. The mark of a strong ruler, lost in our modern times, was that he was able to keep the various factions of the realm under control, to prevent them wrenching everything into chaos and anarchy.[/QUOTE] and yet the early modern era was plagued with warfare, chaos, and famine, despite these so-called "strong rulers"?

[QUOTE=yawmwen;40666755]and yet the early modern era was plagued with warfare, chaos, and famine, despite these so-called "strong rulers"?[/QUOTE] Does a Sovereign have any choice but to fight back when an army walks into his city's gates? The wars you describe subsided once feudalism was replaced by Enlightened Absolutism.

[QUOTE=DainBramageStudios;40666819]Does a Sovereign have any choice but to fight back when an army walks into his city's gates? The wars you describe subsided once feudalism was replaced by Enlightened Absolutism.[/QUOTE] early feudalism was more peaceful than enlightened absolutism. warfare was fairly rare and small scale in the early/high middle ages when land ownership was decentralized and leaders had little absolute power.

[QUOTE=yawmwen;40666852]early feudalism was more peaceful than enlightened absolutism. warfare was fairly rare and small scale in the early/high middle ages when land ownership was decentralized and leaders had little absolute power.[/QUOTE] Are you kidding me? The kings were powerless to stop local barons and dukes from waging their own private wars. I'll even get the statistics hang on.

[QUOTE=DainBramageStudios;40666880]Are you kidding me? The kings were powerless to stop local barons and dukes from waging their own private wars. I'll even get the statistics hang on.[/QUOTE] [img]http://www.immortalhumans.com/wp-content/uploads/life-expectancy-through-the-ages.jpg[/img] life expectancy was higher in the early medieval ages in large part due to lack of large scale wars that were prevalent in both the classical era and early modern.

[QUOTE=yawmwen;40666920][img]http://www.immortalhumans.com/wp-content/uploads/life-expectancy-through-the-ages.jpg[/img] life expectancy was higher in the early medieval ages in large part due to lack of large scale wars that were prevalent in both the classical era and early modern.[/QUOTE] except the picture you cited shows that the life expectancies were influenced more by disease and famine than war. [img]http://i.imgur.com/lzvXbDd.png[/img] note the conspicuous drop during the 18th century, and the huge spike caused by the rise of republicanism at the end of it.

I like how all the dictionary autists are having a field day because of dumb details that are of no intrinsic value.

[QUOTE=DainBramageStudios;40667011]except the picture you cited shows that the life expectancies were influenced more by disease and famine than war. note the conspicuous drop during the 18th century, and the huge spike caused by the rise of republicanism at the end of it.[/QUOTE] do you have statistics that date back before 1400? maybe something around 1100 ad?

[QUOTE=yawmwen;40667056]do you have statistics that date back before 1400? maybe something around 1100 ad?[/QUOTE] This is the only decent thing I can find for dates before the Early Modern period, and I'll admit it doesn't seem to support my or your conclusions very strongly. [img]http://i.imgur.com/KXOIGhw.png[/img] [quote]Two patterns jump out of the splatter. The first is that the most serious wars and atrocities—those that killed more than a tenth of a percent of the population of the world—are pretty evenly distributed over 2,500 years of history. The other is that the cloud of data tapers rightward and downward into smaller and smaller conflicts for years that are closer to the present. How can we explain this funnel? It’s unlikely that our distant ancestors refrained from small massacres and indulged only in large ones. White offers a more likely explanation: [quote]Maybe the only reason it appears that so many were killed in the past 200 years is because we have more records from that period. I’ve been researching this for years, and it’s been a long time since I found a new, previously unpublicized mass killing from the Twentieth Century; however, it seems like every time I open an old book, I will find another hundred thousand forgotten people killed somewhere in the distant past. Perhaps one chronicler made a note long ago of the number killed, but now that event has faded into the forgotten past. Maybe a few modern historians have revisited the event, but they ignore the body count because it doesn’t fit into their perception of the past. They don’t believe it was possible to kill that many people without gas chambers and machine guns so they dismiss contrary evidence as unreliable.19[/quote] And of course for every massacre that was recorded by some chronicler and then overlooked or dismissed, there must have been many others that were never chronicled in the first place. A failure to adjust for this historical myopia can lead even historical scholars to misleading conclusions. William Eckhardt assembled a list of wars going back to 3000 BCE and plotted their death tolls against time.20 His graph showed an acceleration in the rate of death from warfare over five millennia, picking up steam after the 16th century and blasting off in the 20th.21 But this hockey stick is almost certainly an illusion. As James Payne has noted, any study that claims to show an increase in wars over time without correcting for historical myopia only shows that “the Associated Press is a more comprehensive source of information about battles around the world than were sixteenth-century monks.”22 Payne showed that this problem is genuine, not just hypothetical, by looking at one of Eckhardt’s sources, Quincy Wright’s monumental A Study of War, which has a list of wars from 1400 to 1940. Wright had been able to nail down the starting and ending month of 99 percent of the wars between 1875 to 1940, but only 13 percent of the wars between 1480 and 1650, a telltale sign that records of the distant past are far less complete than those of the recent past.23[/quote] [editline]16th May 2013[/editline] Wars follow a Poisson distribution if I remember correctly.

[QUOTE=yawmwen;40666739]so instead of working class people choosing directly because it overwhelmingly favors the upper class, they should instead choose someone from the upper class to "represent" them in politics?[/QUOTE] yep. despite widespread belief that politicians don't mean what they say, statistically their rhetoric usually pretty well represents their own personal ambitions and policy making decisions. there are very few politicians that have statistically different disparities between public and private speech.