Your thoughts on freedom of voting and the uneducated masses

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I'm in favour of a meritocracy. Recognising that people are, not in fact, equal, at least when it comes to votes. Basically, giving the educated more votes than the uneducated.
 
At the risk of sounding like Naridill or Hraefn ( :roll:) The Germanic monarchy always seemed a good idea.
There was a hereditary king, but he needed the support of his people to claim the throne. iirc, they also had chieftains which worked in the same way, but governed a village rather than the kingdom.
A Germanic king wasn't all powerful either. A local chieftain could ignore his commands - as long as the people agreed of course.
 
Democracy doesnt work.

A truly benevolent dictator is the best form of government. That eliminates the stupid from messing things up. If somebody were to take all the good things (constitution and other such things) from all the "Western Civilization" countries and then have a dictator to deal out and enforce the law, then life would be good.

And im talking about a dictator thats does whats best for his country, not a Bush or Hitler. Well, maybe Hitler before WWII started. Too bad that will never happen.  :cry: Human nature is way too flawed to let someone good rule over everyone else. (flawed because no one will let one have power anymore and because everyone wants more power once they have it.)

God bless america though :grin:
 
13 Spider Bloody Chain said:
The problem with a good dictator who is in control of everything is that said ruler can mess up (and do so quite badly), no?

Well thats why we have the Consitution there too. So the people can overthrow the dictator is they so choose. Either that or how will they know he screwed up. Someone with total control will not let his subjects know that he has screwed up. He wont let them know or he will be honest, depending on which his people perfer most.

Plus, so what if he screws? The dictator has control of the military, so if he screws up, praise him. Or die.
 
Ursca said:
Not really. Feudal positions are hereditary.
The knights fight for the king in return for land, and the peasants work the land in return for protection from their local knight.

Feudalism doesn't inherently have to be hereditary. It wasn't until its later stages. What you are suggesting is
less like feudalism and more like representative democracy. Something which isn't very democratic, but tends
to keep local issues at the fore. The problem is that the federal govt will tend towards becoming more pervasive
in this case. Feudalism is a better solution, selecting the best out of a population, rather than the most popular.
 
Yoshiboy said:
How can you test intelligence anyway? IQ testing is hardly viable. Half of it is just based on vocabulary. Also intelligence does not necessary mean you understand politics or the world around you. NOT TO MENTION a certain level of people skills are needed to make a good judge of the society you are in. There is no way to get rid of the stupid assholes and stop them doing stupid things.

Actually, I'd rather see a "how well you are following politics" test. If someone knows enough about the leading political figures and their stances...then they are educated enough to vote.

I've seen my fair share of 'stupid ass college students' and I've seen my fair share of 'enlightened highschool drop-outs'. The only education that should matter is an education in politics. If a person can grasp what is going on, and knows what x political figure will do (and their opponets)...then let them vote. Not the most practical system, I admit.
 
"Who is the current President?
a. Winston Churchill
b. Mohandas Gandhi
c. George Bush
d. Daffy Duck"

Anyone who fails that test should be put to death immediately. Our gene pool doesn't need that ****.
 
It seems to me that the "uneducated masses" (who the hell are they by the way? ever got to know one?) should cancel each other out somewhat as it is. If it weren't for the inevitably unequal representation of the parties/leaders, statistically those who vote on whims would have their votes spread evenly, leaving the informed voters to decide. Getting equal representation is the trick and probably near impossible.
 
Papa Lazarou said:
It seems to me that the "uneducated masses" (who the hell are they by the way? ever got to know one?) should cancel each other out somewhat as it is. If it weren't for the inevitably unequal representation of the parties/leaders, statistically those who vote on whims would have their votes spread evenly, leaving the informed voters to decide. Getting equal representation is the trick and probably near impossible.

The odds of people voting on a whim and coming up 50/50 are the same as the odds of people voting 70/30, or 60/40, or 13/87, and so on and so forth. You would not expect random voting to come up evenly, that's not statistically true. Just goes to show that mass voting isn't really done on a whim at all.
 
It would be interesting to see if America was split in two with the west and east coasts (California, New york washington etc) forming one country, and the central part (the bible belt, etc) forming another country, how rich they would be compared to each other, and the sort of people and political ideologies they each put into power. It would be interesting to see how things turn out.
 
Would never happen, but I once played a Civ2 scenario that was based on that. IIRC, the new country that was made out of California was ruled by Clint Eastwood  :roll:. It was hopelessly out of date, everyone know that Arnold Schwarzenegger would be the President of the Republic of California if one was ever created.
 
Mage246 said:
The odds of people voting on a whim and coming up 50/50 are the same as the odds of people voting 70/30, or 60/40, or 13/87, and so on and so forth. You would not expect random voting to come up evenly, that's not statistically true. Just goes to show that mass voting isn't really done on a whim at all.

If you flip 100,000 coins wouldn't you get about 50,000 heads and 50,000 tails? My point was that if information about the parties/candidates/whatever came from a completely impartial (impossible I know) source, then the parially informed votes would cancel each other out.
 
Papa Lazarou said:
If you flip 100,000 coins wouldn't you get about 50,000 heads and 50,000 tails? My point was that if information about the parties/candidates/whatever came from a completely impartial (impossible I know) source, then the parially informed votes would cancel each other out.

You might.  You also might get 99,999 'heads' and a single 'tails'.  :wink:

Narcissus
 
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