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Syndicate
Then there has never been a totalitarian state, because no state exerts total control. As you rightly pointed out "the will of the people can not be circumscribed entirely". You were the one to introduce totalitarianism into this conversation, not I. The oxymoron is of your own making.
I posed the issue of being one of imposing a "totalitarian" process. A state, a government, a family, are all social processes. Nothing is absolute. What ever made you think it was.
Even if you did manage to institute your totalitarian scheme it would never succeed because the "will of he people can never be circumscribed, entirely" and someone somewhere would manage to subvert your fascist plan by not voting. 5% of all Australians "not vote" against fascism every election.
[ 05 November 2008: Message edited by: Cueball ]
Imposing voting is analog to forcing a treatment upon a paranoiac. Totalitarianism and paranoia grow together.
Go see by yourself in the nearest psychiatric hospital.
By violence or the threat of the imposition of violence. Often done at psychiatric hospitals. But then this violence, how does it square with:
[ 05 November 2008: Message edited by: Cueball ]
Hey! For a paranoiac anything can be irrationally violently threatening.
The Afghan, El Salvador, and Iraq Elections
Compulsory voting is not truly fascist unless there is a real threat of violence or even death as was the case in so many U.S. managed elections around the world where they've propped up brutal and corrupt regimes
You are the one who is imposing the a-moral totalitarian measure. You want to grow totalitarianism. Therefore...
[ 05 November 2008: Message edited by: Cueball ]
Yes, from the perspective of many FN Canadians, I am sure Canada has looked, and possibly still does look pretty fascist.
Ultimately, even the enforcement of things such as tickets are backed up with the threat of violence. If you don't pay your tickets you can go to jail. Imprisonment is violence.
[ 05 November 2008: Message edited by: Cueball ]
On a blank ballot people would write their own name as the best MP or the name of their best friend...
You stated there were too choices, morality or violence. You have chosen violence.
I knew a guy from Toronto who went to live in Quebec to avoid paying thousands of dollars in parking tickets. QPP picked four of us up in his car somewhere between Matagami and Noranda, open wine bottles and beer everywhere. He was slapped with an affordable fine back then in the 90's. We went on our way to peelers in Noranda about 15 minutes behind schedule.
But that's not like being menaced by Hitler's guardsmen standing over us at the ballot box, or the transparent ballot boxes in 1980's El Salvador with Duarte's thugs standing within eye shot. Our federal Liberals and Tories were real asshole-deluxes in the good old days. But aside from a few indigenous Canadians arrested by RCMP and dumped outside city limits to suffer severe frostbite and even freeze to death, Canada has no real desaparecidos.
Choosing deliberation is obviously choosing morality.
Choosing is one thing. Forcing people to choose, is something entirely different. Hitler ran a number of referendums where people were forced to choose.
In a deliberation everything is "on the table": the use of force, the number of choices, everything...
Next time you better think twice before pointing your finger at moralists.
[ 05 November 2008: Message edited by: Benoit ]
I think you may be on to something. Canada may not be a brutal U.S.-backed rightwing dictatorship or even bear semblance to a corporate-sponsored European fascist state of the 1930s and 40s, but perhaps there is something in between? Liberal fascism?
Jack Lint: "This is information retrieval not information dispersal."
In the words of Monthy Python:
"NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition!
Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise....
Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless efficiency....
Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope....
Our *four*...no... *Amongst* our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry... are such elements as fear, surprise....
I'll come in again."
What are you talking about?
You specifically stated that you could either be moral or violent. The fact is that ultimately violence is at the heart of any law when it is enforced. If you pose the idea the violence and morality are juxtaposed, and then say you want to force people to vote, you are backing that up with violence, and saying therefore that your position is amoral.
Utterly illogical tautology. Of course you did not mean that. You meant that violence is justifiable in the name of the "will of the people".
What you are is some kind of Corporatist Totalitarian.
[ 05 November 2008: Message edited by: Cueball ]
Surprise without fear cannot be a weapon since it is what makes life exciting.
The people's will forever will evolve and escape any totalitarian attempt but the individual wills cannot be kept isolated from some collective will.
[ 05 November 2008: Message edited by: Benoit ]
What about ruthless efficiency?
I once neglected to declare a few dollars of income(less than $5 bucks) on an application for UI(before it became the very Orwellian "Employment Insurance"). The feds knew about it and scolded me for it , went so far as to hold up my claim because of it. Meanwhile multinational corporations have deferred and unpaid corporate income taxes to the tune of billions and billions of dollars. You and I would probably go to jail for non-payment of income taxes. And their friends in industry can dump toxic waste into the environment and maybe pay a slap on the wrist in affordable fines. You and I would be fined what we would consider serious dough for dumping a bag of trash where we're not supposed to. The people will police themselves in a liberal-fascist setup, but corporations often get away with murder.
[ 05 November 2008: Message edited by: Benoit ]
You don't even have a consistent thesis.
[ 05 November 2008: Message edited by: Cueball ]
That's true. Slave labourers in Nazi occupied Europe weren't so productive as they were worked to death. Slave labour in the complete absence of human rights has always been a wet dream for capitalists. Stalin used forced labour as he realized a massive military buildup was taking place in Germany in violation of the Versaille Treaty, but many of those labourers paid even a meagre wage in Russia during the war years knew what the consequences were for losing.
Democracy is like friendship. If friends choose to chain themselves together is will be the most original form of chain.