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When Utilitarianism becomes mob rule : Comments
By Dara Macdonald, published 17/10/2022We are all Benthamites now! Declared my Criminal Law lecturer at university. And never has the axiom that the way measure of right and wrong is the greatest happiness for the greatest number been more popular.
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Posted by ttbn, Monday, 17 October 2022 7:38:58 AM
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?Who and what are worse, the voters belief in a voting rights to elect rulers from a pool of clowns in a Canberra circus or the circus itself?
I think the ring master is the resurrected Calvisius Sabinus! Oh for a Seneca to call-out the madness of it! Dan Posted by diver dan, Monday, 17 October 2022 9:52:50 AM
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That's what you get when you only have the saturation educated out-of-touchers making decisions !
Posted by Indyvidual, Monday, 17 October 2022 10:53:32 AM
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Disagree with most of this.
Most of society's problems came with promoting individualism over the rights of others and making everyone, regardless of circumstances, personally responsible for outcomes! Individualism fails when the whole tribe face emergency and need to cooperate for the survival of the tribe. When the Titanic was sinking it was women and children first as a guiding moral imperative. Society is by definition a collective of cooperating individuals. We all drive on one side of the road and report suspected criminal behavior, when we see or hear it etc., etc. Co-ops were e.g., the only private free market business model that survived the Great Depression largely intact. Moreover, the Great Depression started as a manageable recession forced to become the Great Depression by the application of, as usual, asinine conservative ideological imperatives. It's when we as the collective face the greatest adversity that we have our finest hours. As in the battle of Britian when Sir Winston Churchill stated, never in the annuals of humankind have so much been owed by so many to so few and should the British empire endure for a thousand years, mankind will say, that this was their finest hour. Almost everything wrong with society is the result of, greed is good individualism. Including the crime rate and multi-million-dollar white-collar crime! That said, there is a place in the collective for individual rights. And those rights can only be protected by a long overdue bill of irrevocable human rights! And election, will of the people, outcomes that cannot be altered by the application highly manipulated, election preference swaps. Instead of all this slimy backroom power broker wheeling and dealing, we need primaries and that followed by the two leading contenders going back to the polls in a first past the post outcome. This would deal the backroom power brokers out and largely powerless and a good outcome for genuine democracy, i.e., the collective! Alan B Posted by Alan B., Monday, 17 October 2022 11:09:18 AM
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Hey ttbn,
"It's not the majority calling the tune these days, it's the loud, bullying minority." - minority collective. Look at politics in the US. The democrats co-opt minorities for the power they can gain unto themselves. The use a collective of minorities to overpower the majority. So I think it's not just 'minorities' calling the tune. It's combining them into a collective for the purposes of outnubering as a combined force and out-shouting the silent majority. Posted by Armchair Critic, Monday, 17 October 2022 11:30:43 AM
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The democrats co-opt minorities for the power they can gain unto themselves.
Armchair Critic, But they like calling themselves Democrats ! Hypocrites is more apt ! Posted by Indyvidual, Tuesday, 18 October 2022 1:07:21 AM
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Hey ttbn, "It's not the majority calling the tune these days, it's the loud, bullying minority."
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=22190#387492 I'm sure that the woke and communists are on the watch for Counter Revolutionaries. Most of the population just want to live their lives with their own culture but at some stage they will realise that if they don't do anything they'll be prisoners- they need to stand up for their own interest- and their own territory- and not be influenced by the politics of "white guilt" and "communist multiculturalism". As Nietszche said "politics is for the rich and the idle". Ayn Rand said similar implying that communism has the smell of a stinking rotting corpse. Posted by Canem Malum, Friday, 21 October 2022 2:46:29 AM
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The fatal flaw of democracy is the theory of majority rule which easily degenerates into the tyranny of the majority if it is not checked by a strong tradition of individual rights, free speech and institutions that provide checks and balances as the writers of the US Constitution did their best to achieve.
Limited government is much more important than giving votes out to everyone and that might have been understood by the leaders of democratic movements while Christianity still provided the moral framework for the west. The rise of socialism and especially Marxism put several gigantic spokes in the wheels of peace, freedom and prosperity. The wreckers got a lot of help from Plato who in some respects poisoned the well of western political thought, especially with his theory of collective justice that underpins modern collectivism and identity politics. Posted by Pericles2, Monday, 24 October 2022 12:17:16 PM
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More on Plato's collectivist theory of justice and the totalitarian state.
http://www.the-rathouse.com/OpenSocietyOnLIne/Chapter-6-Platonic-Justice.html Posted by Pericles2, Tuesday, 25 October 2022 7:13:17 AM
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"Prohibiting doctors from giving individual advice to their patients that is different to public health messaging could mean – ironically – telling them to do something very bad for their health."
This is truly totalitarianism, coming to light in Queensland, and rumoured to be marching interstate soon. How many Australian bozos know about it? Enough to resist?
Note Lord Jonathan Sumption: dictators do not take our freedoms, they are handed to them by the population.