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To: Gib Bogle who wrote (65215)	6/19/2005 10:53:11 AM
From: Slagle	Respond to of 74559

Gib Re: "Democracy" You certainly know more about the US than I know about your country for I have never been there though I hear its a beautiful place. But I sense that maybe there are some features of our system you would like to see adopted there? Just a guess though maybe wrong. The bedrock of American democracy is the statewide and local elections. The single national candidate a person votes for is the president and if you think about it that is not really very democratic. First, you don't even vote for the candidate but a delegate. And you are not offered much in the way of a choice as the opposing pair of candidates are chosen behind closed doors, months or maybe years earlier. The "third party" candidate can never acually win, due to the electorial college, but can act as a "spoiler" (ie. Perot, Nader) and throw the election. While a person votes for president once every four years in the meantime he votes in literally dozens of local and statewide elections and is offered the choice of hundreds candidates. This is REAL American democracy. The US is very unique in one respect; political power here is very local. In other countries power is usually concentrated in the national government with the individual provinces or other subdivisions beholden to the national government for each and every thing. That is not the case here. Each state raises its own revenue and makes its own budget. They even have their own military. You are familiar, of course, with the big dispute over education. This whole dispute concerns the Federal contribution to education, which is only about 12% with the rest being raised from local taxpayers like me. Some localities have opted out of the national program and raise all their revenue locally. By doing so they can avoid the cumbersome and destructive Federal regulations. I vote for and contribute money to politicans who have a program to do likewise in my school district, in which I have two children as students. I would much rather pay more school tax and have the education system run under totally local control. I wish GWB and other US presidents would shut up about "democracy" with regards to places like Iraq. ITs ridiculous. This sort of clap trap began with Woodrow Wilson, a man who may have caused the world more misery death and destruction than any other, Tammerlane included. And I totally agree that "fascism" is innate, though I guess what you really mean is that nationalism, patriotism or just a "sense of belonging" which comes from being with and having a preference for people of your own kind is innate and natural. I TOTALLY agree. There is nothing wrong with that either and great good can come from a sense of belonging and patriotism, though it can get out of hand. But it doesn't have to. "Fascism" is a terribly abused term. I have lived abroad in places where all the inhabitants were of a single race or ethnic group or at least all shared a very long cultural heritage and language. When an international flight lands in the capital city all the passengers hug each other and kiss the ground as soon as they set foot on their native soil. This doesn't happen when a Delta flight lands in Atlanta. <g> People in these sorts of places have a very great sense of nationalism and patriotism, though they may despise their own national government and political leader. But of course they live in a place where there are essentially no foreigners and no immigration. Is this Fascism? Slagle

To: Gib Bogle who wrote (65215)	6/20/2005 8:28:26 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 74559

Gib, <My position on human nature is that I don't see it improving. To me, fascism is innate, at least in the cultural sense (as a meme), or even genetically. It's easy to explain in evolutionary terms why this should be so. That doesn't mean we have to like it, and I don't (I'm with the free-thinkers). But we do need to face it, along with other unpleasant realities. > It's nothing that a bit of eugenics can't fix and that process is well under way. As you say, there's good genetic background to fascism, namely the eons-old confiscatory found-wealth territorial alpha male dominance hierarchy run by primates, wolves and other social mammals. But those genes are being filtered out gradually by way of car crashes, self-destruction, sexual selection and in millions of other ways. Basically, being a chimp in a modern society isn't a good way to have a lot of successful offspring. For a start, they end up in gaols. Human nature is improving dramatically. Check out the Flynn Effect for a start. We are in the midst of a quantum step in evolutionary punctuated equilibrium as a 6 billion human seething mass evolves. Mqurice