Why so down on Belgium?

[lordandcount]

Well it's betterin Belgium than in the US. It has more then 2 sides and why is it wrong to push your idea if you are the majority Chaos? Isn't that the whole idea of democraty that the side with the most votes win?

[KingKaramazov]

Well, I suppose that's true L&C, but what that often means is that members of a certain party feel they have to further the goals of the party even if those goals don't necessarily agree with their own particular ideals.

So you get people furthering political goals in order to gain dominance over the opposing party or parties even if it they aren't the political goals that are the best for their constituency.

If that makes sense.

I think things would in general be better off if politicians were forced to stand on their own and base the decisions they make regarding political goals on their own ideals and the interests of their constituency, not the interests of their particular party.

Also, the lack of political parties would force people to actually pay attention to the particulars of a candidate when they go to vote, not just which party they happen to be from. That way you would get less "party loyalty" where people who think of themselves as Republicans feel they can't vote for any non-Republican candidates, and so on.

[I__CHAOS__I]

[quote=""lordandcount""]Well it's betterin Belgium than in the US. It has more then 2 sides and why is it wrong to push your idea if you are the majority Chaos? Isn't that the whole idea of democraty that the side with the most votes win?[/quote]

its impossible to compare our situation with the US, the only "similar" systems can be found in germany and maybe austria / switserland, but the being without goverment for over 165 days while all the politicians acts like 12 year old girlies .... it's unbelievable

why it's wrong what they did? they voted not because of the subject (and their point of view on the subject) but they did this purely to make a point towards the wallon politicians. I can assure you, it's a major scandal and has nothing to do with democracy anymore.

[Navarone_Guy]

I'll admit, the US government and party system has been corrupt since the beginning. It's all about factions and seeking positions of power and no longer about the welfare of the nation.

[KingKaramazov]

^ Exactly.

All you have to do is look at the way the election process works and you can see it's not even entirely democracy.

Numerous times we have had presidents elected that do not even get the votes of the majority of the people in the country, all because of our ridiculous "electoral college" system.

The founding fathers were not the lovers of democracy and human rights that our educational system would have us believe....

[Navarone_Guy]

I really don't get the electoral college. They claim it's to lessen the burden of counting tens of millions of votes, but they count those votes anyway to determine the electoral college. It's just an unnecessary middleman. Just muddles up the system.

The country blows all its revenue on terribly ineffective programs and instead of fixing them, asks for more money, appealing to peoples' emotions and using terribly misleading and emotional slogans.

And, KK, I don't think the founding fathers were as different as you might say. By today's standards they were terrible. They owned slaves and didn't believe in equality as we define it today. However, in their time they were truly revolutionary.

[KingKaramazov]

Yes they were revolutionary, but the point is they didn't believe in democracy the way we think of democracy - they basically just wanted the male aristocracy (the elite) to vote people from their own ranks into office and run the country with their interests in mind. That's rather different from our conception of "everybody has a vote and a voice" democracy.