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Old 08-30-2004, 10:39 AM   #40 (permalink)
smooth
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Location: Right here
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cynthetiq
SATS the thing that you are missing, is that in this country you have the ability to make a difference. First, by votoing. How if who you vote for if they never get into office? By running yourself.

In other countries like I mentioned you can vote, but you are supposed to vote for the incumbent, and no one ever wins but the incumbents party.
I couldn't figure out what you guys were referring to by SATS! lol, ok, got it now.

But I don't think you are giving other nations' voting systems or voters the credit they deserve. You seem to have built up this fiction in order to prove to yourself that this is the 'freeest' nation in the world. I think that you are willfully placing blinders on yourself that would make it so that you are unable to recognize critical changes taking place.

When things don't fit people's paradigms, they are usually reinterpreted to fit within it, or thrown out. Only after enough cognative dissonance will the paradigm start to unwind and may shift. Unfortunately, it may be too late before you experience 'enough' dissonance.

I would just encourage you to try and refrain from supporting the fiction of freedom we have in this country (and that isn't to say that we don't have freedom, but that our flavor of freedom is romanticized and embedded in our cultural beliefs that may or may not match with individual experiences) by building caricatures of other nations' flavors or experiences of freedom.
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"The theory of a free press is that truth will emerge from free discussion, not that it will be presented perfectly and instantly in any one account." -- Walter Lippmann

"You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists." -- Abbie Hoffman
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