The Glade 4.0

No, it becomes our responsibility to have a semantic discussion.

Instead, cocks want to interject and say how worthless semantics are, and how we should just go on either using their definition or not creating a universal one for discussion.



I blame the education system. 1) People are taught that their belief about the meaning of things matters, rather than the actuality of the meaning of things, and 2) people are taught that words are mutable between two people, rather than the reality that words are mutable over time.

Once these teachings reach the populace, we get idiocy like this:



Words have meanings.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

Fair enough. Although I think you get to understand my assumption along the way. The poll already shows that lots of people here don't actually understand what Representative Democracy means.

And then you have cocks who just want to nit-pick to death definitions to grind their own personal axe.

And when logic fails, because most people are morons who believe that they can construct a reality built around internalized opinions about the world, and that their opinion is as good as anyone else's never mind what actual facts might be?

That's when correct, ignore, and shun comes into play.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

I haven't seen any evidence of this here.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

If I assume you're speaking about me, which axe? The one that indicates actual debate and discussion requires like-terms, as opposed to whatever 'debate' you may believe you engage in where people just fold for you?

The idea that people shouldn't discuss terms and meaning is so blatantly stupid I can't think of a proper way to insult it.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

That's because you weren't posting regularly the last time we had the definition of "terrorist" turned into "whoever Monty needs it to be to grind his own personal axe".

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Fair enough, but I've already accounted for that kind of idiocy:

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

Am I naive 'cause I thought you were teasing me?

Anyway you meant it, I smiled.

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In time, this too shall pass.

So, wait. Is this poll trying to define "representative democracy" or is it asking us what we demand of our current system, which RD commonly refers to as a representative democracy? Because I don't think the clarifications have really answered that, yet, and it's obviously something that we're reading differently. I had assumed, for instance, that this was fishing for our responses on whether our Congresspeople should be voting for health care (assuming the individual congressperson believes it's really in our best interest as a society) or sticking their fingers in the wind and respecting the overwhelming negative reaction to the bill. You, on the other hand, seem to think this poll is trying to democratically define the term.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Or that they voted on what they inferred RD to be asking, contrary to the meaning of the question RD asked because, as we've found now, he wasn't as precise in his wording as he should have been.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

It seems obvious the question is "what something means to me" as opposed to what it means in the most syntactically accurate definition.

Changing the question after the fact without reposting the entire poll is problematic.

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In time, this too shall pass.

If I recall correctly, changes to the poll will reset the votes in this forum software.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

In my opinion, neither option provided in the poll actually answers the larger "meta-question" asked, regardless of how it was intended. There are semantic issues (and those are important), but I think the bigger problem is a contextual one. Too much depends on things not specified. There is no blanket answer to the scenario posed by the poll. The personal whims of a politician are no more or less a suitable foundation for good government than the whims of a public majority (or minority).

It is, in a manner of speaking, a false dilemma. The scenario posed just assumes that our form of government (since this is apparently what RangerDave intended with the titular question) boils down to nothing more than a conflict between personal desires and opinions: those of the majority and those of the public official. To put it simply, I reject that assumption. Good government may be informed by these things, but it is not dictated by them. The government of the United States should not be a popularity contest. Nor should it be merely the platform for whatever those who are in office wish to enact.

Or, to put it simply, I think you're asking all the wrong questions -- which to me is far more telling than any of the answers provided.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

And what is it telling you?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Best for whom, his constituents or himself? Best for the State, the Country? Best for all?

The purpose of electing someone democratically to serve in this republic is not only to have them serve the people they represent as a conduit for their opinions, but to modify that service with their wisdom. The elected official may have a keener insight as to the overall good, or the long term good, that their constituents aren't privvy to.

The question isn't all that simple.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

*chuckle* I have to say, this thread is everything I love and everything I find infuriating about the Glade, all rolled into one! I posed what in a normal, real-life conversation with most people would be a pretty straight-forward question - do you think elected officials should vote based on their own judgment or based on the revealed preferences of their constituents? In fact, I have posed that question in numerous real-life conversations and never found anyone with difficulty understanding what I was getting at. Here on the Glade, however, I discover that no one can agree on what exactly is being asked, and we have three pages of discussion regarding the precise meaning of "representative democracy", which political system we're operating in, the value of semantic clarity, etc.

On the one hand, that's incredibly frustrating, because I really just threw it out there for a casual conversation. On the other hand, it's informative and fun to be part of a community that always digs down into the underlying assumptions that color my language and beliefs. So, basically, I love you guys, but damn, remind me never to play Scrabble or D&D with you!

Wasn't this addressed on page 1?

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You're not in a one-on-one situation here, and the answers in real-life don't become fodder that can be used against you (typically to make you out as a hypocrite) in a future discussion, and real-life conversations aren't in a search-able database.

Think Supreme Court meets death cage match and you're getting close...

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In time, this too shall pass.

Melodramatic much? Yes, language is important, but so is being able to have a discussion without distracting the conversation and/or annoying everyone.



Well hello Mr. Fancypants. Amateur polling? Lighten up, man. Nobody here is a professional pollster. And if you don't want to participate, you don't have to.

As I said earlier, it's ok for an amateur poll to clarify your answer. For example, I answered the poll, but did not vote because my option wasn't there. So I just provided text and left it at that.

I sometimes wonder if people act this way in RL. It would be, I suspect, lonely....

Why not? You don't have to define the word in Scrabble, so it doesn't matter if you think it means what it does not, so long as you spell it right. And, in D&D, terms are clearly and explicitly defined...

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Well... this is probably TL;DR, but this is why I think this thread didn't quite go as you expected:

I think the problem is that you didn't ask just that question. The question that you just now asked is considerably more straight-forward than what you actually asked. Your titular question was an open-ended question about semantics. "What does 'representative democracy' mean to you?" Asked in a void, that's a pretty straight-forward question, even if it doesn't necessarily have a straight-forward answer. The question (again, just by itself) doesn't imply whether you think the U.S. federal system of government is a representative democracy, or whether you think representative democracy is good form of government. It just asks you what you think that term means, which is a simple enough question.

It's when we get to the poll and body of your OP that things go sideways.

The poll question, unlike the thread title question, is neither semantic nor open-ended. Instead, it's a policy question specifically framed as a binary dilemma. It's also devoid of any context. That tends to be problematic for dilemma-style questions where the audience is being asked to make a global decision between no more than two choices. Speaking for myself, I think that a public official should do whatever is actually best. This may be what he thinks is best. It may be what his constituents think is best. It may very well be neither. In fact, I think this is probably more often than not the case in our modern political climate.

But beyond the problems I have with the poll question as it stands alone, where I think we really run in trouble is that the poll question is not alone. The question asked in the poll is not the same as the question asked in the title. They may or may not even be related to one another depending on how someone would answer the titular question. And beneath it all is the undercurrent that you may actually be asking our opinion about the U.S. federal system of government. This might not have a huge effect on the policy question asked by the poll, but it completely transforms the titular question into something utterly different from an open-ended semantic question. And, in the process, it just kind of quietly assumes that the federal system is, or ought to be, a "representative democracy".

To make a long story short, I think you asked at least three distinctly different questions. Which is fine if they're recognized and asked as distinct and possibly unrelated questions. But I don't think it's yet "clicked" with you (so to speak) that these even are different questions. As I alluded in my last post, that you don't seem to see the distinction (nor, apparently, do the people you usually converse with) is interesting to me.

I think it reveals something about your own personal thought processes and internal political constructs. While interesting just for its own sake -- that is, just because you are a Glader and I like to understand how you think -- it's also interesting to me in a broader context. I'm not quite the "deconstructionist" that Khross is, but I think I might be starting to lean that way, at least when we stick to that side of it which is a practical working philosophy (i.e. phenomenology/praxeology) and ignore the, well ... existential bullshit.

More broadly speaking, then, your political constructs are interesting to me because of how and where they were constructed. The "background grid" of your political universe is a sort of touchstone, if you will, for the American education system. And, in particular, for that specific branch of tertiary education which concerns itself with the teaching of law. Why does this matter to me? The answer is simple: ask yourself which profession is by far the most common among those who would become public officials.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

I endorse pretty much everything Stathol has said. Not that uncommon, actually, of late.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Indeed. I took it as given that (i) the American system is an example of representative democracy, (ii) in a representative democracy, elected officials are not strictly proxies for their constituents and thus may exercise their own judgment in office, (iii) there is nevertheless an understanding that the government derives it's authority from the consent of the people and thus should generally reflect the will/wishes of the people, and (iv) there is an inherent tension between (ii) and (iii) that often plays out in the manner described in the actual poll question.

I assumed all of that would be commonly agreed-upon background information for people here (as it generally seems to be in my real-world conversations), so it didn't occur to me that people would be thrown off by the reference to representative democracy in the thread title. I figured everyone would just glance at that and answer the poll question on the assumption that the thread title was merely setting the context as a system, like ours, having the characteristics described above.

If it helps clarify my thought process, though, my actual poll question, which I had to shorten because of the space limitations, was originally written something like this:

"In a representative democracy like the United States, if a legislator thinks Policy Option X is best, but polls show a large majority of his/her constituents prefer Policy Option Y, should he/she vote for Policy X or Policy Y?"

Incidentally, I chose to make the poll binary and leave out the standard "Other" option, because I figured everyone would just choose that and say that both the legislators' own judgment and the constituents' preferences should be factors. That's not particularly edifying, though, since (as I indicated above) I took it as a given that we all agree both factors come into play in a representative democracy. I wanted to push people into choosing based on which way they leaned - i.e. are you more of a "best judgment" or "constituents' preferences" kind of person - and then leave the nuance for the discussion.