BigOl64 wrote on Jan 10^th, 2013 at 2:38pm:


you dont give lessons... you simply rant and rave and pretend that the QLD sun hasnt fried your brain and your personality. it has. Your rudeness and vile responses simply prove that you have no case to put forward.

PS you know nothing of my military record so assume nothing, wannabe.

muso wrote on Jan 10^th, 2013 at 6:39pm:


it isnt melodramatic at all. they fought for our democracy which you lot seem so willing to dilute all for... well buggered if I can work out what is the advantage in voluntary voting besides pandering to the stupid, the lazy and the like.

don't assume that we ARENT thinking outside the box. perhaps some of us have thought about voluntary voting and decided on considerable thinking to reject it. Thinking 'outside the box' isnt intrinsically correct; if anything the opposite is true. An idea has to have considered merit regardless of where it came from.

I still haven't seen a single principled position behind voluntary voting other than the patently stupid accusation that compulsory voting is a breach of human rights. I still see mainly laziness as the motivation and/or a refusal to participate in the democracy we all benefit from.

Most curiously, this is a politics site where people refuse to vote??? what is with that?

I have an interest in politics too and I don't always vote. I actually helped the greens out at the polling booth one year and didn't vote, so there goes the 'lazy' tag. Less people will vote, and there will be a lot more informal votes, as people, especially the youth, become disenfranchised with this current lot of pollies.

If either party want important votes, they should do something about the  49.8% youth unemployment in western Sydney.

Muso:

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They are irrelevant to this debate muso. You appear to be arguing that anything improtant to you is relevant to whether voting should be compulsory. Your whole argument is built on drawing absurdly long bows, hence my constant and uinanswered requests to you for explanations about why it is relevant.

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Nice generalisation Muso, but once you get specific, you have a hard time arguing that taking away someone's right to not vote undermines democracy? Is this why you keep escaping to vague arm waving waffle?

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Oh really? Who'd have thought that Muso's constant attempts to define demcoracy by Greek standards and to equate the right not to vote with freedom of the press would take people down irrelevant tangents?

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There, he is doing it again.

GM:

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They have even banned certain items of clothing. France puts an extreme version of secularism above freedom.

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Partly because the outcome does not depend on which minority group gets most wound up on election day.

Hicks:

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Argumentum ad populum is a logical fallacy.

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So is argument by association.

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But you don't have the option of not being ruled by one of them.

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I see you also struggle with the meaning of democracy.

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Denying the existence of arguments made by your opposition is not the same as rationally countering them.

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Do I need to explain why this is wrong Hicks?

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Thanks, we will.

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Wow. You must have thought about this for like, 20 seconds.

Bigol:

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Reality isn't good enough for you? You need a piece of paper instead?

Muso:

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You seem to have missed the point GM was making. He was obviously not implying that they fought for compulsory voting.

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You can start by finally explaining the relevance of your argument, beyond vague and meaningless word association games.

My argument is that a good Liberal democracy depends on freedom, which includes rights. Obviously some freedom, such as the freedom to hurt somebody else, is harmful. Optional voting doesn't fall into that category. It hurts nobody.

Arguably the whole purpose of a democracy should be that of freedom, although it works both ways.

One of the recognised measures of the effectiveness of a democracy is that of its participation rate. Any compulsory voting system will mask that measure of effectiveness.

It is obvious to blind Freddy that democracies differ in interpretation, and you don't need a university degree in political science to  understand that. Although it's not a major part of my argument, I have quoted the works of great thinkers such as Aristotle and Thomas Jefferson.

I'm not talking about how the Ancient Greeks introduced democracy as anything particularly special, or the current system in the US for that matter. What counted much more was how the thinkers of the day conceived the system operating.

They dwell to a large extent on the subject of freedom, and you find liberty/ freedom as common recurring themes in the birth of democracies. Liberté, égalité, fraternité was the catchcall of the French republic. You hear a lot more about freedom that about democracy.

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John Barbour (1316-1395)

You can have freedom without democracy, but you can't have an effective democracy without freedom.

You can also have a democracy with no freedom. These are ineffective democracies - democracies in name only. If you reduce the freedom, you reduce the effectiveness of the democracy - not by very much perhaps, but it is tangible.

I argue that voting, whether voluntary or compulsory makes very little difference. Each has its advantages. This is interestingly enough, mirrored in the poll, which shows that a slight majority are in favour of a voluntary poll, but that on the whole, there is very little difference.

You argue that those people who are forced into a vote will somehow transform the electorate from one dominated by excitable minorities. I argue that the inclusion of people who would rather not be there, does not add any additional rationality to the poll or reduce "excitability" in any way.   

Compulsory voting might be a very slight erosion of freedom, but a little leads to more and more erosion of our freedom.

You can think of a democracy in terms of cold mathematical principles, but it's worthless unless you inject some freedom into that democracy, and take account of the nature of humanity - not cold number crunching - It has always been in the nature of humanity to yearn for freedom. The demo part of "demokratia" or "people-power".

Is it relevant to talk about the inspirations of people in older times when freedom was less universal? I'd argue that it is, because so many people these days take it for granted. If you want to know about freedom, listen to those who hungered for it - yes and fought for it.



It's preposterous to think that by making voting voluntary would catapult us into either the the UK model or the US model, and both are very different systems. Do you really think that would be the case, Jalane?

No, we'd remain uniquely Australian. It's in our nature.

freediver wrote on Jan 10^th, 2013 at 9:45pm:


So you think that reducing the transparency of the democratic process is an unsubstantial consideration?

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So Democratic Freedom has gone from being a personal invention to a silly word association?  Thomas Jefferson would roll over in his grave.

You see democracy as being the objective. I see democratic freedom as being the objective.  There is a not so subtle difference.

Wow 357 posts in this thread so far, I'm going to go back and read them all.