A concept that was quite alien to me was introduced to me yesterday, in a thread in LF by Dead Ken (he who created the greatest of all quotes*) he brought up the fact that democracy, especially liberal democracy is the symptom of a specific type of government and is not nearly as universaliseable or as inherently desired as it is portrayed to be. This does beg the question is the kneejerk Democracy (or at least "good" democracy as defined by foreign policy requirements) = good?
I honestly don't know and it is something I will likely be devoting a fair bit of thought to from now on. Certainly while the type of democracy we currently have now is flawed and deeply problematic what to replace it with is the big question, if the governed don't have some kind of input or right of reply to their rulers then they will be exploited and used. Then again they kind of are now. Still the lack of an immediately obvious alternative to democracy wont come to mind if, like me, you haven't thought that democracy as it is now is not what you assumed it to be.
Anyway, wondering about this caused me to do some googling and I found this transcript of a public discussion between Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou about the problematic nature of democracy and the problems of its' current sacred cow status.
Edit: turns out the guy whose blog that transcript was posted on is a major fraudster and is on the run from the police in several countries. I don't think the transcript was false but given he holds some pretty hardcore libertarian views who knows? Details about his fraud and a link to a BBC current affairs program about him (that anyone can access) can be found here
*"Science is a debased form of Marxism"
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