(Turkey)Occupy Gezi crackdown spins out of control

[Stark]

Splitting hairs, as constitutional monarchies they function no differently from most presidential republics.

The joke here is that 'republic' just means 'democracy' to almost everyone except Americans, who had to invent a new term for Civilisation game balance - I mean because it was the 18th century. Even the jingoistic wiki article struggles to make a meaningful distinction.

And serious, if you think Australia functions 'no differently' from a presidential republic, you must be talking at a pretty seriously high level. But hey, the word was also hijacked by dictators, so it's even more of a joke.

[AniThyng]

Splitting hairs, as constitutional monarchies they function no differently from most presidential republics.

The joke here is that 'republic' just means 'democracy' to almost everyone except Americans, who had to invent a new term for Civilisation game balance - I mean because it was the 18th century. Even the jingoistic wiki article struggles to make a meaningful distinction.

And serious, if you think Australia functions 'no differently' from a presidential republic, you must be talking at a pretty seriously high level. But hey, the word was also hijacked by dictators, so it's even more of a joke.

I regret now not saying "from most parliamentary republics with elected figurehead presidents." I still fail to see how it's meaningful to dispute that most "modern democracies" are "republics" by going "nuh-uh, the UK is a Kingdom!"

How would the replacement of the Governor General with a "President" with the same powers change the character of the Australian government?

[Stark]

The question being such a laugh is why almost all tabled suggestions for ditching the monarchy in Australia have entirely different solutions to the executive power, and some have arguably deliberately been stupid or dumb (ie America) to lose on purpose.

[AniThyng]

In any case it's interesting to see the attitudes in place here regarding majority/minority rules.

It really does seem to me that people are saying it's OK to disregard the results of the national popular vote if the outcome is against an ideologically determined better outcome! This is hilarious to me due to the circumstances of the recent election, and being a citizen of a paternalistic authoritarian state that has long held that the people can't be trusted to know what's good for them!

[Grumman]

In any case it's interesting to see the attitudes in place here regarding majority/minority rules.

It really does seem to me that people are saying it's OK to disregard the results of the national popular vote if the outcome is against an ideologically determined better outcome!

I would not only say that it is acceptable to disregard the will of the masses, but also that it is sometimes unacceptable to do their bidding. If a hundred million people think it should be legal to torture prisoners who have been found guilty of no crime (read: support enhanced interrogation), that is a hundred million people who are wrong.

[AniThyng]

In any case it's interesting to see the attitudes in place here regarding majority/minority rules.

It really does seem to me that people are saying it's OK to disregard the results of the national popular vote if the outcome is against an ideologically determined better outcome!

I would not only say that it is acceptable to disregard the will of the masses, but also that it is sometimes unacceptable to do their bidding. If a hundred million people think it should be legal to torture prisoners who have been found guilty of no crime (read: support enhanced interrogation), that is a hundred million people who are wrong.

In cases like this you are probably lucky that there are 99 million people who think it should be illegal, hence making it relatively easy for you to sway a mere 1% of the 100 million and then proceed to declare the triumph of the popular will to outlaw torture, and also neatly sidestepping the need to clearly justify why your minority opinion is clearly right against the overwhelming majority of the population.

[madd0ct0r]

you mean like historically campaigning against slavery?

[AniThyng]

you mean like historically campaigning against slavery?

So I just went at looked that up, and it seems Lincoln won only 40% of the popular vote, while of course securing victory thanks to the electoral college system.

Hm. Well. The system worked. Well then there was a civil war and all that, but at least right prevailed with plenty of doses of might?

[ray245]

Hm. Well. The system worked. Well then there was a civil war and all that, but at least right prevailed with plenty of doses of might?

Well it could have gone the other way round if the northern states have lesser votes than the south.

[AniThyng]

Hm. Well. The system worked. Well then there was a civil war and all that, but at least right prevailed with plenty of doses of might?

Well it could have gone the other way round if the northern states have lesser votes than the south.

On further shallow study it seems that the plurality of the vote still went to Lincoln or non-pro-slavery factions - so in a sense the popular vote as a nation was against slavery. But the US is a very big nation.

Something to bear in mind when considering issues of popular sovereignty, geography and demographics. At which level do we accept the popular franchise?

[GuppyShark]

Democracy should not be and never should be mob rule.

If 10% of a polity believe in X, then that should be respected, even if 90% of the polity believe Y.

[AniThyng]

Democracy should not be and never should be mob rule.

If 10% of a polity believe in X, then that should be respected, even if 90% of the polity believe Y.

Would you agree this kind of imbalance is a 2 way street, and that the 90% have to accept that as the majority, they hold the cards and need to make allowances for the 10%; while the 10% accept that they are a minority position, and that they have to make demands in a context that does not elevate them over the wishes of the 90%?

[Irbis]

Someone tell me if the following is true:

Turkey is practically the only example of a working, first-world modern democracy that is majority Muslim. Although there's no way to be sure, that probably couldn't have happened without the military ensuring the state stayed secular. (or at least AFAIK that's the main difference between Turkey and other Muslim countries)

Because if so, I don't see it as a "problem" in Turkey.

Only example? How about Iran - they are exactly what Turkey would be without military, a minority of progressive city dwellers ruled by religious government voted in by Islamic rural countryside majority. They have democracy, too, it's just in all that demonizing of Iran by the west people forgot both that and the fact democracy isn't free by itself.

I'd argue that secularism is a requirement for democracy, or else everybody votes for theocrats; and so by protecting secularism they are ensuring (in a roundabout way) Turkish democracy.

What if majority wants theocracy? See, it's like picking Fort T - you can have it in any color, as long as it's black. Is it still a choice?

The problem is, if 90 years of forced secularism in Turkey still doesn't produce results the enforcers want, then maybe it's time to give up and admit the country wasn't democratic any more than 'people's democracies' of old Warsaw Pact where you could have voted any way you liked, just the party and military ensured inconvenient votes 'disappeared'.

Turkish TV and radio stations were reporting nothing at all for most of a day.
Arabic TV and radio stations were on the story within an hour of the first police department mass resignation. There was coverage on Al-J and Egyption TV but nothing international yesterday. My statement was correct, there was no coverage except in the Arabic world until late last night when CNN-I picked it up and other places started noticing the situation.

Were they? From what I saw, Arabic news centres kept quiet, like they did during Arabian Spring, for the same reasons - their rulers don't want to give ideas to their subjects. Only the supposedly independent ones, like Al Jazeera, covered it. On the other hand, if by 'social media' you mean things like twitter, facebook, and tumblr, most of the info about protests I was able to find were from educated Turks publishing info in both Turkish and English.

[Simon_Jester]

In any case it's interesting to see the attitudes in place here regarding majority/minority rules.

It really does seem to me that people are saying it's OK to disregard the results of the national popular vote if the outcome is against an ideologically determined better outcome! This is hilarious to me due to the circumstances of the recent election, and being a citizen of a paternalistic authoritarian state that has long held that the people can't be trusted to know what's good for them!

Demagogues leading a tyranny of the majority, resulting in injustice and oppression of minorities, are one of the most common and famous failure modes of democracies ever. It's been a bug in democracy since Athens; if there were democracies before Athens I don't know of, I'm betting it was a problem for them too.

So yes, you need some kind of mechanism in place to keep minority rights from being trampled by a majority. This is an especially important issue when what's really going on under the hood is that 25% of the population wants to oppress people, 30-40% is willing to stand aside and let them do it for religious reasons, and the rest fear oppression. Which is hardly an unrealistic case in the Middle East.

It would be much better to do this without military coups. But I'm not going to categorically reject a system which uses military coups as a check on the executive branch, so long as the system works and does not lead to military dictatorships.

Government is an instrumental good.

What if majority wants theocracy? See, it's like picking Fort T - you can have it in any color, as long as it's black. Is it still a choice?

The problem is, if 90 years of forced secularism in Turkey still doesn't produce results the enforcers want, then maybe it's time to give up and admit the country wasn't democratic any more than 'people's democracies' of old Warsaw Pact where you could have voted any way you liked, just the party and military ensured inconvenient votes 'disappeared'.

Since Turkey has also gotten pretty good outcomes from its mode of government, arguably it's better off this way.

By analogy, there are former SSRs which would probably have been better off staying under the communists. That doesn't make communism good, it's just better than being ruled by a self-deifying tyrant who lets the economy decay down to subsistence agriculture while building giant gold plated revolving statues of himself.

The Warsaw Pact states have pretty much uniformly been better off under a complete democracy than they would be under communism. But the same cannot necessarily be said for Uzbekistan. I think similar arguments apply to the Middle East, especially since Turkey's "interrupted reset" form of democracy is much less bad than Soviet-style dictatorship.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Yeah Zeon mentioned it as a bad thing, like it was a provocation to the military to arrest traitors. It's bizarre how outcomes let people distort their values.

The truly fascinating thing about this statement is that it implies that you think I have values which would normally make this wrong. I've been supporting the Kemalist system of giving the military a constitutional, defined role in politics to defend Laicite since this board existed, and Erdrogan's move against the generals was cover for the fact that with the amendment of the constitution (as a kowtow to the idiotic EU) he was now free to reimpose religious law on Turkey. I at least am quite prepared to say that you're wrong: My values were not being distorted by my prior statement.

[SomeDude]

Splitting hairs, as constitutional monarchies they function no differently from most presidential republics.

The joke here is that 'republic' just means 'democracy' to almost everyone except Americans, who had to invent a new term for Civilisation game balance - I mean because it was the 18th century. Even the jingoistic wiki article struggles to make a meaningful distinction.

And serious, if you think Australia functions 'no differently' from a presidential republic, you must be talking at a pretty seriously high level. But hey, the word was also hijacked by dictators, so it's even more of a joke.

I regret now not saying "from most parliamentary republics with elected figurehead presidents." I still fail to see how it's meaningful to dispute that most "modern democracies" are "republics" by going "nuh-uh, the UK is a Kingdom!"

As long as one of the definitions of republic is "a government having a chief of state who is not a monarch", it's a bad idea to say "you know, all modern democracies are really republics". There's no need for the stretch. Use the proper term: democracy (not 'mob rule', but 'rule of the people' - not 'ochlocracy', but 'democracy').

[Simon_Jester]

As long as one of the definitions of a republic is "a state in which the supreme power rests in the body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by representatives chosen directly or indirectly by them," then it's a bad idea to say "Britain is not a republic." There's no need to stretch and call a parliamentary democracy not-a-republic just because in theory it has a monarchy which in practice hasn't played a major role in running the government for something like 100 years or more.

Ochlocracy has the advantage of being strictly accurate, but the disadvantage of being an obscure word which has almost totally disappeared from public discourse. Plato may have loved it, but today it is irrelevant.

[SomeDude]

See, Britain was a republic under Cromwell, but it isn't now. When a British person says (s)he's republican, (s)he means (s)he wants to abolish the monarchy - not that (s)he supports some abstract notion of "a state in which the supreme power rests in the body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by representaives chosen directly or indirectly by them". Do you know why? Because that latter definition applies just as easily to 'representative democracy' without the connotations of abolishing the monarchy.

[Dr. Trainwreck]

Yeah, but that definition of republicanism is a British thing. Beyond the basic descriptives, it's basically pointless to try and define a word so it's standard for every country; each country has a long political history where factions define themselves in opposition to one another, and also its own issues to take sides on.

[SomeDude]

It's not just British - I can vouch for it being present in quite a few European countries. In fact, I think it's the norm and that the alternative definition is mostly American in origin, because for some reason, there is some fetish in America about how "we're not a democracy, we're a republic" (as if both were mutually exclusive).

[Simon_Jester]

See, Britain was a republic under Cromwell, but it isn't now. When a British person says (s)he's republican, (s)he means (s)he wants to abolish the monarchy - not that (s)he supports some abstract notion of "a state in which the supreme power rests in the body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by representaives chosen directly or indirectly by them". Do you know why? Because that latter definition applies just as easily to 'representative democracy' without the connotations of abolishing the monarchy.

...In the context of this debate, this whole thing is completely inane. Since the original point is "democracy does not simply mean rule by the majority, or if it does, then more democracy can be a bad thing."

Obsessing over whether a "republic" is a subtype of representative democracy or just any country not ruled by a king is completely irrelevant.

[Stark]

Alyeska already talked about how for many, many people, the idea of democracy is conflated with social, cultural and political ideas to mean 'like it is here' rather than 'government determined by majority vote'. It's possibly even a normative thing - it's easy for people to imagine all those bizarre differences and scary cultures exist because of BAD LEADERS and those would obviously go away if the people who are JUST LIKE ME could vote the buggers out.

[Dr. Trainwreck]

It's not just British - I can vouch for it being present in quite a few European countries. In fact, I think it's the norm and that the alternative definition is mostly American in origin, because for some reason, there is some fetish in America about how "we're not a democracy, we're a republic" (as if both were mutually exclusive).

Well you know I can't really understand why there would be "republicanism = abolition of monarchy" in a country that doesn't have a monarch in the first place.

America's problem with the word is that it was used by the founding fathers (in the British context, to mean abolition of monarchy). Ever since, every idiot that combines Yahweh with ancestor worship has been pounding on the word like he was getting paid for it.

[Simon_Jester]

Alyeska already talked about how for many, many people, the idea of democracy is conflated with social, cultural and political ideas to mean 'like it is here' rather than 'government determined by majority vote'. It's possibly even a normative thing - it's easy for people to imagine all those bizarre differences and scary cultures exist because of BAD LEADERS and those would obviously go away if the people who are JUST LIKE ME could vote the buggers out.

True. Do you think the following is normative?

Personally, I think our concept of "democracy" should include not just majority vote, but also the preconditions for a real national political discourse. For democracy to work you need fair elections, you need a media that can get (sort of) accurate information to citizens, you need freedom of speech and assembly so that people can organize political efforts, and you need enough freedom to behave differently that political movements aren't being crushed for 'deviant' behavior.

When competing political voices are getting intimidated or rolled over, it is a sign that something is wrong with the democracy. Thus, a democracy that owns slaves is not much of a democracy. Likewise a democracy that subjugates and disenfranchises women. Likewise a democracy where the dominant party, with the support of 55% of the population, tries to outlaw the other 45%'s way of life.

[madd0ct0r]

actually, could all this semantic shit be split off so we can get on with talking about the protests in turkey?