Intergalactic Summit

A bit of a side issue, maybe, and I'm hardly an expert on the Gallente political system, but how else would the average Msr. Saissoire know that there's even a significant issue, candidate, or legislature to vote on, much less how it impacts him?

Jovian telepathy?

An interesting case to be sure, and I've no doubt that it is representative of many Federal Citizens. However, I don't agree that such attitudes are held by anywhere close to 95% of the population. If wider Gallente identity was so completely subsumed by local culture, the Federation would never have formed in the first place. Much less maintained such a preeminent cultural strength in the cluster at large.

I hope you realize I was providing opinion-commentary, since this is the IGS, not the realm of academia. Of course the logic was incomplete because my comments were just that: comments. Not the initial prepositional statement whereby through the power of inductive and deductive logic given a series of facts, evidences and relevant supporting statements I am able to provide citations for I am able to reach a conclusion of sorts. Joke's on you I suppose for decrying incomplete or contradictory logic when I treat this venue as essentially the comments section for a GalNet video sharing site -- except there's very little cats being adorable on camera if any videos at all.

However if you were to insist on debate all I would be interested in providing is something along the lines of, well Ms. Okazon you have an albino pet furrier on your head, thus your argument is invalid. Which probably makes as much sense as most attempts at argument or debate on the IGS.

That said, freedom and Federation are just as fine words to worship as God and Empire; or tribe and Republic. I even genuflect before duty and State at times.

Why should I care about the cultural self-identification of others and their need to defend their prescribing to such points of conformity in public? I care only up to the point that such differences in culture and identification ensure that opportunities remain available for private security contracting.

Seriphyn - I disagree that the proto-gallente has it wrong. Best watch over the home roost. As my grand-pappa used to say "If everything is good in the henhouse you don't have to go out for eggs."

Fredfredbug4 - Eh. Those strange ads usually tout that they'll bring "the highest standard of living! The grossest national product!" But it's a well known histororical fact that "suckage" seems to result either way. Usually your distinguished incrumbent tends to win. I oppose "univeral suckage" as a result. Rather than be a faithful constituitionals and sign political documentaries and votes that just cause the lot to descend into a time of "universal suckage", I try to be a Faithful Amarr and trust in the Divine Will of God and and follow his ways.

Perhaps it's my own personal lack of faith, but I would rather trust a scummy politician than a "God" any day. At least a politician has the decency to appear frequently to the public and speak directly to his followers. Even if your God does happen to be real, I doubt he's uttered a word to anyone in thousands of years.

Regardless, I too have many qualms with democracy, but I just remember that “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.”

To be fair, God speaks to us very directly. He just doesn't hold press conferences. When He wants a change in policy, He tends to punish or reward us to nudge us in the direction he wants us to go. It's our job to be able to read the signs and interpret his will via the Scriptures and His works in the cluster.

Honestly, I do hope the Gallente democratic experiment bears fruit someday. It is certainly to the Gallente what Scriptural thought is to us. Even at the top of our hierarchy, we have a "voting" system, so the idea of selecting a qualified individual for government is not new to the Empire. It simply seems that the biggest problem the Gallente encounter isn't the theoretical aims of their system, but the devils in the details. If I was going to select the best person in my Empire for a certain position, I'd have to say an election is probably the absolute worst way to do it.

Essentially, Gallente politicians don't have to be good at their jobs, they only have to be good at winning elections. That means that bad administrators can still win positions despite their incompetence if they can spin popular opinion or become the darling of a political party. Certainly, Gallente have voted for necessary evils in certain parties knowing that the party covers the majority of their complaints and has a chance to get into government. So they spend enormous amounts of money digging up political (and largely inconsequential) dirt on each other, then trying to snuff or spin the information in their vast machines.

Once in, those people then have a few short years to achieve their aims. This is usually not enough time to affect necessary change in government, but is ample time to make as much money as possible. If there is one common complaint that Gallente parishioners have regarding their government, it's all about money. How much money candidates spend, how they dole out tax money to their cronies, how much money is gathered up from lobbyists. That sort of thing.

The check on these issues is that citizens in a democracy have to be, in theory, completely well educated on all standing issues, judge their candidates after carefully studying them all, and make informed, rational decisions based on their information. In theory, this would be an excellent way to select a government. In practice, Gallente are free to not be educated, can still make judgments on faulted, phony, or bad information, and make decisions based on everything from tea-leaf reading to following celebrity advise. In essence, democracy would probably be an excellent system if it wasn't so often installed on societies that guaranteed freedom in other areas. When you put the power in the hands of the people, you have to make damn sure that those people are all, to the last man, capable of making those choices.

As I said though, I do hope the Gallente democratic system eventually develops into what it promises to be. You can't fault the Gallente for taking a concept that seems too high to reach and figuring out the engineering challenges to reach it. We do the same thing in building a moral society rather than a political one, aiming for an almost unrealistically high expectation. What we do know is that we will never achieve anything of real substance if we compromise our values and say, "This is good as we can do."

All I can say is that if the Gallente ever do find a surefire way to make their democratic processes work flawlessly, most of us wouldn't find it a bad way to make decisions. I hope one day your people iron out the wrinkles. After all, if the universe was perfect, accountable government would be the best government. There is no excuse for anyone to shrug and stop trying to make the universe perfect. We're not going to get any closer to ideal by just accepting that we have problems.

Look out, we got a bad ass over here.

I think, Fred, we have a similar issue. We have these systems that, when working optimally, are excellent at providing right thinking. We simply have to deal with the imperfections of humanity, which is where the education side of it all comes in. Unfortunately, we also seem to have the same hindrances, corruption and indifference. Gallente democracy works in theory because that second term should be impossible to get for a bad politician. This assumes people are paying attention to that particular office, or even that people are well-learned enough to recognize what they see. I think, perhaps, the Gallente should make mandatory classes on government and current issues in order to allow the opportunity to vote. That seems it would give everyone an opportunity to vote, but would assure they really put the work in to do it.

Perhaps that isn't a very Gallente suggestion, but it seems you've a perfectly reasonable method of governance more or less hindered by your people's freedom to be intentionally unreasonable.

There is a district that I visit often controlled heavily by Unionists, in a factory district. Most of the people there are working in industrial settings and will vote with their unions on any matter. This has kept a rather terrible territorial governor in power for years, simply because the party has such strong loyalties. The problem is that his policies have made the district unprofitable, and it has fallen far behind Caldari industrial giants that do the work cheaper and more efficiently. They also keep their factories from investing more heavily in automation and drone technology, which has saved the rest of the Gallente manufacturing sector.

Common sense dictates that they should have kicked the party out a decade or two ago; the party has completely wrecked any prospects the district has of remaining competitive and providing work for its people. Yet I think the Unionists won a 55% majority of the vote there in their last local election, and that was considered a rare vote of no-confidence in the government. Yet the new governer of the same party is promising to do precisely what hasn't worked in the previous... I think... four or five administrations?

One of the larger problems is that the government, due to its propaganda working in its nigh-single-party system in that particular district, has horribly misused funds. It has concentrated them on protecting party administration first and making sure that they have enough to live comfortably while the rest of the district sits on the precipice of poverty. When reports surface of their own party misusing funds, their supporters seem to shrug and do their best to justify or ignore it.

Essentially, the party in that area has dug itself in deep and made itself very good at winning elections, but can't do what is necessary to really fix the district's problems.

In the end, I am sure they will eventually be kicked out of power unless the district simply withers into nothing first. Still, it seems this is the sort of place where democracy is going to have issues. I'm not sure what you can do for places like this beyond mandating education to try to teach people why they are slowly strangling their own families. Even that is going to raise specters of fascism to the common Gallente and they would likely accuse anyone trying to help of simply being a partisan for another party. The adversarial political system seems to generate momentum in some of the wrong directions.

I'm simply thinking out loud, as I've said, I really do hope Gallente democracy works out. I simply don't see it working out in a society as completely free as that of the Gallente. It seems somewhat difficult to allow people that much civic power without enforcing some amount of civic knowledge. Otherwise, a politician would refuse to make a painful, but necessary, decision simply to remain employed. After all, it's a lot cheaper to run a good publicity and spin campaign than to actually fix some of these problems.