Democracy

Just thought I would share yet another observation with you, do you remember the last German election, the one that re-elected Mr Schroeder. I remember this because of how much it upset both the US and some other European member states. It upset them because Gerhard managed to get re-elected because he promised not to send German troops to Iraq, anyway the people voted and he got back in power. I thought hang on, how can these other democracies be annoyed at this behaviour, after all, surely in a democracy, it is not up to politicians to decide what the public want, I always thought it should be the other way around, how about you?

Democracy = the will of the people, so for a change the will of the people won.

Nice to see democracy still works in some countries.

On a more fundamental note, capitalism and democracy are basically two ideologies that are at odds with each other, democracy has been hijacked by big business for it's own purposes (once again). We live in an unequal society because, capitalism can not work in a true democracy, so the two ideologies have in effect come to an uneasy compromise. Democracy can be seen as the will of the people, capitalism on the other hand can be seen as the will of business, so who controls business, this is the problem, because after all, business is not a democratic process.Remember it has been said, that Hitler saved capitalism. You see during the political turmoil of the 20's, wealth for the few, was rebelled against and was seen as the wrong way to go, at least by the majority. But capitalism and fascism found within each other, mutual bed fellows, they where both in effect hierarchical systems in which the majority found themselves at the will of leaders. This led to unchecked global weapons development and proliferation. The capitalist ideology seen a business opportunity in fascism, in other words cheap labour, high profits and an ideology that was not dissimilar to their own.

The capitalists, have always supplied the weapons, the little people have always done the dying. The diplomats and the old men do the lying, whilst the young men do the dying, an old phrase, for a modern age. The young, apathetic and the sycophantic, managed to let the Nazi Ideology lead the German people to their destruction, the human race is currently following the capitalist ideology, I wonder where it will eventually lead us all?

Anyway to leave business in charge of the future, makes no sense (at least to me), because capitalism in effect works towards creating wealth for some individuals, rather than the good of us all. If we leave business in charge then it will probably try to sell supercomputers, nanotech, A.I or even net plugins (see Ubiquitous Computing), so as to allow anybody connected to have access to all of the processing power, storage etc, they could ever want and all invisible to the user. Thus leading to unchecked and global proliferation of such technology, so quite possibly leading to the downfall of us all. This is just like before WW2, where the capitalists seen in certain political ideologies a new and lucrative money making opportunity, i.e. sell arms to anybody and everybody, at the end of the day, who cares about the consequences. To leave the world in the grip of big business and capitalism as it works today, I'm sure, will lead to stock market meltdown and mass unemployment, that's if this technology is introduced by such forces.

Big business plans obsolescence into it's marketing strategy so as to keep the production lines going, but to apply this philosophy to certain advanced technologies will more than likely lead to the human race, becoming obsolete itself. The problem is, that after Roosevelt and his new deal, an economic nightmare in-sued, so ever since, most governments have been reluctant to mess with big business. But I think in the case of A.I ./ nanotech and computing power etc, then governments should be at the forefront of these issues, tackling them head on. Otherwise capitalism and the greed it promotes, could once again lead us all into war, this time WW3 a war to end all wars. If the world can set up the World Health Organisation, then why not a similar organisation to monitor, track and even eradicate certain types of software / technologies etc, that are considered too dangerous. This would obviously represent a monumental undertaking and really would require global co-operation, because it would take only one smart A.I. or self replicating nanotech system, to cause serious global problems.