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On france, we currently have one with 2.1M signatures, gov still said nope (petition against reintroduction of dangerous pesticide, backed by sciencists community)
Don’t you guys have a more effective way of convincing the government?
Milk poured all over the streets of Paris worked well for the dairy farmers to the best of my knowledge. Imagine the fucking smell two days later.
The French are first class protesters.
I signed the petition but I had zero belief it would actually result in anything.
We don’t actually live in a democracy, that’s just something they tell us while they do whatever the bloody hell they want.
It’s a representative democracy, not direct democracy.
And why should it be that way? You can certainly have a mixed system. In many American states, for example, official petitions can result in referendums to enact laws without the legislature’s intervention.
Because the plebs are fucking retarded and change their opinions more often than their underpants. With a representative democracy, you have at least some chance that those in office try to think for more than 30 seconds about a topic before they vote.
If we had a direct democracy in Germany, I bet we’d see a ridiculous amount of racist and anti-poor legislation pass.
Or consider the anti-vaxxers as an example. I want my government policy to be made by somebody who doesn’t think “macrophage” is an insult.
Of all the arguments against democracy, I think this one is probably among the strongest.
In the past, this was solved by giving the power of the franchise only to the upper class, because those people at least had the time and education needed to consider their choices before voting. Of course, such a system would never work in the modern day. It would just result in a country turning into a cyberpunk hellhole.
But on the other hand, giving educated people stronger voting power than uneducated people seems to be a historically unexplored idea. Something like all citizens having one vote to start, secondary school graduates having a second, baccalaureate holders having a third, and then graduate degree holders having a fourth.
Education is tightly connected to parents’ education. A voting scheme like this would cement another aristocracy.
And it’s also against the ‘everyone has equal rights’ thingy we kinda agreed on.
