Kandinsky
Yes, there does seem to be quite a few posters on the news & politics board who are anti - everything. Hours are spent on here linking endless articles & surveys, it’s not what your average grandparent would spend their leisure time doing - but takes all sorts as the saying goes.
If only If more people did take a keener interest in news and politics and bothered to read quality editorial of all political stripes in newspapers, journals and online publications they would know and understand much more about that is going on. We can only make informed decisions if we engage actively in acquiring information and think critically about it. Almost every negative effect of Brexit was predicted and yet our democratic process allowed an electorate, many of whom did not know or understand the facts, to make a critical decision which is now crippling the country and will set economic development back decades, a decision which is now affecting our children's and our grandchildren's futures.
From Humphrey Hawksley’s 2009 book ^Democracy Kills^:
For many years Western governments have insisted that the only way to achieve long-term prosperity and political stability is through a combination of free-market economics and democratic government. Yet, all evidence now indicates that this argument is both flawed and can also be the direct cause of war, disease and poverty.
From Pakistan to Zimbabwe, from the Palestinian territories to the former Yugoslavia, from Georgia to Haiti attempts to install democracy through elections have produced high levels of corruption and violence. Parliaments represent not broad constituencies but vested interests and, amid much fanfare, constitutions are written, but rarely upheld.
When I first read this book, I thought his views were only relative to other unstable countries. Now the UK has a government controlled by immensely wealthy donors with vested interests, some of that money very dirty, a manufactured class war, millions of sick people who cannot get adequate and timely healthcare and increasing levels of poverty, I think his views could equally be applied here. I am not arguing again democracy, of course not, but in the hands of a politically uninterested, politically illiterate or politically gullible electorate, democracy is an equally dangerous thing.
