Democracy: Friend or Foe?

You can't go through a world history class without hearing that the ancient Greeks came up with the idea for democracy. An interesting fact that a lot of these classes leave out is that the Greeks said that democracy was a BAD system of government. See, the Greeks came up with three "good" systems of government. They ranked them, from good to bad, as follows:

1. Monarchy - The ultimate form of government. The country would be unified under one leader, who would strive to work for the good of the people. The idea was that this one person was groomed their entire lives to be the best leader possible. They would be well-educated and they would be trained to be a good ruler.
2. Aristocracy - The next-best thing. The elite class, which in this case was the educated, virtuous class, would rule the country by way of council. In the council, majority ruled.
3. Polity - The educated people in the community vote on candidates based on their individual character and virtue. This was considered the least desirable of the three.

The Greeks also realized that all three of these systems of government had the potential to become corrupt.

• Monarchy <-----> Tyranny
• Aristocracy <----> Oligarchy
• Polity <----------> Democracy

When they became corrupt, they would also switch places in the ranking of good to bad, so the monarchy, the best of governments, would, when corrupted, become the worst of governments.

1. Monarchy
2. Aristocracy
3. Polity
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4. Democracy
5. Oligarchy
6. Tyranny

Some people might argue that democracy and polity are synonymous, or that an aristocracy and oligarchy are one and the same. This isn't so.

• Democracy - There is one big difference between polity and democracy: partisanship. All of a sudden, you're not looking at candidates based on their individual merits. You look at them in terms of political party affiliation.
• Oligarchy - Oligarchy and aristocracy are both centered in the idea of an elite class being in power. The difference is in who this elite class is. In a Greek aristocracy, the elite class were the well-educated and the virtuous (ideally). In an oligarchy, the people who hold power do so by way of wealth, powerful friends, or birthright.
• Tyranny - The worst possible government. In a tyrannical government, the country has a single ruler who governs not for the good of the people, but for the good of himself.

Unfortunately, in modern day you see mostly governments 4, 5, and 6. In a way, you can see all three of them prevalent in modern-day America. It is undeniable that the United States is a democracy. Everyone votes, and there is definitely a lot of partisanship in our government. You fit into two categories: red or blue. Sure, you can vote on a third party candidate, but let's be realistic. If you do that, you've wasted a vote on a candidate who will never win. So you may very well have people who are much better candidates for office than the Democratic and Republican candidates, but who will never win the Presidency and help our country because it is impossible to battle these political powerhouses. In addition, many candidates get in not because they are especially liked by the people, but just because that party has such a massive amount of members. One of my friends, for example, was very displeased with how Bush served his first term as President. In 2004, HE VOTED FOR HIM AGAIN. Why? Because he's a Republican. Easy as that.

You might say that you'll give me that our government is definitely a democracy, but you don't see how it's simultaneously a democracy, an oligarchy, and a tyranny. Okay. An oligarchy is a society in which a small elite group governs the masses; specifically, the small group of the wealthy. Let's be honest. Elections in the United States are not won by votes. They're won by corporations. If you have money, politicians are your friend. Or they want to be, anyway. If you don't have money, they don't give a rat's ass about you. The corporations' lobbyists can push nearly any bill through Congress, with enough money. The corporations also fund Presidential campaigns. Wonder why Bush is in Iraq? A good chunk of his funding comes from oil companies. Wonder why he's lax about environmental issues? Corporations, specifically oil refineries, are big contributors to the Republican party. Partisanship leads to an oligarchy because when the party gets money from a certain contributor, they cater to that contributor. You're not going to bite the hand that feeds you. Thus, the people running Congress are not the politicians, but the corporations who put them there; the elite class of America, our CEOs.

The tyrannical state argument is actually probably the easiest to prove. When you have people who are elected by the masses based on partisanship, the parties look to the wealthy, the corporations, for funding. When they are elected into office, thanks to the corporations and the wealthy, they take care of the people who made this investment, in order to make sure that their sponsors, if you will, don't cut the funding off. Congratulations, you now have the leader of your government governing in such a way that he's making sure HE'S taken care of, rather than his people. It's kind of a chain reaction, really, and America is the poster child for this chain of events.

In my opinion, the ancient thinkers and philosophers of Classical Greece that we so admire would have been very disappointed in government today.

Vegan Parents Starve Baby to Death on Soy Milk/Apple Juice Diet

Amazing. And sad."Vegan parents guilty in infant murder 6-week-old died of starvation after being fed diet of soy milk, apple juice"

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I usually don't do this, but one issue I had with this story on Digg was the assinine comments made on it. Some of the real sore thumbs follow:

"Poor parents, they must be traumatized....I'm surprised they never mentioned the fact they were vegans to their doctor, a nutritionist could have easily helped them support their baby on a vegan diet." -dacrazydude

"'I know they're vegans, but was there something wrong with feeding the kid the milk from her breasts?'
That would be an animal product. " -chompy

"No offense to all the veggie eaters but I hate to break the news to you we are no herbivores, we're omnivores. Could they be any dumber really? Women don't have breast milk for no reason you know, proof right there we are to eat dairy and products of animals. " -richiestang78

"Proof positive that humans are not meant to be vegans. If you decide to be a vegan that's all well and good, but let your kids make decisions for themselves, and in the mean time feed them a healthy, normal diet that an omnivorous species like us is supposed to have." -dgh1973

And so on and so forth.

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The parents did not do this because they're vegan. They did this because they're extremely stupid and cruel. First off, she could have breastfed the baby or fed him a soy-based formula, both of which are vegan options that are perfectly healthy for a baby. Also, if she had fed the baby a large enough amount of the soy milk, he would have survived, he just wouldn't have been very healthy. So not only were they feeding the wrong food, they were feeding him a much smaller amount than any baby could have survived on.

That's not even the biggest mistake they made. I could understand not knowing any better and doing that for a couple of days, but when your baby is losing weight instead of gaining, there's a problem. When you have a six-week-old infant that weighs less than four pounds, there is no way in hell that you don't know that something's wrong. The reason they deserve every minute of their lives in prison is for ignoring their son's well-being and not even bothering to take him to a doctor until he was already dead. In my opinion, they used the vegan thing as a crutch, hoping it would get them off. I know many vegan mothers who have raised vegan children who are perfectly healthy. Hell, if you can't breastfeed, they sell vegan formula at Wal-Mart. Come on.

The thing that really gets me about the whole mess is that these people are going to reflect on the vegan community even though they're the exception, not the rule. There have already been cases where vegan children who are perfectly healthy have been taken by CPS because of their parents' dietary choices. (These children were all eventually returned to their parents.) Then you have people like the commenters above who get the completely wrong idea about things.

The REAL Cost of the War

One of the greatest political issues of the day is the war in Iraq. There are many arguments surrounding the war, such as whether there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, whether Hussein had anything to do with the attacks on the World Trade Center, and various other issues that the Bush administration pulled out of their collective ass. Perhaps one issue we should be looking at more closely is the cost of this war. Many people dismiss these costs as something unimportant, but the fact remains that the cost of this war is a really big problem.

As of 11:57 AM on May 8, 2007, the cost of the war reached a staggering $423,929,450,000, according to costofwar.com. Estimates for the possible total cost of the war by its end range from a rather conservative $500 billion to well over two trillion dollars. many people dismiss the issue of money without giving it much thought, but what we need to do is ask ourselves, "What else could be be doing with this money?" Once you start throwing some numbers together, it becomes obvious that we could do much better things with 424 billion dollars than kill people.

We could provide government housing for 3,817,099 families, according to CostOfWar.com, or medically insure 253,850,000 children. While Bush has been pushing for increased funding for his war in Iraq, he has also been working to cut government-sponsored medical plans. Education is an area we all know is woefully underfunded. This amount of money could employ 7,346,799 teachers for one year or provide 20,551,257 students with a four-year-scholarship to a public university. How many starving children could we feed and clothe with this money? How many African AIDS victims could receive treatment? How many of our senior citizens could live comfortably?

The sad thing is that the tremendous amount of money that is spent on the war doesn't even begin to cover the real cost of the war in Iraq. What is the real cost? To date, 3,378 United States soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq, 80 of them women, according to Iraq Coalition Casualty Count. 24, 314 soldiers have been wounded, as well. That is a huge loss to our country. What about the cost of the war to the rest of the world? The war has claimed the lives of 148 soldiers from the United Kingdom, 33 Italians, 20 Poles, 18 soldiers from Ukraine, 13 Bulgarians, 11 Spaniards, as well as soldiers from Australia, Denmark, El Salvador, Estonia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Netherlands, Romania, Slovakia, and Thailand. A total of 223 soldiers from other countries have died in Iraq fighting Bush's war. Then we get to civilian deaths. Many jounalists and other workers who have gone to Iraq have died, and the number of Iraqi civilian deaths is perhaps one of the most sobering statistics of all. 38,198 Iraqis have died that we know of. This number includes men, women, and a startling number of children. Over 41,799 people have died as a result of this unnecessary, senseless war. The big question we have to ask ourselves is: Is it worth it? Is anything worth this?

The Romeo and Juliet Effect: Why Christians Keep Having Sex Before Marriage

In William Shakespeare's play, "Romeo and Juliet," the titular star cross'd lovers fatefully decide to pursue their love, despite the chaos and war unfolding around them. Their decision ends up being a fatal one. I suppose the ironic question that some people might want to ask the protagonists is: Out of all the wo/men in the world...

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I don't see why people think that abstinence programs or religion do any good when it comes to keeping their kids from having sex. They're surprised that 88 percent of those kids break their vows of chastity? It's a red flag for them to sign the oath anyway. You know who you can always find to sell you drugs? Someone with a DARE sticker on the back of their car. "Dare to keep kids off drugs!" = dealer. In any case, the entire environment is just bad to begin with. First off, you keep telling kids sex is bad, sex is bad, sex is bad. That's all you tell them. You don't tell them how to use a condom. You don't tell them that they can get pills or shots to avoid pregnancy. You don't tell them about how to be safe or how often to be tested, because you're assuming that they'll listen to you and that they'll stay virgins forever anyway.

News flash: people don't care if you tell them sex is bad. They don't care if you tell them it's immoral, it's a sin, it's dangerous, whatever. They're going to do it. We're programmed to do it. You telling a person not to have sex isn't going to make them decide to be chaste. However, if you tell them the dangers of unprotected sex and then teach them how to protect themselves, they may listen to you.

The other problem with a lot of parents who go this route is that then you have kids who are so afraid that you'll be angry that they're not willing to talk to you about it when they DO start having sex. They're afraid to ask about buying condoms. They're afraid to ask to be put on birth control. And so then you end up with high schoolers catching STDs or getting pregnant, where, if they were able to have a healthy discussion about sex with their parents who cared more about their child's safety than about their chastity, they might not catch these diseases or become pregnant. The entire idea of putting so much pressure on kids not to have sex just hurts us in the long run. You have people who aren't informed and who are afraid to talk to their families about getting medical care but who are still doing to do whatever they're going to do.

Why do people have such a problem with sex in the first place, anyway? I mean, it's perfectly natural, it's necessary for the survival of the species, and we're programmed to do it. The things about women that men find attractive? Large breasts, hourglass figure? Those women are more fertile, which is why men are programmed to find them more attractive. Women find big, strong men to be more attractive most of the time. Why? Natural selection of a sort. The ones with the best genes are the ones who procreate. All of this is programmed in our brains to begin with. Why go and fight it? It doesn't make any sense. And since when is feeling good sinful? Who are you hurting by having sex with your boyfriend or girlfriend? What's more, a lot fewer people would get hurt through sex if we were intelligent about it and informed, but we still have people pushing abstinence-only education in schools, doing the exact opposite.

Of MILF and Men : The Sexy Mom Phenomenon

...All of which leaves us a little conflicted about the movement. We, like many modern women, are trapped between two fears: that having kids will make us unsexy, and that trying to stay sexy will make us ridiculous. Our inner feminist tells us that MILFdom is not a solution but rather a self-destructive form of female-chauvinist piggery, to borrow Ariel Levy’s term: Are today’s mothers really so afraid of seeming past their prime that they accept objectification as a compliment?



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I guess I'm a little of two minds on the subject. I think it's great that women today are considered attractive and sexy at older ages, and even with kids. (Of course, I'd also hate to think that my romantic life would be a complete thing of the past as of this September, so I might be a bit biased.) It's empowering, for lack of a better word, and it's good for the women themselves in the sense that there IS life after baby. However, at some point this attraction went from considering these women still sexy and desirable to making them into sex objects. You can see this in the movie that's considered to be the turning point in the MILF phenomenon - American Pie - when the MILF of the movie, Stifler's mom, is never even given a name. She is simply "Stifler's mom", and is otherwise referred to as "MILF". I'm aware that it's funny and maybe I'm being a little uptight over it, but it also is kind of a problem, isn't it? This woman is such an object that she doesn't even have a name.

The problem with our society is that we always take things to an extreme. First, we have the attractive single mother. Partially this is caused by an increase in single mothers, and perhaps the fact that many women have children at a young age is a factor as well. It also helps that many women are using health and beauty products, exercises, and even surgeries to look younger than they actually are. It also has to do, I think, with single mothers being more accepted by society. We no longer look at them as criminals, but as capable, independent women, and as such, they don't have to hide like lepers anymore and can even *gasp* date. In addition, capable, independent women are hot. There's just something about a self-sufficient woman that's sexy. But at some point we get so caught up in the idea that moms can be hot too, and we take it to an extreme, turning it into sexual objectification, the polar opposite of the problem that single mothers USED to have, but just as bad of a problem. Some people even consider these women to be sluttier than a young, single, childless woman who really isn't any less sexually active. One male friend of mine states, "Well, you know she puts out," and then guffaws at his own crude wit (I guess because nobody else found that incredibly amusing). Women who walk around wearing MILF T-shirts (yes, that means you, Ms. Spears) don't help matters, either.

Perhaps the solution for a woman who doesn't really know if she should embrace the MILF stereotype (it's saying something good about her - that she's still attractive - right?) is: don't. Be attractive. Be sexy. But don't think of yourself in that way and don't allow yourself to fall into that stereotype, emulating Stifler's mom. And if a man ever, EVER refers to you as a MILF, read him the riot act and for the love of god, don't sleep with him.

Man Sues Library After His Sons Find Book On Lesbian Lovemaking

A man is seeking $20,000 after his sons found a book on lesbian sex at a public library. The library has since removed the book from circulation. In an e-mail, the father said that God was speaking to his heart and helped him find the words that removed it. He said the teenagers found it while looking for material on military academies.



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... the fuck?!

This is outrageous. First of all, the library has books that appeal to diverse crowd. They're a public library. I can understand if he'd been upset finding this at a Christian bookstore, but he's in a public library. They have an entire section on sex. Besides, in the Dewey Decimal System, the Sex section is in the 600s and the Military section is in the 300s. Yeah, his teenage sons just accidentally wound up looking at books on lesbian sex in the middle of the sex section. I'm sure they MEANT to be over in the Military section, at the other end of the nonfiction section. Right. This guy better hope his kids don't get a hold of the internet. They might just "accidentally" run across a porn site while "trying to do research for school." Give me a break. Your kids were looking for graphic descriptions of sex. If you have some sort of problem with that, reprimand your children, don't sue the library. And don't give us that "they were traumatized" bullshit. I think we all know just why they had many sleepless nights over this.

I know that you want to pretend your kids are all innocent and everything, but a sixteen-year-old isn't going to pick up a book on lesbian sex, in the middle of the sex section of the library, thinking that it's about West Point. Come on. They looked at the book intentionally and just happened to get caught. If you have a problem with what they look at in the library, go with them to make sure they steer clear of that section. And besides, the public library doesn't just have to have books that are okay with Christians. They're a public library, and they have a very diverse crowd that walks through those doors. They try to have books that appeal to everyone because that's what they're there for.

As for the money thing, don't think that just because you're mad at the library for carrying a certain book, you can force them to buy you a new car. Your kids were not scarred for life, and I can guarantee you that they look at pictures of the exact same thing on the computers at school. They chose to look at the material, nobody made them. He keeps saying how God wanted him to do this... what, is he going to donate the $20,000 to the church? Doubt it. Greedy jackass.

Westboro Baptist to Picket Funerals of Virginia Tech Shooting Victims

from godhatesamerica.com, WBC's homepage

"Why did this happen, you ask? It's simple. Your military chose to shoot at the servants of God today, and all they got for their effort was terror. Then, the LORD your God sent a crazed madman to shoot at your children."

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These people are completely sick. When I first heard about them, on Louis Theroux's BBC special, I was absolutely apalled and enraged at what they were doing, and my opinion of them has just gone downhill from there every time I've heard about them. I mean, they're entitled to their religious beliefs just like everyone else. I understand that, and I don't begrudge them their right to religious freedom, even though I disagree with their hateful message. I don't agree with them, but everyone in America has the right to free speech and the freedom to think for themselves.

However, the funeral thing just goes too far. It's horrible enough that they demonstrate at the funerals of soldiers who've died in Iraq. I mean, imagine that you're a mother trying to bury her 18-year-old child. Hard enough. Then imagine that while you're trying to do that, you have these hateful people with their vulgar messages trying to demonstrate at the funeral. That's horrible. I mean, what right do they have to intrude upon that woman's grief? She didn't do anything wrong, and really, her child didn't either. I don't agree with the war in Iraq, but it's not the soldiers' fault, it's the fault of the politicians who sent the soldiers over there in the first place. Why don't they go demonstrate outside the White House like every other group of demonstrators? No, they have to go make these families' lives just that much more of a living hell. It's sickening.

It seems even worse to me for them to be doing this at the funerals of the victims of the recent Virginia Tech shooting. It's not that it's more sad that these students and faculty members died, but I would think that it would have to be just as difficult, if not more so, for their families. When your child is sent off to war in Iraq, their death is a possibility, and you are well aware of that fact. You know that there's the chance that they'll be coming home in a body bag. These families had no warning. They had no idea that this could ever happen to their child, who was only off at college, minding their own business. I can't believe they would think to use these funerals, intruding upon these families' time of mourning, just to get attention from the media to push their agenda.

Girl, 14, Nabbed In Student Bus Beating

From The New York Post

"A 14-year-old girl was busted yesterday in the beating of a high-school student by a pack of kids who taunted her for being "Chinese" as she rode a city bus to her Brooklyn home, police sources said."

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This is horrible. I can't believe that a girl got jumped on the school bus for being
Filipino. And it's all well and good that they're finding the students who jumped her, but what I want to know is: What are they doing about the bus driver? The adult who was there didn't lift a finger to stop the students from beating this girl up because of her race, and then when the girl left the bus, had the nerve to tell her to go to a priest. As if she'd done something wrong by being born into her ethnicity. My god. That woman's the one they need to be pressing charges on, more than the other students, anyway. It's so sad that even in 2007, there are still hate crimes being committed.