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Well, right now there's a odd vogue to think that a healthy democracy does things like ban political parties (currently an active debate regarding the AfD in Ge

Well, right now there's a odd vogue to think that a healthy democracy does things like ban political parties (currently an active debate regarding the AfD in Germany), or embrace indigenous apartheid movements (NZ, Australia), or to cede sovereignty to unaccountable transnational elites that promise to protect you from the ravages of political misinformation (the EU as a whole.) I don't think these notions will stand the test of time, but we'll see.

cycomanic 3y ago
For those of people who are wondering about the "indigenous apartheid", the poster is talking about co-governance, i.e. giving certain "typically local", economic and political powers to indigenous organizations. This has become recently become on-vogue to call "apartheid" in right circles. I guess the people opposing co-governance are not very fond of following contracts, because at least in NZ the founding document/contract the treaty of Waitangi guaranteed a co-governance (and arguably the commonwealth for a long time ignored those obligations).
- aydyn 3y ago
  Its not “co-governance”. Its privileging a demographic with greater power under the law based on skin color. Thats apartheid.
  - andrei_says_ 3y ago
    Is t the case that this “privilege” is an attempt to balance oppression and / or the existing privileges of others?
    - huggingmouth 3y ago
      Two wrongs do not make right. It's fascinating that we live in an age where this needs to be said out loud.
      - EliRivers 3y ago
        "Two wrongs do not make right." That's quite a strong statement to just present as an axiom without even any evidence or premises leading to it. Can you justify this statement, or do we have to just accept it as an axiom?
        aydyn 3y ago
        lol nice trolling
        carlosjobim 3y ago
        It's one of the most common divide in philosophy and morals, and I think nobody is capable of changing their opinion, because this one question is fundamental in how a person sees the world. Should you punish the children for what the fathers did wrong? Because whoever wronged the people are dead since long. The people who were wronged are dead since long. Do the children inherit the sins or the victimhood of their ancestors? Some say yes. They say to the youth: "Look how bad these people were treated long before you were born! Now it's your responsibility to settle the score and pay back." Others say no. They say that nobody can be held responsible for the wrongs that other people have done, even if those people were their ancestors, or are considered their ancestors by modern measurements. The question is if somebody is to be seen as an individual and judged as an individual, or seen as a member of some tribe and judged as a member of that tribe. It's worth to mention that things are usually seen in another way. What we're seeing right now is the end of christian morality, where a victim is held in high regard. This is not common through history or through the world. Once these kind of victim-revering morals don't exist anymore, the attitude will instead be: "Your ancestors were slaves, therefore you deserve to be a slave" or "My ancestors conquered your ancestors, therefore we have the right to treat you as we wish" and such awful things.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - ben_w 3y ago
        Sometimes a single wrong can be its own right. The word "harem" is derived from Arabic/Persian for "forbidden"; it was a place where men were not allowed, and thus a considered a safe space for the women within. Little Boy turned actual little boys into carbon ash imprints on the concrete where they sat and ate lunch; it probably saved many more children from burning up in a sustained campaign of carpet-bombings. To create a new power group to balance rights? It's unstable, but it also leads to things like "women, as well as men, get to vote" and "workers can organise their labour via trade unions, just as owners can organise their capital via shareholdings and loans".
    - aydyn 3y ago
      so what? I dont want to be part of a society with built in racist laws.
  - lostlogin 3y ago
    When they were actively blocked from governance for a long time and effectively blocked for most the rest, is it really apartheid to have Māori represent their views? It’s also what was guaranteed in our founding document - depending on how you read it. That dubious piece of legal work managed to botch the key term ‘governance’ such that interpretation is required and it may, or may not guarantee Māori governance of the country. Comparing NZ to apartheid South Africa is darkly funny. The oppression I face is underwhelming. https://nzhistory.govt.nz/politics/treaty/treaty-faqs#WhatdoestheTreatysay https://nzhistory.govt.nz/politics/treaty/treaty-faqs#Whatdo...
  - skissane 3y ago
    > Its privileging a demographic with greater power under the law based on skin color. Thats apartheid It literally speaking isn’t based on skin colour. In Australia (I think the situation in NZ is similar?) indigenous status is based on descent, identification, and acceptance by the community. Unlike the “blood quantum laws” which apply for Native Americans in the US, there is no minimum percentage of indigenous ancestry required. So you have people, the majority of whose ancestors are European, and who look physically indistinguishable from other European-descended Australians, but who have some indigenous ancestry, who choose to identify with that ancestry, and whose identification is accepted by a recognised indigenous community - they are legally indigenous. An indigenous person can have any skin colour, and due to trends in intermarriage and indigenous identification (which is optional), the distribution of skin colours is changing over time.
    - agentgumshoe 3y ago
      Which makes it a little odd to separate out 'indigenous' as needing a separate legal or advisory entity doesn't it? What is the position of the 1% indigenous? It is referring to a culture contextualised by skin colour. It's all signalling. In Australia there are support and administrative bodies at all level of government interacting with aboriginal communities (often failing for different reasons, mostly budget). A 'Voice' (which is still vaguely defined as having influence but no power) does not magically create harmony between the past and future, it only continues the divide. We are stuck in a world of trying to simultaneously give back the 'old past' while carrying on as-is otherwise. That is impossible. We must work towards a common, prosperous and respectful future for all inhabitants that recognises and admits the things we can't undo or change. We are trying to have it both ways, and it will leave the divides strongly in place.
      - freejazz 3y ago
        >Which makes it a little odd to separate out 'indigenous' as needing a separate legal or advisory entity doesn't it? What is the position of the 1% indigenous? It is referring to a culture contextualised by skin colour. Weird how you seem to recognize what culture is, yet in the same sentence it means nothing more than sharing a skin tone
- refurb 3y ago
  I think they mean apartheid in the sense of South Africa - separate and unequal. Look at the NZ approach of taking race into consideration when prioritizing medical care. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/auckland-surgeons-must-now-consider-ethnicity-in-prioritising-patients-for-operations-some-are-not-happy/ https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/auckland-surgeons-must-now-con...
  - foldr 3y ago
    Comparisons with apartheid South Africa are not to be made lightly. Anyone who makes the comparison in this case is either extremely ignorant or simply trying to stir up pointless controversy. Any serious argument against the policy described in the linked article can only be weakened by such an absurd comparison.
    - zx8080 3y ago
      Does it basically mean "don't compare because it's different"?
      - foldr 3y ago
        It's like a schoolboy calling their teacher a Nazi for putting them on detention. There's an abstract point of comparison (authoritarian behavior), but the differences in scale, severity and underling motivation are so vast that the comparison is absurd. If someone seriously wants to argue against this particular form of affirmative action – and knows what South African Apartheid actually was – then they don't make this comparison. (Similarly, if you think a teacher is being too authoritarian with their students, you won't make your case any more convincing by making comparisons with crazed dictators.)
    - fallingknife 3y ago
      You could have saved a lot of words there by just writing "your opinion isn't valid because I say so"
      - foldr 3y ago
- hatefulmoron 3y ago
  If many people believe that co-governance is undemocratic, what does "following contracts" have to do with anything? Frankly, why should New Zealand be forever bound by the treaty? Parliament is supreme, if they didn't want to follow the treaty they don't have to.
  - throw0101b 3y ago
    > Parliament is supreme, if they didn't want to follow the treaty they don't have to. If they don't want to follow a treaty they should rescind it. Until then it is the law of the land and it should be followed. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_New_Zealand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_New_Zealand
    - hatefulmoron 3y ago
      > If they don't want to follow a treaty they should rescind it. Until then it is the law of the land and it should be followed. Or not, as parliament is free to decide. I think my previous statement on parliamentary supremacy stands for itself. If you have something specific to talk about from that Wikipedia page, it's best that you spell it out for us.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    How many steps between that and the Māori having a casus belli to engage in open warfare? Stuff like this may have a certain level of "might makes right" (similar question for Hawaii, although there it's obvious who would win in a fight) but not always (Irish independence at close to the peak of the British Empire, the Cod Wars, that the US didn't keep all of Mexico after the war, just Texas, Arizona, California, etc.)
    - barry-cotter 3y ago
      > How many steps between that and the Māori having a casus belli to engage in open warfare? Of course they have a casus belli. They’d lose if there was a war though so there’s that.
    - 3y ago
- voldacar 3y ago
  You're just doing Russell conjugation.
  - vixen99 3y ago
    I'd not come across this term before. Odd (for me) to see a special term used to describe something that I see in almost any story reported across a range of publications on any one day.
zirgs 3y ago
I see no problems with banning Nazi and Communist parties after what they did to my country.
- swayvil 3y ago
  What if the billionaires behind those parties, who funded those "nazi" or "communist" parties, funded a party and gave it a different name. Would it be ok then?
  - zirgs 3y ago
    The ideologies themselves have been banned. You can call those parties whatever you want - you will still have to talk to the alphabet boys.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- Mountain_Skies 3y ago
  Who gets to decide who is a Nazi or a Communist? Maybe one day you'll be declared a Nazi for disagreeing with something the government in power decrees or even because some social group disapproves of your lifestyle. Definitions are powerful and recently, quite flexible to achieve desired goals of those who make themselves the arbiters of definition.
  - zirgs 3y ago
    The Communists invaded and occupied my country for 45 years. The Nazis invaded and slaughtered almost all of our Jews. We know very well who is a Nazi or a Communist. We don't want another Holocaust or Gulag camps here ever again. I'm fine with restricting some speech. It's a small price to pay.
  - digging 3y ago
    It's actually not very difficult to distinguish who nazis are. I see all these arguments waxing poetic about how dangerous it is to... I don't know, give anyone power? As if we haven't had these debates before. We have concrete examples of policies and behaviors that are harmful on fascist/Communist (big C is important) levels. We can compare someone's rhetoric and actions to those of people who have done the kinds of harm we want to prevent. We can use reasoning to parse their arguments instead of reacting emotionally. People do this every single day. If it's really your concern that we can't define what dangerous ideologies are, then educate yourself, because we can.
ben_w 3y ago
The EU isn't unaccountable, unlike most free trade agreements it's also got a parliament that citizens can vote for. NAFTA or TTIP — unless I've fallen for the exact same propaganda that led to Brexit — would have been better examples.
- 6LLvveMx2koXfwn 3y ago
  Whatever it's benefits the EU is a terrible example of democracy, to the extent that I would say it is not directly representative of 'the people'.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    It's a trade agreement; the democratic part is unusual, one of the rare (IIRC unique) examples where one has a mechanism for self-updating by the people of the counties in that agreement rather than by the government of whichever country happens to be biggest and most able to throw its weight around. You're welcome to not like the details of the democratic mechanism within the EU; ironically this is in part because some of the member state governments thought that making the EU more democratic would usurp the sovereignty of the member states.
    - 6LLvveMx2koXfwn 3y ago
      I suspect it's more to do with the EU being an economic enterprise, democracy was and is an afterthought.
    - barry-cotter 3y ago
      Whatever the EU was it is not now a trade agreement. Trade agreements don’t have delegations to the UN. https://www.eeas.europa.eu/delegations/un-new-york_en?s=63 https://www.eeas.europa.eu/delegations/un-new-york_en?s=63
      - ben_w 3y ago
        As does: • The Vatican (a "country" on paper; but seriously?) • The Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta (not to be confused with the country of Malta; this lot have no territory) • The Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States • The African Development Bank • The Andean Community (another free trade area) • Both the Commonwealth of Independent States (former soviet bloc) and the Commonwealth of Nations (former British Empire) • The International Olympic Committee … The list of organisations sending delegations is pretty big, even just limiting to the ones important enough to get into Wikipedia; you can probably find a whole bunch more of small ones.
kazen44 3y ago
> right now there's a odd vogue to think that a healthy democracy does things like ban political parties (currently an active debate regarding the AfD in Germany) this is based on the idea of streitbare demokratie[0]. Which basically states that the foundation of the state (bundestag, bundesregerung and courts) has the right AND duty to defend itself against parties/elements who wish to abolish the "freiheitlich-demokratische Grundordnung" (freedom/democratic foundation/order). This concept actually is worked out in various different laws in the Grundgesetz. It solves the problem of the paradox of intolerance quiet well in my opinion, and considering germany's history it is a very, very good system to have. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_democracy

cycomanic 3y ago

For those of people who are wondering about the "indigenous apartheid", the poster is talking about co-governance, i.e. giving certain "typically local", economic and political powers to indigenous organizations. This has become recently become on-vogue to call "apartheid" in right circles. I guess the people opposing co-governance are not very fond of following contracts, because at least in NZ the founding document/contract the treaty of Waitangi guaranteed a co-governance (and arguably the commonwealth for a long time ignored those obligations).

aydyn 3y ago
Its not “co-governance”. Its privileging a demographic with greater power under the law based on skin color. Thats apartheid.
- andrei_says_ 3y ago
  Is t the case that this “privilege” is an attempt to balance oppression and / or the existing privileges of others?
  - huggingmouth 3y ago
    Two wrongs do not make right. It's fascinating that we live in an age where this needs to be said out loud.
    - EliRivers 3y ago
      "Two wrongs do not make right." That's quite a strong statement to just present as an axiom without even any evidence or premises leading to it. Can you justify this statement, or do we have to just accept it as an axiom?
      - aydyn 3y ago
        lol nice trolling
      - carlosjobim 3y ago
        It's one of the most common divide in philosophy and morals, and I think nobody is capable of changing their opinion, because this one question is fundamental in how a person sees the world. Should you punish the children for what the fathers did wrong? Because whoever wronged the people are dead since long. The people who were wronged are dead since long. Do the children inherit the sins or the victimhood of their ancestors? Some say yes. They say to the youth: "Look how bad these people were treated long before you were born! Now it's your responsibility to settle the score and pay back." Others say no. They say that nobody can be held responsible for the wrongs that other people have done, even if those people were their ancestors, or are considered their ancestors by modern measurements. The question is if somebody is to be seen as an individual and judged as an individual, or seen as a member of some tribe and judged as a member of that tribe. It's worth to mention that things are usually seen in another way. What we're seeing right now is the end of christian morality, where a victim is held in high regard. This is not common through history or through the world. Once these kind of victim-revering morals don't exist anymore, the attitude will instead be: "Your ancestors were slaves, therefore you deserve to be a slave" or "My ancestors conquered your ancestors, therefore we have the right to treat you as we wish" and such awful things.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - ben_w 3y ago
      Sometimes a single wrong can be its own right. The word "harem" is derived from Arabic/Persian for "forbidden"; it was a place where men were not allowed, and thus a considered a safe space for the women within. Little Boy turned actual little boys into carbon ash imprints on the concrete where they sat and ate lunch; it probably saved many more children from burning up in a sustained campaign of carpet-bombings. To create a new power group to balance rights? It's unstable, but it also leads to things like "women, as well as men, get to vote" and "workers can organise their labour via trade unions, just as owners can organise their capital via shareholdings and loans".
  - aydyn 3y ago
    so what? I dont want to be part of a society with built in racist laws.
- lostlogin 3y ago
  When they were actively blocked from governance for a long time and effectively blocked for most the rest, is it really apartheid to have Māori represent their views? It’s also what was guaranteed in our founding document - depending on how you read it. That dubious piece of legal work managed to botch the key term ‘governance’ such that interpretation is required and it may, or may not guarantee Māori governance of the country. Comparing NZ to apartheid South Africa is darkly funny. The oppression I face is underwhelming. https://nzhistory.govt.nz/politics/treaty/treaty-faqs#WhatdoestheTreatysay https://nzhistory.govt.nz/politics/treaty/treaty-faqs#Whatdo...
- skissane 3y ago
  > Its privileging a demographic with greater power under the law based on skin color. Thats apartheid It literally speaking isn’t based on skin colour. In Australia (I think the situation in NZ is similar?) indigenous status is based on descent, identification, and acceptance by the community. Unlike the “blood quantum laws” which apply for Native Americans in the US, there is no minimum percentage of indigenous ancestry required. So you have people, the majority of whose ancestors are European, and who look physically indistinguishable from other European-descended Australians, but who have some indigenous ancestry, who choose to identify with that ancestry, and whose identification is accepted by a recognised indigenous community - they are legally indigenous. An indigenous person can have any skin colour, and due to trends in intermarriage and indigenous identification (which is optional), the distribution of skin colours is changing over time.
  - agentgumshoe 3y ago
    Which makes it a little odd to separate out 'indigenous' as needing a separate legal or advisory entity doesn't it? What is the position of the 1% indigenous? It is referring to a culture contextualised by skin colour. It's all signalling. In Australia there are support and administrative bodies at all level of government interacting with aboriginal communities (often failing for different reasons, mostly budget). A 'Voice' (which is still vaguely defined as having influence but no power) does not magically create harmony between the past and future, it only continues the divide. We are stuck in a world of trying to simultaneously give back the 'old past' while carrying on as-is otherwise. That is impossible. We must work towards a common, prosperous and respectful future for all inhabitants that recognises and admits the things we can't undo or change. We are trying to have it both ways, and it will leave the divides strongly in place.
    - freejazz 3y ago
      >Which makes it a little odd to separate out 'indigenous' as needing a separate legal or advisory entity doesn't it? What is the position of the 1% indigenous? It is referring to a culture contextualised by skin colour. Weird how you seem to recognize what culture is, yet in the same sentence it means nothing more than sharing a skin tone
refurb 3y ago
I think they mean apartheid in the sense of South Africa - separate and unequal. Look at the NZ approach of taking race into consideration when prioritizing medical care. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/auckland-surgeons-must-now-consider-ethnicity-in-prioritising-patients-for-operations-some-are-not-happy/ https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/auckland-surgeons-must-now-con...
- foldr 3y ago
  Comparisons with apartheid South Africa are not to be made lightly. Anyone who makes the comparison in this case is either extremely ignorant or simply trying to stir up pointless controversy. Any serious argument against the policy described in the linked article can only be weakened by such an absurd comparison.
  - zx8080 3y ago
    Does it basically mean "don't compare because it's different"?
    - foldr 3y ago
      It's like a schoolboy calling their teacher a Nazi for putting them on detention. There's an abstract point of comparison (authoritarian behavior), but the differences in scale, severity and underling motivation are so vast that the comparison is absurd. If someone seriously wants to argue against this particular form of affirmative action – and knows what South African Apartheid actually was – then they don't make this comparison. (Similarly, if you think a teacher is being too authoritarian with their students, you won't make your case any more convincing by making comparisons with crazed dictators.)
  - fallingknife 3y ago
    You could have saved a lot of words there by just writing "your opinion isn't valid because I say so"
    - foldr 3y ago
hatefulmoron 3y ago
If many people believe that co-governance is undemocratic, what does "following contracts" have to do with anything? Frankly, why should New Zealand be forever bound by the treaty? Parliament is supreme, if they didn't want to follow the treaty they don't have to.
- throw0101b 3y ago
  > Parliament is supreme, if they didn't want to follow the treaty they don't have to. If they don't want to follow a treaty they should rescind it. Until then it is the law of the land and it should be followed. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_New_Zealand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_New_Zealand
  - hatefulmoron 3y ago
    > If they don't want to follow a treaty they should rescind it. Until then it is the law of the land and it should be followed. Or not, as parliament is free to decide. I think my previous statement on parliamentary supremacy stands for itself. If you have something specific to talk about from that Wikipedia page, it's best that you spell it out for us.
- ben_w 3y ago
  How many steps between that and the Māori having a casus belli to engage in open warfare? Stuff like this may have a certain level of "might makes right" (similar question for Hawaii, although there it's obvious who would win in a fight) but not always (Irish independence at close to the peak of the British Empire, the Cod Wars, that the US didn't keep all of Mexico after the war, just Texas, Arizona, California, etc.)
  - barry-cotter 3y ago
    > How many steps between that and the Māori having a casus belli to engage in open warfare? Of course they have a casus belli. They’d lose if there was a war though so there’s that.
  - 3y ago
voldacar 3y ago
You're just doing Russell conjugation.
- vixen99 3y ago
  I'd not come across this term before. Odd (for me) to see a special term used to describe something that I see in almost any story reported across a range of publications on any one day.

zirgs 3y ago

I see no problems with banning Nazi and Communist parties after what they did to my country.

swayvil 3y ago
What if the billionaires behind those parties, who funded those "nazi" or "communist" parties, funded a party and gave it a different name. Would it be ok then?
- zirgs 3y ago
  The ideologies themselves have been banned. You can call those parties whatever you want - you will still have to talk to the alphabet boys.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
Mountain_Skies 3y ago
Who gets to decide who is a Nazi or a Communist? Maybe one day you'll be declared a Nazi for disagreeing with something the government in power decrees or even because some social group disapproves of your lifestyle. Definitions are powerful and recently, quite flexible to achieve desired goals of those who make themselves the arbiters of definition.
- zirgs 3y ago
  The Communists invaded and occupied my country for 45 years. The Nazis invaded and slaughtered almost all of our Jews. We know very well who is a Nazi or a Communist. We don't want another Holocaust or Gulag camps here ever again. I'm fine with restricting some speech. It's a small price to pay.
- digging 3y ago
  It's actually not very difficult to distinguish who nazis are. I see all these arguments waxing poetic about how dangerous it is to... I don't know, give anyone power? As if we haven't had these debates before. We have concrete examples of policies and behaviors that are harmful on fascist/Communist (big C is important) levels. We can compare someone's rhetoric and actions to those of people who have done the kinds of harm we want to prevent. We can use reasoning to parse their arguments instead of reacting emotionally. People do this every single day. If it's really your concern that we can't define what dangerous ideologies are, then educate yourself, because we can.

ben_w 3y ago

The EU isn't unaccountable, unlike most free trade agreements it's also got a parliament that citizens can vote for. NAFTA or TTIP — unless I've fallen for the exact same propaganda that led to Brexit — would have been better examples.

6LLvveMx2koXfwn 3y ago
Whatever it's benefits the EU is a terrible example of democracy, to the extent that I would say it is not directly representative of 'the people'.
- ben_w 3y ago
  It's a trade agreement; the democratic part is unusual, one of the rare (IIRC unique) examples where one has a mechanism for self-updating by the people of the counties in that agreement rather than by the government of whichever country happens to be biggest and most able to throw its weight around. You're welcome to not like the details of the democratic mechanism within the EU; ironically this is in part because some of the member state governments thought that making the EU more democratic would usurp the sovereignty of the member states.
  - 6LLvveMx2koXfwn 3y ago
    I suspect it's more to do with the EU being an economic enterprise, democracy was and is an afterthought.
  - barry-cotter 3y ago
    Whatever the EU was it is not now a trade agreement. Trade agreements don’t have delegations to the UN. https://www.eeas.europa.eu/delegations/un-new-york_en?s=63 https://www.eeas.europa.eu/delegations/un-new-york_en?s=63
    - ben_w 3y ago
      As does: • The Vatican (a "country" on paper; but seriously?) • The Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta (not to be confused with the country of Malta; this lot have no territory) • The Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States • The African Development Bank • The Andean Community (another free trade area) • Both the Commonwealth of Independent States (former soviet bloc) and the Commonwealth of Nations (former British Empire) • The International Olympic Committee … The list of organisations sending delegations is pretty big, even just limiting to the ones important enough to get into Wikipedia; you can probably find a whole bunch more of small ones.

kazen44 3y ago

> right now there's a odd vogue to think that a healthy democracy does things like ban political parties (currently an active debate regarding the AfD in Germany) this is based on the idea of streitbare demokratie[0]. Which basically states that the foundation of the state (bundestag, bundesregerung and courts) has the right AND duty to defend itself against parties/elements who wish to abolish the "freiheitlich-demokratische Grundordnung" (freedom/democratic foundation/order). This concept actually is worked out in various different laws in the Grundgesetz. It solves the problem of the paradox of intolerance quiet well in my opinion, and considering germany's history it is a very, very good system to have. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_democracy