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No violence when one Castro passed power to the other nor when Maduro continued Chavez. Democracy means nothing. Republic means everything.
by sebastianconcpt 10y ago
No violence when one Castro passed power to the other nor when Maduro continued Chavez. Democracy means nothing. Republic means everything.
- vintermann 10y agoAnd was those genuine changes of government, you think? Or just a new face on the same old one? Anyway, that's one way Popper's definition is insufficient. Democracy is not just about whether a government can be replaced, but about how different the government we replace it with can actually be. Replacing a government isn't worth much if what you can replace it with is functionally identical in every way.
- sebastianconcpt 10y agoFor the screwed up constitution that Castro established it was perfectly genuine and legal. You have to remember that everything that was done in Nazi Germany was legal. Being legal or coming from the State is orthogonal (means nothing) to being moral.
- vintermann 10y agoI said nothing about legal or not. By genuine I meant just that - was it a genuine change of government, in the sense that policies changed in meaningful ways? If not, then I still call these countries non-democratic.
- toyg 10y agoNeither change was prompted by the citizenry, which really is the unstated core of Popper's definition (which has other problems, eh, but is a decent start).
- sebastianconcpt 10y agoAs start I prefer ~2000 years predecessors of Ancient Greece who invented The Republic to keep bread and circus at bay.