I'll preface this with my bias. I'm a bit of an anti-authoritarian moral reductionist, an anarchist of the unhyphenated sort. I believe that you can express a

I'll preface this with my bias. I'm a bit of an anti-authoritarian moral reductionist, an anarchist of the unhyphenated sort. I believe that you can express all moral statements that convey meaning solely in terms of the imposition of will, that the imposition of will for any reason other than to resist a greater imposition is the only immoral act, and that any framework which attempts to ascribe moral meaning to reality must either reduce to this or invalidates itself by contradiction. I find the post you're responding to be an amusingly phrased and more reasonable interpretation of democracy than most, and will with the remainder of my post attempt a proportionate defense from the imposition of will you intend in representing your self-interest as moral truth. > can you see how that is not the same thing at all? I believe this phrasing is unnecessarily dismissive of the viewpoint you are responding to. A micro-imposition, if you will. > [Democracy] also opened up the field for consent on all sides Democracy does not transform or create consent, consent existed in the same form prior to democracy. If you do not resist an imposition of will, you consent. There is one point of the original post I will disagree with: the vote does not impose on the governed in democracy, the people with "swords/bullets" who find that vote to be an agreeable imposition and resistance to be a disagreeable imposition do. Voting may often be an adequate proxy for the use of violence to coerce, but it is nothing other than a statement of one's willingness to use violence or see violence be used for coercion towards a specific end. > Democracies with minority protections (aka one of the ways we differentiate democracy from mob rule) make true win-wins possible I disagree. Democracy enables aspects of reality to be classified by criteria which do not convey moral meaning, and for those classifications to become parameters in the function that allocates violence for the purpose of coercion. The closest approximation of a "true win-win" within the constraints dictated by reality is when all parties minimize their imposition. Voting in regards to which arbitrary classification of reality shall be imposed on in the interest of some other arbitrary classification is a statement of violent intent which is so far detached from moral meaning it amounts to a random walk in that metric space. > There is not way to wage a war in such a way that all sides win, a way to fight in a way where noone gets hurt. It is not possible to exist in such a way that all things which do exist or could possibly exist win. Physical reality is inherently adversarial: conservation of energy suggests that a quanta of energy released by one process can only and will only be consumed by exactly one process. One may strive to maximize the entropy of reality, to allow the largest number of contending states to be occupied, and this is moral. Democracy, again, moves with no discernible direction in relation to moral meaning. > The first sentence describes the removal of democracy. The second claims that this is evidence for democracy not always being good for the people. Compared to ruling by force, yes, democracy is inherently good for the people Democracy is exactly ruling by force. Resist the imposition of the will of the majority, or something which is fraudulently misrepresented as the will of the majority unopposed, and you will be coerced by violence. The only thing that is inherently good for the people is for every individual person to minimize their imposition to that which is necessary to survive and seek truth, and only then if that does not require a greater imposition than they would resist. Anything more is an immoral act of self-service.