Well, I've voted. That's that chore out of the way until the third Saturday in October 2012.
For the last few weeks, it's been impossible to get into the district centre without running the gauntlet of pollies. They're everywhere.
In Canberra, we have state or local government, just the ACT government. The British* Hare-Clark system is used. The ACT is divided into three multi-member electorates. Candidates are grouped by party, but in a random order that varies from ballot to ballot. You have to select at least seven candidates. It's unlikely that any party will win a majority, but the bookies pay on the party that claims the chief ministership.
Now I have to write an essay for the Army on "The Fallacy of Democratic Triumphalism".
* Except that British people have never heard of it.
For the last few weeks, it's been impossible to get into the district centre without running the gauntlet of pollies. They're everywhere.
In Canberra, we have state or local government, just the ACT government. The British* Hare-Clark system is used. The ACT is divided into three multi-member electorates. Candidates are grouped by party, but in a random order that varies from ballot to ballot. You have to select at least seven candidates. It's unlikely that any party will win a majority, but the bookies pay on the party that claims the chief ministership.
Now I have to write an essay for the Army on "The Fallacy of Democratic Triumphalism".
* Except that British people have never heard of it.
Comments
rs
Democracy, and its twin of market capitalism, alone can instantaneously create lethal armies out of civilians, equip them with horrific engines of war, imbue them with a near-messianic zeal within a set time and place to exterminate what they understand as evil, have them follow to their deaths the most ruthless of men, and then melt anonymously back into the culture that produced them. It is democracies, which in the right circumstances, can be imbued with the soul of battle, and thus turn the horror of killing to a higher purpose of saving lives and freeing the enslaved.
Edited at 2008-10-22 20:38 (UTC)