Ben D » Sun Jul 21, 2013 10:30 pm wrote:barracuda » Mon Jul 22, 2013 11:21 am wrote:.
seemslikeadream wrote:would you clarify that comment? Would that be socks as in sock puppets?
Yeah.
Jerky wrote:Do you have proof of this assertion that sock-puppets are rigging the vote?
Do you have any that they aren't?
Seems to me that since you are making the claim, the onus is on you to put up...
I guess I thought that the reason he followed that up with this...
Or are you just behaving poorly because the vote isn't going the way you'd like?
False dicotomy. I am saying the poll is illegitimate, meaningless, and subverts the forum. I don't care if Canadian_watcher comes back or not, frankly, because I know she'll just act up again, and probably end up banned.
...was that he grasped that while being annoyingly flip might have its benefits, clarity isn't necessarily one of them if you don't explain that you're not literally saying that the voting is overrun by socks but rather that polling an issue without doing all the usual fairness-and-merit-type safeguard stuff doesn't mean much and isn't inherently fair. Or even likely to be.
So I was under the impression that he wasn't making the claim.
I could be wrong about that.
But I'm sure that he can't spell "dichotomy." And I don't agree with everything he's saying.
However, fwiw, I'd say he couldn't be more right that there's not actually anything intrinsically legitimate about people organizing a vote and then voting, when it's really that bare-bones..
The reason that the popular vote is regarded as a hallmark of legitimacy in an established democracy is that when that's what it's a part of, it comes fully equipped with legitimizing democratic features, such as notifying people of the vote; taking some steps to ensure that everyone has more or less the same equal access to both the polls and the necessary information as everyone else; establishing some kind of debate-ish or campaign-like means for people to challenge the merits of each option on the same terms as one another, etc..
But that's not what it is in it's natural and unadorned state. Someone has to make it legitimately democratic first.
...
Not that democracy and legitimacy don't both have their disadvantages. I'm just elaborating on what I took to be his point.