Congratulations, SD, on a very fine thread. What this means is that, for anyone who has the energy and motivation, the hardcore haters on ATS can now be found with a little creative search engine use. By their keywords ye shall know them...

I applaud you: this is right and necessary. The entire ATS community should know just who these rogues are. Not their real identities, of course. Just their member names.

Your threads always have in them an artistic use of the medium of the internet message board. What a fantastic thing: the internet is creating its own literary and art forms.

Might be a thread subject there... for BTS...

...sorry. I'm rambling. A fine and dandy piece of work, Chien de quantomist. You've already got more stars than a Hollywood sidewalk, but you get a few more from me anyway. And a flag.

Gosh, this is becoming a political-science thread. A really interesting one, too.

I don't know about midbrains and forebrains, Destroyer, but I think melatonin's right when he points out that the democratic systems of our age select for mediocrity. The wider the franchise is opened and the more weight is given to public participation in civic life, the greater the incentive, as well as the opportunity, for men and women of blinding mediocrity to rise to the top.

Universal franchise plus a free media equals the rule of the mob.

I suspect this is a problem with democracy that even kosher political scientists haven't properly begun to grapple with. Democracy wasn't designed to function like this. In its original form it was a system of rule by the landed elite of Athens - the wealthiest, most powerful, best-educated men of that society. It was the same in Rome, for as long as the Roman republic lasted. In both countries, there was a property qualification for voting, just as there was in most modern democracies until the late nineteenth century. In modern democracies, there were generally other restrictions, too: of sex, religion, race and so on.

Still, the elite held on for a few more generations... a momentum effect, I guess, because people had, since the beginning of time, been accustomed to look to their social superiors for instruction and example.

But with the universalization of media as well as the franchise (fully established by the beginning of the Second World War), the days of elite rule were numbered. Pace all the elite-conspiracy theorists who may read this, the truth is very different from their smoke-filled-room fantasies. It's the people themselves who decide policy nowadays, not just through their votes but through their opinions - polled, obtained through media tracking data and often freely aired on the media themselves in news footage, on talk TV and phone-in shows. This is what rule of the people, by the people really is. What it turns out to be.

Still, would we want it any other way? Many good folk here on ATS are forever complaining that their government doesn't listen to them, that it acts arbitrarily, even dictatorially without regard to the wishes (sometimes they're more like whims) of the people, that they feel oppressed and spied upon. And these people are living, mark you, in some of the freest countries of the world - board membership is almost entirely North American, British, European and Australian: I'm one of the few exceptions.

The question is, what are the alternatives?

You can't restrict the franchise in any way. The public wouldn't stand for it.

And censorship is obviously undesirable.

So, obviously, are rigged elections.

Anyone want to go back to the bad old days, where leaders weren't chosen by the people, but were selected by heredity, emplaced by their predecessors or simply raped, pillaged and slaughtered their way to the top?

No, thought not.

So I guess this overmediated democracy is still the best political system we have - at least the best we can think of at this time. But as the world fills up with people and becomes more globalized, the problem we are discussing is going to get bigger.

Yet we may console ourselves that a degree of incompetence in leadership is no bad thing. You want a super-competent, charismatic leader? Try Vladimir Putin? How would you Americans like a Putin in the White House?

* * *

Aside to weedwhacker: despite a lifelong and always enjoyable association with it, I'm not actually a member of the honourable minority. You may chance upon me among the tents, but never by the flagpole. What to do? Can't fight nature.