Meritocracy vs. Democracy

This is just a bunch of whining about a small issue. If you don't like it, vote with your feet.

Direct democracy doesn't work anyway, and neither does representative democracy. That's probably why Debian, which the article says best shows representative democracy, has very few users compared to other distros, and is consistently very very far behind on everything. "The people" are not able to make the best decisions for themselves, and democracy just turns into mob rule, with "leaders" just pandering for votes and saying anything to get elected. The best democracies, historically, have been those where a ruling class of people did the voting, and not just anyone. This includes revolutionary America, where only rich landowners were allowed to vote. Everything went downhill after suffrage was granted to everyone, including uneducated people.

Quoting:That's probably why Debian, which the article says best shows representative democracy, has very few users compared to other distros

Your metrics for that statement are where?

Quoting:This includes revolutionary America, where only rich landowners were allowed to vote. Everything went downhill after suffrage was granted to everyone, including uneducated people.

This logic can be used to prove or disprove anything. You shouldnt be allowed to vote without military service, as that proves that you are willing to defend the country with your life and thereby are best situated for helping guide the country having done so. OR you should not be allowed to vote if you have been in the military as it proves that you have violent tendencies and are therefor fundamentally incapable of guiding a polite and peaceful society.

If your going to try and shoot down someones logic, at the least have the decency to not use strawman arguments.

> Direct democracy doesn't work anyway, and neither does representative democracy.

Direct democracy has seldom been tried, mostly due to the difficulties of implemention among larger populations, so it's rather hard to justify blanket assertions about how well it works.

Representative democracy has worked about as well as any other system of government. Now, given the record of the competition, that's not saying much, but...

> That's probably why Debian, which the article says best shows representative democracy, has very few users compared to other distros

Care to offer some proof of that assertion?

If someone wants to claim Slackware doesn't have many users compared to other distro's, that's one thing (though even Slackware has far more users than most outsiders seem to think). But I'd be very hesitant to make that claim about Debian.

Quoting:That's probably why Debian, which the article says best shows representative democracy, has very few users compared to other distros, and is consistently very very far behind on everything.

Debian is the 4th most popular distribution (according to DistroWatch: http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major), and probably more than 50% of distributions -- including Ubuntu -- are based on Debian. Also, Ubuntu is based largely on Debian unstable, so Debian unstable is typically more up to date than Ubuntu is.

And I use Debian unstable, it is.