Link: https://gizmodo.com/using-grok-to-bomb-iran-and-the-twisted-dream-of-causing-death-without-killing-2000773399

The Trump administration's haphazard "AI-first"approach to warfare has already killed countless innocents and is setting the stage for a world where no human is ever to blame for the deaths.

It may be a world where no one is ever held accountable for the deaths, but many will know who is responsible and to blame for them. The question is: when will those decent people rise up to do something about the atrocities that surround us? And can they do it through peaceful, democratic action? Or is it too late for that?

Democratic action is impossible in a state that was built from the ground up to be as non-democratic as possible while having the trappings of democracy.

Certainly difficult but I'm not yet convinced impossible. The concerted will of the people can be powerful, regardless of the regime. Not that I'm optimistic. I think the will is weak and there are many worse decades to come.

The only question is what BBQ sauce goes best with a medium rare rack of trillionaire ribs.

PSA: do not eat the brain there is something poisonous about humans eating other humans brains.

You can't have democratic action without democracy pretty much by definition.

What will have to happen for the USA to have democratic action is to actually become a democracy at first. And THAT the people can force if they develop the will. Eventually. Some day. Probably long after I'm dead and turned to dust.

So what then is democracy?

Some equate democracy with election of representatives that form the government.

I think the definition in the American Heritage Dictionary is more fundamental and relevant to the question of democratic action:

1. Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives.
2. A political or social unit that has such a government.
3. The common people, considered as the primary source of political power.
4. Majority rule.
5. The principles of social equality and respect for the individual within a community.

The United States and several other countries recently provide ample evidence that election of representatives does not ensure democracy in this latter sense. Far from it.

All the countries were I have lived have had reasonably free elections of representatives. But they have also all had a legal bar to holding those representatives liable for failure to fulfill any promise or commitment made prior to their election and in recent decades the representatives are so beholden to financial interests that they almost never do what they promised in their election campaigns or what the vast majority of their electorate actually want. Rather, they do what their financial supporters (to put it generously) require of them. Thus, I have enjoyed the form of so-called democracy (election of representatives) but not the essence of democracy (the supremacy of the will of the people).

What might democratic action be? I would argue that it is action that at least promotes and at best achieves the will of the people. Such action is possible regardless of whether there are elected representatives or whether they do what they promised. In fact, even in countries with elected representatives, the elections are a very small part of the overall process of government and the expression of the public will. Social media, recently, is a much more powerful expression of the will of the people, for example. Campaigns to contact representatives between elections have also, at times, been very influential.

Whether the USA is a democracy, I would argue, is not a binary issue nor a prerequisite to democratic action. Being democratic is a matter of degree. Democratic action is possible even if the political system remains far from being ideally or even reasonably democratic. Further, that democratic action is essential to the process of becoming a democracy: democratic action precedes becoming a democracy rather than follows it.

But I agree that true democracy is impossible in the USA or any other country, before you and I are both long gone.

The USA has facilities in its electoral system that are explicitly designed to be anti-democratic. The electoral college, for example. Political party primaries/caucuses. (Political parties in general.) The bizarre way that the Senate has two representatives from each state no matter what the relative populations. (Numbers I hear are that 25 states, and thus 50, or half of the, Senate seats are held by 15% of the population.) Supreme justices appointed by the ruling party and serving for life. Campaign financing laws that favour corruption.

And that's dealing with the system as it is designed. Just the formalisms, in short. I'm not even addressing the anti-democratic actions taken by people who suppress votes with voter ID laws, playing games with where voting stations are, having brownshirts out in force to "monitor" voting, etc. Or even procedural judo like filibusters. Or the absurdly high bar set for constitutional reform making even popular reforms almost impossible to introduce; a minority in effect holding the majority hostage.

The USA has never been a democracy in any meaningful sense and this was by explicit design.

I agree with you on all that. Canada shares many of the same faults. Real power for the people is a long, long way off and a very steep uphill battle.

Yup.

Of course as soon as we discover a way for the people's voice to matter, they'll make it illegal or something.