For myself I have been trying to reduce the campaign to snappy slogans (

Actually, I wish we actually got the theory of wands stuff, and Harry being annoyed because the blackthorn wand doesn’t work as well for him. But that might have been a bit too much innuendo.

How is an immutable rule democratic if a small intellectual cadre put it in place over the majority, then?

As I’ve said before, the solution is constitutional safeguards. If we have an immutable section of the constitution which says “No law or action of government shall prevent the free pursuit of autonomous agents’ own conceptions of the good unless the pursuit of those conceptions harms unwilling others.”, we have a problem as solved as it can be within the constraints of the real world (I am not getting into an argument with you about “real world”.)

One cannot answer all political questions with “harm principle”, so an intervening power should stick to those that unambiguously can until it can install a liberal democracy with a constitution which prevents the new, democratic government going beyond the harm principle.

“My basis is that no power beyond a minimal interpretation of the harm principle can be wielded without being in the hands of the people.”

So as long as the people vote for it, they are allowed to oppress minorities? If so, you’re not being particularly liberal – and if you’re not being liberal, appealing to the harm principle seems rathr vacuous.

No current state quite lives up to this. But our current liberal representative democracies (the more proportional the better) are a good approximation, and provided political freedoms are present, can be transformed into this ideal without the need for revolution or foreign intervention. Saddam’s Iraq or Kim’s North Korea cannot be transformed without military action.

‘An undemocratic state is an illegitimate state is no state …’

You need to do some significant work in order to be able to assert this, because otherwise there are a myriad of reasons for holding the view that a reader could draw out.

So I assume that the power of a state has to be in the hands, somehow, of the people that live in it in order for that power to be legitimately exercised over them. It is very far from clear that representative democracy – what the West espouses and what is perhaps the only practical democratic system for anything bigger than a city-state – achieves anything like this. A government can have the capability to pass laws indiscriminately upon the populus with less than half of the popular vote. And alternative election systems have many problems of their own.

Justify your assertion if this is to work.

And this is what I, at least, tend to want at the polls.

Corollary is acceptable, obviously, I’m just messing about… What’s worse is how I now speak as I write Maths proofs, e.g. ‘note that’ has a much higher frequency in my speech than it used to.

You are not permitted to use the word Corollary when a) you can’t spell it (I spelt it wrong until very recently…) b) you don’t do proper Maths :P

J

All I can think of right now, sorry.