Simple Utah Mormon Politics

Credit: Forbes Magazine I'm glad I attended the BYU Technology Forum today, which featured Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. I once thought Facebook was another time-wasting gizmo like MySpace. Boy, was I wrong. Reflecting the insights of its founder, Facebook allows the passionate to share their passion in productive ways to bring people together in common causes in order to make a better world.

Recently Utah Senator Mike Lee stated that the federal government should not issue flood relief funding, because it is not a Constitutional responsibility of the federal government. Yet he also asked that constituents in his state receive federal flood relief. This was met by howls of laughter from Mike Lee detractors. It was the kind of laughter that is not mixed with much thought. Mike Lee's two statements can easily be reconciled.

With the diabolical sneer of the Ayatollah Khomeini etched upon our minds, it's hard for us to imagine that Iran is democratic in the least. With George W. Bush having branded Iran as a charter member of the Axis of Evil, it's probably unpopular to think about such a possibility. But Iran is relatively democratic. When you compare recent presidential elections, you might be surprised to discover that, in its own way, Iran is as democratic as the United States. That's really not saying much about the United States, though. Prior to the 2005 Iranian presidential vote even occurring, George W. Bush had this to say about Iran. Today, Iran is ruled by men who suppress liberty at home and spread terror across the world. Power is in the hands of an unelected few who have retained power through an electoral process that ignores the basic requirements of democracy. If you substitute "United States" for "Iran" and "shock and awe" for "terrorism...

America is the most powerful nation in the world. The problem is that we act like other nations in history who have achieved this status—and those nations are long gone. Our emotional capital with the other nations of the world is at an all-time low and declining. Our economic standing is not far ahead. The American hegemon, rather than showing respect the rest of the nations of the world, has for decades dictated to the rest of the world how the game should be played. With the United States’ moral and economic capital at an all-time low, it seems that our “piper” is warming up his pipe and preparing to call in our loans. Shortly after September 11, 2001, the French newspaper Le Monde carried the front page banner headline, “We are All Americans”. George W. Bush and the United States received at that time a great deal of emotional capital from the nations. It didn’t take long, though, for us to squander nearly all of it. Instead of realizing that America is a nation among equal...

What happens when Democracy goes wild? Here's a story that ought to make you think. Recently a web site posted the instructions for how to decrypt content on HD DVDs. Quickly it received thousands of approval "Digg"s on digg.com. The "intellectual property rights owners" asked digg to remove the story, as it was an infringement on their property--which, by the way, it is. The result? A plethora of other unique source stories began to pop up around the internet, which got Digg'ed, and which included the same decryption secrets. Representative democracy (or a 'democratic republic') works rather well. Democracies often do, too. But sometimes the herd mentality of a democracy causes society to go haywire. I think digg.com is cool. Digg is not to be blamed in the least. But this story clearly illustrates that if we were to allow everything to be decided in a pure democracy, life would turn into rule by the whims of the mob. As much as I despise...