"Democracy is Teetering"

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The definition of conspiracy theory is pretty clear. If you say you think there's a conspiracy, it's a conspiracy theory, what else? If you don't, then it's not. Are you? Of course there may be real conspiracies, so being a conspiracy theory doesn't make it wrong in itself. I personally am not interested in dismissing anything as "conspiracy theory". I need some better reasons to dismiss something (like understanding the math, what it says and what it doesn't say in the document linked by siLLy puPPy).

Other than that, the view on these things may be different from the position of people who have actively, within the system, done politics, and I know a few of them (even though personally I haven't done much more than peeking in from the outside a bit). Now my take on this is rather ambiguous thinking that the system is full of people with different motivations including personal narcissism, taking advantage, manipulation, but also personal values (if I agree with them or not) and the honest drive to achieve something or at least represent the voters. I don't think a conspiracy is needed to explain corruption and dysfunctionality, as these things pop up even on the most marginal occasions where people come together and have to negotiate something political. As I said before, it is totally clear that voting doesn't achieve much. Being voted for can achieve more and does so on occasion, but it also comes with lots of potential for being frustrated and corrupted. And of course some players will try their best to take advantage, and they will organise themselves, so there are for sure conspiracies to be found, except that I believe that there will be human political games all the way up, with alliances breaking up and regrouping, treason, disorganisation and failure, and new conspiracies against the conspirators, besides the odd success. 

As I wrote, for me democracy is a gradual thing, there is no "true ideal democracy" to be categorically distinguished from what we have. Even where democracy is organised at a harmless level where only very local decisions are made very directly by the people, you can already see all the human traits that make democracy such a mess (and in fact make all forms of governance a mess although when it just comes to being less messy, dictatorship may in fact be ahead of democracy unless the dictator themselves are messy, for which there are of course many examples).

So I'm fine with much criticism of Western democracy and for sure I'm not going to deny that some rich global players have far too much power. I also like the idea that direct voting on all kinds of thing such as in Switzerland would be nice, although the Swiss system in many respects shows all the signs of corruption that you find in other democracies. But I doubt that we will see a democracy that is democratic and nice enough for you to actually call it a democracy, not because some people behind the scenes wouldn't allow it (not denying that there may be some who'd like to stop it), also because people would quickly mess it up anyway. 

I guess we'll get by with whatever we have ... after all, as individuals we cannot change the system. Not by trying to educate people (because the system controls education and information),

Yeah well, I hear this all the time, and all the time, strangely, I hear people complain that they are not allowed to say what they are just saying.  

I haven't been censored by "the system" yet, and I do education (and I have some views that some don't like). But then maybe what I say is so useful for "the system" that it doesn't see any reason in stopping me, or maybe I'm just one of the controllers myself, who knows? 

Thanks for linking this. I have some respect for the person who wrote this. It is pretty well thought through. The sandpit mathematical equations give it away though. (It is entertaining to spot some more bizarrities here and there, but most of them are probably OK for doing the intended job.)