Quality Democracy as Political Pleasantness

When politicians and government employees do not listen to reason, they do not respect democracy.

When politicians and government employees do not have empathy, they cannot understand democracy.

Without democracy, a society is not politically pleasant for anyone but the corrupt, the cruel, the greedy and the otherwise incompetent.

How do you define competence in relation to democracy?

Where is democratically pleasant journalism to be found, and how do you identify it? 

What is pleasant journalism in relation to democracy as political pleasantness?

You may be quite surprised to find information online about democracy as political pleasantness.

You may even find it quite surprising that you have access to that information.

But what will you do with the information?

What do you expect it to do for you?

How are you contributing to pleasant journalism?

How does pleasant journalism assist a suitably democratic practice of political pleasantness? 

Who is actually meant to be encouraged to act reasonably through presentations of appropriately democratic news? 

You may already be aware that democratically pleasant journalism breaks all the conventions of unpleasant journalism and provides its own.

Pleasant journalism is primarily presented to encourage other democratically pleasant political actions.

All democratically pleasant political actions are intended to address harmfulness and potential harmfulness as appropriately as possible.

Good decision-making practices never ignore the need for contextual understanding. 

Such an understanding informs proper policies.

How do you contribute to the development and implementation of such policies?

How do you know whether any policy is proper or not?

 

 

 

 

There are universal needs to acknowledge.

There are particular expectations to understand.

There are many different contexts to explore.

Throughout history, ignorant young people, and gullible older ones, have been duped into enabling aggressive agendas.

What, if anything, can be done to change the situation for the better?

How do you contribute to the prevention of aggression?

How does pleasant journalism contribute to the development and implementation of proper policies?

Genuine political pleasantness is only possible within a proper democracy. 

Working in the service of democracy, whether in a paid or unpaid capacity, is the basis of political pleasantness.

Perhaps you believe that serving democracy is unimportant, and possibly even boring, or impossible.

Perhaps you have never had a chance to learn about the work of servants of democracy.

Far too many people have had unjust disruptions to the continuity of pleasantness in their lives, even when serving democracy very well indeed.

But what are the rules of political pleasantness, and do you play by them, and work by them, and lead by them, and learn from them?

Proper policies do not ruin lives, destroy the reputations of innocent persons, cause unfair disruptions to reasonable plans, dismiss accountability as unnecessary, or reflect a disregard for dangers and disasters.

Perhaps you mainly participate in cultural practices associated with games and game-like behaviours.

Democracy, as political pleasantness, is not a game. 

Regardless of your current age, you may lack the maturity and life experiences to know what is appropriate to regard as a game and what is not.

Aggressive competitiveness is never appropriate.

All aggression causes harm.

All psychological harm has long-term, detrimental consequences.

How have your memories formed?

How have your memories informed your responses to the problems you have subsequently faced? 

Perhaps you lack the morality to play games fairly.

What are your thoughts about morality in relation to memories, democracies, journalism, pleasantness, policies, and being of service to good in the world?

When have journalists asked you such questions?

When have other people, including employers and politicians, asked you such questions?

You are currently experiencing pleasant journalism, of course.

As you will have noticed, there are no bylines here. 

This is a service to democracy.  It is not provided for self-promotional purposes.

Even so, the copyrights of all the compositions within Political Pleasantness are protected very seriously indeed by the copyright owner.

How do you distinguish between public ownership, private ownership, community ownership and the absence of ownership?

How do you assess legal systems in relation to democracy as political pleasantness?

How do you assess financial systems in relation to democracy as political pleasantness?

Authentically pleasant journalists are rarely to be found at media conferences and other hyped events.  They have much better things to do than give attention to already over-indulged attention-seekers. 

Authentically pleasant journalists also have much better things to do than indulging their own egos.  That is why they are not attention-seekers themselves.  

Authentically pleasant journalists contribute towards societal pleasantness by giving attention to societal problems.  They do so by defining the problems accurately and identifying the causes, and not by intruding into the personal experiences of sufferers.

How do you define your personal boundaries, and why?

How do you define your local boundaries, and why?

Perhaps your sense of community is global, or at least international.

Perhaps you have no sense of community at all.

Perhaps you have no sense of place.

Perhaps you have no sense of purpose. 

Perhaps you drift from place to place and year to year, or at least you did until quarantine restrictions happened.

How do you define local appropriateness, and how did you acquire that definition?

Perhaps you usually think of your experiences of a locality as temporary rather than permanent.

Perhaps you usually think of your interactions with people as temporary interludes rather than as part of your permanent memories, and their permanent memories.

Perhaps you lack a permanent sense of community and identity as a consequence.

How do you currently define the purpose and practice of local democracy, particularly in the form of political pleasantness?

How do you currently define the purpose and practice of quality, local journalism?

Perhaps you have always regarded yourself as a short-term visitor everywhere you have been. 

Perhaps you have no feeling of home anywhere.

Perhaps you think of yourself as a guest and/or temporary resident and/or temporary employee and never as a permanent resident or long-term community member or deeply committed custodian.

Although life itself is obviously temporary, there are permanent influences we may all have on the world, if we become conscious of those influences and carefully attempt to enhance them.

How will you be attempting to enhance democracy as political pleasantness from now on?

How will you be attempting to contribute to the local appropriateness of pleasantly democratic practices?

How deeply have you already attempted to learn about the world immediately around you, wherever you have been at a particular time?

How do you try to prevent all abuses of power?

How do you distinguish between an abusive activity and a non-abusive one?

How do you define corruption?

How do you know when someone is corrupt?

How do you know when someone is not corrupt?

Who should be involved in proper policy discussions if not the true servants of democracy?

True servants of democracy are not corrupt, of course.

How do you attempt to inform the public about corrupt practices, whether through journalism or other means?

How are you preserving and improving democracies as a way to prevent corruption?

Real leaders, both locally and globally, are actively preventing corruption with suitable consistency.

Anyone in a position of leadership and failing to prevent corruption is either incompetent or corrupt.

How have you most recently been expressing leadership, and why?

Perhaps you prefer to encourage corruption rather than overcome it, even if you have not yet acknowledged that reality.

How do you usually address incompatible practices?

Democracy does not thrive when corruption thrives.

Indeed, corruption kills democracies.

Preventing corruption should begin at the highest level of every society yet it rarely does.  That is why everyone must contribute, as necessary, to hold abusers of power to account.

How do you define an abuse of power?

What, then, is political pleasantness in practice?

Perhaps that is quite an easy question for you to answer now, or not as the case may be.

What is politics, for that matter?

What is pleasantness?

What is democracy?

Perhaps you regard the provision of proper policies to be someone else's responsibility and not your own.

Yet proper policies prevent corruption from arising.

Perhaps you are not yet able to provide answers to policy problems with any accuracy.

Perhaps you feel policy problems are not your responsibility.

Through all the work conducted from this part of the Internet, the global public has been provided with many of the tools necessary for safely and simply preventing corruption and improving democracies in their local areas.

Any other necessary equipment will be found within themselves, if they look for it.

There should never be any tolerance of inappropriate behaviours.  If such behaviours are caused by health problems, those problems should be addressed immediately.

How do you know whether a behaviour is appropriate or otherwise?

When corruption is endemic and systemic, there is no suitable way to address it other than by informing the public about the causes.

And even though the public has a right to know the truth, it is important to acknowledge that most people would probably prefer to ignore the facts.  

Understanding why people prefer to ignore reality is especially important when seeking to improve the world.

Facts reflect the truth.

Reality is shaped by the truth.

While the standards required for non-corrupt practices are globally-applicable, impeccably secular and suitably democratic, the necessary actions are mainly local.

Even so, most people are probably exhausted.  Their lives have been made intolerable through experiences of corruption, inappropriate policies and official indifference to their suffering.  They probably feel powerless.  They may even be traumatised.

Yet without public awareness of the truth, no accountability will occur and corruption will continue with impunity.

Abuses of power are urgent policy problems to resolve.

Only then can urgent needs be met fairly.

But how is that to be achieved, and by whom?

How could you contribute better to the responsible distribution of locally necessary information?

How could you contribute better to the development and maintenance of quality, local journalism?

How could you contribute better to local patronage in support of interpersonal and societal pleasantness?

When have you withdrawn your patronage from a person, a practice, a business, a community, or a charity, and why?

How could you contribute better to the development of enlightened democracies, both locally and globally?

How could you contribute better to the reasonable application of appropriate local and global etiquette?

Perhaps your rights have often been disrespected.

Perhaps you disrespect the rights of other people on a daily basis.

Perhaps you are even an adversary of political pleasantness.

Or perhaps you are an advocate of, and even activist for, political pleasantness.

Advocacy attempts to promote and/or prevent through persuasive words and images.

Activism attempts to promote and/or prevent through actions as well as words and images.

How is your patronage a form of activism?

How could you contribute better to the appropriate composition, management and sharing of information, co-ordination and planning in order to prepare for the future wisely?

What have you been learning about nationality, citizenship and legal status, and how?

How could you contribute better to political reform processes, locally and globally?

How could you contribute better to the advancement of civility and democracy both locally and globally?

What do you already know about the connections between civility, integrity, quality democracies, and quality economies, and how do you know it?

You may be seeking a few enlightening references to support the improvement of your contributions to political pleasantness.

Perhaps those references will help you to improve the quality of your advocacy and activism.

What usually helps you to define meanings more clearly?

How do clear meanings help you to solve problems more effectively?

Defining words in mutually comprehensible ways makes the social examination of anything so much more pleasant and much less political.

Perhaps that statement will help to increase your production of accurate, suitably useful definitions.

What can be achieved, and thereby improved, through clear definitions and a few enlightening questions?

How have you defined a quality democracy?

How could you contribute to the improved supervision of persons in positions of societal responsibility?

Where do you usually locate quality information and how do you know that information is of quality?

How do you assess the usefulness of facts?

How do you distinguish between economic usefulness, political usefulness, aesthetic pleasantness and moral usefulness?

How do you distinguish between aesthetic pleasantness and political pleasantness?

How do you try to gain an accurate understanding of the minds of people, especially if you believe they are in possession of deluded views about economics, politics, aesthetics, morality, usefulness, uselessness, pleasantness and/or unpleasantness? 

How much kindness is expressed through your investments, and how do you know? 

How do you define a decision as an investment decision?

How does your patronage reflect your investments?

How does your philanthropy reflect your investments? 

What have you discovered about elegantly egalitarian approaches to political pleasantness through political philanthropy?

Far too many people have no idea what they are meant to be doing in their jobs, or in their lives more generally.  

When they are given a task to do by an employer, they receive no real guidance on why the task is necessary.

Similarly in education, students are often required to remember something with no real understanding of the potential, long-term usefulness of the information acquired.

The reasons for learning and doing are not necessary easy to understand, even with years of experience in the practices of learning and doing. 

How do you define political pleasantness when you are alone?

How do you define political pleasantness when you are with other people?

Many untrustworthy persons are associated with untrustworthy organisations.

How do you tell whether a person is trustworthy?

How do you tell whether an organisation contributes to quality relationships between people or disastrous ones?

Perhaps you believe political pleasantness requires money.

Perhaps you believe quality democracies require money.

But why is money required in any situation?

What is money, in your view?

What is the appropriate use of money, in your view?

What is the the inappropriate use of money, in your view?

How are you working to improve the world, and with what resources, and why?

To act in the service of a quality democracy often involves reshaping a culture from one of rudeness and ruthlessness to one of pleasantness.  That can only be achieved, of course, by being aware of the difference between interpersonal pleasantness and interpersonal unpleasantness.

Much misguided advocacy, in practice, involves rudeness, ruthlessness, deceptiveness, aggressive competitiveness and the abusive pursuit of money.

It is therefore incompatible with the advancement of a quality democracy.

There is never anything respectable about deception and aggression, regardless of whether those practices are expressed in public or private.

That is especially the case when they are expressed through perceived prestige.

All perceptions of prestige are associated with deception.

What do you know about interpersonal rudeness and interpersonal pleasantness?

What do you know about global rudeness and global pleasantness?

How have your decisions and actions shaped environments, lives and livelihoods?

How have the decisions and actions of other people, and other species, shaped your experiences of life?

What do you already know about working together to improve the world, and how do you know it?