QUOTE (Umidori @ Apr 23 2014, 02:47 AM)
But hey, being an advocate of Representative government, I guess Churchill was fine with a rough approximation of reality that suited his own personal agenda rather than the actual thing.
/off topic
~Umi
Well, to be fair to Churchill (not that one must be, of course), a genuinely representative government (which is in fact often known as a "representative democracy") was far less technologically feasible in his day, when telegraphs were still in routine use, and telephones were largely connected by hand. In our day, though, there is precious little reason that it couldn't be done (though many reasons that it
won't be done, few of them good!).
His comment also made more sense when one was looking at democracy versus monarchy and aristocracy, with the change to a "proper" democracy being fairly recent. Sixty or more years on, it seems like many of the perceived advantages of democracy over that system have been eroded.
That said, a more direct democracy, genuinely representative of public opinion, might well be a very mixed bag, as watch polls of the public's opinions tends to suggest - government would likely be more open, less warlike, less imperialistic and perhaps fairer to enfranchised citizens. At the same time, it would frequently be wildly and dangerously irrational on scientific or rational matters (as dumb and corrupt as politicians can be on this, they are not as dumb as Joe Public), and would make some spectacularly bad knee-jerk decisions, all of which "seemed like a good idea at the time".
It would also be less vulnerable to traditional lobbying, wherein business (or other wealthy) interests target a few key individuals and crypto-bribe (or just straight-up bully) them into helping their agenda, but far more vulnerable to the less-traditional-in-the-US method of using private control of the press to strongly influence public opinion. It would also mean that the press' love of running with a nonsense-story because it sells papers (or click-thrus or whatever) would be a vastly larger problem. A good example of this is in the UK at the moment, where, thanks almost entirely to the press basically obsessing about and telling lies about immigration for the better part of a decade, immigration, which is in reality, a non-issue, has become an absolutely huge issue. For no good reason at all other than it winds people up and most of the British public is a bit racist (not viciously, but...). The whole thing basically started as an issue to distract people from the whole "Whoa bankers screwed the economy!" thing.
Of course, one upside is that if people were voting more directly, they might feel more responsible for their results of their action, so when people are being hurt because of a dumb law, they can't say "Well I voted for that party but just for tax reasons!", they'll have to own up to it. So perhaps we'd see fewer vicious/evil laws.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaanway, getting way off-topic but your point was interesting!
As for pushing the button, well, was it ever established if VITAS is connected to magic returning? I know HMHVV (or however it's spelled!) is. So anyone pushing the button now, rather than slowing things down is essentially murdering
billions of people, pretty much at random. Which makes it more or less impossible to morally justify. Indeed, you'd be history's greatest monster by a pretty large margin! That's not even accounting for all the wars and so on.
So personally, assuming I know this stuff, I would push the slow-down button, not the speed up button. If I didn't know the consequences, I'd probably leave well enough alone, and just attempt to publicize what I knew, particularly about the artifact.