Californiaand the initiative Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words - 1

Californiaand the initiative - Essay Example Moreover, this era advocated for scientific approaches to decision making as well as medical and engineering solutions. During this period, major reforms were carried out in public education, finance, insurance, medicine, industry, railroads, churches, local government, and many other areas. In order for the people to achieve their objective, various processes were taken into consideration, which gave the need for direct democracy. Direct democracy is a form of democracy that allows people to vote on certain policies directly without engaging their representatives. This process entails passing decisions on various subjects mainly on executive decisions, and formulating new laws directly without consulting the Congress. There are two forms of democracy known as  participatory democracy or  deliberative democracy. California is one of the first states to implement and use direct democracy. However, many countries in the world use representative democracy whereby they are represented by the Congress or the House of Commons. In direct democracy, it does not replace but instead, it complements the Congress form of democracy. It only allows the popular and most important decision as to be decided by the public through processes such as the referendum. However, the Congress, government, and local administration make most of the other decisions. Moreover, direct democracy gives independence to the judiciary and th e executive arms of the government. It is based on the realistic option that the people are the best suited to handle the situations affecting them. It I s based on delegation and not direct representation. In this case, delegates are elected to make decisions on certain subject matter and cannot change previous decisions made by an assembly of the people. However, the delegates themselves can be immediately recalled by their electorate

Cultural Relativism Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 2

Cultural Relativism - Essay Example the word itself in layman’s dialect means all cultures are equal and no culture is above another, and we should tolerate the differences that make up our cultures. Today’s cultures are engaging in closer interactions that results in ethnocentrism, which is the negative attitude towards a different culture and cultural relativism, which is attributed to bringing about positive association with different cultures. As a way of acclimatizing to the rapidly changing societal world, cultural relativism has proved to be the rather a proficient doctrine. However, it was brought to the public limelight as a solution to the Nazi holocaust aftermath where therapy proved unreliable. Nazism took form as another cultural practice and the victims had to practice cultural relativism (Nkeonye, 1994). That approach among many others has proved that cultural relativism fails in moral theory scrutiny. Cultural practices like slavery and genocide have no moral theory grounds to be accepted among the ideals and ideas of cultural relativism. The major problems of cultural relativism are between two cultures; modern and western culture. The modern cultures, be it in religion or government, is abusing the notions of cultural relativism to use social unrest for their benefit simply because it will be understood as a cultural practice when it is clearly immorality. This is a problem of cultural relativism in many ways according to whichever perspective you may prefer. Societal moral standards are being violated and are excused under the notion of cultural relativism. Nkeonye (1994) points out clearly cases such as the media, using the cultural acceptance notion to make pornography acceptable to our children. For instance, today every production obviously violates moral standards. This is a problem simply for the reason that the western cultures are misusing cultural relativism notions to advance the beneficial agenda of a few; thus utterly violating everything. Research indicates