Pretty sure it’s been cited on here before, but George Carlin once said, “think about how stupid the average person is and consider that half of people are dumber than that”
It’s more likely that 4 of 5 Americans are idiots.
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Not clear that Carlin is correct there without more info imo. If the stupidity distribution is left skewed, it is very possible that most people are stupider then average.
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4/5 of americans believe a magical man in the sky created the earth and all the animals about 5000 years ago.
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Yes but I bet half are dumber than the median.
I’ll take the under cause I like to gamble.
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Remember that part of the liberal push for voting rights was strategic because GOP voters were considered reliable. As a liberal that maybe doesn’t reflect well on me, but updating beliefs with new information is a good thing.
https://twitter.com/RyanGirdusky/status/1757628585165082889?t=UpxxGLrrKlfdaf6nu15lKA&s=19
Even if you want to look at it as a purely strategic matter, I think R’s overall are probably better at drafting voting restrictions in a way that is biased towards their specific voting coalition (whatever it is). So instead of relying on Dems to execute a targeted strategy well, I’d rather just make it easy for everyone and let the chips fall where they may.
I’m not in favor of limiting voting, because it’s wrong.
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The responses in that thread are incredible.
“Hey, you conspiracy theory peddling weirdos are chasing away any sane R voter. You should probably stop doing that.”
“Yes, but have you considered that we are the last line of defense against deep state pedophiles looking to trans our kids and flood the country with MS13 fentanyl mules?”
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Suppose there is a state that has no mail-in voting. A Republican proposes a new law that makes mail-in voting an option only under the following circumstances:
- Voters over the age of 75
- Voters that are more than 4 miles from an early voting location
Analysis indicates that the cohort of people that this law applies to are likely to be 20 points more Republican than the average voter. You suspect that the motivation for the law is to advance a partisan advantage, although the Republican legislator denies it. He claims it because of access and mobility issues for these types of voters, and that it is worth the trade-off of the “known ballot security issues” associated with mail-in voting.
Do you want your local legislator to support this law on the sole basis that it makes voting more accessible to more people?
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Which of these comes closer to describing your attitude toward democracy?
- Democracy is a universal value that we should seek to maximize regardless of outcomes
- Democracy is valuable because it leads to better outcomes but we should abandon it if another system produces more good
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voters
The one thing that was universally believed everywhere from the invention of writing to woman’s suffrage was that most people should not have a say in how to run a polity. “Those fucking rubes” is the whole basis of Plato’s Republic.
I wish we could screen for informed voters but 1) we’d see the return of Jim Crow literacy tests immediately, 2) denying ignorant people voting rights would alienate people from society and lead to significant friction and lower overall satisfaction, and 3) it’s probably good to regard voting as a basic right (but see, electoral college, Senate misappropriation of population, districting, etc).
I’m a pragmatist, show me a system that doesn’t result in the occasional Hitler or Trump and I’m all ears, I’m just skeptical anything better than universal suffrage can be crafted from the crooked timber of humanity. (But if we ever get decent AI I think we should turn over the car keys.)
Pretty much every system tosses out a dictator type at least occasionally. The US has had a pretty long run good until recently. (And of course there could be better forms of representative democracy than the US system)
Monarchies and Communism more than democracies.
Our chihuahua is a tyrant.
We could really use a magic cheeseburger between now and November
I think the difference is Americans had stronger institutions in the past. We’ve had plenty of bad presidents, like Buchanan, Johnson, Hoover, and Nixon. Even John Adams passed a law criminalizing “seditious speech,” before it was later overturned.
But the framework in which they operated had strong enough guardrails to prevent really terrible outcomes. There’s still been plenty of pain.
What Trump has done, for all the world to see, and to the shock of lawbros everywhere, is to prove that you can strip all that away, and it’s all bullshit unless everyone buys in and maintains what America stands for.
At its core, America is about a group of people willing to live in a system where they write down the rules of the way they want to live. And anyone on the planet should be able to become an American if they agree to live by those rules too.
I still believe that. And I believe there’s enough Americans who think this way that Trump will lose in November.
…But if he wins, then I think all along it was a failed experiment that was never worth fighting for.
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They’re always bringing out their best and brightest.
Well, she is used to speaking with managers, so she probably picked a few things up along the way.
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American Democracy was worth fighting for in the event Trump wins. It will be worth fighting for in the event he wins again. We got him out once, we’ll get him again.
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Does the Senate even have to entertain this?