I’ve been thinking something similar lately about signal vs noise. Trump and right wingers are great with noise, not so good with signal.
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Same. 
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There was a levy vote in Nov where @spidercrab was sure it was going down in flames due to social media.
Is she wearing a watch around her neck?
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Yeah it looks like a cartier. Haven’t seen one of those since flava-flav
1 in 5 Americans are idiots
It’s more than that.
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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.)