What I’m saying is that you don’t need to say it at all. I could be trying to argue my side by saying that anyone who opposes my opinions is a stooge of the 1%, wants a corrupt government, and won’t be happy until Congress is made up of only self-funded billionaires and cretins who have sold their souls to the highest bidder – which is NOT something that I think about you, I’m just throwing this out as an example – but I don’t think that calling someone names, or telling them what they really believe, has any merits at all.
It’s just downright insulting for anyone to be told what values they hold. And it’s pretty clear to me that the only reason such things are said is to discredit the person, rather than the argument. It’s the exact definition of poisoning the well.
I’m telling you that your views reflect certain values. If you don’t hold those values, perhaps you should change your views to match your real values.
How about this? “How can you reconcile your presumed support for democracy with your stated views that demonstrate contempt for the voters and their right and responsibility for making choices?” Is that better?
It’s perfectly legitimate to say that a position one holds is inconsistent with larger values.
Translated into plain English, you wish to assert that my position is embarrassing ignorant and downright scary, astoundingly uninformed, and outrageously wrong.
You’re welcome. You are certainly entitled to your beliefs but the alleged wrongness and crackpottery of my views is belied by the simple fact that the remedies I advocate to promote an informed public are implemented one way or another in every advanced democracy in the world. Whereas the position you hold is the exclusive domain, not even of the US, but the American right alone.
I saw some voters recently being unable to answer apparently difficult questions like how many states there are, how many senators from each state, or who the vice president is – never mind how many justices on the Supreme Court, how they tend to rule, or naming major decisions. And these people vote.
Not all voters are like that, of course. And maybe the majority really does enjoy getting poorer while the rich get richer, having Congress cater almost exclusively to an economic stratum to which they will never belong, or being the only advanced country in the world without universal health care. Maybe what we need is a systematic study. Yet every one I’ve cited has been dismissed by my opponents here as “stupid” or “confused”. Here’s another one:
It’s a comparative study of media systems, public knowledge, and democracy [PDF] in the European Journal of Communication in 2009. Pay attention to the percentage of respondents from the US, UK, Finland, and Denmark who were able to provide correct answers to questions about international hard news (Table 2), international and domestic hard and soft news (Table 3), or their exposure to national television news (Table 6). The comparisons are, shall we say, instructive.
Note that I didn’t claim voters are “stupid”, or if it sounds that way that’s not my intent. My assertion is that voters are uninformed to a degree not conducive to a functional democracy that supports majority interests. The distinction is important – “stupid” is just dismissive, “uninformed” implies causation.
Your argument is facile and wrong and reflects two misconceptions. The first is analogous to the false belief in economics that free markets result from, and are even synonymous with, absence of regulation. This is a truism in a level playing field of roughly equal competitors. It’s manifestly untrue in markets which are inordinately influenced by large, dominant players who can game the marketplace, monopolize resources, and drive out competitors. It’s no different in the marketplace of ideas and speech.
The second misconception is what I find to be the uniquely American phenomenon of distrust of government, which seems to have become more extreme in recent years as government becomes more dysfunctional than ever in a kind of vicious circle, where it’s perceived as largely in the service of a powerful establishment yet no one seems to be able to figure out why. Go back to the free markets analogy. When there are overwhelmingly dominant players there’s no natural level playing field. You can have the government, representing the people, try to restore some balance through regulation, or you can have the Koch brothers and their friends run the place. You have to pick one. Because if you don’t the Kochs and their pals run the place by default. The Kochs will spend nearly a billion dollars this year to say you should let them, because … freedom.
Voters are doing it wrong - if only you could dispense with this whole democracy thing and force people to vote the correct way. Maybe you could engage in a widespread campaign to convince people in the US they should be more like other countries!
No, it’s not. The ACLU is most definitely not representative of the American right.
You are arguing that voters can be misled into supporting decisions that are anti-democratic, by those with conflicts of interest and greater than average degrees of influence. But you seem to think it’s impossible that YOU and your position fall into this category. The First Amendment is designed specifically to protect us from know-it-alls who think they should be allowed to decide what political opinions are acceptable to voice or to listen to.
You said far more than that. What you said showed contempt for the voters and their ability to inform themselves. But no matter - who are you to say the voters are “uninformed?” Because they don’t agree with you?
I don’t distrust the government, I distrust people like you who might attain government power.
The idea that we need to “level the playing field” of speech is dangerous nonsense. The voters don’t need you to help them think. They are capable of listening to speech, and deciding what to believe or not to believe, or what to listen to further or ignore. They can decide whether hearing something many times makes it more true or not. They can decide that they don’t have enough information about something and go seek it out. They don’t need or want you rationing what they hear. And the fact that you think you are entitled to manipulate what voters see and hear so that you can get a “better” result from elections goes back to the arrogant contempt for voters’ intelligence that is more than just saying they are “uninformed.”
No, the Kochs don’t, and won’t, “run the place.” The voters do. They have a right to decide that they prefer the Kochs’ opinions rather than yours, for any reason, including the simple fact that they’ve heard the Kochs more than you. You have no right to declare that the voters are making the “wrong” choice because you think they are “uninformed.”
And the fact that you are somehow smarter than the rest of us - and somehow able to resist the enchantment of the Kochs and somehow be more informed than the masses, who you say are unable to inform themselves and are at the mercy of the Kochs’ brainwashing, is the icing on the cake. Why are you special? Why are you better than other voters?
If you think voters don’t have information you want them to have, go out and use your own speech to tell them.
It is not “free speech absolutism” to believe that citizens should be able to make and air a video criticizing Hillary Clinton in the day before the potential election of Hillary Clinton. That’s not some obscure stretch of the First Amendment. It’s the whole point of the First Amendment.
Exactly! Some people go around pretending like this is about some kind of harmless exception (and the amateur high-school lawyers use the tired “fire in a crowded theatre” example). This couldn’t be more of a stab at the heart of the First Amendment. It’s an attempt to stop a film from being widely seen because it expressing an opinion about a political candidate.
I do have contempt for the voters and their ability to inform themselves. We, the People, are very easily swayed by advertising. The correlation between campaign spending and electoral victory is terribly significant. Elections are bought and sold.
And this is the place where I get stuck, because I agree with you. I can’t think of any sensible solution to campaign finance, because it would intrude too much on people’s right to express their opinions.
Also because it would be too easy to get around. It would mean suspicious examination of all movies! (“See, Captain America and Hulk are obviously representations of Trump and Cruz. It’s electoral campaigning!”) The thing is someone could make a movie where the characters are representations of candidates! You have both that problem and a problem with false positives.
Censorship of any kind is not the right answer. But that doesn’t deny the fact that there really is a very, very significant problem.
It’s not, actually. Virtually every attempt that political scientists have made to show correlation has failed to show it.
That doesn’t mean it’s not there. For one, the measurements are subjective because it depends on what money you include, and what you control for. Most studies look at campaign donations in a vacuum, and they often try to control for other measurements of candidate success (in part to rule out the hypothesis that the success causes the money rather than vice versa). For another, it could be that competitive candidates are necessarily good fundraisers, and so they sort of balance out.
But not you - you’re smarter than that, right? Otherwise you wouldn’t know this. Or do you have contempt for yourself and your ability to inform yourself?
Rubbish.
Correlation isn’t causation. Popular candidates get more money because they are popular. They aren’t popular because of their money.
And even if they are, that’s the choice of the voters. Who are you to say they are wrong and need to be manipulated because you don’t like how they vote?
If you have such contempt for people and their intelligence, why do you care about the right to express opinions?
Also, you have to exclude all the candidates who are in non-competitive races (popular incumbents and candidates in districts and states with a large majority of voters in one party). They may get loads of money even if unopposed - obviously their money didn’t cause them to win. Also, many candidates try to raise as much money as they can just to scare of potential challengers. That’s not about voters following money. Those cases seriously skew the “money wins elections” argument.
Nope. I didn’t say that, and your conclusion is incorrect. Also badly reasoned. Also a tad impolite.
That is often true. It does not explain all elections where the preponderance of the money correlates to electoral victory. It may explain some of those cases, but not all. Elections are bought and sold.
Try running two identical campaigns, one with advertising and one without. Get back to me on the results.
Simply because of their having been swayed by advertising. It shows that they aren’t voting out of principles, but on the basis of what ads they’ve heard the most of.
Fallacious reasoning. I have contempt for, let’s say, professional basketball. I also will defend people’s rights to see games if they want, and I will demand that the league guarantee fair play.
How about you spend a little less time telling me what I believe, and a little more time trying to explain what it is you believe, and why. It’s very tiresome of you to be trying (inaccurately) to tell me what it is I think. At very least, can you try to get it right once in a while?
My conclusion is sound. But if it’s not polite, let me say this - you dont’ respect democracy. Better?
Your views are incompatible with the basic premise of democracy, which is trust in the voters’ ability to think for themselves and make decisions about voting free of manipulation of the information they have access to to make that decision.
At best you can say you don’t know. You certainly cannot claim a cause.
But if you want to say elections are bought and sold, okay - who the hell are you to say that’s wrong? The voters are buying, or selling, or whatever. They can do that if they want to. If they want to vote for whoever spends the most money, it is not your place to say they are wrong.
Did I say ads don’t work? Of course they do. So what? It’s just speech. That’s what campaigns do, they speak on behalf of the candidate. What else would they do?
So what?
Who are you to say that’s wrong?
Who are you to say you are smarter than the voters and you know why they vote and how they should vote?
And who are you to say you are somehow above it all? You see the same ads. If the voters are all brainwashed by them, but you aren’t, what made you so special?
Cool. Sounds good. Now just stop trying to walk in and tell others they are fans of certain teams for the wrong reasons and that you have the right to change the rules so those teams don’t win as often, and sit down and enjoy the game.
You don’t seem to understand that your views contradict the values you claim to be championing, that’s why. You claim to be fixing democracy, but your cure is worse than the disease.
Churchill said it best: it’s the worst way to govern…except for all the other ways.
That’s obviously falsifiable: we all know people who don’t make up their own minds, but who ask a friend or family member or minister and vote that way. It’s never been the premise of democracy that people have the ability to think for themselves and make decisions free of manipulation.
If that actually worked, there wouldn’t be any political advertising, as it wouldn’t work. Political advertising does work. It sways opinions, significantly enough to alter the outcome of many elections.
It’s “wrong” in an ideal moral sense. In practice, shrug. We are the People that we are. I can’t replace The People with a better class of voters. We go to elections with the people we have, not the people we want. Sometimes, large majorities vote stupidly. That’s the nature of voting, and human nature.
I have every right to say, “Well, they were wrong in this case.” That’s part of free speech, which, along with democracy, most of us believe in.
You’re right in that making bad choices is at the heart of democratic freedom. If some outside force existed to compel people to vote wisely, then it wouldn’t be “democracy” any more, but a variant form of autocracy.
Note, in my comments on campaign funding, I have not embraced or endorsed limits on advertising. I don’t like advertising, the same way I don’t like Republicans. It doesn’t mean I would ban advertising or disenfranchise Republicans.
Then we’re in agreement. That’s what I came in here saying.
I am smarter than many voters, probably smarter than the average. You are also. I get to say these things because I believe them, and because there’s no rule against saying them. You get to say what you believe, too. Those are good things, not bad.
I didn’t claim to be immune from the blandishments of advertising. I will claim to be more resistant than many, perhaps most, other voters.
Who’s gonna censor me? You seemed to be opposed to the censorship inherent in campaign advertising limits, but, here, you’re telling me I’m not allowed to express my opinions. Which way does it go?
I actually agree that campaign advertising limitations would be worse than the disease. You blunder in thinking that I espouse them. It is not “my cure.” I’m against it.
I don’t like the Citizens United decision, but I have to support it. I believe it was, horrible as it may be, the right decision under the constitution.
Read what I say more carefully before accusing me of holding particular views, most especially those I don’t truly hold.
I was recently listening to a right-wing hate radio show – the Brett Winterble show – and the host was arguing that corporations, being legally “people,” should have the right to vote.
He may have been joking, but it was definitely what he was arguing for.
He also argued that small business owners should get “additional votes.”
I’m gonna take it on faith that this does not reflect modern conservative thinking.
But that’s the POINT. They are still making up their minds! They just choose to do it by asking someone else.
The point is that it is THEIR RIGHT to choose any way they want.
It is in our democracy, as evidenced by the First Amendment.
But political advertising isn’t just brainwashing that tells people what to do. It’s just speech. Ads contain information that voters may or may not want to consider in their decision to vote. If ads were the same as people asking others to make up their minds for them, that would apply to all speech!
So why are you different? How are you special and not stupid? And how can you tell?
But I could just declare that you are brainwashed by the lies you’ve heard and read about this issue and so your opinion doesn’t count. I could just as easily declare YOU to be part of the “stupid majority.” What’s stopping me?
Exactly. And that’s exactly what I’m trying to avoid, and you are trying to move closer to.
This thread is about limits on spending on speech. Do you support those? If not, we have much less to talk about.
Okay, but all that’s left is figuring out why you agree. But maybe that’s not worth it.
Yes, I’m smarter than the average voter. But I don’t believe that entitles me to call them all stupid and try to manipulate their democratic rights, etc.
I guess that’s progress. You’re stupid and gullible too, just not as stupid and gullible?
Of course you can express your opinions. I didn’t mean you can’t say things - I meant you just can’t enforce your opinions in law. Sorry not to be clear about that. If you’re only here to bash the idiot voters, I won’t stand in your way. I’ll enjoy it. Just don’t go trying to make laws that limit speech or other democratic rights.
Cool. I hope you understand the confusion, given the topic and nature of the thread.
Um, wait - you said you didn’t want to limit ads, but now you say you opposed a decision that said just that. Which is it?
Well, be more clear then. You just said you don’t support limits on ads, but then you say you didn’t agree with the Citizens United decision.
