Let me just also note that smart people are often wrong, and quite smug in their wrongness. Especially when they are in a large majority and those backward people who believe in a man in the sky disagree with them:
When Virginia passed a law requiring sterilization of the mentally ill after three generations, SCOTUS voted 8-1 to uphold. A conservative, Pierce Butler, was the lone dissent. Oliver Wendell Holmes, considered a giant by progressives today, snarked as if he had half a brain, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough. Justice Butler dissents.”
Aside from the fact that this is a complete non sequitur and does not address anything I previously said, it’s also a terribly poor example of any conceivable thing that you think you might proving.
First of all let’s understand a few things – this was in 1927, during an era when many – liberals and conservatives alike – considered eugenics a modern way of thinking about these kinds of problems. It was typical of the times and not an ideological issue. And Oliver Wendell Holmes isn’t regarded as a giant just by progressives; there’s a reason he is the most cited Supreme Court justice in history.
Secondly, if Pierce Butler was so brilliantly representative of enlightened conservative thought, how come all the other conservatives on the court all sided with the majority? In fact, Butler was one of the so-called “Four Horsemen” – conservative justices on the Court who strenously opposed the New Deal and any sort of welfare, social assistance, or business regulation – and all except Butler sided with Holmes and the majority.
Thirdly, the only reason Butler dissented was because of his religion – he was a devout Catholic – which is an absolutely terrible and downright dangerous and illogical reason to make a Supreme Court ruling. If he dissented against eugenics in a way that we would agree with today, he did it for entirely the wrong reasons – most religiously driven policy judgments are illogical and reflect blind dogma rather than sound reasoning: anti-abortion no matter what, anti-contraception, anti-gay, etc.
If these Trump morons revolt, it would be ok to kill them, so that part is good at least. The revolt, not so much.
And no, that’s not fucked up at all, there is nothing wrong with that line of thinking. Its like saying “I wish I could kill murderers” while simultaneously hoping there are no murders. IF there are murders, then getting rid of them would be a positive, just like if there is a revolt, at least we’d be able to speed up the natural process of these shitheads dying. Nature is taking its sweet fucking time. 150 years after the Civil War and their descendants are still threatening the fabric of America
That’s not necessarily an uninformed choice though; for legislative and judicial elections, sure, but for executive ones, you’re as much voting for the candidate themselves as you are the slate of appointees they’ll usher in as part of their reign. Cabinet posts, etc… are all important positions, and to some degree, they’re as important in aggregate as the President himself. Of course, the President or Governor is responsible for appointing them, but it’s almost a certainty that he’ll appoint from within his own party, and most of the time you have an idea of who might be appointed ahead of time.
So maybe voting for one candidate over the other on the strength of the party infrastructure and expected appointments isn’t as dumb as it sounds; (not coincidentally, that’s part of what makes Trump so scary; nobody has a damn clue who he might or might not appoint at this stage of the game).
But I do agree that people who don’t realize that the President’s Cabinet isn’t where he keeps his dishes and glasses, probably shouldn’t be voting in elections for President.
“You do your best, you try to serve the people, and then they just fuck you over…and you know why? Because they’re ignorant, and they’re dumb as shit! And that, ladies and gentlemen, is democracy!”
-President Selena Meyer, Veep
There is a lot of misconception that “democracy”, as our Founding Fathers designed it, is about selecting the “right” leader. It is more about creating checks and balances in the event the “wrong” leader is selected.
If your political philosophy is based on killing off “shitheads” who disagree with you, chances are it’s a pretty shitty philosophy.
Anyway, can anyone imagine being the one to deal with the PR fallout when someone is informed that they aren’t “smart” enough to have political say?
The PR fallout wouldn’t be much if it’s a rural gun-toting hillbilly who can barely read, but if it’s a young adult in a wheelchair with cerebral palsy, or an elderly retiree grandmother with reading glasses, or a minority single-mother with a GED in the inner city, that would be a PR nightmare.
In my post that you were responding to, I was talking about vetting candidates, not voters. If you aspire to be President, then you should be able to pass a Civics 101 class about what the Presidency is and how it interacts with the other branches of governments.
There is nothing that can be done about voters who think they are electing Santa Claus and expect Christmas to come after Election Day.
The central question of the book is tangential to this topic, but there’s some great discussion of various justifications for democratic rule, broadly defined. Legitimacy is one I find particularly convincing: less-democratic systems have trouble maintaining convincing claims to rule legitimately. I think smartypants-ocracy or whatever it’s called would have some real trouble there, too.
Nonetheless, I think adaher proved his point about how easy it is to be smug in your wrongness. Heck, “Quite smug in their wrongness” could serve as a motto for the modern conservative movement.
The thing that annoys me the second most about conservatives is how appallingly ignorant they are. Even about subjects they say they’re deeply concerned about. Right now on this board there’s a thread that was started to figure out America can get Japan to pay a share of the cost of stationing American troops in Japan. Some pretty extreme proposals are being made.
The irony is that the people worrying about this apparently don’t know that Japan is already paying the overwhelming majority of the cost of stationing American troops in Japan and has been all along. So these people are proposing radical solutions for a problem that has never existed. And the same principle applies to a lot of the other problems conservatives get themselves worked up over.
That leads me to the thing that annoys me the most about conservatives; they let themselves be led around like this. Somebody had to go through a mountain of Supreme Court records to find that little nugget of information about how Butler voted in Buck v Bell. That somebody had to know what the overall picture looked like. But they found one fact in the pile that, isolated from all the rest of the facts, made conservatives look good. And they took that one fact and they fed it like a puppy treat to their followers. And they told those followers they now knew everything they needed to know. And those followers believed they now knew everything they needed to know.
And when they find out the rest of the story, do you think those conservatives will go back and complain to the people who misled them? Do you think they’ll say “Next time could you tell me the whole story?” Nope, they’ll just wag their tails and ask for another treat. They keep believing the people who have lied to them over and over again.
Sure, but I’d argue that truly incompetent candidates are so vanishingly rare to not be worth actually vetting for. I mean, Trump is the only one in recent memory who seems to be truly unconcerned with how the government actually works; even W would have passed any reasonable vetting process.
Voters, on the other hand, can literally be anyone who can manage to negotiate the trivial hurdles to getting registered and actually voting, which only require something approaching basic literacy, much less how the government works or what various issues are.
Nope, I’m far from it. I would never pre-emptively kill them, I only speak of killing if they were to revolt. If these people to revolt like they did during the Civil War, then the correct thing would be to kill them. Some people here are simply too afraid to even raise the possibility, a stance which I feel empathetic towards but disagree. Any revolution is going to come from the conservative side, not the liberal one, because they are the ones who act as if its a great injustice if they don’t get 100% of what they want
I’d counter that excluding Trump would be worth it. It’s arguable that he’s already done a huge amount of damage even if he doesn’t get elected.
I might also suggest that if you consider how many political offices exist at the federal and state level, there may be a lot more true incompetence than you estimate. Individually they may not do a lot of damage, but when you have a Black Swan event like Trump, they provide fertile ground for dumb ideas.
