The saying is "A few bad apples spoil the barrel", meaning "be vigilant about bad apples and get rid of them ASAP." I'm baffled and frustrated by the tendency to use "a few bad apples" as if the saying were "a few bad apples are no big deal, get rid of them if you happen to notice."
I actually don't think reasoning from vague analogy and folk wisdom is all that great an idea, but reasoning from the reverse is probably worse.
Feel plenty free to make the case that we should tolerate some level of misconduct - I might agree. But please don't refer to those involved as "a few bad apples" while you do it.
Moved to a house with a few apple trees last spring and.. yeah. You have to pull those out quick or you'll be bringing the farmer next door wheelbarrowfulls of soft apples for animal feed :-(
You're overthinking my point. I don't care about the folk wisdom of bad apples.
I was just using it as a way of expressing the issue at the centre of aiming to have a zero tolerance society.
Not tolerating misconduct will always lead to ever increasing intrusion into our lives and people that choose not to take part where they can will automatically be viewed with suspicion for it because the ignorant assumption is only people with something to hide would do that.
I wasn't addressing your point. I was addressing your wording.
It's picking a nit - I acknowledged that in the very first sentence of my response.
Argue for what you want to argue for - I probably agree. Just don't use that phrase that way. Or do - just know that you will be annoying me (and apparently others - my comment got more upvotes than it deserved) and distracting at least some of your audience from your argument.
And our society seems to have picked the latter because it sounds good when it comes out of the mouth of a politician. This is probably a weakness of democracy.
It's probably a weakness of democracy, sure, but it's not as though "total financial freedom and anonymity" are common properties of non-democratic states.
Most of the problems in democracies seem to exist, possibly magnified, in the alternatives.
IIUC, the "problem with democracy" being pointed to is not the outcome in this particular case, but the general tendency for us to make decisions that sound good without thinking too deeply.
In a democracy, we're not the ones who are making the decisions. The decisions are, by and large, out of our control. We decide who makes the decision, but the same decisions tend to get made on the majority of issues.
So is the problem that our decider selection process is flawed and puts up deciders who don't think deeply, or is it (more likely) that whoever you put into that position is likely to come up with the same answers, because they tend to answer important questions, and then to provide a different justification because it sells better?
> In a democracy, we're not the ones who are making the decisions.
In a representative democracy, as opposed to a direct democracy, yes. In much of the US, we have a bit of both, in practice.
But even in the case of representative democracy, as long as deciders are judged based on (proposed or actual) actions, our decisions about the deciders will be based on what we think about those actions. To whatever degree it's a problem that we don't think too deeply about things, it will be a problem in a representative democracy by virtue of deciders thinking deeply about what people generally will think more than what will actually give the outcomes people generally want (where those differ - which is at least "sometimes" by the nature of our premise).
The saying is "A few bad apples spoil the barrel", meaning "be vigilant about bad apples and get rid of them ASAP." I'm baffled and frustrated by the tendency to use "a few bad apples" as if the saying were "a few bad apples are no big deal, get rid of them if you happen to notice."
I actually don't think reasoning from vague analogy and folk wisdom is all that great an idea, but reasoning from the reverse is probably worse.
Feel plenty free to make the case that we should tolerate some level of misconduct - I might agree. But please don't refer to those involved as "a few bad apples" while you do it.