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by AdrianB1
2276 days ago
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The only thing I can respond to your lengthy comment is: politics as we have it now is rigged in the favor of populist "leaders" that do what people want them to do, not what is the right thing to do. With "one man, one vote" the lower 51% less educated and intelligent part of the voters will elect the politicians that play their tune, even if the other 49% that are more qualified will vote otherways. In a way, it is the dictatorship of the stupid (no intention to offend someone, just math and basic psychology). I found some of my father's school books from ~ 1960: that close after the war, it included lots of war-like information like how to use protective gear (not top NBC one, but how to improvise if needed), how to carry a stretcher, first aid, etc. Now people forgot about war, this is no longer in the school teachings and people lack self-preservation skills. If a country leader tells them to self-isolate, they will laugh and ignore until it gets serious and in hindsight they blame politicians. When you have no pandemic for 100 years you don't care about ventilators and ventilator contracts, you care about unemployment, taxes, football and the last iPhone models. History is always forgotten because regular Joe and Jane don't read history and Einstein has a single vote. |
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I mostly agree, but I would replace "populist leaders" with something like "the rich and powerful". If you think back to before Trump's election, can you remember anyone complaining about the system being rigged in favor of the rich and powerful?
> With "one man, one vote" the lower 51% less educated and intelligent part of the voters will elect the politicians that play their tune, even if the other 49% that are more qualified will vote otherways.
I agree a lot with this also. Where you and I likely differ quite substantially is in the designation of who belongs in the groups "less educated and intelligent part of the voters" or "more qualified". I consider concepts like intelligence and qualification to be highly dimensional, where most people seem to see it as uni-dimensional (here I must speculate, because ideas like this seem to be a rather sensitive subject for many people).
> In a way, it is the dictatorship of the stupid (no intention to offend someone, just math and basic psychology).
I would absolutely love to see the math behind this, are you referring to a specific paper of some kind?
> If a country leader tells them to self-isolate, they will laugh and ignore until it gets serious and in hindsight they blame politicians.
This seems true enough, there have been all sorts of people on TV laughing it up on the beach with full knowledge that a global pandemic was underway. It would be nice if we could find a way to put some additional sense into these people's minds.
> When you have no pandemic for 100 years you don't care about ventilators and ventilator contracts, you care about unemployment, taxes, football and the last iPhone models.
110% agree here - it's true, and it is a very big deal, imho.
> History is always forgotten because regular Joe and Jane don't read history and Einstein has a single vote.
Yup. The interesting thing about that though, is that hardly anyone reads history. Take HN for example, I'd be surprised if even 10% of the people here would remotely qualify as "students of history", yet I suspect the percentage of people who consider themselves qualified to deploy phrases like "History is always forgotten..." would be up around the 90% range. Obviously I'm not referring to you here since I mostly agree with everything you've said, but I suspect I'm at least in the ballpark.