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by 2xpress 1739 days ago
Indeed a good point. Had the US elected representatives had better morals none of this would have ever happened. It would have been pre-empted decades ago. But we have no influence over their morals, only an ability to vote for or against them. Those elected by definition are the best people available. So if they don't have good morals that means the whole society does not have good morals. I suppose the best we can do is to try to have better morals ourselves and hope to positively influence the rest of society to make better moral choices...

All that is hard, and that's why evil like Putin prevails...
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a1369209993 1739 days ago
> Those elected by definition are the best people available.

If by "available", you mean political candidates, then yes. If you mean of the society in general, then no, quite the opposite, actually.

> So if they don't have good morals that means the whole society does not have good morals.

No, it means two of the worst people in the society (namely, the 'republican' candidate and the 'democratic' candidate) do not have good morals. This a slightly stronger measure than the society's minimum level of morals, but not by very much, and says nothing about average or about particular non-politician cases.

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jhrmnn 1739 days ago
I think this distrust in democracy as a system to elect representative people to legislate and govern is widespread and to a certain degree based on facts, but also deeply worrying. In a way it signifies a failure of democracy.
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a1369209993 1738 days ago
> In a way it signifies a failure of democracy.

I'd say "demonstrates the", but... yes? Obviously?

Democracy worked well early on because institutions hadn't yet figured out how to exploit it, not because it had any inherent resistance to exploitation; now it's like Merkel-Damgaard hash functions[0]: it was always broken, but now we (and the attackers) know it's broken and are seeing the consequences.

0: eg, MD5, SHA-1

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