• @OpenStars
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    16 months ago

    I don’t think it’s about stupidity per se - and I am a working-class person myself, thus have to spend many hours of every day doing my work activities, with less time leftover to devote to such things, so possibly I might be recusing myself even from this? - and rather I think it is about people who are educated vs. not. e.g. those who can spot logical fallacies vs. not, and if some subject is about to be voted on, someone who can understand at least the bare minimum of what is being talked about (is trickle down good? bad? neutral?). Anyway, that ship has sailed… I was just saying that the founders DID warn us, and we DID ignore them, and there ARE alternatives other than restricting voting, i.e. making a liberal arts style of education free for anyone who wants it.

    About hospitalizing people without a moral compass, I have a better idea: why don’t we put them in charge of literally everything, everywhere? :-P Unfortunately this is no joke, b/c that seems to be what tends to happen.:-( Shareholders vote with their dollars, and more often than not they seem to choose to invest into people who rise up and do WHATEVER IT TAKES to make profits.

    “Stupid”, “immoral”, “evil”, these are not just words, but in another sense they are, b/c what matters is how the world truly works - one principle of that being survival of the fittest. If we killed off the top half of all people in the world after sorting them by IQ, the remaining people might be more “stupid”, but they would be alive, in comparison to the alternative. Conversely, people such as Robert Iger the current CEO of Disney who has run the company for almost two decades, tend to remain in power at the behest of the shareholders, who could vote to expunge him at any time if they wanted. You might say “evil” or “greedy”, but they say “me likey, and want to keep”.

    What you are missing though it that it is not just those INDIVIDUAL PEOPLE who are “greedy” or “evil” or whatever, it is the entire SYSTEM - e.g. if Robert Iger ever were to die (he is getting older now…), he would be immediately replaced, by someone who similarly meets the expectations, nay the DEMANDS, of the stockholders. So no, I don’t think it is anywhere remotely close to as easy as you describe. The people who own stock in that company may not be okay with owning a slave personally, but they are quite happy to benefit/profit from the misery of the workers who are forced to churn out that assembly-line whimsey, under what you and I might call “evil” working conditions, but which they call “cost-effective”.

    So be careful with what you wish for. You might want those people prevented from taking office, but in turn it is THEY who are likely to abuse their power in order to prevent US from holding office. Might makes right. I mean… it ABSOLUTELY does NOT, and yet if you are not willing to fight for what you believe, those who are willing to take action will win the day. In one sense “they” even have a semi-admirable trait then that you and I lack: humility, to bow before the rules of the universe and work according to its precepts, rather than attempting to impose their own particular brand of morality onto it.