03-05-2021, 12:56 PM
(03-05-2021, 07:57 AM)Einzige Wrote:(03-05-2021, 07:45 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Here's the problem: a random selection could get you a criminal, an addict, a madman, or an idiot. Everyone would be at different levels of the learning curve, and some would be quick drop-offs because... well, they might even be illiterate.
Were I to ever assume the responsibilities attached I would do my level best... I would do some things right for my district, such as to seek a posting on the agriculture committee because my district is extremely rural. I would also be a poor ideological match even for that. I am a liberal in an R+20 district.
Lol, plenty of politicians are functionally illiterate about anything outside of politics.
Political life does not exist in a vacuum. Locally there is the cultural color, and that can be very different from some conception of the state as a whole. Tennessee seems super-Red, but Greater Nashville is more like Greater Atlanta or Greater Indianapolis in its politics.
We have plenty of people who believe in Young-Earth Creationism. a nearly-complete denial of biological science because evolution denies the first chapters of Genesis. Something had to explain the origin of life and the universe, and the ancient Hebrews took the most convincing story of the time, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and stripped it of its pagan gods and used it to stifle curiosity about things that people could not then know. Anyone who believes in the Genesis account at the expense of all other explanations has no curiosity about paleontology, continental drift, archeology, and genetics that together tell a far richer story than some curiosity-crushing meme.
We have Holocaust deniers (I can say this to people who claim to be defending the German people from a slander: there was nothing wrong with the German And Austrian people between 1933 and 1945 that Judaism would not have solved), anti-vaxxers, white supremacists, and Afrocentrists... and in turn AIDS deniers and COVID-19 deniers. We have people who think that everyone in possession of a gun would make life safer. (Truth be told, dogs are safer and more likely to attack bad guys effectively, and a dog is likely to make one more likely to survive a medical catastrophe and less likely to commit suicide in a depressing situation). Statistics over spotty stories? Sure, we have all heard the tale of someone who smoked like a chimney and lived deep into his nineties. I do not smoke. I know the statistics. Statistics is the easiest math class in college.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.