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This article has an unexpected resonance for me after several weeks of pandemic lockdown. Just three months ago I would have laughed it off. Now I am increasing

This article has an unexpected resonance for me after several weeks of pandemic lockdown. Just three months ago I would have laughed it off. Now I am increasingly pissed off. In the US, but I see reflection of this in Europe as well, has allowed irresponsible puerile imbeciles to be elected. These people play games with wealth and power, with no regard to the lives and well-being of the society that pays for it. I did not mention any party, that perennial misdirection to their collective heist. Also don't fall for the other smoke screen of small vs. big government. I demand at least a competent government. For politicians truth is whatever you make people believe it to be. Meanwhile engineers and scientists struggle daily to find the hard facts of the world to painstakingly build or discover something that improves lives. We should be disgusted and revolted at who is leading us right now. We should drive these fools out office and strip them of any respect. If we don't, there will be no one competent left in position to rebuild from this, or the next, catastrophe that "nobody" could have expected. Or maybe there will be some states or localities that can get their act together, and the rest will be a wasteland of warring cultural and racial tribes.

twomoretime 6y ago
There's an old saying that people deserve their rulers.
- Afforess 6y ago
  This attitude is toxic and worse, incorrect. The majority of Americans did not vote for our President. I live in Austin, and my state district in TX includes a tiny slice of a city hundreds of miles away, Houston. Many state districts are like this, gerrymandered to prevent my vote from counting. Some places have it worse, DC, the capital, has no representation at all (fun trivia: Google the DC license plate). The voters didn't ask nor vote for our government. The government picked the voters...
  - vwcx 6y ago
    As a DC resident, it does feel really frustrating, at a time when the nation's politics feel especially important, to not even have a representative to speak with/pressure. Especially when the chief argument against DC statehood has been that it'll tip the Senate to the left. BS.
  - Fricken 6y ago
    You can rise up and fix the system and get the leader you deserve, or you can complain about and do nothing else, and in that case you'll end up with the leader you deserve.
    - Afforess 6y ago
      This is more of the same sanctimonious toxicity. You don't know me. I already donate to act blue. I already go to political rally's. I already help get friends to go vote. I already am a member of local political groups. I am still not represented. No state or federal ballot I have ever cast has counted. Please don't tell people that they would ever deserve our current leaders. People deserve safety, stability, and basic decency, no matter what. Even if they make a mistake. Especially then. People deserve better.
      - fractallyte 6y ago
        Stop paying your taxes. It's not meant as a flippant comment. Taxes are an exchange from citizens to state, in return for a certain duty of care. Yes, the system is set up to inflict severe punishment on dissenters - because tax money enables (or disables) government. But, the more people who rally around your political protest, the more effective it becomes...
      - jbay808 6y ago
        Perhaps we can say, you got the leader that a large number of your countrymates deserved?
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - withdavidli 6y ago
        Disclaimer that I use similar remarks to the quote you disagree with. This is with the understanding that the price that needs to be paid will literally take lives at times, and that there is little to no fairness at who bears that cost. That being said, you seem to be quite active politically and doing more than most in this arena. At what point do you give up and move to where you think you'll be represented? This is assuming you have the means to go elsewhere. Some people operate on moving to where they are treated best, that includes the option of a different country.
  - nmfisher 6y ago
    The 50% of people who didn’t vote in the last election are equally responsible for the current President as those who did (and every president prior, too). I agree wholeheartedly that a democratic government reflects its voters. A largely apathetic, non-voting populace exaggerates the effect of gerrymandering, campaign finance and media manipulation.
    - JSavageOne 6y ago
      You realize Trump lost the popular vote right? Also due to the electoral college and the winner-take-all way in which voting is designed in the U.S, your vote for president only matters if you live in a swing state. If you live in California or New York, there's basically no point in voting for president because there's such a large Democratic majority and it's winner-take-all.
      - nmfisher 6y ago
        > You realize Trump lost the popular vote right? I am well aware, but that has nothing to do with the almost half of eligible voters who didn't vote at all. Californians who didn't vote in 2016 (~9m) far outnumber Hillary's margin over Trump (~4.3m). There's only "no point voting for president in California" because 9m Californians don't vote. That's nothing to do with "the system", that's a choice that every single one of those 9m voters is making. Which brings me back to my original point, which is that voter apathy exacerbates the influence of gerrymandering and campaign spending in winning elections.
        JSavageOne 6y ago
        > If you live in California or New York, there's basically no point in voting for president because there's such a large Democratic majority and it's winner-take-all. Winner-take-all in any state that leans predominantly in one direction means that your vote doesn't matter. Unless those 9 million people happened to all be of the Republican party (extremely unlikely), it wouldn't have made any difference had they voted or not. Winner-take-all means all the delegates go to the winner. It has everything to do with the system. Instead of just preaching that people should vote, maybe take a look at why they aren't. Maybe some don't because they can't get off work and unlike many other countries, election day isn't a national holiday. Or maybe because they don't feel like it makes a difference. If you don't live in a swing state, then one is right to feel like their presidential vote doesn't make a difference because as I just explained, it doesn't, and it shouldn't be that way.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - twomoretime 6y ago
    You miss the applicability of the saying because you drastically overestimate the capability of the average American. Hell, ignoring the deplorable level to which standards have been lowered by perverse incentives to pass students, the US only has an average of 80 HS graduation rate. These are your voters. People who struggled to make it through high school have just as much of a day over your governments, your legislation, as you do. Do you expect uneducated and/or ignorant voters to make good decisions? https://www.publicschoolreview.com/average-graduation-rate-stats/national-data https://www.publicschoolreview.com/average-graduation-rate-s...
- toss1 6y ago
  Which is only true as a tautology. Start with considering skewed results when an electoral process is skewed by asymmetric warfare of an adversary. Or consider regulatory capture by small subsets of the society, not visible until the damage is done....
- flipgimble 6y ago
  You're right that nobody is blameless. But we can't abandon everyone to destructive whims of the minority. In the US only about 23% of the possible voting public won the last presidential election. It's not just voting. I'm to blame for inaction and not running for office. As an engineer I could have something credible to say about many pressing issues. By why would I ever enter a race that is decided not on any values I uphold, but by manipulating the under-educated. Somehow the message did not win many races: "Vote for a scientist or an engineer or you may die from the next catastrophe that nobody believed us when we said we should prepare for it."
te 6y ago
You might like Gaming the Vote by William Poundstone.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
  And anything by P.J. O'Rourke. Parliament of Whores was entertaining.
jimbob45 6y ago
Nobody competent? I think I'd be quite competent, thank you very much.
- sethjgore 6y ago
  no need to take it personally.
  - jimbob45 6y ago
    My point was that there are a lot of competent people. Take a look through any HN thread and you'll find scores of highly intelligent, very wise, and uncorruptible individuals who would certainly do better than many in power today. To say that we'll run out of competent people to lead is nonsense.
s5300 6y ago
Quite tired and ill right now so I'm unfortunately not going to be able to write this out even slightly well... but for some reason, I want to post the thought anyway so I will. (Note: I'm a U.S. citizen) In short: As an engineering student with quite severe chronic illness that also got fucked over by abusive parents/a broken home I couldn't escape even with scholarships... I simply can't come to the moral conclusion that the majority of the population of the U.S. deserves the work of engineers and scientists at this point. Now - obviously, you could say "well, they didn't ask for the engineers/scientists help" - but they definitely want the ability to receive some sort of medical care, and if they stop having a new phone to buy every year on the dot... some vocal portion of the populace will be quite unhappy. Getting into how I actually feel about politics would be pretty irrelevant/pointless. However - I do think the U.S. is at the point where the average HN goer would agree the current government is a shitshow. Making that statement - I obviously agree with it. However, I've reached a point where I truly believe I'd rather have another four years of this administration, in a sincere hope that things keep going downhill and get exponentially worse, just so some drastic form of change and restructuring will have to happen - either that, or just the U.S. becoming a completely failed nation and engineers/scientists just jump ship to a more competent country. Not trying to troll in the slightest in posting this. Am I crazy, or does anybody else feel the same way?
- Animats 6y ago
  That's the plot of "Atlas Shrugged".
  - beefield 6y ago
    Except that it is precisely the opposite in certain important details. John Galt did not want a functioning society funded by money tax^H^H^H stolen from him. He did not want the society to offer medical care or education to "engineering student with quite severe chronic illness that also got fucked over by abusive parents/a broken home" He went to strike and pushed for existing society's destruction precisely because he did not want those. (On the grandparent, I have to agree that occasionally I feel like the development of society at large is kept hostage by morons. Not only politics, but practically everything seems to be built for the lowest common denominator. It may really be that one day in the future some kind of Galt's Gulch is needed. Only Rand is going to be turning in her grave. If not for any other reason, then because in this gulch the members are pissing on her grave.)
JSavageOne 6y ago
The problem is largely the democratic system itself. The average U.S. Senator spends 2/3 of their time fundraising during the last 2 years of their term. Half of Congress are millionaires, their salaries are in the 95th percentile ($174k/yr), and they receive world-class healthcare. The electoral college means Trump and Bush get elected despite losing the popular vote. We're limited to a two-party system because third-party votes count for nothing, limiting the spectrum of ideas. American satisfaction with their own government is ~34%. What pisses me off more the problems themselves in our society (terrible healthcare system that ties healthcare to employment, outrageous university tuition + student debt crisis, homeless crisis) is the fact that we all know and agree these are problems, have known for decades, yet do nothing about it. 9 of the 10 warmest years in history have occurred since 2005, yet we do little to nothing about climate change. Epidemiologists and public health experts saw the coronavirus pandemic coming in January, yet it takes the crisis actually hitting us to start acting. We get some fiscal stimulus, but the people get relative scraps while most of it goes to wealthy corporations. I still don't even know if I qualify for the COVID checks because the government website tells me "Payment Status Not Available". For example take tax filing. In most countries, filing taxes is effortless and takes about 2 seconds - log into a government website, verify that the information the government already has on you is correct, and submit. But in the U.S., citizens are forced to waste time manually filling out all these tax forms and pay private companies money (eg. TurboTax, now there is e-filing, but ). It doesn't matter if you're Democrat, Republican, or a member of the Nazi Party, we can all agree that making tax filing take as little time and effort as possible is superior to having to take more time and effort. Yet in 2020 I still have to pay TurboTax to help file my taxes because the U.S. government is too incompetent to make it as easy as countries like Sweden, South Korea, etc. We can definitely improve things significantly by electing better politicians, but that can only go so far within the confines of our current money-driven two-party system. We need a system that more accurately reflects the will of the people. Rank-based voting would enable third parties, liquid democracy would enable citizens to vote directly on issues without having to be beholden to elected officials. Experts should be in charge of their domains of expertise, specially when it comes to science (eg. public health experts in charge of public health policy). Politicians can decide what gets taxed, who gets the money, and vote on laws, but beyond that we need competent people managing what they're competent at, and a system that's proactive rather than reactive. Too bad it's taboo to even suggest that a system of government devised over 200 years ago when people were riding around on horses may not be the most efficient in the 21st century. EDIT: Rather than simply downvoting because you disagree (which is not what the downvote tool is designed for by the way), how about taking a second to explain what you disagree with?
theonething 6y ago
Are you referring only to the current administration? Aren't prior administrations also guilty since they did not prepare for an electrical grid collapse either?
- viscoelastic 6y ago
  As op predicted, there is always one that tries to derail the discussion into the false distinction between parties, administrations or what have you. As opposed to working towards solutions that may save lives, let's spend the next decade or two throwing blame and arguing. Classic use of what-aboutism to muddy the waters.
kstenerud 6y ago
The issue in America is split between cultural baggage and the first-past-the-post voting system. FPTP voting collapses into a two-party system, which ultimately leads to a government and people at war with itself. Under such a system, compromises become impossible, sabotage the norm, and nobody can get anything meaningful done anymore. The loudest man wins. The cultural baggage comes from the Cold War. If you look at popular media from the time, you'll see a very strong connection between "communism" and "science" (because the USSR placed such great faith in science as the saviour of their people and a vindication of their way of life). American TV, books and movies conflated science and anything "sciency" with commies and conspiracies to enslave the common man, but it's hard to blame them since they were taking their cue from the spirit of the times. To this day, there are few countries with such a heavy distrust of science as America has. And since the alternatives for explaining complex things are religion, superstitions, and "folksy wisdom", it's no wonder that such people get elected to office. And since it's a two-party system, belligerence is a virtue.
- masonic 6y ago
  the USSR placed such great faith in science as the saviour of their people and a vindication of their way of life Perhaps you need to read some history. USSR socialist "science" resulted in a horrendously mismanaged economy and multiple famines (1920s: 5+ million dead; 1930-33, another 5 million; 1946-47: over 1 million dead). In all three cases, the leading relief efforts (and vast improvements to Soviet agriculture) were provided by those "anti-science" Americans. Given what a horribly ignorant "anti-science" place America is, it's baffling that so many of y'all want to go there to live.
  - kstenerud 6y ago
    I'm well aware of what happened in the USSR. What they believed and what actually happened are entirely different things. My point is that the USSR's fanatical devotion to a flawed religion of "science" had ripple effects to the USA, their sworn mutual enemy. When one side takes on a slogan to rally their tribe, the opposing side must distance themselves from it, which in this case meant that America distanced itself from trust in their own scientific institutions for fear of appearing to support the enemy tribe's position (it was an ideological and cultural war, and everyone was watching). That official distrust of science spread into a cultural distrust that resonates to this day. Note: I'm not blaming America here; this is the nature of culture (regardless of who it is), and it couldn't have happened any other way in their competition, given Moscow's "science the saviour" position. It's just unfortunate that this is part of the fallout.

twomoretime 6y ago

There's an old saying that people deserve their rulers.

Afforess 6y ago
This attitude is toxic and worse, incorrect. The majority of Americans did not vote for our President. I live in Austin, and my state district in TX includes a tiny slice of a city hundreds of miles away, Houston. Many state districts are like this, gerrymandered to prevent my vote from counting. Some places have it worse, DC, the capital, has no representation at all (fun trivia: Google the DC license plate). The voters didn't ask nor vote for our government. The government picked the voters...
- vwcx 6y ago
  As a DC resident, it does feel really frustrating, at a time when the nation's politics feel especially important, to not even have a representative to speak with/pressure. Especially when the chief argument against DC statehood has been that it'll tip the Senate to the left. BS.
- Fricken 6y ago
  You can rise up and fix the system and get the leader you deserve, or you can complain about and do nothing else, and in that case you'll end up with the leader you deserve.
  - Afforess 6y ago
    This is more of the same sanctimonious toxicity. You don't know me. I already donate to act blue. I already go to political rally's. I already help get friends to go vote. I already am a member of local political groups. I am still not represented. No state or federal ballot I have ever cast has counted. Please don't tell people that they would ever deserve our current leaders. People deserve safety, stability, and basic decency, no matter what. Even if they make a mistake. Especially then. People deserve better.
    - fractallyte 6y ago
      Stop paying your taxes. It's not meant as a flippant comment. Taxes are an exchange from citizens to state, in return for a certain duty of care. Yes, the system is set up to inflict severe punishment on dissenters - because tax money enables (or disables) government. But, the more people who rally around your political protest, the more effective it becomes...
    - jbay808 6y ago
      Perhaps we can say, you got the leader that a large number of your countrymates deserved?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - withdavidli 6y ago
      Disclaimer that I use similar remarks to the quote you disagree with. This is with the understanding that the price that needs to be paid will literally take lives at times, and that there is little to no fairness at who bears that cost. That being said, you seem to be quite active politically and doing more than most in this arena. At what point do you give up and move to where you think you'll be represented? This is assuming you have the means to go elsewhere. Some people operate on moving to where they are treated best, that includes the option of a different country.
- nmfisher 6y ago
  The 50% of people who didn’t vote in the last election are equally responsible for the current President as those who did (and every president prior, too). I agree wholeheartedly that a democratic government reflects its voters. A largely apathetic, non-voting populace exaggerates the effect of gerrymandering, campaign finance and media manipulation.
  - JSavageOne 6y ago
    You realize Trump lost the popular vote right? Also due to the electoral college and the winner-take-all way in which voting is designed in the U.S, your vote for president only matters if you live in a swing state. If you live in California or New York, there's basically no point in voting for president because there's such a large Democratic majority and it's winner-take-all.
    - nmfisher 6y ago
      > You realize Trump lost the popular vote right? I am well aware, but that has nothing to do with the almost half of eligible voters who didn't vote at all. Californians who didn't vote in 2016 (~9m) far outnumber Hillary's margin over Trump (~4.3m). There's only "no point voting for president in California" because 9m Californians don't vote. That's nothing to do with "the system", that's a choice that every single one of those 9m voters is making. Which brings me back to my original point, which is that voter apathy exacerbates the influence of gerrymandering and campaign spending in winning elections.
      - JSavageOne 6y ago
        > If you live in California or New York, there's basically no point in voting for president because there's such a large Democratic majority and it's winner-take-all. Winner-take-all in any state that leans predominantly in one direction means that your vote doesn't matter. Unless those 9 million people happened to all be of the Republican party (extremely unlikely), it wouldn't have made any difference had they voted or not. Winner-take-all means all the delegates go to the winner. It has everything to do with the system. Instead of just preaching that people should vote, maybe take a look at why they aren't. Maybe some don't because they can't get off work and unlike many other countries, election day isn't a national holiday. Or maybe because they don't feel like it makes a difference. If you don't live in a swing state, then one is right to feel like their presidential vote doesn't make a difference because as I just explained, it doesn't, and it shouldn't be that way.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- twomoretime 6y ago
  You miss the applicability of the saying because you drastically overestimate the capability of the average American. Hell, ignoring the deplorable level to which standards have been lowered by perverse incentives to pass students, the US only has an average of 80 HS graduation rate. These are your voters. People who struggled to make it through high school have just as much of a day over your governments, your legislation, as you do. Do you expect uneducated and/or ignorant voters to make good decisions? https://www.publicschoolreview.com/average-graduation-rate-stats/national-data https://www.publicschoolreview.com/average-graduation-rate-s...
toss1 6y ago
Which is only true as a tautology. Start with considering skewed results when an electoral process is skewed by asymmetric warfare of an adversary. Or consider regulatory capture by small subsets of the society, not visible until the damage is done....
flipgimble 6y ago
You're right that nobody is blameless. But we can't abandon everyone to destructive whims of the minority. In the US only about 23% of the possible voting public won the last presidential election. It's not just voting. I'm to blame for inaction and not running for office. As an engineer I could have something credible to say about many pressing issues. By why would I ever enter a race that is decided not on any values I uphold, but by manipulating the under-educated. Somehow the message did not win many races: "Vote for a scientist or an engineer or you may die from the next catastrophe that nobody believed us when we said we should prepare for it."

te 6y ago

You might like Gaming the Vote by William Poundstone.

TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
And anything by P.J. O'Rourke. Parliament of Whores was entertaining.

jimbob45 6y ago

Nobody competent? I think I'd be quite competent, thank you very much.

sethjgore 6y ago
no need to take it personally.
- jimbob45 6y ago
  My point was that there are a lot of competent people. Take a look through any HN thread and you'll find scores of highly intelligent, very wise, and uncorruptible individuals who would certainly do better than many in power today. To say that we'll run out of competent people to lead is nonsense.

s5300 6y ago

Quite tired and ill right now so I'm unfortunately not going to be able to write this out even slightly well... but for some reason, I want to post the thought anyway so I will. (Note: I'm a U.S. citizen) In short: As an engineering student with quite severe chronic illness that also got fucked over by abusive parents/a broken home I couldn't escape even with scholarships... I simply can't come to the moral conclusion that the majority of the population of the U.S. deserves the work of engineers and scientists at this point. Now - obviously, you could say "well, they didn't ask for the engineers/scientists help" - but they definitely want the ability to receive some sort of medical care, and if they stop having a new phone to buy every year on the dot... some vocal portion of the populace will be quite unhappy. Getting into how I actually feel about politics would be pretty irrelevant/pointless. However - I do think the U.S. is at the point where the average HN goer would agree the current government is a shitshow. Making that statement - I obviously agree with it. However, I've reached a point where I truly believe I'd rather have another four years of this administration, in a sincere hope that things keep going downhill and get exponentially worse, just so some drastic form of change and restructuring will have to happen - either that, or just the U.S. becoming a completely failed nation and engineers/scientists just jump ship to a more competent country. Not trying to troll in the slightest in posting this. Am I crazy, or does anybody else feel the same way?

Animats 6y ago
That's the plot of "Atlas Shrugged".
- beefield 6y ago
  Except that it is precisely the opposite in certain important details. John Galt did not want a functioning society funded by money tax^H^H^H stolen from him. He did not want the society to offer medical care or education to "engineering student with quite severe chronic illness that also got fucked over by abusive parents/a broken home" He went to strike and pushed for existing society's destruction precisely because he did not want those. (On the grandparent, I have to agree that occasionally I feel like the development of society at large is kept hostage by morons. Not only politics, but practically everything seems to be built for the lowest common denominator. It may really be that one day in the future some kind of Galt's Gulch is needed. Only Rand is going to be turning in her grave. If not for any other reason, then because in this gulch the members are pissing on her grave.)

JSavageOne 6y ago

The problem is largely the democratic system itself. The average U.S. Senator spends 2/3 of their time fundraising during the last 2 years of their term. Half of Congress are millionaires, their salaries are in the 95th percentile ($174k/yr), and they receive world-class healthcare. The electoral college means Trump and Bush get elected despite losing the popular vote. We're limited to a two-party system because third-party votes count for nothing, limiting the spectrum of ideas. American satisfaction with their own government is ~34%. What pisses me off more the problems themselves in our society (terrible healthcare system that ties healthcare to employment, outrageous university tuition + student debt crisis, homeless crisis) is the fact that we all know and agree these are problems, have known for decades, yet do nothing about it. 9 of the 10 warmest years in history have occurred since 2005, yet we do little to nothing about climate change. Epidemiologists and public health experts saw the coronavirus pandemic coming in January, yet it takes the crisis actually hitting us to start acting. We get some fiscal stimulus, but the people get relative scraps while most of it goes to wealthy corporations. I still don't even know if I qualify for the COVID checks because the government website tells me "Payment Status Not Available". For example take tax filing. In most countries, filing taxes is effortless and takes about 2 seconds - log into a government website, verify that the information the government already has on you is correct, and submit. But in the U.S., citizens are forced to waste time manually filling out all these tax forms and pay private companies money (eg. TurboTax, now there is e-filing, but ). It doesn't matter if you're Democrat, Republican, or a member of the Nazi Party, we can all agree that making tax filing take as little time and effort as possible is superior to having to take more time and effort. Yet in 2020 I still have to pay TurboTax to help file my taxes because the U.S. government is too incompetent to make it as easy as countries like Sweden, South Korea, etc. We can definitely improve things significantly by electing better politicians, but that can only go so far within the confines of our current money-driven two-party system. We need a system that more accurately reflects the will of the people. Rank-based voting would enable third parties, liquid democracy would enable citizens to vote directly on issues without having to be beholden to elected officials. Experts should be in charge of their domains of expertise, specially when it comes to science (eg. public health experts in charge of public health policy). Politicians can decide what gets taxed, who gets the money, and vote on laws, but beyond that we need competent people managing what they're competent at, and a system that's proactive rather than reactive. Too bad it's taboo to even suggest that a system of government devised over 200 years ago when people were riding around on horses may not be the most efficient in the 21st century. EDIT: Rather than simply downvoting because you disagree (which is not what the downvote tool is designed for by the way), how about taking a second to explain what you disagree with?

theonething 6y ago

Are you referring only to the current administration? Aren't prior administrations also guilty since they did not prepare for an electrical grid collapse either?

viscoelastic 6y ago
As op predicted, there is always one that tries to derail the discussion into the false distinction between parties, administrations or what have you. As opposed to working towards solutions that may save lives, let's spend the next decade or two throwing blame and arguing. Classic use of what-aboutism to muddy the waters.

kstenerud 6y ago

The issue in America is split between cultural baggage and the first-past-the-post voting system. FPTP voting collapses into a two-party system, which ultimately leads to a government and people at war with itself. Under such a system, compromises become impossible, sabotage the norm, and nobody can get anything meaningful done anymore. The loudest man wins. The cultural baggage comes from the Cold War. If you look at popular media from the time, you'll see a very strong connection between "communism" and "science" (because the USSR placed such great faith in science as the saviour of their people and a vindication of their way of life). American TV, books and movies conflated science and anything "sciency" with commies and conspiracies to enslave the common man, but it's hard to blame them since they were taking their cue from the spirit of the times. To this day, there are few countries with such a heavy distrust of science as America has. And since the alternatives for explaining complex things are religion, superstitions, and "folksy wisdom", it's no wonder that such people get elected to office. And since it's a two-party system, belligerence is a virtue.

masonic 6y ago
the USSR placed such great faith in science as the saviour of their people and a vindication of their way of life Perhaps you need to read some history. USSR socialist "science" resulted in a horrendously mismanaged economy and multiple famines (1920s: 5+ million dead; 1930-33, another 5 million; 1946-47: over 1 million dead). In all three cases, the leading relief efforts (and vast improvements to Soviet agriculture) were provided by those "anti-science" Americans. Given what a horribly ignorant "anti-science" place America is, it's baffling that so many of y'all want to go there to live.
- kstenerud 6y ago
  I'm well aware of what happened in the USSR. What they believed and what actually happened are entirely different things. My point is that the USSR's fanatical devotion to a flawed religion of "science" had ripple effects to the USA, their sworn mutual enemy. When one side takes on a slogan to rally their tribe, the opposing side must distance themselves from it, which in this case meant that America distanced itself from trust in their own scientific institutions for fear of appearing to support the enemy tribe's position (it was an ideological and cultural war, and everyone was watching). That official distrust of science spread into a cultural distrust that resonates to this day. Note: I'm not blaming America here; this is the nature of culture (regardless of who it is), and it couldn't have happened any other way in their competition, given Moscow's "science the saviour" position. It's just unfortunate that this is part of the fallout.