[Deckard]

Originally Posted by chuck

They parrot the line - never questioning.

With public figures, there's always the problem of how passionately they've previously stood up and defended a certain point of view, and how embarrassing it would be for them to admit that they were wrong. In that respect, there's an investment in never questioning.

I should say, from clips I've seen recently, The View seems (incredibly) rather more sophisticated than the UK's version - Loose Women or whatever it's called, in which a bunch of women sit around talking slebs and cellulite.

Well, so my female friends tell me, anyway.

Originally Posted by chuck

but because the good old Kiwi way is to give everyone a go - and this Labour government has been in power for 8 years, so let's give the other fellows a go.

That version of democracy sounds very familar.

Originally Posted by chuck

Ugh - sometimes humans are so stupid.

There's a whole lot of stupid out there, and it sits there stewing because of the view that equates intellectualism as elitism and therefore a bad thing - something that itself is probably borne out of an inferiority complex, but is nurtured by the vacuous give-em-what-they-want culture, and an inadequate press (and in the case of channels like Fox, both of those things at the same time). This comment piece made a pertinent point, I thought: "American democracy [though I maintain it's not just American democracy] is flawed, because a fake sense of intimacy with a presidential candidate has come to count more than credentials and arguments." ([The] point is not about the US. It is about educational systems that leave people clueless about the world, and hence do not provide them with criteria better than gut-level sympathy to choose their political leaders.)

Most of the comments below that piece seem to miss the point, but one comment that I agree with - I want my leader to be better than us, I want him or her to be elitist, to be more intellectual. Far rather that than just "someone with whom I could share a beer".

Always comes back to the same thing though, and it's precisely what you wrote in that other thread: the importance of educating. Of course there will be resistance, like trying to get a Muslim to switch to Catholicism, or a religious person to atheism, or a Chelsea supporter to Man U - but slowly, the more information spreads (and we could get into Dawkins' meme theory here) the higher the bar is raised.