Quote:
Originally Posted by Deckard
I suppose, yet again, like just about everything else, it can only come down to improving education. It's just that I have this fear - perhaps it's unfounded - that people in the democractic western nations are gradually becoming more and more stupid.  |
Which is why Malkin's comments are possibly more dangerous than we imagine. You can do two things here. You can lament the voter intelligence as a premise to rigging the democratic process for your own ends, or you can support a general culture of education. I wonder which one will actually strengthen our democracy and which one she's afeared of. hmmmm. tom jefferson had a lot to say about this. want an educated voting mass? don't proscribe education as elitist. don't place stupid meat head american muscle in cultural value over a girl reading a book. stop finding it cute to be willfully ignorant, like its something to be proud of. When people start talking thus, you know they are really interested in the strenght of our democracy, not whining sour grapes about a particular outcome.
there's a whole page of this shit
here.
"Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories. And to render even them safe, their minds must be improved to a certain degree." --Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia Q.XIV, 1782. ME 2:207
"The most effectual means of preventing [the perversion of power into tyranny are] to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts which history exhibits, that possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes." --Thomas Jefferson: Diffusion of Knowledge Bill, 1779. FE 2:221, Papers 2:526
"The information of the people at large can alone make them the safe as they are the sole depositary of our political and religious freedom." --Thomas Jefferson to William Duane, 1810. ME 12:417