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Techies Must Educate Governments
Rub3X writes "Those in the know about technology must spend more time reaching out to governments and helping them understand the Internet's role in society, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said Tuesday.
'The average person in government is not of the age of people who are using all this stuff,' Schmidt said at a public symposium here hosted by the National Academies' Computer Science and Telecommunications Board. 'There is a generational gap, and it's very, very real.'"
They are not dense. They are very intelegent, and work hard at doing their jobs.
Which is getting elected. That is what they are paid for, that is what counts.
The important part of a politician's job is gathering votes. Not ruling a country. We are supposed to only give votes to those who we think will do a good job of ruling, but the measured quantity in a politician's life is the number of votes they get.
It is not that they are not smart. It is that they have learned that applying smarts to ruling a country does not get them as many votes as applying smarts to getting votes does. I'm not sure how to change that, but that is the root problem.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
My party is already formed. It is the libertarian party. The American people have determined that they are not interested in liberty, nor even particularly in the constitution; they want a mommy government that controls everything they do without thoughtful guiding principle, underlying legitimate constitutional authority, or any semblance of honor. And that is exactly what they have received. Unfortunately, that means I have received it as well. Hence my extreme dismay.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
So form your own party, see how well you can do it.
I don't think you understand the issue. When he said it is a two-party system, he meant laws have been passed to insure only members of those two parties are likely to be elected. Two registered presidential candidates with thousands of backers were forcibly ejected from the last presidential debates and not allowed to participate. The last time I voted it said right at the top of the ballot that if I voted for candidates from multiple parties, my ballot would be invalid and discarded. That means I could vote for the the better of two candidates for congress (democrat), or I could vote for the libertarian candidate for mayor, but not both.
The laws have been written to prevent the people from electing anyone not republican or democrat and they have been written by the incumbent social groups to maintain their dominance. We will never have electoral reform because no one in favor of it can get elected.
Remember that democracy is the worst posible political system, except for all the others.
Ahh, but we don't quite have a democracy anymore, since the laws are written to make sure the will of the people is not enacted, but rather the will of those who are supposedly representative of the people.
Problem is, in my HS Government/Civics class, I was taught democracy was "Majority Rule, Minority Rights." I used to be so idealistic and naive...
Anyway, it falls apart where we don't live in a democracy. We live in a democratic republic. Very important distinction. The people do not make the laws in the US (outside of the rare ballot initiative), the people elect representatives to make the laws.
Maybe what we need is to get people to stop throwing around the word "democracy" like a placebo.