kryptkpr, above, made a good point on this issue. I'd make another one; even if it is clear to the user that by installing a P2P application and placing files in their 'shared folder' is tantamont to sharing copies of the file, it is not clear to the layman, especially a minor, that such an act of sharing is illegal. Many people do not think in computer terms, and think that the paradigm of sharing in the modern age is not different in kind from the sharing of yesteryear, such as loaning a book or record to a friend. Most people would not implicitly expect such behavior to be wrong, and probably would not know that it was (according to the law) until they were told.
Even prior copying activities have been protected in the past, and there is not an average adult today that would question the legality of taping their favorite show on TV to watch at a later time, or even loaning or giving that tape to a friend. The minutiae of 'fair-use' are not even on the radar screen for such people; they've been doing it for years, don't see sharing songs as any different, and are basically unaware of the underlying legal arguments either way.
And if it were possible for the average layman to traverse the eddies and cul-de-sacs of the law with middling success, then I would say that the story could end there. However, in reality, in most areas of US law, the law is so complicated and crufty that even lawyers who are experts in a particular field often will have difficulty predicting the likely outcome of a particular case or controversy in that field. How can a citizen under such circumstances know the law they are apparently obligated to follow?
In such an environment of legal indeterminacy, quantity, power, privilege, and money have a gap to wiggle through and affect the outcome. Scholars don't work for free; scholarly legal arguments come with a serious price tag. In such circumstances, it cannot serve the interests of justice to simply fall back on the textbook assumption that "the truth will out" in an adversarial proceeding, especially when an underlying and very obviously false assumption is that each side is sufficiently and equivalently equipped to argue the case at hand. While it may not be the job of the judge to prepare one side's case, it is not out of line to consider the inequality of the resources that each side brings to bear in considering how to weigh the arguments.
Anyone who is surprised that the RIAA is suing has NOT been on the internet, and thus they don't have to worry about it. Everyone else has been warned for quite some time now, and it's not like they had no clue it was illegal before the lawsuits even began.
That's one hell of a pair of assumptions. Most 10-14 year olds who use this technology (which is a serious chuck of the file-sharing user base) I imagine neither know nor care about the RIAA; lawsuits for them, if they have any awareness of the concept, is something that old people do. I also think you dramatically overestimate the extent to which 'obvious-to-slashdotter wisdom' is spread; keep in mind that the/. crowd is dramatically more aware and more conversant on copyright issues than the average casual web surfer.
As for your first point:
How do YOU sleep at night knowing that 'making available' a song that you don't own could wipe out your own savings? It's such a little thing, and SO easy to avoid... And yet, you do it anyhow.
I don't disagree (much) that if a person is aware of the likely consequences of an action, and yet does that action anyway, there is not too much sympathy to be had. However, simply 'making available' hasn't been settled as an action that could incur these consequences until now, and so it is hard to argue that the likely consequences were sufficiently apparent.
Further, and this is the point where I couldn't care less whether the person knew what they were doing or not, is that justice demands proportionality. There is a disgusting lack of proportionality in punishing a person for causing what is at best a few bucks worth of harm by destroying their economic future.
Though the 'switch in time that saved nine' meme has become undergrad gospel Supreme Court history, there is a decent amount of evidence that the switch had little if anything to do with the threatened court packing, as while the decision at issue was delivered after the plan had been announced by FDR, it is unclear whether the actual deliberation and vote on that decision occurred before or after the announcement.
It is the ultimate dismissal of human life and values.
On this we disagree; duty to others is in many cases an affirmation of a recognition of the value of human life. Where I think duty becomes problematic is when it is applied to abstractions of people, or to people in the aggregate, especially when that aggregation is not the primary beneficiary-in-fact of the fruits of the duty-labor. Most governments, for example, are this way, where there is an explicit duty to the 'people of a nation' when in most cases the benefits of the duty are received only by a small number of the total citizenry.
Just like if you have a sensitive neurotic kid in your neighborhood, you wouldn't call him names in jest that you would call everyone else.
Dude, I don't know what amazing utopian neighborhood you grew up in, but in most of the rest of the world, that kid you just described gets it the worst.
Dare I ask whether you've ever spent time in a jail cell? There is political freedom, and then there is literal Freedom to carry on your life, live in your home, tuck your kids in at night, etc.. It is this second type of freedom, which you trivialize, that is being discussed by GP.
While I will not dispute that political and social freedoms are of extreme importance, their importance is at best on parity with practical freedom, esp. the freedom to live physically freely. Anyone engaging in an activity which might deprive them of that freedom should not be so cavalier.
It was smart of him up until the part where he got caught. Seriously, for those of us who think that nuclear power would be a good stopgap energy solution to invest in, cover-ups really set back the team, probably a great deal more than the original incident would have if they just copped to it in a low-key fashion.
What you're not getting (and from outside the US, it might not even be all that obvious) is that Bush is so bad in many deeply unconservative ways that even may rank-and-file Republicans were voting across party lines to attempt to counterbalance his excesses by installing an opposition congress. In the final analysis, many believe that having something of a constitution left is preferable to having their own party in power as it drives everything straight into the ground. The irony, of course, is that the newly minted democratic majority has been utterly useless at counterbalancing Bush, and probably will remain so until 2008.
It happens. Reporters, being somewhat lazy on the technical end sometimes, will run with whatever units their source provided them. Some happy-go-lucky SI geek gets a hold of an impressionable or lazy reporter, and you'll get kilometers, grams, liters (litres!) and all other sorts of perversion and anti-American sentiment. That's how I understand how it happens, anyway.
While I am by and large against intrusive gun control, the poster had a point. The gun-rights lobby is guilty, as many others are, of reducing what ought to be nuanced and well-reasoned arguments into trite slogans that don't help any discussion of the issue. The problem becomes that through these slogans rank-and-file believers become a liability to the cause, as their parroting makes them and their position seem overly simplistic, naive, and unreasonable.
You misunderstand. I'm not saying that cell phones *are* important or necessary. I'm saying that, as opposed to five years ago, the general sentiment of the public has come to regard them as important and perhaps necessary. There are in fact many occupations now where you would not maintain your employment if you were not accessible by phone or e-mail; it is a social and employment expectation of access. That was what the original post was about: the supposed inability of the general public to identify internet access as something important enough to protect and guarantee, which I think as I indicated their devaluation is overestimated.
I'd have agreed with you. Now? I think you underestimate just how much people have realized that Internet access is important to their lives, even if it isn't a technical 'necessity' in most cases. It's much like cell phones: they used to be regarded as merely a convenience (and an ostentatious one at that) but now you are the weirdo on the block if you don't have one, a crazed luddite. I think the same is basically true now about e-mail and Google access.
Well, where software is concerned, EULAs are moot. You see the EULA after you make the purchase and open the package. Open the package, the store will refuse to accept it. Your right of first sale (it's a commodity good, NOT a work for hire) allows you to use it for its intended purpose without restriction. You are still of course bound by patents and copyrights, but not to use the package for its advertised purpose, or even to resell it to someone else when you're finished with it.
Not that I disagree that's how it ought to be, but last I checked/heard/read the US Appeals courts were still thoroughly confused on the point of whether the First Sale Doctrine applies to software licensed for purchase. Any lawyers in the house who know one way or the other? Have there been any definitive rulings, esp. Supreme court rulings on the issue?
Hey guys, it is mid-August in what was supposed to be a record hurricane season. No storms yet.
Apparently you do not live in Texas, where Hurricane Dean (the fourth named storm of the season) is about to hit. But hey, don't let facts get in the way of a good story.
Most rules books for RPGs explicitly say 'these rules only at the discretion of the GM', and they are right to do so. If a character is doing infinite damage every turn due to munchkining and slavish and/or badly twisted interpretations of some rules set, the GM is not doing his/her job, period. My favorite D&D system was 3rd ed, right out of the box (well, corebooks); needed few dice, easily scalable, removed most of the cruft from prior eds, and was easy to ad hoc or homebrew rules. When a book rule gave a counterintuitive mechanic for something, I or whoever else was GMing would craft a house rule that worked better. I have found that so long as the players trust that you are being fair and attempting for a fun game, they tend not to be crummy sports about the rules.
He mentioned it, I imagine, because of the surprise and amusement previously expressed that a CIA analyst would care enough about Buffy to edit that page. Implication being that CIA analysts are different enough from 'normal' people who are non-CIA analysts that such an interest is surprising. GP's point was that it shouldn't be surprising, as the distinction between people who are and people who are not CIA analysts is smaller than was originally implied. Certainly, in any case, smaller than your obnoxious counter example of mass murderers and dictators. To your question, yes, it is a powerful instinct in people to demonize those who are perceived to be 'the enemy'. Thus, it never hurts to point out the humanity of people in that group, unless the enemy as such is quite behyond humanization (such as the aforementioned dictators and mass murderers).
And that this needs to be explained at all is quite embarrassing on your account.
Well, you make an interesting point. I think what has changed most is the rate of social acceptance and civilization-wide implementation of new technologies, and the attendant acceleration of social, legal, political, and psychological changes. From the Watt Steam Engine (first engine concept robust enough to pull significant loads) to Blenkinsop's Steam Rail car was forty years, and significant commercial implementation was another twenty-five. Even with that amount of lead time, the impacts on society and government were immense. Now compare the time-lapse between the first practical personal computer to commercial implementation of the Internet, and the gap is one-quarter the size. And the Internet is shaping up to be as much if not more transformative.
You have to keep reading. Though, I will admit, the pro-life lobby tends to be so dismissively unconcerned with female dignity that it was plausible enough on the fringes. That it was remotely possible and believable that a presidential candidate could endorse such a callous thing...well, hell, one of them has been talking lately of wiping entire cities off the map if Muslims continue to irritate him. So, I suppose anything goes.
World War II was a war with readily identifiable enemies, discrete military and political goals, and concrete benchmarks for meeting those goals. There were also 'victory conditions' easily defined, that marked, once achieved, the conclusion of the war. The "War on Terror" is none of those things, and has no discernible victory conditions.
Comparing an extraordinary or constitutionally-questionable surveillance power or privilege from WWII to one today is beyond absurd. Unlike in a regular war, which typically ends after some period of time, in a permanent war, freedoms gone are gone for good, because it is problematic to reasonably postulate a time when the tools used to prosecute the war will no longer be necessary. In addition, the experiences of both France and Israel (and most recently the US) have shown that counter-intelligence techniques and powers quickly migrate from the military into the domestic law enforcement context, and are difficult to remove once they have made that migration.
How are they going to justify the Big Brother system in New York?
But this is progress. As such, the burden is now on those like you to justify standing in the way of progress. Why are you such a reactionary luddite technophobe? Don't you want rapists and murderers to get caught? We should embrace this and all other technologies which will usher in a brave new world...eh...um, yeah!
Seriously though, this is the mentality in a technocratic culture like ours. Tools are worshiped above and beyond any consequences that might proceed from their introduction. For once, I am sort of glad that there are some cranky old men and women sitting on the bench in many places, critical and suspicious of law enforcement and regulatory technology that many others unthinkingly rush to adopt. Many times, admittedly, such elderly crankiness produces decisions that turn upon misunderstandings of the technology. Much of the time, however, their cautious distrust of technology can retard the whole-scale embrace of new invasive techniques and devices for at least a little while. I was pleasantly surprised, for example, when the justices ruled that thermal surveillance cameras of a residence were a 'search' that required the standard warrant and probable cause.
The first level is whether to respond to you earnestly or snarkily, as it seems that while you are somewhat flamebaiting, the ideas you are expressing are not exactly uncommon amongst the Slashdot crowd. Would it do to point out merely that many (probably most) of the monsters in humanity's history (and their many apologists) were earnest students of politics, history, art, sociology, science, and world history? Or does it bear mentioning that education and intelligence of a superior caliber is nearly universally consummate with superior arrogance and ambition? Or the further obvious fact that studying those things does not free a person from the grip of a desire to self-aggrandize or seek to support their own interests at the public expense?
The second level is my ambivalence regarding the underlying point. I'd sure like to believe that smart and well-educated people make overall better decisions in the public sphere. Certainly it is true that stupid and ignorant people make spectacularly bad decisions in that same sphere. On the other hand, the democratic model outright assumes that people, smart or stupid, will vote their interests and not their beliefs (and one might add that interests and beliefs ought to match in equivalent proportion to intelligence); if people don't do that then many of the underlying assumptions that validate elections and public politics are vacated. It is in the general domain of smart people to assume that being smart is superior in all conditions, much in the same vein that rich people assume that being wealthy is a superior condition to all others. And equally fallacious, for pretty much the same reasons.
Personally I find your brand of cynicism offensive, and for my part have met enough educated people to pray that academically inclined folk never ever wield disproportionate power to their numbers. They are the ones who are ruled by ideology to the exclusion of reality, and with overweening senses of self-adulation seek to save the 'dirty masses' from their ignorance and conditions. I am not impressed. Surely there are other ways of viewing the world that are equally destructive, and those I would also never wish to possess power wielded in excess of the numbers of people who possess them; this is why democracy is the worst system except all the others, and the one I'd rather try to get to work rather than spew pointless invective upon it.
Interestingly, with occasional recent counter-examples I will admit, stupid people tend to choose people smarter than themselves to represent them.
A decent idea. At most three offices are up for national election in any given district (with extremely rare exceptions where some states have at-large house representatives), President/Vice-President (elected on a unified ticket), one Senator (66% chance), and one House Rep.
Slashdot Mirror
kryptkpr, above, made a good point on this issue. I'd make another one; even if it is clear to the user that by installing a P2P application and placing files in their 'shared folder' is tantamont to sharing copies of the file, it is not clear to the layman, especially a minor, that such an act of sharing is illegal. Many people do not think in computer terms, and think that the paradigm of sharing in the modern age is not different in kind from the sharing of yesteryear, such as loaning a book or record to a friend. Most people would not implicitly expect such behavior to be wrong, and probably would not know that it was (according to the law) until they were told.
Even prior copying activities have been protected in the past, and there is not an average adult today that would question the legality of taping their favorite show on TV to watch at a later time, or even loaning or giving that tape to a friend. The minutiae of 'fair-use' are not even on the radar screen for such people; they've been doing it for years, don't see sharing songs as any different, and are basically unaware of the underlying legal arguments either way.
And if it were possible for the average layman to traverse the eddies and cul-de-sacs of the law with middling success, then I would say that the story could end there. However, in reality, in most areas of US law, the law is so complicated and crufty that even lawyers who are experts in a particular field often will have difficulty predicting the likely outcome of a particular case or controversy in that field. How can a citizen under such circumstances know the law they are apparently obligated to follow?
In such an environment of legal indeterminacy, quantity, power, privilege, and money have a gap to wiggle through and affect the outcome. Scholars don't work for free; scholarly legal arguments come with a serious price tag. In such circumstances, it cannot serve the interests of justice to simply fall back on the textbook assumption that "the truth will out" in an adversarial proceeding, especially when an underlying and very obviously false assumption is that each side is sufficiently and equivalently equipped to argue the case at hand. While it may not be the job of the judge to prepare one side's case, it is not out of line to consider the inequality of the resources that each side brings to bear in considering how to weigh the arguments.
Anyone who is surprised that the RIAA is suing has NOT been on the internet, and thus they don't have to worry about it. Everyone else has been warned for quite some time now, and it's not like they had no clue it was illegal before the lawsuits even began.
That's one hell of a pair of assumptions. Most 10-14 year olds who use this technology (which is a serious chuck of the file-sharing user base) I imagine neither know nor care about the RIAA; lawsuits for them, if they have any awareness of the concept, is something that old people do. I also think you dramatically overestimate the extent to which 'obvious-to-slashdotter wisdom' is spread; keep in mind that the /. crowd is dramatically more aware and more conversant on copyright issues than the average casual web surfer.
As for your first point:
How do YOU sleep at night knowing that 'making available' a song that you don't own could wipe out your own savings? It's such a little thing, and SO easy to avoid... And yet, you do it anyhow.
I don't disagree (much) that if a person is aware of the likely consequences of an action, and yet does that action anyway, there is not too much sympathy to be had. However, simply 'making available' hasn't been settled as an action that could incur these consequences until now, and so it is hard to argue that the likely consequences were sufficiently apparent.
Further, and this is the point where I couldn't care less whether the person knew what they were doing or not, is that justice demands proportionality. There is a disgusting lack of proportionality in punishing a person for causing what is at best a few bucks worth of harm by destroying their economic future.
Though the 'switch in time that saved nine' meme has become undergrad gospel Supreme Court history, there is a decent amount of evidence that the switch had little if anything to do with the threatened court packing, as while the decision at issue was delivered after the plan had been announced by FDR, it is unclear whether the actual deliberation and vote on that decision occurred before or after the announcement.
It is the ultimate dismissal of human life and values.
On this we disagree; duty to others is in many cases an affirmation of a recognition of the value of human life. Where I think duty becomes problematic is when it is applied to abstractions of people, or to people in the aggregate, especially when that aggregation is not the primary beneficiary-in-fact of the fruits of the duty-labor. Most governments, for example, are this way, where there is an explicit duty to the 'people of a nation' when in most cases the benefits of the duty are received only by a small number of the total citizenry.
Just like if you have a sensitive neurotic kid in your neighborhood, you wouldn't call him names in jest that you would call everyone else.
Dude, I don't know what amazing utopian neighborhood you grew up in, but in most of the rest of the world, that kid you just described gets it the worst.
Dare I ask whether you've ever spent time in a jail cell? There is political freedom, and then there is literal Freedom to carry on your life, live in your home, tuck your kids in at night, etc.. It is this second type of freedom, which you trivialize, that is being discussed by GP.
While I will not dispute that political and social freedoms are of extreme importance, their importance is at best on parity with practical freedom, esp. the freedom to live physically freely. Anyone engaging in an activity which might deprive them of that freedom should not be so cavalier.
It was smart of him up until the part where he got caught. Seriously, for those of us who think that nuclear power would be a good stopgap energy solution to invest in, cover-ups really set back the team, probably a great deal more than the original incident would have if they just copped to it in a low-key fashion.
What you're not getting (and from outside the US, it might not even be all that obvious) is that Bush is so bad in many deeply unconservative ways that even may rank-and-file Republicans were voting across party lines to attempt to counterbalance his excesses by installing an opposition congress. In the final analysis, many believe that having something of a constitution left is preferable to having their own party in power as it drives everything straight into the ground. The irony, of course, is that the newly minted democratic majority has been utterly useless at counterbalancing Bush, and probably will remain so until 2008.
It happens. Reporters, being somewhat lazy on the technical end sometimes, will run with whatever units their source provided them. Some happy-go-lucky SI geek gets a hold of an impressionable or lazy reporter, and you'll get kilometers, grams, liters (litres!) and all other sorts of perversion and anti-American sentiment. That's how I understand how it happens, anyway.
While I am by and large against intrusive gun control, the poster had a point. The gun-rights lobby is guilty, as many others are, of reducing what ought to be nuanced and well-reasoned arguments into trite slogans that don't help any discussion of the issue. The problem becomes that through these slogans rank-and-file believers become a liability to the cause, as their parroting makes them and their position seem overly simplistic, naive, and unreasonable.
You misunderstand. I'm not saying that cell phones *are* important or necessary. I'm saying that, as opposed to five years ago, the general sentiment of the public has come to regard them as important and perhaps necessary. There are in fact many occupations now where you would not maintain your employment if you were not accessible by phone or e-mail; it is a social and employment expectation of access. That was what the original post was about: the supposed inability of the general public to identify internet access as something important enough to protect and guarantee, which I think as I indicated their devaluation is overestimated.
I'd have agreed with you. Now? I think you underestimate just how much people have realized that Internet access is important to their lives, even if it isn't a technical 'necessity' in most cases. It's much like cell phones: they used to be regarded as merely a convenience (and an ostentatious one at that) but now you are the weirdo on the block if you don't have one, a crazed luddite. I think the same is basically true now about e-mail and Google access.
Troll? Seriously? Oh come on, mods. That was, at worst, FUNNY. Wish I had mod points to help rectify the injustice. ;)
Well, where software is concerned, EULAs are moot. You see the EULA after you make the purchase and open the package. Open the package, the store will refuse to accept it. Your right of first sale (it's a commodity good, NOT a work for hire) allows you to use it for its intended purpose without restriction. You are still of course bound by patents and copyrights, but not to use the package for its advertised purpose, or even to resell it to someone else when you're finished with it.
Not that I disagree that's how it ought to be, but last I checked/heard/read the US Appeals courts were still thoroughly confused on the point of whether the First Sale Doctrine applies to software licensed for purchase. Any lawyers in the house who know one way or the other? Have there been any definitive rulings, esp. Supreme court rulings on the issue?
Hey guys, it is mid-August in what was supposed to be a record hurricane season. No storms yet.
Apparently you do not live in Texas, where Hurricane Dean (the fourth named storm of the season) is about to hit. But hey, don't let facts get in the way of a good story.
Most rules books for RPGs explicitly say 'these rules only at the discretion of the GM', and they are right to do so. If a character is doing infinite damage every turn due to munchkining and slavish and/or badly twisted interpretations of some rules set, the GM is not doing his/her job, period. My favorite D&D system was 3rd ed, right out of the box (well, corebooks); needed few dice, easily scalable, removed most of the cruft from prior eds, and was easy to ad hoc or homebrew rules. When a book rule gave a counterintuitive mechanic for something, I or whoever else was GMing would craft a house rule that worked better. I have found that so long as the players trust that you are being fair and attempting for a fun game, they tend not to be crummy sports about the rules.
He mentioned it, I imagine, because of the surprise and amusement previously expressed that a CIA analyst would care enough about Buffy to edit that page. Implication being that CIA analysts are different enough from 'normal' people who are non-CIA analysts that such an interest is surprising. GP's point was that it shouldn't be surprising, as the distinction between people who are and people who are not CIA analysts is smaller than was originally implied. Certainly, in any case, smaller than your obnoxious counter example of mass murderers and dictators. To your question, yes, it is a powerful instinct in people to demonize those who are perceived to be 'the enemy'. Thus, it never hurts to point out the humanity of people in that group, unless the enemy as such is quite behyond humanization (such as the aforementioned dictators and mass murderers).
And that this needs to be explained at all is quite embarrassing on your account.
Well, you make an interesting point. I think what has changed most is the rate of social acceptance and civilization-wide implementation of new technologies, and the attendant acceleration of social, legal, political, and psychological changes. From the Watt Steam Engine (first engine concept robust enough to pull significant loads) to Blenkinsop's Steam Rail car was forty years, and significant commercial implementation was another twenty-five. Even with that amount of lead time, the impacts on society and government were immense. Now compare the time-lapse between the first practical personal computer to commercial implementation of the Internet, and the gap is one-quarter the size. And the Internet is shaping up to be as much if not more transformative.
You have to keep reading. Though, I will admit, the pro-life lobby tends to be so dismissively unconcerned with female dignity that it was plausible enough on the fringes. That it was remotely possible and believable that a presidential candidate could endorse such a callous thing...well, hell, one of them has been talking lately of wiping entire cities off the map if Muslims continue to irritate him. So, I suppose anything goes.
World War II was a war with readily identifiable enemies, discrete military and political goals, and concrete benchmarks for meeting those goals. There were also 'victory conditions' easily defined, that marked, once achieved, the conclusion of the war. The "War on Terror" is none of those things, and has no discernible victory conditions.
Comparing an extraordinary or constitutionally-questionable surveillance power or privilege from WWII to one today is beyond absurd. Unlike in a regular war, which typically ends after some period of time, in a permanent war, freedoms gone are gone for good, because it is problematic to reasonably postulate a time when the tools used to prosecute the war will no longer be necessary. In addition, the experiences of both France and Israel (and most recently the US) have shown that counter-intelligence techniques and powers quickly migrate from the military into the domestic law enforcement context, and are difficult to remove once they have made that migration.
How are they going to justify the Big Brother system in New York?
But this is progress. As such, the burden is now on those like you to justify standing in the way of progress. Why are you such a reactionary luddite technophobe? Don't you want rapists and murderers to get caught? We should embrace this and all other technologies which will usher in a brave new world...eh...um, yeah!
Seriously though, this is the mentality in a technocratic culture like ours. Tools are worshiped above and beyond any consequences that might proceed from their introduction. For once, I am sort of glad that there are some cranky old men and women sitting on the bench in many places, critical and suspicious of law enforcement and regulatory technology that many others unthinkingly rush to adopt. Many times, admittedly, such elderly crankiness produces decisions that turn upon misunderstandings of the technology. Much of the time, however, their cautious distrust of technology can retard the whole-scale embrace of new invasive techniques and devices for at least a little while. I was pleasantly surprised, for example, when the justices ruled that thermal surveillance cameras of a residence were a 'search' that required the standard warrant and probable cause.
Most of the spies you know?
I'm divided on two levels.
The first level is whether to respond to you earnestly or snarkily, as it seems that while you are somewhat flamebaiting, the ideas you are expressing are not exactly uncommon amongst the Slashdot crowd. Would it do to point out merely that many (probably most) of the monsters in humanity's history (and their many apologists) were earnest students of politics, history, art, sociology, science, and world history? Or does it bear mentioning that education and intelligence of a superior caliber is nearly universally consummate with superior arrogance and ambition? Or the further obvious fact that studying those things does not free a person from the grip of a desire to self-aggrandize or seek to support their own interests at the public expense?
The second level is my ambivalence regarding the underlying point. I'd sure like to believe that smart and well-educated people make overall better decisions in the public sphere. Certainly it is true that stupid and ignorant people make spectacularly bad decisions in that same sphere. On the other hand, the democratic model outright assumes that people, smart or stupid, will vote their interests and not their beliefs (and one might add that interests and beliefs ought to match in equivalent proportion to intelligence); if people don't do that then many of the underlying assumptions that validate elections and public politics are vacated. It is in the general domain of smart people to assume that being smart is superior in all conditions, much in the same vein that rich people assume that being wealthy is a superior condition to all others. And equally fallacious, for pretty much the same reasons.
Personally I find your brand of cynicism offensive, and for my part have met enough educated people to pray that academically inclined folk never ever wield disproportionate power to their numbers. They are the ones who are ruled by ideology to the exclusion of reality, and with overweening senses of self-adulation seek to save the 'dirty masses' from their ignorance and conditions. I am not impressed. Surely there are other ways of viewing the world that are equally destructive, and those I would also never wish to possess power wielded in excess of the numbers of people who possess them; this is why democracy is the worst system except all the others, and the one I'd rather try to get to work rather than spew pointless invective upon it.
Interestingly, with occasional recent counter-examples I will admit, stupid people tend to choose people smarter than themselves to represent them.
A decent idea. At most three offices are up for national election in any given district (with extremely rare exceptions where some states have at-large house representatives), President/Vice-President (elected on a unified ticket), one Senator (66% chance), and one House Rep.