Quote:
Originally Posted by SecondFloor
I think you are correct when you say Trump is a symptom and not the cause. For the last 40 years America has de-funded public education systems. When we do budget for schools, it is based off the taxes in the school area, so rich areas have good schools and poor areas have worse schools - and the distance gets wider all the time.
Democracy requires intelligent, well-informed citizens to work correctly, because it requires that citizens participate in political decisions. Some political issues are very complicated - issues of global finance and geopolitics - we need citizens who understand these difficult problems and can make informed choices.
In Italy, in the 1400s, when the founders of the Renaissance were trying to figure out how to implement democracy, they looked at the education system of the ancient greeks. The humanist education - rhetoric, logic, argument, communication - and they decided THIS is what makes democracy work. America needs this kind of citizen - well-informed, well-educated, intellectually curious. But it has starved its education system, and now we have adult citizens who can't discern reality from fantasy.
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just like you, I would have written it if my english was perfect enough.
nice that you don't use your head only for hair cutting.
and nice that you think about the real problems that don't offer simple solutions in themselves.
if i let my dogs choose how often they get to eat, they would be dead after a few months. so they are not allowed to vote and are excluded from democratic rules and that is good for them.
but now unfortunately i am an ardent advocate of democracy - at least when it comes to the human society and here begins the problem, because if people have the educational status of my dogs, that can end in disaster.
here the heart of freedom beats against the heart of logic and to defeat this evil we don't need hollywood but an equal education system all over the world and for everyone.
we need people who also recognize when they are pulled over the table with rhetorical tricks that could be read in any 2-dollar pocket book.
we live in the age of manipulation and also the advertising industry would not exist at all if these tricks would not work.
may stupid mistakes make? yes - they may - but only as long as these mistakes do not have to be paid by others.
education is therefore the highest goal that we humans should have. education, empathy, logic and farsightedness are the true rare earths from which we have too little.
for me, it's simply frightening that millions of people don't realize that in the oval office a notorious liar and dilletant is sitting - and in addition a damn bad liar.
it's also a mystery to me why these people don't recognize the carrying capacity in a worldwide economy, because the consequences will still be noticeable in decades to come.
i can't understand why so few people have even the simplest basic knowledge about what they like best: money.
this is where the problems and limits of democracy lie. maybe this is how the founding fathers of america saw it and that's why they introduced the electors who could turn the people's will for the better solution. this was perhaps the underlying idea that led them to it. but to continue this circumstance forever and to live with the fact that the voters are stupid and remain stupid doesn't make democracy grow but die.
there is a user here who wants to explain to me that the USA is not a democracy but a constitutional republic. Doesn't that also scare you that young people in this country have so little knowledge about forms of government that they don't even KNOW that they live in a democracy (even if in a special and limited form of it)?
A country that has been waging wars for democracy for decades. In which millions of soldiers have left their lives for democracy has inhabitants who do not know that they themselves live in a democracy? Should such people really be allowed to vote or wouldn't an election licence be appropriate in this case?
Please do not take this the wrong way. America is not the only country in the world with this problem. But America is the only country that claims to have understood democracy and from here on it becomes an oxymoron.
I worry about America but I worry even more about the remaining 96.7% of humanity for whom this is supposed to be an example.
You defend your 2nd Amendment and take thousands of deaths every year in exchange for it on the grounds that it is right to defend yourself against your government when it gets out of control. The government has been getting out of hand for decades - so what has the 2nd Amendment done, except killing people?
You hate the Russian oligarchs who milk the people there like cows and live in dependence on a few oligarchs who for decades have been telling you the blue of the sky and fooling you into believing the beautiful world.
There has never been a war movie shot in Hollywood in which the US Army doesn't win heroically and bravely. No matter what atrocities the same army has committed in the world and unmentioned the fact that America has never won a war (at least not alone).
Wake up America - this is not the reality that is called Matrix.