86
this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2026
86 points (100.0% liked)
Slop.
851 readers
511 users here now
For posting all the anonymous reactionary bullshit that you can't post anywhere else.
Rule 1: All posts must include links to the subject matter, and no identifying information should be redacted.
Rule 2: If your source is a reactionary website, please use archive.is instead of linking directly.
Rule 3: No sectarianism.
Rule 4: TERF/SWERFs Not Welcome
Rule 5: No bigotry of any kind, including ironic bigotry.
Rule 6: Do not post fellow hexbears.
Rule 7: Do not individually target federated instances' admins or moderators.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
"I don't know who he is but I trust senator
" is a voting demographic
Explain to me again why democracy is an ideal when the majority are just plain dumb?
To be transparent, I find it distressing that this conversation seems to come up every second week on a forum that is nominally for leftists, but I will nonetheless give you a summary.
Imagining counterfactually that all of the tacit assumptions about humanity you are making are true, the answer is still not an enlightened oligarchy, because that simply is not a real system of governance (oligarchy is, relying on arbitrary enlightenment on a personal level is not). You cannot construct any such system that doesn't just become a bureaucratic monstrosity that has very little regard for whatever sort of enlightenment you were initially selecting oligarchs for. Either democracy must be made to work or there is no real approach to progressive politics that isn't just the Dictatorship of You, Personally in place of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
The ruling ideology in all societies is the ideology of the ruling class. Ideology overwhelmingly functions effectively as a survival strategy, whether in terms of guiding practical action toward the world or developing coping mechanisms to rationalize action and inaction informed by the former. It should be extremely obvious why leftist spaces tend to be populated by people of various marginalized identities, because these are the people that the ruling ideology nakedly hurts in a way that is either intolerable or fully not survivable, so they seek out alternatives. This does not mean that they were born with superior souls to the social majority ["social majority" means people society socially privileges, even if they are in the numerical minority, like men or white South Africans or whoever], it means that the circumstances they were met with disincentivized them from turning a blind eye to the barbarism of the status quo, usually in the interest of protecting themselves or people in their lives. It is the job of every socialist to change that calculus by various means in the minds of more and more of the population until we have a popular base for making the proletariat the ruling class with its own ruling ideology.
The people are not above criticism, but they aren't as bad as you are portraying them to be and this is blatantly an absurd extrapolation even setting aside that we don't really know why the polling data looks as it does.
The website being this tolerant of misanthropy and bald-faced elitism is really not to anyone's benefit.
It feels very wrong that I can do a ton of research on candidates, dig into their backgrounds, do my homework and yet I have the exact same voting power as someone who is filling in ovals because the candidate hits some demographic (I've heard voters vote for only women for example) or has a certain letter next to their name of because they were the first person on the list (yes that actually happens and there's a small advantage to being on top of the list on a ballot). People don't vote when it's raining outside. People vote "how Jesus told me to vote".
People voted for Kamala in 2024 simply because she was black. Some simply because she was a woman. Some voted against her simply for those reasons.
People ARE fucking stupid and I have a lifetime of dealing with these people to back that up. Normally being dumb is harmless or at least only self-inflicted injury. I don't know jack about fishing so I don't fish. No harm no foul. No one gets hurt.
But people who know nothing about how the world works or are blindly following whatever because most people are sheep... well they vote and they outnumber people like us who have put in the hours and studied, read books, learned all of the history, etc. So stupid wins. And my family suffers for it. My friends get hunted by the government because of it. I can't ever afford a house no matter how hard I work because Cletus and his 12 kids outnumber me and the Baptist Evangelical church they all go to told them to vote Republican. I'm sick of it!
I refuted this with point 1. You can complain that it is unfair, but you have no alternative, just grievances. What? Do you want us to do dressed-up literacy tests like had been used to further-marginalize minorities for so long in America? For our trouble, we would get the grand accomplishment of giving tremendously disproportionate power to the fucking lanyards who, surprise surprise, don't actually want pro-social policy just because they score far above the average in their awareness of the policies of candidates and so on, and in many cases score far above you.
Who writes and evaluates the tests? Whatever you claim the answer is, the ultimate answer is "bureaucrats," because a ruling minority who gets to decide the terms of qualifying for being in the ruling minority is a bureaucracy, and the majority being able to decide and re-decide the terms will, on the basis of class interests, will come to reflect the ruling class's interests.
Maybe political equality is unfair, but so is the inexorable march of entropy. It's a cost of existing in the real world and not being able to just wave a wand to make things however you personally want with magic.
I refuted this line of argument with point 2, which you never even attempted to address. The ruling ideological paradigm is backwards and most people follow one of the manifold versions of still just supporting rancid neoliberals or theocrats. You have failed to make any attempt to understand why this is the case beyond the most intellectually lazy and epistemically worthless and elitist conclusion:
Your position is indefensibly reactionary, and being able to point at people making foolish or false claims is just completely failing to understand the terms of the argument in favor of saying their souls are wrong and yours is better. Until you make a more serious attempt to understand why people are the way they are (and no, it's not their inherent inferiority to you), you are just going to be making the same arguments that heinous supremacists have made since the written word was invented.
What books? What history? You clearly are no Marxist, nor an anarchist, nor do you seem to have a grasp of "all of the history" or you'd understand that technocracy is a farcical dead end, just like all of these misanthropic screeds.
And I'm sick of people mistaking Idiocracy for serious political analysis, but we can't always get what we want.
As kind of an aside, besides all the other issues with complaining about the "stupidity of the masses" and so on, you're also missing that intelligence has very little to do with it because you don't need to be a policy wonk to support better policy, and in fact most people who support better policy aren't policy wonks (and for several major policies, this includes most Americans!). The fundamental difference between you and them isn't that you're so much smarter, it's that you were met with conditions that pushed you against the status quo. We can make some tedious argument about the precise threshold is affected by intelligence, but it's missing the forest for the trees, the forest in this analogy being that humans are continuously shaped and re-shaped by their circumstances.
Beautiful 💚
I and basically everyone on this site ARE smarter than most people and I have no problem owning that. I can read at a high school level just for starters.
Also if we are relying on people to fall into conditions to push them our of Capitalist thinking... no wonder ML parties have 0 successes in the west.
Where is this "soul" crap coming from? I said people are stupid and no matter how much word salad you want to serve you are not erasing decades of real life experience that proves to me over thousands of interactions that I'm right. Go work a week in any customer facing job and then claim that the masses are somehow enlightened when most of them can't read past a 6th grade level!
I want the system China has. No direct elections over party leadership, but many layers of party positions where the people can choose their local reps, and the reps have to PROVE they are competent leaders by doing good work, producing results, and studying advanced Marxism to move up the ranks. This is a Meritocracy seeded with people that the local voters want to represent them. I like this system.
The system we have now is a marketing farce where there is a multi-billion dollar industry dedicated to share vapid emotional appeals to elect the dumbest people to go to Congress, get Aipac money and piss and moan about Hasan Piker.
This debate bro speak is obnoxious. Cut it out
You don't know me and you don't get to define who I am.
I have enough knowledge to know the only thing that ever works at gaining power is violence and war. This idealist notion that we can just talk our way to Socialism is short-sighted. Nice to imagine but not real life. The problem you will run into quickly is that people in general are not logical creatures. They're emotional ones. And the way leftists in general and especially ones on ML sites is... cringe. I want to like you people because we share some views but the more I am here the more I realize the electoralist, social Democratic end is where I belong.