Working the Refs
16th August 2021
Severian speaks truth to cower.
For as dumb as the average voter is — and you certainly don’t have to tell me — about specific stuff, the general questions of public policy aren’t that hard. The public, if consulted, gets them “right” about as often as the refs get the calls right, if only because, like the majority of balls and strikes etc., most times the “right” call is pretty obvious. Just to take one recent example, “our” ingnominious (a word this iteration of WordPress insists is a typo, how ya like that?) retreat from Afghanistan. Had the public been consulted at any point after the first, whack-’em-with-SF stage, none of the subsequent bullshit would’ve happened.
Is “nation-building” a viable thing in one of the world’s most backward places? Of course not. Any idiot can see that. Put the facts fairly to The People, let them vote on it, and the war is over by spring 2004.
The key concept with ‘democracy’ is not that The Peepul will get it right all of the time — they won’t, you know that and I know that — but that they get to decide, be they right or wrong, it’s their decision to make.