He travels to three states (Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania) that are having key mid-term elections on Tuesday, November 8 to talk to mostly Republican voters. As usual, he does not seem to find any difficulty in interviewing total nutters who seem to be unable to understand simple logic.
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
It’s not even just simple logic. See the withered hag at 9:41, who states clearly that even if she knew she’d got fewer votes she wouldn’t concede, then when challenged on that point concedes that she doesn’t know what “concede” means.
Why are these people even allowed to vote?
Because of the danger of election deniers deciding that I’m too insane to vote.
Yeah. I know. I get it. I agree.
It just always amazes me that people I wouldn’t trust to sit the right way on a toilet seat get to contribute to the decision about how the government is run.
I have a couple of things I trot out when Brexit comes up, if someone tells me they voted Leave. First I ask them this: which do you think is more likely to reconcile the inconsistencies between quantum theory and general relativity -- loop quantum gravity, or string theory? I know a single-digit number of people qualified to understand the question, let alone begin to have a meaningful opinion. Overwhelmingly, people look at me like I’m stupid for even asking -- it’s obvious to them that they’re comically unequipped to answer usefully. To which my response is -- what the fuck makes you think you were any more qualified to answer the Brexit question? It’s not “do you want fries with that?”. It’s complicated.
So given that, my suggestion for the vote was “choose your company” -- look at who you’re comfortable being associated with. On the one hand, every living prime minister, the official policy of ALL the major political parties, most professional and academic organisations, huge numbers of respected authorities, and ALL the experts. On the other side, Alexander “Boris” Johnson and a cavalcade of racists and c**ts.
It would be nice if Jabba the Hutt about nine minutes in could have her voting card altered so it said “Do you want to vote for the people who try to steal votes and manipulate elections?”, so that when she ticks “Fuck no!”, that vote goes Democrat. She’ll get what she wants, which is surely the point of an election. Who could argue?
I think part of my problem is I have trouble accepting the apparent reality that really quite a lot of people (although it seems thankfully not quite a majority) are hateful, bigoted arseholes. I want so hard for that not to be true, despite the hard evidence the world presents me with every bloody day. I criticise others for delusions like astrology, religion, ghosts, whatever -- but I’m just as deluded, I think. It’s just that my delusion is that people are generally OK.
I’m going for a little lie down.
@3
Yes, definitely. What gets me down is remembering the sort of people with whom I went to high school. I suspect that many of them never matured emotionally beyond age 15, and to whom academics in general was anathema. I knew people so dim that they couldn’t find their own butts if you tied their hands behind their backs. No doubt many of them vote today (and think their opinions on economics, science, CRT, etc. are well-formed). Mind you, there were some very nice, intelligent, considerate people, but they remained a minority. I suspect that I went to a fairly typical US high school at the time.
It’s a problem, but what we do we do about it? For starters, I suggest that the US election/campaign system is horribly broken, and is at least partly responsible for the disinformation, obfuscation, and out right lies that we see in print and on TV and radio. I’ve seen TV campaign ads over the last few weeks that are just flat out lies. No one is held accountable for it so it just gets worse, and naive people see it, and believe it. Media companies sell politics as sport and entertainment. It’s always about grabbing eyes/viewers to make more money, not what is good for society. People identify with and join a team, turn off their brain, and that’s that. But how do you get the people who control and benefit from this system (the entrenched political parties, their funders, many of the politicians in those parties) to change it?