Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: goldworldnet who wrote (269654)	7/3/2002 2:10:55 AM
From: JEB	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

LOL, ...I love it! ... First let me note that as well as being too dumb to vote, you can also be too smart to vote. People of very high intelligence are especially susceptible to large abstract theories about society. They live lives, and think thoughts, that put a wide gulf between themselves and the generality of citizens. Carry out the following thought experiment. Suppose that in, say, 1920 the U.S. franchise had been limited to citizens holding a Ph.D. What would the consequences have been? Is there any doubt that we should have had a Soviet America in very short order, and that we should right now be digging ourselves out of the same pit the poor Russians find themselves in? It seems to me, in fact, that political stupidity is a special kind of stupidity, not well correlated with other kinds. At the very highest levels of intelligence, the correlation may actually be inverse: the more brilliant you are, the dumber your politics. Albert Einstein seems to have thought well of Stalin; Hitlerism got its first mass following in the highly-selective German universities. And think—without smiling, if you can—of the barmy political programs that issued forth, with such confidence, from Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertrand Russell, Norman Mailer and other members of the mid-20th-century preposterentsia, as exposed in withering detail in Paul Johnson's book Intellectuals. Message 17688729 ;-) JEB