So Washington state voters rejected the income tax on $200,000+ households, but approved the lifting of the sales tax on candy and soda! I'm tempted to make some obvious joke about bloated, toothless idiots serving their masters, but that would be to blame the victim, wouldn't it?
More or less. I think the coparison I offered in another post yesterday is a fair comment. Just as genes are expressed only in some environment, so is intelligence expressed only in specific environments. One way to characterize the current political environment is that the initial triumph of conservative capitalism in the Carter-Reagan Administration has reached an extreme, not only confining the electoral choice to a choice between extreme rightists (the DP as well as the RP being an extreme rightist party at present), but offering only extreme rightist perspectivesd on reality in all the organs of intellectual/political life. In that context, _every_ election will result in results that (however regards the voters) that are as Doug describes the Washington vote. Those results are no more objectively idiotic than urging both the improvement of education and the firing of teachers! Or calling the Afghanistan War a war against terrorism.
When leaders are deliberately obscurantist, what can the ordinary person do but cast weird votes.
So you are right: to attack the Washington voters is indeed to blame the victims. The environment in which human intelligence and good will have to be expressed will transform both -- to idiocy and ill will.
But ... If we assume that the "leaders" too are, as individuals, intelligent and knowledgeable (an assumption I would make), then one _might_ conclude that there is indeed an immense social crisis of a complexity that the leaders themselves cann not get a grip on.
Put in more technical terminology: we may indeed be in deep do-do.
Carrol