For those Napsterites in the USA

[theknife]

Originally Posted by albed

Does anyone really think getting more idiots to the polls will make democratic countries any better. Most of the political rallying cries amount to little more than shallow commercial slogans; "vote for change", "blah blah cheaper gasoline blah blah", etc. aimed at the large segment of low IQ voters who can't or won't put forth the effort to understand complex issues. Why the fuck do we need more of them voting?


I don't think the internet has made dumb voters any smarter; it's just given empty propaganda a wider audience and provided bandwagon appeal to get even apolitical people to support a candidate just because others are and it's the cool thing to do.


And no matter how the presidential election turns out, the vast majority of voters would have preferred someone else in that position. Think about that.

so only people as smart as you should be able to vote? quite the elitist, aren't we? perhaps we should just roll back the process a couple hundred years and only allow white male landowners to vote...

more information is inherently a good thing - whether people are using it well is impossible to quantify and therefore inarguable. the internet simply expands on what radio, tv, and the printing press has done before it and takes it to the next level.

furthermore, the internet decentralizes the political process in a fundamentally profound way: a candidate now has the ability to go outside of the established party structure to organize and fund-raise at an unprecedented grass-roots level. a national constituent base , a war chest, and a campaign can be created online literally in a matter of hours. in this way, the internet has weakened the top-down nature of party politics - also a good thing, imo.