Originally Posted by Zichao

Whether the body politic wants it or not. After all, you know better than them...

Nope. No matter how often you assert it, it doesn't get any truer.

If you were only intending to do what they wanted you wouldn't need to educate them about your ideas.

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Originally Posted by Zichao

But I didn't say do as little as possible, I said go into it with a healthy terror of what'll happen to you if you piss too many people off.

You'll lose the next election. That's what usually happens...

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Persuading surely? Superiors educate, equals persuade.

If I wasn't superior to nearly all (in in terms of intellectual capabilities and understanding), why would I try to be a leader? On which grounds?

Leaders have to be superior or, more to the point, deliver superior governmentship to justify them getting the job in the first place. Otherwise, they're just overpaid, overaggrandized assholes - and I cannot respect them or their decisions. Which is what's happening right now. I am not impressed with nearly all of our politicians and so I feel cheated. Why am I paying taxes to these fuckwits?

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Whether the body politic wants it or not. After all, you know better than them...

Not hard when, as you yourself points out, 99% of them are idiots. You cannot maintain both attitudes at once. And even your rebuttal that people should be free to hurt themselves doesn't wash when you consider that bad policy decisions affect me/mine whether i want it or not i.e. i am part of society and cannot withdraw.

I can be that detached only when it comes to a far off land like, say, the US. I might have been annoyed with their pointless war on Iraq but, ultimately, it has had little effect on me directly. But if French or English electors (or even German and Greek ones) fuck up, I will suffer very directly from their stupidity. Through no fault of my own. And, surely, i have enough short comings on my own without adding the public idiocies to them...

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Originally Posted by Zichao

If you were only intending to do what they wanted you wouldn't need to educate them about your ideas.

I didn't say you needed to. I said you couldn't help it. Because everything you do, and everything you say in explanation or justification, becomes part of the public conversation.

Is there such a thing as "the public conversation"?

The UK red-tops would lead you to believe that theirs is the public conversation; The Guardian would try to convince you that theirs is it. In the meantime there is a more measured conversation going on amongst the readers of The Financial Times and, indeed, The Economist, which this week starts this conversation:

Cutting the fiscal deficit

The workout begins

George Osborne and David Laws have an unenviable job to do. Tax rises and welfare cuts are inevitable

IF THERE is one reason why a hung parliament produced Britain’s first coalition government for 65 years, it is the dire state of the public finances. The Conservatives realised that they needed a formal coalition with the Liberal Democrats for the full five-year lifetime of the parliament to push through the politically perilous slashing of public borrowing. The Lib Dems, for their part, feared that hanging back on the sidelines at a time of national emergency could undermine their credibility as a serious political force.



The starting point for the new team at the Treasury is a towering deficit of £163 billion ($235 billion) in 2009-10, the fiscal year that ended in March. At 11.6% of national income, this was by far the biggest since the second world war. According to forecasts published by the IMF on May 14th, Britain’s deficit will be the highest in the G7 both this year and next (see chart).

This week the government lost no time in signposting how it will bring the public finances under control—a task so formidable that it will test the resolve and staying power of the coalition. George Osborne, the Conservative chancellor of the exchequer, said that spending cuts worth £6 billion in 2010-11 would be announced on May 24th. As for the other £157 billion, the “emergency” budget he pledged before the election will be unveiled on June 22nd. This will set out the broad outline for the fiscal retrenchment that lies ahead and get the bad news out on planned tax rises. A spending review conducted by David Laws, the Lib Dem chief secretary to the Treasury, will go where both parties feared to tread in the campaign and specify this autumn where the axe will actually fall. [...]

The fate of a nation ultimately depends on which public conversation will prevail.

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You'll lose the next election. That's what usually happens...

Yep. One of the principal advantages of democracy being that it sanctions bad behaviour.

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If I wasn't superior to nearly all (in in terms of intellectual capabilities and understanding), why would I try to be a leader? On which grounds?

Somewhat brainier than others in your own specialisation =/= infallible.

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Not hard when, as you yourself points out, 99% of them are idiots. You cannot maintain both attitudes at once. And even your rebuttal that people should be free to hurt themselves doesn't wash when you consider that bad policy decisions affect me/mine whether i want it or not i.e. i am part of society and cannot withdraw. I can be that detached only when it comes to a far off land like, say, the US. I might have been annoyed with their pointless war on Iraq but, ultimately, it has had little effect on me directly. But if French or English electors (or even German and Greek ones) fuck up, I will suffer very directly from their stupidity. Through no fault of my own. And, surely, i have enough short comings on my own without adding the public idiocies to them...

If you've got a better system I'm all ears.

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I didn't say you needed to. I said you couldn't help it. Because everything you do, and everything you say in explanation or justification, becomes part of the public conversation.

I suspect that if I regularly went into conversations with the objective of educating those around me I wouldn't get many repeat invitations.

I've said it before, but "education" implies a position of superiority.

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Originally Posted by Zichao

Yep. One of the principal advantages of democracy being that it sanctions bad behaviour.

Agreed. So no need to add extra fears about making it out office alive...

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Somewhat brainier than others in your own specialisation =/= infallible.

Being brainier includes knowing your limits or realising when a problem may have several valid answers.

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If you've got a better system I'm all ears.

Nope, I don't have a better system. But it does mean I find normal for politicians to try and educate people.

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I suspect that if I regularly went into conversations with the objective of educating those around me I wouldn't get many repeat invitations. I've said it before, but "education" implies a position of superiority.

And the last politician who got elected because people thought he'd be a nicer guy to have a beer with than the opposotion turned out so well...

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Originally Posted by Zichao

I suspect that if I regularly went into conversations with the objective of educating those around me I wouldn't get many repeat invitations.

Which is in fact the opposite of what I said. I said nothing about it being an OBJECTIVE, I dexcribved as being INADVERTENT. You're missing the wood for the trees.

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I've said it before, but "education" implies a position of superiority.

Maybe that's why I used it in inverted commas?

Well okay, if you didn't actually mean education, what did you mean?

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Originally Posted by Zichao I suspect that if I regularly went into conversations with the objective of educating those around me I wouldn't get many repeat invitations. Which is in fact the opposite of what I said. I said nothing about it being an OBJECTIVE, I dexcribved as being INADVERTENT.

Where in Das Kapital does it define the role of the accidental educationalist?