alt Hacker NewsIf you don't think people can decide whether statements made in ads are true or false, then why trust them to decide who makes & enforces laws? Either they're rational adults or they're not.
You're saying you want Trump's FEC to decide what ads can be shown during a football game. Do you really think that would be an improvement?
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This is not as black and white as you portray it to be.
Humans are inherently irrational, but that doesn't mean they can't make good decisions as a group [0].
But we can also be convinced to not trust our own eyes, at least in the short term.
[0]The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki (2004) is a great book covering this idea.
We are social animals not the god's replica, it means we got biases and one of the strongest is that we behave like a flock to ensure cohesion and shared responsibility to increase our survival.
So no people are influenced by everything, saying otherwise is preposterous, it's how we found out about PTSD which we didn't even believe at first to be psychological but physical hence the name shellshock.
The question is how much and what are the ultimate effects of the daily exposure to something.
I'm saying that in living memory we had campaign contribution limits (still do!) and we also had limits in outside groups buying advertising intended to swing elections. Maybe Trump's FEC wouldn't have enforced them but then campaigns have standing and can sue directly.
> then why trust them to decide who makes & enforces laws?
Firstly, it's not black and white: humans are swayed by propaganda, but not entirely.
Historically:
We tried feudalism, and we have run limited experiments with one-party states.
Classical republics with a citizen class might obviate the fuckwit-voter problem somewhat; but the French Revolution made the idea of a political underclass unpalatable, and I'm not sure the conditions still hold. Classical Athenian education was sufficient to prepare the gentry for the problems of classical Athens; society today has more moving parts.
Benevolent and wise dictatorship would be nice, but the "benevolent" and "wise" parts may be unrealistic expectation.
I like anarchy, but i don't believe it scales to nation size.
I am open to being convinced that some given form of government would be ideal, but i very much doubt that i can be convinced that there's any path to get there, and I'll always be skeptical that the given idea will be as sweet as promised in practice. Revolution tends to pan out badly.
We are all motes in a complex system. The fact that we can perceive and reason about that system is a cosmic cruelty.