Re: OT ; Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On 02/10/2024 17:46, rbowman wrote:

On Wed, 2 Oct 2024 08:30:57 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
 

On 2 Oct 2024 07:29:49 GMT, rbowman wrote:
>

On Wed, 2 Oct 2024 03:05:23 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>

On 2 Oct 2024 02:40:51 GMT, rbowman wrote:
>

Democracy leads to mediocrity and worse.

>
“Democracy is the worst system in the world ... apart from all the
others.”
     -- Winston Churchill

>
You have this implicit assumption in the USA that you are the best in
the world at everything. Therefore if you do something badly, nobody
else can be doing it better.
>
Quite a few other countries manage to do democracy better than you; why
not learn from them?

 You keep making the assumption that I consider democracy a good thing.

It isn't the worst, by a long chalk.
I always like Heinlein's qualified democracy. You got a vote for education,  a vote for owning your own house, a vote for being  a parent and a vote for having served in the army. Something like that.
Or if you were a junked up piece of trash on social security, you didn't get a vote at all.
Populist leaders in an unsophisticated population leads to the excesses of South African democracy, but its still better than next door Zimbabwe, which is a ruthlessly ethnically cleansed single tribe 'communist' monoculture, with a 10th rate economy.
The problem is one of educating people to be capable of making informed choices, when the government takes over the schools and turns out indoctrinated assholes.
--
It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.
Mark Twain