Ah, but pushing the idea of God took a lot of work by a lot of dedicated people for a very long time. With current technology this would take a tiny fraction of the time. I don't think people were any smarter before. In fact, I think people are on average smarter (or less stupid) than at any time in prior history (not an optimistic statement though, people in the past set the bar very low). But stupid ideas can propagate and strengthen much faster now.
Of course, the God story did lay the groundwork for a lot of the modern stupidity ("I don't want to vaccinate my kids because it goes against my religion!", "the Bible says the world is only 4000 years old", etc.), but technology is now exponentiating this effect. It's like giving the American nuclear arsenal to a pyromaniac.
Democracy, like any other politically charged term like Fascism, Socialism, Terrorism, Nazism, etc. is a rather silly word, people use it to mean whatever they want it to mean at the time. Unfortunately there seem to be too many people who think that having elections equals "democracy" equals a "good" government system (or, as the cliché goes, the least bad we have). Even if you set aside subtleties like what do the elected do, how they interact with each other, and what checks and balances are built into the system, the reality is that "democracy" has brought us endless wars, a destruction of the environment on a geological scale, the senseless death and/or torture of millions of people, etc. People are very bad at predicting the consequences of their choices, and extremely likely to choose based on emotion rather than reason. And rich people and politicians know very well how to take advantage of that.
In any event, I completely agree with you that Hillary would have been way worse. Like an eviler, more efficient Obama. Trump and the Republican Party are no less evil, but they're much less efficient. This is also something I've always pointed out to people trying to understand Venezuela: the only reason the country didn't get destroyed faster was that the government was so inefficient that they couldn't even be evil effectively. Given the two choices of Hillary and Donald, I guess people did the best they could, but that doesn't change the fact that "Democracy" gave us only those two options.
For the record, I don't really loathe people in general. I only loathe people who are ignorant and proud of their ignorance. That's a lot of them but not all!
Ah, but pushing the idea of God took a lot of work by a lot of dedicated people for a very long time. With current technology this would take a tiny fraction of the time. I don't think people were any smarter before. In fact, I think people are on average smarter (or less stupid) than at any time in prior history (not an optimistic statement though, people in the past set the bar very low). But stupid ideas can propagate and strengthen much faster now.
Of course, the God story did lay the groundwork for a lot of the modern stupidity ("I don't want to vaccinate my kids because it goes against my religion!", "the Bible says the world is only 4000 years old", etc.), but technology is now exponentiating this effect. It's like giving the American nuclear arsenal to a pyromaniac.
Democracy, like any other politically charged term like Fascism, Socialism, Terrorism, Nazism, etc. is a rather silly word, people use it to mean whatever they want it to mean at the time. Unfortunately there seem to be too many people who think that having elections equals "democracy" equals a "good" government system (or, as the cliché goes, the least bad we have). Even if you set aside subtleties like what do the elected do, how they interact with each other, and what checks and balances are built into the system, the reality is that "democracy" has brought us endless wars, a destruction of the environment on a geological scale, the senseless death and/or torture of millions of people, etc. People are very bad at predicting the consequences of their choices, and extremely likely to choose based on emotion rather than reason. And rich people and politicians know very well how to take advantage of that.
In any event, I completely agree with you that Hillary would have been way worse. Like an eviler, more efficient Obama. Trump and the Republican Party are no less evil, but they're much less efficient. This is also something I've always pointed out to people trying to understand Venezuela: the only reason the country didn't get destroyed faster was that the government was so inefficient that they couldn't even be evil effectively. Given the two choices of Hillary and Donald, I guess people did the best they could, but that doesn't change the fact that "Democracy" gave us only those two options.
For the record, I don't really loathe people in general. I only loathe people who are ignorant and proud of their ignorance. That's a lot of them but not all!