prog | (no subject)

A while ago I posted a hypothetical question designed to be asked at Bush-voting Americans (which I'd happily link to if LJ had a tagging feature so I could find it grumble grumble). It was, in essence, "If you could magically eliminate everyone in the world who is not American, would you?" I predicted that more than you might think would answer in the affirmative. Got some very thoughtful comments, many saying I was just riding my own cynicism to think so lowly of my countrymen.

At first I tended to agree, but I have thought about this from time to time since then, and found that I've gone back to believing that my original hypothesis would be true. I am reminded of it, time and again, in little ways. I am posting this now because I saw it again today in this Doonesbury discussion thread.

I probably first saw it years ago back when I read Lileks every day, and he went insane in this highly specific fashion. And -- it's harsh -- but I really do think that a great deal of otherwise rational Americans are completely batshit crazy in the same way.

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Good Lord, I don't even comprehend that post. "There must be, to have those who are wealthy, those who are poor, those who are not going to get a fair shake"--that's not even a sentence.

There must be (those who are poor, those who are not going to get a fair shake) to have (those who are wealthy)

Oh! That makes sense. Well, by which I mean, that's a sensible parse of the sentence, which is, I stress, terribly written. ("those who are X, those who are Y, those who are Z" looks like it should be a single list.)

And of course, it's not remotely true. I mean, perhaps if one wants a sense of superiority, one can't feel wealthy unless there are lots of people with less than you; but it's simply not necessary, for this guy to have as much money as he does, for other people to be poor. See Wikipedia's article on "non-zero-sum" games.