Why I Hate People
This John Stossel article is pissah. Read the whole thing. I read every John Stossel article, but I had to post about this because of the viewer responses.
Let me be politically incorrect and say that maybe some people shouldn’t vote.
I know I’m swimming against the tide. Get-out the-vote groups now register young people at rock concerts. HeadCount (www.headcount.org) cofounder Andy Bernstein told me: “We registered over a 100,000 people. It is so imperative that this generation’s voice is heard.”
But wait. Is that really a good idea? Many kids don’t know much. At a HeadCount concert, “20/20” asked some future voters, “How many senators are there?” One said 12, another 16, and another 64. One girl guessed, “50 per state.”
Most kids didn’t know what Roe v. Wade was about. “Roe vs. Wayne?” asked one. “Segregation, maybe?” “Where we declared bankruptcy?”
Headcount’s Marc Brownstein concedes, “there’s a lot of uninformed voters out there.” But he argued:
“Democracy is not about taking the most educated portion of the society and having them decide who’s going to run the entire society. Democracy is about every individual having a voice.”
I suggested that when people don’t know anything, maybe it’s their civic duty not to vote.
That’s a good story. I don’t know if I agree with him altogether, but it is well-written. After airing something similar on 20/20, bitches didn’t like his flow. Here’s his recapitulation of some of the responses:
“That was a shameful piece you put together about youth voting. … I wonder if the quality of the information in our society has anything to do with hackery like yours infesting the airwaves and drowning out reasonable discussion.”…
“You sit there on television and ignorantly say that all youth should not vote . . . wow.”
“You simply cannot create a litmus test for voters. At what point does a voter become satisfactorily ‘informed’? Do they have to know the name of the president, vice president, both their senators? This is the problem with your argument; you don’t state how informed a voter should be, just that they should be. This is a very slippery slope.”
Wow. That’s special. Let’s take the first one. ‘[D]rowning out reasonable discussion’? When did John Stossel stop someone from talking, or talk over someone, or in any way compromise someone’s ability to discuss, well, anything?
‘Sit there on television…’ Does Stossel generalize a single time? Does he say that young people shouldn’t vote? No, he says that uninformed idiots shouldn’t vote. If someone wants to project and say that means ‘all young people’, then good on them. They’ve indicted the whole YouTube generation as fucking morons.
The worst is obviously the last. Why do people automatically associate disagreement with ‘hate speech’, ‘fascism’, and ‘mean spiritedness’? John Stossel is not the government. He’s just a dude. He posits that maybe idjuts shouldn’t vote. This jackass starts talking about slippery slopes. Hey, arsehole: there is no ‘slippery slope’. John Stossel is a private citizen writing a column. Nobody has proposed a test for people to vote. Nobody will stop stupid people from voting. There will be no quiz at the polls. John Stossel posed a question as a private citizen and he got rubbish in response.
That is why I hate people.
The Corcoran Brothers 
funny story, somewhat related, many of these new young voters are all about the massachusetts bill to abolish the income tax. which is good or bad or what have you, but we are at the state school. all the student groups have rows of booths set up getting people to vote, at the end of all the rock the vote and what have you booths and it is the young republicans or some other conservative group and there is a kid saying, yeah, abolish the state income tax… do you know what your tuition would be if that were to happen?