Whether either knows it, all that's accomplished is making certain that Gorsuch is just an Evangelical Radical Right Wingnut hack. But enquiring minds already know that. But the "interview" does contain some stunning words of idiocy.
What do we lose in that process? We lose juries. Juries are wise, right?Well... not necessarily. And, as anyone who's watched even a little bit of L&O knows, there is a very positive side of a plea bargain: the perp's allocution. A jury verdict of guilty does not carry an admition of guilt. A plea does. That's why there are plea bargains. And that's why prosectutors go to Hell and back to make the plea penalty so much less than the verdict exposure: they, and the victim (most always) want the admission.
You're absolutely right that in an increasingly complex world, we need experts. There's no question about that. At the same time, our system of government is premised on the idea that we the people — those are the first three words of our Constitution — are sovereign, and we are entitled to govern ourselves.And here is the crux of the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts vast stupidity: the sub-GED majority in the shithole states get to govern, comfortable in the beliefs like bleach, hydroxychloroquine, and such snake oil are the God Given Cures for Covid, and, further, that any future disease cure is their remit.
And, herein, he reveals the depths of his stupidity:
And I think if you go back and you look at what Madison and others had in mind, it could be summarized by the wisdom of the masses, that concept. You know, Francis Galton, who's a cousin of Darwin, went to a county fair in England, and there was a "guess the weight of the ox" contest. And he observed all the experts and their guesses on the weight of the ox. But then he also summed up all the guesses of ordinary people. And he found that the average of the ordinary people's guesses was more accurate than any of the experts.It gets better. If you read the wiki on this "experiment", it is not the case that the Masses were more accurate than the experts, only that they agreed to a minuscule difference. IOW, ole Neil lies, if only by saying that the median/mean of the crowd is "more accurate than any of the experts". Well, yeah, that's the nature of stats.
Only the truly innumerate would buy such a pile of shit. It's called The Small N Problem, and figures quite prominently in drug clinical trials. In a nutshell (repeated in various ways over the course of these missives), if you have an estimate of a parameter twice, once with a small sample size and once with a large sample size, the large sample size will almost always be closer to the true value. Always. The Phase II trial will have up to a few hundred (cherry picked) patients, will often show that Drug X is a miracle. Then, on to the Phase III trial which will have much more, as much as 10 times the number of patients. The efficacy measure plummets, sometimes so much that Drug X is abandoned There is no wisdom of the crowds, only stupid rubes being conned by conmen.
So, based on a bit of stupidity from a 19th century conman, we should embrace the Governance of the sub-GED cabal?
Toward the end, French tries, not very forcefully, to pin Gorsuch down to what "text, history and tradition" really means. He won't admit that the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts are using that non-Constitutional code for extreme reactionary justice driven by their simple greed for reactionary power. "Party like it's 1829!" Just what the sub-GED cabal wants.
Finally, near as I can read, French does not tell Gorsuch that there's not really "too much law" compared to 1800 just because the USofA is much larger, land and population and complexity. 99.44% of what the Law has to deal with didn't exist in 1800. So, yeah, there's more Law on the books now.
USofA, 1800 - 5,308,483 USofA, 2020 - 392,500,000Grow the fuck up, Neil.
No comments:
Post a Comment