http://www.democraticunderground.com/1172157321
Demilitarization of the Police Requires Demilitarization of Civilians | Benjamin Studebaker
http://benjaminstudebaker.com/about/
IV. Sophiarchism
Posts in this category will discuss my concept of the sophiarchist state (as opposed to the democratic or traditionally authoritarian states), a concept of which I am most fond.
http://benjaminstudebaker.com/2013/08/30/reintroduction-to-sophiarchism-2/
My proposed solution to all of this I term sophiarchism. The principle theoretical contention of sophiarchism is that we need to ensure that those who rule in our societies are qualified, that they have devoted many years reading, writing, and thinking about statecraft. The controversial element in my theory is that, in order to achieve this state of affairs, we need to restrict access to the vote, and we need to restrict who can run for office down to those that have these qualifications...
...I argue that, at present, the most reasonable way to do this would be restrict the vote to people with a degree in a social science discipline (political science, economics, philosophy, law, history, and sociology immediately to my mind as relevant disciplines). There maybe be room to argue as to how high a level a degree we should require–BA, MA, or PhD. In my view, the more advanced the degree requirement, the better our voting pool will be. Given that many BA’s and MA’s end up in unrelated fields, while most social science PhD’s end up working in academia, the PhD requirement also helps to ensure that specific interest groups with large numbers of social science BA’s and MA’s (like investment bankers) don’t end up unduly influencing state policy. PhD’s have wide-ranging opinions that do not conform to any narrow ideology and they put in many years reading, writing, and thinking about the state and society in order to earn their qualifications. They all have to submit well-constructed dissertations and cannot get by on mere memorization of facts.
After this royalist craptrap was righteously denounced, you had the crust
to proclaim yourself arbiter of who and what is and is not progressive:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1172157321#post14
The subject of gun control has always attracted self-appointed
politruks,
but you take the cake- touting the work of a writer who makes George F. Will
look like a hippie,
while simultaneously pronouncing anathema on others for a purported lack of progressivism...
= new reply since forum marked as read
