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dannydarg 8 months ago
I'm not sure what is being asserted here. Is it that these people are genetically inferior to some norm and hence <physically> incapable of voting in a way that will lead to their overall happiness or is it an environmental claim that, were they to be placed in a country like the UK (where this was printed) they would have voted differently, nay, `intelligently.'
These options appear to exhaust all possible meanings of the phrase "someone is stupid."
Now the first option is blatantly racist as it's the claim that a group of people is genetically inferior to your own. Plus, it's intrinsically unlikely since most Americans are descendants of British and European settlers, so the genetic differences should be, a priori, negligible.
The second option, that "were they to be in a different environment, they would vote intelligently," simply begs the question. You are assuming what you are trying to demonstrate. You therefore need to start with the phrase "differently." Now voting differently in a different environemnt does nothing to show that one vote is less "intelligent" than the other. The author of this title can't just argue that "this vote is different to the sort of vote that would be classed as intelligent here therefore it is not intelligent" as the intelligence of an act must be judged according to its circumstances. E.g. an intelligent act in Antarctica is to put on a warm coat, but that doesn't make the same act "intelligent" in the Sahara desert. The author must therefore claim to KNOW (or have good arguments) the environment and personal circumstances of 59 million people who voted in this manner in order to conclude that their choices were in fact stupid, that is, they will suffer reduced happiness in the long-run as a result. That is a big burden of proof.
Perhaps if I were buy a copy of this paper I would find such arguments formulated in a logically coherent manner tracing back to plausible premises that I do in fact accept. However, I think you'd have to be the really stupid one, ironically, to think such a "news"-paper is interested in intelligent argumentation.