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Pathetically Dysfunctional Politicians

Jim Mason
2 min readJan 12, 2024

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We have too much communication; it swamps useful information and leads to bad decisions

Screen shot by author of Yahoo search results

I find watching the endless spectacle of U.S. politics both fascinating and exhausting. It’s easy to waste time enjoying the drama of it all, including the idiotic and narcissistic behavior of many of those involved, led by the recent past President. It’s hard to learn many useful governmental ideas from it in any reasonable amount of time.

The process of selecting candidates for President has fallen into complete dysfunction, as revealed most clearly on the Republican Party side, where the so-called “debates” and polls have narrowed the field to nothing but unqualified candidates.

In the past, candidates were chosen mainly by party insiders in a closed process of communication. That led to abuses of favoritism and exclusion, but it had the advantage that the people who chose candidates for governmental offices could get to know the candidates well. They could eliminate candidates who had serious flaws of character, education, or intellect.

In the interest of overcoming the disadvantages of that closed system, processes of primary elections were created to allow more open selection of candidates by a wider, more diverse body of voters than party insiders. The new system did enable a more diverse range of people to…

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Jim Mason
Jim Mason

Written by Jim Mason

I study language, cognition, and humans as social animals. You can support me by joining Medium at https://jmason37-80878.medium.com/membership

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