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comment by JTHipster
JTHipster  ·  4226 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Bush: Terrible President, Also Not a Smart Man

    Who cares?

    I'm the smartest person in my family; I'm actually probably the smartest person in my group of friends. They're all doing much better in life than I am.

    George Bush was not a good President. He fucked up a lot of stuff, stuff that I'm going to have to be fixing in the nest two or three decades. He could've been the smartest man in the world but he still created a society of incredible debt, prolonged wars, environmental mess, an educational system now compiling the issue of decades of already misguided policy. I'd rather have an idiot that had stumbled in to the right choices. Now off to my steadily more expensive college class that will get me a job almost no where. I can go on to spend years in debt up to my ears struggling to make a living, watching a government that I can't trust expand upon everything Bush did.

    Shit, my really big developmental years, the time I spent in school, was basically spent with the country in a constant state of war. Awesome. Well, at least he was smart.

The point of me quoting myself is that this is an irrelevant debate about nothing significant.

Intelligence is not a virtue, and once you treat it as such then it can be manipulated exactly like it is right now.





Kaius  ·  4226 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I wouldn't agree that intelligence is not a virtue. It absolutely is a virtue but it doesn't represent anything more than potential. An intelligent person is not necessarily one with good ideas.

JTHipster  ·  4226 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Virture, while it can mean a desirable quality, has a moral connotation. Intelligent people fall on the same spectrum of assholes as every other human being on the planet, they just happen to be smart about it.

Intelligence does not preclude morality nor good judgmnet.

Kaius  ·  4225 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Fair point. I was thinking of a virtue as roughly equivalent to a desirable quality. Intelligence has no real connection with morality as you said.