Comment by imoverclocked
14 hours ago
I think knowing about the branches of your government is a prerequisite to having an opinion or good argument about it. It’s not sufficient to just know that but it’s a good filter in the USA where a surprising number of people have “opinions” but lack the most basic knowledge.
It's a prerequisite, but so is breathing. It's necessary but not sufficient.
The bar I like to use is pretty simple: do you know who represents you in Congress (I am American so this is my bias, but substitute your country's equivalent if there is one)? As in, your state's two Senators and your district's Representative? If not, you probably don't vote or don't pay attention when you do, and you've definitely never called your Congresspeople to complain about their votes, so you probably don't really care that much about whatever it is you say you care about, since you haven't done the easiest thing you can do to make a change.
It's not perfect, and no criteria will be, but there are tons of people who can rattle off "executive, legislative, judiciary" who nevertheless don't know ball.
Having valid opinions about politics and engaging with the existing political system are not the same thing. I am super happy to chat about political questions (of all sorts) irrespective of my interest in voting.
Note that when I say "talk politics" I really mean "discuss things controlled by politicians", not "discuss politicians". If you mean the latter it is a super fair bar to set!
>It's a prerequisite, but so is breathing. It's necessary but not sufficient.
It's the fizzbuzz of political debate.
You are filtering out politically engaged people who have assesed the current mechanisms of state to be too flawed to be worth continued interaction.
This is likely quite a large group.
This particular test might be reasonable, but at some point you're just filtering out anyone who's not in your bubble, which is a problem when your beliefs are extreme because your bubble is tiny.
Imagine a Marxist who refuses to discuss economics with anyone who can't explain dialectic materialism or enclosure.
IMO. It is ok to filter them out.
One simply does not have infinite time and resource to engage with everybody.
Aware what you have filtered and don't treat them like idiot
Even in his particular test, he's filtering out people who are quite well informed on political topics but also feel that the input of the average person has effectively 0 impact. And this is quite a huge blindspot because political understanding/knowledge tends to precisely trend towards that worldview for many. A sack of money goes much further than a phone or picket.
> and you've definitely never called your Congresspeople to complain about their votes
Or, you know, you haven't lived at the same address for twenty years. In your imagined world where every single citizen either has something so pressing to call their representatives about or is just ignorant, you're still basically filtering out everybody who moved for a job/college/SO/whatever recently. I guess in your mind it's only fitting that they're disqualified from having an opinion? For reference about 12% of Americans change residence each year.
Feels a little disingenuous to quote this line and not the full section where OP was just asking you to know your local representatives.
I've never called anyone about anything political, and I also haven't lived at the same address (or even in the same state) for 20 years but I still know at least who my senators are and some of my representatives. State elections are every two years; you have to almost actively not pay attention to not know anything about yours.
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As always everyone is entitled to their opinions, the question is how much should the rest of us care.
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We all learned what the 3 branches are in grade school. Some people forgot it. Liberals are more likely to remember it because liberal discourse (this thread for example) reminds them of it. It's a biased litmus test in other words.
It's inconceivable to me that you could forget the three branches. There are still headlines and news articles about the president , congress, and the supreme court. Those three things , talked about constantly, are a basic reminder of the most visible aspects of each branch.
That's because your experience is siloed. People in other silos are seeing other headlines and other news articles, and wondering how you could not see them.
It is indeed important to know about ones government - not just its branches, but also its misdeeds and crimes.
The national secrecy is a cess pool of corruption in any and all governments - the corruption of all government begins with its secrets - a truly free people don't allow their governments to keep secrets, but encourages governance to have a responsibility of protecting the truth over secrecy - and this, under the knowledge that absolutes are unattainable. Of course, nuclear codes need to be made inaccessible; the more the people know about their government, the less corrupt it is, however.
After all, do you know why your government hates Russia, like, legislatively - as opposed to culturally and all the other distractions from governance.
The issue is, the overlying principle is that modern governments must allow the people to survive extremism. Political systems, designed to combat the extremes of mass survival, reach a point where they, too, are extreme. As is also born in the history of other forms of human organization - religion, and so on. The very thing the subject was started to address, becomes it in the end.
Basic knowledge is one thing. But constant awareness is something else. We must always hold our governments and their agency, accountable. It is true of priests and politicians and scientists and icons, alike.