That’s factually false. Nobody who matters in any meaningful way wants to “destroy” Northam. He needs to resign as governor because he can’t effectively govern a diverse state after this. But nobody is saying he can’t continue to be a physician or to do other public service.
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Have you considered the fact that both you and
@Metamagician are commenting on an event in a country in which you don’t live? That your understanding of the context may be crucially lacking because of that? Also, he wasn’t 18 when he finished medical school. He was 25.
That's not an argument. It's a rhetorical move. Also, there's plenty of reason to suppose that living in a country does not give people a good appreciation of these sorts of issues. See, for example, 'The nature of belief systems in mass publics' by Converse (an early classic).
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Your “social media mobs” rant was certainly not an argument - not a *relevant* argument at least (anything can be called an argument without that qualification). You (and
@Metamagician) are making a category error. -
For most people’s jobs, it is true that their performance is largely unrelated to whether we like their expression, and their jobs shouldn’t be in jeopardy because they say or do something unpopular. But applying that argument to politicians is patently absurd.
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Well, given that you're so keen on context, that claim demonstrates a lamentable ignorance about the motivations of the founders of the USA - check out de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (for example). Also, Burke, for example, on European context.
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What a certain elite thought 240 years ago is irrelevant to a modern notion of democracy.
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It's not irrelevant. It's an absolutely fundamental on-going issue in the theorisation of democracy. How do you avoid short-termism, and pandering, and populism, in systems of democratic representation?
End of conversation
New conversation -
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