Re: Engineers in Parliament
I don't want politicians who can use html, I want politicians who ask awkward questions like "why are we locking all these people up for drug possession when all the evidence is that it doesn't work, and exactly why do we need a nuclear deterrent when if it ever gets used it will because the country has ceased to exist?"
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You had me until there. Drugs policy isn't quite comparable to a nuclear deterrent. I'd generally agree with you on drugs policy, the evidence isn't there, more research required. We've got a penal system built around rehabilitation, not vengeance, so the policies that puts people into it should be in tune with that.
Nuclear deterrent isn't the same thing. It's stated aim was to prevent another world war, by making war between the great powers too terrible to contemplate. In that, it seems to have succeeded... There was never a war between the first and second worlds (to use the old terms), only small scale proxy conflicts that gave enough of a gap that the main blocks could back out without risking their own destruction.
So, 50 years worth of evidence says that a nuclear deterrent does what it says on the tin.
I'm not sure that scientists are really the right people, as a group, to be in charge of policy. Technocracy seems as poor a choice as anything else. One group, believing they know better. Politics is not science, no matter how much we want it to be. Not defending the current state of affairs, however politics is often making fixed decisions in the absence of good enough information. Science is not, it's the pursuit of that information.
I think that we should go back to the old greek system. Politics as a punishment. Lots are cast, and the losers are the ones that have to serve for a year, and they should be regularly punished for mistakes. Make the job horrible, so that no one wants it. Anyone who wants power is fundamentally untrustworthy.