Wobble-shop Benjo: ****-wool raked up out the half-rats Skilamalink fly-rink O' Baldric Eggling.

This thread will function as a kind of omnium gatherum for the melange of dissenting observations and opinions I have about MMA, MMA bouts and fighters, things I find humorous, and essentially any other thing. Why? Because sewage warrants proper curation as much as anything else. Arguably more.

Toshers and specklebellies welcome. No mutton-shunters, namby-pambys or needy-mizzlers. Pull up a stool and smother the parrot.

* Edited at 11.01.2021, 6:47 PM ET *

@Baldric Eggling

With that dog picture example. I appreciate that the 2nd place image would've required more time and skill to draw but if more people decided that they liked the 1st one more then surely that makes it the overall better picture? 

Kinda reminds me of one of the absolute injustices in the history of British democracy. There was a competition to name a new scientific vessel that would be used for expeditions. Anyone could submit a name to this website and the one with the most votes won. The name "Boaty McBoatface" won by a ******* mile with 124,109 votes compared to the 2nd placed one with 34,371 votes. Instead, they decided to ignore that and named the boat the "RRS Sir David Attenborough". This lead to a pubic outcry and they decided to compromise by calling a smaller submarine type boat "Boaty McBoatface". Still a disgusting betrayal of democracy. We voted for the large vessel to be called "Boaty McBoatface" and won fair and square per the rules they set out at the start of the competition. The compromise isn't good enough IMO.

As a fun bit of trivia, the name "It's Bloody Cold Here" came 4th with 10,679 votes which still beat "Sir David Attenborough" which came 5th with 10,284 votes. Yeah that's right, the one they went with didn't even come 2nd. Sir David Attenborough is a legitimate legend and one of the best people Britain have ever produced but sorry Sir David, you lost this one.


https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-36064659

Boaty McBoatface Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boaty_McBoatface

RRS Sir David Attenborough Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RRS_Sir_David_Attenborough

* Edited at 01.20.2022, 10:54 AM ET *

@Stephen more people like chocolate than Kale. Does that make chocolate a better dietary choice?  Fifty Shades of Grey is the greatest selling fiction of all time. Does that make it superior to Ulysses by Joyce?

The problem with gross consensus is that it is....gross, and par excellence must be protected from the tyranny of the majority.

Now, I'm fully willing to admit that I wouldn't meet the standards of a normative citizen. But I've met a lot of real people, Stephen. And honestly, most of them are ******* idiots.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority#:~:text=The%20tyranny%20of%20the%20majority,those%20of%20the%20minority%20factions.

* Edited at 01.20.2022, 2:07 PM ET *

plato had it right, most average citizens are too stupid to understand the problems facing society and therefore are too stupid to vote.

@Baldric Eggling

Did.....did you just make an assumption about my level of intelligence because I believe that an important scientific research vessel should be called Boaty McBoatface?

And thanks for posting that gif of Ben Shapiro's sister's tits on the miscellaneous thread btw, I've put that with my other.....em.....academic stuff.

Most people are more intelligent than they believe they are. Unless they are genuinely stupid in which case they believe they are intelligent.

Ignorance is not the same thing as low-intelligence.

I remember a similar thing happened to the Mcboatface thing a few years back. Mountain Dew was asking the community to name the new apple flavoured dew, and the top three results were Gushing granny, Fapple (LOL) and Hitler did nothing wrong.

@Baldric Eggling

I can understand the "Hitler Did Nothing Wrong" one not being used because.....well seriously? Why the **** would a brand put it one sale with that name? They'd absolutely destroy their image by doing that. The name Boaty McBoatface on the other hand is just a harmless, silly name so there's no reason not to use it for the vessel.

* Edited at 01.20.2022, 7:43 PM ET *

Well yes, obviously. The point is that these are the kinds of things that happen when everything is decided purely by consensus. 

@Baldric Eggling

There should be some kind of fail safe where the majority vote can be overruled if they've voted to do something extremely stupid (like if the US held a referendum to nuke China and they all voted "yes") so that massively bad decisions are avoided but generally, I think we should go with the majority whenever possible, even if it seems like a "bad" decision.

You mean like...an Aristocracy?

@Baldric Eggling

Well here's my idea. We have one leader voted for by the people in a popular vote. We have different boards of experts for various subjects, separate from the leader politically. About 11 experts per board. So that would be 11 expert economists on the economy board, 11 military experts on the national security board, 11 experts teachers on the teaching board, 11 social inequality experts on the social inequality board, 11 environmental experts on the environmental board and so on. These experts are only voted to the board by members of the public who can prove they worked, previously worked or are qualified in, the issue relating to the board (so only plumbers, former plumbers and qualified plumbers can vote for the experts in the plumbing board for instance). Whenever a major decision (and by this I mean a decision that will have an impact on that field) needs to be made, the leader hands the decision over to that relevant board of experts. Those experts then draw up all the feasible solutions to the problem and hand it back to the leader. The leader then throws this back out to the general public to decide on which solution go with in a referendum based on a popular vote. The one with the most votes gets put into action. 

I don't know if there's a name for this or not but that's my idea. It would mean a lot of votes for the public to vote in but that would mean that only the members of the public who would bother are the ones that actually give a **** about the issue (in the same way more people make picks in the UFC on here than they do in the regional events) and there should be theoretically no REALLY bad options to chose from anyway.

Voter apathy is at an all-time high. It is hard enough to get people to vote in Federal elections, let alone at the regional/state level. Do you really think submitting myriad policies to be decided by plebiscite, relating to everything, occurring every other day would work? How could such a thing possibly be enforced?

And under this system of government, what would happen, say, if one policy submitted by the plumbing department, to only be voted on by plumbers, ran into conflict with a policy submitted by the environmental department which could only be voted on by environmentalists? Who would get veto power assuming both those bureaucracies voted along party lines and created a stalemate? There are far more plumbers in the world than environmentalists, so if it were a case of whichever party got the most votes, the plumbing department would get their way every time. Which would qualify as tyranny of the majority problem--the very thing we're trying to abolish whilst still maintaining majority rule. Wouldn't you agree?

@Baldric Eggling

Well I suppose in that case we'd just let the leader decide. 

That would be rule via fiat. Otherwise referred to as a dictatorship.

@Baldric Eggling

The leader would only decide in those extreme circumstances. In theory, that one grumpy old member of the public that can be bothered to vote every time changes pretty much everything. Or if we scrap the leader picking idea then just have the 11 plumbing experts and the 11 environmentalists force their way to a compromise.

And that would still be a dictatorship. Discharge of functions is similar to this in the court system. That is a very lofty and complicated legal instrument which I would rather not have a conversation about.

If there was no ultimate arbitrator, and the departments alone had to negotiate compromises on Bills, that would simply constitute the same parliamentary or congressional practices that already exist in liberal capitalist democracies.

* Edited at 01.21.2022, 3:54 AM ET *