InfoD-Cafe: Stupid Voters

[Mick McAllister]

>At the end of the article, he quotes a Florida elections supervisor, who 
>makes a mean-spirited remark about "stupid people" who vote--arguing that 
>no matter how good the redesign, they (those stupid people) won't mark it 
>right.
I work as a writer for a government office, and I am often dealing with 
comments about "stupid customers" from inarticulate bureaucrats who write 
the gibberish I try to turn into comprehensible English. I used to tell my 
writing students that when communication breaks down, there are always two 
possible culprits, and before you blame the reader, you might look a bit 
more humbly at what you wrote. I have no patience with the "creative" POV 
that if readers don't get it, that's their problem. Ironically, this 
snideness of poets is actually a common attitude, just couched "creatively."

Many of the document originators where I work think that what I do is "fix 
the grammar and spelling." It's all relative, and self-serving. I heard a 
handful of IT people (a group with their own flavor of priestly gibberish) 
one day joking about "morons," and realized they were talking about the 
people in my division, who were "too stupid" to understand computers.

The "intelligent" people in this country are about to re-elect the most 
corrupt, unpatriotic, evil administration in the history of this country. 
That's a great argument for "stupidity," if you ask me.

Mick