I'm looking for a man - said Diogenes

I echo the sentiments of Mr. Bortz. Your posts have nothing to do with science and I find your argument above unmoving. It has at its core the desire to pummel scientists, and those reading about science, into your way of thinking, to berate them with your opinions about politics. You ask that we fix purely political problems... and imply that we as scientists and especially engineers (those that apply scientific knowledge to the solution of everyday problems) don't actively try to solve the root of many of the world's political problems: resource limitations and inequatable distribution of them. WRONG !! We think of that all of the time! But constantly being an irritant won't help.

I too write about politics and am a political activist, for a specific cause. But I would *never* presume that I should write rants about that subject here.

Please post your blog somewhere else.

Note to moderator; please also consider this issue.

But before I end my own post, perhaps I should directly address the idea that scientists, a form of intellectual who are not a specialists in law and history, should be the ones to design a political system. I read once, a hypothesis, that there have been three kinds of governments, based on the types that run them and their underlying assumptions: Military, Mercantile, and Intellectual.

Military types included the Roman Empire and Feudalism. Intellectual includes early communism, churches, and the Nazis. Mercantile includes the Hanseatic League and the United States. Interestingly the worst modern tyrannies, Nazi Germany, Mao's Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot's Cambodia, etc., have all been the result of an intellectual's theories. I shudder to think of what the next intellectual, especially a "scientific" intellectual, will unleash upon us. (Can you imagine the horror of one based on B.F. Skinner's work?)

Flawed as representitive democracy via the electoral process is... it has been far better than any "intelligently designed" system that we have ever seen. Why don't we relax and allow democracy to evolve, as it has been, toward ever more equatable arrangements via the messy process of compromise that is modern politics?

In the mean time, such discorse should be on a site dedicated to political thought, not this site, which should remain the proper domain for science and its everyday applications.