I can say with some confidence that an alcoholic Fox News talk show host is not smarter than me.
I don't care if they are smarter than me. I need them to be smart enough to know they are not that smart. I don't expect politicians to be smart. I expect them to be good listeners and be the voice for the people.
I want both. I want them to be smart -- not necessarily domain expert smart, but reasonably smart with making life changing decisions for everyone. And base those decisions on recommendations made by domain experts.
But if you want to do international politics its fine because politicians don't have any formal requirements.
So next time you see EU parlament footage where people have speeches in their native language… it's not out of national pride or respect. It's simply because many of them couldn't do it otherwise.
> I mean many bars wont give you a job without passing english interview.
We have a very similar situation in India. But ministers (and their supporters) now take perverse pride in not being good at English. They use our brief British rule as a scapegoat for half the things that are wrong with India. The other half is blamed on Mughal rule.
... why? Ted Cruz is almost certainly smarter than almost all of us, and I do not want Ted Cruz to be a politician. Boris Johnson is exceptionally gifted, and Never Again. Rishi Sunak's as sharp a guy as you're likely to meet, but as the Economist noted, rarely met a bad idea he didn't warm to. You're giving a weird halo effect to intelligence.
I do not agree that Ted Cruz is smarter than nearly all of us.
I guess I just want politicians who can make the most basic logical inferences and do the most rudimentary reasoning, and importantly it would be great to have politicians who don’t think that they already know everything.
One of his Harvard Law Professors called him “off-the-charts brilliant”, and he won several national level debate challenges, so I suspect we’re working off such significantly different world views here as to preclude any reasonable discussion on this point.
Well he was valedictorian at his high school and graduated from Princeton University. I wonder if the Pete Hegseth from Princeton is the same Pete Hegseth today. I don't know, maybe he got messed up somehow during one of his three tours overseas serving in the military.
He might have been a genius at one point (though I doubt it), but I do not think that a Fox News host who brags about never washing his hands [1] is smart. Maybe drinking messed up his brain.
[1] https://youtube.com/shorts/eQI7n_48AY4?si=V5OTOS3uo7GEH8iv
But looking at Hegseth's family history (Father was a basketball coach, Mother was a "executive business coach") maybe they were upper middle class but definitely not elite so I suspect that his academic credentials played a major role in his admission and not any monetary contribution.
>He might have been a genius at one point (though I doubt it), but I do not think that a Fox News host who brags about never washing his hands [1] is smart. Maybe drinking messed up his brain.
Hence why I wondered if he got "damaged" in some way during his military career(three tours overseas, one at Gitmo).
On a side note: I find it absurd that people are mass downvoting something that is literally just one google search.
Without knowing the criteria (as best I know, it's not just based on academic excellence but other things like sports[0] and extracurriculars), it's not much of a claim.
[0] Hegseth was a leading basketball and football player for Princeton.
It really seems like his admission to Princeton was based on a combination of excellent academic performance combined with his athletic ability which is often a boost for applications in competitive schools like Princeton.
https://embed.documentcloud.org/documents/26184649-hegseth
I haven't read it closely, but at a glance, it does look like someone much more capable of thought than the persona he's adopted today.