This bit ...

This Twitter bit, innocent enough on it's own and superficially straightforward enough to take or leave, is the reason why it's more value to abandon Twitter, and do that with prejudice extreme, that is, slam the door behind you for all that can only disappoint you and discourage you from humanity while stabbing your own spirit to death. My experience is Twitter is something you protect yourself from, where engaging it does me no good whatsoever. None. It is a minus, a big one, not a plus.

While others apparently thrive there. Instapundit, for example. They must have skin thick as rhinoceros. Hearts of stone. I don't.

The woman's stated interest is economics. She says pixie wannabe. Most of her posts are observations of interest by her reading she allows cross her path. This time she departs somewhat and points to an article of her interest at PolicyMic about Americans thinking H. Clinton and D. Trump are the worst nominees in modern history. The article cites poll statistics using adjective "whopping" percentages and uses the worst photographs of both candidates available. Hillary as shrill voice-breaking orator and Trump, eh, not as bad, but still the worst available, both open mouth, fierce-eyed, angry spitting, animal-like.

The PolicyMic piece itself is derived from Huffington Post/YouGov poll.

Fine.

But then the response tweets to this innocent Twitter item of the aspiring economist's interest make you want to rip out your own heart, cast it to the concrete floor and stomp it and cry "I give up." Give up on humanity altogether. And not just American tweeters, give up on humanity globally.

The world is not like this. The world is not made up entirely of politically petrified commenters. Examples drawn for their depravity:

* "Don't know who they're polling but we LOVE Hillary♥︎ ♥︎"

What exactly is there to love?  Don't tell me. I'll only become discouraged again.

* " That's probably because they are. I feel so sorry for my american friends right now"

And how is that? And that's American capitalized. We see you have that on your keyboard. Obsessed with U.S. politics as viewed from afar, informed by your spoon-feeding?  I'm trying to imagine an American, any American making a similar comment. We're described as politically disinterested in world affairs. We're described as uninformed where we're actually minding our own business, allowing other countries their own choices with only mild interest and not claiming any sort of intimate  or superior knowledge of their affairs, as they do ours, and do that continuously and obnoxiously.

* "I wish they both fell over and died honestly."

Well, one is doing that so you may get half your wish. But the equivalency here is both astonishing and predictably ignorant and typical. While reading your comment, my wish is commenters like this drop the f dead. It's wearisome. To the soul. See what just happened to my soul?

*  funny how American citizen mess up their own politics by voting for these 2...

And what's funny about it, may I ask?

* Not an american but from an outsiders perspective I'd probably say so.

Oh, do shut up then and MYOFB.

* being in India, I said it 11 months bak. US wud face worst options in Prez if HRC n DJT End up as Nominees !

Well, la-dee-da, look at you. Spelling bee champion? Being in India you've got your own problems. Imagine an American presuming to chime in on Indian politics as this commenter presumes to be all knowing about ours.

And so on. At length. That is Twitter for you.

But I'd rather talk about something else. Yes, that is Twitter for you. That is Huffington poll for you. It's why I don't bother with these places. Still they're brought to my attention as an hors d'oeuvres passing by on a tray held at the shoulder by a caterer gliding through a crowded cocktail affair. Better ignored, "No thank you, we'll be driving through McDonald's on the way home."

Here's the thing. I realize our founding fathers were assholes, tacking together a new government and distrustful of popular vote, for good reason, creating a separation between commoners and their elite ruling selves, excluding entire classes of people and in great numbers besides, by huge swaths and classes, so that the popular vote was limited to precious few free, male landowners without any felony conviction, and then, being all farmers mostly without education, separated by intervening layer.

But a lot has changed since then. Still, we see by these Twitter comments alone that American popular vote is comprised of mostly uninformed, misinformed, mal-informed dopes ossified when not petrified in their state. Twitter alone is proof enough of the virtue of electoral college. And even still, it is the popular vote that presents the choice of candidates.

Best to have elites at the job. Here's the thing, though. The nature of the elites has evolved. In our evolved specialization, they too have become specialized, their own class, their own social layer. And with their own interests.

In their time the elites were estate landowners, plantation landowners, college educated when that meant something general and exceedingly rounded, all of them trained in classics, speakers and writers of Greek and Latin, and so forth, familiar with literature, well rounded liberal educations. Whereas now college education is far more specialized, the result of civilization evolution. Now college education is much more widespread while the educations themselves more narrow. Harvard and Yale educations are not what they used to be. Presently education at that level at those places is pushed out in favor of Social Justice which is no education at all when it's not actually malevolent and destructive. It's just crap that takes the place of useful education. The elite education is crap. So drawing upon it for our elite law makers does not work as well as our founding fathers who were assholes themselves, while still better informed than the average family farmer male free landowner.

So today, who is most genuinely capable of running things? Which type of person, which class of  people really is the most capable of protecting our political setup? The type of person who spent their entire working lives in politics like Obama ♥︎ ♥︎ with his 768 days in the Senate, or Hillary ♥︎ ♥︎ with her entire work life involved in the political arena, zip-a-dee-doo-dahing along fail to fail to fail, both of them carried aloft and along by party, or a private citizen who by birth and by asshole personality proved themselves playing the hand they were given, parlaying success and failures in the economic situation as given to rise to position of candidate? The latter strikes me true to America itself, while entitlement through party alone seems foreign and undesirable. I do not share the estimations of the Huffington poll takers, nor the obnoxiously pinched Twitter commenters. I do not observe Hillary mature by living politics, I see only her presumption grow, her entitlement grow by her tenure in party, her wealth grow by selling services of state offices though foundations that would be deemed illegal outside of her party's support and cover. While I do observe maturity with my own eyeballs and my own ears in the case of Trump, a private citizen actually making himself prepared for office. There is a very clear distinction between these two candidates that I don't think my fellow citizens are appreciating. They still think candidates are better when drawn from the internal arena of politics and not from the larger arena of the entire nation.

I recall in my 20's a gentleman decades my senior say, "I'd like to see a businessman run for president" This simple remark left a lasting impression. That made sense to me then. I thought, wow, that's really smart. But you're fairly guaranteed he or she is going to be a real asshole. Like the person who made the remark. Wasn't Reagan -- am I supposed to genuflect here or inject PBUH? -- closest to that? Drawn from the private sector, with measurable success, and familiar with the affect that government has upon business. In my estimation that is the type, that is the class of people most appropriate to manage American affairs, to lead this country driven by business. And not a candidate drawn from the exclusive world of politics, separate and isolated from the country at large with their own strange sense of entitlement resultant from association and tenure with political party. Bluntly, best is the candidate who knows by instincts developed by winning and losing dealing with the country's mechanisms and with the world, while the other's successes and failures are entirely political. One is a lot more purely American by experience, the other shaped by political lathe. While both can be described accurately as assholes, to be frank and to state it all plainly and bluntly.