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I see acceptable aesthetics as a necessary but not sufficient criterion.
Suppose you are interviewing for a job, and I come in in clothes which I have been wearing for a week which have tomato sauce on them. For most positions, this would instantly disqualify me, and rightly so.
If instead I come in dressed acceptably that does not mean I am actually qualified to do the job, and it would be very foolish to simply hire the best-dressed person (unless you are hiring a fashion designer, perhaps).
Trump tweets like a deranged lunatic. Of course someone who instead wrote masterful sonnets could have policies which were just as bad, but this does not mean that we should just ignore that fact.
If I'm hiring someone to reverse engineer the firmware of a competitor's product, I'm hiring whoever is the most competent for the job, even if it means hiring the sexually deranged catboy wearing programming socks. And for something like reverse engineering firmware, I'd venture a guess that somewhere in the range of 50 to 75 percent of the qualified candidates are catboys (or aesthetically similar).
The same goes for fixing the rot in Western Civilization. The overwhelming majority of candidates capable of fixing it are going to share a lot of Trump's bull in a china shop aesthetics, it's just kind of the nature of the sorts of people capable of what is needed. Sure, some candidate with will and ability to get things done and with the aesthetics of JFK might exist out there, but I'm not going to vote for Democrats that will keep deepening the rot in the meantime while I wait.
One of these things is not like the other....
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Doubt it; I've known quite a few people good at that kind of thing (including myself) and none of them have been catboys or anything similar. Even SREs, who seem to have more than their share, don't reach 50% catboy. Maybe if you include bronies, but you can't tell all of them by looking.
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