Political Ramble
Disclaimer! I hope to God this offends everyone. I am not politically affiliated.
This will be my one and only post on this election. Why? Because all you people are fucking nuts. Last time I wrote anything about politics, I got about three hundred hits and a couple comments I had to delete because of sheer stupidity.
I guess out of fairness I will have to write about the upcoming RNC.
*****
I don’t remember a cycle where the two candidates were so vehemently hated by both opposing sides. To the point of name calling and outright prejudice. There are people who will not vote for a black man, just like there are people blindly opposed to voting for an old white guy. And they will come right the hell out and say that to. It’s gotten to the point where grownups are resorting to name-calling. Plays on the candidates names and so forth. That is juvenile behavior and we are trying to select what is probably the most important democratically elected office on Earth, in terms of how many people could get fucked up.
But for at least 85% of the voting population, they’re throwing their votes away.
The breakdown of voting is such that you opinion probably does not matter. Want to know why? The same reason your religion doesn’t matter or your choice in cars doesn’t matter. You’re not making the decision. You are just riding the coat-tails of whatever your (painfully) predictable geopolitical population is.
“No, I decide based on the issues!”
Ok, let’s look at the issues. Really.
One party is pro-life, the other is pro-choice. One party wants to protect innocent human beings from being sucked apart by a giant vacuum, but has no problem, and in fact enjoys, when innocent human beings are blown apart by US Grade-A thermo-chemical awesomeness, especially if it helps our economy. The other party wants it to be totally legal to kill human beings who are of any inconvenience whatsoever, provided they have no means to speak out about the deal, but want to remove a person’s choice to own weapons they don’t approve of, say words they don’t approve of, and protest policies they agree with. That’s the nature of politics. It’s all Orwellian doublespeak.
But, it is where people draw their lines.
Do you honestly think there is any correct way to think about abortion? They are living human beings, complete with heartbeats, brainwaves, and any other possible biological descriptor of being human, and except for about one percent of the time, they are killed for no other reason than convenience. On the other hand, people die everyday, and that is arguably a good thing. The economic disaster of all those kids being able to grow up in whatever hellish situation would make a mother want an abortion would cripple our urban areas. So, what side do you choose? You can say a woman has a right to do with her body as she wills, and I would agree with that, if we were talking about what clothes to wear or what sports to pursue or what career to follow. This choice kills people.
So I have no opinion on abortion. I can’t. In the few and far between cases of rape or incest, or any of the other bogeys the pro-choice lobby (a very profitable industry, by the way*) runs out, sure, abort. If a girl just got knocked up, I’m not sure it should be legal to end the life of the child. There are women doing life in prison right now who killed their kids or left them in dumpsters when they were too young or too inept to care for them. I’m not sure when it goes from abortion to murder, and I’m pretty sure the unborn baby (nerve endings and pain receptors intact) would argue that being sucked and scraped out hurts at least as bad as being bludgeoned after they escape the womb. But, I don’t want to take care of the baby, either. And, historically, humans have always practiced abortion/infanticide. Making it illegal won’t make it go away.
What’s the other hot-button, immigration? Come on. America has always had a love-hate relationship with those weird people moving into our country. And immigration has always been an issue exploited by the politicians. I don’t give a shit whether it was the Irish or the Italians or the Mexicans. America loves/hates when people show up and don’t turn into anglo-saxon American English speakers overnight. We always have, and probably always will. There’s no solution to immigration.
That’s what happens when you think about issues. They no longer have any possible resolution. The only people who benefit from the issues are the people who use them to galvanize a political base into shrill, crying, and moronic drones.
I watched most of the DNC. I was disgusted. I’m a registered independent, so this has nothing to do with democratic political leanings, besides, I hate republicans equally. It was all so scripted and ridiculous. People crying, people dancing, people repeating mindlessly whatever they were told. It was a fucking church service. One of those weird city churches where people meet in a warehouse and pretty Pharisees lead the Sunday Morning God Show from a high stage. Even to the point of the jumbotron screens with what my dad’s church used to call “congregational readings” running across them.
And people bought it. They bought right the fuck into it. It was appalling. The same speeches were offered by as many different (looking) people as possible, all written by the same people backstage. It was all a show. A friend of a friend actually gave a speech at the DNC, and I knew just enough about the guy to be intrigued. It was total bullshit. It was pandering, preplanned, rehearsed, and packaged for consumption bullshit. The only thing they might have had to change if it had been Hillary Clinton giving the speech is the introduction and one blurb about “…this old Navy man.”
It was a three day live-on-TV infomercial. It was carefully crafted mob psychology, reaching into the minds of the impressionable. It was exploitation of the worst aspects of humanity. I’m sure the RNC will be the same thing.
I wanted to vote for John McCain, based on his record as a senator, but his desire to redraw the Colorado River Compact would starve a lot of farmers I personally know, and his rethinking of the VA (Department of Veteran’s Affairs, for you foreigners) budget would put a couple of guys I personally know out on the street and homeless. Those are real policies he has that I disagree with. And Barack HUSSEIN Obama’s MGIB revamp puts some serious money in my pocket and makes it a lot easier for post-9/11 veterans to go to school. Neither one of these guys hates the country or has a deficiency of intelligence. Neither one hates anybody else. To say that is ridiculous.
I have never voted democrat or republican in my life, outside of local elections. This time, I’m leaning toward the democrat. For completely explainable and concise reasons.
If you are voting for or against him because you are from region X, or because you would never vote for the other party, you’re the kind of close-minded, pandered to part line repeating voter that has never mattered. If you won’t vote for the other party because of closely held prejudice, no one cares about you. Your own party knows they can shit all over you and what you believe in, as long as they trot out some wedge issue like abortion or immigration and get you firmly back on their side.
I hate people.
*”No way! There’s no way someone could be pandering to my childish need to think I have a choice just to make a shit-ton of money! No, it has to be that some faceless well-funded very organized movement has my own liberties at heart!”
Moron.
August 29, 2008 at 10:32 am
[...] It’s here. [...]
August 29, 2008 at 2:34 pm
So……are you saying I shouldn’t write you in?
The thing that drives me crazy are places where the state (or in my case – District) is so polarize that your vote really doesn’t seem to matter. D.C. will vote over 80% Democrat. Parts of the South will vote over 70% Republican. And I’ll be damned if I’m moving to Ohio just to be “on the fringe.” You ever been to Ohio?!?
(There – I just offended Ohio for you. You’re welcome)
August 29, 2008 at 3:21 pm
Go ahead, if you want.
And fuck Ohio. I have never known anyone from Ohio who wasn’t at least slightly retarded. Probably the water pollution.
August 29, 2008 at 3:37 pm
The problem with Democracy is that conceptually it gives voice to all people equally. This is fine when you have an educated democracy, because the balance of choice tends toward being an informed one. However, the less effort you put into educating your population, the stupider they become, and it follows that their choices will be less intelligently made.*
So, in my opinion, one of the worst situations you can have is a dumb democracy. In many ways it’s even worse than an autocracy (because with an autocracy you can end up in a situation with a good leader).
A democracy such as the one the US has, and increasingly as we have, will always be dragged down by the ill-informed. Since there is a correlation between lack of education and religion, this indicates also that your democracy will tend toward simplistic moral thinking.
Some issues, such as abortion, euthanasia and capital punishment, are, as you’ve pointed out, not simple ones. There is no ‘answer’ to whether an abortion is the correct option or the wrong thing – it’s entirely absurd to be trying to create a system that makes blanket rulings on such complex moral and ethical matters. That, of course, is what religion does superbly well, by the very efficient construct of ‘Because God Says!’
Religions are, by and large, constructed by well-meaning people to help guide dumb and poorly-educated people. But the point always was that the people who made the religions were in control, and that the ‘flock’ never had a say in the way their affairs were run. Now we have a situation where people adopting moral guidance designed for simple folk, are electing the leaders of their societies. The feedback loop is inexorable, an in my opinion, negative; Western cultures are tending toward popularly elected, religiously-inclined, ‘personality’ led governments.
There is only one solution: education. In my opinion, the choice therefore is always simple if you happen to be a cog in one of these huge grinding wheels: vote for the person who offers the best policies on education, and is the least religiously motivated. You’re not guaranteed to stop the depressing spiral into a New Dark Age, but it’s the best option you have.
(*I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this recently. I wondered if their might be a correlation between education standard, happiness quotient and religion. It’s hard to find a lot of data – how do you measure ‘happiness’ and ‘education quality’ for instance – but the figures I’m collecting seem to persuasively show that the greater access you have to education, the less likely you are to be religious and the more likely you are to be happy. The three countries that reliably reappear in the lists of figures are Denmark, Sweden and Norway; highly educated, least religious, highest ’self-reported’ happiness)
August 29, 2008 at 4:46 pm
I wonder sometimes about democracy. I think the biggest danger is when the feedback into the education system starts effecting the voting bloc. The democracy run amok that has Kansas teaching creationism comes to mind. In that situation, the local uneducated people had enough to sway to effect the curriculum of the schools and now kids will be turned out of high schools with even less knowledge of the actual nature of life. That’s a whole other post, right there.
It’s interesting that by voting strictly in term of education policies (which will take a lot of research work), you might find yourself all over the party lines. At least half the time, you’ll be siding with the morally motivated robots, whether it’s the crocs wearing Prius driving organic carrot crowd or the workboot and gunrack crowd. I have always been a little astounded at how often I end up being demographically aligned with people who are incredibly different than me when I think about things. Going back to school has reminded me of that particular phenomenon. In the academic crowd, I don’t fit in because of my agrarian roots, but in the blue collar circles, I get some weird looks for knowing as much as I do about modern poetry.
Thinking is dangerous business if you’re xenophobic.
(I have been pondering this lately, as well. Quite possibly the unhappiest people on earth seem to be East Coast liberals. I have never met a group of people quite so incredibly whiny. On the other hand, a close second is the hard-line born again crowd. It reminds me of the mineralogical tristogram. No matter what your beliefs are, once they hit the dogma level, you are an unhappy individual. Of course, you can refer to a few studies done in the 90s about the self described happiness of communally living religions like the Amish or Mennonites that were off the charts happy. Somewhere the balance would be struck that it’s good to believe in morals and stuff, but not too much.)
August 29, 2008 at 8:09 pm
Thinking is dangerous business period. Better not to.
>>Of course, you can refer to a few studies done in the 90s about the self described happiness of communally living religions like the Amish or Mennonites that were off the charts happy.
Well, things like that hardly count – you can relatively easily set up a gated community where everyone agrees to the basic rules, even if they are biarre rules. The trick is to be happy and interface with the rest of the world. I wondered about whether that kind of thing is in play with the Nords, but my conclusion is that if that were the case then all isolated communities should be happy. While that holds true for many (certain Pacific islands spring to mind), it’s not true for all. You do need enough resources to keep you fed & sheltered as well. Like most things it’s complex, and there is plainly no black & white rule.
My feeling is, though, that mostly religion is not a useful tool for happiness.
September 1, 2008 at 11:48 pm
I’m from Ohio. So, fuck you and GSR.