Hooray! Oh, No.

Getting to see one's own perspective (sort of) prevail in November is a lovely feeling.

... And a little depressing, because if there's one thing we've recently been getting all kinds of lessons in it's the talent of leftists, and maybe of political movements generally, for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

We legalized Mary Jane in Washington State. We voted for gay marriage. We re-elected the relatively sane, apparently principled candidate for the presidency. Practical-minded egalitarian daisies seem to be popping up all over.

This has me waiting for the other shoe to drop, naturally.

Some of this may have to do with the regional plague of Seasonal Affective Disorder, which I'm a bit short of immune to. Some of it might have to do with the infamous tendency of Dems to eat our own (of course, the Republicans seem to be learning how to do that). Some of it may have to do with the ongoing tendency of the far right towards "crazy." ... And heavily-armed.

Mostly, though, I just don't see us, in the broader sense, actually learning very much from this election. It reflects some interesting (I dare even say, encouraging) patterns, but it didn't break the deadlock in Congress, and the president is not actually a member of the legislative branch. There's only so much he can do to break the stalemate.

This is purposeful. Lacking consensus or compromise, the federal government is brilliantly designed to do nothing at all. Dictatorships act quickly where democracies deliberate at length.

As in, for decades, sometimes.

It's a strength: we're slower to make mistakes. It's a weakness: a political deadlock can prevent the government from doing even what it absolutely must.

How much of a problem is this going to be? How much of an obstacle? Well, considering the ongoing obstructionist Republican attitude and the tendency of Dems not to turn out for midterm elections ...

I have hope, but also a lot of dread.

Respect

David Brooks at the New York Times is one conservative I don't at all mind sharing a civilization with, even nowadays. Lately, as in, for the last year or two, he's seemed to alternate between trying to outline what he perceives as a decline in American values, but that's understandable: he's been watching his own political faction coming apart at the seams, and he's too intellectually honest to tell himself otherwise.

His latest on Romney is particularly worth reading.

Poor guy.

Woops.

Mitt Romney might just have saved the United States from himself.

A Machine Made of People

At its formalist ideal, the law is a simple, straightforward machine, taking in and processing facts and reasoning and coughing out results. The issue with this machine is that it tries to fit a fractal peg into a round hole. It is fundamentally unconcerned with justice; its only concern is processing the facts to determine the right legal outcome. The results can be fairly horrific. If the law says that pickpockets shall hang, then pickpockets shall hang, period, and it makes no nevermind that this sometimes entails stringing up starving children.

At its realist ideal (or maybe "ideal,") the law is understood to be no machine at all, but a vague set of guidelines by which agreements about how such-and-such a legal issue should be resolved are reached. This approach sees the fractal peg and tries to match the hole to it. The issue with this approach is that, here, there is no machine: just people coming up with answers-- and those answers often differ wildly based on both reasonable (subtle differences in the facts underlying the cases) and unreasonable (whether the judge had eaten lunch yet) factors.

What we actually have in practice lies between the formalist "order" and the realist "chaos," landing with some of the merits of both, a degree of predictability on one hand, a degree of flexibility on the other. However, we also end up with some of the flaws: areas where the flexibility refuses to stretch to include a particular situation on one hand, areas where discretion swings maybe a bit too broadly on the other.

It's only debatably a machine at all, but I think it's best understood as a machine made of people: soft-edged gears whose inner rigidity is no harder than bone, a construct flawed, imprecise, unwieldy, prone to failing in all the ways humans fail, and yet also self-balancing, self-organizing, and self-correcting in the ways humans and their institutions can be.

It's messy, but maybe there's no better way for us to organize human affairs.

A Cure for Folly

Recently the observation that we're a divided nation has gotten downright boring. Tedious. It's something everybody knows, and everybody seems to hate, but it doesn't seem as though anybody's really ready to give ground. And, of course, I'm included in that: to me, it looks as though the Republicans have gone wholly insane, as though their scorched-earth politics are to blame for a good percentage of our present troubles,  and as though the best move they can make is just to get out of the way.

I do not believe that the Dems are equally to blame. I do not believe that the GOP has a valid point to make. I do not believe that bipartisan compromise for its own sake is a worthwhile end: our government is brilliantly designed to produce gridlock in the absence of consensus, and it seems as though, in a sane world, a party that induces gridlock so that it can blame the other side for the consequences should pay a price in political blood.

Only, I'm not convinced we live in a sane world. If a human being is, as Heinlein would have it, a rationalizing and not a rational animal, and if political prejudices define a person's factual reality (as they seem to), if the American electorate has as lousy a memory as it seems to ... what are we headed towards, exactly?

If the Dems win, more discord and gridlock?

If they lose ... I don't quite see the Dems going to the same lengths to achieve their (our) ends, but we, the people, will certainly have validated obstructionism as a political strategy. That's not good.

... But perhaps that's the only way out.

Contemporary Republican economic policies are trash. They won't work. They'll inflict a great deal of unnecessary suffering. They're based on political and economic sophistry, rhetorical smoke and mirrors. And maybe the only way for the electorate to see that is to implement them, and watch the resulting disasters. We've gone that way before, and the reaction from the Right was to double down, but supposing they got everything they wanted-- a new Gilded Age, gold leaf over toxic sludge?

It couldn't last, surely?

Maybe that would make the point. But the devastation in the meanwhile-- national parks privatized, pollution pumped out, corporate fiefdoms entrenched....

If that's to be the cure, it's one history is going to have to produce on its own. I sure as hell won't be voting for it.

A Little Drama

From a young woman just outside the Pierce County Courthouse in Tacoma:

"I just got divorced! Woohoo! It's been too long!"

I'm starting to really like that place.

The Future, Inc.

Yesterday, Jon Stewart had Elon Musk as his guest on The Daily Show.

Elon Musk, apparently, is the guy who originally invented PayPal, which seems like mixed karma considering all the fun what's been had with that.

However, he's also the guy who took the funds he raised via the sale (so I gather) of PayPal, and applied it toward starting up two companies: Space X and Tesla. The former is a commercial, for-profit take on space exploration. The latter builds electric cars. The idea, as he explains to Mr. Stewart, is (1) interplanetary expansion and (2) sustainability (which, if you think about it, is pretty important if you're planning on not just putting a colony on Mars but keeping it there). 

I have trouble coming up with anything at all bad to say about that. Seriously, anything-- and that's in spite of all my misgivings (and there are many) about the role of capitalism in getting our species out of this gravity well. The sort of plutocratic-feudal megacorporate dystopia that is a feature of so much "dark" sci-fi is not my cup of tea, and I do honestly believe that the nature of large, for-profit endeavors drives them towards acting with all the callousness of a nation-state and none of the sense of duty.

... IF, that is, the point is to make money. In this case, it does seem as though Mr. Musk is using money (and capitalism generally) as a method of achieving an end, rather than wealth being the end, itself. 

Perhaps the issue with modern capitalism is that we've got our priorities turned around, making wealth itself the goal. After all, if money is power, and power is a tool, then collecting money is just putting together more and more tools-- useful only if they are then put to work (at doing something, one hopes, other than collecting more and more tools like themselves). 

If that is so, then entities such as Space X may be a step back in the direction of making money serve an end, rather than making an end out of money.

And yes, they do seem to be hiring. Not defense attorneys, however.