Monday, November 10, 2008

Ruminations on an Election

[Originally posted on 11/10/2008]

I originally wrote this for an e-mail list of personal friends and acquaintances.  I have decided to repost it here.

This election was a difficult one.

I'm continually surprised by the venom elections bring out in people. At work, I had people earnestly confiding in me that they would move to Canada if Obama won.  Since these folks are obviously conservatives, given when I know of Canadians, I wonder if they really thought this through.  I mean, I wasn't aware that Canada was made up of war-hawk homophobes who hate socialized medicine.

(I had to pause for a moment....I'm mildly amused that the spellchecker in my Thunderbird e-mail client doesn't know about the word "homophobe".  Perhaps some programmer at Mozilla is an optimist.  Then again, it apparently doesn't know about the word "spellchecker" either, which explains the state of Internet message forums....)

It's interesting that an election can make a moderate Republican known for facing down his own party every so often become in the national psyche a warmongering wingnut who is the very embodiment of evil social conservatives and a virtual genetic clone of the Dictator-in-Chief.  Of course, McCain apparently suffered a stroke over the summer, because he decided a totally unknown, less-than-one-term social conservative state governor with a poorly vetted background was somehow a good choice of runningmate, and then decided to go so disgustingly negative in the last month of the campaign as to poison his own well.

It's interesting that an election can make a nearly unknown freshman senator from Chicago known for little else than one speech a leader for the 21st century.  He had is own stroke over the summer, but it was a stroke of genius, forgoing the obviously politically expedient, and historically trumping, choice of a woman running mate and instead picking one of the most astute politicians in recent memory, and risking alienating a big chunk of his own party in the process.  This writer was duly impressed with his ability and determination to not go totally negative.  Not that he didn't tell his share of campaign ad fibs, but better to fudge your opponent's policy stances than some make hay of social connections that even this libertarian can see are tenuous at best.

For the first time since 1988, I did not vote for the Libertarian candidate for president.  This was an extremely difficult choice for me.  People seem to take personal pleasure in informing me that I'm throwing my vote away, or that I'm really casting a vote for the person they're against.  But there was something oddly comforting about my votes.  I could warmly snuggle into the down comforter of voting my conscience, or at least, not voting for anyone who would be part of prolonging the country's problems.  But instead, I did my due diligence, checking as many facts and counter-facts as I could, examining political rhetoric, attempting to filter said rhetoric through the polarizing sunglasses of election year distortions, and trying, in earnest, to vote for the person I thought would be best for the country in the long term.  Should or should not their choices for vice-president be taken into account?  What would *really* happen if they were in office?  What would *really* happen if they died in office and their running-mates took the office?  Who is more likely to do things that coincide with my beliefs?  Who is more likely to actually attempt to do what they say?  And *what* ARE they really saying?

Of course, I've tried to discuss the pros and cons of both the Democratic and Republican candidates, and no matter who I bring up, I've been the subject of no small amount of abuse by people whose idea of political discourse is a harpy's scream at 120dB.  The Internet has become both the best and worst thing to ever happen to American elections.  Truths are available at the touch of a button, and so are lies.  Truths are declared lies and lies are declared truths and there's absolutely no filter whatsoever, so an earnest, sincere search for information on the candidates becomes a bit like being stuck between two squabbling children shouting "am not!" "are too!".

The answers are only obvious to those who have predetermined the questions, and they are self-appointed.  To them, there are no reasonable decisions.  You pick their candidate if you want to be Right.  If, for some reason, through an honest attempt at sorting through everything, you conclude that the other candidate might in fact be a better choice, then you are (a) a moron, (b) a sheep, (c) either a Socialist or a Racist Hater.

So for those people who are so smugly secure in their choice of presidential candidate, just know that not everyone shared your sense of self-satisfied confidence.

And I will never, ever not vote Libertarian again.  It's just been too traumatic.  It's safer to just throw my vote away.

Sunday, March 16, 2008

Beijing 2008 ~= Berlin 1936

[Originally posted on 3/16/2008]

Red China really wants you to watch the Olympics.  Really really badly.  They want to prove to you that they are a happy, peaceful, unified country.  They're not really bad, they're just misunderstood.  The Olympics will show just how happy their big happy family is.  Right?

Um....

Apparently, the many areas of Asia conquered by the Communists -- and let's not forget, in spite of the end of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, China is a Communist country -- haven't been brainwashed into the ChiCom's Big Happy Family (R) (after all, they're now "capitalist" and so I guess they're supposed to be okay) thoroughly enough.  Turns out the nation of Tibet has never really been happy being held at gunpoint to be (a) officially atheist and (b) happily Chinese, and they're picking now to take another shot at calling the world's attention to it.  And it's working. 

For all the noise China makes about how good they are, they're still a Communist dictatorship, attempting to shoehorn in a token amount of free economic activity into a society that is effectively under a Soviet-style dictatorship. 

In a Reuter's news story:
Kang Xiaoguang, a political scientist at the People's University of China who has long studied social stability, said there was very little chance of the Tibetan protests sparking a chain reaction in broader China.
"I think the chances are minimal," he said of the possibility of copycat protests. "This is a localized problem. In the Han Chinese regions there's virtually zero sympathy for the Tibetan rioters, and so virtually zero chance that this will spread."
Why is that?  Because they're not Chinese.  Duh.  Of course, even if they had sympathy, I'm sure they're not aching to be shot at.

The Federal government is either in utter denial, are totally scared out of the minds by them, or are secretly on the take from them.  We know they launch constant, concerted hacker attacks on our nation's computer systems, especially government and military systems.  We know they want to squash the legitimately capitalist and democratic Republic of China (we call it Taiwan mostly for convenience), which we can't bother to have diplomatic relations with.  They're totally useless in influencing the rogue nations they're supposedly friends with (e.g. North Korea, Burma, Sudan).  They control the Port of Los Angeles.  And huge chunks of our manufacturing has been shipped there, where they thank us by poisoning our children with lead in their toys.

But they have the Olympics, so that makes them okay.  How deeply into denial we've all fallen.