Risky Business

If you’ve read a few of these blog posts, you may have picked up on a fascination I have with the conflict between ideals, whether between differing ideals or the conflict on how to go after the same ideal.  Today I will continue in this line of thought because it strikes me that there is one important conflict that people seem to recognize but never seem to get around to fleshing out.  I’m talking about the conflict in trying to solve a problem by making consequences much more dire.  Those who remember the slightest details about the Cold War will remember the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction, aptly shortened to MAD, as a prime example of this.  And although I will go on a bit more on this subject it is not alone in this field of thought.

OK so a little backtracking with the whole MAD thing.  After the closing of the Second World War with a couple of atomic blasts, the other remaining superpower, the USSR, got to making its own nuclear weapons.  At the same time we in the US were developing even more terrifying weapons to keep ahead of our new geo-political foes.  With the advent of fusion weapons and the mass production of them, the world entered a frightening new era.  Two opposing elements were in a contentious battle for world supremacy, if not directly then culturally, and for the first time in history they each had the ability to kill every human being alive in a matter of days, if not hours.  The ensuing arms race was the inspiration for artists and comedians, one of the great examples being “Dr Strangelove.”  But it was all based on the idea that the opposing side would never act out, because to do so would ensure their death as well, hence mutually assured destruction.  And it may simply be specious reasoning, but it would appear that it worked because we aren’t all dead, so far as I know, and one of the superpowers fell.

The very fact that the political game had been ramped up to the highest levels of danger, so the reasoning goes anyway, was what kept us safe for all those years.  The people may have been terrified in schools where they showed “duck and cover” PSAs, or during that whole Missile Crisis thing, but so far as we can tell the real threat of nuclear annihilation had actually saved us from it.  And there are those who like to take this kind of reasoning to various other examples, that may or may not really work so well.  People like to bring up the statistics that show speed limits don’t make people safer in all cases, in fact it may be that because people are going incredibly fast that they feel the danger that forces them to pay better attention.  Others take this idea a step further and say, generally facetiously, that we should install metal spikes in steering wheels to remind people of the danger that is traveling in the explosion propelled death trap that is a car.  The idea being that staring at that spike while driving would force you to stay on guard and thus eliminate the human error that is at the heart of most accidents.

And although this is clearly a terrible idea, there’s a truth in it that resounds in me.  Every time I hear about a new “advancement” in car technology that automatically turns away from obstacles, automatically applies breaks if you are headed toward something behind you, etc I am more than a little uncomfortable that these advances are just making it easier for bad drivers to stay on the road, when by all reason they should never set foot behind the accelerator.  The counter argument would be, yes of course we’re making it easier for drivers to be on the road, that’s the point.  Seat belts, airbags, backing up cameras do make the whole driving experience a lot safer.  I can think of a time quite recently when my neighbor’s daughter was playing in the dirt behind my car and if I hadn’t seen her as opened my car door I wouldn’t have been able to see her from the driver’s seat.  In that event a camera would be a great asset.  It’s all well and good to say that these advances keep bad drivers behind the wheel, but even a good driver can make a mistake and the goal should be to minimize the damage that can be done and not to shoot a metal rod through their head.

There’s a similar discussion going on with the equipment that is issued to police officers.  In the event of a real emergency, where the officer is facing down a dangerous criminal who threatens their and others’ lives, certainly it is a comfort to know that the gun is available.  At the same time though, are we encouraging officers to use guns by issuing them?  A police officer is not a member of a SWAT team, so why would we equip them with military arms?  We’ve seen the results of officers using their guns in inappropriate ways, and many would argue, myself included, that part of the problem is the fact that they have guns in the first place.  The phrase “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” has been making its rounds in the discussions surrounding the events in Ferguson for this very reason.  I don’t know for certain that we should remove firearms from the hands of police officers, but the risk equation becomes very problematic with them included.

On a completely different issue, there has been news of a possible saving grace for people in the battle against rape.  Four college students invented a new nail polish that indicates if a drink has a date-rape drug in it by changing color with contact to the drink.  They enterprise Undercover Colors, offers a new defense for people who may not know whether the drink that is being offered to them is a friendly flirt or something more sinister.  But others have noticed that by promoting this new product you are changing the equation by essentially saying we’ve given up on trying to stop rapists and so women should find ways to deal with it.  I don’t think this is a fair argument myself, as I don’t hear any legitimate calls to decrease efforts to prevent rape or to decriminalize the use of date-rape drugs.  Furthermore we would all do well to exercise a modicum of self awareness in going out into bars, which let’s not forget serve drinks that can be just as effective in making you less able to defend yourself.  As it is now, there are already voices out there who will claim that a woman who got drunk “deserved” whatever she got, so why shouldn’t we expect those voices to just become more vitriolic if a product like this takes hold and someone gets drugged because she wasn’t wearing it.  Or worse, let’s not forget that every test comes with a potential for failure, in which case we’ve upped the expectation of safety to an unreasonable extent.

It’s one of those occasions where you can hear from a distance the people who would say “the road to hell is aped with good intentions.”  Frankly, I’ve never found that to be an altogether fair expression.  After all, bad intentions are even more likely to lead to hellish results.  So I do tend to side with these guys who simply wanted to make the world a better place.  Nail polish is not going to solve the underlying problem, but if it saves lives then I’m for it.  We should be using many strategies to tackle the ills of this world and we can’t go about making perfection the enemy of the good.  But there still remains that conflict that I started with, about the whole problem of ramping up danger as a solution in and of itself.  The goal we should be aiming for is the elimination of threats not the reduction of its possibility, as a primary concern.  However, there are some threats that we may not yet be able to tackle right here and right now, so the manipulation of possibilities can be a useful tool.

I really wish I had some useful rule to end with here, but I honestly don’t know what it would be.  In the first case, every one of these examples that I mentioned and the countless I didn’t are different.  I don’t think you can adequately bring the same logic to bear against MAD and rape prevention, but I think it is useful to notice parallels like these for some lateral thinking.  We have many issues to tackle, some are immense and international while others are small or personal.  For all these issues it is useful to have a wealth of experiences and ideas to draw from when searching for answers.  We will be wrong, probably as often as we are right because I don’t know of any “flawless” solutions.  Risk is a part of our daily lives and there’s really no getting rid of it, so we have to figure out how we will manage that risk.

Kleptocracies Abound

“Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason.”  This phrase from the mind of Mark Twain has become a rallying cry of people who want to seem cynical or intelligent without putting any actual effort into it.  However, there is more than a little truth in the fact that people, generally being full of shit, should not long be kept in a position of power.  The result of such indifference in the face of such potential corruption is often the kind of nepotism that makes people cynical enough to make the comment that started off this post.  But there’s a problem that faces governments and businesses alike that emerges if we simply keep people from holding positions for very long, and it’s quite simply a matter of experience.

I thought I had already covered this subject, but a quick glance at the over 200 posts that are now on this blog, yes I know not bad for less than eight months, but apparently I haven’t touched on my issue with term limits.  Here’s the thing about professions of all sorts, you don’t know exactly what you’re doing until you do it.  Even at the most basic, entry-level jobs at a fast food restaurant there is a huge gap between a training manual with a bit of common sense and the knowledge that comes from performing the job for a while.  If you’ve ever experienced a visit to a restaurant or a supermarket where the new employees are just out of the training, you may remember that slight frustration, or pity depending on the type of person you are, with the objectively incompetent skills of the person “helping” you.  Nearly all things, especially if you want them done well, require the lessons that only come from doing, failing, and learning in real time.

The same is true for jobs that require more training than a job working the drive through window at McDonalds.  This is not to say that the education and training that go into making a doctor or a lawyer are useless, far from it, just that it is one thing to know the books inside and out and quite another to actually perform those occupations.  I can’t speak from my one experience in a medical field, considering that is not my vocation, but having been in a fair few hospitals it’s pretty easy to tell whose been drawing blood for decades and who is only a couple weeks in and just getting over the sight of blood.  I can extrapolate to even better paid positions.

The CEO of a major company got the job, presumably, because he or she was more than competent at a different but related job.  And regardless of how good they were at the previous tasks, it takes a bit of time to get a handle of what it is you actually need to do in this new profession.  Which carries us back to the matter of politicians.  Regardless of how brilliant the policies, no matter how charismatic they are, a congressman is essentially useless in their first year on the job.  There are so many intricacies in making deals, raising money, getting things done that it doesn’t really matter how smart or moral you are if you can’t learn how to play the game, which takes some time.  So when I hear people calling for term limits of 3 or 4 terms max for a stint in Congress, all I can think about it having to deal with the turn around.

No business, with the possible executions of tech start ups, goes into hiring someone demanding that they seek other employment after a short period of time.  Even if there is an expectation that these employees might leave early, the hope of an employer is to keep long lasting staff to keep training costs down on the one hand, but more importantly to keep a steady supply of employees who know what the heck they are actually doing.  But the people calling for term limits are essentially saying, “if you know what you are doing then we don’t want you as employees.”  And believe me when I say I understand the spirit behind this call for term limits.

The trouble with keeping someone on a single job for a long stretch of time is complacency.  Complacency leads to all sorts of other little problems: inattention, corruption, boredom, laziness, etc.  This is, again, true of most every job.  Back to the fast food joint for a sec, it is easy to criticize the new guy that is still figuring out the ropes of how to simultaneously take orders, mix a milkshake, and give the customer their change, but there’s another problem on the side of the employee that has been there for years and knows exactly what they’re doing.    Laziness can be the mother of invention, after all we wouldn’t need the wheel if we weren’t too lazy to carry things around, but it can also be a serious problem for a business.  The worker that has been around a while knows that there are certain tasks, usually in the form of cleaning, that are difficult to notice whether they’ve been done or not.  And whereas a newer employee is, generally, working much harder to get everything right, the veteran employee is long since passed the point of caring.

As for doctors, there is always that unfortunate reality that by the time you are a decade into your practice, the bulk of what you learned in med school is out of date.  That is the trouble with progress, it keeps going whether you’re on board or not.  And while most doctors put in countless hours after work to stay abreast of the most recent advancements in their field, the temptation for a veteran doctor to let those things slide can grow overwhelming.  In the same way that, as a patient, you might fear the new phlebotomist coming to do the job, you might also fear the doctor with a shock white beard who seems to struggle with what is clearly the newest technology in the room.  This is perhaps a lazy stereotype on my part, as most doctors regardless of age work incredibly hard to stay up to date, but it is an understandable fear nonetheless.

A similar thing happens to politicians who have been in their positions for just a few decades too many.  It becomes easy to question if they even actually care any more about the issues that they seems so passionate about in the past.  Particularly with the type of government we have now, where fundraising is lifted high above actual policy creation, it is a reasonable fear that the politicians who haven’t had to worry about a legitimate campaign opponent for twelve cycles might just be lining their pockets at theist point.  But the problem with this kind of kleptocracy is not that a corrupt politician emerged as a result of being in their position too long.  It emerged because we, the voters, allowed complacency to enter the equation.

The reason we generally don’t hear about the CEOs that have basically been doing nothing in their jobs, in favor of simply lining their pockets, is because they have stakeholders that make complacency a near impossibility.  Of course there are going to be those corrupt exceptions to the rule, regardless of the industry, but it’s a simple fact that people can only get away with what others allow them to.  The manager at the fast food place needs to check that the equipment is actually being cleaned and that the service is remaining up to snuff.  The hospital needs to check morbidity and mortality records to ensure that their doctors are keeping their heads above water.  The stockholders need to be demanding that their CEO is actually getting the job done and not simply swindling their investments.  We as citizens have the responsibility to keep our politicians accountable because we have the right to vote.

The only thing a term limit does effectively in practice is drive out talent in favor of inexperience.  And although I would definitely be opposed to politicians in the legislature or executive having lifetime appointments, it is simply because I need to know that we have the ability to kick them out the moment they stop doing their jobs well.  The issue becomes a little muddled when you involve the legislature, whom you want to be beholden to the laws that exist and not the popular opinion of what the law is on the part of the majority.  But in the case of elected politicians, the goal can’t be to simply limit the number of years a bad politician can do damage, it must be to weed out bad politicians and make sure the good ones stay.  Of course this is all hinging on a fantasy where people regularly vote and participate in the democratic process.

Cheeky

So a few days ago we passed an anniversary of sorts, the bicentennial of the torching of DC in the War of 1812.  As a joke the British embassy in the US celebrated the event with a cake in the shape of the White House with the US and UK flags on either side, along with a couple sparklers.  It was all in good fun, but as has become commonplace in this incredibly sensitive age of internet activism, someone got a little insulted that the destruction of our capitol was being mocked.  Now I might also be offended if it weren’t for the fact that this was literally hundreds of years ago and since then the relationship between the US and what is now the UK has markedly improved.  Was it a little morbid to celebrate in this way?  Perhaps a little bit, but given the treatment Guy Fawkes gets every November I should think we got off a little easy with sparklers.  However, this does give me a flimsy enough excuse to talk about a British issue in less than glorifying terms because turnabout is fair play my friends.  Today we’re talking about the British monarchy.

Now let’s start with the basic details that everyone brings up to avoid this issue.  The queen, and the people that will likely be following her, has no real power.  The queen is a symbol and little else and has been equated to a cat in her utility as a thing that just kind of sits around until people need something to point to, to make festivities more festive.  Although there are some lingering traditions that affect the pomp of governance, e.g. the permission to form a government, it’s not like she could ever really stop the democratic process in the UK.  Furthermore, the monarchy brings in a ton of revenue, mostly in the form of tourism, to the UK.  The fact that there is a living, breathing monarch makes the British castles seem, somehow, even more quaint.  This all setting aside the fact that she is perhaps the single most popular public figure in the UK.

These are all valid points to be made, but I don’t find them compelling enough to make this a moot point that the monarchy is incredibly creepy for a modern society.  Let’s just take for a moment the national anthem.  “God save our gracious Queen!  Long live our noble Queen!  God save The Queen!  Send her victorious, happy and glorious, long to reign over us: God save The Queen!”  This is the song I could envision being sung by a cult.  God save the leader, long live the leader, god save the leader.  But my favorite is “long to reign over us.”  Why?  Because there are few societies in the world, outside that little area North of South Korea, where the people sing joyously over being ruled by a single person indefinitely.  At least the Germans had the decency to change the words from “Deutschland Über Alles.” It’s creepy, even though I know that it is no longer really in vogue to sing along with the exception of the Olympics and Jubilees.  And while we’re on the subject of jubilees.

I understand why people like to celebrate annual events like birthdays and anniversaries, even though objectively the requirements for at least the former are simply not dying over the course of 365 days.  It’s fun to be able to occasionally celebrate the simpler, happier parts of life, particularly when life can be brutal at times.  But, not unlike with the national anthem, I find it just a little disturbing how much time, money, and effort went into commemorating another length of time being the subjects of another person.  And that’s really the brunt of it, isn’t it?  It’s the fact that Brits are not citizens, but subjects of the crown.  This is one of those remnants of language that I find altogether a bit odd.

In America, for all our faults, we understand the importance of language… ok maybe that’s a bit of a stretch.  Nonetheless, the words we use to describe people are egalitarian in nature, in direct response to the language of the empire we left.  We are citizens of the United States of America and we are headed by a president.  These words were chosen with more than a little thought behind it as a way of keeping us modest and equal.  We do not have a king, an emperor, a lord, or a right honorable majesty.  We have a president, a word that is equally applicable to the leader of a nation as to the leader of a company or a rotary club.  But in Britain there is still a House of Lords and a monarchy as an ever present reminder of the less than equal state of affairs.

Again you can make the argument that these are ceremonial, vestigial parts of British society that have no bearing on the actual conduct of the state, even though that argument is a little shakier due to the fact that the House of Lords retains some legislative authority, but it always strikes me as odd that there is still this explicit inequality among classes in Britain, on top of the implicit inequality that arise in all societies.  Although I will grant you that a person wearing a powdered wig and ceremonial robes might seem just a little more equal than the chav from Essex, it’s another thing altogether to quantify the difference by guarantying seats in a House of Parliament to one person and not another.  I’m sorry but I don’t think Andrew Lloyd Webber has done anything so great as to merit permanent membership of the aristocracy, however much I might enjoy the occasional “Phantom of the Opera” tune.  But I could forgive all of that, if it weren’t for the fact that above all others the first estate retains permanent stature in Britain.

Maybe it’s just because I come from a country where we actually do have the separation of church and state written into our legal system, as Jefferson put it “A wall of separation,” but I find it more than a bit out of whack that the head of state in the UK is also the head of the Church of England in the year of our lord 2014.  I mean really, is tradition really so important that no one could amend that bit to move Britain a little bit out of the Middle Ages.  And I know this must sound rich coming out of the blog of a person from a country that is always having a fight with our own religious extremists over whether this is a “Christian nation.”  But in the case of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland the argument would be settled, you really are.  There are special seats reserved for the archbishops and the monarch remains the titular head of the church.  And even though I grew up in the Anglican communion and have fond memories of it, I don’t think the effort should be to retain all the traditions of Henry VIII.

The UK, with the possible exceptions of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, is a pretty intelligent country.  There have been many mistakes made in the creation and maintenance of the empire that once never saw a sunset, but generally there is an effort to right these wrongs, the Falkland Islands not withstanding.  The people most loved in the UK are people of wit: Rowen Atkinson, David Mitchell, and of course Stephen “international treasure” Fry.  Yet there remains this umbilical attachment to a monarchy that maintains a tradition of saying “get to work you peasants, your betters are trying to relax.”  Which just strikes me as less than intelligent.

So let me just say, as a proper American reaction to the cheeky dessert offensive of 2014, “shots fired.”  Mind the gap, pip pip cheerio, Bob’s you uncle, chim chim cheree, fish and chips, God save the Queen!

The Truth and the Truth

A not terribly surprising amount of debate has gone into the life and death of Michael Brown and the officer who killed him.  As I mentioned in a precious post, there has been large swathe of the population that refuses to recognize race or class or really anything as an issue, instead favoring the time honored strategy of putting your fingers in your ears and shouting.  But there is another group out there that, if not actively condemning Michael Brown for his own death, are using surrounding facts to make it go away.  And here is the part that becomes a little too nuanced for the, unfortunately numerous, people who want to see the world in black and white, they’re not wrong but their not right.

The police force made, I believe, a rather callous decision to leak the video of Brown shoplifting at the same time that they leaked the name of the officer, particularly because they admitted that the officer did not make the connection to that incident when he killed Brown.  After quite a long time of giving out no information and actively stopping those who tried to find out, to do this was clearly a matter of smearing Brown’s character.  The fact of the matter is that Brown did indeed shoplift about $40 worth of cigarillos and we simply don’t know if he had acted in a way that might have seemed threatening when confronted by the officer.  But even if he had stolen $4000 worth of goods and startled the officer, that is not an offense worthy of being shot six times.

It is going to take quite a while for the country to find out all the details of what went on, but the small incidental things that are coming out now indicate something clear to me.  Let’s assume the worst, let’s assume that Brown reached into the cop car and started attacking the officer and that he had every reason to fear for his life.  There is no evidence at this point that suggests this is the case, but for the sake of argument, let’s pretend that this particular incident was just an officer understandably “standing his ground.”  Even in that event the larger truth revolving around this case remains and that is the ever widening chasms of inequality based on race, based on class, based on occupation, etc.

You see, there is a conservative chorus out there that want so badly to paint this as something that is endemically wrong, not with the country, but with “inner city culture.”  The looting that occurred in the aftermath of this is proof to them of the immorality in the inner city and of urban youths, which if you hadn’t noticed are vaguely coded terms for blacks.  They want the problem to be with rap music, with hoodies, with the things that they don’t experience in say to day life so that they can go on pretending that this is a localized incident with no bearing on any larger truth.  This worldview is quite comfortable, but it is also quite wrong.

We are living in a society of ever increasing divisions.  In our Congress the gap between Left and Right makes compromise impossible and leaves our ability to govern impotent.  And although, as I’ve mentioned, this has more to do with the obstinance of one side, it remains emblematic of larger divisions on all sides.  On the internet we see websites catering to specific, small groups such that you never have to interact with people you don’t want to.  In the economy the richest continue to make huge sums while the poorest find it difficult to find a job, let alone earn a living.  And yes, the racial divisions of this country are also getting worse in many cases.

We are now more than a century passed the end of slavery and the Civil War, a half century since the passage of the Civil Rights Act and yet the divisions between people based on the quantity of melanin in their skin or their ancestral origins do not seem to be closing.  The White flight that occurred in the latter half of the 20th century made societies are diverse as the Jim Crow South all over the country.  The popularization of certain types of music, styles, slang, etc have simply added to stereotypes and the general feeing of separation between groups, particularly among different generations.  Things only get worse when you also take into account how various Hispanic groups relate with white, black, and really any community in the US.

So when people hear stories about unarmed people of color being killed by police you see two extremely segregated responses, this of course assuming that the stories see any airtime at all.  On the one hand you hear from the community that has been directly affected that this is just par for the course as far as they are concerned.  If facts emerge to discredit that particular story as part of the larger truth of the division and inferiority they experience, then there is the immediate impulse to dig in heels because it took something as extreme as this to get their voice heard at all.  On the other hand you hear the cynics who don’t acknowledge the larger truth at all because each time one of these extreme examples comes up there is a conscious effort to hold minor details, that may have no bearing on the specific circumstances, in an effort to maintain the status quo.

So what is that larger “truth” that I keep alluding to?  Every country has their demons, and racial differences factor into more than we would like to admit, but America goes a step further.  America has had a much longer history of dramatic integration than basically any other country, which is why a lot of us don’t take criticism from European nations in this regard as altogether fair.  Paris and London are certainly metropolitan cities, but the majority of France and Britain are nowhere near as diverse as St Louis, Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, and all the many cities and towns of the US that have long been the home of blacks, whites, and everyone in between.  But there is also a level of accuracy that only comes from a little distance.  And the truth is that America has a race problem.

We are an ever hopeful people in America.  We hoped that the election of Barack Obama would be the final nail in the coffin of racism, we hoped that the Civil Rights Act would lead to the end of racism, we hoped that if we made the country separate but equal that racism would become moot.  Alas in all these cases they were merely hopes, because once someone put any amount of work into solving the problem of racism in this country, the rest of us took it as a cue that the work was over, that we’d won.  So now we’re stuck watching the same story unfold time and again, leaving us feeling powerless and hopeless.

Every so often we see the story of a black guy who gets killed by the police, but we never hear the countless stories of the black guys that were stopped and frisked, were presumed guilty because they had the gall to walk down an American street while black.  Every so often we hear about some high profile latino lawyer who was stopped by the police or the border patrol or ICE, but we never hear the countless stories of the latino kids who were stopped by officers on their way home for the crime of being brown in America.  And this is setting aside all the problems of black on black violence, gang warfare that goes down in our own streets because certain sectors of society have long since been told that they simply aren’t worth the effort.  These are the larger truths that we never get to because the immediate story that would predicate these talks get riddled with holes of doubt when pictures come out of the victim flipping off a camera.

And until we can start to have these bigger conversations without the impetus of a shooting, we are going to fall into the same two stories fighting each other.  “He was an innocent child and he died unarmed.”  “He was a thug who finally pushed an authority figure too far.”  And sadly that argument that defends the status quo against reason, against reality, against morality will always win out because it is a time game.  All that side has to do is wait for the next news cycle and they win by default.

Let’s Make a Deal

So I used to say that even though I vote more often for Democratic candidates that I wouldn’t necessarily consider myself a Democrat because I could still very easily imagine voting for a Republican given that he or she, but let’s be honest it’s the GOP so he, were the better candidate.  And although I still find myself not agreeing with the Democratic Party all of the time, mostly because they don’t follow through with what they claim to value in the platform, I cannot claim that I consider the GOP to be a viable party worth considering in any reasonable sense.  This isn’t to preclude the possibility that a decent Republican could appear and convince me to change my vote, after all given the choice between say Jon Huntsman and John Kerry for president I’d say it’s essentially a toss up.  But I would have to conclude that unless there were a pretty sizable mountain of evidence that the candidate is not a “real” Republican, one that is not willing to stoop to the lowest common denominator in an effort to appease the extremist base of the Right, there simply is no point in keeping up the pretense that there’s anything beyond a Hobson’s choice in choosing Democratic candidates in 99.9% of elections.

Why is that the case?  Why is it that the GOP is no longer even a viable option for many millennials like myself?  Well, as referenced earlier part of the problem stems from the lunatics running the asylum.  The Tea Party may no longer be able to field candidates in the way they did in 2010, but they basically already won the battle they were fighting.  The goal was never to set up a competing third party, just to make GOP candidates recognize that extreme conservatism, although literally dying of old age, is not yet dead.  The goal was to force GOP candidates to fight for the Right in a way that would stop what they view as an evil turn toward the Left in American politics.  And although they are correct in their assessment that America is shifting away from the Right, this hardly constitutes a shift to the Left, if you catch my meaning.  They certainly have succeeded in their effort to keep America from shifting to the Left, by making it utterly impossible for the government to do anything, least of all govern effectively.

Every battle that is fought in the House and Senate is done with the full knowledge that it is a fruitless exercise, particularly in an election year like this.  Incidentally, as the school year is beginning and with it the end of Summer, election day is not all that far around the corner.  Every politician, every staffer, and I think at this point every American understands that there can be no laws passed, or repealed for that matter, because the whole process has been hijacked by an extremist sect bent on killing the American government.  And maybe you are one of the people that would prefer that the government step off your back and let you live free or die, but I’m fairly certain that unless you are yourself in possession of many billions of dollars already, the last thing that would be in your interest would be the end of government.  But even the mere obstacle of the Tea Party could be evaded if only the rest of the government could simply hash out deals like reasonable people, but this gets to  the real reason why I think most people of my generation are altogether fed up with the GOP.

It’s one thing to hold firm principles that you will not back down on, to draw a line in the sand that says “beyond this point I will not cross.”  That is the basic step of negotiation, to mark out the areas that would be an impossibility to making a deal, because as is so often noted politics is the art of the possible.  Each side lays out the terms that they cannot give into and they work in the middle on the things they can negotiate.  Nobody goes home with everything they want, but you leave with something tangible that you can be proud of, and heck if we’re being a little cynical, something you can run on in the future.  But now we live in a world where one party continually draws a line in the sand, pretends to negotiate in full faith, and then when it comes time to make good and pass legislation, backs down and fights against the very things that it had agreed to.

We saw this, most recently, in the botched attempt at passing any kind of immigration law that could help sort out the immediate situation at our border.  The president made a request for $3.7 billion to handle the overall problem, the House GOP responded with a counter offer of just under $660 million to cover a shorter period of time and solve the immediate issue.  Neither side was particularly happy, but essentially the Democrats decided with the length of time they had left before the Summer recess they would by and large accept the GOP counter offer.  Then just before they were going to make that agreement, based on the GOP’s supposedly legitimate counter offer, the Tea Party element decided nope.  They reneged on their offer leaving everyone scrambling.  To have something to show to their constituents they then went through a farcical series of votes to tack on the most extremist policies onto a fake bill that would never see the light of day anywhere else on the Hill.

See, I don’t know if you’ve ever dealt with a car salesman before, but these people make car salesmen everywhere look like pristine examples of respectable traders.  As much as they will find any and all excuses to tack on a little extra here and there, for parts and services that essentially don’t exist, once you shake hands that is it.  When the agreement has been made and the paperwork is being filed, unless you have a particularly bad example to talk about, they don’t tend to light the paperwork on fire and pretend that the price of the car just went up by $10,000 in the last five seconds.  And yet this has become the MO of the GOP, which means that even if you could convince this generation to believe in the “conservative principles” of the GOP, you still have yet to convince us that they’re even remotely honest or even competent leaders.  And this is even with the already heavy cynicism that surrounds politicians.

And as much as I would love to pin this all on people with whom I disagree, I have to say that it takes two to tango, and the Democrats have been as incompetent as ever in confronting their political opponents.  This should be the easiest fight in the world, but as ever the Democratic Party seems poised as ever to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory.  These Tea Partiers are acting like spoiled children and the Democrats, and the mainstream Republicans, are acting as pretty miserable parents.  When the toddler makes a fuss in the store about a particular candy, you don’t reinforce bad behavior by giving in.  Be firm, don’t give in, and if they are going to persist in making a fuss just ignore them until they shut up and act like adults.  I would feel a little remorseful in hurling insults in this way, but if the shoe fits.

Democrats should be running on, not from, the work that has been done in spite of this dogged opposition.  For the first time in American history the fact that you contracted a disease cannot be used as an excuse for health insurance companies to cancel you plan.  As a person living with a “pre-existing condition” this is something important that should be brought up more often, particularly if the GOP is going to persist in threats to repeal the ACA completely.  Democrats should be running on, not from, the consensus of economists that maintain that not only is the economy growing, but that it is doing so thanks to policies of the government and Federal Reserve.  Democrats should be running on, not from, the scientific consensus that not only is climate change real but that it poses a terrible threat to our economy as well as our environment if we don’t act now and that the only people claiming that this isn’t so are either insane, stupid, or so intrenched in a specific industry that they are blind to the fact that even fossil fuels will go bust if there’s no one alive to buy.  Democrats should be running on, not from, the inequality that face all Americans regardless of race because of conservative policies that funnel money to an already wealthy few with nothing to show for it save unemployment and recessions.  Democrats should be running on, not from, the separation of church and state because that means not only that Christianity can’t be made law but neither can Sharia.

And the thing is, although at this point I couldn’t stand voting for them myself, I know that the bulk of the GOP would also be willing to work to actually accomplish something if only there were the impetus to do so.  You want to know how you create that impetus?  By making the group that you can’t ignore, the group that wants the government to get off its ass and get back to work like the rest of us.

Animals All

So yesterday I talked a bit about the threat of hawkish rhetoric in our efforts to confront the threats of, among other things, ISIS.  I tried to focus more on the direct problems that arise when we give in to our base instincts of vengeance, and the overblown nature of people who use those instincts, whether because they are deluded themselves or simply use it as a tool to gain influence.  But today I want to talk about a different, albeit related, topic that seems to pop up here and there in so many discussions, but has come to a particular prominence in discussions about terrorists.  Are they human?

Now the “they” here can be an ambiguous term, because depending on the topic “they” could be terrorists, immigrants, or the poor.  But in whatever terms you put it there is an undercurrent of our conversations that implies, and sometimes openly states, that there are some people who aren’t.  Michelle Fields, a conservative commentator, when talking about ISIS in the aftermath of the murder of James Foley said, “They’re not even humans, they’re animals.”  And to the last but, strictly speaking, she’s right that humans are a species of animal, but the first bit clarifies that wasn’t the point she was making.  And this kind of literally dehumanizing rhetoric is poisonous to us as people as well as our ability to confront challenges as people.

The group Genocide Watch outlines the stages of genocides, and although they have added two stages to the original eight, it is an intriguing topic to consider.  “How could they possibly do that?”  This is the question we ask about the holocaust, about Stalin’s purges, about the mountains of skulls from the Khmer Rouge, indeed about every act of atrocity.  We are utterly revolted by the mere idea that people could carry out such acts of horror against their fellow man.  And though you might hear the accusations of inhumanity leveled on a small scale, I think most of us are grown up enough to recognize that the people responsible for these atrocities are as human as those who suffered.  That is a profoundly terrifying thought.

We want so badly to believe that no human being could possibly be so vile, so disturbed as to do that.  It must be something in the German spirit, something in the Cambodian soul that is fundamentally different than the rest of us humans.  Sadly that is not the case, it is really quite natural that people put in specific circumstances, fed the right information, etc should find themselves capable of unimaginably horrific acts.  At this point I think almost everyone has heard of the Milgram Experiment, if not by name, then by the test itself.  Subjects put in a scenario where they are egged on by an authority figure will administer progressively more powerful electric shocks to another person, even up to the point where the subject dies.  And although there are many reasons to believe that this test is not conclusive proof of the “inhumanity” of humans, it certainly provides more disturbing thoughts to consider.  An ordinary person, taken off the street, if told that they need to do something for a good cause by someone they have every reason to respect might be willing even to kill another.  And that is a person without much social preparation.

I mentioned the stages identified by Genocide Watch earlier, not just to fill words on a page, but as an important reference for the words we use in conversations and debates.  In both the old and the revised lists there is one stage that, above all, would seem of particular importance to this discussion.  “Dehumanization: One group denies the humanity of the other group. Members of it are equated with animals, vermin, insects or diseases. Dehumanization overcomes the normal human revulsion against murder.”  The part that should immediately cause some hairs to prick up on the back of your head now are the words “Members of it are equated with animals.”  

Now, I’m not saying that we need to have squeaky clean rhetoric, free of any and all insults.  I for one find it both poignant and a little fun to point out the lunacy and petulance of arguments and people.  It can be a much needed source of humility to remind you that, much like everyone else, you are not perfect.  Insults, moreover, are a part of the game we play in living life, but like all things, moderation is the key.  Because if your argument hinges on the lack of humanity of others, then you are treading on very thin ice.

And this, of course, is setting aside the irony that the strongest argument that some people feel they can make against ISIS, a group that dehumanizes “infidels,” “imperialists,” and “invaders,” is an argument that dehumanizes them.  But here is another dose of that disturbing truth, they are human.  They had a father and a mother who gave birth to them.  They grew up and played, they laughed and still do laugh.  These are people, and like all people they are capable of loving devotion while at the same time capable of disgusting violence.  The cognitive dissonance that is the human condition means that the full spectrum of humanity covers much more than we would care to admit.

There are pictures of Hitler on the internet, this much should come as no great shock.  There are pictures of his hateful speeches, his face contorted with that screaming rage, but there are other pictures.  There are pictures and films of him smiling and laughing and flirting.  These are the most shocking to us because we want so badly for him to just be a terrible monster with a laughable mustache, and yet there he is being a human being.  He fell in love, he had friends, he told jokes, and he preached hate, killed enemies, and made war.  Dehumanizing him would seem to be the least that he deserves, but all it does is perpetuate the disease he was a symptom of.

We need to be able to acknowledge the full breadth of what it means to be human, not to be politically correct, but to actually be human.  We can be annoying, petty, violent, hateful, loving, forgiving, generous, greedy, amusing, and simply odd.  We were not born into this world by our own choices and we don’t control the world we grow up and live in.  At the same time we are not passive players in the world, we have self control and the ability to choose for ourselves, or if you are certain of determinism we at least have that illusion of choice.  And yes, as human beings we are capable of the worst crimes imaginable and still worse.  This does not negate humanity, but it demands even more from our human capacity to love.

The fact that people use this kind of rhetoric does not necessarily mean that they actually mean they think that there exists an under-race of people, but it makes it much easier to believe that going forward at the very least.  And I mentioned in passing that this same ideology is applied to other lower orders of people, even if it is done less explicitly.  The way people refer to the homeless, the unemployed, immigrants, etc makes me uneasy to say the least.  Even if they don’t come out and say “they’re not humans, they’re animals” when talking about the Central American children that arrive at our Southern border, the way they do talk about them shows that it is simply a matter of semantics.  The allegations of diseases, gang affiliations, drug problems are so easily spilled out of mouths and directed at a whole class of people is at least as problematic as referring to murderers as less than human.

So what?  We aren’t on the verge of systematically slaughtering every Islamist in the world, and even if we did it wouldn’t be so bad right?  I just feel that too often we are only waiting for excuses to indulge in our own worst deeds and we should be skeptical of people arguing for “strong” policies, while at the same time using rhetoric that would look more at home in a Nuremberg Rally than anywhere else.  I have said quite a few times that I do believe that our military support of the Kurds and Iraqis against ISIS is necessary, but those should be very limited terms and I fear missionary creep much more than mission creep.  Because above all else it behooves us to remember that even if we are completely successful, and able to make sure that the only people who die are not civilians, we are still killing.  We are still killing sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, friends, lovers and not vermin, not animals.  Unless of course you are willing to recognize that we are animals all.

Circling Hawks

It never ceases to amaze me the absolute lack of staying power in our collective memory.  I would say that we put goldfish to shame in the department of forgetting things, but to even draw that comparison would seem to be an insult to those faithful post-mortem explorers of our sewage system.  I know that in political terms a decade is an eternity, which is perhaps why so many seem to think that President Obama has broken a record in vacation time, in spite of those pesky little twins, reality and context.  But still, you’d think that with an event so fundamentally table turning as the attacks of 9/11, with our annual pledge that we will “never forget that we could remember even the most basic things that came out of that time.  Yet here we are, hearing the same tired old lines and bracing ourselves for the next world war.

ISIS needs to be taken down: for the sake of the people that live in a country that we so callously destroyed, for the sake of the Kurds who have endured so much, for the sake of democracy that we claim to defend, and yes for our own long term security.  The matter seems all the more pressing in the aftermath of that utterly gruesome display, that remorseless slaughter of an innocent journalist, James Foley.  I was in his home town today, and what I heard there chilled my blood as cold as when I first heard of his murder.  I heard the rumblings of an emboldened sect of war hawks, champing at the bit to fight a new war and send our sons and daughters to die or to kill the sons and daughters of others.

Again, our military assistance to the Kurds and the Iraqi government is not, necessarily, the worst option.  I can’t help but be a little astonished at the sheer stupidity of this Islamist cult, because for all their tactical skill they have made that one blunder that has been the end of greater warriors than they.  All they have done is awaken a sleeping giant and filled us with a terrible resolve.  But it is that resolve that I fear as it has the potential to transform our nation back into the crusading imperialist all over again, instead of the moral arbitrator we wish to be.

I am reminded of the words of Congresswoman Barbara Lee in the wake of 9/11 who had the courage to speak her peace about what America should do, in the face of an otherwise unanimous decision.  The words she found came to her after much soul searching, and much listening to the words of others, not least of all a minister at the ceremony in honor of the victims.  “As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore.”  I find her remarks all too appropriate now, as I remain so thoroughly impressed that she said them just days after the attacks, before we even had a solid idea who we would be fighting.  At least now we have a clear idea of who it is we are fighting, instead of naively declaring war on an idea.  But even with that clarity our discourse is so opaque that reason seems incapable of shining through. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh_sxilhyV0

We have lost so much in the Middle East that it seems there are only two camps left in America on this subject, and I’m not exactly referring to conservative vs liberal.  There are those who are so gung-ho about revenge that any excuse to go kick some ass seems more than sufficient and their boisterous cries can be heard from Austin to Washington.  There are those who have seen such loss, such death and desolation that they can’t imagine these conflicts made perpetual, but their voices have become hoarse from begging for peace.  But these are not my voices, and not to be self aggrandizing, but I think it is a voice worth being heard at least once before we commit to whatever decision it is we make.

To desire justice is not the same as seeking vengeance, though so often in our national discussions such nuances are overlooked.  To desire peace is not to preclude demonstrations of force, though the logical paradoxes are not difficult to spot.  To desire goodness is not to evade doing what is necessary, but as I’ve said before this becomes a treacherous path to take.  I am thoroughly behind the president on this issue as I feel he is doing just what is needed, at the direct expense of popularity, although at this point that would seem a forgone conclusion regardless.  What we need now is deliberate action in aiding the Iraqis and fighting ISIS, and strict vigilance in keeping these terrible decisions out of the hands of those who would find war as a source of pleasure and not pain.

I don’t know what word is appropriate for the feeling I have when I discover that a person who is so utterly committed to war has never served a day in his or her life, because at this point it certainly isn’t surprise.  But I definitely do find a particularly odd form of surprise when the people calling for the lives of our servicemen and women to be put on the line have worn a uniform.  It then comes as something of a moment of revelation when I discover that even those people who did where the uniform, did participate in the armed services, nonetheless never actually saw any real “action.”  To them it remains just a game with various pawns to be thrown at a given problem, and any moral qualms that may have remained are dulled by the assertion that we have a “volunteer military.”  It’s incredible to me that anyone still takes these star-spangled embarrassments seriously, but all the more that people choose this style over actual substance.

President Obama never served a day in his life, never put his life on the line in the field of battle, and yet he acts with the wisdom of a true military leader.  Yet because he wears no badges or pins on his chest he is thought of as weak, while the overcompensating fools are portrayed as if their egos had anything to back it up.  We are living in a time of great turmoil and we need leaders who are willing to make the necessary decisions, not the popular ones and not the ones that get you all hot and bothered.  But more importantly we are also living in as peaceful a time as humanity has likely ever known, which is all the more reason to keep power in the hands of those who seek peace and not eternal war.

It is not exciting or sexy to call for moderation, but deep down we know that it is the right choice to make.  Passion is the enemy of reason, and yet passion can also be the enemy of inaction.  The greatest purpose these war hawks serve to this nation and this planet is in giving appropriate urgency, because at some point we have to make an imperfect decision if the alternative is waiting too long without making any decisions at all.  

We are one nation, one people but that does not mean we are one mind or one voice, nor should we ever hope for as much.  Our diversity is what gives us strength, even as we’ve seen that ignorance can make diversity an agent of chaos as well.  We are fighting an enemy that fights with one mind and one book, we should never try to emulate that.  The voices call for that kind of blind unity would make us that which we deplore and worse, but those that call for joining together in spite of and because of our differences are voices to be listened to.  As we continue to act, as we continue to fight for liberty and democracy and security and diversity let us not make the same mistakes that we made.  Let us not simply learn the lessons of our recent past, but live out the full meaning of our founding ideals.

Me Me Me

When it comes to social issues there is quite a bit of overlap between progressives and liberals, though admittedly for different reasons at times.  If I’m being honest, there are actually many issues where I would put myself somewhere within the libertarian camp, as I am a pretty live and let live type of guy.  Overall if I had to choose between a political Right dominated by conservatives or libertarians, I would certainly choose the latter.  But I don’t think that I could ever actually call myself a libertarian as a general description, even though there are quite a few libertarians that I actually respect, and no the father and son Paul team would not be among them.  The reason comes from the limits of a society where everyone has complete control of their own lives, which is to say that people make incredibly stupid choices.

A true libertarian might say that it is a human right to win or lose, to live or die by one’s own choices and that the do-goodery of progressives like myself does not simply impede these individual per suits it actually leads to less than ideal outcomes.  I would have to admit that the do-goodery of others does lead to less than ideal results, but I don’t think there is a person on the planet who could say that the outcomes of any situation are “ideal” in a less than perfect world, the likes of which we call home.  I find that people are quite capable of creating their own less than ideal results on their own regardless.  Again the true libertarian would say that even if the results of a person’s decisions are less than ideal, it is better than the less than ideal results that come from government regulation because at least individual freedom was maximized.  And this is where I have a problem, with the straw man I have created, because I think that individual liberty is a value to be considered and not The value to be praised above all others.

And this is an argument apart from acknowledging the negative externalities of individual choices, I believe.  There are anarcho-capitalist libertarians out there, who believe that there is no role for government in society.  To them the idea of government regulations to intervene in occasions where one’s independent actions negatively affect someone else is frankly unthinkable.  If I understand correctly, the people directly involved are best able to handle the aftermath of such events, and the natural tendency of people to enjoy not being shunned from society will inhibit the decisions people might make that would result in negative externalities.  To be quite frank I find it ridiculous that anyone could possibly believe that people could actually work like these rational robots, and I find it more than a little ironic that these people so despise communism for essentially the same reason.  No, that extreme is really not on the table for the majority of libertarians, let alone Americans.  I am more than willing to acknowledge that most libertarians acknowledge that government has a role to play, just that the role of government should be as limited as is humanly possible.

But still, I think the initial critique still remains relevant, that individual liberty is one of several values that need to be considered when considering the role of government.  These values include but are not limited to justice, security, opportunity, and community. To exclude the possibility of these other values is tantamount to reverting to early childhood, closing your ears, screaming, and somehow expecting that this noisy display is a convincing argument.  Again, in an effort to be fair, I believe the counter argument is that these values are better played out by the choices made by individuals, but I would contend that some of these are directly antithetical to individual liberty as the individual has the ability to ruin them for the majority.

There are some problems that are caused by the product of all individuals and therefore need to be confronted by all individuals.  The problem is that there will always be some individuals who want to do what they want to do and thumb their noses at community efforts to accomplish goals.  It is at these times that government regulation, and yes coercion can be more than preferable, but necessary.  The prime example of our modern world is climate change, which incidentally is the reason why so many libertarians are “skeptical” of climate science.  There is a scientific consensus on the matter of climate change, it is a fact that A the world is getting warmer, B the warming of the earth poses a direct threat to humanity, C the products of humanity are at least a large part of the reason why climate change is as potentially devastating as it is, and that D governments are the only things capable of getting enough people to act in a way that could solve the problem.  

But I know that the climate deniers out there are simply sick of hearing this truth repeated again and again on deaf ears, so I’ll go to another example, car safety.  Cars are fundamentally unsafe creations.  They are dense structures of metal that are propelled at great speed by explosions and are operated by human drivers who are often either distracted or impaired.  The only way we could possibly eliminate the risk to life created by cars would be to dismantle them all.  We decided that would be too high a cost, so we are left trying to minimize the risk of death posed by cars as much as possible while still keeping them operational.  In that pursuit we have enacted laws to punish drunk driving severely, particularly for drivers under the legal drinking age, and thus create a greater incentive against it.  The result has been a large drop in automobile accidents since the late 70s when these laws were first put into effect.  But perhaps more important is the story of a different government regulation on cars, seat belts everyone.

We as a community prefer to not be flung out of windshields, call us pansies but it’s just not a great time to be had.  As individuals, the makers of cars had come to the decision that they couldn’t take the hit of putting seat belts in cars, but government regulation forced the case.  The result is, again, much safer vehicles at a negligible cost increase, and all in the face of individual liberty.  Although you might find a few extremists who hate this out of instinct, you would be hard pressed to find an expert in the car industry who would actually disagree that this is among the best things to happen to the auto industry.  This is because people make stupid decisions, and although you may think you have a right to be stupid, like all rights it has its limits.

Human beings are social animals, we do our best not to piss each other off; but let’s face it, we’re imperfect.  Oliver Wendell Holmes put is quite well that “The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.”  But what we often forget is that there needs to be someone or something to enforce that or pure liberty simply becomes the rule of the guy with the biggest fist.  I have heard libertarian “solutions” to this dilemma, but my use of scare quotes should give away that I am not convinced.  Individuals make terrible choices: drugs, violence, Crocs, etc.  And although some of these choices are fairly inconsequential or aesthetic, others have the potential to kill not just that individual but others.  What’s more, there are other rights than individual rights.

The social contract is the exchange of some individual rights to the community or government, but we don’t do this for nothing, we get a lot more out of it than we give.  We get the security of a military, yes, but we get a lot more than just the stuff that conservatives love to tout.  We get infrastructure, we get public education, we get all the things that are necessary to have a functioning meritocracy where the individual is able to reach his or her potential.  I can complain with the best of them that the government goes too far in certain respects, that it can be obtrusive and we should scale things back where the government takes more from us than it gives, but we still need the do-goodery of the government.

I am a progressive because I know that success is not mine alone, that it took more than the sweat off my brow for me to have my comfortable life.  I am a progressive because it’s not all about me, because although the individual needs to be protected, the individual is not completely separate from the community.  I can’t claim to be a libertarian because I know the power that individuals have in making life miserable for others, and although the government can do the same, it is the best imperfect check to that threat that has yet been found.

The Last Refuge of the Desperate

A little while back I talked about a few things that we seriously need to think about changing when it comes to our electoral system, e.g. mandatory voting, voting rights for those who’ve served out their sentences, and going to popular vote for the presidential election.  And although I stand by all of these opinions, I feel there is something lacking in them, particularly in light of the elections that happen this year.  Incidentally only 77 days left until election day here in the States.  I say it’s lacking because we still have a fundamental problem, even if everyone gets out to the polls this year, the likelihood of which is so low that it is buried somewhere alongside trilobites. That’s right kiddos, today we’re talking about gerrymandering and how to fix it, and there was much rejoicing.

First let’s identify the problem, it’s gerrymandering.  Well that was quick, but on the off chance there is someone who is somehow reading this blog, ignorant of what gerrymandering is, and somehow incapable of simply going to wikipedia I’ll quickly sum up the issue.  Our representative democracy requires us to divide up states into various districts to determine the constituencies of congressmen, state representatives, etc.  Ideally these districts would conform to natural boundaries, say the area of a town, and include an equal number of people, thus giving everyone an equal voice in choosing their reps and each rep an equal number of electors to represent.  Sadly the distribution of people makes it difficult to get equally sized districts within natural borders, so we need to draw our own lines to get the job done.  Who exactly does the drawing is where we get into a bit of trouble.

Now let’s just assume for a moment that politicians might be a little dishonest, I know a wild assumption.  The group in charge might notice that there are certain spots that are really competitive and move the line just a bit to include electors who they feel confident will give them that decisive edge.  Better than that, if they notice areas that tend to vote against them, they can draw borders to include as many unlikely voters into one or two districts making the rest of them nice and safe for themselves.  And lest we delude ourselves into thinking this is the other party’s fault, both sides play the game terribly well, e.g. Illinois-4 and Texas-35.  The safety of these districts mean both that incumbents rarely ever have to worry about losing to the other party and the actual voice of the people is routinely crushed.

Take for instance Virginia, which when you look at it statewide would seem to be fairly democratic but not so much in the actual legislature.  In 2013 about 48% of voters went with the Democratic ticket and under 46% went with the GOP.  You might expect that the Democrats would have a slight edge in the General Assembly, or if you knew that there was a Libertarian candidate for governor that perhaps the GOP just barely snuck a victory.  It might then surprise you to know that the GOP holds 68% of seats in the House of Delegates.  This is the beauty of gerrymandering, even if you get crushed in the election, by rigging the system you can effectively nullify the will of the people.  And I’ll admit that the Dems can be just as bad at this game, but that’s just all the more reason to fix the problem.

And how, pray tell, can we hope to solve this problem?  With mathematics!  Actually I think I have a pretty solid idea of how to fix this and it comes from the use of two fairly well known proposals for addressing the inadequacies of representative democracy, the Shortest-Splitline Algorithm and Mixed-Member Proportional Representation.  Between the two of these I believe that gerrymandering can be effectively eradicated and a true representation of the voters can be achieved at the lowest possible cost.  And serendipitously that great youtuber, CGPGrey made videos on these two subjects a while ago.

Let’s start with the first problem, the actual drawing of lines.  Although humans are very good at noticing natural boundaries, addressing where there are legitimate regional differences, etc we are just not terribly good at the whole honesty thing that is required for drawing fair electoral maps.  The simple solution to this is to simply remove ourselves from the equation and let simple geometry do the work for us.  Once we decide how many districts we need to draw we simply divide the territory in question into that number using as few of the shortest lines possible to divvy everything up.  For the exact algorithm I employe you to look it up online, and on the way you can look at the maps that people have made on what the electoral map would look like if we did do this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUS9uvYyn3A  

People are blindly put into equally sized groups without distinction for party affiliation, race, or any other distinction that might obscure the vet of the people as it is.  There are some problems with this solution, not least of which being the division of communities by seemingly random lines.  But if we are fair that is already the case.  There are countless towns, communities, regions that are arbitrarily divided by the system we use now, which is to say human discretion.  During the 2010 election I was still in college and when it came time to vote everyone went to the polling place in Buntrock Commons.  Everyone, that is to say, except those of us living in the one dorm that was in a different district than the rest of the school.  At least by using this method the voter knows that the arbitrary lines aren’t being used to insidiously favor one side over another.  What I do feel is a fair criticism is that this can accidentally split up voters into districts in a way that either favors one side unfairly, just as a quick of the geometry of communities, or else ignore diffuse minority groups.  It is because of these flaws that I believe the second measure is a necessary addition to this algorithm.

We need to recognize that political parties are a part of reality and that however noble the desires of Washington may have been, they play an important part in how our voices are represented.  What’s more we need to admit that the first past the post system we have does not represent the people and actually works against the very idea of representative democracy.  Once we make these concessions we can start to move forward and I think the appropriate first step would be to introduce mixed-member proportional representation to our legislatures. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT0I-sdoSXU

By introducing MMP we can essentially solve all of the incidental problems that could arise from the use of the aforementioned algorithm.  Any party that got incidentally shafted as a result of the new districts would gain back the losses from MMP.  And although the way Mr Grey puts it in his video makes it sound like every state would effectively need to double the number of representatives it has, this is not necessarily the case.  Incidentally I do think that it would be worthwhile to consider increasing the number of seats in our legislatures so that politicians can actually reflect the smaller communities, but that’s a debate for another day.  If voters decide that they are not prepared to pay for double the politicians, then the easy answer is to halve the total, use the first half in the conventional way and use the other half for the proportional bit.  In the case of an odd number of reps then either accept one more rep to even it out or else accept one less member for the proportioning of reps.

This system works well for Germans, New Zealanders, Russians, Romanians, Basotho, and Hungarians with the possibility that Canadians might join in as well.  Individuals who think they might want to go it alone can still run in the conventional races, but without a party to back them up they wouldn’t have a chance at the proportioning.  But along with the algorithm we can be quite sure that A the elections weren’t rigged from the get go through gerrymandering, B the voice of the people is as accurately reflected as possible, and C the only thing that matters is objective math where 2 is indeed greater than 1.  So why not give it a shot?  Well among other things it would require Congress to actually do something.  Until then we’ll be stuck with parties clinging onto strategic tricks to win seats, truly the last refuge of the desperate.

Our Robot Overlords

For those of you who do not currently watch CGPGrey’s videos on a semi-regular basis, I have to say that you are missing out but are also avoiding a bit of the heartache that comes from waiting for the next upload.  I bring this up only because in his most recent upload he brought up a subject that I’ve thought about for a while, and since I’m already writing something I might as well talk about it.  So much of the conversations that are even tangentially related to science or science fiction deal with the relationship between humanity and our creations.  And although every generation has had their invention that the elders warned would corrupt the youth or wreak havoc on the natural order, we are now approaching a new milestone of human achievement.  And it’s a little terrifying. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU&list=UU2C_jShtL725hvbm1arSV9w

Before I get to some of the points he makes, let me just say that I don’t think the argument is that this is something that is going to occur in the next decade or immediate future, just that this is a conversation worth having.  There are conflicting prophecies about what the ever increasing power of technology holds for the future of humanity, and although stories of robot uprisings may make good action flicks they aren’t that likely.  On the one hand you have the ideas of people like Gene Roddenberry that outline a world without want, which has its own unmentioned problems; and on the other hand you have essentially “The Matrix”, wherein humanity is basically put in indefinite hibernation because we’ve become essentially obsolete.  My goal here though is not to talk about those possibilities, although they can be fascinating, but to talk about the problems of the transition to any future where humanity essentially doesn’t need to work anymore.

Grey describes just how many jobs are potentially at risk with just very minor advances in either technology or simply the application of existing technologies.  And although you could make an argument that with this type of automation you essentially eliminate scarcity in the world thus making everything affordable, and incidentally ending economies as we understand them, the greater consequences occur in that uncomfortable spot just before that argument becomes fulfilled.  The unfortunate truth is that people will be essentially unemployable before scarcity is eliminated, which means some really big problems.

As he mentions the kinds of jobs that are being targeted are not simply the lower end service and manufacturing jobs, but I don’t think enough emphasis goes on how the people that used to have these jobs will react when they find themselves indefinitely unemployed.  We felt quite a bit of pain in the Great Recession, but even then people were able to get by because, with an unemployment rate below 10% at all times, the combination of institutional safety nets and communal support were enough to take a hit.  But the jobs that are directly acknowledged by Grey account for at least half of all the jobs in America.  What happens when half of the former work force has to provide for everyone with their jobs next on the chopping block?  Our institutional safety net depends on tax revenue, with loans being an impossibly short term solution to this particular threat.  On top of that, although some extremely wealthy families are set up to handle long term unemployment of every family member, what about people who are already barely scraping by?

Great changes in the economy benefit most everyone in the long run, but they crush the people who have to live through it.  Take for instance the last time we saw an incredibly dramatic shift in how we produce things, i.e. the Industrial Revolution.  There is a reason why Dickens wrote about the poor houses, the debtor prisons, the mills that people had to suffer through to survive the new world.  There is a reason why Marx became so popular talking about a hope of prosperity for the working class.  The reason is quite simply that things did suck if you actually had to live through it and you wanted a way out.  But what someone like Marx couldn’t see is that the growth that comes with industrialization makes everyone, including those who had to work in the “hellish mills” richer in the long run.

And it’s not simply about having more money in your pocket, because let’s face it the working class’s wallet is just about as empty as ever, but the material gains that make unheard of technological wonders available so cheap that everyone can have them.  Again this is the promise of the future world where everything is mechanized so efficiently that it is essentially free and the idea of a job with wages becomes obsolete, but in that in between time called a human life it’s something of a hollow promise.  You can’t live off of tomorrow’s bread for very long.  Those who are already wealthy beyond comprehension have no reason to believe that they will have any problem in stemming that tide, but the lower classes not so much.  So, what can be done?

Well first things first is to acknowledge again that this is not an immediate threat, but a growing one nonetheless.  Next is that we need to maintain, or perhaps reclaim, our position at the head of the pack so that we can be ready when humanity does begin to hit this point.  How do we do that?  We need to invest big time in education and research, while at the same time doing away with as much debt as possible to build up a national savings.  I have already mentioned how I think that there are many ways that we can make the tax system fairer and bring in money while at the same time not punishing success, e.g. make capital gains tax rates the same as income tax, simplifying the tax code by eliminating exemptions and loopholes.  This in and of itself would probably be insufficient though, so we do need to address spending.

Our defense budget needs to be cut back in many areas, and the money we invest in basic research will surely benefit the military regardless.  We need to make the actually change our healthcare system so that everyone is covered with top notch healthcare in the most efficient way possible, which is to say a universal healthcare system.  I personally prefer the French system, but there are plenty of other systems that not only protect everyone but do so at a fraction of the cost with better results.  We need to seriously look at the costs of subsidies and make the hard decision to no longer fund corn and oil production amongst others.  All of these savings can and should be put toward paying down the debt and if possible building up a national savings in preparation for when we need the social safety net most.

I don’t find the violent prophecies of futures all that compelling, although it is incredibly easy to scare people with stories of a robot apocalypse or a “1984” style dictatorship.  What I think has proven to be the legitimate vision of the future are the “Brave New World” style visions of problems arising from our desire for comfort.  As individuals I think that we may not be enough to conquer problems like these, but as a community we have unlimited potential.  The only threat to that potential is our own success.  This subject of robotization is not just the stuff of science fiction anymore, and although it’s not on the immediate horizon it is a threat that needs to be addressed before it is too late.  Like climate change it is a subject too massive for us to ignore or to face alone, so let’s start making the first steps together, today.