- Admit that they have a problem hiring cronies and grifters.
- Commit to paper ballots
- Step down
- Vow to only work on local issues where they plan on relocating, since they are, in point of fact, incompetent at the level of governance they are operating.
Second, we can probably expect the elites to double-down, and I think this brings up a very pessimistic understanding, the kind I would like to be wrong about.
DNC-style Dems don't want government to work any more than the GOP, and so they get to pull the same trick: make government suck so much that no one (really no swing voter) believes in it. What happened in Iowa was a down-payment on what they can do to stop the visions of the Left. We really can't have nice things, and it once again shows.
Hanlon's razor "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." Fine, but I remember Venkatesh Rao once pointing out that you can be stupid and malicious at once. DNC-Dems/ the GOP, together they make up our elites, and check out the game plan:
Flail out, create chaos, in the chaos cheat, fail upward. Use those who failed upward to help create more chaos and pull more failures upward. All hail the Maze!
Incompetence is not a conspiracy, first-order. But it can be bailed out with a second-order conspiracy, especially by people who think they are Philosopher-Kings.
===
Appendix
This is an email I wrote to a friend on the matter after he had responded to the piece above:
[Update 4/8/2020. Wow. I sure was wrong about some things. I was wrong about me being done with the horse race. I was also wrong about how the primary would play out. I think I learned some things in the process.]
===
Greetings from Norman, Oklahoma, where we are having our first (and perhaps only) snow of the year. I keep looking out the window because it looks like a postcard from another land, the kind television tells me is the heartland -- at least with my view of trees and the ground out of one window, and single family houses out the other. We can't have one of those urban Christmases, or urban, cold loneliness, can we? . . .I just saw a neighbor take her dog out to see her first snow, and play in it.
Tying this together with your main topic, I am reminded of the Chesterton quote " . . . the real difficulty of democracy is not that voters are unworthy, but that their vote is generally the least worthy thing about them." Not voting is a great way to not get sucked into what is unworthy about life, and then make room for what constitutes the real joy in being alive. I just like having the peace of mind. The waves of history are bigger than anything I can control.
With that said, I had [messed] up. I had allowed myself to engage with politics a lot the last few weeks, watching videos,reading all I could and even getting into arguments on twitter and reddit. I justified this all as a kind of festival. And I was going to cap it with watching the election results as they came in, going from website to website for analysis, checking in from time to time see ABC's take. I had even had a serious conversation with my wife about going to Iowa to do some political tourism, but decided to keep my finances on lock-down until I get a teaching gig again.
But what happened kept me up until something like 2 am, and the next day I stayed in a funk. If this is how other people feel when they scroll through feeds all day, then I am frankly surprised our society hasn't fallen apart more than it already has.
I'm done with the horse race this year. Looks like either Bernie wins, Bloomberg white-knights, or Bernie will be cheated. I now see how bizarro-world that cheating can get (and again, I'm not saying anyone set out for Iowa to go this way, but rather there will second-order exploitation of the disasters created by one's own incompetence), but this is something best watched from afar. Same goes for the general election.
On to creative work, and other interesting things.
===
Appendix
This is an email I wrote to a friend on the matter after he had responded to the piece above:
[Update 4/8/2020. Wow. I sure was wrong about some things. I was wrong about me being done with the horse race. I was also wrong about how the primary would play out. I think I learned some things in the process.]
===
Greetings from Norman, Oklahoma, where we are having our first (and perhaps only) snow of the year. I keep looking out the window because it looks like a postcard from another land, the kind television tells me is the heartland -- at least with my view of trees and the ground out of one window, and single family houses out the other. We can't have one of those urban Christmases, or urban, cold loneliness, can we? . . .I just saw a neighbor take her dog out to see her first snow, and play in it.
Tying this together with your main topic, I am reminded of the Chesterton quote " . . . the real difficulty of democracy is not that voters are unworthy, but that their vote is generally the least worthy thing about them." Not voting is a great way to not get sucked into what is unworthy about life, and then make room for what constitutes the real joy in being alive. I just like having the peace of mind. The waves of history are bigger than anything I can control.
With that said, I had [messed] up. I had allowed myself to engage with politics a lot the last few weeks, watching videos,reading all I could and even getting into arguments on twitter and reddit. I justified this all as a kind of festival. And I was going to cap it with watching the election results as they came in, going from website to website for analysis, checking in from time to time see ABC's take. I had even had a serious conversation with my wife about going to Iowa to do some political tourism, but decided to keep my finances on lock-down until I get a teaching gig again.
But what happened kept me up until something like 2 am, and the next day I stayed in a funk. If this is how other people feel when they scroll through feeds all day, then I am frankly surprised our society hasn't fallen apart more than it already has.
I'm done with the horse race this year. Looks like either Bernie wins, Bloomberg white-knights, or Bernie will be cheated. I now see how bizarro-world that cheating can get (and again, I'm not saying anyone set out for Iowa to go this way, but rather there will second-order exploitation of the disasters created by one's own incompetence), but this is something best watched from afar. Same goes for the general election.
On to creative work, and other interesting things.
