So... when is HE running for president?

[kenosarawa]

FINALLY, someone who feels much the same way that I do. I've grown sick over the past several years of people shoving two bowls of shit in my face and say, "pick one." And, if I didn't pick one, they'd pick one for me and then force-feed it to me for four years.

Reading this, I was tempted to stand up at my desk and give a standing ovation.

Comments

[entropius]

I think you make the error of saying that any candidate you don't like is equivalently distasteful.

A better analogy is someone handing you a bowl of shit and a bowl of spaghetti, when you want a steak. One will keep you alive and healthy; one will send you to the hospital. Neither is what you really want, but one is a whole lot better than the other.

Now, Penn's pretty much a bog-standard Libertarian. He, and they, hold a lot of views that I endorse; he holds a lot of views you endorse too. I know he holds one that you oppose (and I endorse): a full-throated double-barreled hostility toward religion.

(That article is fakery of another sort, however -- Penn is certainly not stupider than Bush, educational history of Clown College or not. The man has brains.)

Maybe you agree with the Libertarian viewpoint. Oddly enough it's a self-defeating one; the very Constitution that they worship keeps them from getting elected, as our electoral system (both legislative and executive) as defined in the Constitution makes a two-party system inevitable. That's beside the point, however.

Then go vote Libertarian in the election. In Alabama it doesn't matter; your vote is irrelevant because the state's going to go Red anyway. Such a vote does help the Libertarians, since their inclusion on ballots and access to election resources depends on their overall popular vote. I used similar logic when I voted third-party in Alabama, since like you I dislike the two-party deadlock, and would like a third-party candidate to be included in debates and such.

But don't for a minute think that because you'd rather have steak, spaghetti is no better than shit.

[kenosarawa]

You say one is spaghetti and the other is shit, and I say that both are shit, but for entirely different reasons. Your opinion versus my opinion. Neither wins.

I don't side with the Libertarians, the Republicans, the Democrats. Your assuming such is just that: an assumption. In fact, I don't side with any of these other groups who subscribe to the corporate delusion which states that the more people that agree with you, the more right your standpoint is. The way I see it, we've taken a shortcut in our nation's political system and applied it as a fundamental truth of the universe. I won't go vote for the Libertarians because, as you say, they are self-defeating. (Similarly, I won't vote Green or Reform because, in my opinion, they are all batshit-fucking-loco and make the infighting of the 'Pubs and 'Dems look like a high school softball game.) Despite their best intentions when it comes to any policy and any amount of well-thought-out approach and mindset supporting it, they always seem to put their worst foot forward when it comes to actually getting the job done.

We've been digging a hole progressively deeper for the past twenty-some-odd years. We elect someone or pass a law, one group then proceeds to verbally assault another over it, mistakes are made on ALL sides, and then we assume that if we elect the person in opposition things will be made better. So now, we return full-circle to the murky bog of opinion. We could argue either side of any argument, but I feel as though the underlying problem would never truly be solved, only postponed.

That being said, I don't wish to argue with you. You're right on so many points: both candidates are so different they can't be put under the same distinction, Bush is an idiot, the Libertarians will never win given their present philosophy, and Alabama will always vote blindly for a Republican presidential candidate. I will not now argue with you on any point whether our viewpoints differ or not.

That's not the point I'm trying to make. I do not hold to this assumption that you must stand on one side of an argument and be wholly against other people and their beliefs, and that is the only way resolutions are reached. The entire system (not the political, economic, or social system, but rather THE system as a sum of all others) is flawed. There are always alternatives, and I will find them.

My wrath is not directed against the presidential candidates, the election, the political state of our state/nation/world, or anything of that sort, but rather against a much wider and diverse field. I know that's an uncertain statement, but it is all I have at present.

On the other hand, any time you're free, I would like to debate the relative merits of any issue you'd like to put forth. I'm always trying to expand my frame of reference, and would appreciate some solid commentary regarding the present election so my decision can be based on something more concrete than which president that I personally will be less screwed under.

P.S. Ok, sorry, I lied before about not wanting to argue. However, I couldn't let this go unsaid. There was one statement regarding my personal beliefs that you were dead-wrong on. I'm guessing its because you don't me quite as well. Maybe that's my fault, and if so, I apologize. Your aforementioned "full-throated, double-barreled hostility" (I like the imagery and word use, btw) towards religion is not as one-sided in this argument as you think. Don't assume that I as a person of a particular faith have any special love for religion at all. But, this is due to the fact that I separate my faith from any religion that seeks to be the endorsing force behind it. The forceful nature of religion has done nothing but cause me grief, and the thought that my personal beliefs are - or ever have been - up for debate in committee fills me with more anger than I can express.

Okay, have I talked enough? I hope so, because that's more of baring my soul than I'm comfortable with at this time of the day and in this state of sobriety.

..and please, PLEASE, tell me that I haven't left any hard feelings between the two of us. I've gotten frakkin' paranoid about that recently.

And I would like the spaghetti over the shit, just one question: which one is the spaghetti?

[entropius]

That's up to you to decide, election by election. I use this analogy not to endorse one candidate in this particular election, but to say that candidates, like most things, exist on a spectrum between ideal and anathema, and that to reject a candidate for being not-ideal ignores that he might be a whole lot better than someone else.

In my case, I prefer Obama to McCain for several reasons, the most salient of which is that anything he screws up will pale in comparison to the damage done to the country by continuing the Iraq war. $2 trillion is a lot.

I don't side with the Libertarians, the Republicans, the Democrats. Your assuming such is just that: an assumption. In fact, I don't side with any of these other groups who subscribe to the corporate delusion which states that the more people that agree with you, the more right your standpoint is. The way I see it, we've taken a shortcut in our nation's political system and applied it as a fundamental truth of the universe.

Ah. This makes sense; you're not opposed to any particular party but the idea of majority-rule in general. Currently, of course, the way politicians -- especially Republicans -- get people to agree with them has nothing to do with demonstrating that they're right. This is a worrying development; this is why democracy above all else depends on an educated, informed, reasoning electorate.

There are two problems, though. Obviously having a whole lot of people agree with you doesn't make you right, but if you're going to have a government you have to pick who runs it somehow. Force of arms? Been tried; look at Africa. Heredity? Some successes, some failures. Various oligarchical schemes? The Saudis, the WWII Japanese... not so good. Then again, the Iroquois seemed to have a reasonably decent society. This is the "Democracy is the worst possible form of government, except for all those others that have been tried" problem.

The deeper problem is that we currently do have a society where power is allocated by vote, and in order to change it you either need a lot of votes (voting for people who want less voting!), a way to influence those who get the votes (which comes down allocating power based on money, at least with our current inhabitants of Washington), or an armed revolution. Sadly, if you want another form of governance, the only plausible way to get it is to vote for it, or vote in the closest thing that's available.

There are other forms of governance, of course, that have been successful on small scales... generally working on decision-making-by-consensus. I'm fascinated by these, and wish we could revamp our political system to work more like them. There are these guys, these guys, the insane but effective organization of the maelstrom of insanity at the heart of the Internets, and even the "affinity group" organization of this lot. This sort of thing -- government by consensus -- works best on a small scale, where we can take the "representative" part out of "representative democracy". The Libertarians are all for this; so, oddly enough, are the Greens.

Don't assume that I as a person of a particular faith have any special love for religion at all. But, this is due to the fact that I separate my faith from any religion that seeks to be the endorsing force behind it.

Ah, then our confusion is a semantic one. By "religion" I (and Mr. Jilette) don't just mean organized religion as you seem to. When I say "religion", I mean something akin to what you mean by "faith": the belief in God, gods, divinity, spirits, angels, demons, and so forth. And this is what Penn's taken such a forceful stance against; he's one of the most outspoken members of the Brights, an organization of atheists.

And, of course there are no hard feelings; after all, the only way to figure out what's right (politically, scientifically, or otherwise) is to test all possible ideas and see which survive!

[kenosarawa]

You touched on one aspect that I've thought of quite a bit. We need an intelligent, reasoning electorate. The only way to fix this is to educate people. Right now, we have a bipartisan government that only seems to be concerned with its own continuance, rather than the continuance of the nation it governs, and they are supported by a rather-uncomfortably-large portion of our population that is utterly convinced, either one way or the other, that their particular brand of "saving the world" is so much better than everyone else's.

Small changes, like course corrections on a ship at sea, are the key, I think. Unfortunately, as I said before, the current state of our government is concerned with self-continuance. (Didn't we have this discussion before? About how a truly unbiased and effective government is run by people who in no way benefit by it?) I'm not looking for an ideal candidate; I'm looking for one that isn't anathema. The way I perceive the spectrum exists on many more axes than the qualitative value line stretched between ideal and anathema.

Why are you so against having faith? I understand the crusade against organized religion. On that side of things, I'd be right there with you, dragging these over-inflated, self-important people who have ruined countless lives by the forceful application of their brand of "laws of the universe" and make them answer for the things they've done (we'll put Scientology and the Catholic Church up on the block first). But, on the other side, by denying people the right (or simply decrying them, whichever) for believing in something greater than what their limited sensorium and experience pick up on, isn't that just as bad? Doesn't that do just as much harm? It is the action, the intent, that flows from those beliefs that is good or bad. This has been a major source of self-reflection and introspection in my life. If you do harm to someone, it was you who chose to do so, or by ignorance allowed it to happen. That fault lies with the person, not with the fact that they had faith. You can't say that a drunk driver accused of running over a pedestrian broke the law simply because they have a car, and then hold the car accountable for the incident. A very simplistic analogy, but it holds.

[entropius]

I think the government of the last eight years has been far, far more concerned with continuing in power than previous governments; the last president that's gone to such lengths as Bush to hold onto power was Nixon. The difference, of course, is that Nixon didn't royally cock things up as badly, and that Congress cared when he got caught.

You seem to suggest that there shouldn't be any "saving the world" going on at all, which is the Libertarian idea of "we need less government, not more". Unfortunately, at this point we need a government to save us from the sins of past governments: someone's got to repair the damage Bush did.

And, as you say, small changes are certainly the key: if you find a candidate that's better than his opponent, vote for him. Are all of the candidates running now literally so bad in your perception that they are indistinguishable? Yes, it is more complicated than saying "this guy is better than that guy", but ultimately you've got to figure out who you like best and vote for them. Saying that the spectrum exists on more than one dimension still doesn't save you from assigning a value function to each point on it: I disagree with Barr (or Obama, or Colbert) on fewer things than I disagree with McCain on, so he gets my vote over McCain.

And I didn't say *I* was so against having faith; I said Penn was. :) And he is.

"Decrying" is an interesting word. I certainly don't decry anyone for merely believing in whatever they will. If those beliefs are things that I think are likely to lead to harmful actions in the future, of course, I may try to convince them that those beliefs are not true, by presenting arguments to that effect ... but that's hardly the same as lambasting them for their belief, or denying them the ethical right to hold that belief.

But as soon as those beliefs motivate actions, those actions are subject to ethical scrutiny. If you harm someone, it's you who chose to do so. That harm, however, is subject to the same criticism whether it is motivated by faith or something else. Far too often people of faith use their faith as an excuse for the harm they cause: "It is morally acceptable, and in fact required, for me to deny my child access to knowledge about human sexuality because my faith tells me that I should do so."

[kenosarawa]

Thank you for clarifying your stance in those last three paragraphs. The violent opposition to any belief is just as bad as those who force those beliefs upon others. Now, the word "force" is used here with a grain of salt. The mere mention of one particular belief outloud with a non-believer within earshot has been classified as "force" in recent years. People who just see the presence of religious or faith-based programming on television as a personal attack on themselves are a little too convinced of their own self-importance. On the other hand, there are many of these televangelists and others that should be held responsible for the direct and harmful outcomes of their messages. Hell, we hold journalists and other media figures liable for... well... libel.

Dammit, I thought I could come up with a better word than that.

[entropius]

Religious programming on public television is something I am opposed to, and that's happening in Alabama.

Mentioning a particular belief out loud with a non-believer within earshot certainly isn't force... but that non-believer standing up and saying "I don't think that's right, and here's why" certainly isn't violent opposition, either.

Neither is "You're a loony".

One interesting tidbit: I was involved in Project Chanology (Anonymous' campaign against the Church of Scientology) for a while, and Anonymous was very careful to distinguish between scientology (the belief that L. Ron Hubbard is a demigod, xenu, thetans, all that) and the Church of Scientology... even to the point of supporting the Free Zone, the non-Church of Scientology scientologists.