It's a minor pet peeve of mine but as someone who, a while back, became addicted to playing checkers with a very good computer checkers program and who progressed to what would be considered a mid-high level player, when I hear someone imply that it's a simple minded game - always people who I suspect ignorantly hold chess in the awe its PR encourages people to believe about it - it irritates me. Checkers is far from a simple minded game played at the highest levels and it is, I think, a far better analogy to what is involved with politics than chess.
I removed the checkers game from my computer. It was too addictive, took up too much time and it taught me everything I needed to get from it.
I have given up trying to guess what Nancy Pelosi and those closest to her are planning in terms of the impeachment of Donald Trump, they're way ahead of me and I wasn't one of the idiots who was whining and crying for the past two years when she, sensibly, was keeping her powder dry and under cold storage. I think she knows that unless the polls make Republicans in the Senate terrified for their majority and their own electability and, so, vote to remove Trump, putting the about as compromised Pence in his place, the impeachment is not going to end with Trump being removed.
The soft edges of that, as personified in the putrid, stinking scumbag Susan Collins, only one of the recent title holders, The Shame of Maine, will hold firm. My sister had on Maine TV when I went to see her last night and the Republican fascists are already putting out lying campaign style ads to gull the very gullible in Maine to put the slag back in for another term. But she's definitely feeling the heat for her voting for the billionaire tax giveaway on the empty promises of Moscow Mitch and Trump, Putin's bitch #1 and her vote to put the sexually assaulting perjurer, Kvanaugh on the Supreme Court. But if the skank thought she could get that by voting to remove Trump, she'd throw him under the bus as fast as he will anyone else. She's thrown her constiuents under it to block a farther right-wing primary opponent, even though there was little reason to do that and to get whatever else she figures she can from it. She's not different in type from Trump, just where she is on the board.
American politics isn't chess, the pieces aren't that varied, their moves are not that different, it all depends on forcing them to move to do what you want them to do. It's even true of the Supreme Court. Roberts must know that if he does anything to show his partisan hand in this, he will blow the one thing the Court depends on, the unthinking piety that has been cultivated for that brothel in the media, in popular entertainment - where it substitutes for a religious hierarchy- and more generally. It's always been a sham, they're as political and self-interested as the Republicans in the Senate and the House and Trump. If he and Mitch Putin's Bitch work together to thwart the removal of Trump too blatantly, he will have discredited the court. I'm not sure I would hold that as a bad thing if people stopped being dupes for that totally non-democratic branch of the government. I think saving egalitarian democracy will, actually, require that the powers of the court and lots of its past precedent be discredited and overthrown. Much of the worst of it has come about as a direct consequence of them creating a privilege to lie, falsely called "free speech" they extended it through, first making money speech, then giving corporations a privilege to lie to maximize profits and the power of their servants (when you read "corporations" in this context, you could as well say "crime gangs") and then further opening up American elections to the influence of billionaires domestic and even foreign through further "free speech" rulings.
Our 18th century Constitution, if it can't get rid of someone as blatantly, as floridly, as self-revealed a criminal as Trump, then it and many of the assumptions we had about it has failed, catastrophically, absolutely, entirely and dangerously. If Trump is not removed, especially if he is reinstalled as he was BY THE FUCKING, GODDAMNED CONSTITUTION THROUGH THE ANTI-DEMOCRATIC ELECTORAL COLLEGE, retaining faith in the Constitution is a lazy, immoral act of rolling over for fascism.
Our Constitution is not the failure: we are. We deserve the government we demand or, more commonly, acquiesce to because we don't like the candidates, so why vote? Or voting is too much trouble. Or, best of all, the results will be so bad "they" will finally see how right "we" were.
ReplyDeleteOur system rests, not on words on paper, but on our attention and participation. It's past time we realized that.
I can't overlook the anti-democratic features of the Constitution, the unequal representation in the Senate, the Electoral College which incorporates, not only the disproportionate representation inherent in the composition of the Senate but which utterly obliterates the votes of those who don't comprise a majority in their particular state, allowing the loser of an election to win the seat. I have a lot of trouble with the Supreme Court, though a lot of that was due to actions taken by the court, not based in what it says in the Constitution. I think the criticism that George Mason made on the basis of the possibility of a corrupt president working with a corrupt Senate has proven to be remarkably accurate.
DeleteI would certainly agree that the Constitution, democracy is only as good as The People make it but if they are lied to by people and organizations that use the most effective tools of the advertising and PR industry, their share of the blame is substantially diminished. The Constitution, though, especially as interpreted, leaves us open to the votes of such a deceived minority throwing rule to the worst possible. I remember being taken aback when Richard Viguerie was using computers to do direct mailing but that was childs play compared to what the Mercers and Putin are doing using social media and the information that the likes of Facebook gull people into giving them.
I think if we want egalitarian democracy, or even just liberal democracy, we have to take into account the percentage of people who are going to be vulnerable to being manipulated because nothing that we can do will prevent those people from being vulnerable. We could make it actionable for those they lie about to act to reduce or minimize the effectiveness of their lying through suing but that would be a huge departure from how things are done now. Other means of reducing the effectiveness of the Putin-Mercer style ratfucking of Democracy might be hard to come up with and it will, certainly, carry dangers but our legal system now contains large and serious dangers - such as Trump - If we want a democracy, we'll have to take some risks but if we take no risks we are guaranteed to be taking a bigger risk.
The protection you mention is supposed to be the "checks and balances" of the system. But we honor that more in the breach than the keeping, and basically we think a "system" is doing everything for us.
DeleteBut we are the system, whether we are naive or venal, pure or corrupt.
If we have a system where I must protect you, who protects you from me? If we have a system where I must decide for you, again, who decides I am protecting you?
In any system where the governed abdicate responsibility for government, however slightly, the corruption is already set in stone.
The problem I've expounded on since the first time I wrote a piece to put up online is the problem of people who are lied to and manipulated by, first, broadcast media - print being of ever diminishing influence in the United States, the NYT and WP perhaps excepted - and then, as it developed, social media and things like Youtube.
DeleteIf people are not told the truth, they won't be free, the lies they are told will enslave them. It is clear that everything from an effective minority to, on occasion, a slight majority of Americans, today, are vulnerable to lies so enabled by the Supreme Court and the ACLU style fundamentalist reading of the First Amendment.
You mix in the advertising industry, PR industry methods of exploiting peoples greatest weaknesses, the love of comfort, pleasure, the excitement of violence and sex, the false substitutions of righteousness that a feeling of false victimhood and aggrievement give them (mix that with envy and you come up with a particularly potent poison) and the cowardice that leads people to blame those who are not really oppressing them but who are further down in the hierarchy of power - broadcast on FOX, on Sinclare, through the social media and democracy is screwed.
The computerized analysis of the raw data as done by Cambridge Analyitica and the such, targeting their "free speech" enabled lies mixed with the Electoral College system allows that nation of the gulled to overthrow the majority who aren't quite effectively.
As I said, my biggest worry is that they'll learn from their sucesses and failures how to do it better and better and the Courts, Republican-fascists will do absolutely nothing to do anything but enable them. And the Constitution is the tool they use to do that. Two crucial elections determined by the Electoral College, one with the direct interference of Republicans on the Supreme Court, we've been in Constitutional Crisis for the past two decades. It doesn't work. We have to accept the dangers inherent in fighting against the power of lies or we surrender to that power as demonstrated in election after election. Our only choice is to choose which danger we live with, only one has a possibility to end the present danger.