Thoughts on poetry, web technology, society and misc.
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Twitter a bit and write poetry on
Chapbook.
Okay, so there’s a lot of debate on how to make congress useful. I mostly here people arguing in favor of citizen-funded elections (that is, public donations only with small caps) and term limits for people in office.
The Problem w/ Term Limits
- The undue influence of special interests does not go away with term limits. Within the # of terms a candidate has available, they will still be subject to fundraising and therefore ineffective at their job if they desire to remain in the job.
- The undue influence of special interests will not go away entirely at the end of the term, because under-principled people nearing the end of their term limit will have a strong incentive to designate a successor and fund-raise for that person. Meaning that you haven’t actually solved the problem of wasted time, corruption, etc. You’ve just freshened up the targets a bit.
- Forced term limits does not provide an opportunity for a legitimately talented and useful individual to serve for a while. This is risky, so it’s a less important point than the above ones, but if you postulate that the current system would turn over more if less special money was involved anyway, it might be actually more less of a risk than it is now. But see above for the real problems.
Citizen-Funded Elections to the Rescue
The whole point here is to return our representatives to acting on behalf of the citizenry. There are a few benefits postulated to result from this:
- More legislation - part of the reason congress is often the bottleneck is because they spend like 1/3-2/3 of their time in office raising money. Imagine how much work you’d get done if you spent, say, half of your time panhandling (assuming that’s not currently your job). Less? Yeah. It’d be easier to get important reforms through if people weren’t having dinners with SIGs while they are on payroll “working on your behalf.”
- Better legislation - the time currently spent fundraising could instead be spent 1) reading the legislation, 2) thinking about the impact of the legislation and 3) conducting impact studies and trials. All of which, I think you’ll agree, works better than repeatedly arguing talking points provided by SIGs as a substitute for actual effort.
Both?
Yeah, that’d be fine, probably. Compromise for the sake of progress is awesome. Hence the problem we have today. Everyone’s stuck in this point-counterpoint situation in which [ed: sarcasm alert] no combination of both side’s ideas could ever possibly be a better solution than just a pure implementation on one side.
Anyone wanna pitch in with me and buy a representative in Congress? I hear it’s expensive, so I’d have to get a lot of people to commit first. I don’t think the district matters. We should probably buy someone that ranks well on a committee, though. Are older members less expensive or more expensive?
I haven’t really thought about anarchy much lately. Perhaps it’s my deviation into the nerdcore sub-genre of hip hop and my current low level of access to old school British punk. But perhaps it’s also probably the fact that I don’t think anarchy is a natural resting state for human collectives and so I don’t tend to take it very seriously in political discussions.
Last week, C-SPAN had a call-in program on the radio while I was driving to work where callers could talk to two very erudite columnists and commentators on politics. I forget their names, but one was from Slate and the other was from… forgot that too. One was a liberal and the other was a conservative. But they were friendly and agreeable. Like sausage and mayonnaise—very different, but they went well together.
So, one guy called in to criticize government, period. He was an anarchist and was concerned that our system was not a Republic, but instead a Corporate Theocracy. That is, a company run by some guy named Theo. Anyway, he asked why more people didn’t consider alternatives to the two party system. So one of the commentators, probably the taller one, said something that I thought was very fresh, insightful and interesting:
If you want people to steer away from government, you have to provide alternatives. Anarchists like to whine, but they don’t often provide any alternative systems that address some of the needs leading to government.
Like, provide free, quality education in your neighborhood. Or something like that. I thought that was a new way of thinking about anarchy. What could anarchists, or just anti-government folk actually do, rather than just talk about, to convince people on the fringe that they should move in that political/philosophical direction.
“ Anyone who made it through an American high school alive knows you don’t win affection from the popular clique with flattery. You do it by acting like you don’t need their approval.
— S. E. Cupp. And may I add a “wtf high school did you go to?” The popular clique lived and died on imitation and that, as I recall, is the highest form of flattery.
“ We seek to make great films first. If a great film gives birth to a franchise, we are the first company to leverage such success. A check-the-boxes approach to creativity is more likely to result in blandness and failure.
— Robert Iger. And may I add a “hell yeah.”
It’s the year 2020. The Miami Tortoise is a news”paper” and Sam is one of their investigative reporters. Sam’s job is to monitor stories and memes of interest on the net and on the streets—particularly local civic/political news, but anything in the public’s interest is fair game—and to go deeper. Sam is all over Tweeter, Headbook, Dugged. Sam’s feed reader picks up your local scrapbooking blog.
Sam catches allegations and other things thrown around on social networks and forums and follows up on them. He does hardcore investigative reporting. He spends, in some cases, months or even years working on different stories. When he’s ready, he publishes an exposé. When there are enough articles ready from Sam and his co-workers, whenever that happens to be, the Miami Tortoise publishes an issue. It is immediately made available to subscribers in print and in personally branded electronic format for users of the Inflame ebook reader. Leaders are made available on the Tortoise’s website, but full text is only available to patrons and thieves.
Every time an issue of the Tortoise comes out heads roll. Hares go running as fast as they can into hiding. Impeachments occur, business leaders are indicted, the public interest is upheld. Sam is feared and loved, depending on where you lie on the spectrum. But Sam helps to keep people honest. And Sam gets to watch his work spread, be cheered and be criticized all across the Internet. In some cases, Sam completely resurfaces a forgotten scandal, lost in the heat of the next big political debate. In other cases, Sam delivers concrete ammo to a current debate stuck in the talking points stage. Sam both knocks things loose and finishes things up.
Ironically, the Miami Tortoise is in the business of putting itself out of business. The more issues they put out, the more shady things they are bringing to light. The more shady things they bring to light, the more they deter graft and corruption and the more they limit content for future releases. But Sam is quite confident that human beings engaged in graft and corruption don’t really think that way. They don’t get deterred. And neither does he. He’s addicted to justice. And so are his readers. They pay pretty well to know first and know big.
