Current Affairs

1. How to channel anger
This week, after the election, I have been disappointed and slightly angry.
I always become irritated and frustrated during election seasons as I realize that many of my fellow humans are perfectly capable of abandoning all efforts at fact-checking or critical thinking when it comes to voting for Their Guys. It became obvious in 2012, and it has been very bad this year.
After this election result, realizing that the USA might be about to morph into a place that is not what I thought it was when I moved here in 1998, I have been taking stock of a lot of things.
When I used to play tennis, my intolerance of my own personal errors and imperfections would irritate me and occasionally anger me. (Yes, when I watched John McEnroe playing tennis, I recognized a kindred spirit, not, as many people claimed, an asshole brat. If you wanted to watch an asshole brat, you could always watch Jimmy Connors, who was a devious little chickenshit when competing on-court. McEnroe struggled to control himself. Connors sought to control the referees, work the crowd and generally engage in any and all tactics that he thought he could get away with).
When you get angry on court you have two options. You can allow the anger to take over your thought patterns, which usually ensures that you lose. Or you can channel the anger productively into something that will help you.
I have been channeling my frustration and anger into life planning. At age 61, I have limited full-time working years left, a totally insecure work outlook, and I also want to move into book writing. So Mary and I are beginning to plan the future out. We are going to visit Belize in December, and we are considering possibly investing in property there. I am working to consolidate my financial future, improve the management of my investments, and prepare for life after working in I.T. All of this is more constructive than foaming at the mouth on Facebook. There are way too many people either thrashing around or being juvenile end-zone dancers there this week. Most of them don’t know it, but I already Hid them. Life is too short to read their nonsense.

2. How kill-or-be-killed approaches debase human behavior
This article from a primatologist explains how unregulated, amoral competition within organizations ultimately debases human behavior (but some of you probably knew that already).

3. Sci-Fi writers
Of all of the artistic creative people out there, Sci-Fi writers are some of the most deep-thinking about societal models. They mostly write about the future, so they are both futurists and story-tellers, imagining what life might be like in the near to distant future. They also tend to skew towards the libertarian end of the political spectrum.
John Scalzi opened a thread on his blog to discuss the aftermath of the election. Scalzi being Scalzi, he intervenes to prevent people from going down rabbit holes from time to time. I like the “cable package purchase” analogy that he deploys here in an attempt to explain how people voting for Trump could vote for a candidate who deployed misogyny, racism and other anti-social attitudes as part of his campaign approach.

3. The Othering of the media
This article in Slate magazine explains how Donald Trump used the media as a prop, a proxy for those damn “coastal elites” that the art and science of resentment politics created 40+ years ago as a punching-bag. Most of Trump’s audience, already invested in the idea that he was some sort of outsider, failed to spot the irony.
Some day, historians will write about how many established veteran political and business insiders were able to convince electors that they were in fact insurgents in order to get elected to public office.

4. The cry of “hear us and understand us!” cuts both ways
For a lot of this election cycle, we have been hearing all about “the heartland” of the USA, and how the people there are to varying degrees resentful of “coastal elites” who look down on them both literally and figuratively (there is a reason for the term “flyover country”). Quite clearly, resentment played a large part in a surge of voters to the polls to vote for Donald Trump.
As J.D. Vance and other insightful authors have pointed out, the attitudes of people in the depressed rural regions of the USA are a lot more multi-faceted than is sometimes portrayed, and they are not always blameless victims of outside forces beyond their control. However, the “Deliverance” portrayal of rural people as scary psychos, or ignorant hillbillies, definitely informs a lot of stereotypes. A lot of media visitors to rural areas often act like tourists, seeing a lot and understanding next to nothing, and media portrayals tend to pick out people who visually stand out. Toothless people waving guns make for better visuals than regular folks going about their daily business. For every insightful article from Vance, I have read a bunch of superficial portraits that usually end up saying something like “I went to Outer Podunk and met a bunch of white folks and boy, they are mad as hell and not gonna take it any more”. This is usually accompanied by a few examples of weird, or downright hair-raising utterances from the people the journalist met.
However, it takes two to make an argument, and the images and stereotypes that exist among rural people about urban and city dwellers are, in their own ways, no better. Rural dwellers tend to sneer contemptuously at city people with their “fancy talk” and “posh ways”, their perceived lack of community and faith, their lack of ability in fundamentals like physical work, hunting and working the land, and to wish them to tumble down a peg or two.
None of this is new. The urban-rural divide has existed for hundreds of years, and probably will continue to exist. However, the mutually expressed antagonisms have become toxic this election cycle.
As Patrick Thornton, himself an export from the Mid-West, explains in this article, it is probably time for the rural disaffected to start trying to understand urban people a lot better also:

If we pin this election on coastal elites, we are excusing white working-class and rural Americans for voting for a man accused of violating the Fair Housing Act by refusing to rent apartments to black people. If we pin this election on coastal elites, we are excusing white working-class and rural Americans for voting for a man who called Mexicans rapists, drug dealers and criminals. If we pin this election on coastal elites, we are excusing white working-class and rural Americans for voting for a man who called for a complete ban on Muslim immigration.
I have friends and acquaintances who are Trump supporters. They genuinely do not understand today’s shock, particularly from minorities. These Trump supporters do not understand that many minorities believe the people who voted for Trump endorse his racism and bigotry — that those voters care more about sending a message to the political establishment than they do about the rights and welfare of human beings.

The last sentence is important. Whenever I read or hear somebody saying they are engaging in punitive action against a person or group to “send a message”, I know I am witnessing or about to witness an abusive action that is fundamentally unjustifiable. This is true in corporate governance, sport, politics or human conquest. (The Nazis in World War II used to regularly round up and execute local people in occupied countries to “send a message” about not collaborating with resistance groups).
When your stated objective is more about “sending a message” it invariably means that you are going to behave like an abusive asshole.

…what sort of country it wants to be when it grows up.
Does it want to try to be that “shining city on a hill”, a beacon of hope and freedom and opportunity?
Or does it want to be a hypocritical, bullying imperial power, dominated domestically by mean-spirited, nativist behaviors?
The USA is a young country in relative world terms, constituted by a bunch of smart people 240+ years ago. It currently behaves like an an adolescent. Adolescents have boundless energy and ideas. They also think they know it all, and they won’t listen to anybody who looks older. The USA is that adolescent. As a country, the USA shows a pathetic level of genuine curiosity about how things get done elsewhere. Some of us like to travel and act like tourists, but tourists go everywhere, see a lot, and understand almost none of it. The rest of us sit close to home, getting a cartoon heroes vs villains worldview from TV and cable channels. As a result, many people are voting today without any clear idea or understanding of the underlying issues facing the USA. Many people are signed on to cockanamie conspiracy theories, dystopian binary fantasizing (Vote XXX or the country is Doomed!) and all manner of odd ideas that cannot be supported by facts.Countries are never perfect, and countries that rise to #1 in the world eventually fall back again. History teaches us that. At some point the USA will be overtaken by other countries. This does not mean that the USA will cease to exist and suddenly become inconsequential. It took us a fair amount of time to rise to #1, and the decline, if it has begun, will be slow.
America is a nation of immigrants (even the First Nations people, who seem to have arrived via the Bering Land Bridge). The rapid growth to world dominance of the United States was fuelled by the energy, drive and enterprise of waves of immigrants who continue to arrive to this day. Unfortunately, a lot of people currently want to pull up the Welcome mat. There are understandable reasons why, but reinvention of countries and rejuvenation of countries is always triggered by human migrations. Another thing that history teaches us.
Right now the US is #1 in a lot of things, including GDP, and defense spending. We’re not #1 in some other areas, most notably healthcare. Those issues are fixable, but denial never fixes issues. On the other hand, dystopian fantasizing about the Global Conspiracies against the USA, and the identification of internal enemies, won’t address issues either. That mindset is exactly what led to the Second World War. History pointer number three.
People need to think about what the future of the country should be. We live in an interconnected world. Time does not run backwards. The past is indeed gone for ever. There is a reason why historians call The Golden Age a fallacy. It was never a Golden Age. As a species we have an uncanny ability to remember mostly good stuff and forget about bad stuff. It actually serves us well most of the time, but sometimes it doesn’t. There is good reason to beware anybody who promises to turn the clock back. That can never happen.
Decisions made in anger are usually poor decisions. Many of the voters expressing opinions this election cycle are voting negatively (the lesser of two evils approach). You wouldn’t pick a life partner on the basis of selecting the least horrible one. We shouldn’t be doing the same for voting preferences.
I also believe that arguments based on “left or right”, “liberal or conservative” are based on outdated fallacious binary language promulgated by the mass media, and everybody would do well to stop buying into those sorts of false dichotomies. Binary thinking is for computers, not societal and governance issues.
The political landscape in the USA is dangerous and toxic today. We have elected representatives and candidates quite seriously suggesting that opponents should be arrested and jailed, and in some cases executed. This is not the rhetoric of mature people operating in a representative democracy. This is seditious, third world bully-boy posturing. It needs to be called by those names, and the people engaging in that behavior need to be ejected from the process and told to not come back until they learn to behave a lot better.
We also have a lot of people arguing from memes and slogans. That’s not argument. It’s rote repetition of somebody else’s simplistic, often bullshit view of a complex issue. If you argue in memes and slogans, that’s somebody else’s voice, not yours. We also have a lot of people expressing views that are varying combinations of racist and/or anti-Semitic. Personally, I avoid those kinds of people. However, they are symptomatic of a deeper underlying dystopian worldview that many less fortunate people in the USA have acquired over time. I would need a doctoral thesis to adequately explain how that came about, but the move to the post-Industrial age in the USA, which has removed economic stability and growth from many areas, is one underlying cause.
Complex societal problems require complex strategies, not quick flashy band-aids. There is a lot of shouting in the USA, and little substantive debate. Many people have stopped listening this election cycle, and I have been dismayed to see intelligent people on my Facebook timeline abandoning all pretense of logical and critical thinking as they line up behind Their Guys. This sort of approach is not a good indicator for how the USA can address issues. Everybody needs to stop emoting and start thinking and listening.
Most of you made up your minds long ago. I have nothing to offer in the way of input on voting choices.
I also don’t have much to say about my likely voting choices, except that I lean Libertarian. However, I believe I know which of the two major party candidates for POTUS is better qualified and temperamentally suited to leading the USA, and it’s not a four-times bankrupt, narcissistic, bullshitting rabble-rouser and carnival barker from Queens. There are over 150 candidates for POTUS. Don’t tell me you don’t have choices. You simply need to be able to do some research.
Just VOTE. A high turnout cements the legitimacy of winners.