Death of a Moonman

Peter suddenly found himself prostrate in the middle of a large field; he was vomitting. What the hell had just happened? He sat up brushing himself off, as the awareness of something truly wrong fumbled its way through his addled brain.

“I”
“huh”
“Maybe?….no”
“Maybe I was asleep and now I just woke up. But why would I be in a field? Well my head is killing me and I was throwing up. It’s possible that I got extremely drunk and this is the rather unfortunate aftermath. But where the hell am I, and why do I not remember having anything to drink for several weeks?”

The drinking story was the only thing he could come up with which seemed even vaguely plausable and yet he knew that it wasn’t the truth. Only moments before, he had been in a comfortable chair typing horribly affected prose and self-congratulatory pontifications into his laptop. Now? Now he was in a field. Vomiting? What the fuck?

He grabbed a clump of dirt and weeds as if to somehow to reassure himself that it was actually there and he was actually sitting in it and this, this totally disregard for the rules of reason and sense and understanding was actually the situation he was now in.

He sat and he stared.

Slowly a smile crept into the corners of his mouth: “well shit, I never really liked reality anyway.”

He layed back down, resting his still pounding head. Staring up ponderously at the cloud cluttered sky, he sharply sat up again, then got to his feet: “might as well find out where I am and what exactly just happened”

With the sun on his back, he started off through the field.

Peter had been walking for about ten minutes, entertaining himself with the most absurd speculation about where he was and what had just occured, when he saw a dirt path. He started to follow it, randomly turning left. Eventually he climbed a slight ridge out of the valley he had been in up to this point and caught sight of someone coming towards him. “well at least I’m not completely in the middle of nowhere” he thought. The fugure was about a mile off so details were difficult to make out but it seemed to either be a humpback or to be carrying a large amorphous sack on its back. The small adrenaline rush that accompanies encountering a stranger on a dirt road in an unkown place, fueled speculations about aliens and alternate universes and time warps that fought tentatively for acceptance in his now thoroughly disconcerted mind. “We’ll just have to see,” he told all the thoughts swirling around him.

Somewhat resolutely and somewhat incredulous that all this was actually going on, he started towards the distant figure who was walking in his direction. As they got nearer to each other Peter decided that it was at least a human being, but it appeared to be some sort of peasant who was indeed carrying a sack.

“A peasant?”
“have I really…yeah, it looks like it. Are you fucking kidding me? I’ve gone back in time?”

All the half-concieved but thoroughly ominous and confounding implications about his life and his family and his sanity and his very notions of the universe that such a realization implied, resolved themselves instead into a prodigous stream of confused explitives that seemed to sum up the situation as well or better than any full and articulated thought could have done. It was in fact hard to doubt his analysis. The man was barefoot, he was wearing what Peter could only describe as pantaloons and he had on a large loose fitting smock of a shirt that looked like someone had cut three holes in a burlap bag. Maybe he was in some foreign country but for some reason he didn’t think so. When they got within about twenty meters of each other they both stopped.

Under the bewildered stare of the man before him, Peter for the first time, became acutely aware of his own appearance. He was wearing a pair of heavy workboots with no socks which he had put on in the morning to take the dog out and fortunately hadn’t taken off, he had on the remnants of a pair of black sweatpants which he had cut off at the knee and also which he had slept in the night before, and he was wearing a white tee shirt with the word Hi written on the back. It was one of those sorts of shirts that was so stupid on so many levels that he couldn’t help but take some kind of sick pleasure in it. Though the first and only time he had actually worn the shirt in public, he ended up in front of an old guy in a long line at the grocery store who took his shirt as an open invitation to say a lot of incomprehensible things and punctuate each of them with a disconcerting laugh that was somehow a mix of blissful ignorance and deperate plea for human affection. It was, as stated before, the last time he wore the shirt in public. Peter concluded that he would look rather rediculous even in his world and must look downright absurd in this one.

“krhevizh, han gorral” The peasant blurted out.

“oh hell” replied Peter with an irritated sigh. “English?” He ventured.

“……..”

“DO-YOU-SPEAK-ENGLISH” Peter exhorted in desperation, simultaneously thinking about all the fictional people he had mocked for speaking in that exact manner.

“Han, na. Nil wrietzan”

“Well this is going to be fun”

This Election is Killing Me

I can’t stop.

I can’t stop reading infuriating stories, which are repudiated by other infuriating stories. I can’t stop leaving heroically asinine comments in responses to other people’s controverted heroically asinine comments. I find myself almost unable to read a “news” article without bias, and what’s far worse than that, I seem almost unable to find a news article written without bias. It seems like absolutely everyone in the media has taken sides. There is no longer any moderator in this debate, it’s about who can lie better and faster and louder to the most receptive audience. I was really hoping that the debates might bring some sanity and apply the coherent balm of reality to the debate. But now I’m pretty sure it will just add a whole lot more shit to the shit storm, even more crap to the pick and choose politics of eulogizing anything that makes your side sound good and ignoring anything that doesn’t. Maybe that’s where we have to be at now. The stakes have become far too high. All in. Total war. At least the framers saw to it that we don’t have to use guns to fight this out (at least not on each other)

Edit: I think I wrote this right after having engorged myself on a bit too much political junk-food. Standing a bit further back it now seems a little over the top, and kind of funy; In a – laughing at me, not with me – sort of way.

Liberalism and Conservatism

There are two fundamental aspect involved in any action: understanding an issue, and acting on that understanding.

The first is liberalism, the second is conservatism. Both are completely useless without the other.

basically – pure liberalism thinks without acting, pure conservatism acts without thinking.

I could write a whole book about this. Actually, when in the sort of frame of mind where I imagine myself as something other than the nearly inanimate object that I seem to be, both physically and in regards to ambition, I see this whole book laid out before me. In my mind I somehow secretly call it Cole/God’s gift to the human race. How’s that for an uncomfortable look into the blackness of someone’s diseased soul.

An overgrown comment that became a blog post

This was originally supposed to be a response to *this* – a synopsis by one Ms. Brigitte Dale regarding an article discussing the growing trend of guys taking ever longer to “grow up”

….Honestly though, this whole thing as a societal phenomenon is pretty interesting. It’s easy on the one hand to simply dismiss it as the inevitable negative outcome of widespread wealth and entitlement and a superficial media culture, and it’s entirely possible that that would make up the bulk of the correct analysis.

It is also possible, however that there is more to it than that. In the animal kingdom, generally the longer it takes for an animal to reach adulthood, often the more complicated the the requirements are of integrating into that species’ social structure. i.e. the longer one spends learning how to be part of the group before taking their ultimate place in the herd, the better one’s chances of success are. Acquiring “adult” status in human society is tad bit more complex than in a herd of elephants or a troop of monkeys but the benefits of spending more time in a formative state of flux are likely similar. In our parent’s time, and even more so their parent’s time, “Growing up” was a necessity. If you weren’t reasonably successful then you were either out on the streets or a step above that in some soul-crushing factory type job. There certainly weren’t student loans and forgiving parents and government assistance to make your twenties easy and fun. Pretty much finding a corporate ladder and climbing it as soon as possible was the only way to vastly improve your standard of living beyond a few steps away from poverty. Now though it’s easy to get away with not starting a career until late in your twenties, and maybe it’s even a good thing to do so. Presumably we all have inherent talents as well as inherent desires regarding what we would be satisfied having achieved with our lives. If you can spend ten years or so kicking the tires o’ life, maybe you end up with a much clearer picture of who you are and what you want than if you just dove in right away with whatever career and family were readily available and just buckled in for the long haul.

On second thought, maybe this whole thing is entirely women’s fault. (everything else is….amirite? anybody? high-five?anybody?) Before the pill, if people wanted to do what people always have done and always will do, which is engage in significant and insignificant sexual relationships, they would inevitably have to deal with what was always the outcome of such doings – babies. Once there was a baby involved, barring total assholery by the male (or occasionally the female), the outcome is pretty much instant adulthood. Job, wife and kids. As this was the norm, the culture grew up around it and shunned bachelors largely as aberrations. Now that people can have relationships without making lifelong commitments, once the exuberance of the initial discovery passed in the “hey let’s have sex with everybody” 60’s, a general pattern and culture of extended adolescence seemed to grow and solidify eventually building to what it is today. But who’s to say that that is necessarily a bad thing? In the absence of biological necessity, the late twenties might just be the more natural and appropriate time to stop gathering the pieces and to finally put yourself together in the role of an “adult”.

Digital Direct-Democracy (The Plan)

My Fello Amerricns,

The time for change has come. The time for hope has come. The time for hoping for change has come.

Sorry, that didn’t really have much to do with anything…. just amusing myself; if you can call it that.
(the rest of this article has nothing to do with any vague pointless references to the present political circus. It has everything to do with the fundamental redemption of the world’s collective political soul)

Direct Digital Democracy:DDD:D3
(no those are not emoticons)

Representative democracy has become the world standard for communal governance and the defence against abuse of power(don’t laugh, it’s true). There are many people however who would argue that an even better system would be a direct democracy, where everyone get’s a vote on everything. Instead of just getting together and picking some guy to send off for four years and crossing our fingers that they don’t spend too much of our money or bomb too many of our neighbors we could have a constant check or even active participation in the application of government powers through direct democracy. The biggest problems with building a direct democracy have been practical ones, it has just always been too hard and too messy to do effectively….Untill Now

maybe.

The argument has been made, by both myself and presumably many others, that the logistical impediments to the implementation of direct democracy have largely been rendered void by the near ubiquity of the internet. It is now theoretically possible to collect, marshal and moderate the knowledge and desires of the electorate through a networked system of moderated participation and voting; ultimately allowing for constant and total control of the decision making process by an involved and informed citizenry without the need to vest all (or any) decision making power in a single representative.

i.e. We don’t need politicians anymore because we have internet forums and optimizable voting algorithms. hoo ray.

That being said – the questions become: would/could direct democracy enabled by networking and software be an improvement and if so how would we go about implementing it?

The Tentative Plan:

First choose a government position like small town mayor or city councilperson.

Then Determine what powers that position entails and the choices that someone in that position faces.

From this information construct a set of software encoded rules to govern exactly what powers this elected official will contractually grant to their citizen constituents.

These rules will be a combination of participatory voting software, political platform, and one-person constitution, and will represent a legally binding contract with the voters to legislate according to the will of the will the voters as evidenced by the voting system.

Once this software is finalized, someone will run as a candidate, having signed this contract to uphold the integrity of the pre-agreed processes, encoded in their “mayor-ware”.

This approach means we don’t need to have a violent revolution and bloody overthrow of the existing government in order to drastically change our mode of politics, we simply quietly go about the business of drastically changing our mode of politics.

The other extremely important aspect of this plan is that each candidate will compete on the strength of their contract in the eyes of their constituents. This means the software will continually evolve and improve in order to better meet this need; with each candidate running on the strength and utility of their latest and greatest version of digital direct democracy. This market pressure will become particularly powerful and productive when it gets to the point that multiple D3 candidates are competing with each other.
(D3=test run of possibly lame, but concise and easy term)

In it’s initial form, the contract could be as simple as saying that registered members of the electorate can force their Representative to vote a certain way on a bill by preregistering for a decision and then acquiring a majority of some specified size behind a yes or no vote. By requiring preregistration say a week in advance you might curtail abuse by vote flooding.

Obviously, the larger the number of people involved in this process, the more complex the systems and controls need to be. That’s why it should be initially implemented in a small, low tension environment and start out simply as a citizen’s veto power.

Once proven as well as certain flaws highlighted, the candidate and possibly new candidates can rerun on new rewritten and improved contracts which learn from the previous implementation.

And finally, to avoid the legal attacks that the signing of a binding legal contract would invite, the contract with the electorate would stipulate that any breach of the contract will be mediated by the votes of the electorate and not sent to a judge.

This will take a lot more thinking and probably a lot of trial and error, but it is entirely possible to build a system that accurately and continuously reflects the will of the people, and in so doing, change the fundamental nature of democracy and civic involvement without changing any of the structural underpinnings. That’s a pretty amazing thought though I think.

Some more notes:

Legislation-
Legislators are rarely elected for their ability to craft quality legislation of long-term value. So there is very little selective market pressure to produce and swear in the best executors of the task which they are ostensibly elected to do: write and pass good laws. There are way more citizens than legislators – presumably some of them could write much better bills than what is currently produced.

Given the above – All that is then required is a system of allowing anyone to propose legislation to the body of participating citizens who can then choose what ideas to further develop and refine until the point that some agreed upon majority percentage is willing to agree to the final wording of a piece of legislation.

Voting-

On the surface, this one is a no brainer. If representatives are elected to vote the will of the people, it makes much more sense to just let the people vote the will of the people.

Executive function-

This ones a little tougher and such powers will likely have to remain vested in a single individual.

What would/could change in a D3 system is much greater oversight and constructive powers of the electorate over the various bureaucracies that are traditionally entirely run by and comported to the will of the head of the executive powers. On a national level, this would mean that major institutions such as the CIA, the Fed, the Department of Education would/could be forced to submit to oversight by the D3 in what would essentially amount to a (or all) seats on what would be the board of directors of these institutions if they had boards of directors.

Much of the argument of vesting power in a single executive comes from the fact that some decisions simply have to be made right now. Timely decision making is not generally a feature of any system that allows and encourages dissent, therefore we occasionally need a momentary totalitarian. However,presuming this is the argument for having a part-time king, one would have to accept that once the timeliness factor is no longer an issue, the power to overturn any choices made by the executive should return to the democracy; something like a six month time delay on the ability to overturn an executive decision. This will needs to be fleshed out quite a bit more but the overall result would be that a significant chunk of the sovereignty of both the executive and legislative functions of government would be transferred directly to the people.

Judicial-

Obviously there is no way this system should be allowed to touch the actual judicial process.

If anyone manages to read this in its entirety and sees some of the at present unaddressed concerns that adopting such a system would bring up, please weigh in..