Tag: Enlightenment

About Those Deplorables

Posted on March 27, 2017March 27, 2017 By Mark Tiedemann

In response to the question of why the election went the way it did, one of the reasons given was Hillary’s “basket of deplorables” comment.Â That hurt her, they say. It turned people off.

Really? Which people?Â People so close to not voting for her that, once in the voting booth,Â remembering that phrase over and above everything else drove them to pick Stein instead? Or people who were already committed to not voting for her? Or perhaps people who were already disinclined to go to the polls anyway—because they had something more important to do than participate in deciding the direction of the country for the next four years—that maybe, had she not said that they might have decided on that day to go vote anyway.…

Reality Check

Posted on February 3, 2017February 3, 2017 By Mark Tiedemann

The question came up in a recent discussion, “Why are you so sure if more people had voted they would have voted for Hillary?”Â Well, I’m not.Â I am fairly certain most of them would not have voted for Trump.Â I base that on a very simple number:Â Trump pulled the base that always votes that way and in fact received fewer votes than Mitt Romney.Â You can try to spin that any way you like, but to my mind that says something very significant.Â Namely that the GOP in its current manifestation is utterly dependent on two things to stay in office—that base and keeping the rest of the country disaffected from the political process.…

A Note On Standards

Posted on January 23, 2017January 23, 2017 By Mark Tiedemann

I did not watch the inauguration.Â This is nothing new, though, I rarely do.Â I saw Bill Clinton’s first inauguration, I watched Obama’s, parts of it, after the fact. I would rather read the inaugural addresses than listen, but really the main reason I skip them is that for me they don’t mean much.Â This is the party after the fight, so to speak.Â Parades, lots of glad-handing, important people with lots of money doing a Hollywood red carpet thing.Â It’s show.

Show is important in statecraft, certainly, but it’s not important to me, so…

But the aftermath this time has been fascinating.Â …

So What Do We Do Now?

Posted on November 20, 2016November 21, 2016 By Mark Tiedemann

It has been clear for all of the campaign season and is now becoming clearer that Donald Trump should not be president.Â He is temperamentally unsuited to the position, he does not have the working knowledge of how things work in a government, and he is wildly unpredictable.Â He is also as thin-skinned as they come.

But so what?Â He has been elected.Â For better or worse, unless something remarkable happens, he will be president for the next four years.

By remarkable I mean any of several possible legal scenarios.

There is a petition circulating to request the Electors of the Electoral College change their vote.…

47

Posted on November 11, 2016November 11, 2016 By Mark Tiedemann

The number will make sense presently.

It’s Friday. I’ve spent the last few days trying to process what happened Tuesday. It is not going well. I’m angry, frightened, and more than a little disgusted by the fact that we allowed Donald Trump to be elected president. I’m a cynic most days, an optimist forced by reality to concede that the world is perhaps more malign than not.Â But I’m also, marginally, an intellectual. By that I mean someone who deals with that reality by trying to understand it and make it cogent. By looking at things through the lens of causality, knowing that events are products, usually of combinations of factors no one person can see.…

Endorsement

Posted on October 26, 2016October 26, 2016 By Mark Tiedemann

With only a couple weeks now till the election, I’ve decided to make it plain (if i I haven’t already) that I intend to vote for Hillary Clinton.

I have a number of reasons for doing so, some of which are not quantifiable, but if I may I’d like to state a few of them.

First off, she is opposed, disrespected, and outright hated by all the right people. Her list of detractors is a grocery list of those I would like to see ousted from their own positions in government. This includes people like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, Representative Issa, and just about every firebreathing Tea Party moron who has been miring the workings of my government in the muck of intransigence like a child refusing to eat their vegetables for far too long.Â …

New Look

Posted on October 15, 2016 By Mark Tiedemann

Maybe I should have waited till January, but then again maybe I’ll change the theme again then. But I was starting to get bored with the old one and decided that–because I’m older now, but why that should matter I don’t know–it was time for a new look.Â This one has sliding images on the header.Â I grabbed a couple at random but I’ll likely change those at some point.

This has been a fascinating year. My boss asked me–because I’m older–if I’d ever witnessed an election cycle this bizarre.

No.

Contentious, yes. Clownish, surreal, weird–no. It’s been suggested that you’d have to go back to Lincoln’s election to find one even close to this in unpredictably oddball strangeness, and that’s a good contender, what with the near-demise of the Democratic Party as it split into three smaller parties, the Know Nothings, variations of fence-sitters, nativist groups, and the odd prediction of the apocalypse.…

Why We Need To Teach Civics

Posted on October 10, 2016October 10, 2016 By Mark Tiedemann

Listening to the debates, not between the candidates but among the potential voters, it becomes clear that for many the workings of our government are a thing of deep mystery and frustratingly obscure. Donald hammered on Hillary repeatedly that in 30 plus years in office she had an opportunity to “do something” about certain issues and she did nothing.

She was a senator and then she was secretary of state.

Neither position affords anyone the power to just “do something” about any damn thing they want.

While morality may not be relative, politics is entirely so.Â The problem is this:Â you have a hundred people in a room who have been given a problem to solve.Â …

What Grabs You

Posted on October 8, 2016October 8, 2016 By Mark Tiedemann

So The Donald was caught on tape saying something egregious about what he wants to do with women.Â This has caused much ire among those in his party of choice.Â Not most of the other egregious things he has said, alleged, alluded to, implied, or otherwise allowed to exit from his mouth.Â We have witnessed basically a year-long example of escalating reaction not to the content of his pronouncements but to the manner of their expression.

Paul Ryan has weighed in with an egregious bit of condescension of his own which adds to the evidence that he is a “classic” conservative who seems not to Get It.…

Stumpf and the Body On The Pavement

Posted on September 21, 2016September 21, 2016 By Mark Tiedemann

Watching Elizabeth Warren disassemble Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf is a gotcha moment, one wherein we assume the bad guy has been handed his still steaming intestines by the champion and justice will soon be served.Â Much as I hate to admit this, I doubt it.

I doubt it because…look at him. He’s looking at her with an almost-blank expression, but there is enough there to tell.Â To tell that he just doesn’t Get It.Â He’s listening to her, he’s answering her questions with well-advised Policy Speak, doing his best to evade a direct answer until she pins him to the wall, and even then there seems to be a kind of “okay, sure, but so what?”…