Okay. I am going to try to explain this calmly and reasonably.
The most pessimistic estimates of ISIL's membership put it at about 200,000 worldwide. That includes non-combatants, support staffers, administrators and other political actors as well as fighters, but 200,000 is going to be our baseline estimate because it's always good to think worst-case scenario.
There are currently 1.3 million active US military service members, with a further 850,000 on reserve. This is solely the number of men and women that America can put into the field; it does not count our traditional allies such as France, Great Britain, Canada, et cetera et cetera.
There are 1.47 billion practicing Muslims worldwide.
Take those three sets of numbers together, and you will see a picture of ISIL as a tiny guerrilla force unable to do anything more than inflict cruelty on the defenseless. They are out numbered more than 10 to 1 by the United States military alone, and we are far from alone in our opposition to ISIL. Even many of the countries we have historically had a troubled relationship with feel that an apocalyptic death cult doesn't make a good neighbor. ISIL is politically isolated and counting on two things to help them in their struggle against the West.
One, they are counting on the fact that because they are small and we are large, we have more to defend and they can choose to strike us where we are not expecting it. This is in the nature of guerrilla warfare. It is utterly tragic, and it will mean that Paris is not the last place that ISIL attacks us, but the same tactics that make them effective as a guerrilla force make them ineffective as a conventional army. They are not able to destroy America. They are not able to destroy anybody. They are only able to inflict cruelty upon the helpless when nobody is watching.
Two, the only way that they can progress beyond their status as petty, vicious murderers is by reframing the issue from "ISIL against the world" to "Muslims against Christians". As a crazy, hate-filled death cult, they are a weak military force that has drawn the attention of some of the most powerful armies in history. As defenders of the Muslim faith, they have a potential army of over a billion that they can recruit from. They are desperate, literally desperate to convince Muslims everywhere that the West hates all Muslims with the same passion that they hate ISIL and want to crush Islam entirely.
In other words, when Donald Trump says that we need to shut down all the mosques to prevent ISIL from gaining strength in America, or when Ted Cruz says that we don't need to care about civilian casualties when fighting ISIL, they are making ISIL recruiting speeches. They are doing our enemy's work for them, and it is a testament to the kindness and decency of the overwhelming majority of the people of the Islamic faith that they have refused to give in to the hatred that their supposed allies around the world hold for them.
That doesn't mean that they don't need to stop and stop now.
Monday, November 16, 2015
Thursday, November 12, 2015
Review: Zombie Birds, Astronaut Fish and Other Weird Animals
I am always up for a bit of pop science. Well-written, accessible books conveying interesting scientific topics to the layperson are right up there with gripping historical non-fiction in my list of good books to curl up with, and when I saw 'Zombie Birds, Astronaut Fish and Other Weird Animals' by Becky Crew, I thought it had some potential along those lines. It's a series of essays on various animals with strange habits or odd biology, from the naked mole rat to the killifish (the titular "astronaut fish") to the great tit (the titular "zombie bird").
The problem is that Crew sells the book as a sort of humorous-yet-informative collection of essays, but the line of demarcation between "humorous" and "informative" is a lot thicker than it perhaps needed to be. Instead of trying to find interesting and funny ways to describe the unusual animals, she includes either a preface or a postscript that imagines the animal's behavior in human civilization. To be honest, these generally come off as somewhat strained ("Imagine if this frog jumped off of tall platforms...in a job interview!") and repetitive, but the bigger problem is that the essays they bracket tend to be dry recitations of fact.
The facts are extremely solid, though. The book is drier than what I was expecting, but it's an extremely well-researched collection of facts about obscure animals and the way that new techniques have illuminated more and more details about the animal kingdom. From details about the way that a fossil's eye sockets can tell us what time of day a dinosaur hunted to descriptions of animals only found miles below the ocean surface, Crew does a magnificent job of showing the way that we are peeling back the mysteries of the natural world.
So although I could wish for a bit more of the book that was described on the back cover, I do have to say that in all fairness it's a sound science book. Just a bit less "pop science" than I was hoping for.
The problem is that Crew sells the book as a sort of humorous-yet-informative collection of essays, but the line of demarcation between "humorous" and "informative" is a lot thicker than it perhaps needed to be. Instead of trying to find interesting and funny ways to describe the unusual animals, she includes either a preface or a postscript that imagines the animal's behavior in human civilization. To be honest, these generally come off as somewhat strained ("Imagine if this frog jumped off of tall platforms...in a job interview!") and repetitive, but the bigger problem is that the essays they bracket tend to be dry recitations of fact.
The facts are extremely solid, though. The book is drier than what I was expecting, but it's an extremely well-researched collection of facts about obscure animals and the way that new techniques have illuminated more and more details about the animal kingdom. From details about the way that a fossil's eye sockets can tell us what time of day a dinosaur hunted to descriptions of animals only found miles below the ocean surface, Crew does a magnificent job of showing the way that we are peeling back the mysteries of the natural world.
So although I could wish for a bit more of the book that was described on the back cover, I do have to say that in all fairness it's a sound science book. Just a bit less "pop science" than I was hoping for.
Monday, November 09, 2015
Today's Thing I Should Not Have To Explain: Of COURSE "Blue Lives Matter"
Despite the fact that we're now well over a year off from Ferguson, and despite the daily articles about yet another police officer using disproportionate force resulting in the death of an unarmed (usually African-American) civilian, I am still seeing people responding to the "Black Lives Matter" movement with counter-movements like "Blue Lives Matter" or "Cop Lives Matter". I am deeply and sincerely hoping that nobody in my regular audience buys into these counter-movements, but on the off-chance that you need to link someone you know through to an explanation of why they're a problem, here's one.
The problem with a "Blue Lives Matter" movement in response to the "Black Lives Matter" movement is that it suggests through implication that the opposite of policemen killing unarmed civilians who may not even have committed crimes is armed criminals killing policemen. This does not make sense. This does not even begin to make sense. This does not even exist in the same universe as sense. This is saying, in essence, that police brutality and extrajudicial executions of innocent people is so deeply ingrained into police culture that it is literally impossible for them to conceive of doing their job without just randomly choking someone to death for a non-violent offense or shooting a random black teenager in the chest for looking suspicious. Those are terrible, insane responses to suggestions that police be held accountable for doing their job badly.
To understand just how terrible they are, imagine transplanting the problem to another possession. Imagine a doctor going into surgery and, instead of operating on the patient to remove their gallbladder, they don full bio-hazard gear, douse the patient in kerosene, and set them on fire before sprinting out of the room, shrieking "UNCLEAN! UNCLEAN!" And then imagine that the state medical board investigates and decides that the doctor is not at fault because there were indications that the patient could have had a communicable disease of some sort.
In this circumstance, pointing out that doctors are at risk of catching communicable diseases from their patient and that we need to care about their lives too does not counter the fact that the doctor in question was terrible at their job and murdered someone in their care through homicidal actions that went far beyond simple neglect or carelessness into active murderous incompetence and malice, and that the authorities whose job it is to make sure that malicious and incompetent members of the profession are not allowed to continue to practice have instead decided that it is more important to protect their own. This is Not Good.
Police lives do matter. Of course they do. It is a hazardous profession, and there's a limit to how much we can mitigate that, but nobody is suggesting that we shouldn't do everything we can to keep cops safe on the street. But a police officer who is killing unarmed people is not doing their job, full stop. They are dangerously incompetent, and the fact that they are killing African-Americans all out of proportion to any other demographic is not coincidence. Violent racism is not something that can or should be tolerated in our police force, and saying that is not "anti-cop" rhetoric. It is anti-racist-incompetent-cop rhetoric. The only people who should be opposed to that are racist, incompetent cops, and it is incredibly worrying that entire departments seem eager to step up and declare their membership in that demographic.
The problem with a "Blue Lives Matter" movement in response to the "Black Lives Matter" movement is that it suggests through implication that the opposite of policemen killing unarmed civilians who may not even have committed crimes is armed criminals killing policemen. This does not make sense. This does not even begin to make sense. This does not even exist in the same universe as sense. This is saying, in essence, that police brutality and extrajudicial executions of innocent people is so deeply ingrained into police culture that it is literally impossible for them to conceive of doing their job without just randomly choking someone to death for a non-violent offense or shooting a random black teenager in the chest for looking suspicious. Those are terrible, insane responses to suggestions that police be held accountable for doing their job badly.
To understand just how terrible they are, imagine transplanting the problem to another possession. Imagine a doctor going into surgery and, instead of operating on the patient to remove their gallbladder, they don full bio-hazard gear, douse the patient in kerosene, and set them on fire before sprinting out of the room, shrieking "UNCLEAN! UNCLEAN!" And then imagine that the state medical board investigates and decides that the doctor is not at fault because there were indications that the patient could have had a communicable disease of some sort.
In this circumstance, pointing out that doctors are at risk of catching communicable diseases from their patient and that we need to care about their lives too does not counter the fact that the doctor in question was terrible at their job and murdered someone in their care through homicidal actions that went far beyond simple neglect or carelessness into active murderous incompetence and malice, and that the authorities whose job it is to make sure that malicious and incompetent members of the profession are not allowed to continue to practice have instead decided that it is more important to protect their own. This is Not Good.
Police lives do matter. Of course they do. It is a hazardous profession, and there's a limit to how much we can mitigate that, but nobody is suggesting that we shouldn't do everything we can to keep cops safe on the street. But a police officer who is killing unarmed people is not doing their job, full stop. They are dangerously incompetent, and the fact that they are killing African-Americans all out of proportion to any other demographic is not coincidence. Violent racism is not something that can or should be tolerated in our police force, and saying that is not "anti-cop" rhetoric. It is anti-racist-incompetent-cop rhetoric. The only people who should be opposed to that are racist, incompetent cops, and it is incredibly worrying that entire departments seem eager to step up and declare their membership in that demographic.
Thursday, November 05, 2015
What I'm Enjoying: The Quest
I found out that "The Quest", the reality TV single-season wonder from the producers of 'The Amazing Race', is now on Netflix. This thrills me to no end, as I saw the first episode during its original run and missed the entire subsequent event, and it really is one of those things you have to see in order.
For those who never saw it, it's basically a big-budget LARP. The producers have rented out a castle, hired experts in practical special effects, make-up and stagecraft, and gotten a bunch of actors to portray the inhabitants of the mythical kingdom of Everealm. Then they got a dozen genuine fantasy enthusiasts and brought to Everealm to spend a whole season competing for the right to save it.
See, Everealm has a problem. As with all mythical kingdoms, Everealm is under attack by Verlox, who goes by the nickname of "The Darkness", and only a heroic paladin bearing the legendary Sunspear can defeat him. But each of the twelve heroes from our Earth has just one piece of the Sunspear...and over the course of a season of mock-combat, tests of nerve and skill, and good old-fashioned Survivor-style voting, the false heroes are winnowed out leaving only the destined savior of Everealm to assemble the Sunspear and defeat Verlox!
(I will confess, due to a habit of slight mispronunciation on the part of pretty much everyone who isn't the closed captions, I keep hearing it as "Sunsphere". Which is a problem, because I keep hearing Bart Simpson say, "Remember, everyone. We're parked under the Sunsphere.")
I won't lie. This is cheesy as hell. But it's cheesy in all the right ways. It hits that sweet spot of SCA/LARP and low-budget fantasy movie, where all the professional actors are speaking in Fantasy Trope-ese and all of the paladins are reacting to it with genuine, sincere enthusiasm. They're living their dream--someone has actually constructed a fully immersive, days-long live-action D&D campaign just for them with Hollywood production values and they get to play it for FREE! That child-like excitement transcends the cliched nature of the storyline and turns any amateurishness into a virtue rather than a fault. It's at a strange crossroads between obvious fraud and vivid reality, and somehow both enhance the other.
The paladins were apparently not competing for a prize (hopefully they were compensated in some form, but the winner's only reward was in defeating Verlox and bringing peace to the Twelve Kingdoms). In a way, I think this was the smartest decision they could have made--if they'd been playing for money, it would have encouraged the worst Survivor-style backstabbing and conniving, which would have utterly broken the immersion of the heroes as paladins attempting to find their inner hero and save the day. There's still a little of that, of course; human nature being what it is, not all the paladins are equally noble. But that too is part of the fantasy charm--it wouldn't have much tension if all of the heroes were bland ciphers of nobility, would it?
(On a side note, there's a pleasingly large amount of race and gender diversity among the paladins. In fact, it's a lot better than most genre work in that aspect; frankly, I'd be a lot more likely to read a generic "Earth person is transported to fantasy realm and must defeat magical evil" if the hero was Shondo Blades, an African-American mixed-martial arts fighter who spoke almost exclusively in sports motivation cliches. Because he's freaking awesome.)
I know that there's currently a fan campaign to get a second season, but honestly I feel that it kind of stands perfectly as a single story. A second season would invariably have contestants who'd seen the original, forcing them to either rework the story in possibly-unsatisfying ways or deal with knowing, ironic contestants rather than the charmingly innocent folks they got. The Quest feels like lightning in a bottle to me, the kind of thing that you can only do well once. A sequel would suffer badly from diminishing returns, whereas this feels, in its own quirky way, just perfect.
For those who never saw it, it's basically a big-budget LARP. The producers have rented out a castle, hired experts in practical special effects, make-up and stagecraft, and gotten a bunch of actors to portray the inhabitants of the mythical kingdom of Everealm. Then they got a dozen genuine fantasy enthusiasts and brought to Everealm to spend a whole season competing for the right to save it.
See, Everealm has a problem. As with all mythical kingdoms, Everealm is under attack by Verlox, who goes by the nickname of "The Darkness", and only a heroic paladin bearing the legendary Sunspear can defeat him. But each of the twelve heroes from our Earth has just one piece of the Sunspear...and over the course of a season of mock-combat, tests of nerve and skill, and good old-fashioned Survivor-style voting, the false heroes are winnowed out leaving only the destined savior of Everealm to assemble the Sunspear and defeat Verlox!
(I will confess, due to a habit of slight mispronunciation on the part of pretty much everyone who isn't the closed captions, I keep hearing it as "Sunsphere". Which is a problem, because I keep hearing Bart Simpson say, "Remember, everyone. We're parked under the Sunsphere.")
I won't lie. This is cheesy as hell. But it's cheesy in all the right ways. It hits that sweet spot of SCA/LARP and low-budget fantasy movie, where all the professional actors are speaking in Fantasy Trope-ese and all of the paladins are reacting to it with genuine, sincere enthusiasm. They're living their dream--someone has actually constructed a fully immersive, days-long live-action D&D campaign just for them with Hollywood production values and they get to play it for FREE! That child-like excitement transcends the cliched nature of the storyline and turns any amateurishness into a virtue rather than a fault. It's at a strange crossroads between obvious fraud and vivid reality, and somehow both enhance the other.
The paladins were apparently not competing for a prize (hopefully they were compensated in some form, but the winner's only reward was in defeating Verlox and bringing peace to the Twelve Kingdoms). In a way, I think this was the smartest decision they could have made--if they'd been playing for money, it would have encouraged the worst Survivor-style backstabbing and conniving, which would have utterly broken the immersion of the heroes as paladins attempting to find their inner hero and save the day. There's still a little of that, of course; human nature being what it is, not all the paladins are equally noble. But that too is part of the fantasy charm--it wouldn't have much tension if all of the heroes were bland ciphers of nobility, would it?
(On a side note, there's a pleasingly large amount of race and gender diversity among the paladins. In fact, it's a lot better than most genre work in that aspect; frankly, I'd be a lot more likely to read a generic "Earth person is transported to fantasy realm and must defeat magical evil" if the hero was Shondo Blades, an African-American mixed-martial arts fighter who spoke almost exclusively in sports motivation cliches. Because he's freaking awesome.)
I know that there's currently a fan campaign to get a second season, but honestly I feel that it kind of stands perfectly as a single story. A second season would invariably have contestants who'd seen the original, forcing them to either rework the story in possibly-unsatisfying ways or deal with knowing, ironic contestants rather than the charmingly innocent folks they got. The Quest feels like lightning in a bottle to me, the kind of thing that you can only do well once. A sequel would suffer badly from diminishing returns, whereas this feels, in its own quirky way, just perfect.
Monday, November 02, 2015
Remind Me Of This On October 1st, 2016
The Halloween season has once again come and gone, although this time without me watching a metric ton of cheesy horror movies (my wife has suggested I watch them on November 8th, in honor of the astrological Samhain instead of the fixed calendar date). I did take my son trick-or-treating, though, because he's nine and I'm his dad. We had a fun time, but I did come away from it feeling like there's a fundamental lack of organization to the whole thing.
Because not everybody participates--which is fine. Nobody is morally obligated to give out candy to complete strangers on Halloween even if they are adorable and bedecked in hilariously cute costumes. (My child was a robot.) But it's very difficult sometimes to tell who's giving out candy and who is out at parties/working on Halloween (the poor bastards)/just misanthropic and hiding in the basement. Ideally, people who are handing out candy should have a porch light on, but lights burn out and some people have those automatic lights to discourage burglars and some parents want to start trick or treating before the sun has completely set because they have small children in black costumes and don't want to worry about cars and generally the whole system is a complete mess.
So here's my idea. Next year, we make up signs that you can print out and put on your doorstep, saying "Trick or Treaters Welcome!" or something more cutesy and Halloween-pun-themed. We print out a stack of them and hand them out around the neighborhood, saying, "Here! You can use this to help let people know when you're ready to hand out treats!" Then, on October 31st, we go to the houses that have the signs, and we skip the houses that don't. Am I crazy, or is this just the best idea ever?
I know. It's not an "either/or" situation. But still.
Because not everybody participates--which is fine. Nobody is morally obligated to give out candy to complete strangers on Halloween even if they are adorable and bedecked in hilariously cute costumes. (My child was a robot.) But it's very difficult sometimes to tell who's giving out candy and who is out at parties/working on Halloween (the poor bastards)/just misanthropic and hiding in the basement. Ideally, people who are handing out candy should have a porch light on, but lights burn out and some people have those automatic lights to discourage burglars and some parents want to start trick or treating before the sun has completely set because they have small children in black costumes and don't want to worry about cars and generally the whole system is a complete mess.
So here's my idea. Next year, we make up signs that you can print out and put on your doorstep, saying "Trick or Treaters Welcome!" or something more cutesy and Halloween-pun-themed. We print out a stack of them and hand them out around the neighborhood, saying, "Here! You can use this to help let people know when you're ready to hand out treats!" Then, on October 31st, we go to the houses that have the signs, and we skip the houses that don't. Am I crazy, or is this just the best idea ever?
I know. It's not an "either/or" situation. But still.
Thursday, October 29, 2015
Birdees!
I've never been much of a bird-watcher; my parents liked to have a bird-feeder outside their window ever since I was a kid, but to me they weren't nearly as cool as animals that would stay still and let you pet them (which we weren't allowed to have, I might add). Still, I'll admit I make exceptions for three factors, and today reminded me of one of them.
1) Color. Even though I never cared much about the birds at the feeder, it was still a special experience when a brilliantly vivid cardinal or blue jay stopped by. Crows (and similar dull-black birds), sparrows and the like were always just sort of there, but it was always neat to see a brightly-colored bird catch the eye.
2) Size. This is what today's bird sighting reminded me of--the building I work at is situated slightly oddly, at the very edge of a small industrial park that nestles up to a wildlife sanctuary. Which means that there are office buildings on three sides...and the window right outside my desk looks down onto a parking lot right next to open wilderness and a river beyond. There are twenty-three wild turkeys milling around the parking lot, any one of which would easily come up to my knee. They're not particularly pretty birds (although again, their head provides a vivid contrast to the gray-black pavement) but man, are they impressive to watch. They're just bigger than you feel a bird should be allowed to be, and you feel a little bit of that primal connection between birds and dinosaurs as you watch them strut around.
3) Propensity for violence. The Twin Cities has a thriving raptor population that has figured out that streetlights make much better perches than tree branches. They're taller, they support the bird's weight better, and they don't have any branches to obscure vision. So on just about any drive through the city, spaced roughly every two to three miles (raptors are territorial birds) you can see a red-tailed hawk watching for prey, or sometimes if you're very lucky a peregrine falcon or a bald eagle (the latter are more common around the Mississippi River). Again, right outside my window I frequently spot small flocks of turkey vultures, lazily surfing the updrafts and keeping an eye out for something they can scavenge. They're astonishingly beautiful birds, even the turkey vultures; their smooth, sleek lines make them look like they're swooping even when they're standing still, and occasionally you'll see one dive with amazing speed and come up with a small mammal gripped in their talons.
There are obviously a few birds that score in multiple categories--hummingbirds, for example, while tiny, get multipliers for color and propensity to violence (plus their speed makes them eye-catching in their own unique way). But for the most part, when you see me stop in amazement at a bird, it's either big or bright or a sleek hunter. I feel very privileged that I get to stop in amazement so often.
1) Color. Even though I never cared much about the birds at the feeder, it was still a special experience when a brilliantly vivid cardinal or blue jay stopped by. Crows (and similar dull-black birds), sparrows and the like were always just sort of there, but it was always neat to see a brightly-colored bird catch the eye.
2) Size. This is what today's bird sighting reminded me of--the building I work at is situated slightly oddly, at the very edge of a small industrial park that nestles up to a wildlife sanctuary. Which means that there are office buildings on three sides...and the window right outside my desk looks down onto a parking lot right next to open wilderness and a river beyond. There are twenty-three wild turkeys milling around the parking lot, any one of which would easily come up to my knee. They're not particularly pretty birds (although again, their head provides a vivid contrast to the gray-black pavement) but man, are they impressive to watch. They're just bigger than you feel a bird should be allowed to be, and you feel a little bit of that primal connection between birds and dinosaurs as you watch them strut around.
3) Propensity for violence. The Twin Cities has a thriving raptor population that has figured out that streetlights make much better perches than tree branches. They're taller, they support the bird's weight better, and they don't have any branches to obscure vision. So on just about any drive through the city, spaced roughly every two to three miles (raptors are territorial birds) you can see a red-tailed hawk watching for prey, or sometimes if you're very lucky a peregrine falcon or a bald eagle (the latter are more common around the Mississippi River). Again, right outside my window I frequently spot small flocks of turkey vultures, lazily surfing the updrafts and keeping an eye out for something they can scavenge. They're astonishingly beautiful birds, even the turkey vultures; their smooth, sleek lines make them look like they're swooping even when they're standing still, and occasionally you'll see one dive with amazing speed and come up with a small mammal gripped in their talons.
There are obviously a few birds that score in multiple categories--hummingbirds, for example, while tiny, get multipliers for color and propensity to violence (plus their speed makes them eye-catching in their own unique way). But for the most part, when you see me stop in amazement at a bird, it's either big or bright or a sleek hunter. I feel very privileged that I get to stop in amazement so often.
Tuesday, October 27, 2015
Crazy Fact of the Day
Jim Gilmore, Lindsey Graham, John Kasich, George Pataki, and Rick Santorum have not dropped out of the Republican Presidential race yet!
Bonus crazy fact of the day: Jim Gilmore, Lindsey Graham, John Kasich, George Pataki, and Rick Santorum are all declared Republican Presidential candidates!
Seriously, though, it is a little hard to understand why so many of these guys are running. The national conversation has been reduced to Trump, Carson, and Bush, with occasional comments about how Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Mike Huckabee, Carly Fiorina, Ted Cruz, Chris Christie, and Bobby Jindal are floundering/are keeping their powder dry for the inevitable implosion of Carson and Trump. (Delete where applicable, although I'm still waiting for an extremely bored opinion columnist to try to combine the two into one column.) To be honest, Jindal has already been moved into the "death watch" section, where the only articles he gets are speculation about when he's going to drop out.
But those other guys...they're not even being mentioned in the conversation about who's going to leave the race yet! They are seriously so irrelevant to the national political discussion that they're not even given consideration as potential losers. It's already assumed that if they're not gone already, it doesn't really matter because they soon will be. Basically, they're the Lincoln Chafee/Jim Webbs of the Republican Party, except that those two guys had the common sense to give up after humiliating themselves on national television. The Republicans appear to be clinging to delusions of grandeur until the bitter end.
My current hypothesis is that this is another unintended consequence of Citizens United. Because it is now so much easier than it ever was to raise vast amounts of money for political campaigns, and because the rules on how that money is spent have been loosened (and the laws that do exist have been loosely enforced) it is now at least a theoretically lucrative proposition to run a losing Presidential campaign. Basically, you find a few big-money donors and shake them down until their teeth rattle, then live high on the hog touring the country and spouting the kind of crap that stands no chance of getting you elected, but does loosen the purse strings on other donors. If you work this system right, you end up with a string of contact information for people with poor critical thinking skills and disposable income who you can milk for years in between elections by sending out fear-mongering emails about Planned Parenthood and Agenda 21.
(I leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out why it seems to be the Republicans who have so many of these political tapeworms in their collective gut.)
As a lifelong Democrat, I'm of mixed opinions about this. On the one hand, I obviously think it's terrible that the current political system actively encourages con artists to pretend to run for President in order to prey on the gullible and stupid. I think it helps to encourage the notion that politics and policy are unrelated, and that the business of elections is a combination of sideshow and sporting event rather than a job interview for the people who will be in charge of our country for the next four years. On that level, I would really like all of these frauds and charlatans to get out of the process. (And yes, that goes for Trump and Carson too. They're no less frauds and charlatans; they're simply much better at it than Rick Santorum is.)
On the other hand, if the gullible and stupid will insist on getting involved in politics, and if they will put their money where their mouth is and throw cash at terrible human beings who spout racist, sexist, nativist garbage and whose idea of a solution to our problems is round up all the furriners and give everybody a gun...well, then I suppose it's not such a bad thing that they're spending that cash on people who have no hope in hell of being elected. If the net result of the Republican effort to openly sell our political offices to billionaires is that in the end, the billionaires are all taken for a ride by con artists and legitimate-but-terrible candidates like Jeb Bush flounder while Hillary Clinton (or better yet, Bernie Sanders) have a smooth path to the White House, I guess that's not the worst solution.
Basically, I think what I'm saying is that until we get real campaign finance reform, I'd much rather conservatives give all their money to the ineffective candidates. Because the alternative is them donating to people who actually stand a chance to win.
Bonus crazy fact of the day: Jim Gilmore, Lindsey Graham, John Kasich, George Pataki, and Rick Santorum are all declared Republican Presidential candidates!
Seriously, though, it is a little hard to understand why so many of these guys are running. The national conversation has been reduced to Trump, Carson, and Bush, with occasional comments about how Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Mike Huckabee, Carly Fiorina, Ted Cruz, Chris Christie, and Bobby Jindal are floundering/are keeping their powder dry for the inevitable implosion of Carson and Trump. (Delete where applicable, although I'm still waiting for an extremely bored opinion columnist to try to combine the two into one column.) To be honest, Jindal has already been moved into the "death watch" section, where the only articles he gets are speculation about when he's going to drop out.
But those other guys...they're not even being mentioned in the conversation about who's going to leave the race yet! They are seriously so irrelevant to the national political discussion that they're not even given consideration as potential losers. It's already assumed that if they're not gone already, it doesn't really matter because they soon will be. Basically, they're the Lincoln Chafee/Jim Webbs of the Republican Party, except that those two guys had the common sense to give up after humiliating themselves on national television. The Republicans appear to be clinging to delusions of grandeur until the bitter end.
My current hypothesis is that this is another unintended consequence of Citizens United. Because it is now so much easier than it ever was to raise vast amounts of money for political campaigns, and because the rules on how that money is spent have been loosened (and the laws that do exist have been loosely enforced) it is now at least a theoretically lucrative proposition to run a losing Presidential campaign. Basically, you find a few big-money donors and shake them down until their teeth rattle, then live high on the hog touring the country and spouting the kind of crap that stands no chance of getting you elected, but does loosen the purse strings on other donors. If you work this system right, you end up with a string of contact information for people with poor critical thinking skills and disposable income who you can milk for years in between elections by sending out fear-mongering emails about Planned Parenthood and Agenda 21.
(I leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out why it seems to be the Republicans who have so many of these political tapeworms in their collective gut.)
As a lifelong Democrat, I'm of mixed opinions about this. On the one hand, I obviously think it's terrible that the current political system actively encourages con artists to pretend to run for President in order to prey on the gullible and stupid. I think it helps to encourage the notion that politics and policy are unrelated, and that the business of elections is a combination of sideshow and sporting event rather than a job interview for the people who will be in charge of our country for the next four years. On that level, I would really like all of these frauds and charlatans to get out of the process. (And yes, that goes for Trump and Carson too. They're no less frauds and charlatans; they're simply much better at it than Rick Santorum is.)
On the other hand, if the gullible and stupid will insist on getting involved in politics, and if they will put their money where their mouth is and throw cash at terrible human beings who spout racist, sexist, nativist garbage and whose idea of a solution to our problems is round up all the furriners and give everybody a gun...well, then I suppose it's not such a bad thing that they're spending that cash on people who have no hope in hell of being elected. If the net result of the Republican effort to openly sell our political offices to billionaires is that in the end, the billionaires are all taken for a ride by con artists and legitimate-but-terrible candidates like Jeb Bush flounder while Hillary Clinton (or better yet, Bernie Sanders) have a smooth path to the White House, I guess that's not the worst solution.
Basically, I think what I'm saying is that until we get real campaign finance reform, I'd much rather conservatives give all their money to the ineffective candidates. Because the alternative is them donating to people who actually stand a chance to win.
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