Not long ago I saw the ending of Final Fantasy X-2. Not just any
ending, but THE ending. I had completed the game long ago and to be
honest though there were lots of cool aspects in the game I hadn’t been
that impressed. It’s clearly a high quality game but I didn’t love it
the way I loved other Final Fantasy’s. In fact I felt almost neutral to
it. Just too much seemed to be missing…

Now though through watching my brother play through with the aim of
getting 100% story completion on one run through, I’ve seen much more
of the story. I’ve watched many scenes that I never go the first time
through, learned many things I never knew the first time through.
Pieces of the puzzle fit together that never did before. And what’s
more I got to see a lot of extra movie videos and an  entirely
appropriate ending that tied in more closely to the prior game. It
was… immensely more satisfying than the first time through, even
though I spent a lot less time and didn’t bother watching my brother
play through a vast majority of the game.

The ending still wasn’t quite what I wanted and there were some things
that were msising but overall it was much more what I have come to
expect from a Final Fantasy. That is a detailed entertaining story even
if it doesn’t actually make all that  much sense.

In the end I now find myself just as well inclined toward X-2 as I am
toward all the other Final Fantasies. It doesn’t rank as one of my
favorites but it does not rank as one of my least favorites either.
It’s a good solid game and I can say that I greatly enjoyed playing it.

But it really really ticks me off that the game’s structure is such
that it took me this long to really enjoy it. I can’t believe that the
game designer’s felt it a good idea the basically deny me a great deal
of the enjoyment I should have had in the game the first time through.
The whole Story Completion idea will go down in history in my book as
one of the worst ideas in video games at least in the way it was
executed in X-2.

In many ways X-2 felt like a game that was activily fighting against
the player. It seemed like it was purposefully trying to withhold story
from you. The game made it entirely to easy to miss cogent important
parts of the plot and not even realize that you had lost something. It
stuck significant plot scenes at the end of large dungeons or behind
strangely locked doors that you have to collect a large number of hard
to acquire objects in order to enter. The game makes it so that
selected the wrong option to a query or choosing to go to the wrong
place in the wrong order can just make it impossible for you to unlock
a good portion of the plot. LAstly the game even has the audacity to,
even if you do everything right and get to 100% story completion,
refuse to give you the good ending just because you forgot to press a
damn button at one point in time. “Ha! No story for you!”

This isn’t good design. Its arrogant offensive game design. It doesn’t
respect your players, rather it like holding a treat over the head of a
dog and making them jump for it. It’s cruel  and disgusting to
create a game that requires you to either replay it multiple times in
order to get a decent amount of the story OR play the game with a huge
complex guide in front of you the whole time afraid to make a single
mistake that would mean you have to start all over again.

Again don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying X-2 itself is a bad game. It
has many many great elements. I love the characters. I like the
dresssphere system. The cut scenes are amazing. Some of the mini-games
are a lot of fun. It is a worthy sequel in almost every way and in a
number of ways it surpasses the original. It’s just that I absolutely
despise the story completion system. I despise the way the free form of
this game turned into a detriment rather than advantage. I think it is
just bad design all around, and I hope to never see another RPG that
adopts these tactics as part of its mechanisms.

*********************
Spoilers Ahead:

Just some random observations about the end:
Vegnagun is unquestionable the most idiotic machine ever conceived of.
It is incomprehensible how such a device could ever come to exist in
any universe. Yet it did. In Sphera. If I ever had any doubt about how
stupid the people of Sphera are, the existence of Vegnagun totally
erases that doubt. It’s just generally a planet full of really dumb
people. Maybe that’s a good thing because it means that the people can
stop killing each other by listening to a single song. If people on
Earth are that impressionable maybe we could totally solve the worlds
ills by gathering everybody up into a giant plane with lightning
striking down all around them and pooring down rain and have them
listen to a famous person sing a good song and that’ll be that. No more
problems.

Anyway, one of the big problems in this story is not only is Vegnagun a
really stupid design, its also in no way scary. I felt no fear
whatsoever that the world was about to be destoryed. At no point did I
feel as if there was some danger that required haste or something
horrible would happen. At no point in the entire story did I have any
doubt of the main character’s ability to easily whup Vegnagun. After
all two of them had been a part of defeating Sin. What’s a big stupid
gun supposed  to do to them? Most of the game I was kinda
wondering why the heck weren’t the main characters just totally bored
out of their minds. I laughed out loud when I heard the characters
exclaim like it was some amazing revelation, that vegnagun could be
destroyed because people built it. Really? Wow what would ever make you
think that?
 
Shuyin in the words of my brother is “just as much of a whiner as that
Tidus.” That pretty much sums it up. I think it is a good symbolic
aspect of the game to make Tidus and Shuyin’s personalities similar in
some ways but it doesn’t help my sense of the significance of this
final battle. Once again just as Vegnagun wasn’t that scary. Neither
was Shuyin. So what if he’s a ghost that can possess people? He’s also
a fool who spent a 1000 years whining because he got killed in cold
blood. Big deal. Get over it. What’s more he’s so damn dumb he couldn’t
even have guessed once in all those years what Lenne’s last words
probably were? Come on. That’s a little dense. Not the mention that he
never admits that the reason he got shot was his own damn fault for
trying to… oh I don’t know… DESTROY THE WORLD! Oh sure maybe he
just thought activation vegnagun would help him save Lenne but can you
really blame the soldiers who know the capabilities of that gun from
overreacting? Ok yeah you can blame them but that doesn’t absolve
Shuyin of blame either. He’s just a dumb ghost with serious emotional
issues. “10,000 years of agony” Whatever.  How exactly did he
suffer? He died once in cold blood. Then he wandered around acting like
a fool when all he had to do was rest. I’m just not that impressed.

Ok so the villains in this game aren’t all that impressive but in a way
that kinda fits the mold too. Afterall X’s greatest weaknesses were in
its totally lame completely unbelievable villain structure.Seymour
still tops my books as the worst villain ever divised. And Sin being a
big mindless beast although a bit scary just couldn’t engage the viewer
like a real villain could. It was more like fighting a hurricane or a
force of natur, a challenge yes  but not a matter of right vs wrong
or good vs evil.

One aspect of the ending of X-2 that I really love and the part that
really made the ending in my opinion was the way you hear the voices
of the dead through the final battles. That was just really cool.
Related to my last point I like how Jecht’s voice says “Put that
crybaby to sleep,” when you’re fighting Shuyin. I really think that
almost everything that was said was highly appriopriate and really made
the ending much more entertaining than it otherwise would be. Another
favorite line of mine is Auron’s “He’s panicking. Yuna. End it now.”
This was just great.

The battle against Shuyin himself was a very nice touch to the ending.
Getting to see all of Tidus’s limit breaks again was just cool no
matter how flimsy the execuse to put them in.

My favorite part of the ending of all was Yuna’s speach. The main idea
of the speach is summed up with the words “I don’t want battles where
we have to lose in order to win.” It is a really potent part of the
story and a great way to introduce the ghostly external voices that
Yuna hear’s throughout the end of the game. Most importantly in this
way does the game actually serve as a thematic completion of the first
game. The transition from somber shadow to true happiness is completed
by banishing the last lingering darkness of the first game, the loss of
so very many significant characters.   It is particularly
cool because so often this is glossed over in stories. So many times we
are faced with tragedy after tragedy and then when the enemy is
defeated we’re just supposed to chear and be happy even when our
favorite characters just aren’t there anymore. They’ve sacrificed
themselves or been killed or lost. Sometimes their ends were noble
other times they were just tragic, but always in the end we are
supposed to swallow the chearing partying happiness knowing that there
are those who just aren’t there anymore. Most stories just end with
that. No one even bothers to acknowledge the losses. X-2 is different.
It is this that I like about this speech even though it was still kinda
cheesy. I can’t believe she ended it with the words “Believe in Yuna.”
Come on.

This game has serious issues with excessive power boundaries. It is far
too easy to become level 99 in all of your characters and have every
dress sphere mastered. And even then you don’t feel all that powerful
unless you stupid trigger happy catnip nonsense.  The game could
really have benefited from an engine that allowed power levels to raise
above level 99 and the removal of the cheesy tricks or if not removal
of those at least more threats that take into account their existence..
Also on the mechanics side, the game would certainly have benefits from
greater differentiation between the characters. Although its balanced
its just not as much fun to deal with characters who are when stripped
of all abilities precisely the same. It also strains realism.

Now about the very end,end. It was definitely a very pleasant ending. I
like how it solves the question of the final scene in X, but then I
also really liked how X ended in a mystery too. So it’s a trade off.
There’s a lot of cheesyness in the final ending. A lot of images where
you’re like “What the?” “Where did they come from?” It was clearly in
many ways a reward ending for those who stuck with the game. Still I
fell for it. I really enjoyed it. It helped that it was all full motion
video too of course. I really like some of the ways in which they
completed the circuit too, like “It all began when I saw this sphere of
you.” and the way the final scene is totally reminscent of the first
scene in X.  It definitely reinforces the idea that X was Tidus’s
story and X-2 was Yuna’s story. But then again didn’t Yuna kinda
commandere the story at the end of X? Maybe we’ll just say that both
games are both of their stories.  I’m not sure I like all this
possessive ownership of stories anways. Seems a bit selfish.

I’ve got to say one last thing. Sphera is definitely one of the wierder
worlds in  all of fantasy. I was really disappointed that they
never do explain what Sphera’s true nature is because I really want to
know. This is a world where dead people can walk around with living
people, and can dream up people who become real enough to walk around
with the dead and living. Dead people can possess living people. Dead
people can turn into giant monsters. Dreams can turn into giant
monsters. Dreams can becomes killed by other dreams allied with dead
and living people  when they are giant monsters that threaten to
destory the world. Dead people can travel into a dream world pull out a
dream’s son so that that dream can help fight his dad who happens to be
a monster now. Dead dreams can have their thoughts pulled together by
dreaming dead monsters  who faded away and become real people
again.

Death clearly is not much more than an inconvenience in this
world and the distinctions between monster and person, dream and
reality, life and death clearly aren’t very strong ones. That’s part of
the world’s charm of course. But it’s also a blank check for the
creators to do whatever the heck they feel like and totally not spend
an ounce of time striving for any kind of coherence. It’s good and it’s
bad. No one wants to blur the distinctions between dreams and reality
more than me, but I really want to understand things as well. I want
logic even in the illogical. I believe that a dream can be as explicable
as reality and their relationship can be well defined without losing
any of the mystery of the connections.

Anyways X-2 is a game worth playing, especially if you’ve played X. A
little too cheery, a little too cheesy, a little too incomprehensible
and with a stupid story completion system that will drive you insane,
but none of this distracts from a game that never fails to keep you
interested and greatly entertained. It is one of those great games that
has many flaws that will always be forgotten because of the
extraordinary quality of it’s good features.

Can’t wait until XII.

Have I ever mentioned how I absolutely despise the word
“accountability”. I don’t know how it because a common word in the
American discourse but in recent years it has and it’s driving me
nuts. 

Every single day you hear something about how we have to hold someone
accountable or how important it is to have accountable in this or that.
I first noted the words use in the business world but it wasn’t all
that popular, it really because infamous when it started to be brandied
about with regards to education. Now it is used in just about
everything. Doctors have to be accountable. Lawyers have to be
accountable. Institutions have to be held accountable. 
Politicians have to be accountable. States have to be
accountable.  Businesses have to be accountable. Parents have to
be accountable. Soldiers have to be held accountable. Murderers have to
be held accountable. Theives have to be held accountable. File sharers
accountable. Terrorists accountable. Children accountable. Human beings
accountable. Computers accountable. Traffic Lights accountable. Green
slimes absolutely *have* to be held accountable for killing all those
poor players of “Dragon Warrior I” all those years ago….

It really does get ridiculous. The language is totally exaggerated,
totally out of place, and often just a load of you know what. But for
some reaon we now think of holding people accountable as a kind of
virtue and not being held accountable as a kind of high crime, treason
against the universe itself.

The existence of the accountability dailectic is somewhat to be
understood as it is an over reaction to the time period not long ago
where a great many people felt and some still feel that humanity is
losing its willingless to take responsibility for anything. You
remember those speaches right “That’s what’s wrong with people. Nobody
takes responsibility any more.” or “We have to instill in our children
a sense of responsibility a willingless to take responsibility for
actions.”

Well truth is we didn’t ever get to a state where people are more
willing to take responsibility. Arguably there never really was such a
time frame and the whole talk about it is just an example of the common
shared delusions of nostalgia.

But we did start to adopt a language of accountability. Unforunately
accountability is in all ways the wrong kind of a dialogue to be
having. In many ways it is a running away from the deeper and more
significant talk of responsibility. In many ways it is an abandonment
of all kinds of deeper analaysis and is mostly just a way for people to
feel superior over one another.

Just take a look at the term’s use. Usually you have something that
goes wrong. Something always goes wrong you see. It is the fundamental
nature of the universe though of course many persons absolutely refuse
to believe that anything will go wrong and act shocked when something
does. These people are deluded and we should not allow them to appear
within ten feet of any serious decision making.

But anyway back on topic. When something goes wrong there are a number
of reactions we can take to it. We can, for example, look for a way to
fix the problem, or to avoid it in the future. That’s what most people
want to do when they encounter a problem. They want to remove it and
never see it again no matter how unrealistic that may be. But still, I
think that is a laudible aim and a good general reaction to a problem.
And I am glad to be a human being when this is the first and foremost
reaction to when things go wrong.

There is a problem though. The search for how to fix or avoid a
problem  in the future always entails in part the discovery of
what precisely went wrong and why it went wrong.  That very often
involves a human being of some sort either making a mistake or being
incapable of preventing the problem due to lack of resources, lack of
training, lack of willingness, lack of ability, or lack of caring. Or
sometimes none of these things. Sometimes someone was there did
everything within their power and had all of the resources but the
problem happened anyway. That’s just the way it goes sometimes. 
No one can be 100% vigilant 100% of the time. Things go wrong.

So when there is a reason and it is associated with a person and we
find it, we logically say that person is a responsible party. There may
be many such responsible parties and there are usually a whole heck of
a lot. Once you’ve identified what parties are responsible and in what
ways they are responsible you can logically start to solve the problem
or work toward ensuring the the problem does not happen again.

Usually that involves looking at each party, the reason they are partly
responsible and how you they can avoid getting into a similar situation
again. Often it even involves utilizing the person’s abilities and
knowledge of the problem for which he is responsible to better
understand the problem and better come up with a way to solve it. 
Normally in the end the best solutions involve working with all
responsible parties to come up with a comprehensive plan of action that
addresses the root causes of the problem and creates a number of
contingency plans to avoid the problem ever happening again.

When this process is undergone correctly and intelligently no one feels
bad. Some people do feel responsible, but that’s not exactly the same
thing. GEnerally people will feel good and confident about their
ability to if everyone sticks to the new plan at least lessen the
likelihood of the thing going wrong again. Of course, when the thing
does go wrong again, and it undoubtable will because the universe is a
prankster out to get us all, we would simply undergo the same process
again of establishing or refocusing responsibiltiies, comprehending
causual connections, and working together to create logical alterations
that will make it less likely for the problem to occur in the future.

Now this is the good way. This is the right way to respond to a
problem. There’s a much worse way and it is at the heart of the
shifting of language away from ideas of responsibility, teamwork, and
solution-speak, to mere accountability speak.

You see the accountability model takes as its fundamental assumption
that you may not ever know the reasons something goes wrong and so you
shouldn’t really even bother to try. The point instead is to focus
entirely on the causes that can be assigned blame. The basic system
works like this: For each area in which something could go wrong,
assign a “responsible party”. This responsible party is responsible not
in the sense of “I feel responsible for this as it is important to me
and I care about it.” but rather in the sense of “You are now assigned
responsibility for this thing. So you’d better start caring about what
happens to it.”  The distinction is very important. This mockery
of responsibility gives rise to the term accountability. 

You see in this model when something goes wrong in the area you look
immediately to the responsible party and hold them accountable. That
means that that accountable party loses something substantive when the
thing goes wrong be it respsect of their peers or money in their
paycheck or decreased chance of promotion. Thus when you are held
accountable you have something to lose so you really don’t want it to
happen. You’ll do everything in your power not to be held accountable.

And that of course is the beauty of the accountability system. The idea
is to avoid having problems come up not by actually fixing them but by
delegating authority so that some underling is so terrified of not
succeeding in  not having problems come up that they will work
themselves half to death to avoid it. And their boss, similarly
terrified of his boss holding him accountable, will do the same. And
his boss and so on right on up to the top of the chain where someone is
accountable to no one whatsoever. More clever systems, also introduce a
reflexive  accountability so that those at the top of the chain
can be held accountable by a number of underlings acting in concert but
by and large that is rarely implemented or acted upon.

So as you can see accountability is all about shifting your talk to
asking questions like “Whose fault is it?” rather than questions like
“How can we fix it? What is the best way to keep this from happening
again?”  Accountability is in no way about discovery of causes or
true explanations of what went wrong, instead it is all about making
someone or something feel as if they ARE the  sole and most
significant cause of what goes wrong.  Accountability isn’t about
a person having integrity and taking responsibility for what has gone
wrong. It is instead in every way about someone being assigned a
responsibility and then being forced to defend it lest they be blamed
when something does go wrong.

No doubt you can see immediately why accountability talk is absurd and
downright dangerous. It is really nothing but the use of the force of
fear and anger to enforce action. An accountable person who is afraid
of losing something precious to them will do whatever it takes not to
be held accountable. That will, without a doubt, involve tilting the
truth, fudging things a little, trying to make bad things look good and
make good things look not as good so as not to raise expectations.
Accountability makes people feel the need to be dishonest. Worst it
makes people want to be cruel Because a person in danger of being held
account’s best bet to avoid further accountability is to make someone
else seem like the accountable one. People have every desire to shift
off responsibilty to say “that’s not my responsibility, it’s that other
guy’s responsibility” Or that other department or that other agency,
etc. You also have every incentive to blame your underlings, because if
its your underling’s fault although you do take some accountability,
you can at least defend yourself by saying “If I’d had better
underlings…”  Ironically picking poor underlings is not
generally seen as unforgivable a thing as making a mistake yourself. At
least with the picking of poor underlings you have to be found guilty a
number of times before people start to really believe that you are the
problem.

So is accountability then always bad? Is it always the wrong kind of
language to use when discussing problems? No. I wish it were that
simple. There is a very real circumstance where accountability is not
just important it’s essential. The thing is accountability works best
when it is upwards focused not downward focused. The people who really
absolutely have to be held accountable are those who if they were not
accountable for the consequences of their actions have a great
incentive to act with impunity. That is a person who fears no loss of
their wealth or power might very well make decisions that are
devastating to those under them on a whim or just to pad their own
pockets more. We’ve certainly seen the era of corporate scandals. We
know how important it is that these people were held accountable. They
needed to be ascribed blame for their actions that were criminal.
But… that’s why we have a laws and a criminal justice system. It is
to make their be consequences for blatantly wrong acts. It is to make
someone take the blame when they deliberately choose to make something
go wrong that cauises some harm to others. Contrast this to the new
accountability, where people have something to lose even when they make
honest mistakes and have every incentive to exert all their energy in
striving to look perfect and almost no incentive in striving to
actually be better at anything.  Which makes sense?

We need to talk more about responsibility and more about problem
solving and reserve the talk of accountability for when it matters. The
use of accountability as a cheap excuse to avoid deep thought about
hard issues has got to stop.

So in
that last post I talked about “The Issue” now to talk about “The
Other Issue” as I see it in the world today. And I’ll tie it into
something that happened during the presidential election season that really
ticked me off.

Every few
years in politics we get the people cajole or trick or force a candidate to
say, stupidely something along the lines of “I will not raise your
taxes.” Why do our candidates say such things? Why do we demand it of
them?. It is utterly absurd, totally irresponsible, and a completely stupid
thing for a person running to be  *leader
of a nation* to promise. It is not your right to make or keep such a promise
when their are millions of people whose future your actions and choices will
effect.
A person with such responsibilities cannot afford to put artificial
limitations upon what they can do to meet those obligations.  You should not dare promise not
to raise taxes because you might have to. It might be the right, logical, and
totally rational thing to do. It may be the only way to secure the health,
safety, and happiness of your people. 
This is why, whenever I hear such a promise, even from a candidate I am
leaning toward rooting for, it makes me cringe. It makes me afraid.  It
makes me to understand how much the whole
election process is nothing but a fake show for the people with no real
honesty
or truthfulness involved. You’d think it’d be the right thing to
explain to people. If you hae to raise a tax in a manner that is
justified for the betterment of the entire nation or even the world
you’d think that people would understand that.   But no as it
stands we demand no taxes. We demand no government interference. And we
trust no one with our money but ourselves.

Why do I bring this up because there is
that other issue I mentioned. The first issue is one that I can’t even
imagine a partial solution short of people just suddenly abandoning
thier idiocy and accepting the truth. But the second issue. That’s a
whole ‘nother matter. There is, you see, a very good solution that has
been theorized by many intelligent persons to this problem. It isn’t a
perfect solution, far from it, but it would go a long way toward
working toward the best solution capitalism can provide. Unforunately
it would require raising taxes. It would require raising taxes a great
deal on one particular commonly used commodity. The creation of this
tax would force the nation to totally restructure its infrustructure
and would be the first step in changing the entire world economic order
and securing the future of the human race on Earth.

The issue of course is energy dependence.

Read this:  http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,65704,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2

And read this too while you’re at it:

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2004-11-11-marvel-sues-over-avatars_x.htm

Now you tell me again as so many people do that the entertainment
industry is a dying doomed beast resorting desperately to evil tactics
because they are unwilling to evolve to face the inevitable future of
online media. I’ve heard this argument a million times and I’ve got to
say quite frankly it’s garbage. Not only is it a bad argument, it is a
dangerous argument. It is the argument of those who are already
claiming victory long before the battle is over.  It is the
argument of those unwilling to accept the truth that is in front of
their face. People who think they can wish away the law suits. They
think if they just sit around and do nothing for long enough things
will magically become better because technology conquers all.

Ha. Yeah right. There is a battle raging where our perceptions of
morality and creativity are at stake. And you know what? It doesn’t
look like the battle is going so well for those who believe in freedom
of creativity. It doesn’t look like it is going so well for people who
believe that the right to share, even to  masses of strangers, is
as valuable a moral principle worth defending as the right to earn a
living. Or more.

I do agree with part of the argument. These media industries are using
evil tactics. They are blatantly acting in a manner that should be
condemned by all but for some reason we are treating them as if they
are the victims and that they are only doing what they should to defend
themsevles. We are treating them this way because this is what they
actually believe. It is what they have to believe in order to justify
their acts.  Yes it makes no sense but your average person really
does buy the idea that a person who downloads a file is no better than
a petty thief and that if you are stolen from you have the right to do
whatever you want to the thief no matter the circumstances even to the
point of destroying their livelihoods, crushing their reputation and
self-esteem, and even throwing them in prison.

I also agree media industries are not evolving as they could to adopt
to the changing the technology. I agree that they aren’t doing this
enough, but I don’t agree that they won’t ever or refuse to change.
That is underestimating them a great deal. Media industries are quite
willing to adopt the new technologies. Provided they do so on their own
terms. That is once ever other upstart company or distribution model
that threatens to attack their complete and total control over the
distribution of media content to the world is crushed under their boot
then they won’t have a problem with evolving.  In fact they are
evolving a bit now. They are adopting new technologies even as the
fight to crush others who use the same. It is their fundamental belief
that they have the right to control media from now until forever and no
one can take it away.

That is what this is about. What it has always been about. Power.
Everyone wants power in the new internet culture. Its just that some
companies have the money and power to ensure that they get that power,
no matter how late in the game they are entering the arena. And their
winning!

I really wish that we could just say to the entertainment industry soemthing like this:
    “OK entertainment industry. Take a deep breathe. Now
take another. Slowly. Now look around you. Are your businesses
collapsing? Are your artists starving? Is it the case that no one buys
DVDs or music CDs or video games or computer software? Is it the case
that no one watches or pays attention to commercials? Is it the case
that no one buys extraneous merchandise related to their favorite
stars? Is it really the case that the internet has completely replaced
movie going experience, the concert experience, the watching of
television? Does it even really look like it’s going to anytime soon?
You have time! Plenty of time to embrace and extend. Plenty of time to
become a major player in a world where distributed networks are the
heart of content distribution. You won’t lose your business. You won’t
go broke. At worst the economy will reach a new equilibrium with
certain new companies having some degree of power as well and maybe
with all the old companies not quite making as much relative profit as
they otherwise would have. But even that is unlikely . Your comapnies
are entering into a race where although you are entering late your
starting off much closer to the finish line than all your opponents.
You don’t have to panick. You don’t have to employ dirty tactics to
ensure you win. You don’t really need to petition the government to get
strict legislation that benefits you and hurts everyone else. You don’t
need to sue people left and right and engage in a smear campaign to
make your opponents look bad. If you don’t need to do these things in
order t o win? Why do them? Just calm down . Don’t act hastily. Just
let things happen. I guarantee you the future that will arise won’t be
nearly as bad as you fear it will be.”

I wish we could say that and they’d listen. But they won’t. They might
if they were just afraid or confused about the new technology and its
impact on them. But they aren’t. They know the risk to their empire is
minimal at best. They know this is nothing about survival or
righteousness despite their rhetoric. This is all about control. This
is all about power. Copyright is their clear means to power and they’ll
milk it to no ends.

We live in a dangerous times. While we are worried about republican
justices, gay marriages, spreading democracy, and wars against
“terror”, we are getting our fundamental rights to share, create, and
experience snatched out from under us.

This is the most important battle. How this turns out will have a huge
impact on how humanity develops two hundred years in the future. Don’t
dismiss it. Don’t get distracted and look away. And for god’s sake
don’t pretend we’ve already won when their’s so much more left to do.

After elections the democrats have been arguing about whether to move
further left or move further right in order to have a chance of winning
elections in the future. It looks like the idea of moving ‘right’ seems
to be winning. I cannot possibly stress how bad an idea I think this
is.  I would even go so far as to say that any kind of serious
significant move to the right would have a good chance of ruining the
democrat’s chances of ever regaining power in the near future. It might
work as a very long term strategy if sustained but even then I don’t
think I’d like very much the nation we’d end up with.

The reason this won’t work as a quick fix is rather simple really. Such
a shift would fit perfectly into the republican narrative. It would
give them fuel with which to fight for years and years to come. You see
conservatives have not just been painting all democrats as liberal
elites over the years, they’ve also been painting them as unscrupulous
people willing to say or do anything to win an election. This is the
underlying argument beneathe the claim that John Kerry “flip-flops” on
issues. It is the idea that Kerry has no core beliefs and just wants to
win. This argument which most democrats think that no rational person
would believe actually has a profound impact on your average person.

How much worse will it be if democrats start talking more and
more  like conservatives, especially right after their loss in the
2004 elections? Much worse I’d say. The right will keep pulling up
quotes from years ago to ‘prove’ how dishonest democrats are in their
current endeavors.  There will just be no end to it. Worse, if
democrats went too far they would have a hard time convincing a number
of people who regularly vote for them to go to the poles at all. People
who now think the conservatives are the devil incarnate may start to
think that the democrats are nothing but the devil’s younger brother.
Of course the ultimate irony here is that both parties have been
shifting left and right as needed over and over again through American
history. Many a ‘conservative’ ideal so strongly argued by the
republicans was once a major tenant of the democratic party and vice
versa for liberal principles.

What we have to talk about though as a nation is bringing the entire
political landscape back into a more coherent line.  Less trickery
and more truth needs to be the way of the future. People need to have
parties that much more clearly represent their core beliefs not just
parties that are striving to win at all costs.

The only way for this to happen is to have more parties. Despite what
some people argue, 2 is by no means enough to represent even a majority
of belief sets held by the American people. We need many many parties
for a fair balance.

But as we won’t get that anytime soon, I propose an immediate smaller
measure that would be a huge step in the right direction. I say we need
to create a flat out “liberal party”. The liberal party would flat out
defy the common wisdom that paints liberals as evil or dangerous. It
would be a party of change oriented, future oriented reason and would
be determined to demonstrate its beliefs with profound, direct,
irrefutable arguments. 

A liberal party would be a solid admission of the fundamental truth
that you can’t really stop a party that is pushing far in one direction
by pushing on the center or worse in that same direction. The best you
could hope for if you do that is a false victory where you’ve won power
but only by becoming that which you were striving to defeat. The result
would be a society so shifted to the right that it is a virtual alien
to the rest of the world at large.

The liberal party would simply be a large group of people who refuse to
let  that happen. They would adopt real liberalism, strong
unapologetic liberalism, and a liberalism that is willing to attack
conservatism on the same level as conservatives have been willing to
attack liberals.

The irony here is that although you’d think that all of the members of
this liberal party would come from the democrats, a great many I
suspect would come from the current republicans as well. You see a
great many modern republicans are really near liberals in disguise. The
very existence of the neo-conservative movement to me only goes to show
how very liberal many republicans can get.. What’s more there can be no
doubt that a great many republicans are totally unconfortable with the
highly liberal dialectic of some of their high spending allies, just as
many others are uncofortable with the heavily religious portions of the
conservative population.

Now this split would leave conservatives able to actually be
conservative in truth. That means status quo, business pro,
nationalist, patriots, small government, state centered, 
preservationalist, strict interpretationalists conservativism. 
The overwhelming principle behind conservativism would be the idea of
change only when that change is necessary to preserve the  current
American way of life. No more. Where of course that American way of
life is largely based on certain christian religious values and
business principles. This in strict contrast to the liberal idea of
change is necessary and inevitable and must be embraced in order to
improve the nation and the world in the near future. The new republican
party would probably end up reabsorbing a number of splinter parties
that have come into existence because they claim that republicans
aren’t nearly conservative enough, especially as they would get a new
opportunity to influence their party’s direction, just as the liberal
party would absorb a great many of the secondary parties that now exist
and syphon off a good number of votes from the democrats each year.

Now once republicans have become the true conservative party and
liberal party has been created but sucking away half othe democrats and
taking a good chunk out of the republicans as well, this would leave
room for the large portion of remaining democrats to become a truly
Centrist party. That is, the democrats would be a party representative
of the idea of moderation between the principles of change and
consistency. They would take the stance of those normal regular people
who  think that we need to face our future with caution and care
but not too much caution and care. They would want to react decisively
when emergency change is necessary whether it be to preserve a
necessary existing system or value or to adopt to a budding future
systems  or values rationally and fairly. They would want to
examine other issues before making decisions and their general
inclination would be toward the middle concilliatory ground when
conflicts arise. They would be the ones to want to go a little bit in
both directions as necessary until it becomes clear which direction is
best.

Now this new democrat or centrists party would bleed off some
republicans too. Namely those republicans that are only republicans
because they’ve always been republicans and don’t agree very much with
either the strongly conservative republicans or the nearly liberal
conservatives in the party. It would of course also take in the other
half of the democratic party especially those who were on the verge of
defecting to the republicans because they were afraid that the
democratic party was becoming “too liberal”.

The most important gain of this new trichotimy is that by making very
clear distinctions between the three parties it should make some of
those who are entirely uninterested in politics because they feel they
don’t fit in either of the two dominant parties willing to re-examine
the political scene. They may find themselves quite in line with one of
the three parties in terms of beliefs and  principles. Getting
these people into the politcal arena would spell more votes for all
three parties and would be overall a good thing.

This would of course be a first step in the direction of spanning
political landscape where all ideas can be treated equally and compared
and contrasted against one another without the baggage of the dirty
tricks and deceit that rules politics today. In such a world the best
ideas whether they come originally from the right or the left should
bubble up to the foreground and be largely adopted by all three parties
in the end proving their worth.  What’s more the US would end up
looking a lot more balanced when compared to the rest of the
world  rather than seeming like a nation barinwashed by some weird
neo-conservatism philosophy.

This would only be the first step to an ideal world of course where
parties are much less significant than individual ideas but it would at
least be a step in the right direction and  a much better system
than we have today.